Areas of Unrest

27 February 2005 - Extension Chords

The title of this entry is a musical pun, not a spelling error. I went to see The Tone Rangers today at the Smithsonian and that had been one of the other names they had proposed for their group. I enjoyed the musical part of their show, but they talked somewhat more than I would have liked. Still, it isn't every day one gets to hear the lyrics of "Wild Thing" sung as a Gregorian chant, and that was worth it.

I should also mention that making up names for bands is one of those odd things I've been known to do in my spare time. For example, when I lived in L.A., I would sometimes drive past a store called "Manchester Live Poultry," which always struck me as an excellent name for a pub rock sort of band, a bit on the punk side, but not quite as vicious.

My final musical note (yes, I know it's an old pun) is a celebrity death. Both Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee got more notice, but John Raitt also died last week. In recent years he was probably most famous as Bonnie Raitt's father, but he had his own celebrity in the golden age of Broadway, most notably in Carousel.

I endured yet another hectic week at work, including a snowy Thursday during which I had multiple meetings, as well as having to write a background paper, assemble a package to transmit a document to another organization, and do various other random acts of bureaucracy. We got dismissed two hours early, since Washington is the city of weather wimps. Except, I only managed to get out one hour early. Fortunately, the snow was pretty much all to the east and my neighborhood got only a couple of inches.

By the way, in defense of weather wimpery, this region doesn't get more than one or two significant snowfalls a year, if that many. So it isn't as if we have the infrastructure for dealing with it that, say, Buffalo does. In addition, there are a lot of microclimates here, so the two or three inches of snow here may be trivial, but the eight inches in Maryland was not. That said, I do think it was over-reaction to close the schools when it was merely flurrying outside. We're supposedly going to get hit with heavy snow tomorrow morning, with accumulations of 4-7 inches, so I suspect I'll be getting some time to catch up on some more things at home.