new music/inland empire/winter/the girls

In addition to entertaining the girls, which lately has involved walks in the cold to the park to play freeze tag and get some exercise, a wonderful trip to the library to practice reading and play pre-school games on the computers and check out books, studying, working, and yes finally hopping back on the treadmill to start running again, there have been a few new releases musicwise that I have been enjoying.

Last week the new Shins came out and I of course got it immediately, it is really a good piece of music to listen, I absolutely loved three of the tracks immediately. I am still surprised that they were so poor live when we saw them at Lollapalooza in the summer. Also, yesterday the new Skinny Puppy was released and it is brilliant, many reviews are heralding it as their best album ever. I am not yet ready to state that though it is a bit more accessible than some past albums though still menacing and thought provoking. It definitely will be fun when they tour in April, their visual spectacle is always cool.

Things are going well, just very busy. It's been particularly cold recently which has kinda limited the family's outdoor exploits. Lots of practicing with numbers, letters, and reading at home, and even some board games such as monopoly, which the girls enjoy. Reminds me, I want to teach them how to play backgammon.

And the new Lynch film is in Chicago for only one more week! So I need to figure out some way to go see it. A. realizes how important it is to me (she knows quite well my Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive obsessions) and so I should be able to sneak out next week and see it. It is a bit frustrating knowing it is 3 hours long, but I am eager to see it, Laura Dern, rabbits, and Poland. Quite a combination!

All for now.

Pats quote

"You can be a Super Bowl champion that wins an individual Super Bowl or you can be one of those teams that are always associated with being a dynasty. They used it for the Steelers, the Cowboys, the 49ers, the Packers and they used it with us. That means we were one of the best teams ever, if not the best. I'd put us up against anyone, but if you ask me, the best team to ever play in this league was the New England Patriots." - LB Tedy Bruschi on the Patriots three Super Bowl titles over the last six years.

the Horror

This makes no sens whatsoever to me...how is this humanly possible?


LONDON (AFP) - Forty-one percent of Britons believe that an event like the Holocaust could happen in the country today, given the depth of intolerance and prejudice, according to a new survey.


Furthermore, 36 percent thought that most people would do nothing about it if it did happen, in a poll released ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday.

The YouGov poll of 2,400 Britons found that 50 percent did not know that as well as Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and the Roma community were also targeted by Nazi Germany.

A further 79 percent were unaware that black people were persecuted and killed under the Nazi regime in Germany, which ruled from 1933 to 1945.

The "alarming" results beg the question "have we really learnt anything from the genocides of our recent past?", said Stephen Smith, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust chairman.

"With increasing levels of hate-crime, prejudice and ignorance towards those that are in some way different to ourselves, we really need to be vigilant in tackling prejudice and intolerance," he said.

"As genocides in Europe, Rwanda and Bosnia have shown, it doesn't take much to turn these negative conditions into something far more calamitous.

"We need to be constantly on our guard against this, which is why we are asking the public to show their support by lighting a candle to commemorate those killed in past genocides."

Holocaust Memorial Day, a day of remembrance across the world, marks the liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

It will be marked in Britain at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, northeast England. The national commemoration was to remember victims of the Holocaust and genocides since such as Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing situation in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Auschwitz survivor Alex Ward said of the survey: "These statistics emphasise it is not just about remembering -- it is also about learning the lessons to ensure the horrific experiences my friends, family and I endured are not repeated."

Freeze tag, class, and reading

Lots of reading and freeze tag going on recently with N&J. Tonight we are planning an excursion to the local park to play some freeze tag. A and myself have been reading more and more often to them, they each just completed 6 additional hours of reading since January 1st in order to win free tickets to an amusement park. This is in addition to their reading homework and reading one book a night to win a free pizza! Sometimes my voice hurts believe me!

The football games were exciting over the weekend and we spent most of Sunday visiting P and E. The girls play with E while P and I drink coffee and watch football, it is actually a lot more fun that that sentence sounds! :)

Tough loss for the Pats but they have two yes two first round draft picks next season so they will be fun to watch and very good again next season.

Had my first class Friday night- it is four hours long, it is a C++ programming class, should be good though sitting through 1 3 hours lecture is not much fun, the hour long lab work is a catharsis to say the least.

And A I are working on a budget and have plans to remodel the house, save for the summer trip to Poland and buy a new tv, so it will be challenging but doable.

Pitchers and catchers report soon!

Goodies

Lots of presents from Christams are finally arriving from Boston- lots of books for N&J including books about puppies and ballerinas, also N showed me a book about how to draw trains. And I think my Doctor Who gifts are due to arrive this week along with other boxes including books, clothes, and board games. So yeah!!!

We had a great Sunday visiting with P and E, the girls all watched Cars, drew pictures, colored, played hide and seek and learned they all love horses and unicorns. P and I watched football then I took N&J to a pool party for their daisy girl scout troop. Unbelievably the Pats won which really was a perfect example of sports uplifting your spirits.

Last night was great we went to the local park via sled, initially pushed both girls then they took turns. We played freeze tag and then went home where we read some more books , then bath, then bed.

