Alan Eastman's blog

Guns

2011-01-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

I've been having an on-line discussion with some friends about gun control. Some of them are very right-wing in their politics, convinced that everyone needs a gun (or several) to protect themselves from the Government. Their contention is that, if everyone had and carried a firearm, we would be safer and that tragedies like the attempted murder of that congresswoman in Arizona would not happen because concerned citizens would quickly shoot the potential shooter. They have also argued that there are many more instances of crimes prevented by ordinary citizens with guns who shoot the criminals than there are gun accidents that kill innocent people. I found a lot of that hard to believe, so I did some research. Here are some of the results, with citations from journal articles in [brackets.] I have tried to use 'neutral' sources for these references, people with no particular ax to grind.

Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. [Harvard School of Public Health: Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Homicide – Suicide – Accidents – Children and Women, Boston: Harvard School of Public Health, 2009, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html]
Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens (FBI, Expanded Homicide Data, Table 15) compared with over 30,000 gun deaths (NCIPC) [Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, 2008, Expanded Homicide Data Table 15 and Table 15]
A gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide, criminal assault or homicide, or unintentional shooting death or injury than to be used in a self-defense shooting. [Kellermann, Arthur L. et al., “Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home,” Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection, and Critical Care, 45(2) (1998): 263-267]
More than 90 percent of suicide attempts with a gun are fatal. In comparison, only 3 percent of attempts with drugs or cutting are fatal. [Miller, Matthew, David Hemenway, Deborah Azrael, "Firearms and Suicide in the Northeast," Journal of Trauma 57 (2004):626-632.]
There are five times as many deaths from gun assaults as from knife assaults, where the rates of assault with knives and with guns are similar. [Zimring, Franklin, and Gordon Hawkins, Crime is not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]

Finally, Hemenway and Azrael carried out a study [Hemenway, David and Deborah Azrael., “The Relative Frequency of Offensive and Defensive Gun Uses: Results From a National Survey,” Violence and Victims, 15(3) (2000): 257-272] comparing rates of offensive and defensive use of guns using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and data from a private survey. It was found that “criminal gun use is far more common than self-defense gun use.”

I'm happy to have my shotgun for hunting ducks, geese, and pheasants, but don't feel any great need to buy or carry a handgun.

We ran away from home again...

2010-04-08T15:25:00.000-06:00

Vickie and I ran away from home again last weekend. It seems like we need to get away from everything once in a while, and Easter weekend was a good time to do it. It was also LDS General Conference, which is broadcast on the radio in Utah, so we could listen while we were driving. We are multitaskers by choice and necessity. Actually, one of the Sunday morning talks was about the best description of what it means to be a Christian that I have heard. Here is the link to that talk, and here's a picture of the Conference Center.

Anyway, since Utah is such a beautiful place to live, we decided to see a part of the state that neither of us had ever been before. The little town of Boulder is about as far away from anywhere as one can get. It was the last town in the United States to get its mail by mule train, for example; that didn't end until 1939! Even now, there is only one road in and out of Boulder, Utah Highway 12. As it turns out, Highway 12, a National Scenic Byway, is one of the most spectacular roads in the country, passing through some of the most incredible parts of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In one spot between Escalante and Boulder, the road lies right on top of a rocky ridge, with a fall of several hundred feet on either side of the road! Here's an interesting shot in Red Canyon, between Bryce Canyon and Escalante.

Our avowed destination on the trip was to eat at the Hell's Backbone Grill, a small restaurant in Boulder. For several years in a row, it has been judged by Salt Lake Magazine the best place to eat in Southern Utah. We agree! The owners and operators are two women who moved to Boulder and opened their dream of an organic restaurant using local fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meat. The cuisine tends to the Southwest, utilizing chiles in almost everything, including the chocolate-chile cream pot for dessert! Vickie's sister Janet gave us a copy of the cookbook put out by the restaurant, and a sampling of their recipes convinced us that we had to eat there. It was truly worth the trip.

After our meal, we spent the night in Escalante, then hiked the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail to Lower Calf Creek Falls, 126 feet high, and a beautiful spot after an incredible 3.5-mile hike in. Besides the red and white Navajo Sandstone, there are interesting pictographs from the Fremont Indian culture. It's an amazing place. It was a reasonable hike, though challenging for Vickie's two artificial knees, and well worth the effort. The only problem was that it is very sandy, and we managed to get enough sand in the lens of one of our cameras that it may not be fixable. Oh well... Here are some pictures we took with the other camera:

After we got the sand out of our socks, we took off for home. Between Escalante and the freeway back to Salt Lake, you pass the turnoff to Bryce Canyon National Park. So we decided to take a look. This time of year, there is still a lot of snow at Bryce, since the canyon rim in the park ranges between about 8000 and 9100 feet in elevation. We weren't disappointed - the snow was about two feet deep. Still, it makes for spectacular pictures. Here are a few:

It was a great trip, and we're back home refreshed and ready to tackle the world again!

The classic April Fool's joke

2010-04-01T14:54:00.005-06:00

It's the day the French call, for some reason I've never fathomed, Poissons d'Avril ("April Fish"). And nobody really knows how it started, or when or where. But it's clear that a lot of people have a lot of fun with it, as you can see from some of the classic pranks related in this Wikipedia article.

The classic April Fool's prank in Vickie's family is one that I had a hand in. Here's the background: Vickie's youngest brother Bruce has been an inveterate prankster all his life, and always targeted his mother, usually successfully. She desperately wanted to catch him unaware some April 1, and was finally presented her chance five years ago.

In late March and early April of 2005, nearly the entire Muir family was on a cruise to the Orient. On April 1, we were supposed to dock in Hong Kong, which had been a part of the People's Republic of China since 1999. On the way in to the port, we saw a couple very ominous-looking little gunboats flying the Chinese flag shadowing our cruise ship. They met up with our ship, and two officers boarded, then went (presumably) to talk with the ship's officers. Now, in order to understand the prank, you need to know that Vickie's brother John has started and successfully run several internet-security companies, and that Bruce is part-owner of a business that installs internet systems in buildings in California and some places overseas, so both of them are constantly and deeply involved in internet security issues in a variety of settings and locations.

At Vickie's mother's request, her brothers Mark and John and I contrived to set up Bruce by convincing him that he was about to be arrested by the Chinese government for obscure violations of Chinese internet law. So we wrote the following note and contrived to have it delivered to the mailboxes outside John and Bruce's staterooms:

____________________________________________________________________________

State  Ministry for Internal Security
 Peoples Republic of China

 

31  March 2005

To:   Sapphire Princess/Security

Question for Identified Passenger

Dear Sir:

During passport control, following person flagged and requested to (1)  answer question below and (2) submit to question/detain at District  Prefecture #4, 729-731 Lotus Harbor Road upon disembarkation.   

Warning:    If passenger disembark in Hong Kong, must report immediately to  District Prefecture.

Bruce  Robert Muir          USA
John Richard Muir          USA
Li We Quan                 USA
Robert Arthur Sims         Australia
Sergei Illyich Suvarov     Russia

Question, please to answer complete in writing:

1.  Name  of Company and Purpose
2.  How  long
3.  Duty  of Job
4.  Business  relationships with Taiwan companies in last 2 years
5.  Purpose  in Peoples Republic of China
6.  Peoples  to meet in Hong Kong
7.  Experience  of Internet Security Damage
8.  Security  Classification

Feng Qin Cho
Assistant Prefect - Security

____________________________________________________________________________

John immediately went to Bruce's stateroom to express his concern about what might happen to them - and Bruce took the bait. He spent the next four hours or so laboriously writing out answers to all the questions, all the while trying anxiously to consult with John on what might happen once we reached Hong Kong. Somehow the phrase "question/detain" had him worried! He was seriously considering staying on the ship in Hong Kong harbor rather than face the tender mercies of District Prefecture #4. In fact, after finally finishing all his lengthy answers to the questions, he asked Vickie's father to help him talk with the Purser's staff to see if his answers would be satisfactory. Dick went to the Purser's Office with Bruce and just before they arrived, finally told Bruce what was happening. He tried to get back at the perpetrators by arranging with the stewards to short-sheet all our beds that night, but all agreed that Bruce had finally met his match in the April Fool's prank business.
Incidentally, it was on this trip that Mark and I had the discussions that led to the founding of GreenFire, our advanced geothermal company that is (with any luck at all) about to be funded. It's almost (but not quite) as fun as writing letters for the Chinese State Ministry of Internal Security!

Winter trip to New York City

2010-03-10T11:02:00.002-07:00

Vickie and I had the interesting opportunity to spend a week in New York City just at the time of the biggest storm there in 20 years. We flew out on February 23rd and the storm dropped more than a foot of snow on the 24th and 25th. Fortunately, Vickie's sister and her husband live in New York, so we had a great place to stay. Take a look at a few places during the storm (the Metropolitan Museum and the street in front of Janet and David's place):

Though we certainly saw lots of snow, the real purpose of our trip was to pig out on museums, music, and ballet. We spent several days, for example, in the Metropolitan Museum, one of the biggest (my aching feet can testify to that!) and best museums in the world. Because Janet and David are members of the museum, we were able to go into the museum several times for a few hours each time; that was a real boon, because we didn't feel we had to do everything in one visit.

Since we might be going to Egypt next year (still tentative), we made sure we took advantage of the Met's Egyptian collection, one of the best in the world. A guided tour by a Museum docent was a wonderful start, giving us an understandable explanation of Egyptian religion, and its effects on Egyptian tomb and temple art. Basically, Egyptians believed that the ba or soul of a person spends nights in the preserved body of that person, but walks among humanity during the day. To feed and care for the ba, everything needed must be symbolically displayed in the tomb; hence the carvings of bread, meat, and so on, and the drawings of servants, models of boats and everything else required for everyday life. The Met contains a real Egyptian tomb and a real Egyptian temple, both removed from Egypt and reassembled stone by stone in New York.

Also in the Met, we took a guided tour of American artworks, and found one of the most intriguing spaces we've ever seen in a museum. In one of the storage rooms, hundreds and hundreds of paintings, pieces of furniture, jewelry, ceramics, you name it, are displayed with minimal labeling: this is part of the storage of pieces for which the museum does not have space for normal exhibition.

While we were there, we saw several special exhibitions, including one of drawings by Bronzino, a Florentine Mannerist and wonderful draftsman, plus one of the Books of Hours of the Duc de Berry, a masterpiece of Late Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

We also visited the Frick Col lection, a museum housed in the former New York town house of Henry Clay Frick, who supplied the coke for Andrew Carnegie's steel mills, getting extremely rich in the process. The museum is small, but everything inside is absolutely first rate, including such gems as Hans Holbein's paintings of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, foes in life, who still stare at each other from opposite sides of a fireplace.

