Roy Hargrove

I can't believe I have been journaling for over a year and not yet written about Roy Hargrove.

Roy is a jazz trumpeter who loves music in the large. He made a name for himself as one of the young lions in the 90's, playing post-bop and ballads, but his music goes far beyond that and resonates deeply with me. I like the straight-up post-bop stuff where he really cooks; I love the more hip-hop stuff with RH Factor and his appearances with Common, D'Angelo and others. But what I love the most is the pure emotion he evokes with the flugelhorn on a ballad. His tone, his control, his phrasing, they all combine to turn my spine into Jello.

A couple weekends ago, Roy and his band were at the Jazz Showcase. After Maria and the kids left town to visit Maria's family, I made a very indulgent weekend of it and went to see him three times: the Friday early set, the Saturday late set, and the Sunday matinee. It was awesome.

Actually Friday's early set left me a little worried. I just wasn't feeling it. I understand that the piano player is new to the group--maybe that's what was holding the group back. Roy seemed to spend most of his time sitting to the side of the stage. The pianist was content to stay tightly in the middle register.

The Saturday late set put all fears aside. From the first song, Roy was moving around the stage in the way that says the real music is happening now. The pianist was moving out of his comfort zone. Then Corey Wilkes and a tenor player joined in, and they blew the roof off the place. No surprise guests on Sunday, but an equally fulfilling set from the group, apparently more at ease with each other after a week of gigs together in one place. It was standing room only on Sunday. I stood happily at the back of the room and soaked it all in. It was a fantastic, indulgent weekend.

David Sanborn, etc.

The cover article in the November Jazz Times was about David Sanborn. This part made me laugh out loud:

"One day during that period [early 1970's] I was over at [Gil Evans'] house in the far West Village when Miles came over. Gil was playing a tape of our show the night before at the Vanguard and my solo came on. I thought, 'Oh, [$#@!], this is Miles listening to me play.' I played one of those no-way-out notes, and it just hung there. Miles looked at me and said, 'You should have played it twice.'"

The article also mentioned the amazing Night Music show, which Sanborn hosted for two years in the late 80’s. I loved that show. I remember staying up to watch it on Sunday nights. The show featured all different kinds of musicians. Maria asked me if they ever released the shows on DVD. They haven’t, but it got me to wondering if good old YouTube had any clips. And they do!

Here’s Sanborn and the house band with Dizzy Gillespie on the Night Music show. Awesome.



And here’s one I remembered for nearly twenty years like it happened yesterday – Sanborn joins the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play “Subway to Venus”.



Seeing those clips reminded me of the new Clash CD/DVD, and I wondered if YouTube had clips of the Clash on the Tomorrow Show from 1981. And they do!!

Sudoku

Some months ago, as an academic exercise, I decided I needed to write a program to solve Sudoku puzzles. I had wanted to write one, and I wanted an exercise in test driven development, so I got started.

First of all, no one should be too impressed that anyone can write a working program to solve Sudoku puzzles. Any undergrad CS student should be able to crank one out. It’s really not that hard.

“Test driven development” (or TDD) means that I started not by writing the Sudoku program itself, but by writing a series of little programs, called unit tests, that check whether my Sudoku program behaves correctly. I would write a unit test first and get it to fail, and then update my program just enough until the unit test passed. The first unit test just stored digits in a 9x9 grid and spit them back out. That’s all. The next test checked whether the grid represented a “valid” Sudoku grid or not – did the same digit appear more than once in any row, column or 3x3 box? Lather, rinse, repeat.

Within a couple hours, and several test iterations, I had a functioning Sudoku solver. It used only a “brute force” strategy but it worked. I had several test puzzles that I copied from newspapers, and there was one puzzle that was particularly difficult for this brute-force strategy. It took my computer about 7 seconds to solve that puzzle. Not bad eh?

Actually, I knew it wasn’t very good at all. Seven seconds is an eternity in CPU cycles. I had planned to add different strategies to the program, which I knew would speed things up. But first I wanted to see what improvements could be made using the same strategy. TDD can be good for getting things to work, but TDD alone won’t get them working in the best possible way. However, once you have things working, TDD does provide you with a good set of regression tests, so you can make improvements without worrying about whether you’ve broken anything.

This was a good opportunity to learn about the profiling tools in Eclipse. I ran my program, and then used the profiler to find out where the program spent most of its time. My initial implementation was copying groups of values from the grid, and then checking them against the puzzle rules. Why not check them in place instead? I worked out an indexing scheme so the checks could reference values from the grid without copying them. This improved performance by about 50 percent – the tough puzzle was solved in about three seconds.

It was time to add a new strategy to the mix. At each step of the solution, before using the brute force strategy, I wanted the program to see if there were any rows, columns, or boxes with only one empty value. If it found one, it would be easy to determine which value belonged there. My first implementation of this strategy improved performance on the tough puzzle by nearly one order of magnitude, to 0.4 seconds.

I went back to the profiler output. Then I realized that it was ridiculous to recheck every row, column and box at every step of the solution. With a small bit array for each row, column and box, I could keep track of which values were filled in, and which digits were used, as I was going. For a small amount of memory and a little extra bookkeeping, the checks for this strategy were sped up immensely. I got nearly another order of magnitude improvement on the tough puzzle, down to about 0.04 seconds. That’s better than 7 seconds, right?

I haven’t touched the Sudoku program now in three months. At some point, I would still like to introduce other strategies. The ultimate goal is a solver that can tell me not just the solution, but also how a human would have solved it. Along the way, this little project helped me to learn how TDD can enable quick functional solutions and support subsequent refactoring. Not all code requires the level of scrutiny I put into this program, to drive out performance bottlenecks, but TDD alone will not produce the most efficient solution. Development teams using TDD should review their solutions against performance requirements, identify potential bottlenecks, and then refactor their solutions carefully to achieve the desired non-functional behavior.

Radio Deluxe

We first heard John Pizzarelli several years ago on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, and we've been fans ever since. So I was surprised to learn about Pizzarelli's radio show, Radio Deluxe, when I read the interview in Jazz Times a couple months ago. Alas, no radio station in Chicago carries the show, but you can download episodes online.

Radio Deluxe is fantastic. Pizzarelli and his wife, Jessica Molaskey, host the two-hour show each week, and play whatever music they feel like playing. Huzzah! And the music they play is amazing. Plus there's a different theme every week. I love it!! I really have to wonder how they work out the licensing so they can post MP3s with all this great music. Hmm, maybe better not to ask too many questions.

