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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Alan's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 | |
| 11:18 pm | Jim Rousey Sad news. Filker Jim Rousey passed away on May 12. Lee Gold just heard of Jim's passing from Jim's brother, and posted to rec.music.filk. Jim was a frequent contributor to Xenofilkia. Of his many wonderful songs, I remember two very fondly: "You've Got To Eat Up Your Liver", which Kathy Mar often sings; and "Life Is Hard, and Then You Die", which has suddenly become tragically appropriate. I did not know Jim well at all, so there isn't really anything else I can add. Jim's brother wrote: "I know how much Jim loved filk music... I listed filk music in Jim's obituary as an interest. All the newspapers, except San Francisco, tried to correct the spelling to folk and I had to educate them." |
| Thursday, March 20th, 2008 | |
| 3:46 pm | |
| Saturday, April 28th, 2007 | |
| 8:38 am | Happy Birthday... ... to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} meritmaat! Alles erdenklich Gute zum Geburtstag und zum ganzen Jahr! |
| Saturday, January 13th, 2007 | |
| 10:56 am | Dave Alway / GaFilk Anything I might say about GaFilk is overshadowed by the death of Dave Alway. It is one thing to know intellectually that sudden death is possible; it is quite another thing to find out that an apparently healthy person I saw on Sunday died on Tuesday. I'll really miss Dave. I have fond memories of how we shared with each other our mutual love of poetry and music. I was reading his song in the GaFilk songbook just a few minutes before I learned of his death. I will remember his many kindnesses and acts of friendship. I will proudly wear the two personalized Duchy of Filkhaven buttons he made for me, and I will think of him whenever I do so. I had a wonderful time at GaFilk. It was great to see so many of my friends, only a few of whom I can mention here. I reminisced with T.J. and Linda about meeting them at the 1986 Worldcon. It amazed me to see how T.J.'s daughter Jessie has grown, no matter how inevitable that was. I was delighted to see how healthy Bill Rintz is now. I had last seen him at OVFF more than a decade ago. Since then, he has overcome many heavy duty health problems. I had a great time with my German friends, singing and/or dining with Eva, Rafael, crystalfall, realfranklin, and shannachie.There is no room to mention my many friends whom I see annually. Nor will I say anything specific about the concerts. They were all wonderful. My only regret is that my mp3 recorder failed to work properly. On second thought, I've gotta say *something* about the concerts. But if I say "that song was great and *that* song was great and *THAT* song was great" I will quickly bore my readers. Let's see. Summer and Fall sang and performed beautifully, using 14 instruments. I didn't count, but other people did. They sang in four languages: English, French, Russian, and German. They provided a helpful booklet with all the lyrics, and translations into English. Linda and friends (Technical Difficulties, The Next Generation) did many great old songs, including my own "Wishful Thinking". Jessie, like her mother, sings beautifully. Unlike her mother, she is not a tenor. Urban Tapestry performed beautifully, as always. They wrote several new songs for the occasion. musicmutt and chirosinger are wonderful individual musicians, and together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.The filk community has become a fantastic international and inter-generational conspiracy. UT performed at least two songs by German filkers, and one song partly in German. UT and Summer and Fall sang together. realfranklin sang with UT. I sat with Americans, Germans, and Canadians at the banquet. As I already mentioned, Jessie and her mother sang together. Proud father billroper showed me photos of his eight-week-old daughter.Special thanks to Eva, crystalfall, braider, realfranklin, Rafael, and musicmutt for singing this version of "Good King Wenceslas" with me, and thanks to edstauff for making the harmony arrangement available. |
| Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 | |
| 6:29 pm | A holiday song for GaFilk? Here is a wonderful poem, by one Bob Newman, that retells the story of Good King Wenceslas. Note that it scans beautifully to "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel". You just have to add an extra line to the melody, because the song has six lines and the poem has seven. Ed Stauff graciously put a four-part harmony arrangement of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" here, so we have all the ingredients we need for a wonderful performance. Who would like to sing this in four-part harmony at GaFilk? I can provide sheet music and midi with the extra line folded in. Please email me if you are interested, and tell me what part you sing. I need to know in advance whether we have volunteers for all four parts, because I won't bother to prepare the sheet music if we don't. Happy Boxing Day, aka the Feast of Stephen! P.S. Where do we add the extra line to the melody? I prefer singing the fifth line of the poem to a repetition of the second line of the "Emmanuel" melody. When will we perform the song at GaFilk? It seems appropriate for the Ecumenifilk (even though, strictly speaking, it isn't a religious song), or we could do it in the 2x10s. The Powers That Be tell me that everybody in the performance except me would be free to do another 2x10. I think we would have to get together once before the performance to run through the song. |
| Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 | |
| 12:25 pm | Here is a possibly boring political screed that you probably won't read because you're tired of that sort of thing by now. It was inspired by the recent discussion on my friends' list of whether all Republicans are evil and stupid. In general, I don't think Republicans are evil or stupid, but I do think the current Republican administration is incompetent. If the Republican administration were competent... They wouldn't have proposed a goofy Social Security reform plan that would have increased the indebtedness of Social Security by trillions of dollars. The person they put in charge of FEMA would have had expertise in emergencies instead of in Arabian horses. They wouldn't have put up on the Internet a guide to building an atomic bomb, written in Arabic, based on Iraq’s nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. When they invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have waited nearly five months after they began their invasion before sending U.S. troops to look for Osama bin Laden. ( cut to preserve your sanity ) |
| Friday, November 3rd, 2006 | |
| 1:53 pm | Political links Here is a priceless, tasteless, totally not work-safe, political song comparing the mistakes made by Bill Clinton to those made by George W. Bush. Here and here (free registration required) are two versions of a study estimating how many people have been killed in the war in Iraq. The authors, from the Bloomberg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University and the medical school of Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimate that approximately 600,000 people were killed in the war between March 2003 and July 2006. The precise meaning of "approximately 600,000" is: With 95% probability, between 426,369 and 793,663 people were killed in the war during the period studied. An additional 53,000 or so non-violent deaths above the pre-invasion mortality rate are attributed to reduced quality of and access to health care. Mortality rates have been steadily climbing since the invasion; the current mortality rate exceeds the pre-invasion mortality rate in Iraq by approximately 1.5% of the population per year. It is possible that this report underestimates the true number of deaths. The study excludes data from Fallujah because it was an outlier. Households in which everybody died are not included because there was nobody in the household to interview. I think every American citizen should read this study. |
| Friday, October 6th, 2006 | |
| 10:21 pm | Quote of the day "In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we've got to be invited by the government." -- President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 Quoted by Molly Ivins in Another Look at Bush's Rose Garden Press Conference (registration required). |
| Thursday, September 21st, 2006 | |
| 11:53 am | |
| Monday, September 11th, 2006 | |
| 4:56 pm | Happy fifth birthday... Happy fifth birthday to J. S.-D. and K. S.-D., twin son and daughter of PDWINOLJ and BSWINOLJ. Nobody mentioned above will read this, but I wanted to celebrate Something Good that happened five years ago today. |
| Friday, September 8th, 2006 | |
| 1:31 pm | Congratulations to Steve and Katy! Congratulations to Katy  and Steve  on their wedding!!!!Wishing you every happiness in life! Wir wünschen euch alles erdenklich Gute in der Zukunft! Love from Alan, Alta, and Adam Current Music: Be Our Pilot, Lord |
| Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 | |
| 8:59 pm | Looking for General Grievous Halloween costume Adam wants to be General Grievous for Halloween. Does anybody know where to purchase a General Grievous costume? Even a mask would be a big help. A. is willing to try to make a costume, but it will be fiendishly difficult. (If you're wondering why I give my wife more anonymity than my son, it's because the minute I picked the LJ name "patoadam" any hope of keeping Adam anonymous went down the tubes. Other ways of distinguishing them, such as A1 and A2 or "big A" and "little A", seem even worse.) In other news, Adam has started first grade and he likes his teacher. We are so relieved. Adam's best friend, who is older than Adam and in second grade now, had Adam's teacher last year, and all the friend's mother could talk about is what a wonderfully strict disciplinarian the teacher is and what a good job she does of making the children behave. We don't want that. We want Adam to enjoy school. So far, he is enjoying first grade. Anything else I might have said about Adam starting first grade was said much more eloquently by artbeco here and by trystel. |
| Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 | |
| 1:10 pm | global warming Stephen Hawking is afraid that global warming threatens the survival of the human species over the next 100 years. Maybe I should pay more attention to this issue. Here is a transcript of his comments: How can the human race survive the next hundred years? I don't know the answer. That is why I asked the question -- to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face. Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions with asteroids. Such collisions had caused mass extinctions in the past, but the last one was 70 million years ago. So the likelihood that we will need the services of Bruce Willis in the next hundred years is very small. A much more immediate danger is nuclear war. America and Russia each have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on earth several times over, and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With the ending of the Cold War, the threat has become less acute, but it has not gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all, and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that it was under attack. There is now a new danger from small and potentially unstable countries acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the entire human race unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers. These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war have now been joined by a host of other threats to our survival. Climate change is happening at an ever-increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilize it and maybe even reverse it by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self-sustaining. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2 trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the greenhouse effect. Let's hope we don't end up like our sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade, and raining sulfuric acid. There are other dangers, such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future. There's a sick joke that the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development, it because unstable and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven't seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is. The long-term survival of the human race will be safe only if we spread out into space and to other stars. This won't happen for at least a hundred years, so we have to be very careful. Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us less and less aggressive. |
| Thursday, August 10th, 2006 | |
| 1:20 pm | |
| Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 | |
| 4:40 pm | Happy Birthdays! Happy Birthday to it_aint_easy and to figmo!Happy Half-Birthday to my 6 1/2-year-old son Adam! The fireworks are for you! |
| Thursday, June 15th, 2006 | |
| 1:41 pm | Adam's thoughts on death Adam is watching a cartoon show for children in which the Grim Reaper is one of the major characters. Adam says it's called "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy". Adam says that when you die, the Grim Reaper sucks up your soul and puts it in his skeleton tummy. I hope Adam knows that this is make-believe. Adam says that when he dies, he wants to be buried with his favorite toy, a Cobra action figure. (Apparently, Cobra is one of Spiderman's enemies.) We told Adam that Mommy and Daddy will probably die before he does, so that he will need to tell someone else after we are gone. Adam says that Jesus didn't rise from the dead because... ( I don't think this will offend anyone, but I could be wrong. ) Adam: Daddy is a geek. Mommy: Yes, Daddy is a geek, but how do you know? Adam: Because Daddy isn't cool. I want to be cool. I don't want to be a geek like Daddy. Current Music: Zombie Jamboree |
| Thursday, June 1st, 2006 | |
| 8:11 am | |
| Friday, April 28th, 2006 | |
| 1:09 pm | |
| Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 | |
| 12:59 pm | Birthday season in Germany! It's birthday season in Germany! Happy belated birthday to thesilee, with whom I had a very interesting discussion about Edgar Allan Poe. Congratulations on your new CD (which I have just ordered)!Happy birthday to nelladarren! Hope you are having a great day! I'm sorry you don't feel quite so young any more, but to me, your age is a distant memory.And I'll also wish salika a Happy Birthday, even though I've never met her and she probably won't read this.Current music: Lather |
| Monday, April 24th, 2006 | |
| 2:50 am | Dorkbots and acts of creation I thought that this article about Dorkbot meetings, an unusual format for creative ideas, might be of interest to my friends who feel that every act of creation is an act of faith, joy, hope, and love. By the way, when Cat Faber wrote that "every act of creation is an act of faith," I thought that she meant that a creative act is a mitzvah (I hope I am using the word right), a worthy deed pleasing to God. When I asked Cat about it, she told me that that wasn't what she meant at all. I still like the phrase. |