The Fredösphere

It was Sunday morning.  I was leading a choir rehearsal.  My basses needed to sing a series of low Fs, which is tough for the baritones.  I gave them a bit of advice:  "turn your head slightly to the left and you'll buy yourself an extra half-step on the low end."  Which is true; it works especially well if you tilt your head up a bit.  I then added:  "the guy who told me that trick is German, so you know it must work."

Two of my choristers were around the school of music of the University of Michigan when I was (the 80s) and thought they could guess who it was.  Within a few seconds they had recalled the name:  Martin Werner.  Turns out Herr Doktor Werner is better known in this area than I thought.  He's had a fruitful career in the west side of Michigan as a choir director.  He also gets gigs as a whistler, of all things.

Anyway, to my old friend I say, Martin, if you've googled yourself and found this page:  hello, and thanks again for the singing tip.

All the world is linking to the amazing Honda commercial.  I have to join them because of the choral content, but also because I want you to know the rehearsal videos (all three) should not be missed.  Note the element of data collection in the creative process:  they recorded the sounds they wanted to imitate.

May I state an opinion?  The impact would much less without the visuals.  The music works only as a partner with the video; most people would be uninterested in it alone.  On the other hand, a choir that wanted to have a lot of fun could produce their own video and perform sound effects to accompany it as part of a live concert.

Meanwhile, About the Composer has found sound files of some truly bizarre Georgian folk music.  Start with Khasanbegura.

First there came the Chuck Norris facts.  Now I give you the Aaron Copland facts:

Women have been known to become pregnant spontaneously upon hearing the first notes of Appalachian Spring.

Aaron Copland feels everything you feel.  Except pain.

Legislators in New Jersey offered to rename their state after Aaron Copland, but he forgot to fill out the necessary paperwork so it never happened.

When Aaron Copland writes bad music, he shreds the manuscript, then burns it, then eats the ashes, then passes them, then burns the excreted matter and eats it again, then passes that, then burns it one more time and buries it.  And even after that, it's worth more than all other composers' manuscripts put together.

When Aaron Copland exits a building in New York City, immediately five cabs appear out of nowhere to offer him a ride for free.

Aaron Copland could have made tons of money playing the stock market.  He just didn't want to.

People who try to beat Aaron Copland in a composition competition experience fever, blurred vision, rosin rash, bagginess of the clothes, and the feeling of being repeatedly hit on the head by a big-boned, skillet-wielding frontier woman.

It was Fanfare for the Common Man, not the allied armies, that crushed Fascism.

I will be the accompanist for the traditional service at church this Sunday, and it has put me in a resentful mood.  Of all types of performing, playing keyboards gives me the least joy.  There are so many notes, and you produce them by poking your fingers into narrowly defined regions.  The whole system seems optimized for mistakes.  Compared with singing, the technique is a nightmare; stop practicing the piano for a few days, and the decay is evident, but stop singing for a month and you can get back to 95 percent right away.  (Although, improvement in singing cannot be accelerated by greatly increasing practice time.  Ramping up is just as gradual as ramping down.)

I find myself playing loud as a practice.  I need to play the hymns as though I am filling a large space.  It reminds me of my old composition teacher, Fred Shulze, who got a job as a young man playing piano in a rescue mission or some such.  The preacher instructed him from the pulpit:  "put yer foot down on that loud pedal and play it like yer saved!"  Which, though regrettably unnuanced, could be worse, as far as philosophies of performance practice go.

Meanwhile, The Overgrown Path found a nice Guardian article that wonders if the pop music world has its period instrument performances.

At Sequenza21, Daniel Gilliam has discouraging words for those considering a degree in music composition.  He suggests you pursue a day job that earns you real money, and spend your free time on composing.

Which is what I've done.  By golly, I guess that means I'm a genius.  (Well, some of my degrees are in music, but I managed somehow to end up in a masters program that was close enough to computer science to get a real job in that industry.)

