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Tag Archives: Land O Lakes
Tampa Dog Trainer Brenna Fender: New Trainer and New Class at Courteous Canine, Inc.!
New Trainer and New Class at Courteous Canine, Inc.!
Did you ever see a dog do some really cool tricks and think, "Wow, I'd love my dog to be able to do that"? Do you just know that your dog could do amazing tricks if you just knew how to teach him? Courteous Canine DogSmith of Tampa can help you do just that!
Certified trick dog trainer Lisa Morrissey will be bringing her trick training expertise to Courteous Canine DogSmith of Tampa this fall with a new trick training class. This class teaches handlers how to train their dogs to do basic tricks and how to build on them to create more elaborate tricks by luring, shaping, capturing and chaining tricks together. Through the class, owners learn how to teach their dogs enough tricks to earn a Novice Trick Dog title through a sanctioning organization called "Do More with Your Dog."
What tricks could you learn to teach your dog in this class? Spin, leg weaves, figure eights, paws up, say your prayers, shake hands, wave, take a bow, jump though a hoop, soccer, wipe your feet, and more! Morrissey has extensive experience in training tricks and has won trick competitions with her rescued Border Collie, Brody, who has also appeared in television commercials and on the news. Learn more about Brody in his online resume here: http://brodythebordercollie.weebly.com/brodys-resume.html
Trick training is fun, but it also has lots of value for dogs that compete in dog sports or participate in family life. Teaching dogs tricks provides mental and physical stimulation and exercise, builds canine confidence, and improves the dog/owner bond.
For more information or to enroll in the class, contact info@CourteousCanine.com or visit our website www.CourteousCanine.com.
Courteous Canine, Inc. offers dog training, puppy training, working with aggressive dogs and rehabilitating fearful and shy dogs. In addition we offer cat training, agility, pushball, Fun Scent Games and dock jumping. Courteous Canine, Inc. is a full service dog school that offers doggie day care, pet sitting, group classes and boarding!
This entry was posted in Blog, Dog Training, Pet Therapy and tagged dog training, Group classes, Land O Lakes, Lutz, New Tampa, Pet therapy, Private training, tampa, tampa dog training, Trick training, Wesley Chapel on July 20, 2014 by Angelica.
Tampa Dog Trainer Brenna Fender: The ABCs of Tracking and Other Games
Tampa Dog Trainer Brenna Fender
The ABCs of Tracking and Other Games
American Kennel Club (AKC) is probably the most well-known organization in the United States to sanction tracking. You can read the AKC tracking regulations and get other info at http://www.akc.org/dog_shows_trials/tracking/.
Beginning tracking dogs learn on short, straight tracks with their handlers close by.
Cross-tracks are found in some tracking tests (the AKC TDX test is one). A cross-track occurs when someone other than the tracklayer walks across the track. In an AKC TDX test, cross-tracks are made by two people who walk side-by-side about four feet apart at a 90 degree angle to the track. Cross-tracks add an additional challenge for tracking dogs. There are many specific instructions on how a cross-track should be laid, and those details can be found in the AKC tracking regulations, Chapter 4, Section 4.
Dogs of any breed can enjoy tracking. Although hounds are well known for their tracking prowess, even toy breeds like Papillons have proven themselves to be talented trackers! Some organizations, like the American Mixed Breed Obedience Registration (AMBOR), allow mixed breeds to title in tracking.
Equipment needed for tracking includes a non-restrictive harness, long tracking leash, flags, gloves, and other articles. You will also need a large, grassy area free of obstacles. Other items may be used in training, like treats or toys.
Flags are placed when a track is mapped in order to tell the tracklayer where to walk. In an AKC Tracking dog test, all but the first two flags are removed before the dog begins to track. In Tracking Dog Excellent tests, only the first flag and flags indicating cross tracks remain, and in Variable Surface Tracking tests, only the start flags remain. Flags help orient the handler and give him or her a visual clue about wind direction and strength.
Gloves are frequently used as the articles found at the end of an AKC Tracking Dog test track. Wallets are also allowed.
Handlers must stay 20 feet behind their dogs in AKC tracking tests, except in Variable Surface Tracking tests, in which the required distance is 10 feet. Leashes used for tracking should be 20-40 feet long.
Items dropped along a track by the tracklayer are called "articles." These smell like the tracklayer and are deliberately placed for dogs to indicate as part of a tracking competition.
Just straight lines? No way! Tracking tests incorporate a minimum of three turns, which can be tricky for dogs to follow.
Know the rules before you enter. Different sanctioning organizations may use slightly different rules, so be sure you know exactly what you are supposed to be doing at any competition.
Levels of difficulty and titling in AKC tracking include Tracking Dog (TD), Tracking Dog Excellent (TDX), and Variable Surface Tracking (VST). Dogs that have earned a TD may go on to the TDX or VST levels next. Dogs that earn all three titles become Champion Trackers and earn the letters CT before their AKC registered name. There are more tracking titles being added as the sport continues to develop.
Maintain your own fitness (and your dog's) because tracking is an outdoor sport performed over varied terrain over long distances. An AKC Tracking Dog test is a minimum of 440 yards long, and the TDX and VST tests are longer, up to 1000 yards for the TDX.
Novice tracking dogs (with no previous tracking titles with the AKC) must obtain a certification before entering an AKC test. According to the AKC tracking regulations, "A written statement must accompany each entry for a licensed or member tracking test for any dog that has not previously passed an AKC TD test." This letter must be signed by a person approved to judge tracking tests, and it must certify that the dog has successfully completed a certification test, which should be equivalent in complexity and conditions to a TD test. Other tracking organizations may also require certification.
Other organizations in the United States that sanction tracking include the Australian Shepherd Club of America (asca.org/programs/tracking), the America Mixed Breed Obedience Registration (ambor.us), and Schutzhund clubs like the United Schutzhund Clubs of America for the German Shepherd Dog (germanshepherddog.com).
Praise and petting are allowed in an AKC tracking test when a dog finds the articles on a track. Competitors can't use the articles to play with their dogs, though.
Quenching a dog's thirst while tracking is fine in an AKC tracking test, but use of anything other than water or ice is prohibited. Be sure to bring water when you are training for tracking since you don't want your dog to overheat, or have his ability to scent the track diminished because of a dry nose and mouth.
Reinforcement in the form of small treats is often left along the track during the early stages of training. In fact, some training techniques involve placing food in every footstep! Other training methods leave treats in various spots, called food drops.
Speed is not necessary for tracking. There is no maximum test time in AKC tracking tests. But if a dog is not working, he may fail the test, so don't expect unlimited time for a dog that is fooling around.
The sport of tracking involves a dog following a human scent over a track laid previously by a person (the "tracklayer") who walks in a pattern designed by a judge. Tracking is not the same as man trailing or search and rescue, where dogs are encouraged to scent both ground and air to find a human who is missing, hiding, injured, or deceased.
Unfortunately, scavengers and insects can be attracted to treats left in food drops. Be very careful using food on the track in places where fire ants may infest your treats. A tracking dog that gets a mouthful of ants may be put off of the sport for a long time.
Variable Surface Tracking tests are different than TD and TDX tests, which generally take place in open fields. VST tests show a dog's ability to work on a "non-vegetated surface." According to the AKC tracking regulations, "The track will have a minimum of three (3) different surfaces, which will include vegetation and two (2) areas devoid of vegetation, such as concrete, asphalt, gravel, sand, hard pan, or mulch. The areas devoid of vegetation will comprise at least one-third (1/3) but not more than two-thirds (2/3) of the total length of the track."
Wind plays an important role in tracking. The scent will drift off the track so dogs may track downwind. When training, it can be useful to know where the wind is blowing the scent so that you can be aware when your dog appears to be off track, but may be following the scent after all.
X is added to the letters TD when an AKC competitor earns the Tracking Dog Excellent title. The TDX test is longer, with more turns, and four different articles to be found on the track. It also has cross-tracks and various obstacles like roads, ditches, and woods.
You want to try tracking? To find an AKC training club in your area, go to the AKC website's club search (akc.org/clubs/search/index.cfm), but be aware that not all of these clubs offer tracking classes or training sessions. To find an ASCA-affiliated club in your area, visit asca.org/ascainformation/affiliateclubs. For Schutzhund, one option is to visit dvgamerica.com and click on "Clubs and Officers by State."
Zebras on the track? No problem! The appearance of animals or vehicles in the tracking area or crossing a track is considered to be part of the testing environment and the dog will continue to work the track.
Tracking has practical applications for those who want to help others you could learn how to teach your dog to track lost animals, and of course search and rescue focusing on finding people is also a form of tracking.
A fun version of teaching your dog to find something is Fun Scent Games which centers around your dog finding treats which are hidden in harder and harder to find places. This game starts with boxes but builds up to a dog searching an entire room or area. Most dogs learn this game very quickly and it can be a great way for with issues to learn to focus and to tune out the environment. Come join the fun and sign up for a Fun Scent Games class group or private instruction today by visiting www.CourteousCanine.com.
A version of this article first appeared in DogSport Magazine and is shared with permission.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Behavior modification, Courteous, dog behavior, Dog sports, dog training, Fun Scent Games, Group classes, Land O Lakes, Lutz, My dog has issues, New Tampa, Private training, tampa, tampa dog training, Wesley Chapel on June 11, 2014 by Angelica.


