The Fredösphere

This brief post is not about weird religions per se, although that is certainly a principal theme here at the Fredösphere. It's about a story found on Slashdot about an Australian senator denouncing Scientologists. Great fun and all, for those of a particular psychological type. (I belong to said type, and I blame my unhealthy interest in other people's kooky beliefs on the R6 Implant.)

No, I link to this story because the name of the Senator in question is Nick Xenophon. Xenophon! Isn't that just perfect? He sounds like he's a space alien who first visited this planet 75 million years ago. Xenophon! I still can't get over it.

Labels: LovableOddballs, Religion

Saline (emphasis on the second syllable, please), Michigan hosts a Celtic Festival every summer.  Think Renaissance Fair and you'll get the idea:  the creative anachronism crowd, but with more bagpipes.  We attended for the first time this year.  My impressions:

• The jousting competition was very satisfying, even if there were only three competitors. This is an expensive, high-commitment, weird, and rather dangerous sport.  I got the impression if one walks away from a tournament with only a few bruises and a sprained wrist, one considers the day a success. The time spent cantering and colliding is a small part of the whole; the riders spend a fair amount of time walking their horses into position. This means there's plenty of time to talk to the crowd, and inevitably trash talk has become an integral component of the entertainment. Also appreciated was the judge/master of ceremonies/FAQ answerer, a dead ringer for a bearded Jeremy Irons.  No fatalities, sadly, something that can happen when a splinter of balsa wood impales the brain via the eye slit.
• I couldn't help but notice the base drummer with obvious African ancestry among all the redheads in the pipe & drum bands, especially since he brought to mind the cover art from this sad, dreadful movie.
• Once again, the local high school provided instrumentalists, and by backing them up with a thumping electronic rhythm section, made them listenable from the point of view of the average audience member. See my previous paean to the Saline Fiddlers: same principle.
• The food was disappointing. Domino's Pizza had a booth, along with some Italian sub thing and a tent selling Hawaiian chicken of all things, and maybe I should have gone with one of those.  Instead I went to the trailer selling authentic Celtic food.  The Welsh pasty might have been good when it was fresh, but it sat around long enough for the puff pastry to turn dry as a Judge Bork martini. Sucker that I am, I obeyed the hype and also ordered a can of "Scotland's other national drink," a soda pop named Irn Bru that tastes like orange baby aspirin.  Not terrible, mind you, but definitely sub-fabulous.  Ah well, the Walkers shortbread cookies at the end redeemed the meal.
• People from the Society of Creative Anachronism really, really don't mind taking the time to explain their coats of arms.

Labels: Culture, local, LovableOddballs

The world's largest, longest piano is one built by a New Zealand teenager.  Brilliant . . . but next, let's move that behemoth out of the tin shack it's in and into a fine concert hall, so we can hear what it sounds like, which, I happen to think, is kind of important.

Labels: LovableOddballs

One of Tolkien's more amusing eccentricities was his anger over the Norman Invasion.  Dude, I would reply in my mind's voice, that was a thousand years ago.  The Saxons are over it.  I'm over it.  Get over it.  Anyway, it's not like the Saxons were peaceful, lily-pure aboriginals; they call the big island "Great Britain," not "Great Saxon," after all.

I was interested to learn Gerard Manley Hopkins shared Tolkien's anger, as documented in this article by Denis Donoghue.  Hopkins' lingering regret involved the continuing effect the invasion had on the English language.  Aaaaah , that makes more sense, and almost certainly explains Tolkien's complaint as well, considering Tolkien was one of the great language-obsessed scholars of the 20th century.  Hopkins apparently harbored a crazy hope the influence of the Romance languages could somehow be backed out of the English language.  (He also wanted to undo the influence of Protestantism on English culture, a project that was somehow related and equally crazy.)

Would English be a better language if it were purer?  Ironically, the removal of the Norman would make English more Frenchified, at least in this respect:  we would have one word for each thing, rather than two (or three or seven).  English poetry would flow more easily, but even this has its downside, as struggle often leads in the end to better art.  I recall hearing somewhere that the Irish language routinely rhymes its antonyms, something that happens only rarely in English.  (Womb/tomb, hire/fire, and make/break are three good ones I stole from The Spencer Encyclopedia.)  Wouldn't such a rhyme-friendly language tend to produce a flood of good poetry, but a trickle of great?  I await expert opinion to set me straight on this conjecture.

Labels: LovableOddballs, New Criterion, Readers Are Leaders

I grew up just a few miles north of the border of Indiana, which also meant Amish country.  I've traded more than my share of Wacky Amish Rules anecdotes, like the horse-drawn buggy pulling a motorboat on a trailer, or the farmers who have phones in their barns (it's not personal, it's business!) but not in their homes.  I've laughed over the irony of amish.net and wondered what an Amish TV network would look like.  (Most likely, Twelve Angry Mennonites 24 hours a day.)  That's why I was surprised that a website like Futurismic could shake my glib understanding of how Amish relate to technology.  Their choices begin to make sense once you understand that the various compromises are all oriented toward solving the problem of avoiding any innovation that disrupts the cohesion of their community . . . and cheerfully adopting any that does not.

I've always understood (and slightly agreed with) their Luddite approach, but reacted with horror to the arbitrary legalism.  My mind has expanded a bit and in the future my grins over Amish men on rollerblades will contain a little less smirk in it.

Labels: Culture, LovableOddballs

Savor the delights of passiveaggressivenotes.com.

One of the great failings of my life has been to not photograph a wonderful sign that years ago was nailed to a tree at the edge of a field near my parents' house. It was a rough piece of plywood with letters in drippy white paint. It said (as best I can remember) "Anyone caught trespassing on this property will pay $50 or GO TO JAIL." I'm sure the implicit threat--that the trespasser would fall into the clutches of a seriously psychotic individual--was about 100 times the deterrent of the explicit ones.

Labels: fun, LovableOddballs

I just found out Stanley Kubrick died exactly 666 days before the start of the year 2001.  Come on, guys--you're supposed to let me know about important stuff like that.

Labels: fun, LovableOddballs

Composers, watch out!  Tell your congressman to include you in the next round of protectionist legislation.  You're about to be replaced by a computer!  And, talk about matchstick men--via SF Signal, it's the Matchstick Minas Tirith.

I attended a composers' forum at the University of Michigan School of Music last night.  It's the first time in several years that I've gone.  I used to find these concerts painful, but last night's show boasted a few genuinely well-written pieces, and even the dogs had something to recommend them.  Is it possible that the kids are better than they were in the good old days?  I definitely recall the forums from way back, from the time I was a student there, were very informal and low on the spit & polish.  Not much was taken seriously back then.  Now, the kids seem terribly sophisticated--sophisticated in a real way, as though some of them are already moving beyond youthful gestures of pseudo-profundity and pointless complexity.

Either the UMSM composition department is recruiting better these days, or maybe I'm getting better at listening.  I suspect the answer is, some of both.  No question I have finally begun to learn how to pay attention to what is not immediately compelling.  I'm still bad at listening, but I now realize I was absolutely, dreadfully terrible at it in my younger years.  (Having a son with the same tendency has made me more aware of the problem.)

While I was at the forum I reintroduced myself to Evan Chambers, who recently emailed me to thank me for blogging his new work, The Old Burying Ground.

Labels: Composer, LovableOddballs