I've heard this kind of advice before.  A few years ago I took some composing lessons.  I expressed the wish to return to the school of music, thinking I would take my education far more seriously than I did when I was in my 20s.  My teacher said it would be a fine thing to do if my goal was to become a better composer, but he urged me emphatically not to view it as part of a career path that would culminate in a cushy teaching position.  I think he was right.  He was a talented guy, trying to support a family on a grab bag of insecure, exhausting teaching jobs.  He quoted William Bolcom:  "music isn't a career, it's a disease."

UPDATE:  According to Justin Davidson, the way to rake in the big bucks is to get hired hauling the chairs that musicians sit on.

Yes, Canada.  Another one of my unhealthy obsessions, along with anti-popes and zeppelins and all the rest.  It's a fascinating country, really.  So big, so empty.  For example, an astonishing number of provincial capitols are located on islands.  Well, okay, it's only three, but hey, that's 30 percent!  The southernmost point of Canada is Pelee Island in Lake Erie.  I'm told the B&B there is a nice place to visit.

Canada's politics can be entertaining too, in spite of what they say.  You should really read up on the odd Social Credit Party who ran Alberta for some years.  They tried to print their own quasi-currency, which was derided as "funny money," and they forbade the serving of alcoholic drinks aboard commercial aircraft while in Albertan airspace.  Here's the kindest possible spin on the movement.  Although it's prosperity bonds resembled a redistributionist scheme, it was based on the theory that the wealth that disappeared in the stock market crash could be somehow rediscovered and returned to its owners.  I wonder if kids vacationing in Alberta can buy replicas of these bonds in gift shops the way they buy confederate currency when they visit civil war battlefields.  That would be cool.  Cool in a deeply geeky history buff kind of way.  Which isn't cool.

Our own (milder) version of this movement (I hope I'm being fair) was the Minnesota Farmer - Labor Party, which was rural, pious, and motivated by a concern for collective prosperity.  It eventually folded into our left wing party, but the Albertans evolved into right wingers.  This weird history explains much of the hostility that eastern Canadians feel toward western Canadians, especially western Canadian politicians.  To be tainted by association with the SCP is to see your national political ambitions die.

You did know they had an election up there yesterday, didn't you?  They have a new prime minister.  Colby Cosh says it's all his fault.

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper"?  These words are like a dream come true, but I don't mean that idiomatically, as a matter of self-identification with the Conservative Party. I mean that the incoming results are like a dream, the way it would be "like a dream" if your fifth-grade Social Studies teacher suddenly bicycled past you in the nude.

The political culture is even more relaxed than in the U.K.  Politicians are free to grow facial hair and dispense with ties.  The CBC starts reporting returns when only a few dozen votes are counted.  You see a number like "53" and you assume they mean precincts, but then you realize that's the current raw vote count for the front runner.

Gravity Lens agrees with Ray Bradbury that Singin' in the Rain is a science fiction movie, "as it's about how people's lives are changed by new technology."

Gravity Lens also links to a Wired article on the rudeness of cell phone users.  I've never been quite so exercised by this problem as the author, but that may be a function of my cosseting myself within a suburban enclave.  However, I was once very highly entertained by a young woman who chose the children's section of the public library as the place to make a lengthy and loud cell phone call about her frustrations while experimenting with therapeutic colonics.  "I think I just need to listen to my body more," was her conclusion.  I think the rest of us just needed to listen to her mouth less.

Virgil Thomson was right:  Ruggles beats Ives.

I'm just now discovering Sun-treader, although it is widely referred to as Ruggles' magnum opus.  Yow.  The opening shout is a brassy leap upward of a minor ninth.  (Such a yummy interval!)  Y'all know I have no patience for gratuitous weirdness (except my own, of course) so if I'm praising this piece, you know it has to be good.  Or I'm messed up.  Or both.

Aworks puts Sun-treader in its context.  He also discusses this business of finding masterpieces that can be "salvaged" among the "wreckage" of 20th century music.  (He calls this the conventional narrative; I don't think he is expressing his own view.)  My own inconsistency really bugs me:  when I find myself getting passionate over a tonality-free zone like Sun-treader, or feeling sympathetic to some of Messiaen's thorny pieces, I wonder if I really don't understand the true reason why I like what I like.  Clearly, I have no business pretending to be a critic, if I can't separate my preferences from my judgments.