So you can download the MP3 files from the web site, then import the files into iTunes, but what a pain. And the web site doesn't offer an RSS feed so you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes and have it download and manage episodes automatically. Feh. So I wrote one myself.

While I didn't spend a whole lot of net time on it, it did take me these past couple months to make enough time to get it to work. I thought it would be a lot easier than it was. I expected to just write an XSL transformation and be done, but the page from the web site that claimed to be XHTML actually wasn't. Then I tried using Tidy to convert the source page to XHTML first, and that almost worked, but all the episode data ended up in a single CDATA section, inaccessible to XSL. I tried my hand at Groovy to transform the source page into an RSS feed, but I ran into issues with its XML capabilities. So I resorted to good old Java and DOM and some regular expressions, and that worked fine.

I tried to have iTunes read the RSS file from the hard drive, but it won't. Then I tried posting the file to Maria's web site, but her host doesn't allow RSS pages that refer to off-site content. That's a weird policy. I finally figured out that our ISP does allow some private web hosting, and that worked fine, after a call to tech support. Finally, iTunes was complaining that there weren't any playable episodes. Then I realized that, while the "enclosure" tag isn't required by the RSS 2.0 specification, it is required for iTunes to distinguish between audio content and other types of content (video, text, etc.). Once I added the "enclosure" tags, iTunes was happy, and so was I! Now I just run an Ant script to download the latest links from the Pizzarelli site, create the updated RSS page, and FTP it to our ISP. Yippee!

Heavy Rotation

Two groups have hit a resonant frequency in me and are in heavy rotation on the iPod this fall. The first is Four80East. Their 2007 release En Route is shameless ear candy, pure and simple. This is groovy, syrupy, down tempo/acid jazz for a new century, with plenty of beats, funky bass and Fender Rhodes. If you put Herb Alpert, Fourplay and St. Germain in a particle collider and smashed them all together at light speed, Four80East might come shooting out. Nothing here would have sounded out of place about ten years ago. There is meat on the bone, but very lean and in healthy portions. The goal here is the overall sound, and the production is top notch. “Been Too Long” and “Don’t Look Back” are especially groovy, and “Waterline” is sublime, with a three/two tension that I love. Only the vocals on “Closer” eclipse my schmalz tolerance and make the track unenjoyable for me.

The second group is Prefab Sprout. They represent all the best of late 80’s pop music – great melodies, lots of synthesizers, shimmery background vocals, crisp rhythm guitar, and a real live person playing drums. Prefab Sprout were certainly underappreciated in their time. I hadn’t heard of them at all until I stumbled across them by way of Ivy, who covered their song “Cruel” a couple years back. Playing Prefab Sprout’s Greatest Hits for the first time was like opening a time capsule. I was hooked on “Sound of Crying” and “All the World Loves Lovers” before I learned of Thomas Dolby’s involvement in the band. Then their appeal made even more sense – the arrangements and the gorgeous, permeating melancholy. Something about their sound is particularly appropriate for this time of year.

The Cold

I’m nearly two weeks into The Cold now. One thing that no one tells you about becoming a parent is that your children will bring home new and amazing forms of microscopic life. Martin had the cold first. Ella had it at nearly the same time but was most successful at fighting it off. In me it started as a cough and an inflamed throat, the kind that transforms my usually squeaky tenor into Barry White. I really enjoy sounding like Barry White, except that it means the worst is yet to come. I was occasionally feverish, but I never felt like a visit to the doctor would do any good. I was down all weekend before last, and stayed home from work until Wednesday of last week. On Wednesday, my boss heard my coughing and instructed me to return home, but I pressed on. Same on Thursday. Thursday night I relapsed and got no sleep at all. I stayed home Friday again, and rested all weekend, again. Needless to say, Maria is tired of The Cold. I am still coughing but it is tolerable.

One consolation is that I am nearly caught up with my reading. I read three magazines every month cover to cover: Wired, Scientific American, and Jazz Times. And I am perpetually behind in my reading. But this month I stand a chance of actually finishing the November editions before the end of November. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

Another benefit is that I have had a chance to learn about the Deutsche Bundesliga, the German soccer leagues. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now understand how teams move between the first and second leagues, and I finally understand the offsides rule in soccer. These things are important.

Lavazza

I was too harsh on Lavazza earlier. I still like the Illy medium roast a little better, but the Lavazza Caffe Espresso at our neighborhood store is nearly as good, and a bargain by comparison. Last weekend, we were shopping away from home. That grocery store didn't have Lavazza or Illy so I thought I would try another brand, which shall remain nameless. The roast is so dark I just find it unenjoyable. I think I will get a couple cans of the Lavazza and mix it in with the other stuff until it's gone.

Perfect Fifths

There are some pretty weird conversations in our house sometimes. A topic that has long interested both my wife (a piano technician) and me (amateur musician and former engineering student) is: Why can’t you have true perfect fifths in an equal temperament?

To answer that question, you also have to address a related topic: Why are there twelve semi-tones per octave? Most people never wonder about this, but if you stop to think about it, having twelve notes per octave is entirely arbitrary. There could as easily be three notes in an octave, or 42. There are instruments and compositions for other divisions of the octave. Go listen to Blackwood’s microtonal compositions sometime. While they are fascinating, you can quickly get an intuitive understanding of our preference for twelve notes per octave. Most other divisions just don’t sound very good, at least to our western ears.

The harmonic series is a way of describing any tone in terms of a fundamental pitch and its overtones. The frequency of each overtone is some whole integer multiple of the frequency of the fundamental. Say you play a note on the piano whose fundamental tone is 100 Hz. That means the string is vibrating back and forth 100 times per second. The overtones are then at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, etc. The string is also vibrating at these frequencies, albeit less intensely than at the fundamental frequency.

There’s good reason to believe that this harmonic series has had an important influence on the evolution of human hearing and on our subjective experience of sounds. Further, it has had a huge influence on our subjective experience of music and harmony – of what sounds go well together.

The first overtone above the fundamental, having twice the frequency, is an octave above the fundamental pitch. Think of a guitar string. Play an open string, then put a finger on the twelfth fret and play it again. You’ve made the string half as long, so you’ve doubled the frequency. And you played a note that’s an octave higher. "Double the frequency" equals "octave." The special relationship of two notes an octave apart is the most basic, most important interval in music.

