The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Author: mongreldogs

  • Marc Cohn at the Town Hall NYC : 2011 0108

    Last night, Annie and I attended a show by Marc Cohn with Suzanna Vega at the Town Hall NYC.

    Playlist

    • Ghost Train
    • Perfect Love
    • The Calling (Charlie Christian’s Tune)
    • Dance Back From the Grave
    • 29 Ways
    • Listening to Levon
    • My Sanctuary
    • Walking in Memphis
    • Into the Mystic
    • Only Living Boy in New York

    We stayed for most of Suzanne Vega’s act.  I don’t really know Ms. Vega’s work so I didn’t capture an accurate playlist and I can’t really comment on her performance.  I was reminded that for me (and I’ll apologize to any Vega fans out there), I like her songs on occasion but couldn’t really listen to a whole album of them.

    Marc Cohn’s portion of the show was everything I’d hoped for, though.  (It was a little short for him, but that’s the result of the double-billing.)  I was a bit taken aback by the realization that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Marc Cohn, his debut.  He’s probably getting a little tired of reciting the story about Muriel at the Hollywood.  🙂  His band was excellent, including as always the amazing Shane Fontayne on guitar.  I found the playlist interesting, as there were some rarer bits (“My Santuary”, for example) and some missing favorites (such as my personal one, “Dig Down Deep”).  He played surprisingly few from what he jokingly calls his “Greatest Hits album, released first”.

    He did two from Listening Booth: 1970.  While I like the album well enough, I am less excited to hear other people’s songs than Cohn’s.  But he put a really nice spin on “Into the Mystic”.

    It’s been too long since I’d been to a Marc Cohn show — this past summer, it seemed like he would play a city only after I’d left it 🙂 — and it was a nice refresher.

  • Currently Reading: First Quater 2011

    • American Scripture by Pauline Maier
    • Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks
    • Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel

  • The iPad at two months

    I’ve had my iPad for just under two months now and thought it’s a good time to reflect on it.

    I’ll admit to hesitating before buying one.  I’m not really a fan of Apple — they do good hardware but (in my opinion) only so-so user interface work, and I cannot abide the zealots who are legion who believe that every decision by the Cupertino company is sublime, inspired, and unassailably correct.  (The single button mouse?  For twenty years? Really?)  But my school is currently investigating providing an iPad to every student, and purchased 20 for faculty to use to get acclimated, and then offered a decent deal on purchasing them.  So I thought, What the heck?

    My impressions are below the fold.

    (more…)

  • Information in Action: What is a parent?

    I was just watching a season 2 episode of Castle called “When the Bough Breaks” and it annoyed me, by going along with a societal convention that annoys me.  In it, a young Czech immigrant is murdered and, after a convoluted investigation, it’s revealed that a doctor had switched his baby for hers in the delivery room.  The doctor’s child had an untreatable always-fatal condition and he couldn’t face it, so he changed the babies.  Eventually, she figured it out, arranged to get access to his son (which was in reality the child she bore), swap the boy’s mouth for DNA, and get a lab to confirm the identity.  The doctor panicked and killed the woman before she could tell anyone.

    (more…)

  • WordPress and the iPad

    So I wonder why my iPhone can run the WordPress app and see Mongrel Dogs but the iPad (running the same app) cannot see the posts (but it -can- see the comments). Odd.

  • Sometimes the worst thing is saying, “I’m sorry”.

    So, last Saturday (Sep 11), a paper in Maine ran a story about the local celebrations at the end of Ramadan the day before.  It was a pretty innocuous piece, a typical fluff article about local culture.

    Then the Internet happened.

    (more…)

  • My summer reading

    Just to put it in one place, here’s what I’ve read and what I hope to read this summer.

    Already Read

    • Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
    • The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
      • Devices and Desires
      • Evil for Evil
      • The Escapement
    • To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
    • Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
    • Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
    • Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
    • Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
    • The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
    • Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
    • 1453 by Roger Crowley
    • The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
    • Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
    • The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
    • The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

    On the agenda

    • The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
    • The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

  • I like programmers with a sense of humor…

    dropbox is one of my favorite “cloud” utilities.  It keeps a directory synchronized across many computers, allowing remote access and automatic backup.  Whenever you set up dropbox on a new computer, all of the files need to be copied across.  As you might imagine, this can take some time.  Usually, dropbox pops up a little balloon telling you how many files are left and about how long it will take.  But if you are syncing a huge amount of data…

    … well, you get the message below.

    🙂

  • Nice metaphor

    Neil Irwin explains the current dilemma faced by the Fed by extending a metaphor promoted by guest host Christopher Hayes on Monday’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show: The Fed is in charge of watering the fields but has exhausted its usual reservoir system.  Anything new will be risky and the Fed leaders tend to be conservative about risk.

    At this point, the economy is so anemic we should probably be considering nuclear-fueled desalinization plants (whatever their fiscal equivalent would be)…

  • Review: Billy Goat Tavern, Chicago

    Billy Goat Tavern
    430 N Michigan Ave., Chicago IL

    Billed on several sites as home of “Chicago’s best cheeseburger” and made famous by a skit on early Saturday Night Live (“cheezborger! cheezborger! cheezborger!”).

    As part of our very-intermittent plan of sampling “the best of…” in Chicago eateries, Annie and I decided to stop at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern on the way back from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

    What can I say?  Meh.  The burger wasn’t bad but it was far from the best I’d ever had.  Heck, it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had in Chicago.  (That goes to the Jona’s burger we had at Jacky’s on Prairie yesterday.)  The Billy Goat burger was, well, ordinary.  It was quick and it was priced right.  But I think that all the raves reflect more on nostalgia than quality.  If I happened to be out and about near the Tribune building, and I happened to be hungry, and someone happened to suggest Billy Goat’s Tavern, I would not be opposed.  But it’s not the sort of experience that makes me want to plan a return outing; it’s not the sort of burger that demands a second sampling.  The tavern has a real working-class ambiance and the place is decorated with more Chicago history than you can imagine…  but the burger?  Just OK.