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After a week and a half of upgrades, master control is finally operational again. Manis and Tim really outdid themselves with the installation of the new digital board. Of course, a new board required upgrades in other areas, so we also have three sweet new computer monitors mounted on a rack above the console. Plus, Tim came up with the perfect ebony shelves to support new powered loudspeakers. Their internal amplifiers generate a bit of hiss which I don’t like, but they look nice. Most apparent is the new floor Tim put down. It’s shiny.

The week we spent in CR-7 was lame, so I was excited when I arrived on Thursday and heard that we’d be switching back to MCR after the noon news. Sure enough, halfway through Fresh Air I went into MCR and Manis had me press the two buttons that switched our signal from being routed through CR-7 back to MCR. Then we spent the next few hours diagnosing a series of odd problems.

The first and most troubling was the talkback system going out over the air. We were testing the talkback system–the intercom between the dialog studios and master control–and I was holding down the talkback button on the console and saying “test” to see if Ben could hear me in the other room. He could, but then Hank Connor called and said he heard it over the air. Puzzled, Manis and Tim looked around until they figured out that the program signal was being fed from a headphone jack which they had been using to test the signal before we switched back to MCR. So, that potential trainwreck averted, the 4:30 news went off without a hitch.  The last remaining problem will be getting the board clock to sync with Simian, which is synced to the atomic clock and the network.  The board clock gained five seconds in about four hours.  That’s bad, but it’s fixable, says Manis.

We’re lucky at work to be able to afford such nice equipment. The board–an incredibly expensive item–was paid for with a grant. But the state pays for everything else, and that beats having to beg for all of it. I really love my job.

Driving home from school the other night, I caught the beginning of a “Live at the Concertgebouw” broadcast featuring, of course, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.  I tuned in just as the Symphony No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 82 of Sibelius was beginning.  This is one of my favorite symphonies, and I will explain why.  Without getting into the musicological debate surrounding this work (the basics of which you can read about here), suffice it to say that the whole symphony is full of wonderful ideas.

Its first theme begins with horns, then adds woodwinds, and it is quite evocative.  Listen:

That theme often gets glossed over, however, and when it does, I think it hurts the whole performance, since the stage is not set for what is to come.  To illustrate how often this theme is trivialized in performance, I have at least five different recordings of this symphony, and only one of them comes close to sounding the way I think the piece should.

I don’t have enough server space to accommodate a complete analysis of every movement, so let’s skip ahead to the last movement.   Listen to the way this fantastic theme starts in the lowest strings, then opens out with the horns, finally joined by the winds:

That’s magic!

Charting its development, the same theme is heard again later in the movement, dramatically transformed:

Finally, everybody’s favorite part about this symphony, and one of its most original ideas, is the great coda, where Sibelius threw in the whole orchestra, brought back the triple-time theme again, and concluded everything with an excruciatingly intense cadence.  Listen to the last few bars; it’s the greatest thing ever:

That’s good stuff.  Who’d have thought that the man who composed it would look so much like a comic book villain?

On Monday, Miriam and I watched Little Miss Sunshine, and it got me thinking about an odd paradox concerning childhood and degrees of happiness. (I’ll tell you when to stop reading before I give anything away.)

Little Miss Sunshine is about an extended family from Albuquerque who travel to Los Angeles to take their young daughter to a beauty pageant. The mother is under stress from her sloganeering second-husband, an unsuccessful motivational speaker; her obscene father-in-law, kicked out of a nursing home for heroin use; her brother, a clinically depressed Proust scholar who just attempted suicide; and her mute teenage son who “hate[s] everyone”. (If you haven’t seen the movie but are planning to, stop here.)

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To follow up on my post from a while ago entitled “William Kristol is Always Wrong“, I note that Howard Kurtz’s Washington Post column yesterday detailed how President Bush recommended Kristol’s ridiculous op-ed to his staff.

So, even though Bush’s policies vis-á-vis Iraq are disastrous, and everyone knows it, he latches on to the sycophantic writings of Bill Kristol, and encourages his people to do the same. You know, Lincoln chose to surround himself with his political opponents, even appointing them to be in his cabinet. He felt he would receive more honest, straightforward advice that way. Just a thought.