Current graduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and those applying to graduate school here are welcome to apply to be a Teaching Associate (TO) with the Writing Program. We have a long-standing relationship with the UMass Amherst English Department, and most of our Teaching Asoociates are MFA and MA/PhD students in English. We do occasionally offer teaching positions to MA/PhD students in other graduate programs at UMass Amherst.
A full TOship in the Writing Program typically involves teaching three (3) sections of Basic or College Writing over the course of the academic year (usually 2 sections one semester and 1 section the other); each section has no more than fifteen students. TOs participate in extensive formal professional development before and during their first year, then into their second year of employment with us.
Applicants who are accepted into their graduate program and who are deemed acceptable by the Writing Program are then interviewed, either in person or by telephone.
experience — teaching, tutoring, and/or experience working with diverse populations, including L2 writers and students with disabilities.
Applications for Writing Program TOships are due by December 15 of each year for the following academic year's employment.
Prospective TOs not currently enrolled can download the application in Word format or in PDF format, and upload the completed application to the "Add Materials" tab in the Graduate Admissions Portal. Applicants must submit this application alongside their application to Graduate School.
Graduate students currently enrolled at UMass may download the application in Word format or in PDF format, and email their completed application to Heidi Terault.


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Q: NLog filter by LogLevel as MappedDiagnosticsContext Based on the answer here: How Thread-Safe is NLog? I have created a Logger and added two MappedDiagnosticsContext to NLog:
NLog.MappedDiagnosticsContext.Set("Module", string.Format("{0}.{1}", module.ComputerName, module.ModuleType));
NLog.MappedDiagnosticsContext.Set("ModuleCoreLogLevel", string.Format("LogLevel.{0}", module.CoreLogLevel));

I can successfully use the "Module" Context in the NLog config (programmatically) to generate the file name the logger should log to:
${{when:when=length('${{mdc:Module}}') == 0:inner=UNSPECIFIED}}${{when:when=length('${{mdc:Module}}') > 0:inner=${{mdc:Module}}}}.txt

This logs e.g. all messages with a "Module" context of "Test" to a filename called Module.txt
I now want to be able to set the LogLevel for the different Modules using this way, and only Log messages which correspond to this LogLevel (or higher)
I am trying to do this through filters, this means, on the LoggingRule I am trying to add a filter:
rule92.Filters.Add(new ConditionBasedFilter { Condition = "(level < '${mdc:ModuleCoreLogLevel}')", Action = FilterResult.IgnoreFinal });

This however does not seem to filter messages.
If I have for example a message which is emitted using Logger.Trace(), and the LogLevel on "ModuleCoreLogLevel" is set to LogLevel.Debug, I can still the Message in the resulting LogFile.

A: I solved this by doing this for each level:
rule92.Filters.Add(new ConditionBasedFilter { Condition = "(equals('${mdc:ModuleCoreLogLevel}', 'LogLevel.Trace') and level < LogLevel.Trace)", Action = FilterResult.IgnoreFinal });

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Vreal Is Amazing For Watching VR Game Recordings And Live Streams!
You Can Now Use The Razer Hydra Motion Controllers For SteamVR!
Oculus Rift or HTC Vive – Which VR Headset is right for you?
Tracked Objects In VR Are A Game Changer – Playing Adventure Golf VR With A Real Putter Is Amazing!
Reficul Is A New Open World VR Survival Horror Game Launching Into Early Access Today And It Is Terrifying!
Duck Season VR Is A Nostalgic Trip Back To The 80's And It's Great!
Copyright © 2019 VRSpies. All rights reserved.


The law firm of Philip DeBerard, Injury Attorney, assists people seriously injured in accidents in Royal Palm Beach, South Florida and throughout the Treasure Coast. You can rely on Philip DeBerard to provide the legal guidance you need to navigate this difficult period. Call 1-800-299-8878 to speak with a caring personal injury and accident attorney or one of our qualified staff, or fill out our online contact form.
Royal Palm Beach, population 30,598 (US Census Bureau 2009 estimate), is a village in Palm Beach County, Florida. A family-oriented community, families make up 77% of the households in Royal Palm Beach. Despite the village's name, Royal Palm Beach is land-locked and located 15 miles inland. Open space is extremely important to residents of Royal Palm Beach. The village set a standard of 10 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. Royal Palm Beach's entire 10-square-mile area is designated as a bird sanctuary. Aerospace and agriculture are the region's top employers. Major regional employers in nearby West Palm Beach and Belle Glade include Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar Corp., Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and A. Duda & Sons Growers.
Most jury trials in Florida take place at the circuit court. The circuit courts are courts of general jurisdiction, and most criminal and civil cases originate at this level. Those courts hear felonies, family law matters, civil cases (over $15,000), probate / guardianship / mental health, juvenile dependency and delinquency, and appeals from county court. Royal Palm Beach belongs to Florida's 15th Judicial Circuit. The Palm Beach County Courthouse is located at 205 N Dixie Hwy # 1. West Palm Beach, FL 33401-4599, (561) 355-2040. Trial court decisions that are appealed are reviewed by three-judge panels of the district courts of appeal before reaching the state Supreme Court. Florida is divided into five appellate court districts. Palm Beach County, where Royal Palm Beach is located, is in the Fourth District Court of Appeal. That court is headquartered at 1525 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd., West Palm Beach, FL 33401, (561) 242-2000.


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Musical Team
Join The Choir
Friends of The Choir
Book The Choir
About The Choir
Support The Choir
York Philharmonic Male Voice Choir
Welcome to York Philharmonic Male Voice Choir
The 'Phil', as the choir is affectionately known, plays a significant part in the rich musical fabric of York. The choir loves to sing; and the passion, commitment, and continuity that has sustained since it was founded in 1925; is very much in evidence today. The story of the choir has been beautifully documented in the book Sound Fellows by choir member Colin Hockridge currently available from Amazon, click here to purchase.
Latest news: Colin has produced a supplemental update for his book which you can download here . This update includes previously undiscovered material and brings us up to date with the history of the choir as we progress through our tenth decade. Speak to Colin if you wish to purchase a printed version.
News: Colin has added to our archive material by writing an article on the choir's involvement in a 1973 competition to write the Australian national anthem. We were recently joined by the Australian Welsh Male Choir who enjoyed hearing the tale and were delighted to be treated to the original recording. click here to read the exclusive article.
Whether your taste is for contemporary or classical, west-end or opera, folk song or spiritual, the wide repertoire will offer entertainment and pleasure. The choir has won competitions and audience acclaim in European venues and in the UK, from the Royal Albert Hall to Village Halls, from Castle Howard to the Castle Museum and from York Minster to a Dales Chapel. If you would like to hear some of our music click the 'listen' tab on the bottom left of this page or click here to purchase a copy of our best known CD, Let All Men Sing.
The strength and success of the choir goes beyond the concert platform, and is heightened by the depth of friendship that exists between members, families, friends and sponsors.
We hope you enjoy your visit to our website and we look forward to seeing you soon at one of our many concerts or welcoming you to join us as either a singing member or as a friend.
NEWS Monday, 07 January 2019 It is with great sadness that we report the death of our long term accompanist and Honorary Life Member Mrs. Eileen Grey. Eileen said 'yes' to an urgent request to play for the choir at 'Carols in Kirkgate' in 1991 – a single booking which lasted for 27 years. She ended her time with us as she began, playing at all the performances of 'Christmas Traditions 2018'. She gave her last performance on the 8th December and announced her retirement on grounds of ill health. She passed away peacefully on the 31st December. Eileen first performed with the choir as a guest singer in 1968, and, in 1975, she was a founder member of the Kirkgate Ladies choir, a group which still joins us each year to enhance our Christmas shows. Eileen's contribution to the success and life of the choir has been so significant that she is the only person, other than musical directors, to merit her own chapter in the published history of the choir.
Listen to the choir...
Follow @Yorkphilchoir
Copyright © 2019 Registered Charity Number: 529713. All Rights Reserved.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Q: I cannot run Kafka through Idea I just downloaded the source code of Kafka from github. And I gradle it successfully.
But when I try to run it, it shows that " SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: Defaulting to no-operation (NOP) logger implementation
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.
Process finished with exit code 1 "
I think I've already make the right property, and built the right directory tree.  And I guess the slf4j is just a warning which cannot prevent running this program.
And the property, directory trees and log showed like this.
It's very grateful to help me overcome it.
log
my property
the directory tree

A: slf4j, which ships with Kafka, is an abstraction layer over logging mechanisms.
Since it doesn't come with a default logging mechanism, it expects you to provide one.
If you add a logging library that supports slf4j (e.g. Logback, Log4j) to your classpath, the warning will disappear and you'll start seeing logs.
That said, I don't think that's what is keeping you from running Kafka. It will, however help you find the actual problem.


Do you want a vacuum cleaner that is totally without compromise, be it for wet or dry use? That's exactly what you get with Charles. One minute Charles will be up to his neck in dust and dirt, keeping everything spick and span, and then suddenly the call arrives and he's expected to unblock the sink or dry the floor. Well, that's no problem with Charles. He has the Numatic full Twinflo' motor and performance to give you exactly what you need.


