I heard an interesting interview on our local public radio station this morning: it was with former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, who's just come out with a book about overcoming our (largely American) tendencies to eat way too much horrible food that's bad for us. He talked about studies in neuroimaging that have been done recently, wherein participants have eaten sugar, fat, and salt, and had brain scans taken to see how their brains and bodies responded. Apparently, when we eat foods that are high in these substances, it doesn't actually satiate our hunger; rather, it stimulates it, so that we just want to eat more and more. Think buttered popcorn. He also talked about how eating these foods creates pleasurable memories in our brains that we then seek to replicate, and since makers of fast and processed foods are catching onto this, they're figuring out any way they can of triggering the pleasant memories to make us want more of their foodish substances. Even high-end restaurants load their food down with fat, salt, and sugar, though it really doesn't have to be like that. Kessler suggests that the real way to combat one's overeating is to recognize what's making us crave certain foods at the moment we start to crave them, and to create positive memories around eating healthfully that will cancel out the positive memories of eating a bunch of crap (my word, not his). He also said that exercising, even a bit, is key, because once a person gets into a habit of exercising, that desire to do good things for their body and overall health spills over into eating. I can personally attest to craving really healthful foods like turkey, avocado, tomatoes and sprouts after working out, so I know that's true.

As I was driving home, contemplating the interview, I saw a billboard with a tall soda cup with ice and fizz at the top, a Coca-Cola logo, and a McDonald's logo: a triple whammy of triggers to make me think I needed to go to the drive-thru and buy a cup full of sugar. Incidentally, I decided a few years ago that it's no accident that the golden arches look a bit like McDonald's french fries, and their logo is so ubiquitous that it would be hard to drive/walk around a city without thinking you need fries at some point. And then I thought about the green Starbucks logo and green awning that somehow make me think I need a caffe mocha every time I see it, even though I don't actually need it and could make one at home for about 50 cents even if I did. They have the coffeehouse mentality working to their complete advantage. And then there are all those ads for indulgent foods that tell you to "treat yourself" or that "you deserve it". Well, Person Who Created the Ad, I think what I deserve is to be happier about the food I put in my body and to cancel out some of the bad food choices I've been making lately. So there.

Enter our first CSA basket and today's lunch.

We picked up our CSA basket yesterday, so we have bags and piles of fresh produce in the house that we have to eat up or freeze within a few days. It's like a challenge: "What can YOU do with 3 pounds of tomatoes, two bags of field peas, a bag of yellow wax beans, two eggplants, three zucchinis, two enormous green bell peppers, arugula, and tarragon? Tell us: what IS your strategy? Okay, GO!"

My lunchtime strategy ended up being a made-up wax bean and pasta dish, which I paired with a salmon fillet that I just picked up at the store this morning. I marinated the salmon in orange juice and balsamic vinegar, then cooked it in the toaster oven while I made the bean pasta dish. I boiled some yellow wax beans for a few minutes, then added some rigatoni noodles (about a 2:1 ratio of beans:noodles) and cooked them until the pasta was tender and beans were done, about ten more minutes. I drained them and tossed them with a touch of olive oil, some grated parmesan, some cherry tomatoes from the farm, and some fresh basil from my garden. Kent got his beans and pasta without basil or tomatoes, since I actually wanted him to attempt to *eat* it, and I knew he wouldn't be impressed by the tomatoes or by something green. He liked the noodles and at least tasted the beans, and shock of shocks, he absolutely loved the salmon. I had been worried that the fillet was a little bit too big for one person, but Kent must have sensed my worry and used it as an opportunity for growth. I haven't fed him much fish since he's generally been pretty unimpressed with it, but he did enjoy it today. Probably means he won't the next time I make it for him.

Tonight's dinner furthered the mission of using up good vegetables: I made ratatouille and served it over grits with a baguette on the side. My recipe suggested serving it with polenta, but I'm from North Carolina, so I made grits. It was good, but I think I might deconstruct it a bit next time, roasting the vegetables and then putting it all together instead of making it in just one pot, to help with the texture of the eggplant in particular and to give everything a nice roasty flavor.

I've been thinking a lot today about making more positive memories around fresh, healthful foods. Being part of this CSA and growing some of my own veggies and herbs are both huge aspects of this, especially since Kent is part of both experiences and is really living up his inaugural gardening days. Grilling and eating on our patio, or enjoying sushi and edamame outside on a pleasant day, or remembering how it felt to eat fresh nectarines and cherries on the pebble beach in Nice — these are all the kind of things I want to focus more on.

So enough with the gross food. I've done a pretty good job in the last few years about cutting out highly processed foods, but I'm now declaring a moratorium (probably only temporary, but you guys can help hold me to it) on fast food going into my tummy. I can make food that's SO much better.

Labels: eating out, greening, kitchen adventures, listening miscellany, photography, what to read

• posted by erica 6/08/2009 08:13:00 PM
•  7 comments

So guess how Jack and I spent our evening last night? Not celebrating our anniversary in any traditional way, or even assembling a play kitchen... we found ourselves hosting two Obama-supporting cyclists who are biking across the country to the inauguration in January.

