The Penultimate Word

WDET was once the best radio station in Detroit, and one of the best in the country. It built its greatness on the strength of its music programming. Unlike the cookie-cutter programming on commercial radio, DET’s programming encompassed jazz, electronica, bluegrass, classical, folk, blues, roots rock, hip-hop, world beat, classical, and much stuff that defied classification. Its hosts were some of the best in the business, stringing together great sets, commenting knowledgably on what they played, but never (well, almost never) getting in the way of the music. They would play new artists no one had heard of, and unfamiliar material by familiar artists. Many of the CDs in my collection I first heard on the station.

Its audience supported it. Giving to the station was among the best in the country for public radio.

Things changed in 2005. Caryn Mathes, the station’s GM for many years, left for another job in Washington, D.C. Another GM came in, and changed the station from primarily music programming to NPR news/talk. This made no sense. WUOM, the powerhouse NPR affiliate run by the University of Michigan, was already an NPR news/talk station and had been for many years. UOM’s signal significantly overlaps DET’s signal, which means that DET serves up the same programming as UOM to an audience that had already been listening to UOM for a long time. Immediately, DET began losing listeners and contributions.

DET’s core audience fought back. In blogs, protest marches, letters to the station, even lawsuits, listeners tried to get the station to change back.

The station continued down its path to irrelevance. DET, now a virtual clone of UOM, has lost listeners, contributors and sponsors. Will Wayne State, its university parent, continue to subsidize it as it continues to be a financial black hole? So far, WSU is continuing to prop it up.

It turns out that Brood XIII of the 17-year cicadas do not occur in Michigan, and we won’t be invaded by them after all. The closest they will come to us is Indiana, according to retired U-M entomologist Thomas Moore.

The University Musical Society’s 2007-2008 season schedule is out, and of particular interest to choral music types is a concert by the Russian Patriarchate Choir, and one by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. The Russians are coming on Tuesday, October 30, the British invasion happens on Saturday, April 5.

Rounding out the choral music schedule is a concert by the Tallis Scholars, on Thursday, Dec. 6, and a performance of the St. Matthew Passion, with the Choral Union and the Detroit Symphony conducted by Jerry Blackstone. The St. Matthew will be performed on Friday, Mar. 21. I have always wanted to do the St Matthew and am considering joining the Choral Union just for this concert.

More here.

The 17-year invasion of cicadas is coming this week.

According to the National Geographic:

Cicadas—insects that spend most of their lives as nymphs, burrowed underground and sucking sap from tree roots—emerge once every 17 years. Living fast and dying young, the shrimp-size, red-eyed insects transform into adults, reproduce, and die, all the while buzzing to beat the band.

Within each 17-year cycle there are subsets, or “broods”. The one coming is Brood XIII, which sounds particularly sinister.

Each brood of 17-year cicadas actually consists of three different species, and they all emerge together. The species look different from one another, and each one has its own song. Listen carefully and you should be able to distinguish the different choruses, according to experts. The three songs have been described as sounding like the word “pharaoh,” a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler. The different species sing at different times of the day—one favors the early part of the day, another prefers midday, and the third takes the late-afternoon shift.

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train:

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop.
3. Boot it.
4. Make sure the person who won’t leave you alone can see the screen.
5. Open your browser to this message.
6. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky.
7. Then hit this link.

From MyLOL.net.

My friend the Speechwriter told me the other day that Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio was five lines of dialog repeated over and over and over. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Still, Mozart gave it such wonderful music it doesn’t really matter.

I saw the Michigan Opera Theater’s production of Abduction last night. Leah Partridge as Konstanze had no problem navigating the vocal fireworks Mozart gave that role. Doug Jones (sounds like a relief pitcher) was a funny Pedrillo, and Ryan McPherson a good Belmonte. But Peter Lobert stole the show as Osmin. This character, who foreshadows The Lord High Executioner with his gleeful listing of horrible tortures, is the comic hinge on which Abduction turns, and Lobert was fully up to the challenge. Lobert is a resonant bass liked who teasing the audience about whether he will hit the really low notes - which he did.

