#ROW80 3RD QUARTER 2013 – POST 3 – THE 12TH MAN ON AN 11-MAN TEAM & HURRY MONDAY

Now that right there is one of the stupider titles I have composed. Stupider still, is the fact that it took 4 tries to type “stupider.” More on that later. In this instance the 12^th man is the audience and is more a metaphor than anything else. Because? The 105^th man in a 104-man team would have no meaning to anyone. So, What am I talking about, huh? The audience. Our wonderful, wonderful audience, who come out to listen to whatever-the-hell we're doing that night, day or afternoon.

This is about the size of the Opera venue I played in; it seats 5000 and was always sold out.

I suspect orchestral composers started putting G.P.s (not gps, you gamers) but Grande Pauses in music to take a sort of “audience attendance,” if you will. To see who's paying attention, and who's carving “I ♥ Mikey” on the seat in front of them, who's rustling candy paper and who's talking in class. Here's how it happens. The orchestra is thundering along in about the 3000^th measure of some reeeaally boring symphony by Anton Bruckner, and then there's this huge, gaping hole, where it all just stops. You're supposed to hear *cricket, cricket* What we are all treated to is “I FRY MINE IN LARD!” From the nosebleed section, or the cheap seats.

This is frowned upon, unless agreed to by the entire audience. There's always some bald guy or old bat in front, who has a crush on the Concertmaster. Don't do this, unless you're prepared to thumbwrestle during intermission. Oh and dressy t-shirts and flip-flops are required. For the orchestra, too.

I'm already wishing I were dead, because the violas thundering part is 58 pages or tremolo, which is a very fast shaking of the bow on the string on one note; it requires small muscle movement and is okay for short periods, but it do cramp the muscles over time. What Beethoven giveth, Bruckner taketh. Bruckner and Mozart are both giant bags of dicks in my book. So, of course, when we sneak back in, in a pianississimo, I'm trying not to laugh and my Russian stand partner is muttering under her breath, “Nyet, you no look at me...*snort*” and we're off to air-viola playing, while we hiss-laugh.

We were kinda like this, only she wasn't a guy and we didn't play backwards. We got along well, which lots of stand partners don't. Actually, I've had very little trouble with stand partners over the course of my career. But Rita was fun. She came from the Kiev Philharmonic and played boatloads of viola; just an awesome player!

You know you're at a really classy concert when you play the “Star-Spangled Banner” and some goon in the cheap seats yells “Play Ball” before the opera begins. I thought Maestro Coppola was going to climb out of the pit and hunt the guy down and bite him. All 4' 2' and 96 years of him. Man! What a little ferocious tiger! I was very, very careful to always stay on his good side. I've seen him eviscerate violinists with 3 words. People never got fired by him. He just slowly tortured you to death.

Here is Maestro, either praising the 1st violins, or chewing them out, it is hard to tell. He always looks like this. His brother Carmine Coppola, who played flute in Detroit, did too.

 

Warning: This is the inaugural rehearsal for I can't remember which Puccini Opera and it's rough, for the 1st 22 or 23 seconds. It gets more polished as we go. Typically, we got the music cold and had 3 rehearsals and 3 performances.

I was playing at one concert on a stage where there are several venues, and across the street, Jeff Beck was playing. Some stoner must have gotten his concerts wrong and been really stoned, because at one point during a Brahms symphony I was playing with the orchestra, and natch, wouldn't ya know, a very, very quiet part, dude pops up and yells "Motherfuckin' Jeff Beck rocks, Man!" and then, pops back down. The surprising part is that no one turned a hair. I'd already started my career as a rock-and-roll violist and had heard it all, as had my colleagues.

Be sure and do this at your next Mozart concert, or Bruckner. The orchestra won't mind. The security can be a bitch, though.