I think I know what's going on here:  the title grabbed me and made me want to like it.  The heightened attention got me over my usual hurdle.  I heard the piece play with a picture of some kind of super being, a lonely and magisterial presence, something from the imagination of Francois Schuiten.  With two words, Ruggles stirred emotions that I search for in science fiction -- usually, with disappointment.

Bonus Track:  Ruggles made me think of The Rutles, a Beatles parody.  I googled a bit, clicked a bit, and all of a sudden, I found Beats!!!!  Something to savor on a slow Friday afternoon.   You're welcome!

Virtuoso performers dazzle us with their high-speed playing, their pyrotechnics of technique.  This can happen with a player of almost any kind of instrument, but there is something especially hypnotic and mystifying about banjo players.  Unlike other performers who work up a mighty sweat, a banjo player seems preternaturally calm.  If you watch the picking hand, the gestures seem impossibly few, given the torrent of notes gushing forth.

A banjo player's picking gesture is tiny in comparison with , for example, a fiddler's bowing, but that doesn't explain the whole effect, not by a long shot.  Banjos (along with other fretted stringed instruments) allow for certain left-hand techniques, including hammer-ons and pull-offs, that allow the player to produce notes at approximately double the rate that the right hand picks them.  This is what produces that illusion that the music is magically -- even maybe diabolically -- busier than the effort ought to allow.

So now you know how to play a fretted instrument with dazzling virtuosity.  Well, one of the ways.  There is another:  you could sell your soul to the devil.  Which only makes sense, particularly if you are a banjo player.

Whichever method you choose, you'll want to become a banjo virtuoso as soon as possible.  It most definitely has its rewards.

Colby Cosh likes -- or at least, fails to hate -- the music recommendation service at Pandora.com.  (Actually, it does more than recommend music -- it also streams it on your own personal "station.")  He says it succeeds in leading you deeper into your pet niches, unlike amazon.com, which always flogs the latest best sellers, or LivePlasma, which thinks Perry Como is the logical next step for lovers of early music choirs.  I'll give Pandora a try if it ever adds classical music to its library; I've used Movielens with success, but I've never found a Beatrice to guide me through the seven labyrinthine circles of recorded music Hell.

Me:  "Do tell, fair and thrice-beatified Beatrice, would I like this latest release by The Bad Mutha Tulips?" 
Beatrice:  "Naw.  Sucks."

(The Bad Mutha Tulips comes compliments of the Band Name Generator.)

Speaking of which, (early music, not The Bad Mutha Tulips) I returned today to The Sixteen.  What delicious singing.  The CD cover titles say:

An Eternal Harmony
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers

This implies the forming of the group involved searching the globe for sixteen men each of whom was a superb singer and also happened to be named Harry Christopher.  Which, if it were true, would be just the kind of admirable yet quixotic quest that you would expect a group of early music fanatics to impose upon themselves -- like continuing a search for the Holy Grail even after you had seen photographic proof it was placed in a Whole Foods recycle bin and melted down to make containers for organic tomato colonics.

I arrived shockingly late to the melody party.  I've always been naturally attentive to harmony and form, but I was in my twenties before I started paying serious attention to melody.  (I'm not sure I get rhythm even now.)  Lately I've been thinking more about note selection and note tendency, using a crude kind of Schenkerian analysis (since I lack formal training in it).  To my shock I find myself being pushed ever more in the direction of tonality.  (For the record:  my parody of Pilgrim's Progress has plenty of self-parody in it.  Just in case you were wondering.) 

A couple of related points about compositional technique:

This is all by way of a reminder that most experiments in novelty result in gratuitous weirdness, and that we should never underestimate the effort on the part of composers who succeed in finding some original gesture that doesn't completely suck.

Composing is a lot harder when you don't just go with the first notes that pop into your head.  Ignorance has its compensations.

And now, a couple of follow-up points regarding Schenkerian analysis:

My few attempts to learn more about Schenker have suffered from a poor choice of introductory texts.  Prof. Tom Pankhurst looks like the guy to help me get started.

I harbor a vague, yet deep, suspicion that Schenker's work is nothing more or less than one part of the world-wide conspiracy to get me to like Haydn.

