Music for St. Patrick's Day

Today is a great day to listen to Irish music, given it's St. Patrick's Day, so I thought I'd share with you a few of my favorite Irish or Irish-related tunes:

• The Chieftains, who just rock, have collaborated with many, many other famous groups over the years, producing a massive, massive body of work. Here's the Foggy Dew, with Sinead O'Connor, if you want a slow sad piece, and the Rocky Road to Dublin, with the Rolling Stones, if you want a faster, more upbeat tune.
• The Dubliners, whose version of Whiskey in the Jar I've always loved. It's the story of a highwayman betrayed by a woman, and you've probably heard the Metallica version. Which is pretty good, don't get me wrong, but you can't really beat the traditional version.
• Captain Tractor, a more contemporary group, did a pretty awesome version of Dublin Lullabye, which is perfect if you're feeling feisty today. The lyrics are pretty much "We're gonna drink and fight and drink and fight and drink and fight some more!" and it has some rude stuff and swearing in it.
• U2, of course, did Sunday Bloody Sunday, which is about the Irish troubles.
• Elton John is English, but his "Made in England" CD featured a very sad and pretty song called Belfast about the Troubles. There's a lovely orchestral introduction, so don't be surprised when the lyrics don't start for a while.
•  The Corrs are an Irish folk-rock group and I absolutely love two of their collaborations with other Irish folks: I Know My Love with the Chieftains and When the Stars Go Blue with Bono.
• And finally, a few samples from groups I'm less familiar with (might be some cursing here, too): Flogging Molly, the Dropkick Murphys and the Boomtown Rats.

Enjoy!

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/17/2010 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: boomtown rats, captain tractor, chieftains, dropkick murphys, elton john, entertainment, flogging molly, ireland, irish, music, st patrick, st patricks day, the corrs, the dubliners, u2

Missing the Holiday

Yesterday I opted to write about Stab Your Friends in the Back Day, but neglected the real holiday that actually occurred Sunday: Pi Day.

Pi Day is a holiday for math geeks and technies and it's also a great opportunity for math teachers to teach their students about pi, one of the coolest strangest numbers around. It's also Einstein's birthday.

It's a shame it fell on a Sunday.

I suppose we could have celebrated it by getting irrational.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/16/2010 at 3:59 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink

Tags: education, holidays, math, news, numbers, pi, pi day, teachers

Stab Your Friend in the Back Day

That's right, folks, today, March 15, is Stab Your Friends in the Back Day!

Well, yes and no. Today marks the Ides of March, the day Julius Caesar was told to beware of and also the day on which he was stabbed to death by a horde of grumpy senators, starting with his alleged buddy Brutus.

The story of the soothsayer warning Julius Caesar came from Plutarch, in case you were wondering, and wasn't just some artistic license taken by some hack playwright in the 1500s.

"Et tu Brute" is the phrase Julius supposedly uttered after having been stabbed, instead of "ow" or "hey, that was really mean" or "was it something I said?" That, however, is not from Plutarch. Suetonius reported Julius didn't say anything at all, but also reported other people claimed he'd said "You too, Brutus, my child," which lent a bit of credence to the old rumor going around that Brutus was Julius's illegitimate son by his mistress, Brutus's mom. Of course it also might have been metaphorical.

The backstabbing, like so many stabbings before it and since, was political. Rome was a Republic and had a serious disdain for kings, which they believed to be barbaric. Julius Caesar had become extremely popular and had accrued significant personal power and adulation after a brutal civil war, and word around the well (since they didn't have water coolers at that point) was that he was going to try to grab more power and become a de facto king.

So a group of the senators slaughtered him.

Of course, there were other factors.

But if they really just wanted to stop Julius from becoming king, they messed it up, because his adoptive son Augustus pretty much made a power grab after the nasty civil war caused by Julius's death and became de facto king, passing on the de facto kingship to his adoptive son, Tiberius, and so on and so on down the line.

The Republic of Rome became the Roman Empire, collected loads of territories and eventually fell apart into a bunch of squabbling unimportant little states we call Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, France Egypt, Turkey, etc.