Audiences can surprise you, but that's the great thing about live music. You never know what is going to happen. Either on stage or off. I was playing in a small theater in Columbia, South Carolina once. This is where I got locked in the bus and had to crawl through the driver's window with Wolf and concert black, but the strangeness had just begun. That night, sitting in the pit, which was floor level with the audience, there was a couple in completely stunning Klingon makeup and regalia. I kept sneaking peeks at them. They thoroughly enjoyed NYGASP's “Pirates of Penzance.” They came back stage after the show and thanked us in Klingon. Talk about cosplay; impressive and elegant.

ghaH 'ej Duvan, vo' columbia south carolina

So, I never knew what I was heading into when I went on a tour, but I always looked forward to tours. I miss them, but it would be impossible now. So, I share them with you.

Well, Monday can't get here fast enough. I will get the results of my DaTScan and we'll see. I am trying to not get my hopes up, because I know this is an arduous process and can take as long as 6 years to diagnose, but I get tired so easily and have been sleeping for as many as 11 to 14 hours. I'm back on my bipolar meds and so, of course, my tremors are worse and by the end of the day, I'm in pain, particularly in my back and shoulders. We shall see. And of course, I missed Wednesday's check in. Bills to pay and shopping to do, which is like this Lawrence-of-Arabia type odyssey, hah.

#ROW80 – POST 2 – NEVER ENDING, CREEPING PARANOIA; MAYBE THE TIN-FOIL HAT CROWD HAS IT RIGHT

I'm probably the last person in the world to talk to about government conspiracies, black ops, black helicopters and things that go bump in the night. The things that go bump in the night aren't “them,” they're “us.” We need to be more worried about “us,” then,\ “them.” I've written about all of this before and now we're back to slathering on another layer of nonsense with all the megrims that are being caused NOW by the NSA. “Fuhgedda aboudit,” as the late, great Tony Soprano would say. They've been there for ever so long.

Today, I received this charming little note from Ubisoft:

Yippee! Who doesn't love hackers, on 3rd party sites? At least this time, they didn't steal my blog posts and sell them for money, like they did last year. Assholes. This is why I have Fortress Network. I need to start hacking these bastards back.

Great, wonderful and swell 'n' all, but guess what? I know about all of this already and have for several years. Because friends and foes, I tracked corporate rogues, both at IBM and Verizon; legally, but there it is. Back in the mid-90s. This wasn't our sole mission, but if we ran across them and they had certain static IP addresses (this was pre-DHCP) we had, as part of our job description (on the hoof, so to speak. A supervisor would holler it out as he/she ran by; situations were "fluid") the authority to cripple and report the servers. One of my jobs at Verizon was to “listen” to my agents' calls to make sure they were hitting their metrics with each caller. If the call was personal, I disengaged from the call. This is all in-house and the agents knew I would do this, they were just not told when.

However, in the case of the rogue servers, there was never any policy stated that an engineer could, or could not create a test server, much like we create virtual machines today to protect our own operating systems. But, this was a matter of proprietary information, which we all had to sign agreements that stated all intellectual property developed would remain with the corporation. Neither IBM, or Verizon wanted information being developed on their turf and shopped elsewhere. At the time it was a gray area, as people were starting to telecommute.

Which brings me back to my little love letter from Ubisoft. I assume it's from some game that I signed up for, but never played because it was stupid. I use phony accounts for things like that, so I am not worried. I've worked at two places which became sites of cyber-attacks and we successfully fended them off, but that's really nerve-wracking, although I found out some really cool ways to prevent it on my own network.

However, it does leave a cold hand upon the back of my neck. All of this skulking around and spying and trying to undercut the enemy. I know I come by it honestly. My father went to college during the McCarthy era and saw college professors at his university lose their jobs, careers and families. In some cases, their lives. A society fraught with paranoia is a society that will turn on itself and eat the weak and the most vulnerable. He never got over that. I know this because when I joined the American Socialist party in 1980, it nearly killed him. I had him on the phone screaming at me, the night I turned up on the “CBS evening news with Dan Rather.”

