notes

1. Another commitment today means I can't attend the Redwood Symphony's opening concert tonight, despite my interest and the pleas both of my editors and its conductor to have me there reviewing it, so I substituted by using it as the kick-off for a round-up of the local classical concert season. Word-count restrictions meant I had to stuff the professional chamber music societies at the end (and I even left out entirely the one that plays in a dreadful hall).

2. Cat report: Maia has a particular sound, a rising trilled purr, which means "Please resume scritching my head." Every time I took even the briefest pause from this arduous duty, she'd utter this. Petting sessions customarily last about ten minutes (until she jumps down from the bed), twice a day after meals. You can count on it. Pippin, meanwhile, is still thinking outside of the box, to the pleasure only of the accountants in the paper towel industry.

3. If Jimmy Kimmel knows more about health care than a passel of Republican Senators, which sadly he does, then it's no surprise that John Cleese knows more about political analysis than a passel of reporters. In this interview he points out something that's puzzled me. Every time I see an article purporting to explain why Trump won so many working-class votes, the article goes into great detail about economic suffering, particularly in rural areas, but never - not once - do they go on and address the question that this is the first time I've seen put in print. In Cleese's words, "why on Earth did the less successful people think Trump was going to do anything he said he was going to do to help them?"

4. I'm not happy with having a "president" implying threats of nuclear war against another country, are you? I suspect the rest of the world isn't thrilled either. And as long as it's still limited to trading verbal personal insults, I have to say that the other, non-English-speaking, party has a more virtuosic command of English-language insults than our English-speaking one has.

5. Anybody re-watched the video of "Despacito" since the hurricanes hit Puerto Rico? Wondering whether anything in the outdoor scenes is still standing? That'd make a great hook for a feature article, but I haven't seen anything of the sort.

6. I was not tremendously thrilled by my experience having an evening out at a comedy club in LA, but it wasn't a bad experience, and lordy lordy was it nowhere near as awful as this.

7. Another thing I did in LA was return to the Richard Nixon Presidential Museum. I'd been there once when it was a private entity, and I awed at its description of Watergate as a conspiracy organized by John Dean and Sam Ervin to overthrow Nixon. I wanted to see how it's changed now that the museum is federally-owned. The contents have been entirely revamped, and the Watergate display is a detailed timeline of impressive veracity, but other parts of the museum are more slanted (there's an implication that South Vietnam fell only because Congress failed to appropriate enough money to support it after the US pulled out), and the only books on Watergate in the gift shop are more conspiracy theory nut jobs.

8. Teenagers who don't drink, drive, or date. Note that this is only a trend. "The portion of high school students who’d had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2015." Still a lot on both sides at both dates. Apparently the reason they haven't learned to drive is that the only reasons they see to drive are to get you to places where you can drink or date. Well, even back in my day I didn't drink nor date in high school, but I did drive, because it was the only way to get anywhere in the trackless suburbs, even to go shopping. And my parents were thrilled to have me available to drive my little brothers to their lessons et al so that they didn't have to do it; they encouraged me to get my license at the first available opportunity. The newer law prohibiting under-18s from driving other minors without an adult present would not have pleased my parents. And maybe that's a reason for the difference.