Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:01 PM

Just wanted to record that this morning as we were leaving the house, we saw a woodpecker in one of the trees.

Tried to identify it, but we're not good enough birders to know for sure.

I didn't notice any red on its head, and its wings seemed to be banded in black and white -- almost like stripes.

Seemed rather small, the size of a cardinal or smaller. Again, hard to gauge from the angle we were looking.

Anybody know what kinds of woodpeckers can be found in Northern Massachusetts?

Still, I think this is the first time I've actually seen a woodpecker in the wild, so... cool!

PS: It appears we weren't the only ones to see woodpeckers today in Massachusetts.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:54 PM

As an update to the previous post, I am now safely ensconced in my parents' house, stealing borrowing their net connection. :)

The more forward of their two cats already is coming up to me for sniffs and scritches.

PS (@ 6:05pm): For those who might be wondering, Ian will be joining me in Florida tomorrow; he's not flying until after Sunday school. I sure as heck hope that the forecasted snowstorms won't cause any delays...

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:50 PM

I'm writing this in the T.F. Green Airport outside Providence R.I.

Hadn't mentioned I was taking a trip, did I?

Well, a sudden... joyful announcement... required a rush trip to my relatives in Florida.

Let's just leave it at that for now. :)

Unfortunately, the airport wifi is T-Mobile, and since I don't feel like paying for internet access, I probably won't actually post this until I'm at my parents' house. [Besides, I've tried plugging my laptop into several outlets, and none of them seem to have any power for the laptop to draw upon. Since I don't want to drain my batteries fruitlessly, I'll probably just shut things off soon.]

I will also grump that Southwest's advice to arrive at this airport two hours before the flight is way way excessive.

I saw something neat at the airport bookstore, however, which the other thing I wished to blog.

I don't fly often, so don't know how long this business model has been in effect, but the following flyer was sticking out of many of the new books:

Read & Return

Purchase any new book at the regular price, Read and Return the book with the original receipt within 6 months to any location listed on the inside of this bookmark and receive a refund of 50% of the purchase price.

And there's a list of about sixty other Paradies Shops airport bookstores around the country.

Elsewhere in the bookstore, I saw a rack of used books, selling for 50% cover-price.

In other words, the bookstore isn't necessarily making any extra profit out of any book.

But it's a nice way of encouraging customers to return and providing less expensive books for readers who don't need a pristine new copy.

Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, I don't know when I'll posts this on the server, but right now it's shortly after noon and I've got a 1:30 flight, so I'm going to shut off my laptop, save my battery power, and read some of the books I brought with me for the wait.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 PM

Crossposted to bard_in_boston and riba_rambles

Actors' Shakespeare Project -- my favorite local theater company -- will be performing Titus Andronicus starting the end of this month.

Titus Andronicus was one of his earlier works (obviously influenced by Marlowe) and is generally considered Shakespeare's most violent play. Though popular in its day, it was almost never performed in the centuries since -- until the mid-1950s when it was revived to much acclaim by Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh. In the past decade the play has become more popular, most notably in the Julie Taymor film starring Anthony Hopkins.

The play will be directed by David R. Gammons, who designed the set for last year's King Lear, and will feature an all-male cast.

Continuing ASP's tradition of presenting plays as the centerpiece of a larger community "project", the production will be coupled with comprehensive outreach and education projects around the themes of poetry, family relationships, and violence.

Location: The Basement at the Garage, Garage Mall, 38 JFK St., Cambridge

I'll confess, I didn't even know the Garage had a basement. Still, it's totally T accessible and I know many of you still hang out in and around Harvard Square, so you should have no excuse for missing it!

Previews: March 29 and 30; Opening Night: March 31
Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2 pm through April 22nd

Tickets $40, students and seniors $33; previews $30. $15 student rush.
Group discounts are available.

Warning: This play contains rape and hair-trigger acts of violence. I don't know how graphic ASP plans to get (last summer's Globe production apparently caused audience members to faint), but this is not necessarily family fare. Consider it the historical equivalent to Quentin Tarantino. :)

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:23 PM

When I woke up this morning, I was dreaming up some story involving Neville (Longbottom) and Pansy (Parkinson).

