Character Study: British coffee biker

"That's not what you said!" he cried, tempering a wild gesture so as not to spill his coffee drink. The man was passionately holding a one sided argument with his female companion next to their shared motorcycle, the sleepy atmosphere of the grocery store parking lot extenuating the odd melodrama of the scene. Although most of the dialogue was obscured by either the bustle of the public setting or his half-hearted attempt to acknowledge it, the cadence of his British accent was always discernible. This was likely due to his voice's juxtaposition to its very American surroundings and seemingly American speaker.  One wonders what could have evoked such passion in this leather clad gentleman, this English Fonze. How long had he been traveling in the States and how many women had been on the wrong side of his latte-fueled tirades? Sadly, nothing remains of this enigmatic road-warrior except the brief impression left on the author.

Southwest

I have always had a warm, fuzzy place in my heart for Southwest airlines. Their recent advertising campaign has been targeted toward their lone refusal among major carriers to charge fees for checked baggage. I thought this was a nice gesture, but I rarely fly with more than a stuffed carry-on. Today, I saw a new campaign that hit much closer to home, and likely cemented Southwest as my preferred carrier.


Last year I flew more miles than I had during the rest of my life combined. A 2500-mile long distance relationship will do that to you. On one memorable occasion, I had booked tickets a month and a half ahead of a  visit to NYC with my girlfriend, who would drive down from upstate NY to meet me. We would then drive back upstate and I would fly back to SoCal from there. A bit complicated but it worked.

Museum of Music: Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I described and criticized the sorry state of public collections of music as compared to other prominent arts. Continuing with that thought below, I outline ideas for the creation of a modern multimedia driven Museum of Music (MoM).


Unlike paintings or sculpture, presenting music en mass is hard. If you walk into a good-sized room of an art gallery, you might see as many as a dozen paintings in close proximity, perhaps with a few statues filling the void between walls. Tourists can dart through the room, taking only passing glances at the modest and masterful alike; and art aficionados can dissect little known works, brush stroke by brush stroke. Part of the fun of art museums is that you can experience the art at the speed and level of depth that you want.


Music needs a solution to the same problem. Average listeners can't stay awake through an entire symphony, and even if they could, without modest training, they wouldn't appreciate what they were hearing. On the other hand, a former cellist who has season tickets to the Philharmonic, wouldn't enjoy being told that Beethoven's 9th symphony can be summed up by a snippet of the Ode to Joy melody.

Museum of Music: Part 1

Art is a very broad term. Art can be paintings, architecture, or upholstery. Artists can be sculptors, chefs, or auto detailers. Anything that is made or done can be made or done artfully and thus become art if the viewer and/or artist deem it so. The most widely practiced and well establish art forms such as literature, painting, sculpture, and music are often displayed in the largest and grandest buildings in cities around the world.

Any book you could hope to read can likely be found at your local library, free of charge, or bought used on Amazon for dirt cheap. Thanks to projects like Google Books, even out of print titles can be found online, for free no less. The greatest paintings, sculptures, and photographs from around the world are collected and periodically circulated in regional museums such as the Louvre, the MoMA, and the Getty. At even the largest museums, the entrance fee is either voluntary or waved on certain days, so as not to keep anyone from enjoying the collections. And if you're not near a museum, you can at least find a high-definition rendering for free with a simple search online.

But what about music? There are museums for physical artworks and libraries for books but there are very few public access centers for the enjoyment or history of music.

Price of a life

On certain points, humans are proudly illogical. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is the supreme value of a single human life. We live in a world defined by limited resources, such as food, water, oil (except in the Middle East), and homes (except in the U.S.). Our need for these resources means that there is technically a price for which one would not pay to save lives.  Essentially, one has to weigh the detriment to society to the potential of that one life.


To simplify the matter for the sake of argument, let's say that there is a child that is certain to die shortly were it not for a magical machine we invented that is guaranteed to save him. However, the machine will only work if we stuff into it half of the world's food supply (it's magical; it can handle it). We wouldn't be willing to pay the price, which in this case would lead to billions of deaths. Even though we had the ability to save a life, we would choose not to.


How does this apply to real life? These types of decisions are made every day by the F.D.A. and other medical standards boards. Poor risk/benefit ratios cause the premature demise of thousands of would-be miracle drugs every year and many already approved procedures can not be performed as ubiquitously as would be most beneficial due to the high costs involved. Would a nationally mandated annual PET scan significantly improve cancer detection rates, and save millions of lives? Yes. But the cost isn't worth the benefit. The machinery is extraordinarily expensive, the radiation would actually cause cancer in a very small subset of the population, and the inconvenience of disrupting people's lives and work would further damage the already unstable economy. It would increase unemployment, cause more people to rely on government help, the government would go further into debt, stock markets would plunge, financial meltdown, panic in the streets. Bad things ensue. And all because we wanted to combat cancer as best we can.

Tap the screen to dog-ear this e-page...

Are the Kindle and the iPad the harbingers of death for the object commonly referred to as the book? The growing number of e-reader owners tout the net money savings and convenience of a library in your hand, but purists stubbornly point to these power-sucking gadgets as yet another instance of the techno-savy reinventing the wheel.


At the forefront of this debate are the simple, quippy complaints that a book doesn't run out of batteries, or need software updates, but these are readily combated by the space and trees savings of e-readers. An e-reader can download a book in less than a minute right from your chair, but again this is offset by the loss of the bookstore browsing experience, for online bookstores are hardly a suitable replacement for wandering the narrow canyons of stacks seemingly formed by the countless footsteps of the wizened readers that came before. Nor are the slapdash reviews in online comments a replacement for the judicious advice of a kindly librarian.

Tea... Earl Grey... Hot...

The other afternoon, Jenni and I succumbed to the desire for Panera Bread for lunch. For those of you that have never had the pleasure, Panera Bread occupies a weird niche in the restaurant scene, high-quality fast food in a warm, inviting environment. Think the sitting area of Barns & Noble or Borders that serves artisan sandwiches, soups, and salads on, in, or with its own delectable breads.

The weirdly cool thing about Panera Bread, at least at the three locations I've been to, is how amazingly fast they are at preparing damn tasty food. You'd be hard pressed to get your drink and find a seat before your coaster pager goes off. That's pretty impressive considering how long it takes McDonald's to get me sub-standard sustenance.


After commenting to Jenni about their super-speediness, she pointed out that it's really not that surprising, given the little they really needed to do to serve sandwiches and soup. Admittedly, whereas a sandwich of elaborate complexity or even a panini still only requires minimal cooking time, just microwaving a Big Mac will take a while. "It's not like they're roasting a chicken back there," we joked (we had some friends over last week for homemade roast chicken).


This got me to thinking.