Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Saturday was Denison Witmer’s 30th birthday. I would have posted then, but we were keeping busy visiting his hometown. To celebrate he is offering 30 MP3s through a new website, www.happybirthdaydenison.com. The MP3s are free, but he suggests making a donation to a very deserving pair of health care charities. So belated happy birthday Denison, and happy Denison’s birthday to all of us.
Lately I’ve been working on Calvin’s campus each Thursday because of our regular Festival of Faith and Music meetings. I work in one of the main areas where students congregate and each week there’s a little bit more frustration and culture shock as I overhear bizarre conversations about current affairs. At the moment there is a guy sitting in the booth next to me holding forth on the state of the middle east. He is asserting quite forcefully that Iran is in the process of testing nuclear missiles and those around him are eating it up. ...
last.fm rolled out a set of new features today, including a flash radio player, free downloads, and an events system that will apparently include ticket sales options. You can see an event I’ll probably be attending tomorrow night here. The new features are as well executed as is to be expected, though there do seem to be a few problems with the operation of the option for event promoters to ’lock’ their events and it would be nice to know whether there is integration with any other event services such as eventful, upcoming.org and tourb.us. There are already far too many places for event organisers to list their events, and since those sites provide well structured data it would be good if there could be some sharing. ...
The other day I wanted to break up a search string into its constituent parts. We’re not supporting any fancy operators, but we did want to allow phrases to be specified in double quotes. It’s an easy enough operation, but I googled to see if anyone was offering a particularly efficient way to do that in ruby. Nothing came up and since I’ve not posted in a while I thought I’d offer it for anyone else in that situation. ...
Last night saw us heading to another show at Calvin. This time it was Chris Thile (of Nickel Creek) and How To Grow A Band. I’d been a little disappointed when we saw Nickel Creek a few months back. My response may have been as much a reaction to the remarkably hyped-up crowd as to the band’s performance, but they struck me as being a little over-confident and the show didn’t quite live up to the hype many in its audience were feeling. ...
Detholz played at Calvin last night. It was probably the most enjoyable show I’ve been to there so far this academic year. Rather than talk about it, I’m just going to point to some videos Kari recorded and that I posted on youtube here and here. Tags: detholz, calvin college, live music
With elections coming up in just a couple of weeks the local paper is full of letters endorsing or attacking candidates, and we decided to join the fray with an endorsement of David LaGrand for the State Senate. For those who don’t know David, he’s probably best known around Grand Rapids for his role in the founding of Four Friends Coffee Shop and more recently Wealthy Street Bakery. There’s a tight word limit on letters to the paper and so there’s not much detail, but if you’re interested you can find out more on his website. ...
A few people emailed me over the past few weeks to say that comments weren’t working on this site. To be honest I’ve been enjoying the absence of spam that that brought, but the time came and the comments should now be fixed. So feel free to post away, or not, as you see fit. I’ve also moved my news feeds to a new (to me) service called feedburner that lets me keep better track of how many people are reading them, and possibly add other services in time. If you currently subscribe your newsreader _should_ pick up the change, but if not, or if you want to subscribe for the first time the URL you want is http://www.feedburner.com/jystewart/anthropic
It’s been a slow few months for films at UICA, but the schedule seems to be picking up and we made our first visit in a while to see Half Nelson, a film I’d been looking forward to since reading about it in Andrew O’Hehir’s compelling but all too often frustrating (given how few of the films he mentions make it here) column for Salon, Beyond The Multiplex. As O’Hehir makes clear, this is most definitely not another “inspirational-teacher flick” in the vein of To Sir With Love. As befits a film with quite this much indie-cred, its tale is far more ambiguous. Ryan Gosling’s teacher certainly has his moments of inspirational teaching (and his decision to teach history to these disenfranchised minority kids through Marxist influenced dialectics is a daring decision in an America that has yet to get past the Red Scare) but his life is anything but inspiring. ...
Having very much enjoyed The Virgin Suicides and loved Lost In Translation, I tried to ignore the negative buzz around Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It may have been booed in Cannes, but it wasn’t too hard to believe that those reports were overplayed and that some of the response had come from French critics who shared their nation’s resentment towards that most controversial of queens. The film’s scenes are as luscious as was to be expected, the choice and use of music impeccable, the performances are strong, and the timing gives a good sense of the emotional ups and downs we are led to believe Marie Antoinette was experiencing as she negotiated life in the last days of the French court. But overall, it felt like a film of ‘moments’. There are many good pieces but they didn’t come together to form a compelling movie. ...