Okay, I wasn't at this rally, but I love this country. My dad would have had a bird if I'd been in this. Let's just all hold hands and hum "The Internationale" for a minute and shed a tear for Trotsky. By the way, you can see the spires of St. Basil's Cathedral in Krasnaya Ploshad (Red Square) in the back ground. Good times, good times...

Of course, no paranoia is complete without the Area 51 muddle. I have an uncle, the Mad Scientist, as I call him. He doesn't talk to anyone on the computer; only if you write him. Why he thinks this will keep him safe, I have no idea, but there it is. He worked out at Jack Ass Flats, which is north of Area 51, and not far from Nellis AFB, where my father spent some time when he was flying B-29s, doing Nuclear Testing in the late 50s and 60s. They blew up Atom bombs, above ground, then below ground. 

He used to see a lot of UFOs; he probably still does. Being a nuclear physicist and a mathematician (but a horror on the computer; he thinks everything's a virus) he based a set of mathematical theorems on the way he saw the UFOs move. Basically, he took the entity of mass out of the equations, or changed it, or something, (I am not a math geek much; I made it through Calculus in university for computers, he's dabbling in astro-physics here, I believe) because of the way they would move quickly, then stop very briefly, and then move just as quickly in another direction. He substituted another mathematical function (it's been years since I've seen all of the formulae) and the math works. He published several papers that were reprinted in several journals and then ... just stopped.

At least I think he did. I'm not sure. That's always the way it goes with these things. I truly believe information for the general public is massaged and fed to us in little spoonfuls. If aliens did exist, and I think it conceivable that they do, I'm afraid that it is like the “Cigaret Man” opines in “Musings of a Cigaret Smoking Man” in X-Files, Season 4, episode 7. Not the entire episode, because in the whole, it leads us to believe that the “Smoking Man” is involved in everything from the assassination of JFK to plotting against the Buffalo Bills football team. For me, this just sounds like old news, or background noise. The one thing that has always horrified me, and I don't think this is just something the X-Files' creators cobbled up out of their deep well of imagination is this one statement, regarding the finding of a living alien life form: "Any country capturing such an entity is responsible for its immediate extermination." I also believe THAT has already happened.

I want to believe as well, but I also have a huge streak of skepticism and am not easily led. Both my father and my uncle have the same qualities. I may laugh at what my uncle does, but he's a hard-headed rationally-thinking scientist.

And why not? We're already, as a planet, doing the most idiotic and hurtful of things, to EACH OTHER. I just read about the new front-bencher in Australia who is Muslim. He took his oath of office on the Quran, as is his right. Australia is up in arms. Gee, maybe he should have used the phone book. It would have meant the same if he had taken his oath with a Christian Bible. This man Ed Husic will never forget this. His moment of triumph, will be forever soured, over such a little thing. We are already killing each other. Wouldn't we kill beings from another planet to keep that information secret? So much is kept hidden. People just don't get it. We need to make governments accountable, and we need to check ourselves and try to live by that. Our moral compasses run deep and true. But we have to protect that; get honest with ourselves and tear down the dishonest falseness. Like Mulder, I want to believe.

I come from a family of seekers, with very firmly held principles. Sometimes, I don't think we have very long shelf-lives. We'll see.

#ROW80 3RD QTR 2013 – POST 1 – RANDOM THINGS AND STUFF

Well, July 1^st is finally here and it's time for #ROW80 to start. I signed up, absolutely clueless and with a sort-of-goal-looking thing rolling around in my head, but I'm not sure I've committed to it yet. It may be a book, or it may be just a series of essays; already written, but fitfully polished. Or not. I am never sure about these things. In my post-homeless lifestyle, one should probably keep one's options open. Situations can become fluid.