The opera began and ended at the same time as the Tigers game against the Cardinals, whom they clobbered 14 - 4 (why didn’t they do that last year???). Traffic was a total nightmare, but we did get to see the post-game fireworks over Comerica Park.

The New York Times reports that the Metropolitan Opera is expanding its high-definition live broadcasts of their productions next season. These have been wildly successful, with the Met selling over 324,000 tickets this year and more overseas. The Met expects to sell around 800,000 next season and earn a profit on the program.

I wondered if these simulcasts would help or hurt regional opera theater. Regional company managers quoted in the article say there is no evidence one way or the other, but the jury is still out. In any case, other companies, like the Royal Opera House in London and the Opéra de Paris, are so excited by the Met’s success that they are looking into doing their own broadcasts.

A test given to 8th graders in 1895 has been making the rounds for a while. Sample questions:

GRAMMAR (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

5. Define Case. Illustrate each Case.

ARITHMETIC (Time, one hour)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 feet deep, 10 feet long, and 3 feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

The entire test is here. So, are you smarter than an 8th grader? (No cheating by looking at the answers. Otherwise, I’ll give you an F and make you repeat the 8th grade.)

Does this demonstrate a shocking decline educational values in this country? I am not so sure. There are no questions on trigonometry or algebra, subjects which I studied in the 7th and 8th grade. There are no science questions. I bet an 8th grader from 1895 would be utterly lost in a modern middle school.

The railroad bridge over Washington Street here in Ann Arbor is unusually low, so two or three times a year an inattentive truck driver receives a very sudden lesson in Newtonion physics.

The inattentive truck driver learns about two laws of physiscs. The first is the one which holds that two objects cannot occupy the same space and the same time. The second is the law of inertia, which is demonstrated by objects in the cargo area continuing their forward motion even though the truck has suddenly stopped, until their motion is arrested when they slam into the front wall of the cargo box. Thus does the bridge educate the inattentive truck driver.

Those of us who work near the bridge have learned to recognize the sound of the bridge giving a physics lesson. It is a metal-on-metal grinding, tearing, ripping sound, followed by an eerie silence while the inattentive truck driver contemplates Newton’s laws and his suddenly narrowed employment options.

It takes some work to extricate the truck. A large wrecker of the kind used to tow semis, is summoned. The air is let out of the stuck truck’s tires, and then the wrecker drags the truck from under the bridge. Sometimes it takes two wreckers.

Not a lot of work gets done while this happens.

The Bayeux Tapestry come to life.

In 2003, Ann Arbor Township voters passed a dedicated tax of 0.7 mils to fund the purchase of property development rights (PDR) within the township. The township recently made its first purchase by purchasing the development rights of the Kapp farm on the east side of Nixon road at Pontiac Trail. The PDR purchase was for $2.2million, with $689,500 from the US Department of Agriculture, $757,000 from the City of Ann Arbor greenbelt program, and $757,000 from the township PDR fund. The Kapp family has been actively farming in Washtenaw county since 1838, the Nixon road farm has been in operation since 1931. The purchase ensures that the farm will be farmland forever and never developed.

Across Nixon from the Kapp farm, a cluster development of 38 homes will be constructed by the Silverman company on about 200 acres. The remaining 153 acres of the parcel was donated by Silverman to the township and that parcel will be preserved as farmland. The interesting thing about the parcel to be developed is that the residences will be clustered together on comparitively small lots, instead of spread out on 5 to 10 acre lots as is normal for this development. This means that much of the 200 acres will be open land. This kind of development is a good thing, I think. The property owner can sell his property, the developer can build an economically feasible development, but much of the land remains open. Since development of the rural areas of the county cannot be completely halted, this seems like a good compromise.

More information about the Kapp PDR purchase and the Silverman development can be found in the township’s newsletter.

I had always regarded graphic novels as comic boks with literary pretensions, an attitude which irritated my sister into lending me Maus, A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman.
Maus is about the wartime experiences of Spiegelman’s parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, and Spiegelman’s difficult relationship with his difficult father.

