One thing about editing is that music can be very distracting, especially music with any sort of lyric. So, when I’m editing I do so generally in silence (or purely instrumental music if it’s a lighter text). I love it, then, when I get to the design and layout stage because I can listen to anything I want. Three CDs...
It’s an overly broad term, but essentially “Early Music” refers to Western music from “the beginning” through the sixteenth century (including some artists and genres of the seventeenth). This time period is where I spent most of my time and energy in university, and my honour’s and master’s theses focused on composers...
One genre I enjoy for the most part is anime. I’m not hard core or anything, and there’s plenty I don’t like, but there’s quite a bit that I do. My recent Netflix binge has only stoked this even more as I suddenly have access to so many shows I couldn’t access before. The purpose of this post is to mention my three...
Rating: 5/5 I love musicals. I particularly love musicals with strong stories. Adele & I have recently discovered Netflix, and one of the best things about it is the wealth of older movies we can watch for next to nothing. This weekend we sat down and watched two favourites of mine, “Funny Girl” and “Hello, Dolly!”...
Rating: 5/5 Haim Harari, A View From the Eye of the Storm: Terror and Reason in the Middle East (New York: Regan Books, 2005). Read this book. It will only take a few hours. It is worth every minute.
Rating: 5/5 “Bohnanza” by Rio Grande Games If you’ve known me for long, you know I’m an avid gamer. While I enjoy games in any medium, nothing beats face-to-face, tabletop gaming. (I still think Bridge is the greatest of man’s creations.) And when it comes to face-to-face gaming with a group of non- or semi-gamers,...
Rating: 5/5 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (New York: Routledge, 2002). Dr. Faustus was an actual historical figure. He was apparently an itinerant scholar and fortune teller, and there is some documentation on his life during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. (See the Wikipedia article...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2010). I have read a fair bit of Wendell Berry lately, and I will soon be looking more closely at his fiction. This collection of essays is more autobiographical and is certainly more literary. The overall focus is on influence—how we...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010). I can’t say enough how much I enjoy Wendell Berry’s writing. At a technical level, his writing is beautiful. He uses plain language , and his arguments are clearly and logically laid out. At a content...
Rating: 3/5 Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Well I’ve decided to stop reading books about education for a while. I just get too frustrated and frankly, too hopeless. If Adele and I are ever in a...