Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Traditionally songs about Thanksgiving focus on the harvest and gathering of family: "Come Ye Thankful People Come," "We gather together," and so on. Today, families are often far-flung and distant. This is the first year neither of my two sons will be coming home for Thanksgiving. The youngest is spending the holiday with a college friend in upstate New Jersey (the rural, "Garden State" part, not the petrochemical part), and the oldest is in Antarctica. Though not really a Thanksgiving song, I've had the Beatles standard "In My Life," on my mind today; it's a song about looking back on the people we aren't with. There are places I remember All my life, though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places had their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life I've loved them all But of all these friends and lovers There is no o...

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I noticed where the recent production of "Atlas Shrugged, Part 1," will be released on DVD and Blu ray tomorrow. Get ready to relive the excitement of the first third of Ayn Rand's colossal door stop again and again. Since I never saw it, (nor plan to), I'm hardly qualified to offer up any meaningful criticism. I'll leave that to the good reviewers on Amazon's website . Not unsurprisingly, fans are once again using this a forum to accuse the professional critics who panned this epic of all sorts of dastardly liberal bias (imagine that). They've racked up the ratings to an average 4 stars (out of 5). Sample comment: "The movie is well made - the quality is actually quite good. Acting was generally good to excellent. Camera work was good; although the low budget resulted in a missing camera angle here and there. Special effects were consistently well done. The story, of course, is exceptional; and it is well-told in this movie." Hmm...if...

A couple of decades ago I was noodling around on my guitar and remembered a lick from a song my old high school buddy Chuck Niebling used to play. It had a lilting, slightly melancholy sound. The lyrics (I can never remember words) had something to do with leaving home. That's all I could recall about it. I've played that 24 bar phrase on and off ever since; searching through the repertoires of every obscure and not so obscure 60's and 70's folkie I could think of -- to no avail. I've been totally stumped ... until today. I was listening to a new download I'd gotten from Amazon featuring Jorma Kaukonen and David Bromberg (highly recommended, by the way) and was struck by a tune Bromberg sang. I went back to Amazon to check out some of his other CDs, clicked on a selection and --- OMG! MY MYSTERY SONG! It was called " Child's Song, " and was written by Canadian Murray McLaughlin. More research revealed the version my friend Chuck had perform...

I'd gotten an invite for Google Music a month or two ago but hadn't done much with it until recently. The other day I logged in again and started playing with it again. Here's a few notes for those who are interested in that sort of thing. Here's the short version: Google Music is cloud-based music streaming service, which you can use to upload (I hesitate to say "store" for reasons I'll describe later) and playback MP3s. You get to store 20,000 files, apparently regardless of size. Right now it's in Beta with limited availability (get in line and wait for an invite). It's similar to what Amazon recently launched and what Apple seems to hope iCloud will be. I don't want to call this "cloud storage," because, although you can upload music to play back, there's no way to natively download it - so you won't be using it to back up your music collection. So far it's a one-way street. That being said, I've seen a coup...

Woot has a short video editorial on the subject of Martinis, to which I say, as a confirmed Martini drinker, "A - freaking - men." Preach on, brother Beetle!

Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 8, at age 70. Most people will say "huh," upon hearing his name. I'd argue he had a much greater influence on modern computing than the late Steve Jobs. He developed C , the most widely used programming language in the world, while working at Bell Laboratories in the late 60's. He still has a home page at Bell Labs . While originally written to be used to create the Unix operating system (which Ritchie also developed, along with Ken Thompson), C is now used for writing software for computers, embedded devices, smart appliances, cellphones, consumer goods - everything from operating systems to applications to device drivers to...well, you name it. The beauty of C is that it can be compiled for any number of different platforms. C gave rise to an number of variations and spin offs - C+, C++ (I'm not making this up) as well as directly and indirectly influencing the structure and syntax of a host of other modern programm...