Sunday Junk Drawer
I’m really glad we got out on that hike Monday. The weather turned gloomy, wet and cold for the weekend. We haven’t turned the heat on yet - we’re gritting our teeth (to keep them from chattering) and tip-toeing past the thermostat, because we all tacitly recognize that twisting its dial is tantamount to switching summer off for good.
I had to work all day Saturday, so I didn’t get to see my Buckeyes’ vivisection of Michigan State. I’m converting a client over to new accounting software, and they’re going live Monday morning, so there are a lot of mission-critical threads running through my days and Saturday onsite was a necessity. I could have tuned the game in on internet radio, but the one Columbus station I know of that broadcasts online wanted $6, so I followed the strange little real-time recap on Sportsline.com instead. It actually was a better fit with the work I was doing, since I could ignore it for long spans of time, then catch up with a quick ‘Alt-Tab’.
While it was amusing to reflect, in my previous post, on the admonishment for bus-ride behavior handed to the Wisconsin band, it shades into the bizarre when a professional symphony’s behavior has to be called out. Some in the Seattle Symphony are miffed that Gerard Schwarz’s contract was extended, and that he has given some plum contracts to a couple of star-power performers. “Symphony Musicians Warned on Improper Behavior“, the P-I headline said - much the same as the articles on the Wisconsin band, actually. Among other things, the article detailed:
Stimulated by the renewal of Schwarz’s contract in the spring, the conflict became increasingly nasty and violent: instruments were vandalized, cars keyed, anonymous phone calls made, mail stolen from backstage mail slots and doorbells at musicians’ homes rung anonymously at night.
The old doorbell game! The one we used to pull on my poor grandmother when we were second-graders! However, it gets a little more serious:
In late September, Cerminaro (a french horn player (or do they call them “freedom horns” now) ~ ed) found in his Benaroya mail box a razor in a magazine and, in a separate episode, a cup of hot coffee, both of which could have caused serious damage to his hands.
Compared with this, you could say that the Yankees are treating A-Rod with genteel disdain. And while the Wisconsin band will make some adjustments and get on with life, I think it’s a very good thing that this Seattle gang doesn’t ride a bus to its performances.
