WTF-Beta

@jon-nyc what kind of ride was it? I mean, distance, time?

@Big_Al said:

The past 2nd Trump term has seemed to me to have been like being in the trenches during a mortar barrage. Some hit at a distance and you count yourself lucky. Some hit nearby and you know where it hit. Some land on someone you know and wounds or kills them. You just wonder if one had has our name on it.

Sadly, this feels very, very accurate as a way to describe how things are!

@RealPlayer I didn’t know that, but I just googled and it said that he lost vision permanently in one eye and was told there’s a chance that it could happen in the other eye (although it has not yet).

@bernard your piano class meets weekly right? What?

I was thinking about your class and I think it’s similar to what they call “studio class” here at the university music school. Except that studio classes are only for music majors, so I’ll never be able to take one.

Today is my piano lesson day. It’s funny how much I look forward to it!

I don’t think I’m making any actual progress with Clair de Lune, but I did add another two measures to the parts of the score I’m working on, so that’s not nothing. But the slowness with which I move through this piece is in stark contrast to how much more quickly I’m moving through the other two pieces I’m working on.

@steve-miller A few days back, your photos weren’t laid g for me, but I came back to this thread today and now they are. What a great trip you’re having! The photos are stunning so I can imagine how glorious it must be to see it all in person!

@jon-nyc said:

They’re over 20 years old. It’s just that prescribing them for weight loss is newish. Used to be just diabetes.

Wow, I didn’t know that! I knew that expanding them to general weight loss came after their use for diabetes, but I thought the drugs themselves were truly new.

@jon-nyc said:

I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.

Probably. Still, if someone isn’t diabetic and is just taking the drugs for weight loss, they ought to know whether it incurs an increase in this kind of risk that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications

I would imagine!

given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo).

I didn’t realize that! Are there things you can do to mitigate these risks?

@Rontuner said:

So far our son's research job is still ok - I believe lots of private funding has been able to bridge the gaps left behind by the Trumpublican regime

Hopefully your son will continue to helped both those resources.

But some of those gaps are just going to go unfilled.

@bernard thank you!

P.S. i meant to say, "not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship" does not mean that such a relationship doesn't exist.

OMG!

a 63-year-old man was prescribed Ozempic to manage his diabetes in 2023 and woke up four months later with loss of vision in one eye. He continued taking the medication, not knowing it had been linked to vision problems in some clinical trials and studies, and lost sight in his other eye in October 2024.

"Now legally blind, Engel has had to quit his job and give up his commercial driver’s license. He can’t see his grandkids play baseball, he said, and the couple has shelved much of their retirement travel bucket list," USA TODAY reported.

Ok, also this:

There is currently not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between GLP-1s and NAION or other vision changes.

But seriously, these glp-1 drugs are so new, doctors should be more cautious about prescribing them, and any new illness or symptom in a person on a glp-1 maybe should lead to increased scrutiny of possible connections.

@RealPlayer said:

My daughter’s job will soon be ending

I'm so sorry to hear this!!

@Jodi thank you!

@Mary-Anna Oh cool!! I wonder what their song catalog looks like.

The ones in Japan are soooo comprehensive, with all kinds genres, languages etc.

thank you @mary-anna

@Piano-Dad said:

Piano*Son's job is in jeopardy.

I'm so sorry!

STEM research is collapsing along with humanities.

Yep. It's a blood bath. And there are so, so many other horrible things that are happening, that a lot of these "little side attacks" are just not on the radar for most people.

I put "little side attacks" in scare quotes because most of these will have (are already having) significant, far-reaching, long-lasting impacts that far exceed the surface level area (i.e., a completely derailed stem and humanities research engine is going to be far more destructive than most people realize.)

Well, it finally happened to me. I knew it would happen eventually. You-know-who axed a grant program I had applied to. They were supposed to announce the results at the beginning of September. As the days came and went and there was no announcement, I started to suspect this would happen.

He announced a new “pocket rescission" package on Friday. Although the announcement doesn’t name the program we applied to, apparently it’s been canceled because it’s in the “Ed funding for woke international education” category, listed here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2026/09/president-trump-takes-historic-action-to-eliminate-wasteful-and-harmful-spending/

I spent the better part of the summer preparing this grant application, I am (was) the project lead for this project that would have had a 6-digit figure budget (a huge and ambitious project in my field, which doesn’t need expensive equipment or labs, so project funding is generally much more modest than in stem fields, so the project we proposed was a huge deal and would have been a sizing for the research I do).

I would rather have had the project rejected than the entire program canceled because of this *sshat’s idiotic policies.

I knew we shouldn’t have applied for a federal grant under this administration. What a huge f*cking waste of time that was.

Dammit.

Red

On the subject of the cello… I believe I have written about my recent experience playing with a cellist who’s a doctoral student (cello performance) in the music school here. Like @kluurs I loved having that amazing resonance in my living room.

I’ve also played with violinists, and I really enjoy it, but there’s something that’s just so compelling about the cello.

The first time I ever played with a cellist was many years ago (maybe around 2017? Before COVID, before I had a grand). I didn’t realize how amazing the cello is as an instrument, and so I wasn’t “emotionally” prepared for having that sound right next to me. As soon as he started to play, I teared up and found to very hard to maintain composure and keep playing.

That’s the essence of music. It vibrates to the very core of your being. I think all music has the potential to do that, but maybe the cello just does it exceptionally well…

I used to love singing! When we lived in Japan, we went to karaoke all the time. Mostly pop music, but singing is singing. And for the record, karaoke in Japan is not like US karaoke, which is not something I have a very favorable impression of. In Japan, each group gets a private room with its own karaoke equipment, you can order food and drink and you reserve the room for some amount of time. So you’re just singing with your friends, no one else. And Mr. SK has a beautiful voice.

I also used to do more accompanying myself at the piano. I had a piano teacher who also taught voice and she taught me a lot of warm up activities and different techniques for bringing your voice out, and how to use your stomach to support your singing etc.

I got away from singing somehow and now my voice is out of practice and I can feel that I’ve sort of forgotten how to sing.

That’s ok, I have more than enough musical activities to keep me busy, but I can imagine that (if I ever get to retire…) I would enjoy joining a choir in the future.

Be

@Mary-Anna said:

Claire de Lune has been on the edge of being too hard for me for my entire adult life.

Ok this makes me feel better!!!

I was already thinking that this is a piece I need to "learn," and then put away for a few years and come back to. But the "come back to" part doesn't work if I don't learn it first, so that's one reason I decided to stick with it.

My piano teacher thinks I can have it ready for the final jury, but I think she's either being very nice, very overly optimistic, or just completely misunderstanding my level!

Yay! I’m glad to hear this! Keep us posted on how it goes!

My piano class at the uni is also underway. I’m working on Clair de Lune, which I still think is just on the edge of being too hard, so I also have three other pieces I’m working on as well. One of these will eventually become the piece I have to play for the final jury.