When a political party is in deep trouble in the popularity stakes as an election looms, switching their leader to a new and shiny model rarely works. If you look at the list of Canadian prime ministers, you'll see a couple from the 1980s and 90s who served derisorily short terms. That was the reason.
It worked this time, though. And, weirdly, the person responsible for that was Donald Trump. Old PM Justin Trudeau from the Liberal Party had already announced his impending retirement when DT pulled his "be a bully to Canada" routine, and it got everybody's back up. You'd think a guy who wrote The Art of the Deal would know better than to antagonize people he's negotiating with, but then Trump didn't really write his own book, did he? Anyway, Trudeau denounced all of this in his quiet Canadian way; his successor Mark Carney denounced it even further in his even quieter Canadian way, and just about everybody in the country agreed with them. (As do I, though I'm not Canadian.)
Even Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the opposition, chimed in, rather awkwardly both because "me too" isn't a fervent campaigning posture and because Poilievre's personal style is rather Trumpian. He's also even more alarmingly right-wing than Stephen Harper, the noxious previous Conservative PM. Canada dodged a bullet by not electing him. Voters decided that Carney, a sober banker who's led major financial institutions out of crises before, was a better bet to stand up to Trump.
But this didn't mostly happen because of Conservatives changing their minds. It seems to have been mostly supporters of the third major party, the New Democrats - a social democratic group rather similar to what Bernie Sanders and AOC want to lead here in the States - who decided they couldn't risk letting Poilievre into office and turned over en masse to the Liberals. They weren't willing to do this before, but they were with Trudeau out and Trump looming. As a result, the NDP - which 14 years ago actually outpolled the Liberals at their pre-Trudeau nadir - won the fewest seats ever in its history. But that's what happens to third parties in a first-past-the-post system.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
concert review: Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra
I was less than excited to be sent to review a concert with Schoenberg and Mahler in it. But the Schoenberg was Verklärte Nacht which is tonal and was not played too goopily; and the Mahler was a brief cycle of very early songs, and hence as unobjectionable as Mahler can get. And to go with this, Beethoven's Seventh, an old favorite played with the tires squealing as it rocketed down the street.
This was not just the concert. The performers were here for a week to work with students, so I enriched my experience by going to the public events on Wednesday. This included a long concert of mostly very dull music by Mahler and the Second Viennese School; a talk with Verbier Festival administrators, who explained how and why the festival works and what this touring orchestra has to do with it; and, in the morning, a master class with the orchestra's conductor and some of the groups that would play that evening.
The conductor's accent was almost impenetrable (yes, this was the same guy who read the Verklärte Nacht poem aloud before the performance, with results as you might expect), but I tried my best to follow him. When the high school string quartet played the Webern Bagatelles, he told them they were very good (which they certainly were) but that they were too intellectual; their performance needed more emotion. He said that composers encode the emotions they want to express in the score, and that performers need to bring those out and convey them to the audience - gesturing to those of us gathered to listen to the session. He took the leader's violin and showed what he meant. Essentially it amounted to adding more variation in dynamics and tone color to the playing.
And I thought: what good is it to 'add emotion' to music when there's no emotion to be had? This is Webern! The driest, most dessicated and cryptic composer in the western repertoire. Maybe a few connoisseurs will appreciate it, but there is no emotion in Webern that can be conveyed to a general classical audience. No matter what you do, it doesn't come across as emotion. It's eloquence in an alien language. Try this on something that actually has some emotional content.
Anyway, I didn't hear any effective difference in the performance afterwards, although I hear master classes entirely reworking students' playing styles all the time.
This was not just the concert. The performers were here for a week to work with students, so I enriched my experience by going to the public events on Wednesday. This included a long concert of mostly very dull music by Mahler and the Second Viennese School; a talk with Verbier Festival administrators, who explained how and why the festival works and what this touring orchestra has to do with it; and, in the morning, a master class with the orchestra's conductor and some of the groups that would play that evening.