I have one dominant criterion for judging improbable finds, such as Precolumbian maps of the New World.  It is:  if it entertains me, I believe it.  I believe this.  My unerring sense of good taste does impose its limits, however.

Greetings to the swarm of Saline Fiddlers and their friends invading the Fredösphere today (because of yesterday's post).  If you guys crash my server, I'll never say another nice thing about anyone.

My friend Alan alerted me to MPR's live interview with Anton Armstrong of St. Olaf's College.  In case you don't know, Armstrong is the choral educator par excellence.  I listened live; you can listen to the archival recording.

Armstrong says students arrive at college today with less of the fundamental training in place that in years past.  He also places great emphasis on an ensemble mentality, and he says sometimes he turns down superior voices to get it.  He thinks some churches' search for relevance has become "narcissistic;" "feel good" seems to be a favorite put-down.  Finally, he lauds the arts role as a prophetic voice -- oh, yes! -- but then drops a fly in the ointment of an otherwise inspiring interview by citing Paul Robeson, who was "accused by Senator McCarthy" of being a communist.  Yikes.  We need to remember the rule:  just because McCarthy called you a communist doesn't mean you're not one.

From Anton Armstrong to animated talking organic produce.  (Thanks for the link, Jeremy.)  From the sublime to the ... to the ... even more sublime!

The wifeösphere teaches Sunday school, so we got to attend an appreciation party for the teachers Friday night.  Just like last year, the Saline Fiddlers played a concert.  I liked them very much last year; this year I was even more impressed.  As usual, the kids (high-schoolers all) played with enormous energy and enthusiasm.  They play at a high level of technical skill, but more importantly, they use their skill as an aid to emotional expression.  So many performers let technique smother the emotion.

In the case of the best players of the group, the music seems to be generated by their whole bodies.  Indeed, I noticed a few times a surge of emotion on a player's face that went beyond the goofy, joyful (indeed, near offal-ingesting) grins the kids keep on their faces.  I saw the rapture that outwardly is hard to distinguish from pain.  We call these moments "communication," but they less about a deliberate attempt to send a message, and more about a kind of accidental emotional sympathy.  That, my friends, is music making.

It's about Alito, but the point is not political.  You have got to see this.  (Hat tip to my friend Jeremy.)

I have little time for blogging today, so I'll pass on something my friend Alan found.  Have a look at the Abston Church of Christ, an impressive example of new architectural design.

As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Conservatory of Music, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed in a Black Turtleneck, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Textbook in his hand, and a great Burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying What shall I do?

I looked then, and saw a man named Neo-Romantic, coming to him, and asked, Wherefore dost thou cry?

He answered, Sir, I perceive by the Book in my hand, that I am condemned to write music with all manner of discordant harmonies, and after that to come to Obscurity, and I find that I am not able to do the first, nor willing to do the second.

Composer no sooner leaves the World but meets
Aaron Copland, who lovingly him greets
With tidings of another: and doth shew
Him how to mount to that from this below.

Then said Neo-Romantic, Why not willing to compose tonal music, since this modernist crappe is attended with so many evils? The Man answered, Because I fear that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the Grave, and I shall fall into disfavor with Aworks and Listen. And, Sir, the thoughts of these things make me cry.

So I saw in my Dream that the Man began to run.

Now he had not run far from his own door, but his fellow music professors and his Dean, perceiving it, began to cry after him to return, and did begin to beat upon their pianos with their forearms; but the Man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying Tonality! Tonality! Eternal Tonality!

The Neighbors also came out to see him run; and as he ran, some mocked, others threatened, and some cried after him to return; and among those that did so, there were two that resolved to fetch him back by force. The name of the one was Dodecaphony, and the name of the other Aleatoric. Then said the Man, Neighbors, wherefore are you come? They said, To persuade you to go back with us. But he said, That can by no means be; you dwell, said he, in the City of Noise.

