Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations.
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| You Listen to Me, Mr. Kick-Ass Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations. |
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Thursday, September 25, 2003 Postmark I arrived at the 24-hour post office, thankfully still open 24 hours, at 11:20pm. I stood in line(!), and the grant is in, postmarked the appropriate day, and winging (or walking, since it's here in town) its way to the money with a half-hour to spare. Then it took me over an hour to get home. Dang C-Train [which I just discovered is no longer on Friendster, alas]. Also the kids were just getting back from the humongous free Dave Matthews Band concert in the park. Man, with the United Nations assembled, the "President" in town, DMB and the Dems debate, god help you if you try to drive in this town this week... posted by Ginger | 1:48 PM Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Kicking it Grant Style Guess what?! I'm still at work - working on a grant, of course. I hope the 24-hour post office is really still open 24 hours. It will be a rude awakening (har! get it? I should be sleeping?...never mind) if budget cuts somehow removed that luxury from my urban lifestyle. So how many of you can write a reasonable annual budget in less than 60 seconds? I thought not...that is what makes me better than you. [let me have my pride - I've been at work for 12 hours!] The good news is that the shows have been cast, I think. As long as everyone we want says yes, we're in good shape, plus we found a really kick-ass enthusiastic & smart volunteer "assistant stage manager" (otherwise known as the "whatever we need" gal) today - hallelujah. We needs 'em 'cause we aint gots no money, you know... Also have two great candidates for stage manager. So great that we are finding it hard to choose. This is a good problem to have, since last show we didn't have a stage manager until a couple days before opening -- sheesh. Tomorrow the backdrop guy comes to show us his work, and the costume lady is gearing up to start sewing, so believe it or not, things are sort of coming together. Rehearsals are always fun, so I'm looking forward to starting those, even though it means I will have pretty much no free time for the next six weeks or so. Oop! Printing is done (90-plus pages!), I gotta catch a cab to USPS...it's a scant hour before this behemoth is late! posted by Ginger | 10:27 PM Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Aw Heck, I'm Feeling Generous Today There has been a real run on humorous spam lately. To wit: IMUST INTERNATIONAL LOTTERY FROM: INTERNATIONAL PROMOTION/PRIZE AWARD DEPT. REF: 2671890937-026 BATCH: 000234/02 RE: WINNING NOTIFICATION/FINAL NOTICE: We are pleased to inform you of the result of the IMUST International Lottery programs held on the 31st July,2003. 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Sincerely yours, Pale Rufus> (Winning Co-ordinator IMUST Lottery) I'm not greedy - make your claim for the Five hundred thousand Fifty Thousand Euros! Good luck kids! posted by Ginger | 11:33 AM Monday, September 22, 2003 Chip off the Ol Blog For those of you fascinated by my mysterious baby sister Melanie, wonder no more - she now has her very own online Diary. Nothing so nerdy as a "blog" for my dear sister; she's one of those arty people who can't be bothered with HTML (though to be fair she says she's learning). Not many entries up, but one includes a longish account of a visit to The Fair, including a complete list of "fair food" she consumed. Remind you of anyone? Update: Dang, that girl has already got a sweet template up and running. I knew she had some geek in her, somewheres. posted by Ginger | 12:05 AM Sunday, September 21, 2003 Goodbye to Galileo According to this Countdown to Jupiter page, it will be about three hours before the Galileo orbiter smooshes into Jupiter on a noble suicide mission to keep it from crashing into Europa. Galileo will disintegrate while sending back a few last gasps of data on the Jovian atmosphere. After a fourteen-year dramatically plagued and miraculously successful mission, Galileo will speak no more. Thankfully, the New York artistic community is not ignoring such a momentous event. Some friends of mine--one of whom went to my high school--have put together a rock opera called Galileo: The Emotional Life of a Spacecraft. I saw this last week, and I enjoyed it a lot--more than I honestly would have expected from the words "science-based rock opera." The structure of the show is pretty much a tarted-up rock concert, with video projections of various parts of the Galileo mission and spectacular shots of Jupiter and its moons up on a screen behind the band. The black-clad, adorably nerdy looking 5-piece is your standard guitars-bass-drums arrangement, with a much less nerdy-looking female singer, and a narrator who exudes the sort of hip, black-bespectacled intellectual cool of the New York literati, but she's talking about space! Or space craft, specifically. This is unquestionably an educational show, perfect for any age that learns science factoids much easier through visuals and dramatic interpretation than through dry textbooks and filmstrips. The text, what there is of it, appeals to the geekier side; if you're the sort to respond to breathless revelations like "A 486 PC running DOS was more powerful than Galileo's computer!" then this is your show. The bulk of the story, however, is told through a 16-song cycle which tells the anthropomorphized Galileo's story from the first person. From liftoff on the Shuttle Atlantis, to when her main antenna first fails to unfurl, to the bombardment of radiation that hindered further transmissions, the mission is told as a constant roller-coaster of tragic setbacks and remarkable recoveries. Despite a number of systems which never worked correctly, Galileo still managed to transmit data back to Earth that surpassed the most optimistic projections. The first images we've ever seen of a comet hitting a planet (as Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged into Jupiter) were transmitted, albeit fuzzily, by Galileo. These images and an astounding number of others, courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, filled the screen behind the band, and were arguably the stars of the show. Being honest, I'd say being at home watching a spectacular documentary on the Galileo mission would be at least as exciting and informative as sitting through Galileo, but one thing this show does is get the "emotional" right. Not that anyone believes a three-ton malfunctioning piece of machinery can have feelings, but it is clear that the scientists and engineers who put countless years into the project, from inception to end, have gone through emotional highs and lows few of us ever experience with one of our dorky projects. This show cleverly brings us their story, by putting us in the passenger seat. The music itself is pretty good, from what I can tell. I would say it's sort of Phish-ish, if only because I know that Max (composer) is a big fan, since I'm pretty much ignorant of the Phish oeuvre. As annoying as that may sound, it's really not. The fairly standard jam-rock is constructed into an operatic score, with repeating themes that appropriately reflect the "emotional life" of the title, and tie the mission's highs and lows into a coherent whole. The songs go from funky to mournful to hopeful and I find myself humming them at odd times. Unlike a lot of musical scores I've purchased on CD, I actually listen to this one. The singer (Dionne Romero) has a lovely voice and commits entirely to the concept, which would strike anyone as being initially silly ("I'm a spaceship?") without a trace of goofiness. Goofy or not, I was moved nearly to tears a few times, and that doesn't always happen. Ok, it does a lot, but still. So, if you can make it to the Remote Lounge this Wednesday (at 8pm, $10), you really should check it out, especially because you'll never see this show in such a unique way. All of the wonderful JPL images will be projected on individual monitors throughout the space - "just like mission control!" says the press - it should be a good time. So, as I type this, it's exactly the time (12:50pm) that the JPL expected the Galileo signal to end, as the orbiter burns up in the atmosphere. The countdown says the end is a bit further away, but this is as good a time as any to say farewell and thank you to Galileo, our eyes and ears for the past 14 years. I can't deny that it's an emotional moment, and Max, Megan and their show have something to do with that. Permalink to this entry posted by Ginger | 11:42 AM |
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