Ergo’s fifteen bucks?  Rook is only twelve.

The 3rd Brandenburg mocks me.  It’s beyond my ken how such a piece could sound good, let alone great.  If anyone else had written it, it would be terrible.  Yet somehow…  Or take the first Prelude in WTC; how can a piece be made entirely of arpeggiated chords and key changes on the whole-note?  It should sound like a Hanon finger exercise.  It’s no mystery that a Chromatic Fantasy can impress, cramming in the notes and accidentals as it does, but to make a simple profundity [or profound simplicity?] surely must be the most difficult thing in the world.  With only five notes per measure there’s no place to hide.

Spotted the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile today at the Winn-Dixie.  Beats the hell out of the Goodyear Blimp, which was hovering overhead yesterday.

The government aims to build a Lovecraftian necropolis to house radioactive waste.

The academics dismiss, out of hand, a “Keep Out” sign—a woefully lacking solution, since nuclear waste will remain dangerous much, much longer than such a message would remain intelligible.

Even if future trespassers could understand what keep and out mean when placed side by side, there’s no reason to assume they’d follow directions.  Not only must intruders understand the message that nuclear waste is near and dangerous; they must also believe it.

What’ll really scare off 210^th-century tomb raiders? The report proposes a “Landscape of Thorns” with giant obelisk-like stones sticking out of the earth at odd angles. “Menacing Earthworks” has lightning-shaped mounds radiating out of a square. In “Forbidding Blocks,” a Lego city gone terribly wrong, black, irregular stones “are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot wide ’streets’ running both ways. You can even get ‘in’ it, but the streets lead nowhere, and they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in.”  Giant, jagged earthwork berms should surround the area. Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks, each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch’s Scream) as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo explaining what’s buried.  Three rooms—one off-site but nearby, one centrally located, and one underground—would serve as information centers with more detailed explanations of nuclear waste and its hazards, maps showing the location of similar sites around the world, and star charts to help intruders calculate the year the site was sealed. According to 1994 estimates, the whole shebang would cost about $68 million, but that’s just a ballpark figure based on very incomplete data.

I can’t think of a more awesome way to spend $68 million.  It’ll blow away that Chinese terracotta army.  Hell, they need to build three or four of these and forget about the toxic waste, just sell tickets.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33936653/ns/world_news-washington_post//

Brazil blackout cause uncertain, president says

Brazil says it will voluntarily cut carbon emissions by at least 36 percent

This… means… something!

My bookshelf is populated mainly by volumes I’ve read at least once.  Every now and again I realize that I’m missing some prized volume, either given away or lent permanently; conversely, on rare occasions I find something I’ve never managed to read that has been patiently waiting years for my attention.  Yesterday I discovered that have but have never read Phaedo.  Given the topic of discussion, I’ve made a mental note to return to this volume in the days before my own death, should I be so forewarned.

Lately I’ve been giving myself over to small pleasures.  [Is this behavior philosophical?  Depends upon your school.]  Today’s was the first cool morning of the season, and I relished taking the hot coffee tumbler in my cold hands.  Disgusted at long last by both AM and FM talk, I’ve tuned my car radio to a place it’s never before been, the Jazz station.  [Excepting this announcement I'm keeping that to myself; like sports and television, Jazz grows harder to like the more I hear others gush about it.  (Come think of it, the Internet probably killed TV for me.)]  Tomorrow I plant to visit the zoo for the first time in a long while.  (With any luck, I’ll catch the tortoises at feeding time; watching them sprint for lettuce never gets old.)

I’m leaning against buying the new Super Mario Bros. You can’t go back, and the same money buys me a copy of BattleTech: 25 Years.  If I’m going to spend money on something I won’t have time for, it should at least look impressive on my bookshelf.

I can’t be the only one to wonder whether Palin is pulling a Colin Powell, but I haven’t seen the suggestion anywhere yet.

Is Mexico about to fall?  The Atlantic asks, and answers: “Stay tuned.”

Two lines of graffiti summed up a place where not only law and order but civilization itself has broken down: Mi ciudad pide clemencia en su dementia (“My city asks for mercy in its madness”), and Mi ciudad es un negro lamento un aullido infinito (“My city is a black lament, an eternal howl”).

I’ve actually been to a (different) country that was at the time spiraling down the vortex of the war on drugs.  The great pity is that Mexico isn’t so much a poor country as a rich country with many, many poor people.  Can a large nation survive the complete corruption of its army and civilian government?  We’ll soon know.

I’ve never been prouder.  What a country!

A New Jersey judge says a quadriplegic blocked from buying a gun to go hunting has the right to bear arms even though he will have to use a wheelchair mount to use the firearm.  He plans to mount the gun on his wheelchair and operate it with a breathing tube.