But I can no longer remember any of the reasons why the two were thrown together, though I thought it was brilliant at the time.

9:29 pm Update: After further thought, I think one of them was in a hospital bed while the other was visiting or nursing...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

Ian and I stopped at a Wild Oats on our way home tonight, because I was thirsty and wanted to pick up a decent soda.

I noticed they had a dispenser of antibacterial wipes next to the shopping carts and baskets.

How can people be that paranoid about germs on a shopping cart and still buy organic food?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:30 PM

And Ian has another Boopsie update for those who are interested.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:42 AM

Door-to-door, my morning commute takes the same amount of time as one lesson in Pimsleur's Italian Short Course.

So far, the Pimsleur's approach seems to be working well for me (and Ian).

I can now say "I understand Italian very well" even when I don't.

But so far, it hasn't been too hard. I studied Spanish in high school; Ian studied Latin. So while we're both approaching Italian from opposite directions, our backgrounds definitely come in handy.

My only complaint with the Pimsleur approach is that it's solely focused on verbal Italian -- speaking and listening.

That's valuable, but I assume I'll need to read while in Italy -- menus, train schedules, etcetera -- and Pimsleur doesn't go into that.

Which means supplementing it with some other method of language learning.

Any suggestions?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:58 AM

For those who don't normally read Ian's journal, last night, he wrote a long entry on how Boopsie's doing.

Ian sees more of her than I do (being home most days while I'm at work) and he's been in charge of taking her to the vet as needed and pilling her daily (for her thyroid).

In short, Boopsie's getting on in years.

I've had her since the summer of 1991, finding her on the streets shortly after my 21st birthday, a month after my college graduation.

At that time, we (the vet and I) estimated her age around six months old -- particularly since she went into heat shortly after I made her an indoor cat.

So you do the math.

Incidentally, I first met Ian in the autumn of 1992, and we didn't start dating until the end of 1994, so Boopsie has a certain amount of seniority.

Heck, Boopsie is pretty much the only solid fixture in my post-college adult life.

And now I may be getting unnecessarily maudlin, so I'll just stop here.

[Besides, I've got to be getting to work.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:18 PM

As I feared, the Blogger upgrade reposted my entire RSS feed (nearly 20 entries) as new items on your friends pages.

Hopefully this is a one-time glitch, and not worth defriending over...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:35 PM

If anyone from Blogger is still doing bugchecking and fixes, I noticed three changes to my profile:

• It changed my default email address to the gmail one (though that's probably considered a feature)
• I originally omitted the year for my birthday -- the migration changed it to 1756
• And somehow, my homepage URL was wiped out.

Those were easy enough to catch and fix.

Now we get to see what happens when I post!

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:35 PM

I'm about to migrate my journal to New Blogger.

I've backed up all my settings and templates and posted files.

I'm still nervous, though.

Because New Blogger no longer supports a dedicated archive page (where I've been hosting both archives and search options, it means I'll have to update my template.

A pre-emptive possible apology to people reading my journal from aggregators (such as the LiveJournal feed) on the offchance that the upgrade changes my feed in such a way that you get spammed with all my current posts.

Here goes...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:50 PM

Crooks and Liars quoting Rachel Maddow on CNN:

"You can't say it doesn't matter what we're doing cause we're trying to get Al Qaeda. It matters what we do. We're America. That's more important than Al-Qaeda."

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:45 PM

So, this evening we attended the BPL/BLO lecture on Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera.

During the Q&A, somebody mentioned that Boston supports Shakespeare in the Park, so how about free public opera?

Afterwards, I made the suggestion that Boston Lyric Opera should partner with Commonwealth Shakespeare and try to pair free public Shakespeare with free public opera by doing the same story in both forms -- Verdi lends itself to three possibilities, just off the top of my head: Macbeth, Othello/Otello, Merry Wives & Falstaff.

Apparently, BLO sometimes programs its seasons thematically, so I may have planted a seed for a Shakespearean opera season.

Here's hoping.