What musical interval comes next in importance? Well, what’s the next overtone in the harmonic series? It has a frequency three times that of the fundamental pitch. Musicians will recognize it as a "perfect fifth" above the previous overtone. Go back to your guitar. Play the open string again, then put a finger on the seventh fret and play it again. The string is two-thirds as long now, so the frequency increases by three-over-two. That’s a perfect fifth.

So even if we don’t go any further up the harmonic series, it’s safe to say that we would subjectively like a musical scale that incorporates these two most basic intervals, the octave and the perfect fifth. What does this tell us about how to chop up an octave? One approach we could take is this – if we start at a given note and go up a number of perfect fifths, it would be nice if we returned to some octave above our starting note. (Musicians know this as the "circle of fifths".) Can we do that?

It turns out that if you start at some note, and go up a perfect fifth twelve times, you reach a note that is really close to seven octaves above the starting note. Really close, but not exactly! How close? Let’s start with our 100 Hz tone to make the math a little easier. A note seven octaves higher would be:

100 Hz x (2 ^ 7) = 12,800 Hz

And twelve perfect fifths higher would be:

100 Hz x (1.5 ^ 12) = 12,975 Hz

A difference of 175 Hz may seem like a lot, considering we started at 100 Hz, and 200 Hz would be a whole octave higher. But the higher you go, the bigger the intervals get, so it’s really not that bad. The relative difference is:

(12,975 – 12,800) / 12,800 = 0.0137

It’s roughly 1.4 %, over seven octaves. That’s pretty close, but it’s enough to drive piano tuners crazy (and keep them employed). It means that every perfect fifth they tune isn’t quite perfect, but a tiny bit smaller instead.

Just a little more math – A perfect fifth implies a factor of three, and an octave implies a factor of two. For some number of perfect fifths to line up exactly with some number of octaves, you would need some power of three to equal some power of two. That just won’t happen. No number that factors into all threes could ever equal some other number that factors into twos. It’s just a happy coincidence for musicians that they come as close as they do.

So if we chop an octave into twelve equal pieces, we can have a scale with perfect octaves and nearly, but not quite, perfect fifths. And it is because twelve perfect fifths happen to be so close to seven octaves that we generally agree on twelve notes per octave, in case you ever wondered.

I’m certain that this has been explained by others, and much better than I have done here, but I wanted to give it a shot myself.

Airport Security

A fantastic, funny article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.

Electronic Voting

Security researcher Ed Felten spoke at the University of Illinois at Chicago last week. I took an early lunch break and went to listen. Felten described research that he and his students have performed on electronic voting machines. He is really a proponent of electronic voting, but only if it’s done openly and properly. He described vulnerabilities in existing machines, steps to improve the machines, and new and efficient ways to audit the outcome of elections to ensure that the results reflect the intent of the voters. It’s very important work, and there’s much more to be done.

A Very Expensive Haircut

It’s very difficult to believe, especially for my daughter, but I once had long hair. It was long enough I could almost pull it into a pony tail. In the front it reached the tip of my nose. This was during my last year at the university, almost 20 years ago. The long hair symbolized nothing. It was the product of frugality and laziness, mostly laziness.

My mom hated it.

That year for Christmas, my parents gave me a very special present. They arranged a trip for me to visit our family in Guatemala . My aunt married a man from Guatemala , and his family has always treated our family as theirs, and vice versa. I was to go in early January for over a week, and spend time with my Tia Carmen and my cousins in the capital city and in various towns around the country.

One catch: the long hair had to go. So I got the biggest haircut of my life, and - Hasta La Vista! An amazing trip, worthy of several posts sometime.

Did my mom arrange the trip just so I would get my hair cut? Perhaps not, but it’s fun to speculate.

Ira Sullivan

The week of the Chicago Jazz festival, Maria and I went to the new Jazz Showcase (hooray!) to see Ira Sullivan. The new Showcase location in Dearborn Station is very nice, and better suited to its purpose than the previous location. The acoustics are good, there are no pillars obstructing the view, and there are even some easy chairs and a sofa along the side. It was a weeknight so the audience was sparse. We could only stay for the first set.

Sullivan played mostly alto but switched to trumpet and bass flute as the set got going. There was an older gentleman on piano, who played one song on vibes, and a couple “kids” on bass and drums. They were all terrific. Apparently, the bass player (wish I got his name) had rehearsed little if at all with the group, so things were a little loose, but he really came through. It was an enriching musical experience.

Tony Bennett

Late this summer, Maria and I finally went to see Tony Bennett perform at Ravinia. Bennett has appeared at Ravinia for many years, and we’ve been meaning to go for the longest time. We had seats in the pavilion, towards the back. He had a small group of excellent musicians – guitar, piano, bass and drums.

We were disappointed right away by the sound. It sounded like we were all listening to the stage monitors. I don’t know if I remembered the sound at the Ravinia pavilion as being better than it is, or if we’ve been spoiled by the wonderful sound at the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park.

Bennett’s singing was fantastic. The arrangements were “crowd-pleasing” – each song was short and each ended with a magnificent crescendo. But as a result, each song sounded very much like the previous one. It was a very good show in any case, tailored to the masses, and acoustics notwithstanding.

Giving Directions

A couple weeks ago, I was walking home after work in our neighborhood. Crossing a busy intersection, I was summoned by a distraught looking woman driver waiting for the stoplight. “Is this River Forest?” she asked. I heard her fine, but not believing someone would mistake the northwest side of Chicago for River Forest , I had her repeat the question. “Not even close,” I said. She was visibly upset. I asked where she wanted to go. “Dominican University.”

Given that the light was about to change, I did a pretty good job, I think, of giving her directions quickly. I kept the turns to a minimum, and steered her clear of the west side of Chicago. I even sent her off with some words of encouragement. But since then, I thought of a few things I could have done better. In the interest of self improvement I will list those here:

• Keep the sarcasm to yourself. “Not even close” was really uncalled for. “Sorry, no,” would have been just fine.
• Estimate the distance between turns. It would be three miles to her next turn, and four miles to the one after that. She obviously would not have known that. I could have spared her a lot of second guessing along the way.
• Better yet, draw a map! There’s a gas station at that corner where she could have pulled over. A map would have made a lot of things much clearer.
  