The conductor's accent was almost impenetrable (yes, this was the same guy who read the Verklärte Nacht poem aloud before the performance, with results as you might expect), but I tried my best to follow him. When the high school string quartet played the Webern Bagatelles, he told them they were very good (which they certainly were) but that they were too intellectual; their performance needed more emotion. He said that composers encode the emotions they want to express in the score, and that performers need to bring those out and convey them to the audience - gesturing to those of us gathered to listen to the session. He took the leader's violin and showed what he meant. Essentially it amounted to adding more variation in dynamics and tone color to the playing.
And I thought: what good is it to 'add emotion' to music when there's no emotion to be had? This is Webern! The driest, most dessicated and cryptic composer in the western repertoire. Maybe a few connoisseurs will appreciate it, but there is no emotion in Webern that can be conveyed to a general classical audience. No matter what you do, it doesn't come across as emotion. It's eloquence in an alien language. Try this on something that actually has some emotional content.
Anyway, I didn't hear any effective difference in the performance afterwards, although I hear master classes entirely reworking students' playing styles all the time.
Monday, April 28, 2025
dramatic review
Here There Are Blueberries, conceived, directed, and co-written by Moises Kaufman (Berkeley Rep)
This is a documentary play. By which I mean it records historical events in plausibly accurate language, with genuine historical material inserted. Here that material is projections of photographs.
The play is mostly set in the US Holocaust Museum. They've recently acquired a donation, a photo album that a US intelligence officer found in a ruined house in Germany just after the war and has kept ever since. There's no name, but some of the captions say they were taken at Auschwitz.
They're not of prisoners. They're of SS officers and clerical staff, enjoying themselves at after-work parties and such. Oh, look, there's Dr Mengele, laughing it up among his comrades. One set of photos shows the SS officer who's clearly the man who compiled the album - later identified by the museum staff as the adjutant to Auschwitz's commander - serving food to the young women of the office staff. "Here there are blueberries," says the caption in German.
The Holocaust Museum staff ask, do we want this album? Our focus is on the victims, it shouldn't be on the perpetrators. But they decide there's value in knowing more about how the Holocaust happened, and emphasizing that it was people who did this, not alien monsters.
The innocent-looking young women on the staff, for instance. What did they do? They ran the message office. What messages did it send? The museum tracked down an interview of one of them, after the war.
Witness: Every time a train came in, we'd send a message off to Berlin. So many men to work camp, so many women to work camp, so many men S.B., so many women S.B., so many children S.B.
Query: What did S.B. mean?
Witness: Sonderbehandlung. Special treatment.
Query: What did 'special treatment' mean?
Witness: Gassing.
They knew.
So did the officers, including the one whose album it had been (nothing is said of how he lost it), who claimed they knew nothing, nothing of what was really going on there. But the photos show them touring the extermination centers.
And then, at the end of the play, after we're assured that we have almost no photos of the prisoners, some do show up. It's another album, photos taken the day the train arrived that held the very prisoner who found the album in an abandoned SS barracks after the camp was liberated. She sees herself in the photos. She sees her family, the ones she never met again after she was sent to work camp and they were all marked for S.B.
I was not just stunned, I was thrown for a loop. Why does this only show up now? The whole play should have been about this album, instead.
This was powerfully done - the small cast played varied parts. The creators are the same people behind The Laramie Project. But the switch at the end ... I dunno why they presented it this way.
This is a documentary play. By which I mean it records historical events in plausibly accurate language, with genuine historical material inserted. Here that material is projections of photographs.
The play is mostly set in the US Holocaust Museum. They've recently acquired a donation, a photo album that a US intelligence officer found in a ruined house in Germany just after the war and has kept ever since. There's no name, but some of the captions say they were taken at Auschwitz.
They're not of prisoners. They're of SS officers and clerical staff, enjoying themselves at after-work parties and such. Oh, look, there's Dr Mengele, laughing it up among his comrades. One set of photos shows the SS officer who's clearly the man who compiled the album - later identified by the museum staff as the adjutant to Auschwitz's commander - serving food to the young women of the office staff. "Here there are blueberries," says the caption in German.
The Holocaust Museum staff ask, do we want this album? Our focus is on the victims, it shouldn't be on the perpetrators. But they decide there's value in knowing more about how the Holocaust happened, and emphasizing that it was people who did this, not alien monsters.
The innocent-looking young women on the staff, for instance. What did they do? They ran the message office. What messages did it send? The museum tracked down an interview of one of them, after the war.