The other museum we were able to visit was the Brooklyn Museum, which turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. The building itself is huge, and the collections are very interesting. The displays are not up to the level of the Metropolitan, by and large, but are well-presented and shine a different light on what they do display. For example, the Met has wonderful large-scale Egyptian artifacts; the Brooklyn's Egyptian collection, while very large, concentrates on what the Met does not, like small-scale jewelry and the lives of more ordinary citizens. Taken together, one gets a far better picture of what life in ancient Egypt must have been like than one could get from either museum alone.

There is also an extremely interesting section devoted to feminist art, i.e., art by and about women. The prize of their collection is a sculpture/display/thing called "The Dinner Party." It is a triangular table set with 39 customized place settings, each one commemorating the life and work of a famous or not-so-famous woman or goddess. Each setting includes a large (~15" across) dinner plate whose design reflects the life of the woman commemorated, a customized place mat, plus silverware and a goblet. On the floor, the names of other women with accomplishments in the same area are written in gold. Overall, 1038 women are celebrated. Vickie brought home a copy of the display in the hall that gives the names and accomplishments of all of them.

As you can tell, we hit the museums pretty hard! That's at least partially because the snow prevented us from doing as much exploring as we would have liked. We were able to attend church at the Manhattan 1st Ward, which was fun, and walked around Midtown a bit. As it turns out, the LDS chapel and temple in Manhattan are right across the street from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. And we spent a bunch of time there.

We ended up seeing two performances of the New York City Ballet, one of the world's great ballet companies. The first performance was of two ballets by Jerome Robbins; one of those was his West Side Story dances telling the entire story, with minimal singing. For that performance, we sat up in the fifth ring (i.e., the nosebleed section); it was amazing how well we could see from there, though our binoculars were essential. On the other hand, the tickets only cost $20 each! The second night, we paid for better seats (no binoculars necessary) and saw an all-Balanchine program, including his Jewels, a ballet that Vickie loved when she saw it in the late '60's. The work was terrific, but seems a little dated now. Before that performance, we attended a talk by several of the ballet artists, which was a wonderful introduction to the performance. As it turns out, two of the principals of the company are a brother and sister from Sandy, of all places.

We also went to see the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The Gewandhaus is the oldest symphony orchestra in the world, and clearly one of the best, if what we heard is any example. They were unbelievable! Listening to them was like hearing silk or satin. Since Monday, March 1 was Chopin's 200th birthday, they played the Chopin 1st piano concerto, and made what can be a fairly pedestrian work come alive. Then they played the Brahms 2nd symphony, and, though I know it well, they brought out things I had never before heard. The only bad part was that we were up in the top balcony, which, judging by looking out the window, was about level with the 7th floor of the building across the street! The rows of seats were so close together that it was impossible even to put your knees at a 90° angle. Once wedged into position, we absolutely could not move a muscle. Fortunately, the people next to us gave up at intermission, so we fared better during the second half of the concert.

A famous story about Carnegie Hall comes from an experience of the famous violinist Mischa Elman; after a strenuous rehearsal one day, he was walking home carrying his violin case. A couple tourists, recognizing him as a musician, asked him, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Without even looking up, he muttered in reply, "Practice, practice, practice!" So I now own a t-shirt that says, "Practice, practice, practice." How could I not buy that!

We were finally able to spend some time wandering around. Monday the 1st was a beautifully sunny day, warm enough to be comfortable, and we made the best of it. We started out with a trip to Ground Zero, and took a tour narrated by two people who were intimately connected with the events of 9/11. One of them was an emergency responder who had set up some of the fire-safety systems in the Towers, and the other was a bus/subway driver whose brother worked for the Cantor/Fitzgerald brokerage firm with offices in one of the towers. That firm, as you will recall, was complete wiped out by one of the planes, which struck the two floors where their offices were located. The morning of 9/11, our guide and his brother had, as always, eaten breakfast together to start the day. That was the last time he saw his brother, and no part of the brother's body was among the 10,000 or so body parts that have been recovered.

Right now, Ground Zero is a huge construction zone, with one very large new building (Liberty Tower) going up, along with several smaller ones. Just across from the site is a complex called the World Financial Center. It was badly damaged on 9/11; here are pictures of the central Palm Court on 9/11 and today. We viewed the Twin Towers site from one of the concourses of the World Financial Center. To celebrate Chopin's 200th birthday, they had put a number of grand pianos around the complex and had relays of very fine pianists playing nothing but Chopin all afternoon - and were going to continue all week! It was amazing - yet another concert, this one all Chopin and completely free.

To cap off the day, we went on a long walk through Greenwich Village, at at a little neighborhood Italian restaurant (terrific!), then went to be hugely entertained by the Blue Man Group, which plays at a tiny theater next to NYU. what a day!

Eventually, of course, all good things come to an end, so we flew back to Salt Lake, tired but very pleased with the break from our busy and stressful lives.

Random pictures

2010-03-10T10:57:00.003-07:00

Thought I'd post a couple of the pictures I've taken over the past year or two, just for fun. A couple were taken quite a ways from home, but most of them were taken within less than an hour's drive from our front door. Enjoy!

Stream in Big Cottonwood Canyon, about 20 minutes from my front door

Cowboy at Ogden Pioneer Days Rodeo

At Arches National Park

Waterfall in Scottish Highlands

Ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, Scotland

Forest floor, autumn in Utah

Colter Bay Marina, Tetons

Mt. Moran from the Oxbows, Tetons

Brooklyn Bridge from a restaurant in South Street Seaport, New York City

Devil's Castle and indian paintbrush, Albion Basin, Utah

Eagle and American flag

Two new grandsons!

2010-03-08T13:42:00.005-07:00

I'll try to make this post a little shorter than some of mine. This is a fun one: since I last posted, Vickie and I have two new grandsons, born about six weeks apart.

Oliver James Stewart
Born to Adam (Vickie's son) and Aimee
in Chandler (Phoenix), AZ
January 14, 2010

Jevan Dean Fleming
Born to Hyriam (Alan's daughter Giselle's husband)
and Sunny
in Riverton (Salt Lake City), UT
March 5, 2010

This makes twelve grandchildren for us! Here's the official count, organized by parents.

Alan's kids:
Daniel and Michelle: Amiya (5)
Giselle and Hyriam (now Sunny): Jared (8), Livia(8), McKenna (6), Ethan (2), Jevan (newborn)
The girls were born to Giselle and Hyriam, Sunny brought Jared to the family
Krista and Nate: Max (8), Elise (5)

Vickie's kids:
Adam and Aimee: Lizzie (10), Eli (7), Ivy (3), Oliver (newborn)

We still have children who are newlyweds or single, so this number could rise with time, or then again it might not. (No pressure guys, really!)

Stratford Street Big Band

2009-05-25T19:58:00.005-06:00

The last few months, I've been playing piano in a big band, playing mostly 40's music in the manner of Glenn Miller, Woodie Herman, Duke Ellington, and so on. It's about 21 pieces most of the time, consisting of 6 saxophones (3 alto, 2 tenor, 1 baritone), 5 trumpets, 4 tenor trombones and a bass trombone, and rhythm section (piano, bass, drums, and 1-2 guitars.) I was invited to join the band by my friend Scott Miller. Scott and I, along with a drummer named Don Main, had a trio in high school - The Blue Notes. The previous pianist apparently was a classical pianist who, though a fine pianist, just wasn't used to playing from a lead sheet or in the jazz style.

One of our trombone players, Lee Shuster, provides a lot of sound equipment for our gigs, and recently recorded the band at a dance we did for a church youth fundraiser. Here is a slide show of the band and some of the dancers over our rendition of "Yes, Indeed," a classic from Tommy Dorsey's band. Lee (who does not usually sing) and Katrina Madsen are the vocalists. Enjoy!

Cleaning the Conference Center

2009-05-15T13:51:00.013-06:00

On Tuesday night, Vickie and I filled an assignment from church to help clean the LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City, across the street from Temple Square. The building seats 21,000 people, with no interior pillars at all. As you can see from the pictures, it looks something like the Starship Enterprise.
Vickie ended up cleaning brass railings for 2 1/2 hours (our shift was from 9:30 pm to midnight!) I was assigned to vacuum carpets in two of the seating sections on the main floor, using a back-pack vacuum. My best guess is that I vacuumed a swath of carpet approximately 3 feet wide and a mile long! Will we do that ever again? Well, maybe...

Arizona Natural History Museum

2009-04-07T20:24:00.010-06:00

While Vickie and I were in Phoenix watching grandkids, we decided to take them to the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, which has a great collection of dinosaurs, which are usually a big hit with the kids. It started outside the museum, where they all posed in front of one. Once inside, though, Ivy was absolutely terrified by the mammoth skeleton, and it took her a while to allay those fears. After a while, during which time nobody was attacked by the skeletons, she decided that maybe they weren't so scary after all.
Besides the dinosaurs, a big draw was the outdoor gold-panning stream. As you can see, everybody got to try it - and get a bit wet. The sand was spiked with gold (OK, fool's gold), so that everyone came home with some sparkle.

Finally, after all this fun, Lizzie, Eli, and Ivy presented us all with a play - so here it is!

Grandparents at work...

2009-04-03T14:48:00.018-06:00

Vickie and I are in Phoenix as I'm writing this. We came down to watch Adam and Aimee's three children (Lizzie, Eli, and Ivy) while they are in Costa Rica celebrating their 10th anniversary. Check Aimee's blog for details.

Before Adam and Aimee left, we went to an exciting school carnival.

Later the same day, we also went to the first of three of Eli's baseball games for the week. While Eli was listening to the coach, in the field or at bat, Lizzie and Ivy practiced their cheering. It's amazing how quickly Ivy picks up on the cheers that Lizzie designs. Here is a picture and a video clip for your enjoyment.

Of course, April Fool's Day just happened to fall when we were here, so Vickie and I had to put together a suitable menu. For breakfast, we made fried eggs and bacon on toast. Nothing too unusual there, except that the toast was pound cake, the eggs were whipped cream and half apricots, and the bacon was fruit leather!

Of course, the kids had to take snacks to school, so we sent them off with rocks and wormy apples (rock candy and apples with gummy worms added:

The kids had a relatively unexciting day at school. It turns out that elementary school kids just aren't as inventive on April 1st as, say, high school kids or even older (say 60-ish) semi-juvenile delinquents, so the little ones didn't have a lot to report.

On the home front, though, creative cooking was under way. Dinner was cupcakes (meat loaf cooked in muffin tins and frosted with tinted mashed potatoes, then put in paper cups and topped with a cherry tomato), mixed peas and carrots (from the candy store - unfortunately, the peas were mint flavored!), and fruit salad (also from the candy store, including such fruity things as orange slices, peach rounds, and candy raspberries and blackberries.) They all seemed to enjoy the dinner.

Dessert was a slightly different matter: the menu was dirt, mud, and worms. (Actually, crushed Oreos, chocolate pudding, and gummy worms, respectively - but it looks pretty bad! And the reaction was decidedly mixed, at least until they tried it.

