Yeah, writing is mysteriously appearing in this space, and that’s because despite all the stuff that’s been happening recently my fingers have not completely broken up their relationship with the keyboard. And what “stuff” could have been happening? Well as an e.g., in an unrelated order of importance…

• Various forays to various weddings
• Diverse friends moving away from here forever
• My Ph.D. defense
• My own getting married

See? Told you “stuff” was going down.

The last two of that list were done on the sly. We did a stealth, ninja-type wedding, and my supervisor likes to spring graduation on her students within weeks of the anticipated date. I’m still going to carry on doing pretty much the same thing for a bit though, I need to finish stuff up, and postponing the job search isn’t an entirely unattractive option. For now I’ll do a mini post-doc.

Something else I discovered is that you should under no circumstances send things which aren’t money. This can actually hinder the relief efforts, since it is extra boxes of stuff that aid workers have to sort through and deal with:

“Of course, the donors were only trying to help, but misplaced intentions actually worsened the suffering. Buried under care packages and out of date antibiotics labeled in Thai and Chinese were the world’s most advanced malaria medications. Meanwhile along the coast, people who had just lost homes and families writhed in malarial fever for lack of treatment.”

So just stick with the credit card…

And taken on my usually rubbish phone camera! Apparently even its paltry pixel count can’t put up a fight when faced with such a delicious increase in daily maximum temperature, and blueness of sky.

Instrumental edition. To keep the eye you aren’t pretending to do work with entertained we have for your internetting pleasure….

• The BeoTime alarm clock — homing in like a laser-sighted jaguar on that group of  people whose love for woodwinds is only slightly surpassed by the huge piles of money lying around their castle. Yours for a tad under four-hundred smackaroos.
• A woodier woodwind – Like the arboreal George Mallory, this guy had an inextinguishable urge to get all homnidy with what nature had provided. Unlike Mallory this meant wiring up a tree in his backyard and then bowing the crap out of it.
• Playing the black keys – If, like the NYPD, you are finding it hard to relinquish the mechanical ball of joy which is your typewriter AND your wax-cylinder gramophone is currently in the shop for repairs then this musical typewriter might be just what the old-timey doctor ordered. Then again, if you enjoy your music to actually be composed and, you know, pleasurable perhaps it’s better to pass.

Have a good weekend! I have not one, not three, but TWO work barbeques to attend over the next two days — although surprise suprise, now that it’s Friday the weather is switching from as sunny to possible to dribbling water. Oh dear.

Usually I find it really hard to fall asleep on planes. Hell, it’s hard enough to fall asleep in bed. I think it helped that the aisle I was plonked at the end of — aisle seats are the way forward for flights longer than an hour, due to toiletery priveleges — had only one other person in it all the way across the breadth of the plane. Initially there was another guy sitting next to me (who began the trip by deftly consuming a bag full of breadcrumbs and mayonnaise) but he resat himself after our frontward neighbours were still (loudly) talking about UK/USA culture clashes after two hours.

But not before making some under his (mayonnaisey) breath comments to me about how he’d never experienced anything like this in all his years of flying.

It didn’t bother me. Actually it was fascinating. Neither of the two knew each other until they became seating partners, and they had a chair between them. After about three seconds of conversation it was clear that the XYish one wanted more than just a bit of chatter, despite wives and boyfriends being brought up. There were some awkward almost hand contacts, and possibly a comment about, errr, how beautiful she looked when asleep, when he had to wake her up to go to the toilet an hour before we landed.

And she was having none of it.

I know, I’m a dirty little eavesdropper. But it was so conveniently right in front of my face.

I’m not even away for very much more than one week. And that week is chopped up into little packages of visits, so the entire thing is like a handful of candy, and will have passed before I’ve even really started to appreciate the jetlag. And yet that has just about zero correlation with my level of stress.

I could bitch about specific things (e.g., my supervisor coming back from holiday right after I leave, making it look like I have taken a disproportionately large amount of time off; the weather forecast predicting T storms for Thursday…) but that would be probably be really boring. So I’ll hide them in those parantheses, instead, and try and put on a happy face for another 48 hours.

And if that fails there’s always the airport bar…

Back to the real-world weekly work experience tomorrow though. Whaaa.

If I had stayed in England I would have graduated two years ago…

Must. Not. Whatif.

This evening I found my lost hat which is colored the specific shade of green that me and my sister are colorblind to. I wore it walking to the hotel bar in the middle of campus, through the drizzle, listening to Haitink conducting Shostakovich 15, last mvt.

Some dudes at Georgia Tech built and performed with a marimba playing, auto-accompanying robot Jazz robot. Yes, yes and yes, kids. Realtime music analysis and processing is the future.

Tomorrow is “Slope Day” a music/drinking extravaganza in honor of the last day of classes. Campus was warned via email to a) not get alcohol poisoning to excess; b) not to uprise if the concert is canceled by thunderstorms; c) not spread too much swine flu.

I have a huge crush on this style of illustration. I want to teach myself to draw like this. All Medievaly (I’m pretty sure that’s the academically established term for it, amirite?). This particularly undelicious looking hunk of pork was taken from here, through which I have spent about the last 10 years browsing.

Of course, this is all in reference to the media frenzy and general panic over the potential H1N1 flu pandemic. Something which people seem not to mention when trying to sell the fear is that ordinarily there are about 36,000 deaths in the US from regular seasonal flu, every year. So it’s a little premature to get so riled up over the 20 confirmed cases in Mexico.

Ah crap, I lost my segue. It was going to be: While on the subject of ye olde stuff, here’s the last thing I heard on NPR last night, before the 1 o’ clock news forced my remote hand into the off position:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think I either liked the version they played on NPR more, or I liked the way it sounded through pre-sleep. The latter is kind of a recurring occurrence. I remember really liking how the, errr, violini lines wrenchingly blurred and pulsed into each other, and how that and the modality made me think of more modern pieces, in places. It’s still got some of that, but without the remembered near-violent intensity. Maybe I’ll listen to some of his other stuff while (inevitably) churning out PowerPoint slides tomorrow.