Andrew Greene

Just got an e-mail alert from the Wall St. Journal:

WSJ NEWS ALERT: Cnooc to Buy Argentina's Bridas for $3 Billion

which, of course, I misread at first as

WSJ NEWS ALERT: cnoocy to Buy Argentina's Brides for $3 Billion

elainetyger suggested that I post the answers to yesterday's cryptic, and have a discussion thread. To prevent the answers from being picked up by the RSS feed to Facebook, I'll post them as the first comment to this entry. (So if you're reading this on Facebook, please come to my LiveJournal blog at http://530nm330hz.livejournal.com/353588.html to see and comment.)

A video based on David Ellis Dickerson's entertaining "Greeting Card Emergency" vidcasts:

The 12th of March is the birthday of two my friends in the NPL. In their honor, I’ve written a variety cryptic....

According to today's NYT, part of the proposed national curriculum states that third graders should "[u]nderstand that rectangular regions can be tiled with squares in rows and columns, or decomposed into such arrays." (K-12 Math Standards, p. 21)

But that's not true. By definition, if the sides of a rectangle are in an irrational proportion, it cannot be decomposed into an array of squares.

Happy birthday to two of my favorite entertainers, John Barrowman (b. 1967) and Keren Peles (b. 1979).

(Yes, there are other famous people whose birthday is today, but these are the two whose artistic output I have enjoyed over the past year.)

"You're attempting to be funny, aren't you?" -- Tani

(Followed up by "I didn't say your attempt wasn't succeeding....")

Felt the sudden urge to throw together a puzzle. So here's a double square of order 4:

ACROSS:
1. Simile part for an entrance
2. Brand seen on desert roads, perhaps
3. Word seen above doors at MIT?
4. Gilbert or Sullivan, for short

DOWN:
1. Simile part for an exit
2. One who polishes off the cake?
3. Magazine published by Bob Guccione
4. Jay's home

You know what the scariest part of that movie is, based on the one TV ad I saw last night during The Daily Show?

They go back in history... to the 1980s.

Whippersnappers.

I just went to the website that usually has the week's menu for the Hebrew College kosher cafeteria. Instead of the usual content, it was one of those generic "wrong site" search portals. (We haven't been to the cafeteria in a few months; I hope Efraim's still there.)

The top two links it offered were "Russian Wives" and "Christian Singles."

Our really cool team at Adobe has three open positions in our new Waltham offices. Full descriptions available on request; here are the brief ones:

• An experienced developer to work on the design and implementation of client-side and server-side infrastructure which supports acrobat.com.
• An entry-level developer (new college grad) to work with and develop software responsible for the build, validation, and deployment phases of a version of Acrobat.com during all phases of its lifecycle.
• Quality Engineering Intern - Summer 2010 -- develop and execute test plans to check the code before we ship

Strangely enough, while everyone else seems to be gushing about the video for This Too Shall Pass, I was deeply moved by the video that came out yesterday for Keren Peles's new song כל היתר חולף whose title basically means "Everything Shall Pass". [I just wish my Hebrew were good enough to understand enough of Peles's lyrics to know if I agree with the song itself. But the music is sweet and the images are, by turns, disturbing, amusing, inspiring, and moving.]

So apparently there's this wildly successful series of books about a kid named Percy Jackson; I'm told the first one has been made into a film that was just released. (What do I know? The last film I saw was Frost/Nixon, and before that, Wordplay.)

The first I'd heard of Percy Jackson was when Tani read the first book, The Lightning Thief by Ron Riordan. He loved it, and his description of it at the dinner table sounded interesting. Since I like to spot-check what my kids are reading anyway, I picked it up.

And?

Whoa!

That was a well-written, entertaining book, reinterpreting and evoking classic Greek mythology without "dumbing it down" at all or coddling the reader. I'm impressed, and looking forward to the rest of the series.

Reading Ted Kennedy's autobiography, and Sen. Bayh's op-ed piece in the Times the other day, and several other pieces of the years, I was struck by the comments that one of the reasons for the decline in bipartisanship in Washington DC is that Republicans and Democrats no longer socialize with one another.