BTW, if anybody from the BLO stumbles upon this site, while I know there are more than enough Opera's based on Shakespeare's plots to fill a season, may I just point out that last year William, a biographical opera on the Bard, debuted in Sweden by Håkan Lindquist and Tommy Andersson. [A press release and my comments upon hearing the simulcast] Just food for thought...

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 PM

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV):

After telling a bunch of different stories about why they fired the U.S. Attorneys, the Bush Administration is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Congress and the American people deserve a straight answer. If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness.

PS: I also like Kevin Drum's summary of Bush's speech tonight:

Allow me to spend a few minutes scoring political points by accusing Democrats of scoring political points.

That's what it sounded like to me, and why I'm so glad to hear the Democrats not giving ground...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:49 PM

I agree with Susie. What a brilliant passage:

Privatizing profits in good times while socializing losses in bad times is another form of reckless corporate welfare that generates moral hazard while fostering new bubbles. Ideological supply side voodoo zealots should not be allowed to spin a tale where evil government intervention caused this disaster. And the private sector institutions and investors that indulged in this unregulated reckless behavior should take their losses.

Nouriel Roubini on the subprime mortgage mess, as quoted by Atrios.

Government can't not take care of people in bad times, which means that responsible governments should take steps to prevent things from reaching such a state.

Which means regulating industries, rather than relying upon faith that corporations focused on short-term profits will make the right decisions to benefit the public over the long-term.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:37 AM

No, not your usual grumble about the return to the workweek.

But Boopsie is a big furry pain-in-the-butt who would not be quiet at all last night.

She doesn't meow for attention, but finds any possibly noisemaker in the house, from paper she can crinkle and rip to stationary objects she can scratch to... I don't know whether she wanted food (she has plenty) or attention, but she would not let us rest. And we can't lock her out of the bedroom, because then she transfers all her attention to the door, trying to claw and bash it open.

[And the reason I was up so late blogging last night was because she pissed in the bed yesterday afternoon, so I had to change all the sheets.]

I am so exhausted...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:35 AM

Just a quick quote from Krugman's latest column echoing sentiment I and other bloggers have been expressing:

Mr. Reagan's administration, like Mr. Bush's, was run by movement conservatives -- people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.
In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

<snip>

The movement's apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn't likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

BTW, over at his new digs on Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has been churning out dramatic articles on:

• Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally (3/13)
• The DOJ's explicit refusal to obey the law (3/16)
• The significance of the FBI's law-breaking (3/18)

Scary times.

And while I don't always agree with Bill Maher, his latest New Rule is on YouTube and worth a listen.

Excerpting another blogger's transcript:

And finally, new rule: liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn't asked Americans to sacrifice for the War on Terror. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice something enormous: our civil rights.

<snip>

So when it comes to sacrifice, don't kid yourself--you *have* given up a lot! You've given up faith in your government's honesty, the good will of people overseas, and six-tenths of the Bill of Rights. Here's what you've sacrificed: search and seizure, warrents, self incrimination, trial by jury, cruel and unusual punishment. Here's what you have left: handguns, religion, and they can't make you quarter a British soldier.

<snip>

In conclusion, after 9-11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden "could run but he can't hide". But he ran and hid. So Bush went to Plan B: pissing on the Constitution and torturing random people. Conservatives always say the great thing Reagan did was make us feel good about America again. Well, do you feel good about America now?

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:25 PM

Last July I blogged several photos of a kitten that SimplyKimberly dubbed "watch kitty," because the photos featured the kitten perched on a wristwatch-wearing forearm.

Well, after several months,

Eventually it became a cat

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:18 PM

Primarily a personal reminder:

Tuesday Night at the Opera (PDF)
March 20, 2007 at 7 p.m.
Rabb Lecture Hall, BPL Copley Square

The Boston Lyric Opera presents a lecture and performance from Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:03 PM

Thanks for the advice so far.

An Italian in London -- somebody who knows the route -- has advised us not to take the train from Paris to Italy.

However, as (I think) I've mentioned earlier, Ian hates travel. He particularly hates flying. However, he likes trains. Trains are cool. That's why I thought of it -- the train trip is much more palatable to him.