We heard a segment last week on NPR's Talk of the Nation about how various people were getting to the inauguration, and Neal Conen was interviewing a guy named Ryan Bowen, a cyclist from Los Angeles who decided he'd bike across the country to DC. He talked about how he slept wherever he could, ate wherever he could, and had a website and blog set up to raise awareness and accept donations, and I thought it sounded like such a cool thing to do. He mentioned that he was in Texas, heading toward Houston, and since we're a few hours on the other side of Houston, presumably right on his path, I dropped him an email on his blog and said we'd be happy to host him or just feed him dinner whenever he was coming through Baton Rouge. He replied and thanked me for the offer, then I wrote him back with our address and phone number, and I didn't hear from him for a couple of days. I figured he'd let me know if he still needed a place to stay, and lo and behold, on Sunday afternoon, I got a call from him that he was a few hours' ride from BR and would love to stay with us if we were still up for it. And he has a friend with him now, a guy named Josh who he found online. Josh is from Dallas and met up with Ryan a few days ago to ride all the way to DC with him.

Ryan and Josh got here around 8, just as I was putting Kent to bed, and we visited with them for a while and served them some Asian veggies with tofu and brown rice; Ryan's a vegetarian and Josh is a vegan, so luckily for them, they happened upon one of the few housewives in Louisiana who knows something to cook for them. Josh remarked that it was his first time eating tofu since he left home, and Ryan said that this food was the closest to his own cooking that he'd eaten on the whole trip. Imagine my delight! They had spent the last few nights in tents, scary restrooms in public parks, etc., so sleeping in beds and being able to take showers was a pretty nice change for them. They're taking things a few days at a time, relying on the publicity from Ryan's interviews on NPR, CNN, and Fox News (!), checking the website to look for people who want to host them along their way, using their PDAs to map out their route and find places to eat, and photographing things along the way. Oh yeah, they both happen to be professional photographers, among other things. They looked at some of my photos last night. I was in heaven.

As part of their welcome to Baton Rouge, they got hit by a guy in a Jeep last night on their way to our house, mostly because it was nighttime and very wet from all the rain we've had; Ryan sustained a muscle injury to his thigh that he's been icing, and they both need bike repairs. The guy who hit them, who happens to be a cyclist himself (proving that *anyone* can hit someone on a bike if they're not paying enough attention), picked them up this morning to take them to a bike repair shop, and they'll come back here in a little while. Ryan said that a lot of his interviewers have asked him what he'd say to Obama if he had his ear for a moment, and he figured out yesterday that he'd tell him this: "More bike lanes!"

Some friends of Ryan's are on their way from Los Angeles in a car to film the last few weeks of his journey, and they just happen to be meeting up with him today, so he'll probably ride with them for a day or two until his leg heals. They have plans to go to New Orleans, even though it's a bit out of the way, and then they're heading across to the east coast and up to DC. Check out the site if you're on the Southern end of the country and want to lend some support.

Crazy, no?

While I was listening to Ryan's interview and the rest of the TOTN segment, I was thinking about how Obama's campaign brought people together in ways they'd never been brought together before (remember the "I am here because of Ashley" story at the end of his race speech last spring?). I feel an obligation to continue what Obama started, now that he's going to be our President. We wanted Obama, and we also craved the unifying spirit he brought with him, so we're helping Ryan and Josh.

It's a good day to be an American.

Labels: being political, listening miscellany, observations

• posted by erica 12/29/2008 11:46:00 AM
•  5 comments

I heard this brilliant commentary on public radio's Marketplace yesterday afternoon. It speculates about the effects of Starbucks' new plan to market to kids and teens, which scares me a little. The commentator asserts that perhaps they should change their name to JitteryTeenBucks.

Of course, part of what worries this particular commentator is that teenagers will take over the coffeehouse and turn it into something it's not... but I'd remind him that there's always the option of visiting a local business over a national chain, which I try to do whenever possible. They hardly ever market to anyone, and yet they somehow sustain themselves... or at least the good ones do. Starbucks has consistently good coffee (strong, how I like it!), but the atmosphere can sort of suck when compared to local places like my fave Highland Coffees, which roasts its own beans on site and has big burlap sacks of beans casually piled outside the roasting room (you wouldn't believe how good it smells). It also has its walls covered with the photographs and paintings of local artists, and they play whatever music they want, instead of whatever CD they're trying to sell to their customers. I'm not really trying to bash Starbucks. It's just coming out that way.

Anyway, the commentators on public radio are some of the most informed, thoughtful, and witty journalists around. I just love them. Make the time to listen to this if you're even a little bit of a coffeehouse person.