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Phil O'Keefe: In The Studio Trenches
HC Signature Forums
Asking opinions of the engineers here: why are older recordings so often so much better?
By Vito Corleone, August 24, 2019 in Phil O'Keefe: In The Studio Trenches
Vito Corleone 13,571
no longer Guido
I don't want to make this a digital vs analog debate—although maybe that's part of it—and I definitely don't want to discuss modern "brickwalled" recordings and masterings—
but I'm so often amazed by how much better recorded older stuff seems to be.
Right now I'm listening to this 1959 recording of Violin Concertos by Jascha Heifetz recorded and released by RCA's "Living Stereo" series. These were recorded on 3 track tape with just 3 mics placed in the studio. The liner notes say it was probably done using Neumann U47 and M49/50 microphones.
This particular release is 3-track with the original 3 tracks spread across the 3 front speakers.
It sounds just amazing. Like I'm in the studio. So much warmth and depth and presence. How did they do it so much better back then with older gear?
Phil O'Keefe 10,966
Sometimes less is more, but in general better material, better arrangements, better performances = better recordings.
Sounds to me like you're hearing a Decca tree recording... nice, huh? Practically puts you right there in the middle of the orchestra...
2 minutes ago, Phil O'Keefe said:
It doesn't mention if they used one or not, but it sounds great. Yes. Sounds like I'm right in the middle of it.
Yes. The performances and arrangements for sure. I do like orchestral performances from this period. More "pastoral"? Can't think of a better word. I hate using words to try and describe music.
But the recording is superb. The room, too, will have a lot to do with it of course. But the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium? Who knew! Lol.
lerber3 558
Modern recordings have been processed so they fill all the frequencies and compressed so they are at nearly maximum volume at all times. Further, they have been quantized or played against a click so a lot of the feel has been eliminated. Older recordings had holes, fluid tempos, and dynamics that draw you into the musical space. Just MHO.
Edited August 24, 2019 by lerber3
1 minute ago, lerber3 said:
Yeah, I'm not really talking about modern compression techniques. That's kind of obvious why recordings done that way sound bad.
I'm just blown away by how they got such a great sound out of a full orchestra with only 3 mics.
I do think it must be a "less is more" thing. I think that even by the 70s, a lot of these recordings were starting to lose that "magic". Too much processing gear to play with? Too many tracks and various micing techniques?
Three Mics and the Truth.
SteinbergerHack 6,905
12 minutes ago, Vito Corleone said:
Well, we get that great sound with only two ears.
Yeah, back then, they had to put their effort into the basics - performance, mic placement, gain structure, etc. In order to have access to the best talent and equipment, you had to have proven your abilities.
Zig al-din 2,655
You don't want it to be about digital vs analog but unfortunately, I think that is a lot of it. Human feeling isn't digital for one thing. And as Phil said, better material, musicianship, performance, etc.
One debate I've been having lately on this topic with musicians has settled on the issue of familiarity. This debate had more to do with drum loops and preprogrammed beats vs real drummers, but I think the issue might be the same. For people who came up listening to X, X sounds better. It's not a rational response - IOW, there's no way to persuade anyone that it sounds better but it just does. For a lot of (younger) people, electronic beats do just sound better than "sloppy" human drummers.
PS I love those JHeifetz recordings!
Edited August 24, 2019 by Zig al-din
Maybe because they had a full orchestra with actual musicians playing together at the same time in an actual acoustic space... ditto for the early rock recordings... now music is laid down a track at a time with very little interplay. IMO, the music was just better.
In the day, we took it for granted... now we look back in awe.
7 minutes ago, SteinbergerHack said:
Yeah, but our ears have our brain to process what we hear. A phenomenal listening apparatus we are born with!
10 minutes ago, Zig al-din said:
Oh that's true. We like what we are conditioned (grew up with) to like. That's not necessarily a bad thing. That's just human nature.
2 minutes ago, Vito Corleone said:
Yes and it's because:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta19.htm
1 minute ago, Zig al-din said:
I'll need to pour another glass of wine if I'm going to read THAT tonight!
Edited August 24, 2019 by Vito Corleone
Haha I think Pythagoras might have been on to something...
Yes and the curious thing now is that people are being conditioned to like music that is essentially "robotic" for lack of a better word. I wonder if it's part of this evolutionary step towards cyborg or hybrid life forms.
Red Ant 9,159
1 hour ago, Zig al-din said:
My "music sensei" (guitar/theory teacher, mentor, close friend) insists that everything changed - and not for the better - with the introduction of the click track. The musicians may still be human, but they're locked into a temporal straightjacket, if you will... it robs the music of its breath, which is essential for imparting human feeling. Im not 100% sold on his theory, but it does make a great deal of sense.
Having made hundreds if not thousands of recordings, both with click and without, i can certainly attest that the results are different, and not just in how tight the performance is.
Its always easier for an engineer if the musicians use a click, but whenever I record musicians who have "good time" I will usually lobby for them to forgo the click and play "free". And I never use a click on any of my own group recordings.
2 hours ago, Vito Corleone said:
Three mics, three tracks, and the types of mics mentioned lead me to believe it was almost certainly a Decca tree. Same with your description of the positioning and sound field.
1959 would have been right after the Santa Monica Civic opened. And it's really not a bad sounding venue at all IMO. Lots of live albums have been recorded there.
Donny G 576
High Steppin'
4 hours ago, Phil O'Keefe said:
roughtrade 1,044
Digital is little packages, I think that sometimes the packages miss tiny pieces. Analog is linear, it recorded everything warts and all.
Sometimes the tiny pieces tie everything together.
That's why live music is better than recorded music nowadays.
1001gear 759
10 hours ago, SteinbergerHack said:
Gotta bring up the other part of the equation. Modern convenience leaves craftsmanship wide open for option hacks to proliferate.
moogerfooger 4,234
10 hours ago, Vito Corleone said:
Engineers have so many choices in post theses days that they spend less time on the input side and employ the fix it in the mix method. Thinking you can make a silk purse out of a sows ear leads to more sows ears and less silk purses
4 minutes ago, 1001gear said:
Absolutely true. Today, some bedroom hacker can buy $500 worth of gear, cut 300 takes of his one and only song, then blast it out to the world. That would have cost an immense amount back in the 70s or 80s, and simply wasn't possible prior, due to the very limited availability of equipment and tape.
Personal anecdote - when I was playing full-time and decided that I wanted to do some studio work, I took a simple.direct approach. I chose the local studio where I wanted to work, called them up and booked an hour to record a personal demo. About 15 minutes into the session, the engineer "took a 5 minute break", and went to get the studio owner to come listen. That hour of purchased studio time (and tape) ended up getting me a LOT of work over the next couple of years, because it showed the studio owner one simple thing - I cut every track in one take. You can't make that point with a basement recording on the internet...and maybe it doesn't really matter anymore anyway......
2 hours ago, SteinbergerHack said:
One of the reasons for that (and this connects with your first point), is the sheer amount of music that's being released these days.
There used to be so-called gate-keepers, producers, executives, etc, who limited quantity, influenced taste, and decided what got out there and what didn't. The downside of the current situation, as has been mentioned many times, is that if there were a Stevie Wonder equivalent now, no one would hear him because he'd just be a drop in the grey of the massive musical "content" that's out there. However, as some have also pointed out, it's much easier now for a niche artist or a someone working in an obscure/weird genre to find their audience (and easier for the audience to find them.)
What this says about quality, I can't say for sure; it's probably the case that the same % of what's out there is still garbage (Sturgeon's Law), it's just that there's a lot more of it.
ohmygod 134
I'm not a rookie
12 hours ago, Red Ant said:
Yes I just started practicing without a metronome 16th notes at 150bpm. It's much easier to feel the pattern of notes without the click. Just two bars with one beat of 16th notes.
35 minutes ago, ohmygod said:
I think its absolutely essential - vital, even - to practice with a click. So that you don't need one to record
And in my experience, if you want to "learn time" its equally essential to keep the click on 2 and 4, only.