A Fun Anniversary

2009-03-19T14:34:00.009-06:00

Vickie and I celebrated our 8th anniversary on Tuesday the 17th. We had been planning to just hit dinner and a movie, but those plans changed markedly for the better. Here's the story.

Vickie is involved with planning a yearly women's retreat. A few weeks ago the ski resort where the retreat has been held for a couple years called and said that they were not going to have a summer season this year, so the retreat would have to find a new site. Slight panic ensued, since the retreat draws about 70 women, and involves meetings and seminars, not to mention meals and a place to stay overnight. So Vickie sent out feelers to all kinds of places, including several in Park City. If you're not familiar with Utah, Park City is about 30 miles from Salt Lake, and was the site of many Winter Olympic events in 2002. It's a terrific and funky ski town. Click here for some more information on the place.

Tuesday afternoon, the meeting consultant for a motel in Park City called and invited Vickie and her committee to come up and take a look at their facility. Vickie said that she would love to, but that it was hard to get the committe together, and anyway, it was our anniversary. The response was, "I've got a hot-tub suite with your name on it if you'd like to come use it tonight." So we ended up taking a quick ride up the canyon and spending a night in the Honeymoon Suite at the Best Western Landmark Inn in Park City.

I don't know if the committee will decide to hold their meeting there, but it was certainly a wonderful place for an anniversary. We first went out to dinner at the Red Rock, a brew pub close to the motel. This place has a great reputation, and based on our meal, it's justified.

After dinner, we went back to the motel and took a tour of the place to see if it would be suitable for the meeting (I think it would be terrific, but I'm not the one who decides.) Then we took out the DVD we brought, started filling the hot tub, and settled in for the night. What a place! Here are some pictures:

Aphorisms - IV (and end)

2009-03-18T22:48:00.004-06:00

Here are the last of my collection, for now:

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, but quite another to put him in possession of truth. - John Locke

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. - Mark Twain

If you add to the truth, you subtract from it. - the Talmud

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst. - Acton

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. - Henry Adams

The primary danger of the TV screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents - the talks, the games, the family activities, and the arguments through which much of the child's learning takes place and his character is formed. - Urie Bronfenbrenner

You don't always have to solve problems; sometimes technology enables you to bypass a problem. - E. E.David, Jr. , scientific advisor to Presidents Nixon and Johnson

Canned thinking, like canned meat, is not dangerous, providing that fresh thinking has preceded it.

The paradox of time - few people have enough, yet everyone has all there is.

Be sure, when you think you are being extremely tactful, that you are not in reality running away from something that you ought to face. - Frank Medlicott

The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of ill temper. - Nietzsche

We must interpret a bad temper as the sign of an inferiority complex. - Alfred Adler

He who learns but does not think is lost;
he who thinks but does not learn is in danger.
- Confucius

On losing one's temper - It's like a sharp nail that tears the threads of something durable and lovely. We may use every bit of patience and skill in mending it, but we cannot make it like new again. The darned place will always be conspicuous. - Margaret E. Sangster

There is time for everything. - Thomas A. Edison

Those who do the least always seem to have the least time. - Arnold Glascow

No hour is to be considered a waste which teaches one what not do to. - Charles B. Rogers

Tradition means handing on all that is valuable to the next generation.

The obscure we see eventually; the completely apparent takes longer.

Work is a great blessing; after evil came into the world, work was given as an antidote, not as a punishment. - Arthur S. Hardy

Nothing would be done at all if a person waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault with it. - John Henry Newman

Wisdom is special knowledge in excess of all that is known. - Ambrose Bierce

The wise avoid evil by anticipating it. - Publilius Syrus

Work fascinates me; I could sit and watch it all day. - Mark Twain

Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. - Benjamin Franklin

Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if only we didn't spend half our time wishing. - Alexander Wollcott

There are two things needed in these days: first, for rich men to find out how poor men live; second, for poor men to find out how rich men work. - Edward Atkinson

All I want is less to do, more time to do it, and more pay for not getting it done.

Cease from the folly of metaphysical speculation...and pursue one end alone - how you may do what your hands find to do and go your way with never a passion, always a smile. - Lucian

Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily. - Schiller

Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; wisdom is humble that it knows no more. - William Cowper

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. - Oscar Wilde

An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. - Booker T. Washington

If your luck is good, you get credit for wisdom.

True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness. - Whittaker Chambers

Nothing is work unless you would rather be doing something else. - James M. Barrie

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes. - Miguel de Cervantes

Experience has shown that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work body and soul.

It is usually better to do the wrong thing than to do nothing. - Winston Churchill

There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness. - Robert Burton

Work is dull only to those who take no pride in it. - William Feather

Concentrate on your work and the applause will take care of itself. - B.C.Forbes

My little sayings - III

2009-03-18T18:03:00.003-06:00

Here are some more of my aphorisms - enjoy!

If priesthood were perfect, all the world would be converted. - from Piers Plowman, ca 1340, John Langeland

I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid for whatever reason to follow the course that he knows is best for the state; and as for the man who sets private friendship above the public welfare - I have no use for him, either. - Sophocles, 495-505 BCE

A man need not extol his virtues nor comment on his failings; his friends know the former and his enemies will search out the latter. - Charles B. Rogers

Praise is like perfume: it's fine if you don't swallow it. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Pollution is of three types: 1 - Actual, 2 - Political, 3 - Emotional

Essential steps in any program:

Wild enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Panic
Search for the guilty
Punish the innocent
Reward and promote non-participants

Reading with reflecting is like eating without digesting. - Edmund Burke

Unlike the movies, real life provides no musical background to help us recognize the climactic moments.

We are judged by what we do - not what we claim we do. - William Feather

The inevitable law of results: Cheap, Quick, Good - pick any two

Repentance makes a man live longer. - The Talmud

The problem is not shortage of data, but rather our inability to perceive the consequences of the information we already possess. - Jay W. Forrester

If resolutely people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. - John Ruskin

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

The real steps of research:

Interest
Preparation
Incubation
Illumination
Verification
Exploitation

We keep saying that Johnny doesn't read because he's deprived, hunger, and discriminated against. However, one of the biggest reasons Johnny doesn't read well is because Johnny doesn't practice reading. - Rev. Jesse Jackson

Children see major events reported in 90 seconds of a newscast. If a shooting war can be covered in less than two minutes, then a 200-page book seems just too long to read. - Dr. Nicholas Long

The price of greatness is responsibility. - Winston Churchill

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been - it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. - Thomas Carlyle

Facts are of slight value unless they are intelligently interpreted. - William Feather

It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications. - Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns. - J.M.Clark

The element of the unexpected and the unforeseeable is what gives some of its relish to life and saves us from falling into the mechanical thralldom of the logicians. - Winston Churchill

Reverence for life does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone. Reverence for life does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. Reverence for life refuses to let the businessman imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. Reverence for life demands for all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others. - Albert Schweitzer

A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own; a gang is where a coward goes to hide. - Mickey Mantle

One of the charms of the scientific enterprise is how deficient we can be and still play some meaningful part in it. - Robert Oppenheimer

Science has its cathedrals, built by a few architects and many workmen. - G.N.Lewis

Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. - Thomas Dekker

Whatever one may call the Creator, his only authentic revelation is the universe. Science is the study of the work of the Creator, a kind of divine service, a search for truth, searched with uncompromising honesty. - Albert Szent-Gyorgi

History shows that, no matter how generous others may be, those who have been helped the most are those who have helped themselves. - William Simon

Man seeks his own good at the whole world's cost. - Robert Browning

Failure is harder than success. Who works harder, the man who saunters down to the train ahead of time, or the one who misses it by 15 seconds after running three blocks? - William Feather

It took TV soap operas to get sex education out of the schools and into the home, where it belongs. - Linda Ellerbee

Seriousness is the final refuge of the shallow intellect.

The only conquests that are permanent and leave no regrets are our conquests over ourselves. - Napoleon Bonaparte

The most significant data are the most elusive. - Hugh D. Crone

Science is a process that seeks truth;
politics is a process that seeks survival.

There are seven sins in the world:
wealth without work
pleasure without conscience
knowledge without character
commerce without morality
science without humility
worship without sacrifice
politics without principle
- Mahatma Gandhi

There are hundreds who can stand failure to one who can stand success; the good loser is far more common than the good winner. - Franklin P. Adams

Endurance is the best success insurance. - Arnold Glascow

He who is master of himself will soon be master of others. - H.G. Bohn

Only a few men can be counted on to rise to the occasion. Even fewer know when to sit down.

Favorite little sayings - II

2009-03-16T14:50:00.002-06:00

Here are some more of them:

A fanatic is simply a person who does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew all the facts. - F.P.Dunne

To believe is to learn to think like God. - Andre Frossard, French theologian

The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself. - Plato

If businessmen took their jobs for granted in the same way that many of them neglect their wives and children, they'd be looking around for another position. - George Penn

Liberty is a luxury of the self-disciplined. - Montesquieu

People who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. - Lloyd Jones

Anyone who believes that business runs on fact rather than fiction has never read old five-year projections. - Malcolm Forbes

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. - Harry Truman

God should not be judged on the basis of this world - it is just one of his rough sketches. - Vincent Van Gogh

An elephant is a mouse designed to government specifications.

Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenses. - Anthony Eden

Central government is the most efficient agency for the collecting of money, and the most inefficient for spending it. - E.G.Schumacher, British economist

No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks. - St. Ambrose

Unless you know where you are going, any road will get you there. - Theodore Levitt

No wind favors him who has no destined port. - Michel de Montaigne

He who is not liberal with what he has deceives himself when he thinks he would be liberal if he had more. - William S. Plumer

Rocks have been shaken from their solid base, but what shall move a firm and dauntless mind? - Joanna Baillie

Beware of what you set your heart on, for it shall surely be yours. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we hate our enemies, we give them power over us. - Dale Carnegie

The first condition of happiness is a clear conscience. - David O. McKay

It is just as hard to break a good habit as a bad one, so get good habits and keep them. - William McKinley

There can be no happiness if the things we believe are different from the things we do. - Freda Stark

A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison. - Francis Bacon

The greatest thing in the world is to be able to do something well, and say nothing about it. - E.W.Howe

The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. - Marcus Aurelius

One can endure sorrow alone, but it takes two to be glad. - Elbert Hubbard

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

There is something in humility that strangely exalts the heart. - St. Augustine

To know is science; merely to believe one knows is ignorance. - Hippocrates

An intellectual is a person educated beyond his intelligence. - Fulton Sheen

Innovation consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

More of us might live up to our ideals if we knew what they were. - Arnold Glascow

The smallest good deed is better than the grandest intention.

Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend. - Walter Savage Landor

Every invention goes through three stages: doubt of its existence, denial of its importance, credit to someone else. - Alexander von Humboldt

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being. - Goethe

Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. - 'Kingfish' on Amos n' Andy

Never carry your shotgun or your knowledge half-cocked. - Austin O'Malley

People are born to kindness as a wind is born to movement. - Neil Miller

Since we cannot know all there is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything. - Blaise Pascal

Diligence is the mother of good luck. - Benjamin Franklin

Life is made up not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort. - Humphrey Davy

Some folks believe liberty is doing as they please, but with controls on others. - Arnold Glascow

Love your enemies; not only does the Good Book say so, but it will make them madder than anything else you could do. - Mark Twain

There are no chances so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage; and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Leadership is the ability to get people to do what they don't want to do - and like it. - Harry Truman

A great deal of the joy of life consists in doing perfectly, or at least to the best of one's ability, everything which he attempts to do. There is a sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work - a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in all its parts - which the superficial man, who leaves his work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns work into art. The smallest thing, well done, becomes artistic. - William Mathews

There is a difference between the casualness of mastery and the carelessness of ignorance. - Charles B. Rogers

Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn't need if you had stayed single. - Jimmy Townsend

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. - Mark Twain

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day. - Henry Ward Beecher

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards. - David O. McKay

To live is good. To live vividly is better. To live vividly together is best of all. - Max Eastman

When there are no other values, money counts for everything. - Digby Baltzell

Management: When in charge, ponder. When in trouble, delegate. When in doubt, mumble.

Mathematicians are a species of Frenchmen: if you say something to them, they translate it into their language and presto! it is something entirely different.

A good musical comedy consists largely of disorderly conduct interrupted occasionally by talk. - George Abe

Without music, life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Concentrated preparation for musical performances should be tempered with physical conditioning. - Eugene Fodor, concert violinist

Our life would stagnate if it were not for the enexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wilderness. We can never have enough of nature. - Henry David Thoreau

We are faced with great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. - John Gardner

If you're going to have strong opinions, you can't be intimidated by facts that don't fit. - Malcomb Forbes

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but he has no right to base it on the wrong facts. - Bernard Baruch

Philosophers learn less and less about more and more until they finally know nothing about everything. Scientists, on the other hand, learn more and more about less and less, until they finally know everything about nothing.

Let us not fall into the trap of doing that which is important at the expense of that which is most important. - Thomas S. Monson

Procrastination is just another form of fear.

The person who thinks he has no faults has at least one.

I shall tell you a great truth, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment: it takes place every day. - Albert Camus

No man can guess in cold blood what he may do in a passion. - H.G. Bohn

Professionalism means consistency of quality. - Frank Tyger

A man progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. - George Bernard Shaw

Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.

You can't pray with your fists clenched. - Geoffrey Bocca

Practical prayer is harder on the soles of your shoes than on the knees of your trousers. - Austin O'Malley

The first mistake in public business is the going into it. - Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequsites for significan invention. Unless the mind is thoroughly charged beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite. - Paul J. Flory

Favorite little sayings - I

2009-03-15T21:19:00.003-06:00

For years, I've been collecting sayings of all types, usually aphorisms giving sage advice in interesting and memorable language. So I thought I might share a few. There's not particular theme, just some that I remember or had written down. This is the first posting in a series (I've got a LOT of these.)

It's not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. - Caron de Beaumarchais

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once. - Calvin Coolidge

Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent. - Robert Frost

The angry man always thinks he can do more than he can. - Albertano of Brescia

When funds are limitless, the only economy is usually in thinking. - Parkinson

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile. - Laurence J. Peter

The world is divided into people who do things
And people who get the credit. - Dwight Morrow

The only unchangeable things in nature are either fossils or will soon become extinct.

Christianity is not something that has been tried and found wanting, but something that has been found difficult and left untried. - G.K.Chesterton

Words were given to man to enable him to conceal his true feelings. - Voltaire

Confidence is what you feel before you understand the problem.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. - Winston Churchill

The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his everyday conduct. - Blaise Pascal

Conscience is the voice that tells us what other people should do.

Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value. - Albert Einstein

Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of. - Goethe

History is full of examples of lonely thinkers who were belittled by the established figures of the time and who, it now turns out, were deservedly neglected. - Leon Lipson

Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it. - James Russell Lowell

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. - Linus Pauling

The composer Max Reger wrote the following rebuttal to a critical review: "I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me."

I read in a book that a man named Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. - Toyohiko Kagawa

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. - Mark Twain

A creative mind merely has ideas; a resourceful mind makes them practical. - Georges F. Doriot

Debt is a trap which people set and bait themselves, and then deliberately step into. - Josh Billings

It's not that people value money more, but that they value everything else so much less - not that they are more greedy, but that they have no other values to keep greed in check. - Dee Hock, former president of VISA

Scripture for dentists: "...open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it." - Psalms 81:10

To give great attention to details is one mark of genius - to putter with trifles is not. - Charles B. Rogers

Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. - Shakespeare

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers; not because he is obstinate, but because he knows others worthy of consideration. - Allan Bloom

A great many of today's problems are caused by a tremendous surplus of simple answers, coupled with a horrible shortage of simple questions.

If God could have sons, all of us were his sons. If Jesus was like God, or God himself, then all men were like God and could be God himself. - Gandhi

There is no solution to any crisis that can allay an infinity of fears while assuming zero risk. Attempts to satisfy these two impossible constraints are responsible for the lack of positive action. Our current policy is enmeshed precisely in this zero-infinity dilemma. - Bernard S. Lee, President, Institute of Gas Technology

An economist is a person who, when he doesn't have a clue, will always come up with an estimate.

Education - that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. - Ambroise Bierce

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. - Robert Frost

Anyone who promises you a return to the days of cheap, abundant energy is either naive, stupid, or blind to the realities of life. If this country had reacted to Pearl Harbor as we have to our energy problem, we would all be speaking Japanese today. - Robert Robel, Kansas State Univ. (from 1976!)

An expert doesn't necessarily know more than you do, but he has it better organized and shows slides. - Paul Harwitz

How many fancy they have experience simply because they have grown old! - Stanslaus Lee

It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, he - with his specialized knowledge - more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. - Albert Einstein

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. - Aldous Huxley

Organs I have played

2009-02-27T12:46:00.026-07:00

Just thought it might be interesting (for me, anyway) to put in some pictures of pipe organs I've played over the years, listed more or less chronologically.

To begin with, a little information is necessary. If you're a rank beginner, like most people, Wikipedia's treatise on the pipe organ is a good place to start. Speaking of ranks, organs are classified by the number of ranks, or complete sets of pipes they have. How many pipes is that? Since organ keyboards have 62 keys, or about five octaves, a rank is generally 62 pipes. However, the number of stops (i.e., different sounds) is often less than that: "combination stops" blend several different ranks in the high register of the organ to add brilliance, and "celeste" stops blend two stops that are deliberately tuned slightly differently to produce a pleasant vibrato-like sound. Of course, the ranks that are used in combination stops may also be used simultaneously for other purposes, but there are usually fewer stops than ranks. For example, the Salt Lake Tabernacle organ has 206 ranks, but only 147 stops. Look at Wikipedia's article on the Tabernacle organ for a list of stops.

Now, how big is big? For me, anything over about 60-70 ranks is big. This makes the Tabernacle organ a VERY big organ. If you're interested in that sort of thing, several people have made lists of the world's biggest organs. You can find links to those on Google or in Rich ard Elliott's wonderful site describing t he organs on and around Temple Square.

Finally, you need to know something about how organs are put together. Basically, you have a wind chest, pipes, and something that connects the manuals (keyboards) with the valves that let air into the pipes. In the early days, there was an elaborate system of wooden rods and levers that connected the console to the pipes. This system is called a tracker action. In many modern organs, the action is electric (i.e., electric valves under each pipe) or electro-pneumatic (electric control of pneumatic valves under each pipe.) These electric-based systems allow the organ console to be moved around, which can be convenient. However, most organist prefer tracker actions because trackers are much more responsive to the organist's touch and the offer tighter control over exactly how the music sounds. It's worth noting that pipe organs were the highest technological accomplishment of Western society from the Late Middle Ages until the Industrial Revolution.

So why all the different keyboards? Well, different stops can be accessed from each of the keyboards. This allows the organist to quickly change from one sound to another. It also facilitates playing the kinds of polyphonic music that characterize much of the organ literature. For example, one hand would play on one manual, the other hand on a different manual with a different registration (set of stops), and the feet on the pedal keyboard, allowing three melodies to be played simultaneously, each with a different sound. This gives clarity and definition to the music. Obviously, the larger the organ (i.e., the more ranks and stops) and the more manuals (keyboards), the greater the possibilities for variations in sound. One famous organist, on first trying out a new instrument, said, "You have not presented me with just an organ - this is an orchestra!"

Also, organs differ in general sound, depending on when and where they were built. For example, the German Baroque organs that Bach played tended to use fairly low air pressure in the wind chests and had rather severe, plain-sounding pipes. The purity of this sound is well-suited to the music written by Bach and other German composers; whether the organs or the music came first is a matter of debate. On the other hand, the so-called French Romantic organ (like most of those I played in France) is characterized by very rich and varied stops, with lots of aural color and warm reed stops. The Salt Lake Tabernacle organ is a French Romantic-style organ at heart, though its huge size also allows it to be used for German Baroque music as well. There are whole books published on organ stops and how to use them, so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that choosing the registration for a given piece of music is one of the biggest challenges to an organist. You have to match the demands of the music to the resources of the organ, and to your own abilities. It's always an interesting process.

The ward chapel in Salt Lake where I grew up has a small 14-rank organ (which is actually pretty big for a Mormon chapel), and was the first pipe organ I ever played. In high school, our mostly-Mormon choir sang High Mass at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Salt Lake, and I played the organ for that. After that experience, the choir director asked me if I had ever had organ lessons. I'm sure it was painfully obvious to him that I had not! So he offered to line me up with a friend who taught organ. That is how for the ensuing summer and my first year of college, I studied with Dr. Robert Cundick, chief organist at the Salt Lake LDS Tabernacle. My lessons were actually at a little practice organ in the basement of the Assembly Hall, on Temple Square like the Tabernacle, but he did take me over to play the big organ in the Tabernacle a few times.

The actual practice organ that I played on had some pipes from Joseph Ridge's original Tabernacle organ built in Pioneer times. It was replaced by this 8-rank organ during a renovation of the Assembly Hall.

The big organ at the Tabernacle is well-known, of course. Here are shots of the organ and the console.

After my first year of college, I spent 2 1/2 years in France as an LDS missionary. One of the real highlights of my mission was the opportunity to play some wonderful and huge pipe organs in France. My first town was Orleans. One day my missionary companion and I got caught in an unexpected rainstorm. We happened to be close to the cathedral Ste. Croix and ducked inside to get out of the weather. Just as we entered the church, the organist practicing in the loft hit a big full-organ chord. The reverb time in there is on the order of 5-6 seconds, quite long, so the effect was magnificent. It's easy to see how the combination of such music and the stained glass can lift people's spirits heavenward - it certainly affects me that way. The upshot of that visit was that I was able eventually to get to know the organist and play the organ. Here is a link to a view of the interior of Ste. Croix with the organ at the rear, in front of the main rose window, the usual place for cathedral organs. By the way, the organ in Ste. Croix was built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, probably the greatest organ factor (builder) of the 19th century. The organ in Orleans is a virtual duplicate of the Grand Orgue in Notre Dame de Paris, shown here.