Witness: Every time a train came in, we'd send a message off to Berlin. So many men to work camp, so many women to work camp, so many men S.B., so many women S.B., so many children S.B.
Query: What did S.B. mean?
Witness: Sonderbehandlung. Special treatment.
Query: What did 'special treatment' mean?
Witness: Gassing.
They knew.
So did the officers, including the one whose album it had been (nothing is said of how he lost it), who claimed they knew nothing, nothing of what was really going on there. But the photos show them touring the extermination centers.
And then, at the end of the play, after we're assured that we have almost no photos of the prisoners, some do show up. It's another album, photos taken the day the train arrived that held the very prisoner who found the album in an abandoned SS barracks after the camp was liberated. She sees herself in the photos. She sees her family, the ones she never met again after she was sent to work camp and they were all marked for S.B.
I was not just stunned, I was thrown for a loop. Why does this only show up now? The whole play should have been about this album, instead.
This was powerfully done - the small cast played varied parts. The creators are the same people behind The Laramie Project. But the switch at the end ... I dunno why they presented it this way.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
concert review: Chamber Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony
The particular reason I like chamber music concerts sponsored by symphony orchestras is the opportunity it allows for performing works for unusual combos. Where, for instance, but at a symphony orchestra would you be likely to be able to assemble a nonet (one each of all the standard string and wind instruments)? Or - this was really stunning - four men* on bass? (If you thought three was the maximum, that's baseball.)
The Nonet was by Bohuslav Martinů, and was a substantial piece in his lively, angular post-neoclassical style. Lots of group exchanges back and forth between the strings and the winds.
The piece for four basses was by 19C Italian bassist Giovanni Bottesini. Melodic in a bel canto style, it was so high-pitched (a preference of Bottesini's) that it sounded more like cellos under some weird straining stress than it did anything distinctively bassish. At least it was consistently in tune, which I don't expect to hear in exposed bass music by players from anywhere less distinguished than SFS.
The concert also had two more conventionally instrumented works.
Café Music by Paul Schoenfield, which is a piano trio disguised as a romp through early 20C popular music, was played with what I'd expect of orchestral musicians tackling it: well up to the technical demands but lacking that last deposit of wild abandon needed to make this piece really go. The elegant ballad in the slow movement came out well, though.
Shostakovich's Third String Quartet - one of his most often played, and one of his best - started as a cool and objective reading, but gradually the emotion that Shostakovich keeps locked up came out, especially in the desolate finale.
All around, a really interesting afternoon out.
*and they were men
The Nonet was by Bohuslav Martinů, and was a substantial piece in his lively, angular post-neoclassical style. Lots of group exchanges back and forth between the strings and the winds.
The piece for four basses was by 19C Italian bassist Giovanni Bottesini. Melodic in a bel canto style, it was so high-pitched (a preference of Bottesini's) that it sounded more like cellos under some weird straining stress than it did anything distinctively bassish. At least it was consistently in tune, which I don't expect to hear in exposed bass music by players from anywhere less distinguished than SFS.
The concert also had two more conventionally instrumented works.
Café Music by Paul Schoenfield, which is a piano trio disguised as a romp through early 20C popular music, was played with what I'd expect of orchestral musicians tackling it: well up to the technical demands but lacking that last deposit of wild abandon needed to make this piece really go. The elegant ballad in the slow movement came out well, though.
Shostakovich's Third String Quartet - one of his most often played, and one of his best - started as a cool and objective reading, but gradually the emotion that Shostakovich keeps locked up came out, especially in the desolate finale.
All around, a really interesting afternoon out.
*and they were men
Saturday, April 26, 2025
folk music between covers
An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music, by Dave Thompson (Backbeat Books, 2023)
This is some 500 pages absolutely packed with information. Its topic is the performing and recording history of the Child Ballads (click on the link if you don't know what that means: there's always someone), so mostly British, American, Canadian. And other British folk songs get a mention here and there.