Labels: coffee, listening miscellany

• posted by erica 10/02/2007 11:39:00 AM
•  2 comments

Thanks to the fab ladies who do the More Hip Than Hippie podcast, which I love, I found out that there's a bottled water company called Biota, based out of Colorado, that is using bottles made from corn plastic, not oil-based plastic. Oil-based plastics are made from non-renewable resources and never biodegrade, no matter how many thousands of years they sit in a landfill, but corn plastic (PLA) is made from a renewable resource and breaks down over a period of only about 80 days. They can be composted, burned without giving off any hydrocarbons, or even put in a landfill, and they'll actually go away. I'm so excited to learn that this even exists. Biota owns the bottling company as well, and they're trying to work with other drink corporations to get their bottles out there, which is a worthy aim. Another nice thing about these bottles is that they can be reused without leaching chemicals into the water you're drinking, unlike PET plastic (what most water and soda bottles are made from), which are considered single-use bottles and shouldn't be reused.

Problem for me: nobody in Louisiana currently carries Biota. I just sent an email to the manager of our local Whole Foods, since many other Whole Foods stores in other parts of the country carry Biota already, and I'm hoping to get it carried here, or at least special-ordered. Here's the letter I wrote my store, and you can just copy it and use it yourself if you're so inclined!

"I've recently heard about Biota Spring Water, a company based out of Colorado that is the first bottled water company to use bottles made from corn plastic (PLA), not petroleum-based plastic. The bottles are completely biodegradable, unlike petroleum-based plastics, which never biodegrade. I know that Whole Foods stores in some parts of the country currently carry Biota, and I'd love to see it in your store. I can assure you that if this were available, it would be the only bottled water I would drink, and I'm sure other customers would feel the same way after learning about the product. Their website is http://www.biotaspringwater.com if you'd like to read up on them. Thanks for your consideration, and please email me back if you do decide to carry it so that I can come stock up!"

It's a really exciting thing to learn about, and I'd be even more excited if it were more widely available.

Labels: greening, listening miscellany

• posted by erica 2/14/2007 04:23:00 PM
•  2 comments

After three weeks of making the hour-long commute from Baton Rouge to Hammond every few days, I decided that jumping back and forth from my beloved local NPR station to a Top 40 station out of New Orleans (which was about all I could get on my measly car radio) just wasn't cutting it. My other option, listening to CDs all the way there and back, was working pretty well, but I have a finite number of CDs, and many of them are not suitable for driving, N.B. the shifting dynamics in classical music, which comprises a big chunk of my music collection. I was able to put my first adjunct paycheck to good use last week and buy an iTrip for my iPod, which converts the sound coming out of the iPod into radio waves and allows me to listen to it over the car stereo.

Today was my first day of iTripping, and it changed the whole character of my day. I'm an avid fan of Science Friday and the NPR Music podcasts, and I listened to a little of both today instead of whatever drivel I could pick up on 92.3 FM The Diva (yes, that's the station's name... I think it's supposed to make me want to have a dance party or sing into my hairbrush or something). I'm way behind on my podcasts, going back to May for many of them, similar to the way my mom gets way behind on reading the newspapers but obstinately saves the front sections every day and gets caught up every couple of months or so. The difference here is that the stack of newspapers next to her chair is something of an annoyance for her (I think), whereas my podcasts only represent hard disk clutter-- still, it's nice to feel like I might actually catch up. I heard some stories about JazzFest in NOLA and the release of Springsteen's album The Seeger Sessions (both from back in April), plus a couple of things I didn't know about, like this hip-hop artist who's interested in fusing his style with bossa nova sound, so he collaborated with Sergio Mendes and Stevie Wonder (!) on an album. The NPR stories, interviews, reviews, etc., dealing with music touch on such an eclectic variety of styles that it's really entertaining and informative for me, and I feel like I'm expanding my horizons a bit beyond my classical-art-music world. Let's face it: there's a heck of a lot of great music out there that wasn't written by dead white Europeans (well... they weren't dead when they wrote it, though some of them do have an uninspired, plodding, Professor-Binns-esque quality to their compositional styles).

In other technology news, I (Jack) bought a new power cord for Sputnik, my 8-year-old laptop, last week. In the past several weeks, the ability of electricity to make it all the way from the wall to my laptop was severely hampered by what must have been some bent or worn-out wires, resulting in the last few days in my needing to use an elaborate system of pillows to keep the computer and the power cord in the right position for all the connections to be made properly. It was an adventure in logistics, to be sure. I was elated when we got a fairly cheap cord from eBay and it actually worked as soon as I plugged it in. Sputnik goes on to live another day, and the world (my wallet) heaves a sigh of relief.

Labels: listening miscellany, music

• posted by erica 9/19/2006 06:06:00 PM
•  3 comments

Cute interview on Morning Edition this morning... the man who does the puppeteering and voice for Elmo has just written a book called My Life as a Furry Red Monster, and he and Elmo were interviewed about it by NPR's Steve Inskeep, who had trouble keeping a straight face through the whole thing. I was surprised to learn that the puppeteer is black, though I guess I was more surprised to hear any kind of adult voice talking about creating this three-and-a-half-year-old puppet character. It was a great start to my day.

I know my friend Lauren will listen to it, at least, what with Elmo being one of her TV husbands and all. =) Of course, Lauren's new REAL husband might have a thing or two to say about that.

