Stu News and Photos

I'm still writing a parenting column over at GNMParents, something I find rather fulfilling. My latest one went live Monday morning, here's the intro:

Sometimes you’ve just got to want it. You’ve heard that before, right? Maybe it was said by your coach or by a teacher. Maybe it was in a made-for-tv movie. Some wisened leader, leaning down to offer inspiration, suggesting that this was one of those moments when skill alone wouldn’t get the job done, that desire was the missing ingredient.

I can sorta understand why UC raised tuition so drastically - they are another victim of the economic landslide. But they handled it poorly, and I'm sure they could have kept things going with a far smaller increase. So when I heard that students were taking buildings, I was pleasantly surprised. Good for them. Education is the only provable cure for society's ills. Rich people need to give more to educational institutions than they do to varied governmental lobbies. The government needs to give less money to bank bonuses and more money to teach people how to not have any more bank problems.

CNN's story about the protests

This is for my friend, Sully. He is a favorite internet read of mine. He's my people (in a way). He speaks his mind, he talks a lot about a lot of different stuff, from the evolution of human civilization to what constitutes great pizza, and he does it all in a written voice of such humor and candor that I can't help but read, even if I've heard the stories before. Also, he's from New England - I'm from the metro New York area, so we've got a lot of cultural/sociological commonalities. Lastly, he has a unique musical palette that I find ear-opening. If you're sold, go read his stories by clicking on this section of the sentence you are currently reading.

His latest essay is on 15 albums he'd bring with him to a desert island. It's an eclectic grouping, and the rationales for each are soulful. So, for him, here's the long version of one of the songs from one of the records he chose:

Crazy. A school bus, loaded with kids, drove down the street next to our local elementary school (a block from our house), somehow caught its side-view mirror on a support cable for an electrical pole, which immediately brought the pole down on top of the bus. No injuries, amazingly. This happened just today - Click here to read the local news story.

I get most of my daily intelligence briefings from the internet (including, but not limited to, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Fox News (gotta see what the other side's up to), The Jerusalem Post, CNN, The Daily Breeze (the paper that covers our local neighborhoods), The Guardian (UK), and others)... In addition to straight news, I also read a few tech-oriented websites, for keeping up with current gadgetry/science. And then there's Boing Boing. Boing Boing is its own entity, a unique gem of a site. In a nutshell, Boing Boing is a blog with four contributors (along with the a fifth guest-host, a position which rotates every few weeks). These folks post a brilliant bricolage of science/pop culture/current events/weirdness that I find highly educational and immensely entertaining. While they are a "blog," they currently average approximately 5 million readers a month. That's unique readers (or individual computer addresses, to put it another way). So I guess it's nice to know I'm not alone. In fact, I know that there are more than one of my fifteen readers who are fans of Boing Boing. For the rest of you, if you haven't yet, take a few moments to peruse their content: Boing Boing

Anyway, what does this have to do with the title of this entry? In the recent past (depending on when you read this, it could have been yesterday or the day before or the day before that) Boing Boing ran a post pointing to a newly-written article about the history and current state of an internet protocol (application) that pre-dates the web, a protocol known as Gopher. For those unfamiliar, Gopher was sort-of like the web without pictures, a text-only listing of a computer's public "stuff." Back in 1993, before the first web browser fell into wide distribution, if you wanted to use the internet to get a file from another computer, your choices were limited to FTP or Gopher. FTP was nice if you knew exactly where you needed to go to find the file you were after, but Gopher was better, because it was searchable in a variety of ways. Unfortunately/fortunately, Gopher went away with the explosive popularity/ease of use of HTML (the code that was used to create the first web pages, a code that is still widely used today) and the free web browser Mosaic (...the Gopher folks also announced that they were going to start charging a fee for its use, which didn't create a lot of love in the burgeoning internet community). In other words, when HTML hit town, anyone with a middle-school diploma could utilize it to set up their own server, easily offering up their "stuff" to an ever-increasing number of novice computer users. Gopher was, in a relative instant, obsolete.

The following years were wonderful, especially for folks like me. I wasn't blessed with a math/engineering brain, yet I was able to teach myself this new way of using the internet. And there were plenty of folks like me out there, computer geeks with both a mild amount of computer programming know-how and an infinite desire to see other people's stuff. The rest of the 90s and the vast part of our current decade were a grand time for me, internet-wise.

But now I've begun to notice that the web has become a bit top-heavy, in that the substance out there is so thickly coated in fancy graphic ornamentation that the internet is, at times, difficult to navigate. The web used to be fairly clean and streamlined. But an over-abundance of graphic designers and an under-abundance of content-makers (a result of our ever-crumbling public education system) have led us to our current environment of almost-incomprehensible web sites. The sites who can afford skilled graphic designers are ok (few are actually lovely), but the vast majority of today's websites are constructed by folks with little or no design education, so the pages are impenetrable, like a dark and dense forest hiding potential treasure. It is this current state that has me misty-eyed for the heady days of the mid-90s, when the internet was uncluttered, sleek, easy to traverse.

My intent is not to complain. I'm impossibly grateful for what I have. The internet, the web is a true garden of delights - everything is out there, no matter where your interests lie. Yet I feel a certain hesitancy when I use today's web, a slight reluctance borne of the knowledge that my internet travels will be a tad more difficult. Not a big thing, but something I felt was worth mentioning.

Bored To Death contains some of Ted Danson's best work.

As a preamble, to those who read this, our family has been hit with a head-cold, felling us like dominoes. Noe is fully recovered, Nich is on his way, maybe he's passed the half-way mark, Leslie is doing better, but a little more coughy than Nich, and I am the rotten egg, having been hit with it last. It hasn't hit me as hard as the others, due, I assume, to my charm and savoir-faire. Nothing dramatic about any of this, but if you've noticed we've been a little out of the press lately, this is why.

As Leslie and Nich took the brunt of it over the weekend, there was a lot of laying around, watching films. Mostly Harry Potter, as Noe is on a binge lately, like some extended Harry Potter lost weekend. (In fact, much to my surprise, I've been so affected by her devotion that I've started reading the series. While I enjoy reading quite a bit, fantasy is not my cup of tea. The Harry Potter series was something I just thought I'd take a pass on, but I found myself watching these films with Noe and asking so many questions that I realized the only choice I had was to start reading the novels.)

But that's not what I came here to tell you about.

After so many Harry Potter films, I wanted a respite, so I turned on The Fifth Element, my favorite science fiction film. While watching the scene with Plavalaguna performing that wonderful version of Il dolce suono, I was reminded of how beautiful I found the original opera, Lucia di Lammermoor. It's story is reminiscent of Romeo & Juliet, so if you haven't experienced this opera yet, you may well enjoy the plot as well as the soaring arias. Which is what I came here to tell you about. I'd like to share with you a performance of the original composition "Lucia di Lammermoor," and Spargi d'amaro pianto, in English: The Mad Scene. In this scene, Lucia has gone so far 'round the bend that she experiences a full-bore hallucination where she thinks she is going to marry the man she loves, even though he's dead. Pretty moving stuff. -- For those of you who are fans of The Fifth Element, you will undoubtadly recognize the aria.