So! Please celebrate Stab Your Friends in the Back Day by not stabbing your friends in the back. It's very messy and can create unintended consequences, like aqueducts and the use of Latin legal terms.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/15/2010 at 2:24 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: caesar, history, holidays, ides of march, kings, politics, romans, rome, stab your friends in the back day

The Top 10 Geek Anthems

Victor Pineiro of Popten published this fun Top 10 Songs of Geekdom list and after listening to the fun version of the Legend of Zelda theme there, it got me thinking about how much I think about video game music.

A lot. I think about video game music a lot.

Most of the time when I'm going on a long walk, I hear the Mt. Kolts theme from Final Fantasy VI in my head, or else it's the old Zelda (the original) music from the overworld. I know all the words to the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI, and have been known to sing it in the shower.

And who doesn't remember the loopy, goofy theme song to Super Mario Brothers? 

Other games' themes have faded from my memory (probably crowded out by my recent purchases of the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack and the music of Quigley Down Under) but I do recall that at the time I really loved them. The Secret of Mana and the Secret of Evermore had great music.

Of course, these aren't really nerd anthems, per se.

When I think of nerd anthems, I think of "Holding Out for a Hero," because in my very first D&D game that song featured in the plot. (Sadly, this was in the 2000s, not the 1980s. We were that geeky.) Of course, that's not really a nerd anthem either.

Pineiro picked out "White & Nerdy/Dare to be Stupid" as his choice for Weird Al, but I recall "It's All About the Pentiums" a bit better. Either of those is a true geek anthem.

I would also recommend Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" as a geek anthem, since I'm pretty sure its lyrics are at least partially based on Frank Herbert's science fiction epic, "Dune."

Any other ideas for geek anthems?

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/11/2010 at 1:51 PM | Comments (4) | Permalink

Tags: dungeons and dragons, entertainment, games, geek anthems, geekdom, geeks, music, super mario brothers, video games, zelda

When Everyone Is Equal

"When I was your age, television was called 'books.'"

- The Princess Bride

Reporter Justine Wettschreck wrote about her experience of the Junior Great Books program yesterday, and I thought I would chip in with my own impressions.

Essentially, Junior Great Books was a program in which the "gifted" readers in a grade school class would read a story and then get together to discuss it under the supervision of a teacher. The stories were, I think, somewhat above grade level, but they were all pretty easy reads (at the time I was plowing through Shakespeare and having a crack at Milton, which I couldn't get into at all then but learned to appreciate in college).

Many of them were quite memorable. "The Gun Without a Bang," by Robert Scheckley, for example, illustrated the limits of even the most wondrous technology created for destruction. "The Veldt," by Ray Bradbury, had a twist ending that managed to take me, a very cynical and serious child, completely by surprise. Completely. "Mateo Falcone," by Prosper Merimee, a story about honor, impressed me with the utter strangeness of some people's notion of integrity.

In retrospect, I'm surprised by how violent most of the stories were. There was one about a kid who shoots his brother to death, for example, one where a dad murders his child and one in which people got eaten by lions. But they were good stories, and the violence certainly wasn't any worse than what one would see on the news or in movies. And the stories were literary, not trashy. Each had a point and each was meant to be thought-provoking.

The one that captured me, swept me up and made me perpetually wary ever afterward, however, was "Harrison Bergeron," by Kurt Vonnegut.

In "Harrison Bergeron," everyone is not created equal. Everyone is made equal, by law, which is enforced by disrupting smart people's brain waves, forcing athletic people to wear weights that slow them down and having pretty people shave their eyebrows or wear uglifying prosthetics.

Everyone is equal, and it is a nightmarish dystopia. And when someone challenges that equality, the story ends in shocking violence and worse.

So many things in "Harrison" are worthy of discussion: the concept of equality, the question of what fairness means, the government's role in an individual's life, and the importance of memory. 20 years after I read it, I can't remember what we discussed, but I still remember the end of that story. More appalling than the violence that came immediately before it was the stillness and peace at the end.

