Wednesday, April 27, 2005

no two are alike — or are they?

So I was just wasting time as usual, instead of studying, and I decided to see if my blog showed up on a Google search. (Apparently, it does not.) I of course ran across a number of interesting sites along the way, such as this installment of "The Straight Dope," the venerable Chicago Reader column. The snowflake explanation is okay, but the ensuing argument about math is even better.

It's weeks like this one that are going to make me go broke: too many good albums being released. I just picked up the new Ben Folds album, and I'm intending to purchase the new Eels disc as soon as possible. In the meantime I am staying happy by listening to this online over and over again. This is a band I was really disappointed with on their last two albums, but they appear to be kicking it back up several notches. I approve. (I think iTunes needs to rethink their pricing policy for double-disc albums though. I was going to skip buying the CD edition and just download the album from them, but they charge $19.99, twice the price of a single album! The 2-disc CD edition is going for around 14 bucks.)

Ben Folds, on t'other hand, gets forty lashes for allowing his record label, Sony, to release his new album as a DualDisc. In theory it's not a bad idea — a normal audio CD on one side and some bonus DVD content on the other side — but it turns out that there's a little issue: "The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore not all DVD and CD players will play the audio side of this disc." (That's verbatim from the back of the jewel case.) Turns out that my PowerBook's CD/DVD drive is one such player, so I can't import the disc onto my hard drive or my iPod. Boooooo.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

latenite musings

I'm very excited to have found this link to Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker cover drawing, "A View of the World from Ninth Avenue." My grandparents have a framed copy of it on their wall and it is one of the funniest things ever.

Just got done watching two music DVDs with my friend Lindsay. The first was a collection of musical performances from an old British TV show called The Old Grey Whistle Test that ran during the '70s, and some of them are absolutely fantastic. This must've been the real-life inspiration for stuff like This Is Spinal Tap. The second DVD was the Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy, which is probably the weirdest concert/tour film ever made. At several points, filmmaker Grant Gee cuts away from the performance going on onstage to security cameras positioned outside the venue as people mill around and the band can be heard faintly in the background. He's more interested in what other people think of the band than in the band itself. This holds throughout the movie, as when we see clueless reporters asking the band members the same stupid questions over and over. It's a movie you could potentially enjoy even if you weren't a big fan of Radiohead but were a big fan of avant-garde documentary filmmaking — but then again, it's a hard to imagine there's anyone under 40 who fits into the latter category but not the former.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Patriots' Day

No skiing-related news to speak of these days, as I'm back at Dartmouth focusing mostly on classes these days. (OK, focusing occasionally on classes and more frequently on Red Sox games, music, handcycling, and generally enjoying the spring.)

If I do get around to posting here, then, it'll probably be to give you random links like these:

  • I really like this new Beck video.


  • Some people are making a big deal about this new "people search," ZabaSearch, saying it represents an invasion of people's privacy. But it really doesn't provide any information about people that isn't already available elsewhere for free. More interesting (to me) is the site's connection to the Heaven's Gate cult.


  • I'm very excited about the new White Stripes single, "Blue Orchid," which was released on iTunes this morning. It's a very rocking, Led Zep/blues kinda thing — totally worth your 99¢.


  • If you're a Daily Show fan, you may have already caught this report about choosing a new Pope. If not, that clip is a pretty good introduction to the best show on TV.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

heheh

http://mary-kateandashley.com/mind_body_soul/article.php?66|1

stranded

Arrrggh. There's a nasty little blizzard raging here in Denver, and all of today's flights out of town were cancelled. So here I am, stuck until Tuesday morning, at which time United Airlines has decided to allow me to fly to Boston, buy a bus ticket to Manchester, and drive myself back to Hanover. I'll miss two more days of class in addition to the three I missed last week for SkiTAM. This is no fun. At least my friend Charlie is very generously letting me stay at his place for a couple days until I can get a flight out of here. And at least tonight I might get to go see Electric Six and VHS Or Beta play the Larimer Lounge... heheh. Maybe every cloud does have a silver lining.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

SkiTAM, continued

It's been a reasonably fun weekend here in Vail. Last night at a great party, I had a long conversation with Jennifer Kennedy-Zanca (a former U.S. Disabled Ski Team coach), Mike Brown (a former USDST head coach and World Cup racer), and Steve Porino (former World Cup racer and current ski racing commentator for Outdoor Life Network). After a few drinks, they all opened up a lot about their experiences in ski racing over the years and their take on the current state of the sport.