The Harlem Line

This is a true story about parking for the MTA Metro-North Harlem Line train. My sister lives in the Berkshires. If you want to go to New York City, and you don’t want to drive the whole way, you drive a half hour to Wassaic, New York, and take the train from there.

Our parents were travel agents, in the age when that was a real good thing to be. My sisters and I have memories of many plane trips, for which we would always arrive at the airport well ahead of the scheduled departure time. We spent countless hours in smoke-filled terminals waiting to board planes. It was irritating at the time, but we all learned to be punctual and to allow extra time when traveling.

Maria and I left my sister’s house for Wassaic, with what seemed like an hour and a half extra to relax and get something to eat. Our first problem was finding the Wassaic station. If we had followed my sister’s instructions and just stayed on Route 22, we would have found it easily. But I had put “Wassaic” into the GPS, and it took us directly to the town center, conveniently bypassing the station. We had a grand tour of downtown Wassaic. It took us at least 15 minutes to decide that we may have passed it and we should try going back north. Once we did, we found the station with no trouble.

The parking lot at the Wassaic station was full. I guess it is often full, because there is a sign that says to drive two stations down the line to Dover Plains if the lot is full. Which we did. At Dover Plains there were plenty of spaces, and there was still about an hour before the train would leave. Our worries were over, right?

I needed to pay for parking and for the train tickets. Maria wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed in the car. The train tickets were no problem – the kiosk on the platform happily accepted my credit card. The parking, however, was cash only. You pay by the day, and I didn’t know if we would be back by the same time the next day, so to be safe I needed to pay for two days. That’s $7.50. I had just over a dollar in my pocket. Time for an ATM.

I walked back towards the main road, maybe a couple hundred yards from the station. Not a bank in sight. The only promising sight was a Hispanic market across the tracks. I asked the clerk there where I could find an ATM, and he said to look for a gas station back on Route 22. That was a little farther than I wanted to walk, so I went back to the station and to our car at the far end of the lot. Did I mention it was freakin’ hot that day?

Maria and I followed the man’s directions and drove back to Route 22, to the first gas station on the right. I got out and walked up to the door, where a cardboard sign said “Closed – No Power”. So we drove a little further until we found another gas station. It was open, and there was a working ATM. Great.

With a couple crisp twenties, we drove back to the station lot. I walked to the parking kiosk and… it doesn’t take twenties. @#%! I needed change. This time, we drove back to the Hispanic market because a) I was starting to get seriously nervous about making the train on time, and b) it was freakin’ hot outside. I chose a package of big, bland cookies at the market, and I had my change. We drove to the station lot for the third time.

I walked to the parking kiosk again. The first thing it asks you is: “Enter your parking spot #.” @#%!!! I walked back towards the car, close enough to see the spot number, and then to the parking kiosk again. Entered the spot number, selected two days for $7.50, and put in ten dollars.

The parking machine gave me $1.50 change. Really. The @#%ing machine short changed me. And the laugh I got from that was worth way more than a dollar.

So if you're taking the Harlem Line to New York City, just remember to allow two extra hours to find the station, drive to a different station, go on a long walk, find an ATM, and buy big cookies. And remember your parking spot number.

Bill Charlap

To celebrate our tenth anniversary this year, Maria and I wanted to steal away to New York for a night, sans children, during our visit with my sister’s family. On the actual date of our anniversary, we would have just arrived at my sister’s, so it didn’t feel right to go then and leave our kids (especially Martin) with a family they hardly knew. Give them a couple days at least to get familiar with the place.

What Maria and I wanted most in New York was to see Bill Charlap play. We’ve been fans for a couple years, but hadn’t yet seen him play. He and his wife Renee Rosnes, herself a renowned jazz pianist, live with their kids in New Jersey, so they play a lot in New York but don’t come to Chicago too often. After quite a bit of searching, we had given up on seeing Charlap play for our anniversary. Then I saw it: an add in Jazz Times for “Jazz in July at the 92nd Street Y, Bill Charlap, Artistic Director.” Woo-hoo!! Not only would we finally see him play, but also we could choose which night and which program. That was not easy! We decided on the George Shearing tribute concert, with Fred Hersch and Freddy Cole. Then we planned the rest of the evening around the concert on the Upper East Side.

We took the train in to the city – getting on the train warrants its own story sometime. From Grand Central, we took a subway up to 96th. We stopped at the Y at 92nd and Lexington and picked up the concert tickets. Then we walked to the Hotel Wales at 92nd and Madison to check in. This is a marvelous, charming hotel in an older ten-story building. We showered and rested, then went for a walk. Down 5th Avenue, then towards Erminia on 83rd near 2nd Avenue. Next to Erminia, there was a cute little toy shop. We had a few minutes to spare, so we shopped there for some gifts for the kids.

Erminia is a lovely, cozy Italian restaurant. The front is not particularly inviting – you need to know it’s there. You walk right in to the one small dining area. We were perhaps the second couple in the restaurant that evening. The service and the food were both decent. By the time we left, the place was jammed, and it was a bit of an exercise to get and pay the bill. Overall, not disappointing, but hardly overwhelming either. Then a short walk back up to the Y.

What a great concert! Charlap and the other musicians played in various combinations throughout the show. We were disappointed to learn that Fred Hersch was ill. Rosnes played instead, and did an excellent job. Joe Locke on the vibraphone was just awesome! Charlap talked frequently between numbers, and paced the show well. He has a marvelous ability to fit in with whatever group is playing. Dare I say, if Marian McPartland ever retires, Charlap might host Piano Jazz? An amazing show it was. Maria still tells me that she rides a wave of energy she got from this show.

After the concert, a short walk back to the hotel, where we stopped for a drink downstairs. In the morning, before Maria was up, I took the subway back to midtown just to walk around some more. Then we had breakfast on the hotel’s rooftop terrace, which was sublime – a decent view of the area, and you could see a bit of Central Park between the other buildings a couple blocks away. We would definitely stay at Hotel Wales again.

There was a cloud over this little mini-vacation. Maria had a flu bug the night before. At the last minute it wasn’t very clear whether we would go at all. And I couldn’t help but wonder if I would be next, and when it would hit. But we were motivated by this adventure, we travel well together, and our adventures feed us in return.