If you haven't read "Harrison Bergeron," I recommend that you do.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/10/2010 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: books, children, education, entertainment, guns, literature, news, science fiction, violence

Remaking Greatness: Tron, Karate Kid

The new Tron movie trailer came out recently.

Note that the new Tron movie, due to hit the big screen on December 17 this year, is not a remake.

Instead, Tron Legacy seems to be a sequel to the original 1982 Tron, and even has some of the same characters. Sometimes these sequels made long after the originals do well, and other times it probably would have been better for everyone if it had never occurred to anyone to make them.

Given the visual look of the new Tron movie (click the picture for the official website), I'm hoping that if nothing else, it's visually compelling enough to be worth watching. I still enjoy the visual look of the first Tron movie, though the special effects are of course fairly dated.

In other news, the new Karate Kid remake is taking some flack because it features kung fu rather than karate. No, karate is not the same as kung fu, just like China is not the same as Japan. This article questions remaking such recent movies and wonders if it's really necessary to have a new Karate Kid, or a new Clash of the Titans.

I'm glad they chose to make a sequel of Tron rather than remaking it.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/09/2010 at 2:39 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: clash of the titans, entertainment, karate kid, movies, news, remakes, tech, tron, tron legacy

Go Jump in the Lake

The swimming pool at the YMCA is supposed to be open today.

I am absolutely thrilled, because as expected, I hardly exercised at all when the pool was closed. I don't understand how you gym rats can stay so dedicated and keep on going to the gym every day, but I admire your willpower! I only went once and did some stationary biking.

Then I realized that I would have to do twice as much laundry if I went to the gym every day.

I've missed swimming, though. I haven't slept as well, I haven't had as much energy and my sleep schedule has gone goofy again. I feel flabby, and worse, I feel like eating all the time. It is not good.

But happily, it's over! The pool awaits, I have a fresh clean swimming suit and I'm so excited to go back!

Note: The water is warm and the pool smells lemony fresh! (They probably cleaned the glass railing or something.)

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/08/2010 at 4:04 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: fitness, health, swimming, ymca

Bear All at the Library

For decades my parents have threatened to lock me out of the house and skip town, and today, after plenty of fair warnings, they finally did.

(They tell me they'll be back in an hour, but I have my doubts.)

So instead of hanging out at their house, I'm sitting in a comfy chair at the library, right in front of a giant window. It's a little distracting, but it's fun watching the little kids go by, chasing each other, delivering Girl Scout cookies or avoiding the perfectly clear sidewalk in

order to stomp on the crunchy snowdrifts.

Some things never change. The boy across the room is reading a Berenstain Bears book I might have read when I was little; we seemed to have an endless selection of them and I went through them like messier children went through tissue paper.

The boy seems to have a much better attention span than I do, though, and isn't looking up to watch the semi trucks and tractors go by. Shouldn't a child have a shorter attention span than an adult? And mine continues to get worse with age. By the time I'm 90 I probably won't be able to finish a sentence, much less a paragraph. No doubt this will be a relief to everybody else.

Other things do change. I'm typing on a laptop that weighs a lot less than the previously mentioned child, and it's connected to the internet. When I was the boy's age, we were impressed by computers with colored monitors and fought to finish assignments first so we could get one of the three copies of Oregon Trail.

Now I can sit here in the library and work on stories and look up the Berenstain Bears, as well as doing more traditional "library" activities--reading newspapers, browsing through magazines or wandering around the bookshelves.

Today I learned about the newest member of the Bear family, Honey, who was born in 2000, long after I'd stopped reading about the popular children's series by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The first book in the series was written in 1962, and now there are more than 300 of them.

Of course, these things are nice to know but they're fairly trivial, too. What's important, though, is that when a little girl in a pink sweater and pigtails walks over to me and points at the Bear family, I can tell her who they are, and maybe when she's learning to read, she'll remember the Bears on my screen, and pick out a Berenstain book.

Because sometimes things don't change, even when they do.

Posted by: Kari Lucin, Daily Globe on 3/05/2010 at 5:00 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink

Tags: books, entertainment, kids, library, work