Dodecaphony and Aleatoric follow him

  Dodec.  What, said Dodecaphony, and leave your Learned Journals and your Tenure behind you!
  Com.  Yes, said Composer, for that was his name, because that all which I shall forsake is not worthy to be compared with a little of that that I am seeking to enjoy:  namely, dissonances that resolve; also musical works that, when they end, the audience knows to start clapping.

Composer and Dodecaphony pull for Aleatoric’s soul

  Ale.  Well, Neighbor Dodecaphony, said Aleatoric, I intend to go along with this good man, but, my good companion, do you know the way to this desired place?

Aleatoric contented to go with Composer

  Com.  I am directed by a man, whose name is Neo-Romantic.
  Ale.  Come then, good Neighbor, let us be going. Then they went both together.
  Dodec.  And I will go back to my place, said Dodecaphony; I will be no companion of such mis-led, fantastical fellows.

Dodecaphony goes railing back to his RCA Synthesizer

  Now I saw in my Dream, that when Dodecaphony was gone back, Composer and Aleatoric went talking over the Plain; and thus they began their discourse.

Talk between Composer and Aleatoric

  Ale.  Come, Neighbor Composer, since there are none but us two here, tell me now further what the things are, and how to be enjoyed, whither we are going?
  Com.  I will read of them to you in my Music Theory Text.
  Ale.  And do you think that the words of your Theory are certainly true?
  Com.  Yes, verily; for it is based on the overtone series and the laws of physics, that cannot lye.
  Ale.  And what if notes were not determined by any law of physics, but rather by the roll of dice, or by the computations of a thinking machine?
  Com.  That would suck, yea verily.

Aleatoric notices for the first time the burden on Composer's back.

Ale.  How now, good fellow, whither away after this burdened manner?
Chr.  A burdened manner indeed, as ever I think poor creature had. And whereas you ask me, Whither away? I tell you, Sir, this sack on my back, is filled with diverse instruments of unnatural tuning, each fashioned by Harry Partch; and I also seem to recall that there is a piano in there, with various objects stuck between the strings, which give its notes a perverse quality....

Here endeth the parody.  Completing it is left as an exercise for the reader.  It will write itself -- trust me.

The A Cappella News links to an article about Deke Sharon, the maven of the contemporary a cappella movement.  How appropriate that his name makes him sound like a college fraternity.  For more about Deke, start at his Wikipedia entry and follow the links.  I was able to find some sound files and score excerpts.  Sounds like the day they recorded these, somebody accidentally dropped the reverb box down the stairwell -- the sound is pretty dry. 

Their take on "Longest Time" recalls fond memories of hearing it sung (better, frankly) by The Friars, an elite commando unit of the University of Michigan's hoary ol' Men's Glee Club.  (No, I was never a member.)  Apparently the Friars are even better than I remember.  Looking for sound files is frustrating; you might end up here, or you'll get information that, however useful, is not pertinent to our current topic:

Many of Chaucer's tales are joined by brief snippets of dialogue and action traditionally called "links"; on the WWW one "clicks" on a "hyperlink" to go to another "page" on the Web.

If that's too confusing, one can simply "read" Chaucer's tales from a "book" by turning it's "pages" in "sequential" order from "left" to "right."  Okay, I'm done now.

Memo to Alex Ross:  shouldn't you spell it "anti-poppist"?  Otherwise, people will think you are stealing one of my schticks.  Speaking of which, it turns out Pope Paul VI was murdered sometime in the mid-70s and replaced by an imposter.  You learn something new every day.

These days I'm listening to some Christmas gifts:  this Nitty Gritty Dirt Band classic (lot's of fascinating banter between takes), Chanticleer's latest (long stretches of experimental atmospherics), and Terry Teachout's favorite post-bluegrass band ("post-bluegrass" -- can I claim to have invented the term?  I'm awfully proud of it.  Google says ... of course not!).  I'm also enjoying something I found in the New CD bin at the library:  Essential Aúna.  Let's see, what slot can we slide them into?  Their sound is engineered with a bit of a poppish sensibility (hey, look at that:  the word that ties this post together!) but the music is good, serious stuff; I'd call it post-minimalist, but what do I know?  From their outfits it looks like they are trying to decide whether to take the red pill or the blue pill.