And it's thorough, thorough. Occasionally it's a little difficult to follow what Thompson is saying, but mostly the info is densely packed and, as far as I can tell, pretty reliable. Near the beginning are accounts of composers who wrote accompaniments to the tunes (Haydn and Beethoven: yes they did), lots about folk song collectors in the field from Cecil Sharp on down, eventually getting to early recordings ("Phil Tanner, the first folk-singing superstar"), more composers (Benj. Britten, Ruth Crawford), gradually into folk singers you've heard of (Jean Ritchie, Judy Collins), a chapter on folk songs that influenced Angela Carter, then through Dylan and Baez to the folkies I listened to in my youth, going through Martin Carthy, the Incredible String Band (yes, they did Child ballads), Pentangle, etc., and finally arriving at Fairport Convention in chapter 37. Steeleye Span gets two chapters, chapter 40 which has a brief overview of their early work, and chapter 41, a fuller discussion of their Golden Age. Thompson says that Steeleye's real innovation was the almost brutally heavy rock arrangements on the likes of "King Henry" and "Alison Gross", at last giving these songs music that was as menacing and vicious as the lyrics. The "haunted and eerie" arrangement of "Long Lankin" also falls in that category. There are a few more references to Steeleye later on, suggesting that "The Prickly Bush" and "Lord Randall" are their two best later songs, ignoring their amazing "Tam Lin".
As the later chapters (there's 48) drift off into newer performers I don't know but who sound tempting from Thompson's descriptions, I looked some of them up but none wound up appealing to me at all. I'm a child of my time, I guess. But I enjoyed reading about the performers I knew and the earlier ones I didn't.
However, the best thing, the very best thing, in this book is the dedication, which reads like this:
This is some 500 pages absolutely packed with information. Its topic is the performing and recording history of the Child Ballads (click on the link if you don't know what that means: there's always someone), so mostly British, American, Canadian. And other British folk songs get a mention here and there.
And it's thorough, thorough. Occasionally it's a little difficult to follow what Thompson is saying, but mostly the info is densely packed and, as far as I can tell, pretty reliable. Near the beginning are accounts of composers who wrote accompaniments to the tunes (Haydn and Beethoven: yes they did), lots about folk song collectors in the field from Cecil Sharp on down, eventually getting to early recordings ("Phil Tanner, the first folk-singing superstar"), more composers (Benj. Britten, Ruth Crawford), gradually into folk singers you've heard of (Jean Ritchie, Judy Collins), a chapter on folk songs that influenced Angela Carter, then through Dylan and Baez to the folkies I listened to in my youth, going through Martin Carthy, the Incredible String Band (yes, they did Child ballads), Pentangle, etc., and finally arriving at Fairport Convention in chapter 37. Steeleye Span gets two chapters, chapter 40 which has a brief overview of their early work, and chapter 41, a fuller discussion of their Golden Age. Thompson says that Steeleye's real innovation was the almost brutally heavy rock arrangements on the likes of "King Henry" and "Alison Gross", at last giving these songs music that was as menacing and vicious as the lyrics. The "haunted and eerie" arrangement of "Long Lankin" also falls in that category. There are a few more references to Steeleye later on, suggesting that "The Prickly Bush" and "Lord Randall" are their two best later songs, ignoring their amazing "Tam Lin".
As the later chapters (there's 48) drift off into newer performers I don't know but who sound tempting from Thompson's descriptions, I looked some of them up but none wound up appealing to me at all. I'm a child of my time, I guess. But I enjoyed reading about the performers I knew and the earlier ones I didn't.
However, the best thing, the very best thing, in this book is the dedication, which reads like this:
To my beloved cousin Jane Thompson Dua, 1971-2022. As a child, she heard me playing "The Wee Wee Man" (Child 38) one day, and completely misunderstood what the song was about. Her interpretation still comes to mind when I hear that ballad.
Thursday, April 24, 2025
civics education
A few days ago, one whom I read was asking for childhood experiences in being educated in US civics. Generating a response caused memory to bring up some things I had half-forgotten:
I was educated in California, but that was all more than 50 years ago. I do not remember what kind of civics education we got in elementary school, but I do remember the lineup of specific classes after that. We had a dedicated civics class in 8th grade, I was taught it by one of the school's best teachers, and it went into a lot of detail, with a lot of informal argument on civics principles led by the teacher. One specific nugget I remember from this class was students doing a table reading of a skit from the textbook depicting Gen. Scott offering Col. Lee command of the Union Army. So this got into some pretty esoteric historical detail. I also remember a polemic in the textbook describing a pure libertarian government and asking, is this really want you'd want? (And this was a decade before the heyday of the Libertarian Party.)