So it struck me -- no one dares ignore an invitation to the White House, right? So if Pres. Obama wants to be postpartisan, what would happen if he were to re-establish the sorts of dinners for which Katherine Graham was famous? Let's say he has an off-the-record informal dinner at the White House every week for 8 Democrats, 8 Republicans, and a Supreme Court Justice every now and then. Let's assume that the guests would be selected based on whom the White House staff thinks would actually enjoy one another's company.

Sure, it wouldn't have an immediate effect. But what if it slowly resurrected the idea that our elected representatives and Senators could sometimes deal with each other as people and not as adversarial abstractions?

We drove down to my parents' house on Wednesday night to spend the second half of the kids' school vacation week in NYC. And of course being in NYC means indulging in those sensual pleasures for which opportunity is much more available in NYC than here in Boston.

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Tonight was my turn to cook, and I tried something new: Tah Deeg with Tomato Stew. (For those who care, this recipe is vegan/pareve; I served it accompanied by grilled chicken.) Recorded here for posterity (and so I can remember it next time.) ( Cut for portion control )

Not too labor-intensive, and quite enjoyable. As I said, I just wish I'd made the rice spicier. Definitely going into the rotation!

I just uploaded the latest files to the KabShab website. All movements have reached my second milestone!

This means that all ten movements have been broken out into six voices with lyrics properly assigned. What remains: a couple of simple editorial tasks (make sure dynamics and tempi are correctly notated, and that all lyrics are using the same font) and a pass to check the singability of each part (change that it's in range, has no awkward jumps, and that the syllables of the lyrics fall reasonably in the contrapuntal sections).

Let's hear it for long weekends! :-)

In the morning, I worked with the kids on their science-themed Chanukah presents, which have been sitting partially-done for a while. Tani and I finished building his FM radio kit; and Alissa and I went down to the basement and whomped on geodes in an old sock.

After lunch, we walked over to the library for a flute consort concert, which we all enjoyed. Then, of course, we were at the library, so we stayed for a while and got some books.

In other day news, I've gotten KabShab V into six voices; updated the PDF on the website. And I took a first stab at expanding KabShab VIII (Lecha Dodi) from 4 staves to 6; it was already sort of six voices. More editing is needed before I am ready to post that, but it's in pretty good shape. Huzzah! [ETA 11pm: Did the add'l editing on VIII and got the lyrics properly assigned for X. Website updated with new PDFs/MP3]

And tonight is the first of Adar, a happy happy time. Yippee!

Due to various changes, I need to once again re-prioritize and re-schedule my big projects. Here's the new list:

1. Finish editing KabShab. This should take me another one or two nights of intensive work, and then a few days of touchup. New goal: Finish by Feb. 21. Once that's done, the new project will be producing a demo recording, which I hope to finish by June 1.

2. Next round of edits on my siddur. Realistically, this is going to take a month or so, and we're heading into the period of Pesach prep. I'll do what I can as I can, but I no longer think it's reasonable to assume this will be done before Pesach, so (alas) I'm going to push the deadline out to Apr. 30.

3. Resurrecting the Dafcast. Every few months I get a nice note about how useful the pages that are already there are, and I really should get back into it. I'm going to try to get back to doing two or three dapim a week, as an ongoing target along with everything else. I will try to finish up Megillah, but it would also be great to get the missing dapim from Pesachim, Chapter 10 done before Pesach. I also note that with the Daf Yomi starting Sanhedrin today, we've got Makkot coming up on June 6, and it would be awesome to have the 22 pages of Makkot translated (or, even better, turned into podcasts) before Daf Yomi gets there. (Anyone want to take on some of the translation?)

Over Shabbat I read Ted Kennedy זל's memoir, True Compass. It's well-written, of course, and peppered with humourous anecdotes, but primarily it's a fascinating glimpse into his mirror. He's forthcoming about his failings, and his perception of the forces that shaped his personality and his life was illuminating. Highly recommended.