Killer Bunnies

My good friends Tim and Leigh Ann got me a card game for my last birthday called Killer Bunnies. The object is to collect carrots while keeping your bunnies alive and killing all your opponent's bunnies. It is a sick, twisted, demented, evil game, and I love it. The learning curve is a bit steep, especially if there's no one who knows the game to show you how it goes. But once you have the hang of it, it is a lot of fun. There is strategy to the game, but it really is just fun to play, meaning it doesn't make the least bit of difference who wins. In fact, sometimes it can be very unclear who wins.

When we were packing before our vacation, Maria suggested we bring Killer Bunnies with us. I was against the idea - with more kids than adults, I didn't figure we adults would find much time to play. (Adult is a purely relative term here.) And with the oldest kid in the bunch being 8, we could only play it if the kids were asleep. This point cannot be made too clear:

Killer Bunnies is not a game for kids.

If kids see Killer Bunnies, they want desperately to play Killer Bunnies, and will make this abundantly clear to you over and over again until you relent. Then one of their bunnies gets whacked, and they are inconsolable and they HATE YOU HATE YOU HATE YOU!!! We know this from experience.

I knew rather well that my sister would enjoy the game. But figuring we would find little to no adult-only time at my sister's, I thought it would be a waste of valuable suitcase space to bring it. Luckily, Maria is smarter and brought it anyway. A couple nights into our stay, the Killer Bunnies came out. And for the rest of the week, we gave up sleep for Killer Bunnies.

Part of the fun of Killer Bunnies is the discussions about some rules, which I think may have been left intentionally vague for that very purpose. Also fun, as in Risk, is trying to convince your opponents to attack each other and to leave you alone. Sometimes you have no idea what a card will do, so you play it anyway and hope for the best. But as I said, it doesn't matter at all who wins - it's just fun to play. If you're at least 12, maybe 14.

The Berkshires

Last week we visited my sister Paisley and her family in rural New England. Ella had visited them last year with her grandma, but the rest of us hadn't been there since they moved.

We went to Albany by train. We like trains, especially in Europe and Japan where they really know what they're doing. And we dislike airports a little more each time we visit one. Then there's the environmental impact - how do trains compare with planes on greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile? I guess it would be favorable but I admit I don't know for sure.

The ride from Chicago to Albany takes about 16 hours, overnight. If you're by yourself and can manage in a coach seat for that long, it's pretty cheap. However I would not try it with two young children. We had two tiny rooms in the sleeper car. The room is barely larger than a twin bed, and there is a toilet in one corner. I found this extremely weird. It was more like a bathroom with a bed than a bedroom. I would much rather share a separate lavatory with the rest of the car, thank you.

The top bunk is raised up during the day so there's more headroom below, then lowered at night so that a tiny person can fit up above. To get to the top bunk, one climbs up the toilet and the tiny shelf, then twists around in a DNA-like helical manner.

I am a light sleeper. Amtrak leases access to its tracks from the freight companies that own them. Some of the sections are delightfully smooth, but many are horribly bumpy. The top bunk has straps on the open side to help keep you from falling out, and you need them. Most people, myself included, stand no real chance of actually sleeping on this ride. Some resting perhaps, but REM is right out. My dad, God bless him, could sleep anywhere in any position under any conditions, and would have had no trouble at all.

From Albany we drove the rest of the way to my sister's. This is complicated because the train actually stops in Rensellaer, a very nice station but far, far away from the nearest rental car. You have to go to the Albany airport, which is a $40 cab ride from the train station. When you return the car, same thing.

Rural New England is rural, yes, but it is a hell of a lot more interesting than, say, rural Illinois. There are hills, for example, big ones even. And trees! Lots of 'em! And the roads are twisty and charming.

More to come soon, including NYC and Killer Bunnies...

Re-ripping

The ridiculous exercise of re-ripping three hundred CDs continues, as I find time. iTunes, which had been ripping at a good 20x and up, decided to slow things down a bit. Today it is lumbering along at 3.9x, so a CD is taking 15 minutes or so to rip. This could become a political issue. Maria has made it clear that the CD ripping is a silly thing to do, and I can't say I blame her. But there's nothing more frustrating to a music lover than to be right in the middle of a wonderful song when it suddenly ends.

When faced with such a task, one must decide in what order to re-rip. Given that the CDs I'm re-ripping are ones I first ripped long ago, I figure that the frequency with which I have listened to the affected songs is roughly indicative of the likelihood of my wanting to hear them again. So I created a playlist of most played low bit-rate songs, and started at the top.

In order to keep the ratings and play counts, iTunes has to think it is re-ripping the same CD. This is usually not an issue, but sometimes the CD name or song names from CDDB don't match what I have in iTunes. So I have to change the names in iTunes and then re-re-rip. Ugh.

1-3-4-5

Martin is counting now, very clearly, up to five. Except he skips two altogether.

He also likes to say "double flower" a lot. No one knows why.

オコーヒー

Martin, our 20 month old son, loves coffee. Yes, that's right, coffee.

Whenever Maria or I have a cup of coffee, Martin begs shamelessly for some. "O Coffee! O Coffee!" He has a habit now of attaching an "O" to names of things he likes. It's very much like the honorific "O" prefix in Japanese (オ in Katakana).

It is remarkable how different two kids of the same parents can be. Ella's tastes are very limited, and she doesn't like most fruit at all. She will be a meat-and-potatoes girl. Meanwhile, Martin loves fruit. He inhales bananas, strawberries and grapes. He will try almost anything, including coffee. It appears he may not like meat very much.

EDITED 7/19: If you don't have Japanese fonts installed, the title of this post is supposed to look like this:

Lorie's Ride

Off to Chesterton, IN today to do Lorie's Ride for my third year. This time, we got a sitter and Maria came with me.

There was a contentious debate as to whether to do the 25 mile route or the 38 mile route. I had biked the 38 mile route both times before, and all things being equal I wanted to do it again. But Maria hadn't biked that far in years, I haven't done much riding this year, and the weather was still questionable. The 25 and 38 mile routes overlapped for 17 miles so we put off the decision as long as possible.

We started at 7:45 and headed for the lakeshore. The weather early on was fantastic, sunny but not hot, and virtually no wind. It was a great ride to the first SAG station on the dunes, but then the weather looked really ominous and the wind picked up. There were dark clouds over the lake, and we couldn't see the city at all. It looked like a short ride back.

We pressed on, and as soon as we were a couple miles from the lake, it started clearing up. At the 17 mile mark, we needed to choose which way to go - eight miles back to the start, or another 21 miles. Maria felt good and opted for the longer route.