Devoted readers of this space (hi, Mom!) will recall my admiration for The Mote In God's Eye, a sci-fi novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which attempts to imagine a benign role for Christianity in a future galactic empire.  This, in opposition to most futurist visions, wherein religion has become extinct or turned kooky.  Niven and Pournelle's future church has bishops, but apparently no pope, and minority religions are tolerated -- all so close to my ideal, it almost disturbs me -- and everyone is mildly religious, except for your few cultists on the one hand, and your tradition-minded Russian spaceship commander with an icon on his dresser on the other hand.

Well, I thought this was all speculative fiction, but I guess Niven and Pournelle were laying out a serious plan for the future.  It turns out phase one of the plan has now been implemented.  (Hat tip John Derbyshire.)

For a long time, I've wanted to recitfy my inexcusible ignorance of Virgil Thomson's two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All.  Strangely, my local library has no recording of either, which is my excuse.  Anyway, if you'd like to recommend a recording I should buy, or if you have any interesting information about the music, please post a comment.

Readers are to be warned that today's post is odd and probably not to many people's taste.  I should say, unusually so even by Fredösphere standards.  Odd, and deeply self-absorbed.  You have been warned.

My vacation has delayed me, but now I gladly respond to this post on quirks by Don of Mixolydian Mode.  I'm not going to list five different ones, instead, I'd like to spend a minute describing one.

I love to flick things across my finger.  I started as a preschooler, when I found the corner of my favorite blanket was just the right combination of sharp and flexible.  I would hold the corner between my thumb and index finger and flick my middle (or sometimes my ring) finger back and forth across the point of the corner.  (To be clear, we are talking about a quilted blanket, with the corner consisting of two pieces of cloth with a seam folded within and with very thin material inside to stiffen it.)  Later, I moved to other objects; I found paper to be only occasionally satisfying.  Later, after puberty, I discovered individual hairs on my head that were coarser than the rest (I have very fine hair) which worked well.  In fact, I hair is excellent because, as a hair is flicked, the end becomes curled, providing a more complex and satisfying flick.  The most perfect medium I've found is heavy nylon thread, and at least once in my life I have bought a spool of the stuff just for flicking, to relieve my shoulder which had grown tired of holding my hand up to the top of my head, where a particularly coarse hair was growing.

At this point, let me freely stipulate that this is a seriously weird behavior.

Is this just another nervous habit?  I'm not sure.  I suspect it is unlike chewing nails.  I suppose I need to hear from a nail chewer:  how much satisfaction comes from the chewing itself, as opposed to the result, which is that one's nails are shortened?  My flicking has no end other than itself:  I derive exquisite pleasure from the feeling of the flick.  I have another habit which consists of picking at the hairs of my beard (when I am shaving or clipping it very short), but that I consider a conventional nervous habit:  if I find a hair that sticks out, I can pluck it and be done with it.

Hey, I already admitted this was weird.

Flicking is a deeply self-indulgent activity, and I try to avoid doing it in front of other people.  It is usually accompanied by a state of daydreaming, although sometimes it can accompany analytical thinking.  The wifeösphere finds it annoying, as you might imagine.

I really don't understand it's "role" in anything, and I assume it is just one of those weird, freaky byproducts that any system is prone to exhibit when it gets as complex as the human brain.  I also suspect it relates somehow to the way my mind works, which can switch easily from left to right brain activities, or because I am what the Myers-Briggs people call intuitive, or Keirsey called a Martian.  (Specifically, I am an iNTj drifting over into an iNTp -- both of which have an Objectivist connection, which is pretty darned hilarious.)

I'd love to hear from others whose nervous habits can shed light on mine.  That's especially true if you've got the flicks -- but I suspect there ain't many flickers out there.

I'm arriving late to the party, but I wanted to link to Mark Steyn's essay on the future of Europe because it is so provocative.  I hope those who are put off by some of his more extreme statements will realize the necessity of raising the questions Steyn raises.  Also check out Steyn talking about the article on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, and note this passage, as interpreted by the transcriber:

[U]sually you have incredibly swift and dramatic change. That's what happened in the second decade of the 20th Century, where these huge endearing European empires, one by one, were all suddenly gone. Russian empire, Austrian empire, German empire, Turkish empire, boom. All off the map.