Labels: listening miscellany

• posted by erica 9/05/2006 08:51:00 PM
•  2 comments

I finally discovered Guinness this past week. It's good to drink, which surprised me a lot, but it's also quite handy to add flavor to recipes. I heard a pre-St. Patrick's Day story on Weekend Edition Sunday about cooking with Guinness, so I looked up the recipes they had put online and did a Google search for some others. Many of them involve meat, like oysters and Cornish hens, but I found great recipes for Guinness French Onion Soup and Guinness Cheddar Fondue, both of which I made this week. They were awesome. Knock yourselves out:

Guinness French Onion Soup with Garlic Croutons

• 2 Tbsp oil
• l lb onions cut into thin strips
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• 6 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock
• 1/2 cup Guinness Stout
• Garlic croutons [recipe below]
• Grated Swiss or other cheese for topping

Heat the oil and add the onions, black pepper and bay leaves. Sauté the onions until brown; this caramelizes the sugars and gives the soup its color and onion flavor. Add the stocks at room temperature or cold; this allows more flavors to go into the stock. Bring it to a boil. Add the Guinness Stout and bring to a boil again. Remove bay leaves. Ladle soup into bowls, then add the croutons and Swiss Cheese and place under broiler until the cheese is melted.

Garlic Croutons

• Enough oil to cover the bottom of a sauté pan
• Chopped fresh garlic (to your taste)
• Day-old French bread, or whatever you have

Cut the bread in 1/2 inch slices, making sure each slice will fit in the bowls you are using. Sauté the garlic until translucent. Put the bread slices in the pan and brown both sides. Place croutons on a bowl of French Onion Soup with Swiss cheese on top; place bowl under broiler until cheese is melted. [I used our little kitchen torch instead of putting our bowls under the broiler, and I suppose you could also microwave them for a few seconds to melt the cheese.]

***

Guinness Cheddar Fondue
(Makes one pint)

• 1 cup Guinness
• 2 lb grated Cheddar cheese
• 1 Tbsp corn flour or cornstarch
• 6-8 tsp Worcestershire sauce [I mixed a little bit of soy sauce, vinegar, molasses, and garlic powder for a vegetarian alternative to Worcestershire]
• salt & pepper
• cayenne pepper

Heat Guinness over medium-high heat. Mix grated cheddar and cornstarch in a separate bowl, then add by handfuls to Guinness, melting each handful before adding the next. Add Worcestershire and seasonings, then serve with chunks of bread and/or vegetables. [We dipped bread, yellow pepper slices, steamed broccoli florets, and mushroom caps, but you could use any kind of veggies you like.]

Labels: kitchen adventures, listening miscellany

• posted by erica 3/18/2006 12:15:00 PM
•  1 comments

1. Honeysuckle is in bloom and its smell is permeating the campus
2. Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head is good music for walking and noticing flowers
3. Two male students on a college campus in the Deep South felt comfortable enough with their homosexuality to walk around holding hands, which made me smile
4. It's the beginning of spring in Louisiana, which means it's already 80 degrees
5. Lukewarm coffee still tastes good in 80-degree weather

Labels: listening miscellany, observations

• posted by erica 3/13/2006 05:46:00 PM
•  0 comments

And now, a definition for my grandparents and the other people who don't know what a podcast is (from Wikipedia):

"Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the internet using RSS syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to subscribe to, and also the content of that feed. Podcasters' websites also may offer direct download of their files, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming."

So for those of you without mp3 players, you can still listen to podcasts on your computer. iTunes in particular makes it really easy to look for podcasts online and keep a regular subscription so they just download automatically.

In the last few weeks, I've been discovering podcasts to put on my iPod and listen to when I'm out and about. I'm a fan of Wil Wheaton's blog, and he's made a few podcasts in recent months. I'm most of the way through the fourth and most recent one, and he's a lot of fun to listen to when I'm walking around campus. I also like NPR's Science Friday podcasts, since I'm in class during the SciFri broadcast on our local station and I can download the podcasts whenever I want. What podcasts do the rest of you guys listen to? I'd love suggestions of random people, learning shows, musicians, etc. with good podcasts.

Labels: listening miscellany

• posted by erica 2/14/2006 05:28:00 PM
•  4 comments

In the realm of exciting news, I just booked our very first cruise! We'll be going on Royal Caribbean's "Sovereign of the Seas" (that's the ship's name) in May, two days after my semester exams are over, and the ship is going to two different places in the Bahamas. It'll be warm and sunny (we hope) and relaxing, and we'll get to visit places and do things we've never done. I'm so stoked! Since this is my last semester, it feels weird in a lot of ways, so it's neat to have something so fun to look forward to after my exams are over and I turn in my last term papers. =)

What follows is a post I started to write last Tuesday, which I'm now finishing because I figured out what else I want to say. I love the fact that I can save a partial post in Blogger and come back to it before I post it. Anyway, here are my thoughts from Tuesday, plus some extra from tonight tacked on to the end:

Today was a chilly, humid day. The sky felt smaller and colder than usual. It wasn't a bad day, but it was grey. It was just the sort of day when I wanted to listen to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on my iPod. The slow, mellow sounds of Davis and his band may have influenced my mood, or I may have wanted to listen to the album because I was already in that sort of mood, but the day unfolded in a grey way, reminding me of a comment that a professor made last semester when he was asking us to bring in the music we liked to listen to: "You are your playlist." The thing I love most about my iPod is that I can decide what to listen to at the very moment I put the earphones in my ears, rather than having to grab a CD in the morning and hope that it corresponds with my mood. For the first week I had my iPod, the only thing I wanted to listen to was Fauré's Requiem, making me oddly calm for about a week. Since then, I've loaded it up with all of my favorite albums, but I've made a point of adding some music I don't normally spend a lot of time with, like the jazz that always seems so attractive but that I can't just sit and listen to for long stretches. Jazz is, however, perfect walking music on a grey day.

The whole semester has been grey, actually. I feel like I'm being phased out. When I was an undergrad, I took most of my classes with people in my year, so in my senior seminars, we were all at relatively similar places in our school careers. At LSU, though, most of the classes I take can be taken by any grad student at any time as long as s/he has passed the diagnostic exams, so in my first semester, I was with a lot of students who knew a lot more than I did. As I've progressed, though, the balance has shifted, and now that it's my last semester of coursework, I've got more experience with these professors and this knowledge base than most of the other people in my classes.

Last Tuesday, I was obviously feeling separated from the other students. I have only one class with the other theory people, whom I know well and consider friends, and in my other classes, I feel kind of like an outsider. I remember Jeannette's going through something similar last year, during her last semester, and she had to add the fatigue and craziness of pregnancy (and her long commute) to all that as well. I'm still having a great time in my classes, as usual, but since I've been here longer than just about everyone else, I've heard the professors mention the same things several times now, and I sort of feel like the torch is being passed to the next group. Don't get me wrong; giving up the torch is a good thing. I'm ready to teach my own classes and be a self-sufficient adult, even though I still have to write a dissertation before most anyone will let me do that full-time. I know the routine of classes like the back of my hand, and I'm ready for something else. But it's still a little bit sad. I'm seeing things a bit from the professors' perspectives now -- the things they take care to mention each time they talk about a certain subject, for example -- and it's fun. They're giving me a lot to consider about how I want to teach. But I'm still sad, likely because I used to think I could stay in school forever and just keep being handed knowledge. Practically speaking, that wouldn't work, and I mostly don't want it anymore. I want to be a professor. That means, however, that I'm going to be a different sort of lifelong learner than I thought I wanted to be. School is easy. Figuring out what to learn and then doing it myself is hard for me. Staying motivated is even harder.

Anyway, the cruise will be good. We went to Florida for a weekend last year over my spring break, but other than that, we haven't taken a vacation alone since our honeymoon. I like Jack, so it's good to escape with him and go be adventurous. And when I get back, I'm going to have nothing ahead of me academically but my massive general exams and my ever-more-massive dissertation. I tell you, I'm going to feel so much better when I have a dissertation topic.

Labels: listening miscellany, school, travel

• posted by erica 1/30/2006 10:33:00 PM
•  4 comments

I've been copying music from CDs onto my iPod since Jack gave it to me a few weeks ago, and today I ran across a funny thing. iTunes, the program I use on my computer to facilitate the copying, is normally great about finding the track names online, if they don't pop up right away when I put the CD in the drive. And I want the track names to appear, since I have to be able to navigate my iPod and find the music I want to listen to. Anyway, when I searched online for the track names for Verdi's opera Otello, the names of the various tracks came up correctly, but the genre it came up with was "Alternative & Punk." Luckily, I was able to edit the info before putting it on my iPod, but I want to know whether someone was being funny on purpose or whether this was a data entry mistake. I guess Iago is a punk, but that's about all I can figure. Weak Shakespeare humor. =)

Labels: listening miscellany

• posted by erica 12/30/2005 01:57:00 PM
•  0 comments

I heard a good commentary on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday afternoon. It's about a guy who struggles to understand the suicide of a friend who suddenly jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. It was a driveway moment for me (I couldn't get out of my car when I got home until the story had ended), and I think it's worth a listen. Click here for the link to the NPR audio file.

Labels: listening miscellany

• posted by erica 11/30/2005 02:58:00 PM
•  0 comments

Go look at Jack's blog for a post about a recent NPR story we heard. They compiled a blow-by-blow audio account of what happened before and after Katrina struck, how people responded, etc., and it's a really good listen for some factual reporting. Based on what I've heard about Michael Brown (former FEMA director) and his lack of emergency management experience, his resignation is a good thing, though it's hard to imagine how anyone could have been completely prepared for such a devastating storm that knocked out all lines of communication. Don, maybe you can shed some light on this if you feel like it, since you have more knowledge of these things than most of the rest of us. I'd rather not get up on a soap box for this one, but I do feel that skepticism for the response we've seen is healthy, considering the fact that something like this will probably happen again. If more lives can be saved next time because the people in charge have learned from their mistakes (or if new people are put in charge), then it's worth criticizing their response to Katrina and having a real investigation, in my humble opinion.