Another hour or so later, we were at the second SAG stop, at the Art Barn. Maria was tired, but I felt great. After about twenty minutes, we started out again. There were a couple tough inclines for us novice riders in the next part of the route. We took them slow and easy. At 11:45 we were back at the start. Easily a 10 mph pace if you factor in the stops, and I can live with that.

Lorie's Ride is a great ride. It's really well organized, the route is interesting and challenging, and the volunteers are all very helpful and nice. We will be back!

iPod Woes Continue

I love my new iPod. Except the problem with the songs cutting off is much worse than before.

I noticed that it seems to happen only to songs that I ripped long ago. That led me to think there may be a problem with the bit rate or the encoding. I don't even remember what software I used to rip my CDs originally, but it sure wasn't iTunes. And my first MP3 player was so limited on space that I was ripping at 96kbs, which I decided I could tolerate, and which let me fit about 6 CDs of songs on my player! Wow!!

A little googling added evidence to my suspicions. So I opened my music list in iTunes and sorted by bit rate. I "copied" all the 96kbs songs to Excel and sorted by album. After a little compilation cleanup, I identified 308 CDs that I ripped at 96kbs, and that I will now re-rip.

Ow

This morning, Martin was sitting on my lap when he thrust his finger up my nostril and gave me a nosebleed.

Esbjörn Svensson

This was a shock last weekend - jazz pianist Esbjörn Svensson died from a scuba accident.

I really dug e.s.t. They were taking jazz in interesting directions.

iPod RIP

Well, last week's iPod restore helped for a spell, but now the iPod no longer talks to my computer. I tried everything I could find on the Apple site - resetting, switching to disk mode, swapping cables. The silly thing is the iPod itself is working OK. I just can't sync it or put anything new on it. And that's a big problem when you're hooked on podcasts like me:

• NPR News
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
• Chicago Public Radio Featured Stories
• Security Now!
• Scientific American's Science Talk
• Japanese Pod 101
• Deutsche Welles Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten
• and many more

Fortunately for me, Father's Day is right around the corner. I'm told my new iPod Classic 80GB is on the way. I use my cell phone way too infrequently to justify an iPhone, and the new service contract it would require. The iPod touch is cool, but I couldn't rationalize that either. And as I am not a fan of mobile video, it should take me quite a while to fill up 80GB. I was quite content with 20. I was surprised to see the battery life on the iPod Classic is much higher than the Nano with its solid state storage.

New M&Ms

The Cherry M&Ms are good, like the Razzberry ones last winter.

The Mint Crisp M&Ms are freakin' awesome. I can't find them in big bags anymore.

iPod Reset

My good old iPod Click Wheel is a couple years old and practically a museum piece by now. It has served me quite well. Lately though it had been forming a personality: upon completing a song, it would sometimes reprise a half second from the middle of the song (mildly annoying); or right in the middle of one song it would skip ahead to the next song (intensely annoying, and yes the lock switch was on).

One day a couple weeks ago, having just sync'd it, the iPod forgot it had any music on it at all. Half a block from home, and facing the real possibility of no music or podcasts for an entire day, I returned home. I quickly selected a couple smallish playlists that would get me through, and sync'd again. That evening, I decided it was time to try the Restore button in iTunes. Alas, to complete the restore, you then need to plug in the power adapter, and mine was at work. The next day I was truly tunes-free on both commutes, a sad experience. Then that evening and the next I resync'd all the essential playlists.

Life is good again. I am still getting the occasional reprise at the end of a song, but the random fast-forwarding has stopped for now.

The Trouble with Illy

We've been making espresso at home for a few months now. The local market has the Lavazza Caffe Espresso and it's pretty good.

Last week Maria and I were wandering a Whole Foods. They had the Illy espresso. We've been meaning to try it, but there's no Whole Foods by us, and no other place by us has it. So we got a couple cans. It's more than twice as expensive as the Lavazza - ouch! Could it be worth it?

Caspita! Illy really is a lot better. It looks better. It tastes better.

So now we have a problem. Is Illy better enough to justify the expense? Illy will ship to you free if you buy six cans at a time, but it's still twice as much as the Lavazza. Maybe there's another alternative? Maybe there's a blend I can pick up at Intelligentsia that we like better than Lavazza, and that's less expensive than Illy?

And is this the slippery slope to full-blown espresso snobbery? How the hell did this happen to me?

Ella's Birthday List

Larry Hanks

Last night Maria and I were downtown with Susanne, after a fabulous dinner at Salpicon (thanks Mom!). We wanted to go to the Signature Lounge at the John Hancock building, but the line was terribly long. So we wandered around a bit, and finally landed at the lounge at the Four Seasons Hotel. We sat right next to the piano. The pianist there was a very nice fellow named Larry Hanks. He played the room very nicely--there was as much there to enjoy as you wanted. Most could tune out or ignore the music, but we listened intently. Very nice harmonies. Hope to see him play again soon.

Bike the Drive

The weather was just gorgeous for this year's Bike the Drive. It was Ella's first time on her own bike. Plus Maria's sister Susanne is visiting from Germany, so she joined us on the ride.

We had only ever gone on the north end of the ride. This time, we went north but turned around at Fullerton. Then back at Grant Park we decided to try the south half, and we biked to 31st Street before turning around. 15 miles in all, about the same as doing either half of the ride completely. There was a very nice CBF volunteer who met us at 31st Street, offered Ella some Gatorade and Martin a banana.

The Chicagoland Bicycle Federation is a fantastic group that encourages biking and walking, promotes safe biking practices, and organizes support for laws that are friendly to bicyclists and pedestrians. They started Bike the Drive in 2002, and we've gone every year so far.

Musicophilia

I finally finished Musicophilia, an amazing book by Oliver Sacks. A neurologist, music lover and writer, he discusses the pathologies of his patients (and himself) as they relate to music. This leads to fascinating insights about our brains and our relationship with music. It is an especially good companion to Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music and Hawkins' On Intelligence.

Sacks writes about people with enhanced musical abilities and people with musical "impairments", such as an inability to connect emotionally with music, or a shift in one's pitch perception enough to make all music sound out of tune. He writes about professional musicians and how their maladies affect their livelihoods; but more often the subjects are musical "civilians". Music is such a pervasive component of the human condition that an impairment could affect a listener as much as a performer. But Sacks also writes about music's ability to connect to some people when nothing else can, to temper a Parkinsons patient's tremors, or to animate otherwise silent Alzheimer sufferers. Brilliant.