I'm trying to get some reading done now before the closing dinner, and then I fly back to New Hampshire tomorrow.

SkiTAM, continued

It's been a reasonably fun weekend here in Vail. Last night at a great party, I had a long conversation with Jennifer Kennedy-Zanca (a former U.S. Disabled Ski Team coach), Mike Brown (a former USDST head coach and World Cup racer), and Steve Porino (former World Cup racer and current ski racing commentator for Outdoor Life Network). After a few drinks, they all opened up a lot about their experiences in ski racing over the years and their take on the current state of the sport.

I'm trying to get some reading done now before the closing dinner, and then I fly back to New Hampshire tomorrow.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

wow, it's been a while.

Sorry about that. As I had anticipated, it's much harder to make myself write a post on here when I'm at Dartmouth than when I'm doing the skiing thing... I guess it's just something about making myself write voluntarily when there are all kinds of other things I'm expected to write, too.

After Nationals, we went back to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for our quarterly physical testing regime. We do a Wingate Test one day and a full battery of strength, agility, power and balance tests in the gym the next day.

Last Wednesday, I flew from Colorado back to Manchester, N.H., where I picked up my van and drove up to Dartmouth. I was up until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. unloading my stuff from my van into my dorm room, and then the next day I went to two 2-hour classes, one called "Computational Linguistics" and the other, "Mass Media in Latin America." The professor for the computational ling class is a little dry, but I decided to stick it out. The other prof was really dynamic and young and the subject matter seemed interesting, but the course was taught entirely in Spanish and I realized that I was going to have a hard time keeping up with all the native speakers in the class. 50 pages of nightly reading in English take me long enough as it is; in Spanish, I'd never have time to get anything else done. So I opted out of that class.

The next day I went to "History of the English Language," which I'm very excited about and which I like to abbreviate as HOTEL. Monika Otter is one of my favorite profs at Dartmouth. She is a native of Germany but has been teaching in the U.S. so long and is so interestied in the subtleties of language that she has a much better command of English, even idiomatically, than most other American college professors, let alone average Americans. I've been listening to her carefully the last couple of classes, and the only error I heard her make was pronouncing the word "circuit" as "ser-kwit," which is a pretty logical mistake to make. Right now the class is basically a quick synopsis of Ling 1 for the benefit of the non-majors in the class, of which there are many. But looking ahead, we'll be getting into some neat stuff about Old and Middle English that I know nothing about. Here, let me post a sample of some Middle English. This is from a translation of an early French travelogue about Africa:

"In Ethiope, whan the children ben yonge and lytill, thei ben all yalowe; and when that thei wexen of age, that yalownesse turneth to ben all blak."

Funny, huh?

I went home to Maine briefly last weekend to get the rest of my dorm room stuff, and my brother and I went to see Sin City. It's quite a bloodbath, but very beautifully rendered: all in sharp, deep black and white apart from the occasional flash of lurid color: red drops of blood, blue eyes, a pool of yellow ooze.

I wish I could've gone home this coming weekend instead, because my mom's a capella group, !zing, is performing then. I keep missing their concerts. But on Tuesday I had to pack up all my ski stuff again, and yesterday I left for Colorado yet again. We visited St. Anne's, an Episcopal primary school in Denver where we got to see all the kids we've been exchanging emails with from the road ever since October. Ralph gave me a ride up to Vail afterward and let me sleep on his couch, and today we checked into the really luxurious Vail Cascade Resort, where we're staying until Sunday. We're here for SkiTAM, the main annual fundraiser for our ski team. I really don't like schmoozing with people, but it's worthwhile for me to be here because our team really wouldn't have the money to do what we do without this event. Plus, you never know — maybe I can find a company here that's interested in sponsoring me.

OK, it's off to the opening reception for me...