Tchaikovsky

You just can't beat that 1812 Overture.

This is what happens to you when you hear it.

First of all, it starts with Russian church music, and NOBODY does church music like the Russkies. Nobody.

I can feel the dark church with the glow from the iconostasis. I smell the incense, I see the robes of cloth of gold. There are the small, stooped, strong women in their babushkas. Where are they now? Do they wear those babushkas in heaven? Are their hands not so arthritically knotted there?

The scene shifts to the wide outdoors. When the horns start I can see the arched necks of the army horses and hear the jangle as they mouth their bits and that wonderful solid sound of horses' hooves hitting earth. There are the triumphant horns of the army, but La Marseillaise tells me that it's the FRENCH army!

The musical scene moves on. The little peasant dance music making you feel your deep love for your land. Those few bars make me see the land as clearly as Tolstoy makes me see it.

And then, ha! winter is upon those damned French. The violins perfectly portray the swirling snow, the bitter, brittle cold, the long black nights full of ice-chip stars and too-small fires. The long, starving march home. How the hell can violins be swirling snow on dark nights? Who invented the violin anyway? Why aren't there 50-foot statues of this person all over the world?

Next is heard Russian cannon kicking Napoleonic ass and when those violins come tumbling down like water over a cliff, like the tumbling of a defeated, broken enemy, and the church bells tumble, too, but in joy, and the music and your spirit, foe vanquished, climbs back UP....and La Marseillaise is replaced by the Russian national anthem...well!

Oh, yeah, and cannons. How great is that? Church bells, cannons, and swirling snow violins. Can't beat it.

I love people with a passion

I'm on a listserve where an off-topic conversation resulted in my favorite post of 2008:

"My PhD was in plant parasitology.

Specifically, in the sex pheromones of the two nematode parasites of potato plants, ...This is a lot less interesting than it sounds"

No, bless your heart. It isn't.

Anne Among the Office Workers

"Often I wondered whether I had not come upon a sort of fungoid people, with just enough mind to give them motion and the expressions of anger and greed."

- Lilith, George MacDonald, 1895

If my house was clean I'd kill myself

I think I know why you find these houses filled to the rafters with junk piled everywhere. It keeps people alive!

99% of the time I'm happy as can be, but on those very dark days when I think this just isn't worth it, I look around at my little house, piles of crap everywhere and think, "I can't die like this; I never cleaned that bedroom." And on those nights when I have heavy chest pains and I think "Oh, man, I'm just not going to get up, who the hell cares anyway?" I say to myself, omg, this place is such a mess, no one wants to see this, so I get up, go to the cabinet, put that aspirin under my tongue and live to see another day.

It's great having a system that works; I like it.

Thank you, my personal Help Desk

I'm sure you feel this way when you talk computers with me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ&feature=related
Bonus: it's in Norwegian!

Because I feel like it

Images are from www.engrish.com

and I didn't even pick the best ones.

Thanks, John Denver!

Yesterday morning I saw a bald eagle along the Swatara Creek. The photos are not the eagle I saw, but I searched the web until I found two photos that duplicated my eagle experience and here they are.













I was a teenager when John Denver sang: "I know he'd be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly," and I always thought he was right.

He WAS right.