Which in turn reminds me that, the same year in English class, we read the play Inherit the Wind. Again a full table reading, with the entire class participating, and also much discussion of the content.
So we were well drilled in civics before high school. In high school itself, graduation requirements included 1) a full-year course in US history; 2) a half-year course in US civics. No specific grade level attached, though I think most took these in their last two years, if only because they were more mature and better able to handle them. (This was one of the few, if not the only, state graduation requirements. Most of my attention in this matter was focused on meeting requirements for eligibility for admission to the University of California, which were stricter.)
I did not take these classes; I took the 2-year AP US history course, which was deemed to cover both topics. This was 11th-12th grade. We had an excellent teacher, one of the two best I ever had, who rambled his way from the War of Independence down to about the Truman administration before we ran out of time (and remember this was during the Nixon administration). It covered all sorts of topics in political-economic history (rather less on social history). Highlights included an unrehearsed classroom debate between the teacher and the school principal over the merits of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian principles of government, and a whole unit on immigration settlement of the Northern Plains.
There was no textbook; our reading was individually directed by the teacher. Most of mine went to the two major research papers I wrote in this class. These were college-level papers, and this is where I learned how to write one. We chose our own topics in consultation with the teacher, and one of mine was on a historical civics topic: the writing of California's first state constitution. I did most of the research for that one in the Stanford University library, which I had access to as family of an adjunct professor.
At the end of our second year, the teacher selected three of his best students and entered us in the AP US History exam. We all got 5, the best grade.
I felt really well equipped by high school to handle the work of reading history at a major university, UC Berkeley. Rather to my surprise, because I'd been warned repeatedly how tough college would be, especially at that level, I found my courses fun and rather easy.
I was educated in California, but that was all more than 50 years ago. I do not remember what kind of civics education we got in elementary school, but I do remember the lineup of specific classes after that. We had a dedicated civics class in 8th grade, I was taught it by one of the school's best teachers, and it went into a lot of detail, with a lot of informal argument on civics principles led by the teacher. One specific nugget I remember from this class was students doing a table reading of a skit from the textbook depicting Gen. Scott offering Col. Lee command of the Union Army. So this got into some pretty esoteric historical detail. I also remember a polemic in the textbook describing a pure libertarian government and asking, is this really want you'd want? (And this was a decade before the heyday of the Libertarian Party.)
Which in turn reminds me that, the same year in English class, we read the play Inherit the Wind. Again a full table reading, with the entire class participating, and also much discussion of the content.
So we were well drilled in civics before high school. In high school itself, graduation requirements included 1) a full-year course in US history; 2) a half-year course in US civics. No specific grade level attached, though I think most took these in their last two years, if only because they were more mature and better able to handle them. (This was one of the few, if not the only, state graduation requirements. Most of my attention in this matter was focused on meeting requirements for eligibility for admission to the University of California, which were stricter.)
I did not take these classes; I took the 2-year AP US history course, which was deemed to cover both topics. This was 11th-12th grade. We had an excellent teacher, one of the two best I ever had, who rambled his way from the War of Independence down to about the Truman administration before we ran out of time (and remember this was during the Nixon administration). It covered all sorts of topics in political-economic history (rather less on social history). Highlights included an unrehearsed classroom debate between the teacher and the school principal over the merits of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian principles of government, and a whole unit on immigration settlement of the Northern Plains.
There was no textbook; our reading was individually directed by the teacher. Most of mine went to the two major research papers I wrote in this class. These were college-level papers, and this is where I learned how to write one. We chose our own topics in consultation with the teacher, and one of mine was on a historical civics topic: the writing of California's first state constitution. I did most of the research for that one in the Stanford University library, which I had access to as family of an adjunct professor.
At the end of our second year, the teacher selected three of his best students and entered us in the AP US History exam. We all got 5, the best grade.
