Culture in the Blender

Just a little after writing yesterday’s post I happened to check the BBC News website, and lo and behold: US ‘no longer technology king’. So it’s happened already. I wonder how long it will take until the reality sinks in here. One day, there will be a lot of wounded national pride here – especially [...]

I’ve been listening to a radio station I created on Pandora Internet Radio from the song Encore Un Fois by Sash!. (It was a huge hit in the 90s in Europe.) So, I’ve been getting a mix of trance and goa, mostly, and listening to that while calculating things from some data has made me [...]

This morning, I stopped by the new postdoc’s office to offer some settling-in support. He just arrived from Germany, where he got his Ph. D., although he’s Spanish. His wife is here in the chemistry department, so he wanted to come here, and my advisor is old friends with his advisor. I mentioned not bothering [...]

I often eat breakfast on the phone with my mother, because both of our jobs are independent to the point of being lonely sometimes. This morning, my father was still at home, because he had a flight to catch mid-morning and figured he could save time by working from home instead of going in to [...]

Last night, I found an interesting online community called Global Culturati. It’s small right now, but it has message boards, something I wish my page had. When I first found out I was a TCK, I had an intense need to talk to someone else who was. Perhaps this can be like a Usenet group [...]

The Globalist has reprinted parts of a speech by de Villepin to the UN Security Council before the war in Iraq began. I wish the US would have listened. The US is dangerously out of step with changing global realities that they are both subject to and help shape. They also seem to have forgotten [...]

I recently attended a concert by the National Philharmonic of Russia, conducted by Vladimir Spivakov. The highlight of the evening was Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18. I played that piece as a second violin in an orchestra that was a fusion of professional and student players, and it was a [...]