WhirledView

A Holiday Note for Oboe and More

By PHK

It occurred to me last week that I had written nothing about music, drama or anything else that went beyond posts relating to the mind deadening, mostly depressing political morass of the past several months. The closest I came to an uplifting post since mid-September was on November 29 about the Pope’s visit to Turkey.

Maybe it’s because I’m still recuperating from a foot operation in early October and haven’t been as active as usual – or maybe it’s because I became so engrossed in the neverending twists, turns and squirms by our Kafkaesque political leadership since I returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey in late September that my brain has been riveted on the politically absurd as opposed to venturing into the far more pleasurable artistically sublime. Or maybe it’s simply because I’m still identifying photos from that trip and haven’t figured out how to make the best use of them as well as spending much of the time I reserve for the arts to practicing/attempting to play the oboe.

Who knows – I don’t, but John Brown’s recent article on the cultural dimensions, or actually paucity thereof, in America's public diplomacy which I mentioned briefly in my review of the book America’s Dialogue with the World drew me back to the importance of art in our lives and the world. By art, I don’t mean only painting, sculpture or drawing but enjoyment of the beauty and richness of the entire world of the arts as opposed to the all too often skuzzy universe of politics in which we are, or at least I am, often sunk.

Favorites on this Night before Christmas

So I thought I would change the theme today in keeping with the mood of the holidays and offer here several of my favorites on the Night before Christmas.

To begin, I asked Elaine Heltman, the Santa Fe Symphony’s principal oboist and my incredibly patient oboe teacher, for recommendations of works for oboe or pieces featuring the oboe that are performed during the holiday season. Since the oboe is not mercifully or normally a part of those over-played all too familiar Christmas carols, jingles, country rock or pop tunes that we are subjected to endlessly and especially in their ever familiar, stale Musak renditions, this list is not exactly what you, or anyone else I’ll venture, will find among the top 100 or probably even the top 1,000 in the commercial Christmas music vendors’ repertoire.

Blogging Forecast

by CKR

Light and unpredictable blogging for the next few days, with longer posts possible.

Happy holidays to all!

The roadrunner was gone this morning, and a large orange cat was checking at the same time I was. I'll keep the camera at the ready for tonight.

A Christmas Roadrunner

by CKR

Breaking news! As the sun was going down, I looked up from reading and saw on my deck a roadrunner. Just outside the sliding glass door. A roadrunner.

You may recall that I mentioned in my Tuesday blogging of a week or so ago that I saw a roadrunner a few hundred feet or so from my house. Well, here he/she is.

She jumped up on a chair in my outdoor eating area and fluffed out as if she were getting ready to roost for the night. She was aware of me, but I stayed back, and it occurred to me to get my camera. She tried to get comfortable on the chair back, but it just wasn't quite right. She was looking for something higher, and, after I took a couple of extraordinarily bad photos (below the jump), she flapped up to, I think the top of the outdoor light fixture. Part of the reason the photos are bad are that, in the natural instinct to perch where photos are most difficult, she found a place behind the screen on the door.

The temptation to look and get another photo was almost overwhelming, but I resisted. I have now found that it is not possible to see that light fixture from any window in the house.

I have some cracked corn that I didn't want to put out because of the squirrels. But they've been less populous over the summer, and the deck or patio should be reasonably safe. Besides, a roadrunner may be willing to take on a squirrel.

Tomorrow I'll wake early and try to get some good photos. And I'll put out a dish of cracked corn. But I have to remind myself not to be too eager and scare him.

Turkmenistan's Dictator Dies

by CKR

While we were going through the charade of ramping up to an already-decided invasion of Iraq in 2003, my two biggest concerns were that once war is started, it takes on its own logic and may not be possible to control, and that, in an unstable part of the world, it could easily spread.

One of the imponderables is what can happen in nearby states. This morning, Turkmenistan has lost its head of state, and no obvious successors are in sight. Saparmurat Niyazov renamed the months in his family's honor and constructed a rotating gold statue of himself in central Ashgabat with the sun always shining on his face. He had been a leader of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic and continued after the fall of the Soviet Union. He encouraged the study of his volume of poems in the schools, but not much else.

Turkmenistan supplies natural gas to Europe and was a source to Ukraine last winter, when Ukraine's dispute with Russia resulted in decreases in gas from Russia. It is located (click on map to enlarge; from Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection) north of Iran (next candidate for the forcible march of democracy) and Afghanistan (rapidly falling apart again), south of Uzbekistan (another dictatorship) and Kazakhstan (headed that way). It has a radioactive tailings pile on the shore of the rising Caspian Sea from bromine mining. It is mostly desert, with a population of a little over five million.