I felt really well equipped by high school to handle the work of reading history at a major university, UC Berkeley. Rather to my surprise, because I'd been warned repeatedly how tough college would be, especially at that level, I found my courses fun and rather easy.
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
concert review: Geneva Lewis, violin
Violin and piano recital at Herbst.
Geneva Lewis has a violin tone that's light and soft, but with a strong bite to it. It gives the effect of a small bird chirping, if the bird could chirp classical music. The sound was highly appropriate for the delicate, fragmentary Post Scriptum Sonata by Valentin Silvestrov, and impressively effective in the Romances by both Robert and Clara Schumann, and Mozart's K. 301 sonata.
Evren Ozel on piano matched her with lightness of touch. He has the softest and most pillowy of rolled chords.
You wouldn't think that the Franck Sonata would work well with this approach, but listen again: most of the first and third movements, and even part of the fourth, work well as light, delicate, and quiet. But both Lewis and Ozel could ramp up to strong and loud dynamics, just not exaggeratedly so, when Franck calls for it.
While I'm on music, a note on the recent death of Joel Krosnick, long-time cellist of the Julliard Quartet. They were among the groups whose records first taught me the string quartet repertoire. Already retired from there, he was at the Banff String Quartet Competition to teach student masterclasses in 2016, the first time I attended. I met him when he sat next to me for one of the competition concerts.
Geneva Lewis has a violin tone that's light and soft, but with a strong bite to it. It gives the effect of a small bird chirping, if the bird could chirp classical music. The sound was highly appropriate for the delicate, fragmentary Post Scriptum Sonata by Valentin Silvestrov, and impressively effective in the Romances by both Robert and Clara Schumann, and Mozart's K. 301 sonata.
Evren Ozel on piano matched her with lightness of touch. He has the softest and most pillowy of rolled chords.
You wouldn't think that the Franck Sonata would work well with this approach, but listen again: most of the first and third movements, and even part of the fourth, work well as light, delicate, and quiet. But both Lewis and Ozel could ramp up to strong and loud dynamics, just not exaggeratedly so, when Franck calls for it.
While I'm on music, a note on the recent death of Joel Krosnick, long-time cellist of the Julliard Quartet. They were among the groups whose records first taught me the string quartet repertoire. Already retired from there, he was at the Banff String Quartet Competition to teach student masterclasses in 2016, the first time I attended. I met him when he sat next to me for one of the competition concerts.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
I won the lottery
Oh, relax, it was only $50; but nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I've never seen a description of what actually happens when you do, so I'm writing about it here.
At Easter, our niece passed out scratch-off lottery cards as a kind of party favor. I got two of them. One of them I couldn't figure out the instructions for, so after scratching off most of its surface in a futile attempt to understand it, I threw it out. The other made sense, though. It had two 4x4 squares showing various occultish tokens - The Rooster, The Mermaid, The Hand, The Cello, etc - and another section which you'd scratch off to reveal a list of 14 more tokens. Match those up with the ones in the squares, which you could scratch off to keep track, and if you got four in a row on a square you win the amount printed at the end of the row.
According to the lottery's website, 1 in 44 tickets in this game win $50, so it isn't that rare. The instructions say take a small-win ticket to any lottery agent to redeem. So Monday morning I went to a local 7-11 that sells lottery tickets.
What would they do? Would they painstakingly verify that the tokens I'd scratched off on the square matched the ones in the list? Would they demand to know where I'd bought the ticket? (I don't know where she bought them.) Would they make me fill out the name/address/phone/email form on the back of the card?
No, none of those. The guy scratched off an unmarked section of the card, which I guess confirmed it was a winner, and also revealed a barcode which he scanned, probably to let the state know he was on the hook for the money, and then he handed me $50 in cash from the register. That's it. No ceremony, no Bob Barker or anything like that. I gave some of my largess to the homeless guy on the stoop outside.
I've never bought a lottery ticket, but I'm willing to try one if it's given me. This is about the fourth time that's ever happened, and the first one that's come up a winner however petty. These tickets cost $10 each, and I'm sure our niece spent a lot more than $50 to acquire her stash. So that explains where all that lottery money comes from, and that's why I'm not buying any tickets.
