Events

Sunday night I visited my 30th park. I have to say, Coors Field is better than Coors Beer. The Phillies won, because apparently I am a curse on all the ballparks I visit. But that's OK. Being in Denver on 4/20, and having walked past the 4/20 Festival earlier in the day, I really didn't mind all that much. It's hard to tell, but while I had a really great seat, the foul screen meant my photos weren't perfect: The weather nearly was, though. And it was a fun game. Just two parks left: Toronto on June...

Friday night I got to my 29th (out of 32 planned) baseball park: Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas. I didn't realize until I got there that they're tearing it down at the end of this season. (That might affect the Geas if I don't get to both Toronto and St. Louis this season.) It was too busy at the start of the game to get the front-gate photo I always try for. But here's the view from my seat: And the whole park: Things didn't go well for the (then) last-place Rangers. Their in-state division rivals...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post sits right in the middle of everything. The tritone is the interval between the perfect 4th and the perfect 5th. Depending on which direction you're going, it's either an augmented 4th or a diminished 5th. And it's always going somewhere. In the C major scale, the natural tritone is between F and B (where it's an augmented 4th) or B and F (where it's a diminished 5th). B, remember, is the leading tone in the key of C, so it really, really wants to resolve to C. The...

The day after a 3-day, 3-flight weekend doesn't usually make it into the top-10 productive days of my life. Like today for instance. So here are some things I'm too lazy to write more about today: More evidence that living on the west side of a time zone causes sleep deprivation. Over the weekend, at 2pm on Saturday, Chicago set a record for the lowest humidity on record. A software developer and pilot looks at the relationship between the software and hardware of the Boeing 737-MAX. The grounding of...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge will get a little funky today as we look at syncopation, which is nothing more than an unexpected rhythm. Here's a simple example. Take this clunky melody: Now let's syncopate it a little, by shifting some of the notes off the beat: Instead of hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, now it hits 1, and, and, and, 2, and, and, 4. It's harder to dance to but more interesting. More examples? How about Mozart's Symphony #40, third movement: Or the Rolling Stones? Beethoven? Scott...

Most members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) last week fired their agents because of the intrusion of finance into their business. Large agencies, some owned by finance companies and no longer partnerships, no longer appear to represent the writers they claim to represent, as the agents have interests on both sides of many deals. The Association of Talent Agents (ATA) has responded to all these principals firing their agents with questionable logic: For those of you who haven’t been following, the...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will take a look at common musical forms. We've already seen some examples of common musical forms, even though I didn't call them out: the canon and the fugue. Both are imitative forms, though as you've seen the fugue is far more complex than the canon. "Row Row Row Your Boat" is a canon (but, of course, someone made a fugue out of it). When we talk about other forms, we usually note large sections of music with letters. So a form of, say, A-B-A means that you...

My official post, with photos, will appear Sunday. I just want to put a marker in the sand that tonight I went to what passed for a baseball game at Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas. I didn't realize that they're tearing the park down after this season because it's—wait for it—25 years old. Really? Twenty-five years? You know Wrigley and Fenway are both over 100, right? Whatever. This was Park #29, and apparently the Geas won't end this year because I'll have to go to Globe Life Field next year. Or...

The always-incisive Alexandra Petri provides a more honest view of AG William Barr's press conference yesterday: Hello, everyone. I am here to repeat the words “no collusion” as many times as I can without sounding suspicious, but first, I would like to thank Rod Rosenstein. He is here standing behind me. He had plans to step back from public service before I came along and asked him to assist me. Then again, some would argue that by assisting me, he did not perform a public service. Anyway, he is here....

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post explains how musicians keep time. Through all the examples I've posted this month, you may have noticed that a note's stem has a relationship to how long the note sounds. They do. Starting with a whole note (open, with no stem), each change to the stem reduces the length of the note by half. This also works when you start with a whole rest, except a rest means "don't do anything here." Example: (In the UK, those notes are called whole, half, quarter, quaver...