I've never found Czarist Russia, the Ottoman regime, etc. especially endearing, but I'm a notorious grouch, so what do I know?  Also see this parody by View From the Right (via Steve Sailer):

For this magnificent and brilliant speech, delivered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in June 1940, the Claremont Institute has announced that it will posthumously give Mr. Churchill its prestigious Mark Steyn award.

Whew.  That's a lot of politics for a little ol' church musician like me.  Let's move on to more fun stuff.  2 Blowhards linked to this atheist's call for everyone to drop the distasteful "Happy Holidays" shtick and get comfortable with Christmas.  His analysis is interesting, and maybe even mostly right, but the conclusion should not encourage Christians as much as you might think.

Whoa -- I said this was going to drop the politics and have fun, right?  Okay, here's my last offering:  via that sad skeptic Instapundit, the hope that, in a few years, we'll be flying to Mars in less time than it took me to drive my family from Florida to Michigan.  Something about intense magnetic fields and hyperdimensionality -- the words are big, so it must be true!

We survived our drive down to Florida and back.  Thank you, Game Boy, for keeping the kids happy in the van.  Most satisfying moment:  pulling into our driveway at midnight, Tuesday night and having avoided wasting 60 bucks and nine hours on some nasty cheap motel room.  (We had left Sarasota, Florida at 4:30am that morning and experienced near-ideal conditions of road, traffic and weather.)  Least satisfying moment:  walking away from a convenience store in tiny Philadelphia, Tennessee, having noticed they sell the legendary Dr. Enuf soda pop (on my sidebar from the beginning of the Fredösphere but never tasted by me), but realizing that the wifeösphere would be in no mood to expend a little more time and money to get a bottle since that stop was one several gratuitous bathroom breaks of the afternoon, thanks to both kids having drunk an inordinate amount of juice.  Ah well, I have a tendency to idealize things like Dr. Enuf; no doubt my Sweet Desire for it is better than any real taste of it.  (Now I sound like that chick from Millennium Actress, and I never thought that would happen.)

Because the grade of the kids' behavior was cherubic, indeed, almost seraphic, and because I seem to be getting more tolerant of such rigors, I found the long hours on the road not terribly arduous.  There's something enjoyable about watching a large slice of this great country scroll pass before you.  As always, the religious expressions fascinate me.  They start abruptly a little north of Cincinnati (with the giant Jesus I blogged previously) and stay steady until Florida's tight signage laws banish them.  One large cross appeared to be connected to no nearby church, but happened to be sitting next to an adult bookstore.  Coincidence, you ask?  I doubt it, and one can easily imagine all those grown-up church boys casting a guilty look at it as they approach the store.  A brief drama plays out inside each mind, and some harden their hearts, some repent, and some fall miserably into the middle ground, neither repenting nor taking Martin Luther's advice.

(Speaking of which, my friend and fellow church musician Alan alerts us to the arrival of the 2006 Hooters calendar.)

I can't help but become a connoisseur of place names.  I heap scorn on all mindless derivatives of current European places, especially if "New" is tacked onto the beginning:  London, New Zion, Cairo, Athens (Ky) and Athens (Tn), Lebanon.  More forgivable are the names of no longer (or never) existing places, since they give the place a patina of classical dignity:  Troy, Arcadia.  In a similar category are the biblical references:  Corinth, Berea.  Some declare the noble aspirations of the founders:  Union, Pilgrim Rest, Independence, Experiment, Concord.  Native American names have potential, but are often spoilt by their loopy spellings:  Echeconnee, Ooltewah.  Best are those that elevate the common by their uniqueness as place names:  Paint Lick, Rockholds, Dog Walk, Stamping Ground, Turkeyfoot, Locust Grove.  In the ultralame-o category are Middletown, Centerville, Ten Mile, and Lake City, which no doubt stands beside Lake City Lake (which in turn no doubt contains Lake City Lake Island ... but we better stop there).  Absolutely the best highway sign of all:  one in Ohio that announces an exit for both Wapakoneta and Uniopolis.