But I'm trying to focus on being a student again, and that brings with it the necessity to read many things for my comprehensive exam (I made a nice list today of the people and concepts I need to brush up on) and to finish writing my thesis. My exam is on October 15th, and my defense for exam and thesis is November 4th (assuming I hear back in the affirmative from the last member of my committee, who's on sabbatical this semester). Then, on or before November 18th, I'll be electronically filing my thesis with the Graduate School and then passing out from the relief. Knock on wood. It seems doable again.

Labels: hurricanes, listening miscellany, Louisiana, school

• posted by erica 9/13/2005 10:15:00 PM
•  1 comments

Our local radio station, WRKF, just sent out a member survey, and they've been asking people to fill it out and return it so they can have feedback on their programming. Overall, we're both very happy with what they carry, since we're NPR junkies and love the news and talk they play. One aspect that I've always had a problem with, which I know I've mentioned at least once before in my blog, is the guy who does the Night Music show, Bob Mooberry. He's not a bad person (he's really fun to listen to during pledge week!), but he's a slack announcer, so when he plays "classical" music, sometimes it's a whole CD of Bach's greatest hits or classical music from movies, stuff like that. He rarely announces exactly what he's playing; he might mention the name of the CD when it's over, but he doesn't go through all the tracks. One instance that sticks in my mind was when he played a whole CD of Gilbert and Sullivan overtures and reported at the end the title of the CD and the fact that it had contained the overtures from, "Let's see, Pirates of Penzance, Patience, uh, H.M.S. Pinafore..." He was obviously scanning the back of the CD case and giving us an abridged list. Basically, my problem with him is that he conceives of classical music as CDs, not works. So Jack and I were careful to expound upon that in our survey, using delicate language but suggesting very strongly that Bob should announce what he's playing and make a stronger effort to play good music (he's been known to let New Age or instrumental movie soundtracks creep into his playlist as well). Their Sunday Baroque guy does a really good job of giving background and full titles, and he's such a wannabe musicologist that once, he interrupted himself after he played several pieces to announce that he had forgotten to give us Telemann's dates. I chuckled. Anyway, back to the point: last night, when we were listening to the program, Bob announced the name of the symphony before AND after it played, and he named the composer and the full title, including opus number. This is a rare event at best. I turned to Jack in the car and proclaimed loudly, "We changed the world!!" Now, we're not sure if our survey really ushered in the change, but the wacky trend of announcing everything he plays has continued into tonight. He played an all-Ravel CD, but he did tell us, in order, all the pieces that were on it. I'm very pleased with myself.

The other thing we suggested relating to Night Music was that they put a "now playing" feature on their web site. WFDD in Winston-Salem has done this for years and years, and I was surprised to find out that WRKF doesn't. It seems like it'd be relatively easy to hook a media program like Windows Media Player or Real Player into a little box on their home page that constantly updates. I wouldn't be able to figure out how, but somebody with Jack's level of expertise could make it work, and surely they have a webmaster who could figure it out. Anyway, we'll keep our fingers crossed that it'll happen someday, and then we wouldn't have to wait to hear whether or not Bob tells us what he's playing; we could just look it up ourselves! It's important for me as a budding music professor to be able to identify what I hear, so I like guessing at the composers of works I don't know, and I like to be able to tell whether I'm correctly remembering the composer/title of something I should know already. Bob Mooberry could play such a significant role in that! I hope he keeps it up, because it really is a nice change.

Labels: listening miscellany, music

• posted by erica 7/21/2005 08:52:00 PM
•  1 comments

Jack and I were listening to NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday this week, and one of the guests was an old British gentleman who, as I do, laments the decline of spoken English. He was talking about some of the more egregious errors he hears, particularly on the radio, and one he brought up was the use phrases like the following: "The point IS is that..." or "The question IS is whether or not...," etc.

I confess that when he pointed to this error, I wondered who in the world he had heard this from. I thought, "My gosh, are people really that stupid?" And this week, I have realized that they are. SO many of the guests I've heard on NPR in the last few days have used a redundant "is." I don't think they realize how ridiculous it is is. Why would they use the word twice, when it is is a verb, and it's not like "really really" or some other word that can stand to be repeated. "Is is" is is just dumb. A variant of this that looks slightly less ridiculous, but which I've still heard lately, is is "was is," such as "The point of the meeting was is that..." Why?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Why, why, why?? The only justification I could possibly imagine would be if the person were really trying to express a duality of tense, in that the point of the meeting "was/is" such-and-such, because perhaps the point is is still valid. (And I think this is is a stretch and not at all what the person usually intends to say.)

People made fun of President Clinton for saying, in the context of the Lewinsky hearings, "It depends on what your definition of "is" is." However, that's technically correct, because he's using the first "is" as a noun-- the actual word "is"-- whereas the second "is" is is actually the verb. It sounded silly taken out of context, and I think he was sort of trying to stall and give the prosecutors the run-around, but at least it was/is correct grammar.

