In which it is midnight at the oasis

Winter is coming. The forecast this weekend is for a bazillion feet of snow, mixed with ice, hellfire, toads, and the yaws. Time to batten down the hatches.

The downside of this weather is that I don't get to take my daily walk. I always do three miles, listening to my latest audiobook. Given extreme weather, icy streets and whatnot, winter walking can be sporadic at best. I've only managed to listen three times this last week to my latest audiobook. It's hard to keep track of things at that pace. An hour a day, on the other hand, is perfect. Even more perfect (a linguistic impossibility) was my 45 minute driving commute back in the day; you can consume a lot of content in an hour and a half. 

Music (audit division): "One Hour Mama, the blues of Victoria Spivey" from Maria Muldaur is the latest to pop up. I have been a Muldaur fan since her first solo album. I remember a colleague, who had just purchased the record, waving it around in his office and waxing poetic about it. In these pre-internet dark ages, that was about as close as one got to knowing what to listen to. So I bought it, and I've been listening to it, and all her other albums, ever since. This one sounds like it was recorded in the 1920s, which is absolutely perfect. And there's no irony in it. It's a real loving tribute. Muldaur is nothing if not a music historian. I've seen her live a few times when she's traveled to the East Coast, and always enjoyed her shows. And I've also been surprised that they are only sparsely attended. Her voice has mellowed over the years, but she's still there. 

Muldaur is one of the few artists on total replay all the time in my audit queue. I listen to one of her albums, then put the next one at the end of the queue, and so on into infinity. If you're new to her (the heresy!) start with her first album. 

For your enjoyment, a classic performance: The Work Song  "Backs broke bending digging holes to plant the seeds... "

In which we plan a coup

Music (audit division): I have no idea why I was listening to the Charlatans' first album, but there it was. I found the music interesting, with a lot of influences making the end result hard to pin down, which can be quite a good thing. Nothing jumped out at me, but I enjoyed it, and queued it up for another listen in the near future. Apparently they're a popular British band that's been around for four decades, but they're new to me. We'll see. This was followed by "Gypsy Cowboy," the second album from New Riders of the Purple Sage. Despite my Deadhead leanings, I've never been the greatest fan of the Riders, which had its roots in the Grateful Dead. A lot of their stuff is of the long and moan-y persuasion—and so is a lot of Dead stuff, TBH—but every now and then they pick up the pace and get off a good one. So I'll listen for the good ones, and occasionally pop one over to my main playlist. 

Debate: For years now the Lakeland tournament, officially known as the Westchester SomethingOrOther, has been in decline. It has TOC bids in Public Forum and Policy, which makes it appealing as a late qualifier, but merely limps along in Lincoln-Douglas. It also offers some MS stuff, to which I have paid little attention, aside from noting, back when we were live and in person, that MS kids are very, very, very young. And little. And as a rule, in my opinion, should not be physically mixed in with HS kids. (The whole subject of Middle School debate is an interesting one for another time.) Anyhow, lately the tournament is entirely virtual, and it seems to have been orphaned from its Lakeland roots, as well as, lately, some interim roots. So my inspiration this morning was that the Online Debate League should take it over. We would keep the tournament structure, but normalize it on the back end with the NYCFL infrastructure. This would insure the continuance of the tournament, and could perhaps even beef it up a bit. In reality, NYCFL and Lexington have been doing the heavy lifting on most of it for years now. And Lakeland, the tournament's origin, is a school in the NYCFL district. I mean, what's the downside? I proposed this to the others in the ODL this morning. We'll see where it goes. 

Games: I looked at the new NY Times game, Crossplay. As far as I can tell from playing it for about five minutes, it's Words With Friends, a fad which was, at its roots, Scrabble. Maybe it's something for a boring stretch during a tournament, but I don't see myself getting too involved with it. In other gamey news, today was Wordle 3 / Connections 4 / Genius with 1 pangram. It took me a while to figure out the Crossword gimmick, so a way above average 20 minutes on that one. 