Aga and I haven't seen anything decent filmwise since the Illusionist, we did watch a comedy show called Scrubs for the first time and we both liked it.

My second programming class starts this Friday night, 6-10pm. The new Lynch movie is out in Chicago, Inaldn Empire, this weekend but I doubt I will be able to see it sice watching N&J.

Since the Field Museum/Shedd Aquarium was so much fun look slike I will be taking N&J there again, though for next Sunday they have another play date scheduled with E.

Sebald

Anyone who has been reading this blog and noted my Six Feet Under and death references will not be surprised to hear that my favorite part of the Oscars is the montage of all the people who died that year. So my apologies for again writing about a death, though I felt it important to comment on the fifth anniversary of W.G. Sebald's death. On December 14, 2001, he died in a car accident. He was 57, and had only started writing outside of academic work in his 40s, working in his native German even though he had spent most of his life in England.

How to describe his work? Haunting, digressive, melancholy, funny (which is often overlooked). Novels that read like odd memoirs or biographies, with indistinct photographs whose relation to the text is unclear but evocative. One of the most remarkable things about him was how quickly a writer so odd and apparently unapproachable was embraced. In only five years since his first book was translated into English, The Emigrants, he became acclaimed as the most significant writer of the day, the one readers and writers were passing on to each other as someone who had changed literature. His last novel, Austerlitz, was, amazingly, a New York Times bestseller. When people learned I was visiting Auschwitz last summer and struggled with comprehending its horrors, this book was recommended to me, and it did indeed help.

Unfortunately, not much notice has been taken of this anniversary. The best piece on Sebald I can find on the web is the collection of responses to his death (by Sontag, Geoff Dyer, and others) in The Threepenny Review, and there was a good obituary in The Guardian. There's also an interesting interview on The New Yorker site, and an audio interview with the intense literary oddball Michael Silverblatt on his Bookworm show, both from the Austerlitz tour. And here's a passage from Sebald's "The Emigrants'...I have often wished I could write as effectively as he does so effortlessly.....please enjoy!

"It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. And indeed, when I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust. He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woolen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night. Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper."

Active

It was quite the busy active weekend. A. did not work all weekend, Saturday after the girls finished their Polish school we drove downtown and went to the Field Museum, where we checked out Tibet, New Guinea, and Egyptian exhibits and artifacts, then we made a beeline to the Shedd Aquarium and checked out the sharks, the reef exhibit, and of course the dolphin show. Interestingly, J. prefers the Field Museum, she especially lvoed a dimaond and gemstone exhibit of course since she loves collecting stones, and N. loved the aquarium, she saw her favorite unicron fish and also the turles and the dolphins. The dolphins ended up being a big hit with all three girls this time around.

I ended up travelling to the local park three times with N&J, twice we played "freeze tag"- once at the park and once in the front yard. I jogged most of the time since they were riding their bicycles so fast. Oh and Friday night we took a nice long 2 1/2 mile walk to make sure we saw all of the remaining Christmas decorations in our neighborhood.
And I did get to watch most of the Pats playoff game since A. was home, and she bought me some new sneakers, casual ones, not running ones, they are black with red, they are way cool.

I am almost done re-reading all of Raymond Carver's short stories, and I also rewatched Genesis of the Daleks late at night Friday, and Sat night A. and I watched Eddie Murphy in Boomerang, it was actually decent, we had never seen it before.

The girls were in excellent spirits since we kept them so busy all the time, they did of course do some more drawings, and read more books, they are huge fans of Curious George lately and so we have been rading a lot of those stories and alos we read "Make Way for Ducklings!" last night which N. has decided is one of her most favorite stories!!! And they remembered checking out the duckling statues in Boston Common a few weeks ago, and A. and I spoke about J. and how much we miss her! And it is hilarious how much both N&J now love dragons because of J's husband A.!!! :)

And I heard from an old friend who will come visit next Sunday to watch football playoffs so that is good. Also good is I heard back from the Doctor Who audio company in England, Big Finish, and my cds for Xmas will be arriving soon, they were supposedly shipped Friday!

All for now.

Late night movie fun

Watched most of Superman Returns dvd last night, I liked it a lot, I think the actor playing Superman is doing a fine job at portraying the Christopher Reeve Superman.

I took a nice 2 and a half mile walk after dinner with N&J and we walked all around our neighbor checking out as many of the remaining Christmas decorations as possible.

A. is still tired from the trip to Boston, hopefully she gets back to her old self soon.

More on home

It really is relaxing to be home, house and laundry ahve been thoroughly cleaned, N&J keep wanting toi play the game Monopoloy lately and read their books, then after they go to sleep A. and I head to the basement and watch movies, soon we will start to watch all of the Desperate Housewives season two dvds.

The weather has gotten a little chillier but not much. In the back of mind I keep thinking of taking a run at night but so far have not.

The cat's new spot for napping seems to be under the chair near the porch door, for a while it had been under the Christmas tree, though now that all decorations and tree have been stored away, he needed to find a new spot.

I read a news article today that a 112 year old woman just passed away she was a lifelong Red Sox fan and the team brought the chmapionship trophy to hear when they won a few seasons ago, and she calimed it was one of the best days of her life! Interesting.

All for now.