Vladek and Anja Spiegelman spent three years dodging Nazis and their civilian, occassionally Jewish, collaborators until they were caught and sent to Auschwitz. Their story is harrowing, enraging and utterly compelling. Art’s depiction of his relationship with Vladek is poignant, and sometimes very funny.

Spiegelman’s art allowed him to create a book with far fewer words but the same richness, nuance, and texture as a straight prose book. The Germans and Jews are drawn as anthropomorphic cats and mice, respectively. Polish Gentiles are pigs. In one chapter, when Vladek and Anja are hiding in the home of a sympathetic Polish woman, Vladek furtively goes about his business in the village wearing a mask in the shape of pig’s snout. It sounds stupid written out like this but it absolutely works.

Maus is frequently difficult to read but impossible to put down. I highly recommend it and will read again.

The Michigan Department Department ofTransportation, which gave the world the infamous Michigan Left, is gonzo for roundabouts. Several have either been built or are being planned in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area, including:

• Maple Road and Drake in West Bloomfield
• Lee Road and US-23 near Brighton (3 back-to-back-to-back)
• Four on Northwestern Highway
• Three by Skyline, Ann Arbor’s new high school (teenage demolition derby anyone?)
• Nixon and Huron Parkway (between my house and work)

M-DOT claims they are safer and more efficient than regular intersections. Many drivers aren’t so sure.

I haven’t driven any of them yet, but I guess we will have to get used to them.

Pretty soon this place will look like England. Tea, luv?

Test drive the Brighton roundabouts:

You may have already seen this since it has gone viral, but if you haven’t it is really funny. Someone pulled together a bunch of English retirement home residents and had them record, among other things, The Who’s My Generation, complete with instrument-smashing at the end of the song. This has been all over the web, and the BBC will be airing a documentary on them later this month. They do a surprisingly good job, and the video itself is both funny and touching.

They even have a MySpace page.

(Thanks to my friend Lynda for the link.)

In anticipation of the publication of The Deathly Hollows, the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, I recently re-read the first six front-to-back. I had not read the early books in years, and it was interesting to see how consistent Rowling was from book to book. She carefully builds up the Potter mythology and rarely contradicts herself (although I don’t understand how house elfs can Apparate at Hogwarts while no one else can). The early books were much darker than I had remembered, probably because of foreknowledge of later events and revelations. Quirrell seemed much more menacing the second time around than the first.

This what I think will happen book 7:

• Draco will join the good guys. He already showed that his heart is not really in being a Deatheater, and since Voldemort threatened to kill him if he didn’t murder Dumbeldore, he is in mortal peril and his only hope of protection is with the Order.
• Aunt Petunia knows a lot moe than she is letting on. She knows what a howler is and what a dementor is, and she is, after all, Lily’s sister. She is probably a Squib.
• The “R.A.B.” who stole the horcrux Harry and Dumbledore were after in The Half-Blood Prince is clearly Regulus Black, Sirius’s brother. The note left by R.A.B. in the locket fits in with the story Sirius told about his brother. I think Regulus hid the real horcrux in the Black house. Kreacher knows Regulus hid something important in the house, but is not sure what it is, which is why he was hoarding all that stuff in The Order of the Phoenix. It is possible that Mundungus inadvertantly stole the horcrux when he was looting the house after Sirius’s death and sold it.
• Harry is not a horcrux, as some have speculated. It takes some effort to make one, and Voldemort was intent on killing Harry and to his great surprise almost destroyed himself when he couldn’t.
• Dumbledore will not return. His death and funeral were written with too much finality by Rowling to allow that. He may, like Obe Wan Kenobi, put in a cameo, but that will be it.
• Snape will turn out to be a good guy. In The Half-Blood Prince, he very carefully did not kill anyone except Dumbledore, and went out of his way to protect everyone else. I still don’t know why Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him and why Snape agreed and I will be interested to see how Rowling handles that.
• Neville plays an important part. He grew tremendously in The Half-Blood Prince, and I think Rowling is setting him up for bigger things in book 7.
• Harry dies. Everything points that way.

Other HP speculation here. This is a good site for the completely obsessed.