In which we tune in to the occasional podcast

I've been listening to This Week in Tech for as long as I've been listening to podcasts, going back to when TWIT was always in the top ten. Once upon a time, podcasting was new.  It was, insofar as choice was concerned, analogous to the early days of television in that it was fairly limited. And I did literally listen on an iPod. Since that time, podcasting has come and gone and come and gone, but mostly now it's here to stay, providing mostly narrowcasting to audiences interested in whatever the podcast is covering. TWIT is my tech podcast, aimed at the listener fairly interested in general technology, hosted by longtime technologist Leo Laporte with a revolving roundtable of guests, mostly tech journalists but occasionally others as well. If you're curious about, say, the high points of this year's CES or Claude AI or the fact that the richest man alive (that schmegeggie) has a net worth four times greater than the second-richest man alive (that other schmegeggie), you've come to the right place. 

I used to listen to audiobooks during my commute and podcasts during my morning treadmill exercising, but now it's books on my daily walk and podcasts in the car or cooking, so I admittedly listen less than I would like. I can't listen to anything just sitting there and listening. If I sit down I'll read or, as likely as not, nap. But I do never neglect to listen to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me It is the perfect length for the weekly trip to the supermarket. 

And then there's the previously mentioned History of Rock in 500 Songs.  I can't imagine anyone interested in the genre not enjoying it, as well as picking up something new from it every time.

Needless to say, I do follow a couple of Disney podcasts. WDW Radio from Lou Mongello and Disney History Institute Podcast. You know who you are if you want to listen to these.

My last regular listen is You Must Remember This, a podcast about Hollywood by Karina Longworth. If you love (or at least used to love) movies, you'll like this one. Longworth takes a theme for the season, and then runs with it. The most recent one was "The Old Man is Still Alive," about the late films of great directors. With both this one and History of Rock,  you should start at the beginning. They're all good. 

Finally, there's the ones I listen to occasionally if the subject moves me. Mobituaries with Mo Rocca. Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesy Hirway. Imaginary Worlds. And, oh, yeah, there's also Cocaine & Rhinestones, which I put on hiatus, and which I'll go back to if I ever catch up with 500 Songs.

In which no one expects the Spanish Inquisition

Watching: Last night I watched the final episode of "Etoile" on Amazon Prime. This series, from the Palladinos, show runners of, among other things, the wonderful "The Amazing Mrs. Maisal," was cancelled after one season. It's a shame. I would really love to see what happens next. It has good characters, and it's funny and smart, and there's all the ballet stuff. It's probably the dance aspect that brought it down: ballet is not America's Pastime, shall we say. Or maybe it was just too hifalutin in general; I mean, how big an audience is there for the likes of shoutouts to Umbrellas of Cherbourg? 

[Sigh.]

Debate: Bigle X ended satisfactorily. I spent the boring drive home wondering how Kaz, Lexington's coach, can make this boring drive easily eighty or ninety weekends during the season. Other than that, there's not much to report. Catholic Charlie and I challenged Kaz on the idea that there is no room more comfortable for tab than the one she always throws us into, but she insists there isn't. Nowhere on Lexington's campus is there a comfy chair for a poor overworked educator during normal working hours?

Feh.

Music: I realized this morning that I get a lot of my suggestions for music to add to the audit queue from reading the obituaries. Ralph Towner, guitarist for the group Oregon, just passed away. Having never heard of Ralph Towner or Oregon made it a shoo-in for listening at some unknown future date. Whether this is major ignorance on my part or not, I cannot tell. There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio...

In which the source of our serious fandom is explained

Debate: Shock of all shocks, the morning began with scraping ice off the windshield. But not that much, and one was off to the races pretty quickly, listening to Nilsson advising me to turn on my radio and hearing poor poor pitiful Warren Z complain that the young girls won't leave him be. There are worse ways to start a morning.

Word on the street is that bad weather is icummen in this afternoon, so we're accelerating the schedule as much as we can, which isn't much. More importantly, today's quarterfinal round has moved to tomorrow, so people heading for the hills today will reach them in plenty of time, while those of the elimination stripe will chime in tomorrow virtually. I'll leave tomorrow afternoon, after the worst is over. 

It must be Big Lex weekend. 

