the charity continues

Despite still feeling sick as a dog, this afternoon I donned my tux and headed off to Merkin Hall to play a benefit concert with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony. While I was tempted to beg out, the cause was too good (the concert raised more than $20,000 for music scholarships at the Lucy Moses School), and, in the end, I was glad I had slogged through, as it gave me my first chance to play Merkin, a venue famous as having some of the best acoustics in New York (though perhaps having the worst name).

A few other upsides to attending:

– The conductor, David Bernard, who is now one of my favorites in New York. Not only does he have a clearly articulated (and unique) sense of what he’s looking for musically, he seems to be having much more fun while conducting than nearly anyone I else I play for. He conducted the entire concert from memory (i.e. without using a score), looking thoroughly enrapt the entire time.

– The soloist, an exceedingly talented violinist. Not only did she nail the Mozart Concerto in A, but at the reception following the concert (still begowned in full Cinderella-style regalia), she was absolutely putting the moves on me. And she was cute. Sadly, cute in a high school senior, Lolita-esque, “fifteen will get you twenty” sort of way. But cute none the less. (And, no, I didn’t get her phone number. Come on, people, I have some scruples.)

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sick day

After staying out way too late on a date last night, salsa dancing at a little club on the Lower East Side, I woke up this morning with a sore throat, a slight fever, and a general case of the I-don’t-want-to-leave-my-apartment blaahs.

So, with that in mind, and with my pending move cross-town to Hell’s Kitchen only about a month off, I spent most of today taking everything I own off of shelves and out of closets and cabinets, and then putting everything back in place, in an attempt to weed out the random items that clutter my home despite the fact that I’ll never, ever use them again.

The pile I’ve accumulated in the center of my living room now contains such gems as a circa 1997 cell phone (approximate weight, 32 pounds), a Gap sweater vest (also, apparently, circa 1997, as I don’t believe I’ve seen one worn since – ah, if only I still had a pair of carpenter jeans to complete the quasi-retro look), and the utterly fascinating read Advanced Computational Techniques in Biological Statistics.

Yessir, I may still feel stick as a dog, but now I’m also brimming with the joy of good-Samaritan-ness, as I’ll be giving that pile away and helping people! Whoo boy will some homeless guy be lucky to get his hands on that stat textbook! Even better, this being New York (where even McDonalds delivers), apparently I don’t even have to leave my home to make the donation. Come Monday morning, some poor sap from Goodwill will be coming to my apartment to cart all those gems away.

But that’s just the kind of guy I am: helping to change the world, one act of lazy indifference that, being reasonably borderline in terms of global karmic impact, might be mistakenly construed as loving kindness at a time.

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hot lesbian jazz!

Yes, boys and girls, come this evening, I’ll be swinging big band charts with bull dykes. Hot Lavender Swing, New York’s only lesbian big band, has called me in as solo trumpet for their annual Halloween Ball gig, and this evening is our first preparatory rehearsal. Yes, it does seem like the premise for a short-lived sitcom, but we trumpet players are apparently in short supply.

Besides, I’m not overly concerned. They like girls, I like girls. I should blend in fine.

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the truth, revealed

1. Comedy Central’s debut foray into made-for-TV-movie-making, Porn n’ Chicken, premiered this past Sunday.

1b. Frankly, it sucked.

2. However, if you’re a regular reader of this site, and you missed that premiere, you’ll probably want to catch the replays this weekend (Friday @ 11:00p, Sat @ 11:30p).

3. That’s because the movie is about me.

3b. And I don’t mean that in some vague, figurative sense. I mean I sold my life rights to Comedy Central for the film.

3c. Along with three fellow Yalies, I founded PnC, and served as a member of the elusive ‘Tri-Colored’ Council.

4.. The truth of PnC is, by and large, much funnier than the fiction.

4b. Therefore, I highly reccomend that diligent readers attempt to gain access to ongoing PnC events.

5. To assist in that quest, I will now disclose some heretofore closely guarded secrets of the brotherhood.

5b. First, the Logo, to assist in locating the week’s secret meeting place:

5c. Second, the password exchange, to secure entrance:

Chicken 1: We are Unconcerned but not Indifferent.

Chicken 2: For five dollars I will give you the Reach Around.

5d. Nota Bene: As in Eyes Wide Shut, there is no second password.

6. Porn n’ Chicken is Yale

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‘glorification of the automobile’

Check out an exceedingly creative web app (though one, admittedly, of rather dubious utility): Lost in Translation. In short, the app uses BabelFish, AltaVista’s online translation engine, to translate strings of text back and forth between English and a foreign language ten times through. As anyone who has ever used an online translation engine might guess, the results are rather interesting. Observe these sample results:

Before: I’m a little tea pot, short and stout.

After: They are a small POTENTIOMETER, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea.

or

Before: A cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.

After: Biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.

Honestly, this thing could entertain me for hours.

Postcript: As BabelFish ghost-wrote the majority of my Italian papers while at Yale, this exercise greatly clarify my grades in that class.

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a stealthful return

Frankly, I miss it. After six months hiatus from this site, spending all of my time just on work blogging (cyanpictures.com), I seemingly can’t resist the vastly more therapeutic personal blogging urge.

Still, as I certainly don’t have the surprisingly large chunks of free time blogging requires, I can’t promise that I’ll be updating this site as regularly as I have on prior blogging stints. And, to that end, I’m keeping this relaunch rather quiet – if I really do get back into the blogging rythm, I’m sure my old readers will gradually rediscover the site. If not, I’ll simply put the hiatus front page back up and pretend none of this ever happened.

Place your bets, and away we go.

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