Is the Paris to Italy train any better if we get a sleeper car? Or was that part of your assumption, and it's not worth the time or expense?

While on the subject of transportation, the Tuscan villa we'll be staying at is right near the train station. So we don't necessarily have to rent a car to get to most of the major cities.

On the other hand, renting a car would give us a little more flexibility in our schedule, and enable us to visit wineries and vinyards that aren't train accessible.

I've heard rumors of horror stories about Italian driving. Given that we do drive in Boston (which also has a bad reputation) and assuming that we wouldn't be trying to drive and park within cities (we'd walk or take public transit) what is Italian driving like?

Should we consider renting a car during our stay, or should we stay off the roads altogether?

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 PM

So, I've been flipping through a library copy of Shakespeare in the theatre: an anthology of criticism, largely to read other reviews for style and content ideas.

As far as I can tell, Drew Barrymore has never acted in Shakespeare. No "Joint Ventures" between her and the Bard, according to an IMDB search.

A review of Music and Lyrics commented on Drew Barrymore's recent string of romantic comedies, and wondered what direction she'd steer her career when she got too old for those.

So, does anyone think Drew Barrymore will eventually do Shakespeare? And, if so, which roles would you most want to see her in?

I think she could be magnificent as Titania (Tom Green or Adam Sandler as Bottom?), and I'll confess, some sick side of me wants to see her giving sad puppydog eyes as silent Lavinia.

Meanwhile, over dinner tonight we were discussing Merry Wives of Windsor, and how well it might work in a modern setting...

...which quickly devolved into a matter of casting.

After arguing about some of the usual suspects among oversized actors -- such as John Goodman or John Travolta for Falstaff -- I realized that I could actually see it working better with an all-black cast.

Here's what we came up with:

Falstaff:	Eddie Murphy (Hey, it's comedy, he'd be the star, it's potentially respectable to Academy voters, he gets to wear a fat suit and dress in drag -- it's his ideal role!)
Master Ford:	Martin Lawrence
Mistress Ford:	Jada Pinkett Smith
Master Page:	Will Smith (Yes, we're splitting up the couple -- but I think they're all better suited to these roles than trying to pair them)
Mistress Page:	Queen Latifah
Anne Page:	Brandy
Mistress Quickly:	Whoopi Goldberg

What do you think?

And any chance somebody can get word of this to any of them? Or to someone in Hollywood who might be able to start something moving?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:05 PM

It's been a while since I've posted one of these lists, and I just got back from the library, so I thought I'd provide a peek into my collective haul (including selections from at least three networks):

Can you tell what's on my mind?

Besides the obvious fact that

I love libraries...

I know I won't read them all, but I've got enough variety that even if I only flip through a fraction, I should glean something worthwhile...

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:35 AM

So, Ian's grandparents are renting a villa in Tuscany for two weeks the end of June.

I've casually mentioned it a few times, though never quite made a formal announcement.

I am making plans -- and in my own inimicable style, doing so in a TiddlyWiki webpage, which I'm now making open to the public.

So if you want to see what's on my mind as far as a trip to Italy is concerned, please poke around at Osmond-Riba.org/lis/Italy/Tiddly.htm.

It's still very much a work-in-progress, with a lot of half-written tidbits I intend to further fill in later (such as hours and admission costs for various sites).

But as other family members are trying to make their plans, the information I've gleaned may come in handy.

The nature of TiddlyWiki is such that it can't be edited over the web (it's mostly intended as a local tool) but I've added a comment form if you wish to pipe up about anything. Point out destinations that aren't on our radar or warn us away from places you think are overrated.

How often to people invite you to kibitz on their vacation plans?

Now's your chance!

BTW, did you know there's a replica Globe Theatre in Rome? It's probably superfluous, since I hope to re-visit Sam Wanamaker's in Southwark,* but an interesting feature nonetheless...

^* My current plans involve flying into London. Spend a few days in London to show Ian around (and maybe catch a play at the Globe, which I missed last go-round) then take an overnight train from London to Italy (with a possible stopover in Paris for dinner). We could either return via a puddlejumper Italy -> London, or just make our trip in two one-way flights through different countries.