At Easter, our niece passed out scratch-off lottery cards as a kind of party favor. I got two of them. One of them I couldn't figure out the instructions for, so after scratching off most of its surface in a futile attempt to understand it, I threw it out. The other made sense, though. It had two 4x4 squares showing various occultish tokens - The Rooster, The Mermaid, The Hand, The Cello, etc - and another section which you'd scratch off to reveal a list of 14 more tokens. Match those up with the ones in the squares, which you could scratch off to keep track, and if you got four in a row on a square you win the amount printed at the end of the row.
According to the lottery's website, 1 in 44 tickets in this game win $50, so it isn't that rare. The instructions say take a small-win ticket to any lottery agent to redeem. So Monday morning I went to a local 7-11 that sells lottery tickets.
What would they do? Would they painstakingly verify that the tokens I'd scratched off on the square matched the ones in the list? Would they demand to know where I'd bought the ticket? (I don't know where she bought them.) Would they make me fill out the name/address/phone/email form on the back of the card?
No, none of those. The guy scratched off an unmarked section of the card, which I guess confirmed it was a winner, and also revealed a barcode which he scanned, probably to let the state know he was on the hook for the money, and then he handed me $50 in cash from the register. That's it. No ceremony, no Bob Barker or anything like that. I gave some of my largess to the homeless guy on the stoop outside.
I've never bought a lottery ticket, but I'm willing to try one if it's given me. This is about the fourth time that's ever happened, and the first one that's come up a winner however petty. These tickets cost $10 each, and I'm sure our niece spent a lot more than $50 to acquire her stash. So that explains where all that lottery money comes from, and that's why I'm not buying any tickets.
Monday, April 21, 2025
traveling broccoli chef
Most weekends that my days are both busy are because of concerts. Not this last weekend. No concerts. But Saturday was the last night of Pesach, and my friends who invite a bunch of their friends to their family Seder did that on this date this year. Sunday was Easter, and B. and I always spend that with her family. So I get two holidays for the price of one.
Pesach and a family Easter are both food-oriented celebrations, and my contribution to both is usually to bring along my trademark and favorite veggie, broccoli. The question is how to cook it. At home for a dinner side dish I usually just steam it, and I've done that for holidays. But usually I look for something fancier. Most of my specialty broccoli dishes are roasted, and have rather complicated recipes. So when I do those I usually make them in advance and bring them along to be heated by microwave just before serving. The problem is that reheated roasted broccoli is a rather sad thing compared to the fresh stuff.
This year, however, browsing through my recipe collection I found one which uses steamed broccoli and also cashews, which both B. and I like a lot. And the recipe was not complicated to prepare. So I made it twice, putting all the sauce ingredients together at home and packing everything up, altering the procedure for circumstances.
At the Seder, the hosting couple split duties this way: the wife organizes the invites and the table seating, while the husband and one of the sons do all the cooking. They're really well organized and prepare lots of dishes, so (with prearrangement) I figured they could add this in. When I arrived, I gave them the instructions:
This is a four-step recipe.
One, steam the broccoli. [Holds up large storage bag full of cut-up broccoli pieces.]
Two, melt 1/3 cup of margarine or butter or whatever you have in a small saucepan.
Three, stir this in - it's mostly soy sauce and garlic - and bring the mixture to a boil. [Holds up small sealed container of the sauce ingredients I'd mixed at home.]
Four, remove from the heat, stir in the cashews, and pour it over the broccoli. [Holds up small bag of cashew pieces.]
And I left them to it. They did a splendid job, and the dish got raves around the table despite being served following three other excellent veggie dishes that others had brought.
For Easter, where prep is more relaxed and there's much more room in the kitchen, it seemed best to steam the broccoli beforehand and bring it in a serving dish - steamed broccoli reheats in a microwave better than roasted broccoli does - and asked our niece who hosts for a small saucepan, cooking spoon, a free burner on the range, and the butter, and did the cooking myself. Also a successful dish.
Plans to repeat this next year are definitely on.