By the way, this is is my new grammar pet peeve. I plan to laugh rudely at anyone who says it.

Labels: language, listening miscellany

• posted by erica 3/31/2005 12:10:00 PM
•  6 comments

The first rant is directed to no one in particular: why in the heck did my right ear get sunburnt and not my left? WHY?? The sunburn I received on my shoulders seems to be fairly evenly distributed between left and right. I guess my ears decided to mix it up a little.

Second, I have a problem with freakin' Bob Mooberry of WRKF public radio in Baton Rouge. (He is also referred to by Dr. Giger as Bob Moooooooooooooberry and by Jack as Bob Moo-Moo.) He does "Night Music," a nightly program that would seem at first glance to be an attempt at classical programming but which actually contains many unclassical works, more appropriately categorized as new-age crap. (I don't think all New Age music is crap, but the stuff he picks is.) Tonight, he started off the program by announcing Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, but when he started to play it, it was a Beethoven string quartet. After roughly two full minutes, he broke in and said, "Hey, that doesn't sound like the Eroica," and promptly went to commercial while he sorted out the CD tracks. Way to go, Bob. You can tell the difference after TWO minutes between a symphony (roughly forty musicians, including brass, strings, woodwinds, and percussion) and a string quartet (roughly four musicians, all of them playing string instruments).

As a one-time occurrence, this would not be so egregious, but I find his effort at classical programming to be quite lazy on the whole. He prefers to play entire CDs, presumably so he can have a cup of coffee and walk around the building a few times. I can say this, because on more than one occasion, he's come back after fifteen or twenty seconds of dead air and exclaimed, "Okay, that CD was shorter than I thought!" I can just see him booking it down the hall when he hears NO SOUND coming from his booth.

The heart of classical programming is, I think, in variety, which is a crucial point he's missing. A thoughtful classical music fan might play a Beethoven symphony, then a Mozart violin sonata, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, a Haydn string quartet, some Chopin piano solos, etc. Variety. Our little friend Bob, on the other hand, will play an entire CD of piano music, or a Bach greatest hits album, for example, which often don't even contain entire pieces, just individual movements thrown into a large pot. The biggest beef I have with him, though, is the fact that it takes an act of Congress to get him to announce what he's just played. If he's just played a CD, he'll sometimes tell us the title, but he never goes through the individual tracks to tell us exactly what we heard. I find this particularly frustrating, because part of my personal education involves guessing time periods and composers of pieces when I hear them so that I can become a better listener. Bob leaves me hanging. To make it worse, he has a very LOW radio voice, so the bass is often the only discernible sound coming out of his mouth, and I sometimes have trouble figuring out what he's just said. Imagine making an educated guess about something, and when you hear the answer, it's poorly enunciated so you're not sure whether you were right or wrong. To make it EVEN worse, WRKF's website doesn't have a "now playing" feature common to so many classical stations, so I'm often left with a sick feeling of not quite knowing what it is I heard but feeling like I should have figured it out. Where is the learning, I ask you??? To be fair, Bob has admitted during pledge drives that the format for his night-time program has changed frequently over the years (jazz, etc.), so perhaps he was assigned this slot and was made to adapt when listeners preferences changed, even if he wasn't the most appropriate person for the new format. Incidentally, he is a lot of fun to listen to during the pledge drives, because he, unlike the other, more tentative people at the station, will deride listeners for not pledging and complain about the lack of accountability in our society until he's blue in the face. It's a nice change from the more whiny begging that goes on during the day.

In contrast, WRKF has a "Sunday Baroque" show hosted by Lew Carter that I find very fulfilling. Lew is some sort of offshoot of a musicologist, because he is obsessively particular about letting us know all the info for a particular piece, including the composer's birth and death year. This past Sunday, he forgot to tell us Telemann's dates, and he interrupted himself during the next break to tell them to us and apologize for having omitted them. He's no Bob; I'll tell you that. He also gives interesting factoids and anecdotes about the music, which is a nice touch even if all he did was to read the liner notes. Also to his credit, he knows Baroque instruments and something about the music in general, and as a budding music scholar, I appreciate and enjoy listening to him.

I now have comment capabilities, thanks to Blogger's new features. Yay! I have been covetous of Jeannette's comments, and Nicole just added them to her page too; now I have them as well! It has been a dream of mine to make my page interactive, so interact!!

