WTF-Beta

@chas sorry to hear that!

To all who've posted photos, thank you!! I'm enjoying seeing all the beautiful flowers and spaces! I'll try to add some of my own soon.

@wtg said:

As you say, better in someone else's yard.

Yep!

BTW I have been monitoring the lack eyed susan's in the front of our house, and I'm convinced that the animal doing the eating is a deer. The reason I think that is because the spots that are eaten are in the middle of the bunch, as if a large creature walked up and bent their head down from a height, rather than at the edges, as you might expect with a small creature sitting low to the ground and chewing at that height.

This is my current "plant detector" analysis.
I remain hopeful that there will still be blooms come July

@Axtremus said:

filled with pond scum

something something ... like attracts like.... something something

BTW we had an uninvited guest the other day, just making herself at home… If she was that interested in the neighbor’s yard, she should have sat over there!

@Bernard yikes! That’s disconcerting! I take it you don’t have one of those doorbell cameras? This would be one time you’d love to be able to see just what happened, and how big the creature was who did it!

Thanks for this thread @wtg .

@Steve-Miller Neat! I've never had one.

We don’t generally watch the World Cup, but we sort of track how things are going, so we did notice that a Japan had a draw for its first game. -_-

@bernard i only knew a few of those details. Yuck!

@AndyD said:
the amazing mobility at that age.

According to the comments in the YT video, Rubinstein was 88 when this was performed with the London Symphony, and it was aired on PBS in 1977 to celebrate his 90th birthday.

Wow!

@AndyD OMG that score!! The music I play has a lot more white space….

@Bernard thanks for posting that. I thought it was interesting.
I used to read Krugman in the NYT, but I don’t follow him on Substack, so I would have missed that.

Recently, I’ve been seeing more about the connection between declining birth rates and the timing of smartphone adoption. I don’t know if people are talking about that in Japan now, but of course Japan’s population decline is quite serious at this point.

And although the term smartphone came from the U.S., l’m pretty sure Japan had the earliest access to smartphone technology: Internet on phones, texting, ability to take and send photos with phones, emoji, all of that.

@chas thanks for this update, I hope the medications help. And I hope you’re able to do your trip! Keep us posted!

@Bernard thanks for this, how interesting those properties are!

I like number 2 as well! It kind of looks like a modern hobbit house. I noticed the piano bench and thought “that looks like a piano bench, where’s the piano?” and then of course there it was. A nice spot for an upright.

Although it seems like it must be very small (60 sq meters sounds a little cramped, maybe my math is off?)

I liked number 3 too. I want to know what that legless white piano is!

I wouldn’t know what to do with number 4! If ever there was a property listing in need of some virtual staging, this is it!

The last one would make a good museum. But it also kind of looks like it should be a tomb.

(I didn’t watch the video, but used the links to each property site. I kind of hate looking at listings on video, I almost never watch them).

@Bernard said:

perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?

All good points, very interesting to think about! What about the fact that people would go to live orchestral concerts? (with no video presentation in the background!)

Somehow, I still suspect people had longer attention spans for music than they do now... but maybe that's just my bias!

@mary-anna that was all super interesting, thank you! I wonder how it is in Japan, where literacy and reading measures (like newspaper subscriptions, book sales etc) have been consistently higher than in the US. And publishing traditions are different (e.g., short story collections and essay books).... otoh, cell phone reading is also huge so....

Bringing it back to the original topic, there are probably a lot of parallels here between reading and music, because people have said that younger generations don’t listen to “album-length” music any more, in favor of picking and listening to only specific (individual) songs. And the way popular music is being written reflects listening tendencies as well, with intros being shorter and the music quickly getting to the hook. To say nothing of the fact that are fewer and fewer classical music listeners as well.

The common thread is a lack of attention span, whether it’s a book-length work of fiction or an extended work of music.

@RealPlayer said:

Just an aside on games, which Mary Anna brought up. The musical backdrop of games is itself becoming a musical genre of its own, with recognized composers, some of whom have gained reputations as serious composers.

Absolutely. And Japanese game music in particular tends to be very piano-centric, with Nobuo Uematsu probably being the most famous. He did the music for the Final Fantasy games. I have never played any of those games, which is probably for the best because then I would have wanted to play his music, and everything I’ve looked at is all very hard!
(Although now that I say that, I should look again and see how difficult it looks to me now.)

It sort of echoes what happened in the previous generation with film composers like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann and Ryuji Sakamoto, who now see big orchestra concerts devoted to their film music.

Yes, I think this is a good comparison. We recently had a big discussion at the Piano Tell forum about whether to group film music, anime music, and “post classical” piano together or not.

It’s difficult because some composers (like Joe Hisaishi) compose for film, anime, and also do compositions that are just stand-alones as well. And there are people like Ryuichi Sakamoto who compose for film but not anime or games, and also do a lot of non-film compositions.

And the other issue is stylistic similarity, and because of that, I personally think it makes sense to have a “parent genre” (like “post-classical”) within that, sub-genres like film music, anime music, game music, and maybe solo piano. But not everyone agrees with me.

Sorry for the thread drift!!

@Rontuner said:
(When every Midwesterner knows that's the time to go out or up on the roof and see how bad it really is outside!!)

Glad you guys are all ok!

I don't see it to the extent that "students can't read." But I also rarely teach lower level classes, and the one 200-level class I teach is specialized enough that it usually enrolls students with a specific interest in the subject matter. I think in upper level classes, a lot of weeding out has happened and also when teaching majors, there's a different level of engagement from the students.

And most of my grad students received their BAs in Japan, so totally different kind of preparation.

So on the one hand, I don't experience this to the degree that other faculty do.

On the other hand, I can tell that students increasingly seem less academically prepared than in pre-pandemic, and I do feel that the negative influence of AI is starting to creep in.

@AndyD Interesting! That looks somewhat similar.

The cool thing about the kendama is that one goal is to rotate around the device, so that each time, you catch the ball with a different part of it (big cup, small cup, bottom cup, spike).

I'm really good a rotating between big cup and bottom cup, but less so at going back and forth between all four.

Here are some photos.

@AndyD those are very pretty!

I once decided that I wanted to learn how to juggle, and Mr SK and I actually took a juggling class together. That was fun, but I never really got consistently good at juggling three, whereas for Mr SK is easy as pie. Ah well. Maybe I’ll pick it up and give it again some day.

Do you know what a Kendama is? We can both do that, although he’s better than I am.