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All posts tagged Molly Bloom
The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967)
'A melancholy duet about the schism between body and soul' (Milan Kundera in the Introduction)
Czech history – a postwar snapshot
Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. When he was ten the Nazis annexed his country and imposed Nazi rule, when he was 16 the Russians liberated his homeland, and when he was 19 the Russians supported the February 1948 coup which brought a communist government to power. Initially, many of the brightest and best in the country celebrated a new era which promised to deliver a new world of freedom and justice and equality for all. Soon enough the government showed its Stalinist colours, rounding up not only conservatives and capitalists, big landowners, bankers and so on, but also socialist and liberal writers and critics. Hundreds of thousands were sacked from their jobs, around a hundred thousand were imprisoned and tens of thousands executed as spies and traitors and saboteurs, including friends and colleagues of Kundera's.
After putting up with nearly twenty years of oppressive rule, in late 1967 and early 1968 rising protests against the regime was met by a new, more liberal generation of party leaders, who set about loosening communist policy, reining back the dreaded secret police, and allowing a flowering of expression and political criticism in the media, newspapers, radio and TV, and among artists and writers. Which all became known as 'the Prague Spring'.
The growing political, economic and cultural liberalism of Czechoslovakia led to fears that it might be about to leave the Soviet-backed security and economic alliances, and that its example might undermine Russia's grip on all Eastern Europe. So in August 1968 some 500,000 Russian and other eastern bloc soldiers rode tanks into Czechoslovakia, occupying all the cities and strategic points, overthrowing the liberal government and reinstalling a hardline Stalinist regime. Over a hundred thousand Czechs fled the country, and another massive wave of repression and punishment threw an entire generation of professionals out of their white collar jobs, forcing them into menial labouring jobs.
Kundera, just turning 40, was among this group. Back in 1948 he had been an enthusiastic communist, joining the party when still at school. He welcomed the 1948 coup and the arrival of a new world, and went, as a student, to study film at university. But his outspoken wit and anti-establishment stance got him in trouble with the authorities and he was expelled from the party in 1950. After a hiatus in his studies, he was, however, readmitted to the university, completed his studies in 1952, and was appointed a lecturer in world literature. In 1956 he was readmitted to the Communist Party. For the next ten years he was a dutiful communist and academic.
Kundera played a peripheral role in the Prague Spring, looking on as his students went on strike, organised meetings and rallies, devised slogans which they printed on posters and banners and carried on marches and spray-painted on the walls of the capital. But even after the Russians invaded, he continued to defend the Communist Party, engaging in polemical debate with more thoroughly anti-communist intellectuals, insisting that the communist regime was capable of reform in a humanist direction.
Only in the early 1970s, as it became clear that the new hardline government was imposing an inflexibly authoritarian regime, did Kundera finally abandon his dreams that communism could be reformed. In 1975 he moved to France, taking a teaching job at Rennes, then moving on to Paris. He was stripped of his Czech citizenship in 1979, and legally became a French citizen in 1981.
By the 1980s, when his novels began to become widely popular in the West, Kundera had, in other words, been on a long gruelling journey of personal and intellectual disillusionment.
Themes in Milan Kundera's fiction
This all explains why, although the main action of the novels is often set contemporaneously – in the later 1960s and 1970s just before they were published – their root is in that 1948 coup. Again and again, in all of his books, he returns like a soldier revisiting the scene of his post-traumatic stress disorder, to the primal trauma of the revolution (in The Farewell Party, Jakub – a key character – describes it as the obsession of someone who's been in a bad car crash to endlessly relive the trauma). Again and again he examines all its aspects, reliving the jubilation and sense of emotional awakening he and his generation experienced, and then – in the rest of the text – generally delineating the long, grim consequences the advent of communist rule had on so many people and so many aspects of life.
So Kundera's work is characterised by his obsessive return, again and again, to relive aspects of the coup and re-examine what it meant, recasting the events as fable, fairy tale, allegory, in a host of genres and forms, in order to try and work through what was for him, the primal imaginative and psychological trauma.
Cynicism and the absurd
There's no-one as cynical as a disillusioned revolutionary. All Kundera's books bespeak an immensely jaded cynic, with a bitter view of human nature. What makes them interesting is he keeps his corrosive cynicism under control, and deploys it strategically to dramatise and emphasise his plots. What I mean is – he will often create one particular character who is extremely jaded and disillusioned and cynical, and let that character give full vent to (what we can guess is) Kundera's own bitterness, against optimism, against utopian politics, against idealistic revolutions, against unimaginative party apparatchiks who carry out orders without reflecting. BUT – these characters are often set in juxtaposition with other characters, often with sunnier, happier outlooks, and often the cynical characters are proved to be completely wrong.
So he creates dramatic structures in which his bitter cynicism can be forcefully expressed but is always careful to balance and control them with other points of view. Eventually, as we shall see in our analysis of The Joke, what emerges is less cynicism as such, than an all-consuming sense of the utter absurdity of human existence: that nobody's intentions come out as they mean them to, that all human perceptions, understandings, analyses and goals are absurd.
And this doesn't necessarily mean bleakly, nihilistically absurd. it can mean ridiculously, comically, even light-heartedly absurd.
The personal and the private
If the communist government could nationalise entire industries, dispossess the rich of their belongings, collectivise the farms, determine what jobs each citizen is allotted, take over control of all newspapers, radio and TV, and monitor everything every citizen published or wrote, even in private letters and diaries – the one area of life it could not easily control was the citizens' love lives, in particular their sex lives.
Sex plays a huge role in Kundera's fiction, on one reading it is arguably his central theme, and some of his descriptions of sexual encounters between characters are immensely powerful and erotic. And, if you are a card-carrying feminist, I can see how the unrelenting emphasis on the predatory sexual stance of almost all the male characters can become claustrophobic and, eventually, oppressive. I am a heterosexual man, and I have gotten a little tired of the way all of the male characters are obsessed with sex, and with very straightforward, vanilla, penetrative sex, at that. Many elements of his obsession with male predatory sexuality now seem very, very outdated to modern readers.
Nonetheless, it's clear that sex performs two other functions in Kundera's fiction.
1. Given that it was impossible for citizens of Czechoslovakia to write or publish what they felt, to write poems or plays or novels or stories that wouldn't be censored by the authorities, let alone make films or TV documentaries or radio programmes, or even put on festivals or meetings which didn't go unmonitored by the authorities – given that almost all forms of expression were banned or heavily censored and controlled – then sex – the sexual encounter between a man and a woman (that's all it ever is in Kundera's traditional mindset) can be a theatre of the intellect and the emotions, a place where all kinds of thoughts and moods and opinions which are utterly banned in the public sphere can be expressed in the private realm of the bedroom.
2. But the most dominant idea which emerges is Kundera's fundamental concept of absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition. When I mentioned to a friend that I was rereading all of Kundera, she said, 'Oh my God, he's so sexy, so erotic!' But the odd thing is that, studying the texts, you realise that many of the sexual couplings which take place are actually quite repugnant. In several of the novels men force themselves on women who are very very reluctant to have sex. There is at least one instance of brutal gang rape. And most of the other couplings take place between people who have ludicrously misjudged each other's intentions. A good example of which lies at the heart of The Joke.
The Joke – structure and style
The Joke was Kundera's first novel. The end page states that it was finished in December 1965, when Kundera was thirty-six i.e. it is not a young man's book, it has been long meditated on. In fact, towards the end, the protagonists' age itself becomes a topic of reflection, see below.
The Joke is divided into seven parts which are listed on the Contents page.
Ludvik (10 pages)
Helena (10 pages)
Jaroslav (34 pages)
Kostka (30 pages)
Ludvik, Jaroslav, Helena (58 pages)
Which tells us straightaway the names and genders of the main protagonists, and that the main figure is going to be Ludvik, who has more appearances, and more pages devoted to him (134 of the book's 267 pages), than all the others put together.
Kundera's prose style is flat and factual…
The sections are named like this because each one presents a narration in that character's voice, and Kundera makes an obvious effort to distinguish their voices. Ludvik, for example, is self-centred and factual in his approach. Helena's style is immediately different, in that her sentences are made up of numerous clauses which all run into each other. Maybe this is an attempt to capture a more 'feminine' stream of consciousness, and noticing this reminds me of James Joyce and Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. However, Kundera is a very different writer from Joyce.
Joyce had a miraculous, Shakespearian grasp of the infinite range of the English language and, in Ulysses, made it explode into a multi-coloured firework display, melting and reforming words and phrases, and mixing them with other languages to create an extraordinary verbal extravaganza.
Kundera is the opposite. His language is pretty flat and boring. Maybe this is the fault of the translation, but I don't think so. No, the interest of the book doesn't stem from the words but from:
a complex, farcical and thought-provoking plot
from the complex interplay of the handful of characters caught up in the plot
but most of all from what the characters think about the events they're caught up in and activate; the characters are endlessly reflecting, thinking, pondering and analysing their motives
…because Kundera is not a descriptive writer but an intellectual, analytical author
This is what it means to say that Kundera is an intellectual writer. We barely find out what any of his characters look like (having read to the end of the book I have no clue what Ludvik actually looks like, what colour his hair or eyes are, whether he's tall or short or fat or thin).
1. Analysis Instead we are incessantly fed with what the characters are thinking. And their thinking almost always takes the form of analysis. Even when they're thinking about their love lives – and they spend most of their time thinking about their love lives – they are thinking about them in an analytical way. When they think about other people, even their supposed beloveds, the people they're married to or in love with or planning to have an affair with – they tend to think of them as categories of person, as types which fit into certain typologies, and must be managed and handled as types.
Thus Ludvik thinks of Zemanek as The Betrayer and of Zemanek's wife, Helena, as Instrument For Revenge, and remembers Lucie as being Ideal Pure Femininity.
2. Deconstruction But the book is intellectual in another way, which is that the entire story has been dismantled and analysed out into separate elements. The text itself is made up of parts like a jigsaw puzzle. As the index indicates, Kundera conceived a story – then he dismantled it into a set of disparate narratives given from the points of view of four main characters. Like a forensic scientist investigating a complex chunk of organic matter by submitting it to a set of procedures designed to identify the basic elements which make it up.
3. Multiple points of view So, although – as per point 1 – all the characters tend to think of each other as types or categories – the use of multiple points of view almost always undermines their analyses, showing just how wrong they are. Thus it's only about page 100, when we first hear from a completely different character outside Ludvik's worldview, Jaroslav, that we see things from a completely different perspective and learn that Ludvik is not the master narrator of events but is himself also a type – the Cynic, the Man Who Abandoned Folk Music For The Revolution – and a type very much caught up in events, misunderstanding and misreading other people.
In some ways the heart of the book only comes with the thirty pages devoted to the character named Kostka, where we see the world through his eyes and gain a completely different perspective on Ludvik's history, and on his pivotal relationship with Lucie, showing the Ludvik was completely wrong in everything he thought about his one true love.
not only do the characters obsessively analyse their own motives and other peoples'
and the narrator analyses his characters' analyses
but also, by juxtaposing characters' analyses against each other, Kundera performs a further level of analysis, a kind of meta-analysis of the analyses
See what I mean by a very intellectual author.
The Joke – the plot
The book is set around the time it was published, the mid 1960s. But to understand it you have to realise that its roots lie 15 years earlier, at the period of the 1948 Communist coup and its immediate aftermath.
The fateful postcard
To be precise, the summer of 1951. Ludvik Jahn is one of the generation of young students caught up in the idealism generated by the Communist Party's seizure of power and he is still a staunch communist, but also an intellectual and wit and joker. In his circle of friends is a particularly po-faced and unimaginative woman student named Marketa. She never gets any of their gags or references, which tempts her friends to spin all kinds of jokes on her, for example the time they were all down the pub and Ludvik invents the notion that the hills of Bohemia are home to a shy and elusive race of trolls – which Marketa accepts with open mouth and wide eyes.
So when she goes away to summer labour duty, helping with the harvest, as all young zealous communists do, and when she sends him a series of letters each more po-faced and staunchly patriotic and communist than the last, Ludvik decides to pull her leg by scribbling a quick postcard with the sentiments most guaranteed to shock her, namely:
Optimism is the opium of mankind!
A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity!
Long live Trotsky!
The card is intercepted on the way to Marketa's camp. The authorities call her in for questioning. Then Ludvik is called into a kangaroo court where he slowly realises that his quick jeu d'esprit is being interpreted in the most sinister way possible. How long have you been an agent for enemy powers, his interrogators ask him. With horror he realises that merely making a joke, of any kind, is – to these people – an insult to the 100% earnest, patriotic, communist fervour required from the entire citizenry.
Things reach a peak of horror when he is hauled before a roomful of his peers at the university, fellow students and communist party members. Ludvik is briefly heartened when he learns the chair is to be his good friend and fellow wit Zemanek. However, Zemanek rises and gives a thrilling and brilliantly damning indictment of Ludvik, kicking off by quoting the prison diaries of a young communist, Julius Fucik, who was arrested, tortured and executed by the Nazis but who died knowing he gave his life for a noble cause. Having let that sink in among the tearful audience, Zemanek then comes to another text, and reads out Ludvik's postcard. At which point Ludvik realises he is lost. When it comes to a vote, 100% of the arms of his friends and colleagues stretch up to expel him from the university and from the communist party.
In those heady revolutionary times, Kundera explains, it was thought that human beings had a fixed inner essence and that that essence was either for the Party and with the Party, or it was against. Black or white. And a single slip, a chance remark, in a conversation or article or meeting – might suddenly reveal the terrible fact that you were not for the Party. And just that one slip revealed to all the party zealots, to the police and to all society who you really were. Just one slip of the tongue, and you were categorised and condemned for life as an enemy of the people. You would be fired from your job, unable to get a new one, all decent respectable people would shun you.
(Reading Kundera's bitter and extended explanation of how the young, clever, intellectual communist zealots of this day took a fierce delight in policing everyone's speech and writing, and pouncing on the slightest example of unrevolutionary sentiments… the reader can't help reflecting that this is exactly the fierce, young university student zeal which drives modern political correctness.)
In the mining camp
It was only the fact that Ludvik was a student that had exempted him from military service. Now he's kicked out of university, he is immediately conscripted straight into the army and, because of his misdemeanour, into a punishment battalion which works in the coal mines.
There follows a long passage describing the grim lives of the coal miners and the barbed-wire-encircled barracks they live in. Slowly Ludvik gets to know the other criminals and 'social deviants'. I like prison camp memoirs (the twentieth century was, after all, very rich in them; the prison camp memoir is a major twentieth century genre) and I found this extended section powerful and moving. For the first time Ludvik is forced to pay attention to the lives and fates of people outside himself, and to sympathise with their plights.
Once a month they all get a pass to go into town on a Saturday night and spend the money they've earned in the mine, getting pissed and shagging the local prostitutes. Ludvik describes this in some detail.
But then he also describes meeting a shy girl who is different from the rest and who he conceives something resembling true love for, a young woman named Lucie Sebetka. He can only meet her once a month, and comes to project all his sensitivity and soulfulness onto her, turning her into an image of frail purity.
But Ludvik is a man – and a man in a Milan Kundera novel – so sex is ever-present in his mind and it isn't long before he wants to – needs to – possess her, and make her his.
This sequence is written very convincingly, the way Ludvik's thoughts slowly morph from worshiping Lucie's purity to needing to possess it. Thus, on several successive dates – spread months apart – he tries to have sex with her, despite her refusing, clenching her legs together, pushing him off, and bursting into tears.
Maybe it's because I'm so much older than Ludvik (he is, after all, only 20 at the time) or because I've read so many hundreds of accounts of #metoo-type rapes and assaults – but I quickly suspected that she had been abused earlier in her life and this explains her paradoxical behaviour: she loves Ludvik, she brings him flowers, she visits the camp and says hello to him through the wire mesh – in every way she is devoted to him; and yet on the two occasions where he manages to engineer meetings (at some risk – for the second one he manages to escape through a hole in the wire, and devise an elaborate set of arrangements whereby he borrows the bedroom of a civilian miner he's befriended down the mines for just one evening) she is OK kissing, and sort of OK taking her clothes off but… absolutely and completely refuses to go any further, driving Ludvik into paroxysms of frustration, and then into a fiery rage.
He eventually shouts at her to get out and throws her clothes at her. She dresses and leaves in tearful silence. Ludvik waits an appropriate period of time, goes back downstairs to find the friendly miner has got a few mates round and they're all a bit drunk, so he regales them with an entirely fictional account of what wonderful championship sex he's just had with his girlfriend, before riskily sneaking back into the camp, and going to bed in his miserable bunk.
He never sees Lucie again – on his next furlough he discovers she's simply left the dormitory she was sharing in with two other girls and left no forwarding address – but he never stops being haunted by her memory.
His mother dies while he's doing his time and when it's finally over, he is so heartlost and forlorn, that he signs up for another three years hard labour. The loss of Lucie – the stupid bungling lust of that one night – plunges him into years of 'hopelessness and emptiness' (p.104).
It is fifteen years later. We are in the mind of plump, middle-aged Helena. She is fed up with her husband Pavel and his philandering. She hates the petty bickering at work – she works in a government radio station. She resents all the fuss they made when she got some little hussy who she discovered was having an affair with a married man, sacked from her job. All her staff rounded on her, some even muttering 'hypocrite'. But what do they know about all the sacrifices she's made for the Party? And for her country? And for Truth and Justice?
OK, she herself flirts with younger men but that is completely different. And anyway, now she has met the love of her life, a wonderful heartfelt passionate man named Ludvik. And he has invited her for a trip out of Prague, to a town in the country where there is an annual folk festival. She has combined business with pleasure, as she'll cover the festival for her radio station (accompanied by a loyal young puppy of a sound engineer named Jindra) but her real motivation for going is that Ludvik has told her he can't contain his passion any more and must have her. She is thrilled to her fingertips. She has brought her best underwear.
And so she proceeds to check into the hotel in this rural town and then to meet Ludvik. It is only half way through this passage, and half way through the book (on page 151) that we casually learn that her last name is Zemanek. When I read that sentence I burst out laughing and everyone on the tube carriage looked at me. Yes, Zemanek, the name of Ludvik's smooth-talking friend who was the first to betray him and led the meeting which had him expelled from university and the party, who ruined his life.
Now Ludvik is taking his revenge. Having eventually returned to Prague and found white collar work he is suited for, he one day meets Helena who comes to interview him for her radio programme and her surname makes him perk up. He does background checks and establishes she is the wife of his persecutor and contrives for them to have another meeting, at which he uses all his wiles to seduce her. The seduction proceeds apace and is now due to reach its climax in his home town, the setting of the annual folk festival.
And the heart of the novel (arguably) is this grand, staged, ceremonial act of sexual intercourse between the aggrieved Ludvik and his blissfully ignorant, plump adorer, Helena. It is described in great detail and is, I suppose, very erotic.
The two standout features of Ludvik's technique are 1. He insists she strip naked for him, until she is standing there before him, starkers – without pulling the curtains or turning off the light. She is initially reluctant but eventually strips, and this has the psychological effect of making her truly really completely accept the reality of the situation. Rather than hiding under a blanket and letting something unspeakable happen to her, she is made completely complicit, willing and responsible for the act of sex.
Number 2 is that half way through coitus, Ludvik gets carried away and slaps Helena and, to his and her amazement, she likes it, it makes her howl louder, so he slaps her again, and soon he is slapping her face at will, then turns her over and spanks her big wobbly bum, while she howls and groans in ecstasy.
All very erotic, and written with an intense erotic charge, but – as I've emphasised above – also all wildly absurd. Because the forced stripping and the beating unleashes in Helena a deeper level of erotic experience than she could ever have imagined possible, with the result that her love and adoration of Ludvik goes from high on a normal counter, to off the scale, into slavish, super-deotional Shades of Grey territory.
BUT, as the process unfolded, Ludvik found himself more and more overcome with disgust and hatred. With the result that, once they are totally spent, Helena can't keep her arms off him, is all over him, kisses him all over his body, while Ludvik, thoroughly repulsed and now ashamed of himself, shrinks like a starfish at her touch, and only wants to get dressed and flee.