After Orleans, I was transferred to Bordeaux, a much larger city with numerous churches, including the cathedral St. Andre. Like many churches in the Southwest of France, the main tower is not attached to the cathedral, but stands by itself. The first time I heard the entire Brahms Requiem was at a performance here - you cannot imagine the effect that the reverberation of a large cathedral has on such a work. It's something I'll always remember. I met one of the organists here, and was able to play this magnificent organ two or three times.

From Bordeaux, I went back to Paris but was stationed out in the far Western suburbs, a town called Nanterre, which was dominated politically by the French Communist Party and was thus not very friendly to Americans. Since the Viet Nam War was in full swing in 1967-68 when I was there, I heard all kinds of obscene terms that they don't teach you in school! We missionaries were very fortunate that the mission president encouraged us to get immersed in French culture, so we all went to Midnight Mass at Notre Dame on Christmas Eve, among other things. I also had the exceptional opportunity to play the 102-rank tracker organ at the church of St. Sulpice, where Charles-Marie Wido r, then Marcel D upre were the organists for years and years. There is a long-standing tradition that anyone who wishes may play the organ at certain times of the week, so I took advantage of that. The outside of the church is totally unremarkable, but the organ! It is regarded as Cavaille-Coll's masterpiece. Having heard and played it, it's hard to disagree.

After Paris, I was transferred to the small city of Perigueux, the capital of foie gras and truffles. It's an old town, as you can see from the picture of a street near our apartment, and still has the remains of a temple to a Gallic goddess that was 400 years old when Julius Caesar conquered the town! We lived in a building built in 1415, and could see the original hand-hewn beams in our ceiling - wonderful place to live. The cathedral there is built in a Byzantine style, and really towers over the town, as you can see in this view from across the river. One day, my missionary companion and I were near the cathedral and could hear the organ playing, so we went in. It turned out that the console was on the floor rather than in the organ loft, so I went up and started talking to the priest playing it. We eventually became friends, and he allowed me to come in an hour a day at noon to play the organ. We also became what must be a very small set of Mormon missionaries who regularly ate lunch with the priests in the rectory of the cathedral!

My next stop after Perigueux, and my last town in France, was La Rochelle, a beautiful port city on the Atlantic Coast. La Rochelle was one of the Protestant "refuge cities" established by the Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestant churches in France and set aside a number of cities to be governed by Protestant city councils. Unfortunately, that tolerance didn't last very long; eventually Cardinal Richelieu and his troops besieged and conquered La Rochelle (one of my apartments there was about 50 yards from where Richelieu's headquarters had been) and the resulting departure of many of the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, enriched many other places of Europe and North America with talented people now unwanted in their own homeland. Somehow I met the organist at the chief Calvinist Temple (church) in La Rochelle, and again ended up with their pipe organ (a medium-sized one, as it turned out, about 40 ranks) for an hour a day.

The last organ I played in France was one of the best. On the way back to Paris to catch the plane home, I stopped in the city of Poitiers for several hours, having gotten a letter of recommendation to the organist of the Cathedral of St. Pierre. The organ there was built by Francois Clicquot in 1781, and is substantially unchanged since then. It is a four-manual tracker; it's possible to couple all the manuals together and still be playable - an amazing feat of engineering! The building has a reverberation time of about seven seconds, so it sounds just incredible! Here are a couple pictures:

After college and graduate school, I moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and played virtually all the church organs in that city. I also had the opportunity to play perhaps the most interesting organ in that part of the world, the 105-rank Moller organ at the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa. The church itself is built in a style best called Skyscraper Neo-Gothic. The organ is terrific, and balanced very well the 120-voice multi-state LDS choir that I was accompaning at a concert there.

I moved back to Salt Lake in 2004, and am anxiously awaiting an opportunity to play the organ in the new Conference Center downtown. We'll see.

Bach the Magnificent

2009-02-26T16:25:00.015-07:00

You have to know that I play the organ as well as the piano. There is nothing quite so viscerally exciting as sitting at a BIG organ and turning it loose. And, like most organists, I have a bad case of hero-worship of Johann Sebastian Bach. By the way, here is a modern forensic anthropologist's reconstruction of what Bach may have looked like, based on his skull from the Tomaskirche in Leipzig, where he is buried. Put this face on a stocky 5'6" frame and you've got it!

For Christmas, Vickie gave me a course called Bach and the High Baroque produced by The Teaching Company. If you're not familiar with that company, they produce a variety of (mostly) college-level courses on tape, CD, and DVD. The subjects in the arts, sciences, theology, history, and so on, and include everything from Early Christianity to The Joy of Mathematics. The teachers are chosen for their ability to make the course material come alive.

Bach and the High Baroque is comprised of 32 45-minute lectures, all on CD. In addition to that course, our library also includes A Survey of Western Art, The Life and Works of C.S.Lewis, Understanding Linguistics, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, The Chamber Music of Mozart, and Fundamentals of Music. The music courses we have are all taught be a fellow named Robert Greenberg, who is a well-regarded composer himself, and who works with San Francisco Performances. Founded in 1979, San Francisco Performances is the Bay Area’s leading independent presenter of chamber music, vocal and instrumental recitals, jazz and contemporary dance.

Greenberg is an absolutely riveting lecturer. Because he is a composer and performer himself, he knows his subject from the inside out. But that's not all - he's funny, original, and just plain fun to listen to. Here's a sample from the San Francisco Performances site. Click to get to the link, then scroll down to see Greenberg; you'll need Real Player to play it.

Greenberg covers Bach's very interesting life in some detail, including the time his employer had him jailed for trying to quit! (Bach loved life in jail because he had time to compose.) He discusses the life of a composer in the early 18th century: for example, when Bach was in Leipzig, where he spent the last 27 years of his life, Bach was required to supervise and train the choirs and organist for all five churches in town, write music for every Sunday service, plus municipal events (e.g., a mayor's inauguration), make sure all the organs were working correctly, and, by the way, teach Latin to the 12-year-old choirboys! He also had to get in the middle of the political fights between two factions, one of whom loved Bach's elaborate style and thought highly of his compositional gifts, and the other group, who thought of Bach primarily as a teacher and wanted to make the church music rather starkly simple. That battle, by the way, is still going on for most church organists. Over his time in Leipzig, Bach wrote

Several complete cycles of cantatas, 54-60 cantatas in each cycle. A cantata is a 20-minute-or-so, 5-7 movement mini-oratorio based on the hymn for that Sunday in the Lutheran liturgical calendar. Bach wrote nearly 300 cantatas, all told; we have only (!) about 200 of them. Click here for a list of which ones were performed each week during Bach's life.
Four or possibly five Passions. A Passion is the crucifixion story set to music. We have Passions for the Gospels of John and Matthew; the rest are lost. The St. Matthew Passion consists of 78 sections and calls for two choirs, two orchestras, a boys' choir, and four soloists. A performance lasts about four hours. It is one of the world's greatest masterpieces of vocal and orchestral music, highly spiritual and deeply moving.
Reams of music for his children. He and his two wives (sequential, not simultaneous!) had 20 of them, all told, of whom ten survived to adulthood. Even the exercises are masterful compositions.
The B-Minor Mass, an incredible setting (one of the finest ever) of the Catholic Mass - and by a Lutheran composer!
The Art of the Fugue, a masterful exposition of all the tricks used in writing these characteristic Baroque pieces. He uses the fugue subject (theme) forwards, backwards (in regression), upside-down (inversion), upside-down and backwards (inversion-regression), slowed down, speeded up - you name it, he shows how to do it.
An incredible amount of other stuff.

And all of this while doing all the other things his contract required! Well, almost all - he found and paid somebody else to teach Latin.

Bach must have been a real challenge to work with. He had a temper and did not suffer fools gladly, nor was he tolerant of anything but a performer's best efforts in the service of God, which is how Bach defined his role as a musician. This could and did lead to problems, as Bach could play the organ and harpsichord better than any of his keyboard players (in fact, during his lifetime he was better known as an organ virtuoso than as a composer), and violin better than the violinists, plus he was a professional-level singer. In addition, his second wife, Anna Magdalena, was the leading soprano in Cothen, Bach's location before Leipzig, so he brought his own soprano soloist along and wrote many of his soprano parts with her in mind.

Having done some arranging and composing myself, it seems incredible to me that he could have accomplished so much in one lifetime. Consider writing a Lutheran church cantata, for example. He would start working on Monday for the next week's cantata, and would have to have it finished and sent to the copyists on Wednesday so the choir and orchestra could start practicing in order to sing it on Sunday! And he didn't have the terrific music-printing software that we have now. My software, called Finale, will take an orchestral score and automatically print out each part. Bach had to start with blank paper and a pen. Unbelievable! (Especially since he did it so much better than I can.)

The best part of the course, naturally, is the music. We've been listening to the course on our car stereo - it's actually becoming a reason to go for a long drive somewhere, anywhere, just so we can hear some more.

Baroque music is characterized by a highly-emotional musical superstructure built on and controlled by a very rigid formal structure. Greenberg explains and illustrates the formal structures, then plays dozens of different things to illustrate how Bach was a master of just about everything to which he set his hand.

All told, listening to this course is one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. Bach is by turns introspective, flamboyant, pensive, highly spiritual, funny, unrestrained, or tightly wound. He has an unbelievable gift for coming up with unforgettable melodies and beautiful harmonizations - all within the incredibly rigid confines of the Baroque forms.

I will never look at Bach the same way again. And my most heartfelt thanks to Vickie for getting this course for us!

Weight loss surgery

2009-02-20T18:09:00.010-07:00

Let's face it - I'm not 25 any longer. One would think that having children in their 30's would make that pretty clear, but they don't look like they're in their 30's, and I really don't feel like I'm in my 60's (barely!) However, I have noticed that there is more of me (except for my hair) than there used to be. Quite a bit more, actually. The added weight has brought on several problems that I'm not thrilled to be facing. They include acid reflux, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, hypertension, and a near approach to Type II diabetes; the last three together are known as Metabolic Syndrome. All of them are a byproduct of the extra weight. I keep telling Vickie that in me she just has too much of a good thing. It doesn't really help.

Nor did various attempts at diet and exercise seem to do the job. I'd lose a few pounds (up to 10-12), then put them back on. Not good.

So we decided it was time to do something more dramatic: bariatric (weight-loss) surgery. It turns out that there are several ways to go. Here is the link for the National Institute of Health's site discussing weight-loss surgery.