Pesach and a family Easter are both food-oriented celebrations, and my contribution to both is usually to bring along my trademark and favorite veggie, broccoli. The question is how to cook it. At home for a dinner side dish I usually just steam it, and I've done that for holidays. But usually I look for something fancier. Most of my specialty broccoli dishes are roasted, and have rather complicated recipes. So when I do those I usually make them in advance and bring them along to be heated by microwave just before serving. The problem is that reheated roasted broccoli is a rather sad thing compared to the fresh stuff.
This year, however, browsing through my recipe collection I found one which uses steamed broccoli and also cashews, which both B. and I like a lot. And the recipe was not complicated to prepare. So I made it twice, putting all the sauce ingredients together at home and packing everything up, altering the procedure for circumstances.
At the Seder, the hosting couple split duties this way: the wife organizes the invites and the table seating, while the husband and one of the sons do all the cooking. They're really well organized and prepare lots of dishes, so (with prearrangement) I figured they could add this in. When I arrived, I gave them the instructions:
This is a four-step recipe.
One, steam the broccoli. [Holds up large storage bag full of cut-up broccoli pieces.]
Two, melt 1/3 cup of margarine or butter or whatever you have in a small saucepan.
Three, stir this in - it's mostly soy sauce and garlic - and bring the mixture to a boil. [Holds up small sealed container of the sauce ingredients I'd mixed at home.]
Four, remove from the heat, stir in the cashews, and pour it over the broccoli. [Holds up small bag of cashew pieces.]
And I left them to it. They did a splendid job, and the dish got raves around the table despite being served following three other excellent veggie dishes that others had brought.
For Easter, where prep is more relaxed and there's much more room in the kitchen, it seemed best to steam the broccoli beforehand and bring it in a serving dish - steamed broccoli reheats in a microwave better than roasted broccoli does - and asked our niece who hosts for a small saucepan, cooking spoon, a free burner on the range, and the butter, and did the cooking myself. Also a successful dish.
Plans to repeat this next year are definitely on.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
concert review: Ariel Quartet
I crammed a lot of detail into my review of this concert, enough to make me feel disappointed in the roughness and lack of sophistication in the writing. For me, the hardest part of concert reviewing can be finding the right words to describe the strong experience of reacting to the specific performers' styles and abilities.
I wasn't sure if my editors would let pass my rather cheeky comparison of this concert's repertoire with that of the previous Ariel concert I reviewed, but it got through. However, though I provided one, the published article has no link to that earlier review.
The big difference between those two concerts was something off-topic enough for this one that I didn't mention it this time. The previous concert had been held to show off the Violins of Hope, instruments rescued and restored from the Nazi Holocaust. As I mentioned in that review, being played by such excellent performers pushed against the limitations of the Violins of Hope's limited qualities as musical instruments.
After this week's concert, I got a chance to talk about this a little with the group's cellist. She said it was so much easier to play this time on their own instruments, whose natures and capacities they know well. And the extreme aptitude of the performance confirmed that.
Another thing there was no room to mention was the pre-concert masterclass, something I don't always have time to attend. At Kohl, the guest artists usually hold a masterclass with local high-school students. This time the ensemble was a string quintet rather than quartet, playing the scherzo from Schubert's work for that ensemble. The most interesting part of the teaching was the request that the students sing passages from the music, to help them appreciate matters of balance and flow.
I wasn't sure if my editors would let pass my rather cheeky comparison of this concert's repertoire with that of the previous Ariel concert I reviewed, but it got through. However, though I provided one, the published article has no link to that earlier review.
The big difference between those two concerts was something off-topic enough for this one that I didn't mention it this time. The previous concert had been held to show off the Violins of Hope, instruments rescued and restored from the Nazi Holocaust. As I mentioned in that review, being played by such excellent performers pushed against the limitations of the Violins of Hope's limited qualities as musical instruments.
After this week's concert, I got a chance to talk about this a little with the group's cellist. She said it was so much easier to play this time on their own instruments, whose natures and capacities they know well. And the extreme aptitude of the performance confirmed that.
Another thing there was no room to mention was the pre-concert masterclass, something I don't always have time to attend. At Kohl, the guest artists usually hold a masterclass with local high-school students. This time the ensemble was a string quintet rather than quartet, playing the scherzo from Schubert's work for that ensemble. The most interesting part of the teaching was the request that the students sing passages from the music, to help them appreciate matters of balance and flow.
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