Category Archives: Arts & culture

Cat karma?…

Mina, the cat for whom we’re catsitting, walked in just now and settled down to nibble some kibbles. Without thinking about it, her presence prompted me to check out one of my favorite Web sites, LitterboxCam, which as you might guess is a Web cam that shows two litterboxes and some dishes with kibble and water. While I visit LitterboxCam frequently, I have never actually seen one of the cats who live there. All I’ve ever seen is, well, litterboxes and kibble dishes.

Mina must have good cat karma, because as she sat here nibbling away, I was stunned to see that the image on LitterboxCam actually showed a cat, a grayish Siamese (presumably Marco Polo,) sitting and eating kibble! And as I type this, Mina meows loudly for attention — and there’s another cat on LitterboxCam (Twain, the blond Coon cat)!

Good grief. Two cats on LitterboxCam in four minutes — and wait, Twain is back! Three sightings in five minutes. Unbelievable. Thank you, Mina.

But Mina just walked out of the kitchen, so I’m sure that will be the end of the LitterboxCam sightings for the rest of the evening.

The sad thing is, I think this is the most exciting thing that has happened to me all week.

Later note: Oh–my–God! Mina came back in, I’m scritching her head and she’s purring madly, and sure enough… two cats appear on LitterboxCam! –Twain and a black-and-white cat…. the black-and-white cat has been there now for five whole minutes! Mina, you have total cat karma.

Wow

Carol just let me know about this amazing cultural event that’s coming up. Yes, it’s Ukulele Noir, with an all-star cast of uke performers including Greg Hawkes (formerly of the Cars), Mark Occhinero (a jazz ukulelist), and none other than Sonic Uke. Well, OK, Sonic Uke are pretty bad but they’re hilarious.

Only problem is, the concert starts at 8:30 in Somerville. Greg Hawkes probably won’t come on till much later than that. And I’ve got to preach the next morning.

Good angel: “No, don’t go, you need to be fresh for preaching.”
Bad angel: “Haha, don’t listen to the good angel, go hear Greg Hawkes.”
Good angel: “But you’ll be exhausted.”
Bad angel: “One word: Ukuleles….”
Who will win — the good angel or the bad angel? Only time will tell.

Now that’s podcasting

First page of New York Times Business page today, there’s a column by David Pogue titled “An IPod [sic] Worth Keeping an Eye On.” Pogue writes in glowing terms about the new iPod with video screen, and claims it’s much cooler than it sounds. As in, that tiny screen has great resolution and looks pretty big when you hold it a couple of feet from your eyes.

And the iTunes Music Store already has video podcasts ready to download onto your new video iPod. Now that’s cool. I have kinda cooled on the audio podcast idea, but I like the idea of video podcasts.

The only downside that I can see is that some churches will start doing video podcasts consisting of unedited, one-camera videos of a worship service. That sounds horribly boring. But imagine a really rocking sermon recorded with a video montage of vaguely related images, music-video style — that’s something I might actually watch.

What th…?!

Sitting at the table in our apartment having lunch today, reading Mark Twain, and every now and then gazing out at the sunny courtyard of the Whaling Museum. Suddenly, I realize that there are two eight-foot-long white sperm whales in the courtyard, lined up one behind the other, facing me with their heads up, smiling with pendulous lower lip hanging down, and tails pointing smartly to starboard. I stand up to get a better view. No, I was not imagining them. Funny I didn’t see them before. Must be some exhibit for the Whaling Museum. Back to lunch and Mark Twain.

Five minutes later, I look up again. Now there are four white whales, two ranks of two, all facing me and smiling, all four tails pointing smartly to starboard. I know the other two whales weren’t there five minutes ago — were they? I get up to look. No one standing in the courtyard. No truck or delivery vehicle on the street. Who put them there? Maybe I just missed them before — ? Oh well. Back to lunch and Mark Twain.

Five minutes later, a fifth white whale appears, smiling at me with nose in the air and tail pointing smartly to starboard — but this time, I see the two guys in Whaling Museum polo shirts just straightening up after setting this last whale down. At last I know — that’s where the whales have been coming from.

Is podcasting as cool as we thought?

When podcasting first burst on the scene about a year ago, I thought, Wow, this is going to be the coolest thing ever! I love radio — I used to do college radio and community radio, and I still listen to radio more than I watch TV — and I thought podcasting was going to be a way to do radio on the Web. So I listened to a few podcasts, even tried recording a couple myself, but my interest in podcasting quickly waned.