That it took me so long to read it is not a commentary on the book, but rather the relative insanity of my life the past couple months.

North Branch Trail

Today was a perfect day for biking - sunny and neither cold nor hot. So we loaded up and went on this year's first family bike ride.

We thought it might be too cool to bike by the lake, so we decided to bike the North Branch Trail. It's long been a favorite trail of mine. We started at Dempster and headed north, Ella on her own bike, Maria on hers, and Martin in the trailer behind me. Ella did a great job. She chugged right up the bridge at East Lake Ave. We got to the lagoons just north of Willow Road and stopped to rest. I expected we would turn around there, but Ella and Maria insisted they wanted to ride on, so we did. We went up to the Botanic Gardens and had lunch, then turned around for the ride back. Ella complained only a couple times but proved she was up to the task. And Martin was content the whole way, and fell asleep on the way back.

I figure now that we biked about 22 miles today. I still think we should have turned around earlier. It really was too far to go for our first ride of the season, but it turned out alright.

RSA Keynotes Online

Watch the keynote presentations from the RSA Conference. Free! I have enjoyed Hawkins, Gladwell, and the crypto panel. Too cool.

Anthropomorphism in the Apple

When I was about 10 years old, I flew to New York City one Friday night to meet my dad, and to spend the weekend with him there. It was a very special time with him.

My dad had been in New York for some meetings. He met me at LaGuardia, and hailed a big Checker cab to take us to Manhattan. It was in the middle of winter, late at night, and there was a storm. On the freeway we weren't going very fast but we hit a patch of ice and the car started spinning. "Get down!" my dad shouted, and I did. The spinning stopped and the car miraculously hadn't hit anything, so we got off the freeway and drove on. After an eternity we arrived at the St. Regis Hotel at 55th and 5th.

The next day was bitterly cold but sunny. My dad asked me if I wanted to visit the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center. I could not decide, and I told him if I chose either one I would hurt the feelings of the other building. So my dad indulged me and took me to the top of both buildings. We rode the subway. We took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and climbed the steps all the way up to the crown. We saw Times Square and I was not impressed - it was 1977, and I was 10. We went to Chinatown where he bought me a stupid little hand-held roulette game that I desperately wanted. We went to FAO Schwarz - now that was impressive. We ate dinner in the restaurant at the St. Regis with the famous mural.

On Sunday I wanted to see where Lindbergh took off on his famous flight. So we went to LaGuardia and my dad rented a car. We drove to a shopping mall in Queens where my dad told me the airport used to be - I don't know if that's true but I have no reason to doubt it. [Updated 4/30: It is Roosevelt Field Mall in East Garden City, NY] Then we drove to Kennedy airport just so I could see that too. Finally we returned to LaGuardia for our flight back to Chicago.

Happy Birthday Dad

Catching Up

• Work is still hell. Getting a too-big project out the door has been very painful indeed, for my co-workers and me, for our families, and for our IT department as a whole. Online journals have suffered too.
• I've wanted to go to NFJS for a couple years and I finally went to one last weekend. I was long overdue for a good geeky conference. It was an excellent kick-in-the-butt. Some lessons learned: OSGi will be hot (I still don't understand what it is); Java the Platform has surpassed Java the Language in importance; there are good reasons why Java performance can and will surpass C-family performance; and burn-up charts are cool because they clearly show changes in overall work. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with the developer community at large, and see what other people are doing.
• Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia is a great book. It's taken me forever to make time to read it. Sacks writes about his patients' (and his own) experiences with music and neurological conditions, and offers great insights to how the brain works with music.
• My good friend David got me (among other things) a copy of Carla Bruni No Promises for my birthday. This was a truly inspired gift. The music is pretty good too.

So Far

Here's the farthest I've been, so far, in each direction:

N: Arlanda Airport, Sweden (59.6 N)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=59.650571,17.932777&z=13

E: Central Station, Stockholm, Sweden (18.0 E)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=59.33013,18.058283&z=17

S: Caracas, Venezuela (10.5 N)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=10.501821,-66.912746&z=15

W: Kansai Airport, Japan (135.2 E)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=34.4347,135.244703&z=13

Burning Piano

Saw this on Euronews yesterday. Pianist Yosuke Yamashita plays a burning piano. He wears a protective suit and just keeps playing until the piano won't play anymore. Disturbing.

Jamaica

My sister Paisley writes about our family vacation in Jamaica. We spent a week at a house on Discovery Bay, on the north side of the island.

My favorite parts of the vacation included:

• Being with my sisters and their families
• Watching Maria and our kids enjoy the sun, sand and water
• The food
• The massage
• Not thinking about work (OK, hardly thinking about work) for an entire week
• Visiting the Bob Marley mausoleum
• The exchange rate (Bag of Doritos? 274 dollars!)

It was an amazing time, and quite a shock to go from swim trunks yesterday back to snow shoveling today.

Patricia Barber

Yesterday Maria and I saw Patricia Barber and Michael Arnopol play at Pianoforte. What a great set! It brought back some excellent memories of seeing them play at the Green Mill. I remember watching Arnopol play years ago, and noticing how he played two notes together on the bass, even doing a glissando on two strings. That was before I started playing acoustic, and it really impressed me and gave me some ideas.

The set was a nice mix of standards and originals. Barber and Arnopol each played a solo piece. The PA was just right for the vocals; the bass was a little too loud at first, then it got better. In this room, he probably didn’t need to amplify the bass at all.

As Maria told me, it’s nice to see how Barber and Arnopol have each developed on their instruments, and how they continue to complement each other so well. We had a couple good laughs too – the reverb on Barber’s mic kicked in and out without warning, which always provoked a humorous reaction from her; and they played a couple songs which were still fresh and unpolished. I do appreciate it when musicians do that. It’s a risk, and there can be problems, but that’s when the real music happens.

Lunar Eclipse

Wednesday night the sky was perfectly clear. I knew the moon was full so I looked out the window at it before helping Ella to bed. I saw that part of the moon was dark, so I thought there must be a partial lunar eclipse. I showed it to Ella and explained what was happening, expecting it to be gone in a few minutes. After Ella was in bed I looked again, and saw that the eclipse was nearly complete. Wow! I got Ella back out of bed, then we looked at the moon some more and googled “lunar eclipse”. The first link to space.com was toast, so we tried Wikipedia and learned that the complete eclipse would last nearly an hour. Ella really seemed to enjoy it. I told her the next total lunar eclipse was in two years, and she figured out how old she will be and what grade she will be in then.