Sports ball: In recent years I've gotten marginally interested in football. I was saddened by Buffalo's loss yesterday, as I considered them the local favorite in the playoffs. With the exception of San Francisco, the closer a team is to my house, the more likely I am to root for them. SF is the exception because I once had a $1.00 49ers tee shirt I picked up at the local outlet mall, which insured my partiality until the grave. Who can argue with the $1.00 tee shirt? 

In which we chew some bubblegum music

Like so many people, I patiently wait for my jetpack, my flying car, and my gold made-in-America TrumpiePhone. No doubt you do too. It's lonely, living on the edge. 

Music (audit edition): Obviously on a Beach Boys roll, next up was Bruce Johnston's "Surfin' Round the World." This album sounds as if Johnston was asked in the morning to write a record's worth of surf music, and then recorded it all that afternoon in one take. For Johnston, who subbed in for Brian Wilson on the road and wrote the songs that make the whole world sing, including "Disney Girls," this was an early effort, best forgotten. 

Following Johnston in the queue was a solo album by Ron Dante, lead singer of the Archies. If you've ever wondered where one goes from "Sugar Sugar," I can assure you, it's more of the same, only not as...good? Not terrible though; you can listen to it without your brains falling out. But that is, of course, the faintest of praise. 

Listening (audiobook edition): I finished listening to Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers on the way to Lexington. It's the third in her Wayfarers series. I enjoyed the first two more, but this one was fine. It's a rondo, circling from character to character, and it takes a while for the narrative to gel in one's mind, but finally it does come together. I've seen Chambers described as an author of cozy science fiction, a category I admittedly had never heard of, but it's not inappropriate. A lot of SF is dreary and dismal, and as far as I can tell, Chambers doesn't write that sort of book. Good for her. 

In which the sun rises bright over Big Lex weekend

It's as if the weather is luring you in. See my brightness! Feel my felicitous breezes! Glory in my glow! And then, tomorrow morning, we'll spend an hour shoveling snow off the car, hoping against hope that at least one hardy barista will have made it to the Starbucks down the road so that you can at least get a damned cup of coffee. The thing is, I've been to the Lexington tournament about 30 times now. It's in the middle of winter and I know what can happen. Oh, sure, they might throw a warm day at you as a tease, but once they've got you in their clutches...

Music: Meanwhile, I don't recall ever coming across Rebecca Kilgore before reading today's obituary in the Times. If you're a Songbook person, you need to add her to your list: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0vxdLU?si=7cf4f5d15d2546e4

Movies: My generation was raised on the old Universal monsters. They were inescapable on local television. Fifth graders, the absolute target market for this brand of entertainment, would run into school on a Monday full of glee on having seen "The House of" one or another of the Wolfman or Dracula or Frankenstein, a film that would in fact include the Wolfman AND Dracula AND Frankenstein, and maybe an Invisible Man or two to boot. https://crimereads.com/universal-monsters-history/ does a good job of covering Universal's monsters from day one. 

The other genre we fifth graders were the absolute target market for was what I guess you would call Creature Features, not the designation of the local TV station but the movies that were shown in the local theater as Saturday matinees. The place would be packed with kids, the noisiest, least attentive audience imaginable, while on the screen cheesy aliens of one sort or another were attacking earth or greeting earthlings to make soup out of them or whatever. One of these—a good one—I remember clearly to this day: Enemy from Space. This was an entry in the Quatermass series (not that I knew that at the time) in which meteorites land on earth carrying an alien substance. When a human comes in contact with that substance, they become its slave, going on to collect those meteorites to gather that substance which they put into great vats of methane-breathing Jupiter monsters. The only way you could tell if a human was on their side was a telltale rash on their arms. I have to say, this one kept me up a night or two in my youth. The third of the Quatermass pictures was titled in the US Five Million Years to Earth, released in 1967. This one gave me the heebie jeebies when I was in college! Earth was invaded by a plague of scary looking locust creatures from Mars millions of years ago, giving rise to the idea of the devil and still giving off evil vibes in contemporary Swinging London Town. I think they may have spawned humans, making their legacy that much more complex. I highly recommend these Quatermass movies.

None of which has anything to do with the weather in Lexington this weekend, but if things get particularly Satanic, you'll have heard it here first.