Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, April 09, 2021
Four Things
 |
| Since my daughter doodles and draws a lot, I have to watch out for random artwork whenever I declutter the living room. Here's something of hers I found a couple of days ago. |
2. Back at Christmas, our son got a magic set and would perform tricks for us from time to time. Although he sometimes can get flustered doing unfamiliar tasks, that did not happen when he messed up some of the tricks: He'd laugh it off to the degree that it was almost more fun when that happened.
Note to self: Ask him about that some time when it makes sense to do so. Maybe I can understand the fluster better or help him get past that tendency.
3. My son enjoys playing a few online games with real-life friends. One day, I overheard the following on his end, "Kill me, but don't unfriend me."
4. This season, I am coaching my son's soccer team, and I decided to let them come up with and vote for their own team name.
But Gus, won't every kid just come up with their own name and vote for it?
My solution to that possibility was as follows: Every player could EITHER (a) suggest a name, which automatically gets a vote, and vote for one other name; or (b) vote twice on other suggestions.
This worked even more smoothly than I thought it would. About equal numbers chose each option, resulting in a manageable number of suggestions and enough votes for a clear winner.
-- CAV
4 comments:
Yo, Gus, a couple of recent interesting things I've encountered. First, this is a Kickstarter campaign for a hand-lettered and fully illustrated edition of Dante's Divine Comedy just in time for the 700th anniversary of his death. Quite attractive!
Second, it's not as good as some of their other offerings, but the OC ska group Half Past Two that I told you about before has started a series of acoustic covers every Friday for a month, and the first one is enjoyable (I like the range of instruments the guitarist uses).
Finally, Guam has its own anthem, in both English and Chamorro versions (the English came first). It's interesting to see how much Spanish vocabulary there is in Chamorro (not surprising considering that they were a Spanish colony for two centuries before the Spanish-American War), but the grammar and most of the basic vocabulary remains largely Austronesian. (One curiosity resulting from Spanish colonization is that during World War II, the Japanese sought to secure the obedience of the former Spanish colonies it captured by taking strong control of the hierarchy based in Manila, which Guam and other islands were subordinate to, using the more deliquescently spined of the Japanese Catholic clergy. It didn't really work. (As one example, this is a song you might just possibly have heard because Pete Seeger sang it; Guamanians used to sing the earlier version in English as a protest against Japanese occupation, while that link is to the version celebrating the return of the US. This is a more recent version protesting other things.)
Thanks for the links and the bit of history about Guam.
Will be enjoying the links a bit later. It's Mexican night and the food has arrived...
Yo, Gus, this is a curiosity (though a well-written one) that has just been released, a setting for tenor and piano of portions of Newton's Principia, retaining the original Latin. (Next he needs to do the Optics so those poor chaps without Latin can enjoy it.) The composer, Thomas Oboe Lee, is a talented Chinese-Brazilian-American fellow who writes large amounts of music (all recorded and released on Bandcamp, many in performances by music students at his university) in one of the modern styles I like best.
For the curious: Here's Lee's bio.
Post a Comment