So the idea of the joke has multiple levels. It refers to:
the original joke postcard that Ludvik sent
and this elaborate ploy he sets up to ravish, ransack and steal from his bitter enemy, everything that he (the enemy) loves (p.171)
However, there is more to come. Namely that Ludvik makes the tactical error of asking Helena to tell him more about her husband. He does this for two reasons a) he wants to hear more about their deep love, so he can savour the idea that he (Ludvik) has ravaged it, b) it will stop Helena pawing and fawning all over him.
What he hadn't at all anticipated was that Helena proceeds to tell him that her marriage to Zemanek is over. Zemanek doesn't like her. He has been having affairs. They have ceased living as man and wife. True they share the same house, but they have completely separate lives.
In a flash Ludvik's entire plan turns to ashes, crashes to the ground. It has all been for nothing. Worse, Helena now enthusiastically tells Ludvik that now she can announce to Zemanek that she has a lover of her own, and he can go to hell with all his pretty dollybirds because she, Helena, has found the greatest, truest love of her life.
Appalled, Ludvik finally manages to make his excuses, plead another appointment and leave.
Jaroslav and the Ride of the King
The book is so long and rich and complex because there are several other distinct threads to it. One of these is about Czech folk music. It turns out that the provincial town where this folk festival is taking place is also Ludvik's home town. As a teenager he played clarinet in the town's folk ensembles and was deeply imbrued with the folk tradition. He became very good friends with Jaroslav, a big gentle bear of a man, who emerged as a leader of the town's folk musicians and a one-man embodiment of the tradition.
Jaroslav's monologue allows Kundera to go into some detail about the Czech folk tradition, what it means, why it is special, and the impact the communist coup had on it. Surprisingly, this was positive. After all the Czechs were forced to copy the Stalinist model of communist culture – and this emphasised nationalist and folk traditions, while pouring scorn on the 'cosmopolitianism' of the international Modernist movement, then, a bit later, strongly criticised the new 'jazz' music coming in from the decadent West.
The communist government gave money to preserve folk traditions and to fund folk traditions like the one taking place on the fateful weekend when Ludvik and Helena are visiting his home town. Jaroslav is not backward in expressing his contempt for Ludvik, who abandoned all this to go to the big city, who turned his back on the true folk tradition to celebrate a foreign, imported ideology. Once best friends, they haven't met for many years, and Jaroslav in particular, harbours a deep grudge against his former band member.
Jaroslav describes in some detail the 'Ride of the King' which is the centrepiece of the festival, when a young boy is completely costumed and masked to re-enact the legend of the almost solitary ride of an exiled king in the Middle Ages. It is a great honour to be chosen to play the 'king' and Jaroslav is thrilled that his own son was selected by the committee to play the king.
Admittedly the ride itself, as witnessed through the eyes of both Jaroslav and Ludvik, is a rather shabby and tawdry affair. The authorities don't even close off the main street so the characters dressed in bright traditional costumes and riding horses, are continually dodging out of the way of cars, lorries and motor bikes. And the crowds are the smallest they've ever been. (At this point you realise this novel is set in the early 1960s, as radio-based rock and roll was just coming in, as the Beatles were first appearing – and the reader can make comparisons between this Czech novel lamenting the decay of traditional folk festivals, and similar books, describing similar sentiments, written in the West.)
Jaroslav puts a brave face on it all, decrying the horrible noisy modern world, insisting on the primacy and integrity of folk music and traditions and still beaming with pride that his son is riding on a horse through their town dressed as the King of the Ride.
Except he isn't. Later on in the book Jaroslav makes the shattering discovery that his son has bunked off, gone off on a motorbike with a mate to a roadside café to drink and listen to rock'n'roll. And his wife knew all about it and helped cover it up, helped arrange the dressing up of a completely different boy, and then lied to Jaroslav!
No greater betrayal is conceivable. Stunned, the big man stands in their kitchen, while his wife faces their stove, continuing to fuss over the soup she's making while her husband's whole world collapses in ashes. Then, one by one he takes every plate on the dresser and hurls them at the floor. Then he smashes up each of the chairs round the table. Then he turns the table over and smashes it down on the pile of broken crockery. While his wife stands trembling at the cooker, crying into their soup. Then he leaves, dazed and confused, wandering through the streets, and beyond, out into the fields, out to the countryside and eventually sits down by the river which flows through the town, the Morava, then lies down, using the violin case he's brought with him as a pillow. Lies and stares at the clouds in the sky, completely forlorn.
Kostka's story
Kostka's story comes toward the end of the novel, but it provides an important centre and touchstone. As you read it you realise that although Ludvik may be the central consciousness, he is powerfully counterbalanced by first Jaroslav and now Kostka.
Kostka was also of Ludvik and Jaroslav's generation, the 1948 generation. But Kostka was and is a devout Christian. (Christianity, Christian faith and Christian terminology crops up throughout Kundera's fiction. Readers [correctly] associate him with meditations on politics and communism, but Christian belief is also a substantial theme in his books.)
Kostka's inflexible religious belief meant that he, too, eventually found it impossible to stay in university, though he differed from Ludvik in voluntarily quitting and being assigned to a state farm as a technical adviser (p.184) where, being highly intelligent and hard working, he was soon devising more effective ways to grow crops. It was then that a rumour spread about a wild woman of the woods, stories circulated about milk pails being mysteriously emptied, food left out to cool disappearing. It wasn't long before the authorities tracked down the young woman to her shad shabby lair in a disused barn and brought her in for questioning.
It was Lucie, Ludvik's pure young woman. This is what happened to her after their tragically failed night of sex, after he threw her clothes at her and told her to clear out. She did. She left her job and the dormitory she shared, and travelled across country sleeping rough, and ended up in a rural area, living off berries and food she could steal.
The authorities take pity on her and assign her to the communal farm. This is where she comes under the protection of Kostka. And very slowly we learn how she relaxes and opens up and tells him her story. As I had suspected, she was abused, to be precise as a teenager she hung round with a gang of boys and on one pitiful occasion, they got drunk and gang raped her. Even the quietest, sweetest boy, the one she thought was her special friend. He was the most brutal, to show off to his mates that he was a real man.
That is more than enough explanation of why she couldn't give herself to Ludvik. It was precisely because what she needed wasn't sex, but protection. In her mind, she was forcing Ludvik to conform to the role of Lover and Protector. Having sex destroyed that image which is why she couldn't do it (over and above the sheer terror the act revived in her mind). And of course, in his mind she was pure and virginal, and he had worked himself up into a young man's romantic state where he thought of her as especially his, and the act of love as a sacred blessing on the altar of her unsullied beauty.
So both were acting under pitiful delusions about the other.
In fact, we had been briefly introduced to Kostka right at the start of the novel because when he arrives back in his home town for the festival and to deflower Helena, Ludvik looks up one of the few friends he can remember in the place, Kostka, who is now an eminent doctor at the local hospital. In an amiable but distant way, Kostka agrees to loan Ludvik his apartment for an afternoon (for the fatal act of sex). It is only later, when they meet up that evening, that they share a drink and Kostka ends up telling him about his life.
Now Kostka remembers another meeting, by chance, on a train, in 1956. Kostka had been forced to quit the collective farm because of political machinations and had ended up becoming a labourer. First they shared the irony that two young men, both so idealistic about their beliefs, had both been dumped on from a great height by… by… by what? By 'History' is the best they can come up with. By the impersonal forces of society working to a logic nobody really understands, certainly nobody can control. In fact Ludvik was so incensed by the unfairness of Kostka's fate that he moved heaven and earth and used all his old contacts, to get Kostka appointed to the hospital where he still works.
This is why Ludvik looks Kostka up when he arrives back in his hometown in the book's 'present'. This is why Kostka agrees to lend him his flat for the deflowering of Helena. And this is why, later that night, when the two old friends share a drink, Kostka tells Ludvik about Lucie, without realising he knew her: about the gang rape, the flight. How she found one man she could trust, a miner in a god-forsaken mining town. But how he, too, turned out to be just like all the rest. How she had turned up the collective farm all those years ago, how Kostka took her under his wing and how, despite himself, he too took advantage of her and began a sexual relationship with her – about which he now, older and wiser, feels cripplingly guilty.
Soon after this revelation, Kostka's section ends and we are returned to the mind of Ludvik, in the present, walking back from Kostka's flat late at night, and absolutely reeling. What? Everything he ever believed about Lucie, both during their ill-fated affair and for fifteen years since – turns out to be utterly, completely wrong (p.210).
Back to Helena
But there are still more acts to go in this pitiful black farce. For to Helena's own surprise no other than her suave philandering husband, Pavel Zemanek, turns up for the festival. He is now a super-smooth and successful university lecturer, adored by his students for his fashionably anti-establishment (i.e. anti-communist) views. And he's brought his latest student lover along, a long-legged beauty – Miss Broz – perfectly suited to Pavel's stylish sports car.
Helena takes advantage of her recent mad, passionate coupling with Ludvik, to tell Zemanek that she's met the love of her life, that she doesn't need him any more, and generally take a superior position. She goes so far as telling Zemanek her marvellous lover's name, Ludvik Jahn, and is puzzled when he bursts out laughing. Oh they're old friends, he explains.
Helena recounts this all to Ludvik when they meet up the next morning, and it is all Ludvik can do to conceal his dismay. Just when he thought things couldn't get any worse. And then a few hours later, in the throng of the bloody festival, in among the crowds packing the streets to watch the Ride of the bloody King, suddenly Zemanek emerges from the crowd, accompanied by his long-legged dollybird and Helena is introducing the two enemies, face to face for the first time in 15 years.
And, of course, whereas Ludvik is strangled by an inexpressible combination of rage and hatred, Zemanek is unbearably suave and cool, well dressed, well-heeled, hair well-coiffed, gorgeous student on his arm – unbearable! And doubly unbearable because he realises his revenge on Zemanek has not only failed, but epically, massively failed. Not only did he not ravish and desecrate the body of Zemanek's beloved wife – because Zemanek doesn't give a damn who his wife sleeps with – but Helena falling so deeply and publicly in love with him (Ludvik) has done Zemanek a big favour. For years Helena has been a burden round his neck – now at a stroke Ludvik has done him the favour of removing that burden!
Farce is laid over farce, bitter black joke on top of bitter black joke.
As if all this wasn't bad enough, yet another layer is added to the cake of humiliation – because as Ludvik is forced to swallow his rage and join in the polite chit-chat going on between Helena and Zemanek and Miss Broz, he realises something from the latter's talk. As she witters on praising Zemanek for standing up to the authorities and bravely speaking out about this or that issue and generally becoming a hero to his students, Ludvik is subject to a really shattering revelation: the past doesn't matter any more.
As she talks on Ludvik realises that, for her and her generation, all that stuff about 1948 and purges and executions and party squabbles and ideological arguments: that's all ancient history – 'bizarre experiences from a dark and distant age' (p.232) which is just of no interest to her and her generation, who want to party and have fun.
Not only has Ludvik failed utterly to wreak his revenge on his old antagonist – but the entire world which gave meaning to their antagonism, and therefore to his act of revenge, has ceased to exist. He has been hanging onto a past which doesn't exist anymore. It sinks in that the entire psychological, intellectual and emotional framework which has dominated his life for fifteen years… has evaporated in a puff of smoke. No one cares. No one is interested. It doesn't matter.
Alone again with Helena, Ludvik lets rip. He tells her he hates her. He tells her he only seduced and made love to her to get his own back on her husband, the man who sold him down the river when they were students. He says she repulses him.
At first she refuses to accept it – she has just thrown away her entire life with Zemanek, the security of their house and marriage – for Ludvik and here he is spitting in her face. Eventually she wanders off, dazed, back to the village hall where she and her sound engineer, Jindra, have set up base to make their radio documentary. In a dazed voice, she says she has a headache and the engineer (still virtually a schoolboy, who has a puppy crush on Helena) says he has some headache tablets in her bag. She sends him out for a drink and then, rummaging in his bag, comes across several bottles full of headache pills. She takes two and then looks at herself in the mirror, at her fact tear-stained face, contemplating the complete and utter humiliation she has just undergone and the shattering of her entire life.
And, as she hears Jindra returning with a bottle from a nearby tavern, she hastily swallows down the entire contents of not one but all the bottles in the engineer's bag. She emerges back into the hall, thanks him for the drink and writes a note. It is a suicide note addressed to Ludvik. She pops it in an envelope and scribbles Ludvik's name on it and asks Jindra to track Ludvik down and deliver it.
Now, Jindra has got wind of Helena and Ludvik's affair and was present when Zemanek and his student were introduced to them, so he knows Ludvik by sight. Reluctantly he goes off with the letter. The observant reader might notice that the story commences with a missive – a postcard – and is ending with another, though I can't quite figure out the meaning of this – something about misunderstood messages.
Jindra fairly quickly finds Ludvik in the beer garden of the most popular pub in town. He grudgingly hands over the letter. Now a message from an angry upset Helena is about the last thing Ludvik wants to have to deal with and so, to delay matters, he invites Jindra to join him in a drink. He calls the waiter. He orders. The drinks arrive. They drink. They toast. The letter sits on the table unopened. I really enjoyed this little sequence.
Eventually and very reluctantly Ludvik opens the envelope and reads the message. He leaps out of his chair and demands to know where Helena is now. The engineer describes the village hall they've borrowed and Ludvik sets out at a run, zigzagging through the crowds and avoiding the traffic.
He makes it to the hall, bursts in and it is empty. Down into the cellar he goes, amid the cobwebs and detritus, yelling Helena's name. No reply. They check every room on the ground floor, then realise there's an attic, and find a ladder and go up there, Ludvik convinced at any moment he'll see a mute body dangling from a rope. But no Helena – so another frenzied search reveals a door into a back garden, and they burst out into this quickly realising there is no body prone in the grass or hanging from the trees.
But there is a shed. Ludvik bounds over to it and beats on the door, which is locked. 'Go away' they hear Helena's anguished voice, and Ludvik needs no bidding to kick open the door, smashing its flimsy lock to reveal…
Helena squatting on a toilet in agony, angrily begging him to close the door. Those headache pills? They weren't headache pills. The puppyish engineer now sheepishly admits to both of them that he often gets constipated and so keeps a supply of laxatives ready to hand. Only he's embarrassed about people seeing them so he keeps them in old headache pill bottles.
Ludvik steps back, surveys the situation and closes the door on Helena's humiliation and stands lost, dazed, staggered. What… What is life about? What is the point? Could he be any more of an ironic plaything of Fate?
He walks away from the outside loo, from Helena and Jindra, back through the church hall, out into the hectic streets, along busy roads, across town to the outskirts, where the houses peter out, and on into fields, farmland, lanes and hedgerows and trees. Eventually he finds himself walking along beside the river Morava, and then makes out a figure lying down beside it. As he comes closer he is astonished to see it is his old friend and fellow musician, Jaroslav. He greets him and asks if he can sit down beside him.
And so the two lost men, their lives and their illusions in tatters, sit out in the empty countryside contemplating the absurd meaningless of existence…
The Joke is the longest of Kundera's books, and also the most dense. The plot is intricate, ranging back and forth over the fifteen-year period and some of these periods are described in great detail, for example the long passage describing life in the miners' punishment camp. As his career progressed, Kundera was to compress passages like this, making them ever shorter and punchier.
The Joke also feels dense because it includes large sections packed with very intellectual meditations – about music, folk music and Christian belief, as well as politics, communism, and human life considered from all kinds of angles. Kundera doesn't hesitate to lard almost every action in the book with a philosophical commentary, some of which lift off from the text entirely to become stand-alone digressions in their own right.
And if it is a traditional form of literary criticism to describe the patterns in a novel's narrative, particularly in terms of the growth and development of its characters – then you could easily do the same and analyse the patterns in Kundera's deployment of ideas which, like the characters, seem plausible enough when you first meet them but then, slowly, over the course of the book's intricate windings, themselves are undermined and contradicted. To put it another way – in a Kundera novel, the ideas have as many adventures as the 'characters'.
It's true there are a number of sequences acts of copulation and, more to the point, the male characters in particular, obsess about sex almost continually – which can, if you're not careful, become very tiresome. But, as I hope I've shown, this focus on the private act of sex itself is continually opening up into more philosophical and psychological speculations about human nature. It's as if sex, the sex act, is itself merely a stage on which much deeper philosophical and fictional questions can be raised and explored. There may be a fair amount of sex in the book, but if you look closely, you'll see that hardly any of it is happy and fulfilling; most of it is fraught and tragic. Or tragi-comic.
And fundamentally, beneath the meditations on History and Communist power, beneath the stories of the individual characters and their worries and experiences and plans, and beneath the erotic layer of lust and sex which lards much of the book – at bottom the message, for me, is one about the complete Absurdity of human existence.
For me the message is that: Humans are the meaning-making animal, condemned to waste vast amounts of energy trying to find meaning and purpose in the grand narrative of their lives as much as in the slightest event or accident which occurs to them… But at the same time – because we are limited to our own very narrow points of view and relatively tiny number of lived experiences – our interpretations of the world and other people are more often than not howlingly inaccurate and ridiculously self-centred.
It is this mismatch between the will to understand, and the completely incomprehensible reality of the world, which is the Absurdity of the Human Condition. It's all a big Joke.
The plot of The Joke is itself a joke. And not only its plot. Its 'philosophy' as well: man, caught in the trap of a joke, suffers a personal catastrophe which, when seen from without, is ludicrous. His tragedy lies in the fact that the joke has deprived him of the right to tragedy. (Introduction)
Because what if the 'aberrations' and 'mistakes' and miscarriages of justice aren't aberrations from History at all? What if the aberrations and mistakes and miscalculations, which people are continually dismissing from their thoughts, are the norm? What if everything, if all human endeavour and effort, is one vast continual ongoing misunderstanding, just one big stupid joke? (p.240)
Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith: they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deed, people) and in the rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice.) Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. (p.245)
A friend of mine is mad about Kundera. She says I miss the point, or miss her point, about him.
Reading Kundera showed her that even the most grim and sordid events – the kind she was familiar with from her unbookish, working-class upbringing – can be redeemed by thought and imagination. Reading Kundera transported her into a world where even the most crude and barbaric behaviour was translated into intellectualism, into dazzling insights and memorable formulations. The act of reading Kundera was in itself an escape into the company of a highly educated, urbane, confident, man of the world, who could deploy ideas and quotes from the great names of European literature with a light touch, to bring out hitherto unsuspected aspects of even the most mundane situations (two reluctant lovers groping in a shabby bedroom). He sprinkled a magic dust of insights and ideas over everything, making her realise that every minute of her day was just as capable of being analysed, just as susceptible to witty insights and psychological revelations. Reading him made her own life feel full of imaginative promise and intellectual excitement.
And she was dazzled by the way the reader feels they know the characters via their interiority, going straight to the heart of their affairs and dilemmas. She loves the way Kundera plunges you straight into their psychological depths and complexities. It doesn't matter at all that they remain undescribed physical shadows, in fact it's a big plus, it helps you focus all the more on their minds and characters.
As a woman she didn't feel at all patronised by the focus on sex-driven male characters. After all, she grew up in a world of sex-driven men. What riveted her thirty years ago, when she first read Kundera's novels, and has stayed with her ever since, was the revelation that even the most humdrum moments of the most humdrum lives can be transformed by the imagination and intellect into wonderful luminous ideas. This opened doors into a whole new way of thinking and helped inspire her go to university, and beyond.
It's hard to think of a more moving and profound tribute to an author, which is why I include it here.
The Joke on Amazon
Milan Kundera's books
1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)
1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)
1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity
2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance
by Simon on August 26, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Comedy, communism, Novel
Tagged 1948, Brno, Christian, Christianity, comedy, communism, communist, cynicism, Czech, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe, eroticism, farce, fiction, folk music, France, Helena Zemanek, irony, James Joyce, Jaroslav, Kostka, Kundera, Lucie, Ludvik Jahn, Marketa, meta-analysis, Milan Kundera, Molly Bloom, Nazis, novel, Paris, Pavel Zemanek, philosophy, points of view, Prague, psychology, religion, Rennes, Russians, Second World War, sex, Stalinist, suicide, The Absurd, The Joke, the Prague Spring, The Ride of the King, the West, Trotsky, Ulysses, USSR
Posted by Simon on August 26, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/the-joke-milan-kundera/


