I am sad to report the death of Bela, our dear old kitty.
When I met Miriam in 2000, Bela had already been her cat for four years. When I moved in, Bela became my cat, too. She was not always an ideal pet. In fact, her behavior forced us to move her to outdoor living in 2005. Surprisingly, she thrived. She seemed to love living outside. The world became her bathroom. As the years passed, she was a constant presence near our front door. She liked the outdoors so much that even on freezing cold nights we could not persuade her to come inside.
In recent months Bela began to slow down. She no longer ran to get her food, and she didn’t leave the area directly in front of the house. She was old. But even in her old age she still was happy to be outside. A week or so ago, when the weather turned suddenly cool, I walked outside one afternoon to find Bela stretched out in the sun, purring.
Last night we brought her inside the house one last time, and as Miriam and I petted her she passed away.
Filed under: Animals, Family on October 25th, 2011 | No Comments »
Anyone who has had the misfortune of speaking to me in the last year and a half will know I am nearly obsessed with my beloved AR-3a loudspeakers. As I wrote at the conclusion of my project to restore them last year, these speakers are amazing. I could not love a non-living thing any more. I learned last Monday that the man behind these wonderful loudspeakers has died.
Edgar Villchur, who was ninety-four years old, gave the world the acoustic suspension loudspeaker. The AR-1, made by his company, Acoustic Research, changed the way speakers were produced. Unlike many of the existing speakers at the time, his speakers were fully enclosed, and virtually airtight. The vacuum inside would cause the drivers to “spring” back to their proper position automatically, whereas other speakers at the time used actual mechanical springs, and the cabinets that enclosed them were enormous. With Villchur’s technology, people could finally have loudspeakers that were unobtrusive in the home. My AR-3as are actually quite handsome, with walnut cabinets and grill cloths of Irish linen. Stereophile and The Absolute Sound will tell you that the 3a is at or near the top of the most important loudspeakers ever created.
For me, though, it isn’t the innovative technology or the appearance of my AR loudspeakers that makes me love them. It’s the sound. These speakers have changed the way I hear music. My enjoyment has been increased in ways I cannot fully articulate. Considering how important music is to me, I can, without hyperbole, tell you that they have made my life better. For that I am extremely grateful to Edgar Villchur.
Filed under: Current Events, Technology on October 24th, 2011 | No Comments »
Thirty-five years is not old. But it isn’t young, either. Somehow, I don’t really feel any different than I did when I was half my present age.
On this birthday I will make my usual wish: hard times come again no more.
UPDATE: A pretty good birthday. When it began, at midnight Wednesday morning, I was still awake writing a paper. In the morning I had to give a presentation on said paper. In the afternoon I had to give another brief presentation for a different class. But while the morning began with high winds and dark, cloudy skies, by five o’clock in the afternoon it was beautiful outside, and had gotten much cooler. I enjoyed lunch at Leo’s with my friends Anthony and Jessica, then dinner with Miriam, plus the Martinos, the Fagans, Kat and Harris, Leslie and Andy, and other GRRs. Everyone I saw was exceedingly kind, and the well-wishes on Facebook were touching. Then, when we got home, Miriam made me a big chocolate chip cookie shaped like a heart. And tomorrow we are going to Disney World. All is well.
Filed under: Special Occasions on October 19th, 2011 | No Comments »
Something must be done. I cannot live like this.
I receive hundreds of email messages each day. Approximately five of them are legitimate. The rest are what is commonly called spam. I get messages about pills, investing, internet auctions, vacation deals, and countless other things, but none are authentic communications from parties with whom I have any relationship whatever. On the contrary, many of these messages claim to have business with me, but manifestly do not.
Some of these spam messages attempt to deceive me with realistic looking subject titles, like “Student Loan Information”, or coincidentally come bearing the name of someone with whom I regularly engage in correspondence. In this way I sometimes click on a message believing it to be from my friend Anthony, only to find it is not. Sometimes, however, the spammers don’t even seem to be trying. “Follow-up to our talk about refinancing your house” is one I have received. Really? How absent minded would I have to be? One I got today was “Shocking Tim Russert Sex Tape”. Even if this was a real thing, why on earth would I want to see that? I mean, if I got one that said, “Shocking video of you eating cookies in your yard”, yeah, maybe I’d think that was real, and I’d be concerned enough to click a link. But the other thing? No way.
I hesitate to say anything about this here for risk of attracting more attention from spammers, but I assume many of them are robots anyway and don’t know the difference.
Something must be done. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for a month or so, and I have it set to filter junk mail, but I still have to regularly sift through the junk to see if any genuine correspondence has been misidentified. Every day something is. Is there a better way to handle this?
Filed under: Technology, Website on October 17th, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Congratulations to the mighty Texas Rangers who won the pennant tonight. They beat my beloved Tampa Bay Rays last week, just as they did last year, but this year they did it without Cliff Lee, and, somehow, they look even better.
Filed under: Current Events, Sports on October 16th, 2011 | No Comments »