2018.01.22
I came to the city when I was twenty and became a fruit seller. It's allowed me to build a house in my village. I feel healthy. I get to eat. A lot of people don't get to eat on time. So I've gotten everything I wanted. The minute you think: 'I have a lot'--that's the moment your spirit is at rest. My spirit is at rest.
I've been using "Google Translate" to help facilitate with Omar, leader of "Banda de Paz", a group JP Honk partners with. My own high school and college spanish is so unreliable... so far my favorite observation is if you translate "rehearsal" into Spanish (ensayo) and back, you often get back "trial" or "test". That makes me think that many people rehearse harder than I do.
Did I mention I was born in Philadelphia?
What I wanted was an image of Trump's first year that would stimulate the imagination without paralyzing the will. The writer Deanne Stillman put it best, I think, when she wrote on Twitter that Trump is luminol, the chemical that police spray on crime scenes to reveal traces of blood. Stillman was responding to a remark I had made about the astonishing profusion of secrets, tensions, lies, and dirty deals that have been exposed since Trump took office -- I was thinking of racial crimes, sex scandals, acts of espionage, political tricks, even the outlandish CIA plots, real and contemplated, that were disclosed in the JFK assassination files. It felt as though the country had been laid out on a slab for a giant inquest, an autopsy of the remains from a mass grave.
Trump had to be the cause. I could find no other. But how the process worked was harder to figure out. What had he done to lift the lid off the coffin? Why had all the bloodstains started glowing? I'd heard it said, for example, that Trump's alleged sexual assaults were the trigger for the #MeToo movement. That may be part of it, but there was something else going on, something bigger: a realignment of power. Many of the men accused of sexual misdeeds had enjoyed protection from the very institutions -- the political parties and media organizations -- that were partly leveled by Trump's election. Silencing women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted was business as usual for the Establishment. But Trump was not allied with the TV networks that employed such once-untouchable figures as Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. He owed nothing to Harvey Weinstein's Hollywood, which conspicuously advertised its ties to Democratic causes and candidates. Trump's election shook the confidence of the wrongdoers within the Establishment, and their accusers sensed that, I suspect. Had Clinton won, Weinstein, an old friend and donor, would almost certainly have been partying at the White House, which might have given his victims pause. With Trump as president, though, no one knew what the new order would look like.
This is not a defense of Trump. Nor is it an apology for him. It is merely an acknowledgment that Trump breeds chaos, and chaos upends everything. It has ripple effects and unforeseen consequences. Conservatives are so afraid of chaos that they tend to oppose even thoughtful, reformist change, lest it spin out of control. Now they have a true maniac to deal with, and things are certainly out of their control. Over at the State Department, Trump's contempt for tradition and expertise has proved devastating. Morale is down and early retirements have jumped. Meanwhile, the NFL, the consummate fraternity, can no longer count on politicians' support. The league used to do its business quietly, behind the thickest of closed doors, but now its owners' thoughtless comments are leaking to the public: one of them recently compared the players to inmates in a prison. The same anarchic forces that dissolved the elite boys' clubs of the media are destabilizing these other entities that depend on school ties, teamwork, loyalty, and handshake deals. Gentleman's agreements, for good or ill, the ones that oppress and the ones that foster stability, need gentlemen to maintain them, after all. And Trump is not a gentleman.
Any other fellow computer nerds out there subconsciously bugged that a trombone slide held all the way in is "first position" and not "zeroeth position"?
Actually, for my School of Honk'ers that might be curious about the pattern valves have -- I don't know if sectionals run this by new members when they start, so apologies if everyone knows it :-D (For School of Honk, this mostly is about the trumpets and tubas, though or baritone friends we get sometimes play the same too)
Most brass instruments with valves work the same way - pressing down more valves is like moving out the slide on a trombone, the air goes through that tube, so overall the instrument is "bigger", in terms of more tubing = slower vibration = lower sound. (Of course it's more complicated than that, since you have to learn to adjust your lips to buzz at a different "partial". Or it could be simpler than that- with a bugle (or heaven forbid a Vuvuzela) and no valves- in which case you can play nothing but partials. Bugle calls like "taps" and "reveille" make their music out of that- a trumpet player can play all those songs without pressing any valves, or just keeping one down all the time)
ANYWAY, the middle, "second" valve moves you down a half step, first valve a whole step, third valve -- 1 1/2 steps. Which seems pretty weird! I think it's meant to put the more-used whole step on the stronger pointer finger, maybe? And you can combine valves to lower more steps (you might have noticed the third valve is more-or-less the same as first plus second.) Some big horns like concert tubas will have a fourth valve, which will put you down 2 whole steps, and so is about the same as pressing 1 and 3, but lets you dig even lower beneath that.
from The Guardian's 'Trump hasn't just done a good job, he's done a great job' – the view from Muncie, Indiana:
The first is that every Trump voter I speak to thinks he is doing a good job. Since only one of them voted for him in the primaries, they cannot be written off as core supporters. Among achievements cited are cutting taxes; deregulating; putting a conservative on the supreme court who will oppose abortion rights; defeating Isis; and presiding over jobs growth and a record high on the stock market. "I don't just think he's done a pretty good job," says Ted Baker, executive director of The Innovation Connector, which provides office space, advice and support for local entrepreneurs. "I think he's done a great job. It's not easy when you have the mainstream media in your country battling you all the time."I think us leftists need to look at this. Yeah, I understand these are people for whom white nationalism and privilege isn't a thing for, who will never be Pro-Choice, who haven't seen what will happen to health care, that everything positive Trump has done has almost been an accident or an inheritance from Obama's economy, and that once the Winter Olympic-driven North/South Korea we'll see what the hell happens there, but Next Draft was also right in pointing to McSweeney's parody article I've Been Asking Trump Voters Every Couple Seconds If They Still Support The President.
They're aware of many of the faults of our pussy-grabber-in-chief, but they're willing to chalk it up him being like your drunk racist uncle, but who still gets things done, and some things they care about. Cobert-ian "Truthiness" reigns supreme, expertise can be poo-poo'd, they thought health care sucked before anyway, hey look at Isis, and what the f*** do we care, we're white and Cis. Actually we don't even know what Cis-means hahaha!