Podcasts lack the immediacy of radio. When I did college and community radio, people would call in to the station and talk to me — I loved that. I like to listen to the BBC World Service for breaking stories. I love listening to Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers, on “Car Talk,” as they handle all the crazy phone calls they get. Because podcasts are pre-recorded, you don’t get that same sense of immediacy.

And podcasts are essentially a one-way medium. Your only choice is to turn it on or turn it off. Radio combined with the telephone has a far greater potential to be a two-way medium — listeners can call in and interact with the radio show.

So for now, I’m sticking to frequent blogging. It’s much more fun for me. I try to post daily, so I get that sense of immediacy. And I get fast feedback from my readers via comments, email, and face-to-face. But I’d be curious to hear from readers of this blog –do you listen to podcasts? –which do you prefer, and why?

Sucking up

Friday is my sabbath day — no work, just personal and spiritual renewal. This week, I spent my sabbath at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The trolley drops you off past the front entrance of the museum, and right now you can’t help but notice the two racing sail boats cleverly supported above the grass in front of the museum’s front entrance.

The two boats, former contenders for the America’s Cup, are beautiful objects in of themselves, like the helicopter and racing cars in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Unfortunately, the boats are really there to draw attention to a new exhibit, “Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch.” It feels like the show’s only reason for existence is to puff up the ego of William Koch in order for the museum to get some kind of donation(s) out of a very wealthy man. Nothing wrong with that — puffing up the egos of rich patrons has been going on since the beginning of the history of art. But the show itself is a bit of an embarrassment. The collections show little sign of informed and intelligent taste, merely signs of overwhelming wealth. Not recommended.

Junk

Carol, my partner, is an undisputed master of buying things through yard sales, thrift stores, craigslist and other online sellers, antique and junk stores, etc. I follow her lead, and even I have been known to pick through things left by the roadside for trash pick-up (a replacement for the days when we lived in a town with a dump where we could go “antiquing”).

She found a new place to buy junk — er, antiques here in New Bedford, in the basement of an old mill building about a mile north of the downtown. She was talking with the owner of the place, and she said, There’s no reason to buy anything new any more. He said, Yes, absolutely. Because, she said, people have so much stuff you can get pretty much whatever you want used. He nodded vigorously.

Yup. Here in North America, we have reached critical mass when it comes to personal belongings. Carol and I (mostly Carol) have furnished our apartment almost entirely with yard sale items, junk, low-end antiques, stuff saved from the trash, things given to us by family or friends, things we have owned for decades. It’s a fashion statement, a design ethic. There are even books about junk chic. It’s a cultural trend to watch — fashionable, culturally creative, and subversive of the consumer culture, all at the same time.

Or maybe that’s just how we dress up the fact that we decorate with junk.

A few more days

Headline on the front page of today’s New Bedford Standard-Times:

LOSS PUTS SOX BEHIND YANKS

I know the Curse is over after last season, but I had a hard time reading that headline. Too many bad memories.

What I really want to have happen this weekend, for the final showdown between the Sox and the hated Yankees, is to be transported out to George and Walt’s, a neighborhood bar near hte Rockridge BART station in Oakland, where I could sit sipping one of their perfect martinis while watching the games with my friend, Michelle. Universalist that she is, Michelle is always filled with hope, certain that it will turn out all right in the end. She could explain the things I still don’t get (like, I still don’t get this middle reliever strategy — why put a pitcher in for two outs? — but Michelle can make me understand it). Yeah, that’s where I could watch the games this weekend — you just can’t feel the same way about Curse flashbacks when you’re under the bright California sun.

Coming out our apartment this evening, I was greeted with a huge, perfect rainbow. The red was particularly bright because of the red setting sun. I watched it until the sun faded, and the rainbow faded into the gray clouds rushing overhead, until all that was left was a red pillar of fire on the northeastern horizon.

No more floods, but fire next time. You hear that, Yankees? You’re gonna go up in flames this weekend!

Still waiting…

Our technology woes continue. Verizon sent a repair tech out again today, and though he solved one problem he was unable to connect our home phone. Supposedly someone will come out tomorrow. We asked for phone service on August 19, and we’re still waiting.

And my new Mac Mini came today, which I bought so I will have a computer to use when my laptop goes to the repair shop (and after that to have as a backup in case I have another laptop malfunction). It will live in my office at church, and it’s up and running — except that it can’t access the DSL line through the office network. So we will have to call in our church repair tech one more time to fix the network.

I don’t mind being so dependent on technology that I can no longer survive without a computer (in fact I kinda like it). But I do mind being dependent on unreliable networks, or on phone companies that take more than a month to set up phone service.