The type of operation I'm actually having is laparoscopic gastric banding, often referred to by the brand name of one of the equipment makers, lap-band. Basically, they install a little band with an inflatable balloon around the stomach, near the top, to make a little pouch instead of a big stomach. Here's a diagram, so you can see how it works. The inflatable portion is connected by a little tube to a port that sits just under the skin in some convenient place. To tighten the band, you simply inject a little saline through the port; similarly, you can loosen the band by withdrawing saline through the port.

As a precursor to the surgery, I've been on a 1000 calorie/day diet for the last week and a half, and have lost about 10 pounds so far. After the surgery, I'll be on liquids for a week, then soft and mushy foods for a week or two, then back to relatively normal stuff - just not very much of it.

The idea of this whole thing is that you don't eat as much because the pouch gets full and your natural gastrointestinal reactions tell you that you're full - even though you haven't eaten nearly as much as you might with a normal stomach. That is supposed to basically eliminate hunger - which is for me, like for most people, a big part of why I eat.

Of course, I'll have to watch what I eat from now on. Carbonated drinks are out, for example, including champagne (I'll never miss it, since I've never even tasted the stuff.) I will have to concentrate on protein and nutritious things, and be sure not to miss taking vitamins regularly. Vickie and I have already started exercising fairly regularly, so that will continue, too. In essence, you're supposed to live a healthy lifestyle - not a bad thing for anybody. This will just help enforce it.

There is at least one more big advantage - Vickie and I will now be on the same diet, since she had the same surgery about 50 pounds ago, so cooking will be easier. We've already decided how to handle eating out: we will alternate the choice of what we eat, since the best way to eat out is to just order one meal for both of us, then split it.

My surgery is scheduled for Thursday the 26th of February. It's done on an outpatient basis, so unless something goes drastically wrong, I'll only be in the clinic about 3-4 hours. After I come out of the anesthetic, it's homeward for a nice nap.

The statistics for lap-band surgery are very comforting, as complications are rare, especially when it's done by a doctor with lots of experience. My doctor has done about 700 of these, so he knows what he's doing. Even better, all of the office staff has had the surgery, and there are numerous support-group activities. Complications occasionally do happen, but the odds are much better than for other types of bariatric surgery, and having this surgery greatly decreases my risks of having problems related to excess weight.

Wish me luck!

On getting things done...

2009-01-08T09:32:00.004-07:00

Since we're all interested in New Year's Resolutions in January, I thought I'd post this interesting list of four commandments on how to get things done. It's a good one - so good, in fact, that I've taped the list to the cabinet just above my computer screen so I won't forget to apply these.

Four Commandments

1 - Show up - Sometimes all we need to do is simply be in the right place at the right time. It's certain, however, that we won't do anything if we're not where we're supposed to be, when we're supposed to be there. I've got a tendency to be late to things, so one of my resolutions this year is to improve my timeliness.

2 - Pay attention - Most of the time, we don't really need to give our full attention to what's going on. However, when things are happening, it's important to pay attention to a) what's happening, b) why it's happening, c) how what's happening now relates to what happened earlier, d) how what's happening now relates to what should happen in the future, and e) what we need to do about all the above, if anything.

3 - Do your best - Often, it's easy to slide along and do an adequate (but not spectacular) job of things. Having picked that small subset of all our duties that really matter for the long term, it's important to do nothing but the very best on those crucial few. Have I always done that in my life? Sadly, no - but I think I'm getting better at it.

4 - Let go - I was surprised at first to see this one on the list, but the more I think about it, the more important it gets. Once we have done what we can do - even if things don't turn out as we had hoped - it's to our own benefit to let go of the project physically and emotionally. We all know people whose lives topped out when they were in high school and who have done virtually nothing since; people who live on the memories of past accomplishments. Similarly, it's not hard to find people who can't seem to get past some real or perceived emotional wound. Divorces often cause such emotional ossification. Only when we put down past burdens or cease carrying our old trophies are our hands and heart available for the tasks of the present and future.

Giselle

2008-12-16T15:12:00.016-07:00

December 15 was the birthday of my older daughter Giselle. She died of a brain tumor four years ago, leaving a husband and daughters aged three and 16 months. I miss her, and want to say a bit about her.

Giselle was always fair of complexion, with dark hair (eventually - she was blond as a toddler) and big blue-grey eyes, which she learned to use very early. One of her first friends was Jason Johnston, who lived across the street. From the time they were about two years old, she could get him to do anything she wanted, just by batting her eyes and threatening a little cry - and she knew it.

When she was about eight, Giselle started to play soccer - and I became the coach. Though she was always one of the smallest members on the team, Giselle was a good player, quick with her feet and always thinking strategically.

In school, Giselle learned to play the violin. At first she used the family-heritage violin made by my great-uncle, who handed it down. As it happens, I started violin before I ever played piano, but Giselle quickly played better than I ever did. In fact, she somehow bypassed that horrible squeaky phase that I never seemed to get out of. As she got to be a teenager, she joined the Bartlesville Strolling Strings, run by Barbara Wallace, who quickly became one of the more important people in her life.

Music was always important to Giselle. Besides violin, she played piano and had a beautiful, clear soprano voice, without the whiny breathiness that some high school girls develop. She was chosen to represent Bartlesville in All-District choirs and All-District orchestras while in high school. Her signature song was "His Hands," about the Savior. Here is a tape of her singing.

Giselle always got good grades, partially because of good native intelligence, but also because of her willingness to work hard to learn. One night during her senior year in high school, Giselle came to me in tears and said, "Dad, I've been trying really hard to get scholarships for college, but it just hasn't worked; I'm so sorry." I sympathized, of course, and said that she was still going to college anyway, and that everything would work out for the best. The next day, I got a phone call at work informing me that Giselle had won one of the four-year Phillips employee dependents' scholarships that would pay for her entire college tuition!

She spent two years at Ricks College, the LDS junior college in Rexburg, ID, (it's now called BYU-Idaho) then finished up her BA in Elementary Education at Pittsburg State, KS. She and her sister Krista were roommates at Ricks and at Pitt State, after having shared a room their whole lives at home. They never had better friends than each other.

At Pitt State, Giselle met Hyriam Fleming in choir. Hyriam is a big, tall (6'4") man with a gentle way. He also has a degree in chemistry and plays jazz. I have always felt immensely flattered that Giselle was attracted to a chemist/musician like me, even if that was not the attraction! They soon started seeing a lot more of each other. Eventually, Hyriam joined the LDS Church, and they were married in the LDS Temple in St. Louis, MO. Two girls, Livia and McKenna, followed in due time.

For several years, Hyriam taught chemistry and physics in the little town of Sublette, KS, population about 1500. Sublette's only distinction is that it is the county seat of the flattest county in Kansas! But it was a good home for them for several years.

Giselle was unable to get a job as an elementary education teacher in Sublette, but was recruited to teach Special Education in a multi-county consortium. To retain her position, she had to have a master's degree - and the consortium paid for her to get it! She received her M.A. cum laude from Emporia State University.

Eventually, though, they decided that teaching was not a great way to raise a family, so Hyriam went back to school, enrolling in the pharmacy program at Kansas University in Lawrence. They bought a little house in Eudora, KS, just a few miles from Lawrence, and Giselle got a job teaching Special Ed in the elementary school walking distance from their home.

In the fall of 2004, Giselle had several severe headaches that over-the-counter medications just didn't seem to deal with. Finally, one afternoon in October, the headache was so severe that Hyriam took her to the emergency room at the hospital in Lawrence. They basically took one look at her and sent them to Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where tests confirmed that Giselle had a brain tumor. The diagnosis was astrocytoma, grade III or IV. According to one source,

"the highest grade (IV), also known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is the most common primary CNS malignancy and second most frequent brain tumor. Despite the comparatively low incidence of astrocytomas to other human cancers, the higher grades (III & IV) represent disparate mortality rates. Median survival of GBM victims who forgo treatment is approximately 90 days, and even with aggressive surgical, radio- and chemo-therapies is only extended to about twelve months, while long term survival (at least five years) falls under 3%."

It was determined that Giselle had a tumor roughly the size of a lemon, slightly above and forward of her right ear. Since astrocytomas are derived from star-shaped cells (hence the astro- part of the name), the surgeons hoped they would be able to remove all the tentacles.

Giselle and Hyriam approached this grim prognosis with faith and hope. Since it was nearly Halloween, they did all the things that families with young children do on Halloween - but they also made sure to have a family portrait taken. Halloween was a Saturday; on Monday, Giselle went into the hospital and had surgery on Tuesday.

Initially, the surgery seemed to have gone very well. Unfortunately, the surgeons were not able to remove all the tendrils of the tumor for fear of damaging her brain. Giselle was feeling pretty good, to the point that she was reading stories to her girls and looking forward to getting home again. On Wednesday and Thursday, though, things turned very bad indeed. It was later determined that swelling in her brain stem left Giselle without brain function, and she died Thursday morning, just after Vickie and I arrived from Salt Lake. Before her operation, we had wanted to come to Kansas to be near, but Giselle called and asked me not to come until afterward, because she did not want to deal with the problems that my former wife would cause if we were there. I cannot now and probably will never be able to forgive Robyn for that.

Since my father is a mortician, I learned as a teenager how to apply makeup; at that point it was mostly for Halloween and stage use, of course. But how many men can say that their father taught them how to do makeup? Anyway, I had the privilege of applying the makeup to Giselle's body prior to the viewing and funeral. It's not morbid at all, and in fact having Hyriam ask me to do that is one of the greatest honors I've ever received.

Giselle was buried in Eudora, KS, on - as is proper for Kansas - a windswept hill overlooking a pretty meadow bordered by a little stream. She left Hyriam with two little girls, Livia, age three, and McKenna, sixteen months.

Life continues: after some very difficult time as a single father (which he did very well at, though hairdos were always a trial) Hyriam has happily remarried, and his wife Sunny has become a wonderful mother to the girls. They now live in Riverton, UT, just about 15 miles from Vickie and me.

The girls recognize Giselle mainly from pictures; Livia remembers Giselle only slightly, and McKenna not at all. They have started to call Sunny "Mommy," which is good, because Sunny will be the only mother they will know for most of their lives. But Giselle lives on in our memories. We all miss her, now and always.

Thanksgiving odyssey

2008-12-03T15:02:00.013-07:00

Vickie and I took a whole week away from normal life to go South for Thanksgiving week. We started with a drive through the Kolob Canyon area of Zion National Park, and hiked out to an amazing viewpoint. Kolob Canyon actually serves as the terminus for three hiking trails; we went on the shortest, and started out on another of them before it got too dark.

We then went into St. George, where we stayed for a couple days with my Uncle Vern and Aunt Bonnie. They are wonderful people with great senses of humor and the ability to completely enjoy the present. We spent a whole day with them in the other part of Zion National Park, exploring Zion's Canyon, and hiking the River Walk, up to the Weeping Rock, and up to the Emerald Pools. Considering how recently Vickie has been back to having two functional knees, it was a terrific day. She really hikes well, and we're enjoying getting out and around.