in 2020, Corey Baeza recorded 402 strikeouts. This should be listed as the all-time record, but because it was recorded with 2 different teams, the all-time leaders page does not list him as first!
Good catch. I have a fix for this (for batting season leaders too) that I will publish ASAP.


text:
Science|PREMENSTRUAL PROBLEMS SEEM TO BESET BABOONS
https://nyti.ms/29wuUvh
PREMENSTRUAL PROBLEMS SEEM TO BESET BABOONS
By Erik Eckholm, Special To the New York Times
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
June 4, 1985, Section C, Page 2Buy Reprints
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Biologists studying wild primates in Kenya have found that premenstrual female baboons display symptoms resembling those of premenstrual syndrome in women. In the days just before onset of menstruation, female baboons eat more and are less social than at other times, the researchers discovered.
The findings lend support to the assertion, long made by many women and now accepted by a growing number of physicians, that premenstrual syndrome (PMS) - temporary physical and emotional problems that are believed to afflict 20 percent to 40 percent of all women - is rooted in involuntary physiological changes rather than psychological distress.
The discovery of a PMS-like phenomenon in baboons could lead to use of the animals in the study of the causes and potential treatments for PMS, said the research leader, Glenn Hausfater of the University of Missouri.
A report of the findings by Dr. Hausfater and Barbara Skoblick, his former research associate, was presented here today at a conference of the American Society of Primatologists.
Possible Evolutionary Origins
The syndrome, believed to result from hormonal changes, has been noted by physicians for centuries but remains poorly understood. The presence of a similar syndrome in nonhuman primates had not been previously documented and may also shed light on possible evolutionary origins of PMS.
The discovery was unexpected, said Dr. Hausfater, and emerged from observations of baboons in Kenya's Amboseli National Park that were originally made for another purpose. ''Why were we surprised? I guess because nobody had looked for this before,'' Dr. Hausfater said.
Premenstrual baboons ''withdraw from social contact,'' said Dr. Hausfater. ''They spend more time in trees - and in the open savannah there aren't many trees. They don't have neighbors up there.''
In the days just preceding the onset of menstruation the females spent 30 percent of their time in acacia trees, where they fed alone on flowers, seed pods and sugary gum scrapings, according to the report. This is more than twice the usual time aloft for the baboons, which mainly feed on the ground.
Premenstrual baboons spent a total of 50 percent of their daylight hours feeding, significantly more than the 35 percent observed at other times.
As the onset of menstruation approached, females initiated one-third fewer contacts with other individuals than usual, the study found. Other data indicate that ''the males don't behave differently toward the females; the females are just less responsive to their neighbors,'' Dr. Hausfater said.
Symptoms of Syndrome in Women
The physical symptoms of PMS in women can include body swelling, headaches, acne, constipation and an increase in appetite, especially for sweet or salty foods. Physical discomfort is often accompanied by either fatigue and depression or irritability and tension, according to a 1981 article in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Studies have shown that in the days preceding menstruation women are more likely to commit crimes, have accidents and commit suicide. Some studies have linked PMS to marital discord and baby battering. But even these temporarily elevated rates are lower than comparable crime, accident and suicide rates for men.
In Britain, severe PMS has been accepted by courts as a mitigating factor in cases of manslaughter, arson and assault, and the syndrome is legally recognized in France as a cause of temporary insanity. An attempt in 1982 in the United States to invoke PMS as a criminal defense was unsuccessful.
Two earlier studies of primates in captivity had found a rise in aggressive attacks by females around the time of menstruation. But these caged animals were unable to find the solitude that is apparently sought by baboons in the wild, according to Dr. Hausfater.
Some Differences Are Noted
The premenstrual changes observed in baboons were in many ways similar but in other ways different from those recorded in women, the researchers noted. The wild baboons did not display unusual fatigue or hostility, traits often noted in premenstrual women.
But the finding that females of nonhuman primate species also experience regular premenstrual behavioral change is evidence, scientists said, that the syndrome has resulted from evolutionary forces that shaped the emergence of higher primates. Dr. Hausfater speculated in an interview that the syndrome might not have had evolutionary advantages in itself, but rather was ''an epiphenomenon,'' an incidental consequence of natural selection pressures on some related hormonal mechanism that raised female primates' chances of fertilization.
The Kenya study compared behavior changes among a large number of baboons, and was not designed to assess the behavior of individual females over time. Hence it could not answer such key questions as whether the syndrome affects the same females regularly, and whether it occurs in all females to greater or lesser degrees or results from an abnormality affecting only some.
Baboons, which have reproductive and hormonal systems similar to those of humans, have long been used to study ovulation and contraception. Dr. Hausfater said baboons kept in spacious compounds might also prove to be excellent subjects for needed research on premenstrual syndrome.


