Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, March 12, 2021
Four Things
A few coincidences from over the years...
1. Three times, I have unexpectedly met people I knew far from the time and place I made their acquaintances:
- In my submarine days, my boat was pulling into the same port as another, which was the one a college suite-mate of mine who had entered the same program was assigned to. Our duties had us both topside during the brief time when both boats were at the pier, so we had a quick chat before parting ways again.
- In grad school, I tended bar during a lunch shift with another student for a time. A couple of years later, I was walking through London's Heathrow Airport, on my way home from a computational neuroscience conference. This student and her family practically collided with me on their way to catch a flight back to Mexico.
- In 2007, I attended OCON in Telluride, Colorado, and at one point ended up in the back of a bus with someone whose name I recognized when he introduced himself. We had a brief, cordial conversation. I met this person again over a decade later at a local gathering of Objectivists, and may have surprised him when I greeted him by name.
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| Image by James Pond, via Unsplash, license. |
3. Mrs. Van Horn, as I sometimes call her here, kept her maiden name for professional reasons when we got married. The kids use my last name. Each of us was born in a different state -- whose name starts with the same letter as his or her respective last name.
4. One evening, my wife was having a conversation with a friend who mentioned being a fan of Ayn Rand. Naturally, my wife mentioned my admiration for Rand.
The topic had been religion, so this friend suggested that I might be interested in Craig Biddle's interview with Dennis Prager. In fact, I had -- only hours before -- finished listening to it in the car while on errands.
-- CAV
5 comments:
Yo, Gus, in case you missed it, Monday was International Women's Day and Wednesday, believe it or not, was International Bagpipe Day. So, to celebrate...
As for coincidences, the most-amusing-at-the-time that I can think of was the time a friend and I went to the opera in grad school (his date cancelled and he knew I liked the composer). We saw Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites (1953), which is about a bunch of nuns put to death during the French Revolution. The final scene has them singing, voices dropping out one by one with the guillotine; it's quite effective, by far the best part of the opera. Afterwards, we gained perhaps far too much laughter out of humming and saying "thwack!" We went to an Irish pub afterwards (you've been there), and when we passed one booth, we heard someone say "thwack!" and laughter. We were seated upstairs next to the room where some of the cast in the opera were seated, and, natch, several times we heard singing and then all the other people said, "Thwack!" So, not only an effective ending, an effectively parodied one.
Snedcat,
I remember the place.
The music video was a fun change of pace, and I'll recommend it to passers-by, by lifting the description:
"Its St. Patrick's day and i have something very special for you!! Bringing a mix of Irish tunes and metal for you on the Bagpipes with 3 Female Bagpipers all the way from US, Scotland and India. We love DropKick Murphys Shipping up to Boston and we're also metal heads so we chose to mix both the awesome songs as a St. Patrick's day song !! "
If that doesn't at least get people curious, I don't know what will.
Gus
If the descrip
Snedcat,
Oh, and that also reminds me of an account, I believe in Martha Bayles's Hole in Our Soul, of Fats Waller collaborating with a bagpiper in Scotland while touring Europe. It is a shame that those recordings were lost.
Gus
Yo, Gus, ran across some interesting reading and thought I'd share them here, where they are slightly less irrelevant.
First, this is a wild ride by someone who views scientific heresy somewhat like pornography--he can't explain it, but his knee jerks when he sees it. And then he draws in Lovecraft in a way that Lovecraft himself would probably have chuckled hollowly at and described entertainingly in letters to several correspondents. (In case you wonder, the Shiva statue exercising the guy so was a gift from India, not that that would make it any better in his eyes, I'm sure.)
Second, surprisingly, an entertaining article from The Guardian capturing pop science articles on the Internet to a tee.
Finally, in more serious news, archeologists have discovered the Sarcophagus of Romulus. It looks pretty modest--the Catos would have approved, no doubt.
Hah! It looks like the Guardian accidentally published a training document.
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