Some of the news stories say that it is a Moslem nation, but if it is like Kazakhstan, its Soviet past kept religious feeling low, and we may take "Moslem" in the same way we may say France is Christian.

Niyazov continued the old Soviet tradition of not letting possible successors get too close. He supported the US "war on terror", so the US will feel that it has an interest. Russia will also feel it has an interest in a former Soviet republic, but neither has a boundary with Turkmenistan. The hotbed of Taliban activity in Afghanistan has been in the south, but there are rumblings of instability in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Not a good thing to happen just now, but you can't plan everything.

Washington Post

New York Times

Guardian

Happy Shortest Day!

by CKR

This is one of my favorite days of the year. From here on, the days get longer.

I wanted to note exactly where the sun rises over the mountains, the furthest south it will go, but there were a few clouds left from yesterday's snowstorm, not as massive here as in Denver, but I'll have to get the snowblower out later. I've got a little electric snowblower, not as macho as the big gasoline ones, but I don't have to deal with gasoline starting on cold mornings. In this one sense of fortunately, the thermometer under my front portal says that it's 15 degrees, even though the television reported 32. If the snow isn't cold enough, it clogs the snowblower. Looks like I can write a post or two before getting out into the wind that is shaking the snow off the juniper outside my window. Maybe I'll be able to add a photo to this post later.

The Midwinter celebrations come a few days later, because if you're actually observing where the sun rises, it's hard to be sure it's turned around until a few days pass. We now have television weather people to tell us that "winter will arrive" at exactly 7:22 this evening, Eastern Standard Time. That means that the axis of the earth's rotation will be lined up with the sun, the north pole pointing the most away from the sun at that time. I prefer going by the shortness of the day, or the length of the night.

But it is the first day of winter, and, even though the days get longer, there's a good reason for that. We can, of course, expect cold into March at least, and scattered snow in this part of the world until the end of May. In the days before supermarkets, most people who died from the winter's depredations did so in March, when the stored food was running out.

So we've got some bad weather ahead, but more sunshine.

Over-militarized and out of control

By PHK

You get what you pay for.

Just one of the many out-of-control things that have occurred over the six years of the Bush Administration and its compliant and complacent Republican majority Congress is the increasing militarization of American Embassies abroad. It’s ironic that the report that discloses this problem was written by the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – but then their boss, outgoing Committee Chair Senator Richard Lugar is far more of a foreign policy realist than the right-wing, smash‘em - bash’em, might-makes-right zealots in the White House and the Committee often stresses preference for diplomacy over the not necessarily productive "military solution" to foreign affairs problems.

Just wish the study had been conducted and reported on a year or more ago.

The flip-side of this problem is probably also reflected in the apparent inability of the State Department to find enough qualified professional staff among its ranks willing and able to serve at our ever less secure fortress Embassy in the Emerald City on the Tigris. Foggy Bottom’s Green Zone staffing difficulties were reported in the Washington Times last week by the paper’s State Department correspondent Nick Kralev. I suspect he’s got the thrust of the story right despite objections to the contrary from the Director General of the Foreign Service. From what I’ve seen, Nick’s too careful a reporter and too plugged in at State to go off on unsubstantiated tangents.

Tuesday Aloe Watch

by CKR

The florets are beginning to open.

How Terrorists Might Make a Bomb – Twice

by CKR

Peter Zimmerman, Jeffrey Lewis, and William Langewiesche have given us two articles on how terrorists might make nuclear weapons. Not radiological dispersal devices, but the real mushroom-cloud thing.

Zimmerman and Lewis’s article is in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy and Langewiesche’s in the December Atlantic. (Many thanks to whoever is responsible for sending me a copy of Foreign Policy after my subscription expired.)

Both articles are generally plausible, although more assumptions have been made than are evident at first glance. Langewiesche admits that it isn’t easy:

In the end, if you wanted a bomb and calculated the odds, you would have to admit that they were stacked against you, simply because of how the world works—and that this may be why others like you, if there have been any, have so far not succeeded.

Langewiesche gives a broader view with detail on how fissile material might be procured; Zimmerman and Lewis focus on the fabrication team. It seems as though the two articles together could furnish a detailed plan.