I also took out from the library The Renaissance Soul - Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine. It was praised in a Wired article across which I had stumbled, but I should have been warned off by the phrase "Life Design" in the subtitle. Rather than being advice on how to manage multiple passions, it was a book-length pitch for the author's consulting services, encouraging people to realize their inner "Ben Franklin". I skimnmed it cover-to-cover in about ten minutes and there's nothing useful in there for people who already self-identify as Renaissance Men and Women (hence the gender-neutral title Soul) and have decided to embrace our multiple passions. Feh. Four kvteches.

From today's NYT bridge column:

North must not be cowered into passing.

No. The verb you want is "cowed."

It's not like this was breaking news, you know. There was probably time for an editor to review this copy before it went to press.

An LJ friend posted the following quiz in a friends-locked post. With his permission, I'm reproducing it here because it's SO COOL:

There were 42(*) men who served as president before Obama. Here are the number of days they spent in office:

4,422 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,922 2,865 2,840 2,728 2,040 2,027 1,886 1,654 1,503 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,461 1,460 1,430 1,419 1,262 1,036 969 895 881 491 199 31

Can you match 'em up? I especially like "1,460" (how'd that happen?). I'm also surprised that barely half the presidents were either "2,922" or "1,461".

(*) Here I'm counting Cleveland once, and anomalies such as Cheney serving as "acting president" (while G.W. Bush was incapacitated during an operation) not at all.

Normal protocol for people commenting with spoilers is to use <font color="white">spoilery stuff</font> --- until HTML6 introduces the <spoiler> tag. :-)

Last year, when the FCC mandated the analog->digital cutover, Comcast made a big deal about how we wouldn't have to do a thing because they were going to continue to provide analog signal.

Now they're pulling that plug. By the end of this month we need to get converter boxes (at no additional charge) from Comcast if we wish to continue to receive anything beyond the basic broadcast channels.

Well, if we need to go through that hassle anyway, it's time to look into our alternatives. ( Cut for length. Details of what we are looking for behind the cut. )

So: Anyone out there have experiences, positive or negative, to share with us regarding Verizon Fios, RCN, or any other providers? Any corporate customer-relations departments who scan RSS feeds and who stumbled on this posting want to chime in and tell us why your service is best?

This morning, the open question on the third-grade board was to suggest a pair of homophones. Tani wrote:

π pie

KabShab IV is properly 6-voxed. PDF on the website is updated; MP3 didn't change enough to recompile.

Onward!

I used to blog a lot more about my life; recently I've found that I (and many of my friends) have migrated more towards Facebook and Twitter for that. But I don't like Facebook; I use it because that's where more of my casual acquaintances are. I would rather take the time to write things up in a little more length and to have my "diary" be somewhat more permanent. Pepys didn't tweet and Kafka didn't use Facebook.

I'll still use FB for posting random links, and FB will continue to grab the RSS feed from here, so you don't have to switch to following me on LJ if you're an FB friend. (Unless you want access to my friends-locked LJ posts, where all the juicy stuff lives.)

I've been kinda down for the past week. It's a combination of low-sun blahs (yes, I know, grow lamps) and a weekend in which I spent too much time unsuccessfully trying to develop a crossword idea and a feedback loop in which my lack of creative productivity saps me of the drive needed to exercise creative productivity.

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That would be really awesome. It would be great to get some of this "creative productivity" to the point where someone other than myself might enjoy the fruits of my labors.

Over Shabbat I finished The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It was a very good book, although not as strong as the exceptional The Angel's Game. Still, both books are good enough that now that they're back at the library I'm going to buy them.

I also tried to read Manon Lescaut on the basis of it being featured in one of the Wimsey mysteries. Got about 1/4 of the way in before deciding enough was enough.

For those who don't usually do Merl Reagle's Sunday Crosswords, or even for those who don't often do crossword puzzles at all, allow me to strongly recommend Merl's instant classics from last week and this week. Do them in order, and do them from the top to the bottom.