After we left, them we drove on to Phoenix, where Vickie's son Adam and his family live in the suburb of Chandler. On the way, we stopped and bought some cheese from the polygamist community of Colorado City, then visited Pipe Spring National Monument, a place that few people know about. In the 1870's Brigham Young sent a 'cattle mission' down there to manage the cattle that had been given the Church as tithing in kind. They ensured that there would be few problems with the Indians by building a fort on top of the only springs in a huge area - all in all, not a very nice thing to do.

The Piutes in the area already had enough problems: they were continually raided by stronger tribes, the Utes and Navajos, who stole women and children and sold them to the Spanish as slaves. Between 1750 and 1900, the tribal population declined from about 7,000 to 76! It was particularly interesting because our guide was a Piute Indian, who told us about the hardships of his ancestors in this area. Pipe Spring is really a place to see if you ever have the chance.
We finally made it to Phoenix (actually Chandler) and had a great time with grandkids. In addition to the Thanksgiving feast, we got to watch Lizzie at her riding lessons (she was very frustrated because her horse wasn't active enough...), go meet Vickie's college roommate Adrian Shelton and her husband at their house in Tuscson, help Adam replace the rocks that had comprised their front yard with real grass, and see the Chandler Children's Choir (which Aimee founded and leads) in concert. We also got in some swimming and a pie party where playing and singing was competing pretty hard with the pies. Here are some pictures:

Finally, here's a video clip of the Chandler Children's Choir for your edification and delight:

Major surgery for my piano

2008-11-18T09:46:00.008-07:00

I've played piano since I was about ten years old. Because my great-grandfather's brother was a violinist and actually made his own violin (which is still in the family), my parents got me started on violin when I was eight. It was a disaster! In my entire career (and I use the term with some reservations) as a violinist, I rose to the exalted position of next-to-last-chair second violin in the Wasatch Junior High School eighth-grade orchestra. So when I started piano and was given the choice to practice piano or violin, there was really no decision to be made. Besides, piano came very easily: I tore through about three years' worth of beginner books in my first six months, and quickly got to the point where I enjoyed playing the thing.

Fast-forward a few years. My mother found out that the Salt Lake School District was closing South High School and would be auctioning off the contents, including the 6'3" Baldwin grand piano from the stage in the auditorium. She called me (by this time I was out of grad school and living in Oklahoma) and asked if I would like her to bid on it for me. Well, I had no idea whether the thing was any good; given the abuse that school instruments take, it could have been a real wreck.

I called Ed Fernley, my old piano teacher's widower, who is a tuner/technician and asked him to run down and take a look at it for me, which he graciously did. He told me that if I didn't want the piano, he would bid on it for himself. That decided it. In the end, Mom got the piano for a bid of $3100 - on a piano that probably would have sold for $16,000 in the regular market! The only problem was that the lid looked like kids had been dancing on it; given its location in a high school, that's probably exactly what happened.

The piano was shipped to Oklahoma and then to a fellow I found who would refinish the case. It turned out that the piano hit Tulsa (where the refinisher was) on the same day that Jonathan was born. My wife was seriously worried as to which baby I would visit first! (Demonstrating at least a little sense, my first visit was to the hospital.)

When the refinisher stripped the ebony paint off the piano, he discovered that the paint had been applied over mahogany veneer! We decided to just refinish the veneer with a walnut stain; the red of the mahogany would give a very warm tone, which in fact it did. The only problem was around the edges, where the veneer had not been applied since the piano was to be painted. We decided to repaint the edges, some of the trim pieces, and the music desk in ebony. The result is a strikingly-beautiful one-of-a-kind instrument.

Fast-forward again: the piano and I are back in Salt Lake. I'm noticing that the piano sounds a bit dull, and that the action is sluggish and uneven. Then I read an article suggesting that the solution to this problem is to restring the piano, something you're supposed to do every fifty years or so. There is a reference book called the Pierce Piano Atlas; it gives the manufacturer and date of manufacture for every grand piano made in the US by serial number. According to Pierce, my piano was manufactured in 1954, and it's now 2008 - time to restring!

We decide to do more than restring the piano, since the metal plate and trusses that support the string tension are getting pretty ugly, and the sounding board is almost impossibly dirty. After talking with a technician from the local Steinway dealer, he says that he knows someone who will refinish all the metal, plus the sounding board while the strings are on order. Terrific!

Thus, the day before we leave for our trip to Scotland last summer, my piano disappears into the depths of a Steinway truck to be disassembled, refinished, and put back together, destined to reappear in pristine condition when we get home. At least that's the theory. There's an old aphorism that says: "In theory, theory and practice are identical; in practice, they aren't." So true. In the event, though the piano was supposed to be done the end of June, it took until mid-October before everything was done. Let me explain why.

For a guitarist or violinist, changing strings is pretty easy: you remove the old strings by turning the tuning pins with your hand, then put the new ones on, tighten them up to tune, and you're done. For a piano, it's a bit different. To begin with, there is usually more than one string per note; the exact number depends on the brand, quality, and size of the piano. On mine, the lowest eight notes have only one string, the next fifteen have two, and the other 53 have three strings per note. That's a total of 197 strings! And they are not awfully flexible: these things are (naturally) piano wire, made of an alloy designed for toughness. Moreover, the lowest 23 strings (the singles and doubles) have to be custom made for a given type of instrument. Typically the technician will remove the old strings and send them off to the string factory for duplication - you just can't run down to the piano store and get them.

While the strings were on order, the metal frame and sounding board were supposed to be getting refinished. In reality, they were waiting in the shop for their turn with the refinisher. We didn't get the piano put back together and back in our living room until the first part of September! However, it was worth the wait, because here are the results:

The refinished plate and sounding board are absolutely beautiful. The new strings also included new chrome plated pins, replacing old ugly black carbon steel pins.

A word about tuning pins on pianos: you don't turn them by hand. In fact, it takes a special tool called a tuning hammer (though you don't hammer with it), and new pins are always about 0.001" larger in diameter than the old ones, so that they will hold securely in their resting place, the pin block.

Besides the new strings, a restringing job also requires changing the damper felts, the felts that keep each string from sounding unless you have either the key or the sustain pedal down. It turns out that the old felts have grooves where the strings have been, and there is no way to guarantee that the new strings will be in exactly the same place as the old ones!

Finally, there is one more long and arduous task that we had done when the piano was re-strung; it is called regulation. Regulation has absolutely nothing to do with the strings, and can be done whenever needed. Regulating a piano's action it is the job of making sure that each key operates exactly the same as all the others. Each key must throw the hammer at the string at precisely the same point in its travel, with precisely the same force on the part of the pianist, with precisely the same amount of hammer rebound before it is caught and held, with precisely the same ability to quickly repeat the strike if necessary, and on and on.

Piano actions are amazing pieces of mechanical ingenuity and precision manufacture. A grand piano action has about 32 parts for each key, plus about eight more parts for each damper. Altogether, a piano action contains over 3500 parts! These parts determine such things as how fast notes can be repeated, how much finger pressure is necessary to make the hammer strike the string, how far down each key can travel, and a number of other things that define the piano's playing characteristics. Here's a diagram for a typical grand piano action:

Notice that the key itself does not ever touch the hammer. Instead, when the pianist pushes on the end of the key (out of the diagram to the right) the key raises the wippen (part #30) which pushes up the jack (part #1), which raises the hammer shank and tosses the hammer (part #25) into the strings. The hammer bounces back and the hammer's tail is caught and held by the back check (part #26); if it were not thus captured, the hammer would just keep bouncing against the string - and you can imagine how that would sound (sort of like a mandolin, actually.) The other parts make sure that all those things happen perfectly, every time, and that all 88 keys perform exactly alike. And all this has to hold up to the brutal treatment given to the action by pianists!

You're probably getting tired of reading this, so let me get right to the conclusion: after new strings and refinishing the metal parts and the soundboard, the piano looks new and beautiful. That's great, but it doesn't address what pianos are really for - to be played. After new strings and a very extensive regulation of the action, my piano plays and sounds like a new instrument - it's amazing! It's cleaner, purer, brighter, more flexible, more responsive, (I'm running out of praises here), than any piano I've played in a long, long time. And it's sitting in my living room just waiting for me to come caress its fake-ivory keys!

Actually, it's better than new, because most new pianos are not regulated to the degree that mine has been. Am I happy - you bet! Well, the happiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that I can hear not only the beauty of the music but also my mistakes more clearly than before. Still, it's like going out in the garage to take the cover off an old car that's been sitting out there for years. You always thought it was an old Chevy, but with the cover off you discover a classic Ferrari. That's how I feel. Now I need to go practice...

Playing Gilbert and Sullivan

2008-11-12T14:13:00.006-07:00

On Saturday, I'm playing for a Holladay Arts Council production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Yeomen of the Guard. I was called in less than two weeks ago because their previous accompanist decided that the score was too difficult. Its difficulties come in that many of the patter songs are fast - very fast. Otherwise, it's not too bad. Yeomen is considered by some to have the best music of any of the G&S operettas. It is clearly the most thoughtful, since it does not have a particularly happy ending. It is seldom staged, mostly because making the Beefeater costumes is so expensive! Here's a link to the Wikipedia article, if you're interested.

The setting of Yeomen is the Tower of London in Shakespearean times. The plot concerns Colonel Fairfax, a gentleman, soldier and scientist, who has been sentenced to be beheaded in an hour on a false charge of sorcery. To avoid leaving his estate to his accuser (a cousin), and with the help of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Fairfax secretly marries Elsie Maynard, a strolling singer. The bride agrees to be blindfolded during the ceremony and expects to be a well-paid widow in an hour. With the help of the Meryll family, Fairfax escapes, throwing the Tower into confusion and the astonished Elsie (and her mentor, the jester Jack Point, who loves her) into despair. But Fairfax, disguised as Leonard Meryll, woos Elsie, and after a number of plot complications are worked out, she falls in love with Fairfax and leaves Jack Point broken-hearted.

If you're in Salt Lake on Saturday the 15th, come see it at 7:00 pm at the Holladay City complex, on 23rd East just south of 45th South. The price is right (it's free) and should be fun.

On elections

2008-11-05T16:15:00.004-07:00

Well, the election is over - now the hard work begins. I'm glad that Obama won, because I think our country needs what he brings to the office. What's that? Here's what I like about his approach:

A personality that does not take offense easily
Determination to work collaboratively with others, rather than going it alone
Compassion for those who are disadvantaged, coupled with respect for achievement
Willingness to work with and respect those who hold opinions different from his own
An orientation toward people, rather than institutions
The capability to organize well - shown brilliantly by the campaign
The ability to make others excited about his ideas - LEADERSHIP!!

That said, I was very impressed with McCain's concession speech. It exuded class and good sense. It's too bad that so much of his campaign showed a far less attractive part of his personality. Overall, the man is a fine person and a great American - but would not have made a good president, based on some of the choices he permitted his campaign staff to make.