So, it's all rather random and ad hoc, but I don't want too much random and ad hocness, or else you, dear reader(s) may lose interest all together and stop reading, or I may do something kooky and wacky and end back up on the street. That just wouldn't do, so I'll try and behave myself. As it is, I'm not really a person who enjoys random very much. I am pretty hard-wired, so much so, that if one little thing is changed, I start forgetting things, losing things, lose a sense of my routine and I then I get upset and start to hyperventilate and my tremors get worse. It all cascades and it's a mess.

When I'm in the “zone” I can still multitask for short periods of time, but much of my psych meds prevent that. I found that out when I had to come off of them for my DaTScan, but then the bipolar was sneaking back and that isn't welcome. But, now I understand why people stop taking their meds. Anyway, that's why I decided to make this first post for #ROW80 a bunch of random observations 'n' stuff, such as this:

Is this not the cutest kitten ever?

Here is a mystery, I've been pondering. Was I going to make a note and lost interest? Did I forget? Decide the topic was just not worth it? Lost interest, or did I just wander off to make a sandwich?

Whatever it was, I saved it...

Here is a sunfish; these guys are like the clowns of the sea. I was deep sea fishing once with my mom. She was her ever-helpful self. I asked her, “Ma, why are they called Sun Fish?” She said, “Because they are full of sun.” Thanks Ma. That's as bad as the time she told me she had seen a Florida panther in the median of US 19. I asked her what color he was, she answered, “Panther colored,” with a straight face. God, I miss her.

Mr. Sunfish; shining his rays of happiness.

This is Jody and Micky. They were waiting outside TGH for Jody's ride, while I was waiting for my ride after my DaTScan. They very obliglingly let me take their pictures. Micky is from Thailand and works for the PT department, and Jody is one of his patients. She is a beautiful girl and I'm afraid my picture does not do her justice. We had a spirited talk about our favorite desserts, while waiting. Micky's picture is a tattoo of his name in Thai. They were both extremely polite and engaging and they both suffer from cerebral palsy. I always meet the most interesting people at TGH.

Sorry about the quality of the pictures; it was too bright, and I am not a good picture-taker. Jody is a beautiful girl and Micky a very handsome young man. They were both delightful!

These are pictures of Mama I took on the porch. They are the best of a lot of pictures taken. She is nearly impossible to shoot with her looking at the camera. Actually, I think it is me. I suck at picture-taking and video-taking. At least, she's not a giant blur.

This is me as ViolaFury on Runescape, with Linus my lion sitting facing me, while some guard and a troll duke it out to a cyber-death...

I'm sure there are people who say, "why do you flaunt your total geekness on the internet like this? Isn't this the equivalent of pulling your pants down in public?" Well, no, it's not, I say. It's more like showing everyone my boring-ass vacation pictures. The only people who will "get" this, are people who know me and other geeks. Everyone else can bite me.

We have new express buses on HARTline. I didn't realize they ran all the way to Neptune, or maybe the Himalayas. You be the judge...

We have new Express buses that have a limited number of stops. They're green and have that "new bus smell." Same passengers, though, so they'll be smelling like armpits in no time.

I do something resembling “work” for SETI@home and work on 3 projects; SETI, Cosmology and SAT. Every once in a while, some other project “borrows” my CPU and I see some different projects. SAT is a Russian project and they finally added a description of what their project is about:

One of my dearest, long-time, back-to-7th grade smart-as-a-whip, Valedictorian friends, Robert Lee Haycock and I laughed over whether a problem is "practically important," or can all be "reduced to a Boolean satisfiability problem." I would go for the latter; he, the former.

Last, but not least in any way, here is Mama's empty cat treat bag. This just cracks me up for some reason, not the least of which is the cat in the Hawaiian shirt, but no pants.

 

Also, the cat looks less than thrilled with his fish-on-a-spear, there. Maybe because he's enisled on a huge treat with a surfboard and once that treat becomes waterlogged and sinks, kitty's gonna be hanging ten in the middle of the ocean. Happy Monday!