Franck Amsallem

Last weekend we saw Franck Amsallem play at Pianoforte. Amsallem is an accomplished player who had the misfortune of playing the Jazz Salon show after Tommy Muellner, whom Maria and I both absolutely loved. His playing reminded me somewhat of Jean-Michel Pilc. He played a few standards and twisted the rhythms around to make them his own. It was a fine show, a very good show, but Muellner was a tough act to follow.

Last Night

Preview Moby's upcoming album Last Night. Groovy!

Unripped

I am puzzling over a few of my CDs. But first...

I recently completed an inventory of my CDs. I admit I am a little OC about them, but the truth is some of them walk away. On at least two occasions, some of them have simply vanished. I can't say for sure how or who or exactly when, cause they're in the basement now and I don't see them for weeks sometimes. So having completed the ripping of the majority of the collection, I printed a list of albums from my iTunes and checked to see if they were all there. Thankfully no more turned up missing.

But the puzzling thing now is the few CDs that I thought I had ripped but hadn't. They include:

• Steely Dan, Katy Lied (which is desert-island good)
• Bob Marley and the Wailers, Live! (ditto)
• Peter Cincotti

The last one is merely OK, but of sentimental value - the last email I ever got from my Dad was to say how much he liked Cincotti (21 Apr 2003):

I'm probably the last person to have discovered jazz pianist/vocalist Peter Cincotti. He has just appeared on this morning's Today Show. Listen to him when you get a chance.

Jungledisk

On a recent episode of Security Now, they discussed a wonderful program called Jungledisk. It’s a front end to Amazon’s S3 web storage. Finally, what I’ve been wanting for years – an affordable, easy, fully automatic, secure, off-site backup solution. Yippee! I’ve selected a few folders on our main home system that I want backed up, and tell Jungledisk to check them once a week in the middle of the night. Anything that gets added or updated in those folders gets backed up, period. I can forget about it. Jungledisk costs twenty bucks, one time only, free upgrades forever. For Amazon storage, you pay only for what you use, and it’s cheap! Now if the house burns down, we don’t lose all our banking data and years of digital photos.

Beauty

The other day, I witnessed an act of true beauty. At a tight urban intersection, a semi trailer pulled up for a right turn. It was executed with such perfection in timing and position that I had to stop and stare. There was no hesitation, just one swift fluid motion, and the back wheels of the trailer cleared the curb with inches to spare.

Years ago Maria and I saw pianist Liz Story play at a Border’s. In between songs, she talked about how her perception of beauty had changed, and how she had then recently appreciated the beauty with which a backhoe had cleared her rural driveway of tons of snow. Liz Story is not the sort of person you would guess had a thing for large machinery, so the story stuck with me.

Along the same lines, I remember hearing Laurie Anderson once describe how much she enjoyed visiting the Israeli army as they tested large explosive charges in the desert. But then there's not much she would say that would really surprise me.

Crofton

A couple weeks ago, we had a grown-up family dinner at Crofton. Maria and I had been there once years ago for a dinner party, and suggested the restaurant to the rest of the family. It was a great overall experience. We were a little suspect at the portions at first, but what they may lack in size is made up many, many times over in abundant flavor. We left completely satisfied and not overstuffed. Highly recommended.

Crunch Time

Besides being deathly ill for most of last week, I’m averaging about 11 hours a day at work for about a week now and counting. We’re rapidly approaching deadlines on a huge project. Some people get off on this frenetic kind of work atmosphere, but not I. I’m so tired that I’m relying on a few good habits not to royally screw something up.

Getting Started

The other night, Maria was playing "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum", the first piece from Debussy's Children's Corner. This reminded us both of the hysterical short film Getting Started by Richard Condie, in which the protagonist tries but miserably fails to practice the same piece. We hadn't watched it in years, and Ella had never seen it, so I dug up the VHS tape and put it on. We had a great laugh! Then Maria wondered about sharing it with others, and whether it was still "in print". This led of course to Google, which led to this online version. Please watch and enjoy!

Continuum Fingerboard

An electronic musical instrument, created by Lippold Haken of the University of Illinois. You play it like a keyboard but there are no keys. You can play notes at any frequency in the instrument's range, like a trombone or a violin, and not just at the set frequencies of each piano key.

Tommy Muellner

Saturday afternoon Tommy Muellner played at Pianoforte. Muellner is a swinging, lyrical player who sounds very much like Bill Evans. The set was mostly ballads, which suited Maria and me just fine. Later in the set, bassist Larry Kohut joined Muellner for a couple uptempo songs. It was an especially pleasant set that both Maria and I enjoyed very much.

Talking Machines

I abhor talking machines. A couple peeves in particular:

I feel absolutely insulted when a recorded voice attempts to convey emotion to me. For example, when the CTA train is stopped, and the recording on the PA states, "This train has been delayed, and we regret this inconvenience." A monotone computer-voice recitation would be merely comical. But with the affected intonation of this recording, I can't help but think, "Bullshit!! You're a voice-over actor in some recording studio, several years ago! You don't have the slightest idea whether or how I am inconvenienced at this moment, and you're in no position to regret it if you did!"

I refuse to talk to those new phone trees. I will leave a recorded message to be listened to later by a human; but if I'm interacting with a phone tree, just let me push the buttons already. Until a computer can fool me into thinking I'm really talking to a human, I refuse to talk to one.

3 Jan. Edited to add:

I could have been more specific. I hate empathetic and conversational machines. I don't mind recorded or generated voices that state facts without empathy, and that don't expect a response. "The next stop is Irving Park." Fine. "Turn left in 200 meters." No problem. "Thank you for parking at the Grant Park South garage!" Piss off! "We regret this inconvenience." @#%$ing unacceptable!!

Maps

Last week we attended the Maps exhibit at the Field Museum. There was a remarkable variety of maps on display. One personal favorite was Lindbergh's chart for his trans-Atlantic flight. Sections of maps from New York to Paris assembled together in a sweeping arc about six feet wide. I knew exactly what it was as soon as I saw it. When I was a kid, Lindbergh's flight was still a big deal, 40+ years on, at least to me.

My father's spirit permeated the exhibit. He would have loved it - and, through us, he did.