Are you the type who keeps shifting furniture around for a more aesthetically pleasing environment around you or like to have themes for each room? Heck, are you even the type who collects interior design magazines and cuts pages to store for a later date? One of all three is a sign that you're on to greater things, like Interior Design. So, to inspire you some more, we've made a list of Interior Design courses in Mumbai. Get your dose of Vitamin D (for design)!
The aim of their interior design course is to groom you in different specialist areas of interiors, like residential, projects in retail design, public spaces and exhibition design and more. Apart from the usual classroom learning, they also take you out on industrial visits and field trips to give you a holistic learning experience. Their certificate course is for a duration of 6 months where they teach you the basics of design, construction and interior design.
To know more, read this.
Established in 2004, Raffles Design International has a network of 25 colleges across 13 Asia-Pacific countries, and focuses on providing a hands-on practical experience and also developing a work portfolio while working with well-known names in the industry, as a part of their training. They use their labs and workshop rooms and are even taught the design software used in the industry. They offer diploma courses here – Interior Design Diploma (9 months) and Advanced Diploma In Interior Design is 15 months.
To know more about them, check this.
At ISDI's interior designing course, you can learn ways to leverage the opportunities and limitations of a physical space to design better interiors. As a student, you get to design a wide range of spaces, rooted in socio-cultural trends. It's a 4-year undergraduate specialization, which exposes you to design history, material concepts, colour, texture and surface knowledge, spatial scale and detail, visual and digital representation techniques, behavioural aspects of space, sustainable materials, lighting design, entrepreneurship and professional practice.
Take a look at what they have to offer.
This college of design studies boasts of state-of-the-art infrastructure and a conducive environment to explore in terms of design. They have a number of degree courses when it comes to interior design, some that can go on till 3 years, and other diploma certificate courses that range up to 11 months as well. You get to learn all about interior decoration, industrial design, graphic design, ergonomics and much more here.
To know more about their courses, check this out.
Since its inception in 1966, IITC has focused on professional courses in the fields of Designing, Aviation & Hospitality and Export-Import Training. All courses their courses are designed with research and consultation with industry experts. IITC also offers placement and internship assistance. Their course duration is 12 months, which offers you a diploma in interior design.