Labels: blogging, listening miscellany

• posted by erica 5/10/2004 09:31:00 PM
•  5 comments

Yes, I have too many disparate things to discuss to group them under one title. First of all, Jack and I had a lovely time in Baltimore this past weekend at Anilia and John's wedding reception and get-together. (Go see pictures of their Vegas wedding trip and a great summary of the trip by John.) We met lots of their friends in Baltimore, and the reception was very low-key with fanTAStic food. The highlight, which is apparently the caterer's specialty, was this curry cream cheese thing with walnuts, raisins, and dried cranberries and apricots. Sounds weird, I know, but the flavors mixed well and it was unlike anything I had ever tasted. Yum. It sounded simple enough in its composition, and I'm going to have to find out if Jack's dad has had any luck reproducing it (he said he'd try, since we found out all the ingredients from the caterer). There was another party later (supposedly for the younger crowd) and we heard John's band, Birdbath; they have a terrific sound and did a nice cover of "Summertime," even though it was a bit loud in the warehouse. I was low on sleep and was developing a headache, so I felt very old worrying about the noise and the fact that I was tired at 10:30 at night. I think I've always been old in those respects, though. I've never been able to stay up late, and when Nicole and I went to *NSYNC concerts during the summer we were obsessed with them, we wore earplugs. Also during the trip, Jack and I got to see my favorite Katherine for a refreshing few hours; we wandered around the harbor area and took lots of pictures, so wait and see if we manage to get any of those up. This was the first trip during which we actually remembered to take pictures of things, so be proud of us!

Thankfully, my spring break starts tomorrow, so even though I'm a bit reluctant to leave the house so soon after our Baltimore trip, I'm looking forward to seeing all the people we'll be visiting. We're staying in Atlanta on Friday night with Lisa and Joel (Jack's aunt and uncle), then in Charlotte on Saturday night with our friend Heather from Queens and her new husband, who we've never met! After that, we'll spend the next three nights in Blacksburg with Jack's parents, then two nights in Winston-Salem with my grandmother and uncle, then the final Friday night of the trip in Atlanta again with our friend Emily, also from Queens. Yay! I wish we could spend more than one night with the people who are getting short-changed on their yearly quota of Jack and Erica, but there was a limited amount of time, and I'd rather see them for a little while than not see them at all. As I mentioned, we haven't even met Heather's new husband, since they had just started dating when Jack and I got married and that was the last time we saw her (she was a member of the large troupe of bridesmaids). Anyway, I like taking road trips with Jack (he's fun), and I'm glad I have a reliable new-ish car, and if something does happen to it, I can call Saturn and they'll tow me to the nearest dealership. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. =)

I came home for lunch today since I forgot my salad two days in a row. I had made this great salad on Tuesday night inspired by Wendy's new spinach chicken salad, and then I left it in the fridge twice. I was sleepy anyway, so after lunch and a bit of Columbo on Bravo, I took a nap. As I was waking up, I turned on the radio, hoping I'd hit All Things Considered and not the ramblings of the poor people at WRKF who have to get on and beg for money twice a year... that's right, it's the spring fund drive. (Incidentally, when I used to hear them say it, I thought they were saying "fun drive," leading me to wonder what the heck was so fun about it.) Anyway, after a bit of national news on All Things Considered, I heard a fabulous piece of satire. It was done in a completely straightforward and serious manner, essential for any piece of satire. Since people can now keep their cell phone numbers when they switch companies, their story was covering a current movement to let people keep their zip codes when they move. [Pause for laughter.] They threw in conversations with people like a guy from Wisconsin who, after he found out his company was transferring him to New York, he was more troubled by the fact that he'd have to learn a new zip code. Then there was a man from Manhattan discussing how zip codes are inherently prejudiced and some are more prestigious than others. He said that he was a 10024, and people in Manhattan knew what that meant. It was better than 10027, and he had worked hard for that zip code, so he didn't want to lose it if he moved to somewhere that didn't even start with 100! Another clever detail was that the name of this movement is called "Go Postal!" I wish they had the story in their archives so I could link to it, but it's not up yet. I'll check back in the next couple of days, but you could also do a search yourself at www.npr.org.

The other fun thing that happened while I was waking up involved Patti napping next to me. I brought her in there when I started my nap without much hope that she'd stay, since she usually lets me know how independent she is by promptly running away after I've carried her anywhere. She did stay, though, I guess because I put her in the blankets and it was easier for her to fall back asleep than it was to argue. She was in a different position every time I woke up, but at one point, she stretched, and then she wrapped her little arms around my arm and held onto me. It was fuzzy and adorable.

I bought some burgers (real ones, not the ones that come in a box) when I was at the grocery store on Monday, and I'm having one tonight. Yum. It was so exciting to make one Monday, since it was the first one I'd made since we moved to Louisiana. The house smelled like meat for a whole day, and it was GREAT. (No, Jack isn't bothered by that, before you ask.) Jack is going to have a portobello cap sandwich, and I'll have another yummy burger, and Patti will complain until we feed her promptly at 7 p.m.

Tomorrow will be a fun, slightly lazy day, because we're watching a movie of Don Carlos in Verdi (a stage version that I've watched most of since it's on reserve in the library; we're watching Act V tomorrow). Then I'll have my post-tonal class, and we're talking about rotational arrays and all-combinatorial hexachords. (Everyone reading this just had a slight meltdown.) The fun in that class never stops! I get so excited about it every day. =) I haven't loved all the theory I've learned so far (i.e., a certain dead influential German who shall remain nameless here), but this post-tonal stuff is definitely for me. Sko.

Labels: family, felines, kitchen adventures, listening miscellany, school, travel

• posted by erica 4/01/2004 05:43:00 PM
•  0 comments