Incidentally, I've been amused by the pointed Republican reminders that good government includes both parties, and that cooperation is better than partisanship. Where was that attitude when the Bush Administration decided that only Republican ideas and programs were worthy of consideration? Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it's proving to be a bit uncomfortable...

Here in Utah, the Democrats have made some gains, especially in Salt Lake County. Outside of Salt Lake County, Utah is still basically a one-party state. However, a couple of the most divisive legislators lost their positions, so we have real hopes that someday legislation will be debated openly in the legislature instead of being decided behind the closed doors of the Republican Caucus. By the way, I happily voted a mixed ticket - I have never voted a straight party ticket and probably never will, since good people can be found in both parties.

Finally, I'm proud to be an American. The country has shown once more that massive changes in the balance of power can be accomplished without resorting to violence, and that the ballot really is more powerful than the bullet. Sure, we have our problems, but the country is fundamentally in good hands because the people - all the people, of whatever party - have agreed to work together for the good of all of us.

On plastics and chemometrics

2008-10-31T20:35:00.009-06:00

I just got back from three days in beautiful downtown Houston, attending a meeting of licensees of ChevronPhillips Chemical's polyethylene plastic process. Every two years, they all get together to discuss common problems and to hear about all the latest research results from ChevronPhillips. A little background: polyethylene is the plastic used to make milk bottles (and a lot of other things), and ChevronPhillips, a 50/50 joint venture of ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips, is one of the world's largest producers of the stuff.

One of my consulting jobs is basically to install an on-line monitoring system for a new polyethylene plant that CPChem is licensing to another company. This system uses a process called Raman spectroscopy. Basically, in Raman spectroscopy you shine a laser light on the material of interest. Most of the light just bounces off, but a small percentage (maybe one photon in a million) interacts with the material by being absorbed for a few nanoseconds, then is re-emitted (scattered) at a different frequency than it came in at. The difference in frequency corresponds to characteristic vibrations of the atom-to-atom bonds in the molecules. The spectrometer captures those scattered photons and displays their frequencies and the intensity of each frequency. What I do is analyze that data to figure out what's really happening to the molecule.

Sometimes the analysis is pretty easy. For example, with the polyethylene process, you can see the starting materials at the beginning of the reaction, then watch the signal for the finished plastic grow in and the starting materials diminish as the reaction proceeds. This is a particularly handy thing to be able to do, since the reaction is done inside big metal tubes; without something on-line in real time like Raman, you can only analyze what you have at the beginning and end of the reaction. Alternatively, you can take samples out of the reactor and analyze them, but that can be difficult to do, and the analyses are often slow (up to a couple hours), while Raman analysis takes only about 90 seconds. The difference between on-line analysis and conventional analysis has been likened to the difference between a biopsy and an autopsy.

One of the really interesting things that can be done with Raman and some other types of spectroscopy is to determine properties for which the instrument does not receive any signals! I know that sounds a little strange, but let me give an example. If you take a Raman or infrared spectrum of gasoline, it's possible to see peaks that represent different chemical groups that make up the chemical compounds of which gasoline is made: aromatics, paraffins, olefins, and so on. However, there are some properties you'd like to know that are only indirectly related to those compounds. For example, the octane number of gasoline is crucial; octane measures the tendency of gasoline to 'knock,' and is used to differentiate different grades at the service station. Unfortunately, though the octane number of a gasoline sample obviously depends on the components used to make up that gasoline sample, there are no peaks that by themselves give the octane number. Octane can be determined in the laboratory using an engine that compares a given gasoline to two reference compounds. The analysis is difficult, requiring highly-trained technicians, and takes about two hours.

What can be done with that problem is a very elegant mathematical process that falls in the area where chemistry and statistics overlap, an area called chemometrics. To determine octane where no octane peaks are present, one first obtains a bunch of samples (20-50 for gasoline) of gasolines with different octane numbers. The spectra of those gasolines and the corresponding octane numbers are entered into a mathematical matrix, which is then manipulated by a chemometrics computer program (with a little help from me, the operator!) The result is an equation, called the correlation vector, that relates the height of each point in the spectrum to the octane of the gasoline. The correlation vector is simply a series of numbers, one number for each point in the spectrum. To get the octane number of an unknown gasoline, you simply run the spectrum and get the height of the response at each point. You then multiply each height by the correlation vector number for that point on the spectrum and add up all of these products; the result is the predicted octane number.

With polyethylene, one property of importance is the density of the plastic. Different uses for polyethylene require polymers of differing density, so it's important to know that number. During polymer synthesis, the producer wants to make the required material, so it's important for him to know quickly if he's making the right material or if the process is having problems. Raman spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics allows prediction of polymer density while the polymer is still being made, even though (as for gasoline octane) there is no single peak in the Raman spectrum that gives the density. It's also possible to determine the viscosity of the melted polymer before it's ever melted using Raman spectroscopy.

I'm working on a variety of these things for the new plant. By the way, ChevronPhillips has patent coverage on some of these processes, so much of what I'm doing is only possible because it's for a CPChem licensee. In fact, I couldn't even talk about some of these things if they hadn't already been published in the open literature.

Back to Houston. I got to spend several days listening to people talk about problems with pumps, replacing little parts of this and that, problems with how to prevent important holes from getting plugged up, and how to keep important walls from getting holes in them. And then we got to hear about Raman process monitoring!

I was very pleased about the positive reaction to a colleague's paper on the subject, and am even more pleased that the future may bring more opportunities for me to work in the area.

Even though I'm officially retired, there are so many fun and interesting things to do, how could I possibly just sit around or play golf?

What's the title picture?

2008-10-27T22:53:00.003-06:00

Somebody asked me about the picture at the top of my blog. It's a photo I took from the Hayden Peak Overlook on the Mirror Lake Road in the Uinta (pronounced you-IN-ta) Mountains of NE Utah. The big craggy mountain is Hayden Peak, 12,479' high. It's named after Ferdinand Hayden, who did a very early geological survey of the Uintas in about 1870. In the foreground is Moosehorn Lake, about 7.2 acres, and very high - 10,380'! If you're lucky, you can catch rainbow or albino trout in the lake.

The High Uintas constitute one of my favorite places in the world. Just going up there for a few hours lowers my blood pressure about ten points, and is enough to make the world look and feel better, no matter what's going on. There are literally thousands of lakes in the area, and a lot of hikes to get to them. Look, for example, at http://www.go-utah.com/Uinta-Mountains/Hiking/

I talked on a plane ride today with a woman from Omaha who had thought that all of Utah was a flat, dry desert. The Uintas are my answer to people who think that way!

Great fall places

2008-10-26T20:17:00.007-06:00

Just thought I'd post a couple pictures of places close around Salt Lake that Vickie and I have seen in the autumn. Enjoy!

Voting, etc.

2008-10-25T22:58:00.003-06:00

Vickie and I went over to the Holladay City hall and voted early on Thursday. According to the poll workers there, nearly 7,000 people will have voted at that one site before Election Day. It's terrific to see that so many people are being energized by this year's campaigns.

In order to vote intelligently, I read McCain's Faith of My Fathers and Obama's The Audacity of Hope to get a feel for each man. Having done so, I voted for Obama. Obama's life is a true American success story, and the man himself shows a rare combination of high intelligence, superb education, careful thoughtfulness, and a true dedication to public service. I am also impressed that he has taught constitutional law: the Bush Administration has done more to damage the Constitution than any administration in recent history. The invasion (on very shaky pretenses) of Iraq and the subsequent abandonment of the strictures of the Geneva Convention for anyone suspected of being a terrorist are appalling! The Bush policies have alienated our traditional allies around the world, and have greatly tarnished the shining image of America as a nation devoted to truth rather than just to power.

McCain is a genuine war hero, but seems to be a flawed politician. Though he professes that he is not George Bush, McCain has consistently voted for Bush's misguided policies, placing ideology above pragmatism. Moreover, he is famous for having a very hot temper that has often gotten him into trouble. One of the things I like about Barak Obama is that he is very slow to come to a boil - and he seems to use that time for thinking about solutions to problems, rather than just having knee-jerk reactions to them.

I have always though of myself as a moderate. When I lived in Oklahoma, I was active in Republican party politics. But I've noticed that the Republican party has moved significantly to the right, while I've moved slightly to the left. The result is that I now consider myself a Democrat, though still a moderate.

As a Mormon, I've tried to take seriously the teachings of the Savior. I find the Sermon on the Mount a good (if difficult to apply consistently) guide to Christian living. The Republican platform seems to be mostly about right-wing ideology, while the Democrats talk a lot more about helping people other than the wealthy. I find that the Democrats' positions more closely mirror King Benjamin's position (for the non-LDS, Benjamin is quoted in the Book of Mormon) equating service to others with service of God. I'm a little disappointed that so many of my LDS brothers and sisters are taken in by the far-right cant of the Evangelicals (who really don't like Mormons, anyway!)

Summing up, I voted for Obama and sincerely hope that his election will bring a rebirth of true American spirit in the years to come.

Trip to Pittsburgh

2008-10-23T11:35:00.005-06:00

I just got back from a business trip to Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh is a fascinating city, dating from Colonial days. Established as a trading post by the French, it was the object of an abortive drive by the British. George Washington first established his reputation as a soldier when he took over the expedition after the British commander was killed. Because Washington did not understand French and his translator(?) wasn't much better, he actually signed a document admitting that he assassinated the French ambassador to the Indian tribes in French America, and thereby provided the French with justification to start what became known as the French and Indian War.

The British and Colonials eventually prevailed, of course, and the future site of Pittsburgh was called Fort Pitt, after Britain's Foreign Secretary, George Pitt. In later years, Pittsburgh became the center of the US steel and coal industries, with a reputation of a gritty, dirty, blue-collar industrial town.

These days, even after the decline of the coal and steel industries, Pittsburgh is in something of a renaissance. The old HJ Heinz ketchup factory has been converted into a bunch of trendy and expensive loft condos, for example. The smoky, gritty reputation is outdated, too: Pittsburgh now bills itself as 'America's Most Liveable City.' The city is built on a series of rather steep hills, with valleys in between, so the impression is not of a large single city, but of a series of interconnected neighborhoods.

Driving into town from the airport, one does not see the city at all until after passing through a long tunnel through one of the hills. Upon emerging from the tunnel, this is what you see:

Actually, you end up on the bridge on the lower right of this picture, but it's still a pretty spectacular introduction to the city.

As far as the business purpose, it was a good trip. We met with a company involved in supercritical extraction, a key component of our plan for biofuels production from algae, and believe that the meeting's outcome was satisfactory for everybody. To look at our algae business, check our web site, www.greenfireenergy.com.

What am I doing?

2008-10-18T18:06:00.002-06:00

Having never before blogged, it may be time to start. So henceforth, you'll get the somewhat dubious benefit of my occasional wisdom, relatively constant blather, and somewhat rare wit. On we go!