If you haven't seen it before, this map represents an area of the City of Roses in which I am slowly running down all the streets. Purple represents April to June, Blue represents July to September, and green are the new streets from so far this October. It's fine and all, and I do plan to finish it, but it's definitely a rerun of the first version, and some of the thrill is gone.
It'll be fun! I can keep you apprised of the whereabouts of my hypothetical harrier in the sidebar. Maybe he can write in from time to time to talk about places he's been! Maybe even – this would be pretty trippy – I could even go out and meet him somewhere! I could go running with him.
Where should I/he go? I see two areas of great potential. One would be to send Avatar5000 out to explore areas of scenic, historic, or personal interest. Secondly, perhaps you'd like to invite him to come visit! You really wouldn't need much of a guest room; he/I could just crash on the couch, or for that matter at the back of the junk drawer, or in a notebook, or wherever you keep your own abstractions.
There are also two important limitations to this venture. One is that I won't be moving especially fast. Locations in and around Bridgetown would be easy enough to pick off, but the open road will certainly be calling. On the other hand, if I were to put (for instance) FallingWater on the list of places to visit it would be quite some time before I was able to make it to southwestern Pennsylvania (Keep in mind, too, that my avatar isn't going to use freeways, as they are unsafe and unpleasant to run on). We might also have to confine ourselves to North America, because while I would in principle be perfectly willing to run across a hypothetical Bering Strait landbridge or through the Chunnel, I can't guarantee that my remaining running lifetime will be sufficient to get me that far.
The journey begins Saturday, October 27!
But where shall I/he go? If you have suggestions, or would like to invite my avatar for a visit, let's hear about it in the comments!
Everyone runs in Washington DC - no reason why an avatar shouldn't also run there!
Google Maps fails to be able to show it, but from Chelan an avatar could take the ferry to Stehekin then continue up, via gravel road then hiking trail over Cascade Pass and down to Marblemount. From there, well...more ferries around the San Juans and into Canada?
There's a purity to the basic west-to-east cross-continental trek that would probably get my vote. A lot like that bicycle odyssey yearning your wife has completely failed to encourage you to quit your job for!
Morgan: Done! And very kind of you to offer.
Calico, Jenners: Well, it looks like the East Coast might be in the offing, what with all the pressure from the Mrs. But that would be a few years out, obviously.
pfly: Ferries. Hmm... I'll have to think about ferries.
Libby: Your confidence in my long-term running viability is flattering. I blush to admit I have no idea if the whole "Pan-American Highway" concept ever really panned out. Could I actually make it to Patagonia? I suppose if I could take on the Bering Straits, I could take on the Darien Gap or whatever.
Oh man. So, my vote goes for heading Alaska way swimming to Russia (of course, you'll have to do the swimming to get that bit done), and then heading down to visit me. Might take a while, but we're all big fans of Michael5000 avatars down here in Aussieland.
Are you sure you're not yourself eligible for the Dork award?
I'm not, which is a shame. I think I could put together a pretty credible application.