caliarch.net

…but it’s somehow all that much more disturbing when you see it all in one place.

& equally amusing / disturbing, here is last year’s dispatch.

Apparently the new hotness in New Year’s Eve bubbly beverages is something called a Black Pearl, in which champagne / sparkling white is supplemented with a bit of brandy or cognac. I may have to try it sometime.

Ingredients:
ice cubes
1 ounce cognac or brandy
1 ounce Tia Maria
champagne / sparkling wine
cherry for garnish

(c) Melissa Punch

If you enjoy the occasional time-wasting dinky online flash games but are looking for something a little more — ahem — intellectual, have I got the link for you.

So, at our biweekly faculty meetings, we always save the last ten minutes for “Faculty Fun,” and whoever is assigned for that day crafts a quick and fun community building activity.  Yesterday it was my previous partner JD’s turn, and since we all had laptops out already for legitimate business, JD put up a link for us on the board.

“OK,” he said, “the game is world capitals.  Best score out of five rounds win.”

And oh, my, did the community building (or something) ensue!  The sad part was being reminded how horribly ignorant of world geography I really am.  On the other hand, I’ve played dozens of rounds since then, and let me say with conviction that I can actually feel myself becoming a better global citizen.  By the end of the week I may be able to find Lithuania on a map within five seconds.

Just as I have no honest, thorough, and articulate answer to the question “Why/how teaching?” & instead want to just tell people to read The Right To Learn, I also have no honest, thorough, and articulate answer to the question “Why/how music/songwriting/ composing?” Been reading a lot of Tori Amos interviews lately, though, and I think this one speaks to this 2nd unanswerable question in a similar way that TRtL speaks to the 1st.

“I remember John Lennon talking about listening to songs that he loved, then changing them to make them his own versions. He would say, ‘God, I love this song. I wish I’d written this song.’ Then it would come out totally different. You might not even know what song it is that inspired you to do something, but there is that ingredient. Sometimes I do think that we’re really just rewriting songs. There are only 12 bloody notes, you know.” ~ Tori Amos

“It is always hard to tell what your influences are. Everything you’ve seen, experienced, read, or heard gets broken down like compost in your head and then your own ideas grow out of that compost.” ~ JK Rowling

Right on, ladies.

Songs definitely have pedigrees; I’m convinced of that. No one and nothing is 100% original. (Not even our DNA, heh.)