Winds Howling

I decided to switch it up for this one. Since I’ve listened to a few of the Christopher Hogwood recordings in a row now, I listened to the version by Salzburg Chamber Orchestra & Alexander von Pitamic. But I was less enchanted with that sound vs. the average Hogwood, and I initially rated this symphony 1.5 stars out of 5. I figured I had to at least check a different recording, so I switched back to the ones I started this series off with, by Philharmonia Hungarica & Antal Dorati.

It was a bit better — slightly peppier and more dynamic, maybe. I even didn’t really mind the harpsichord, the thing that had sent me scurrying to the Hogwood recordings in the first place. I think the harpsichord was a bit more restrained here than it had been back in Symphony No. 1. I bumped the star rating up slightly, but listening to a second version didn’t completely change my mind about this symphony.

The first movement (‘Allegro molto’) was really the only one I liked, and it still had issues. Each individual section sounds good to me, and I like hearing them revolve in sequence. I’ve found myself humming some of them over the past couple days. You can hear some “Canon in D” in there, and I pick up strains of the “Gauntlet” theme song at certain moments. But there comes a point, after only a minute or two, when I’ve heard enough. It’s repetitive and too long by at least a third.

The second movement (‘Andante siciliano’) fully loses me — not much going on here at all. My ears pricked up for a couple things in the Dorati recording that they hadn’t in the von Pitamic recording — strings ominously plucking in the background, and the way it all occasionally trickles away into silence before reviving itself. But these were just glimmers of interest.

The third movement “Presto” finale was maybe the worst of all the presto finales so far. Hardly anything happened that I took note of. The Dorati recordings didn’t really improve much on this one.

My final rating is 2 stars out of 5.

Versions listened to: Salzburg Chamber Orchestra & Alexander Pitamic; Philharmonia Hungarica & Antal Dorati
Length: 14:13
Next up: Symphony No. 32

I first listened through this one on June 6, but it was only today that I got around to fleshing my notes into paragraphs, so I took another listen.

The main activity in the first movement (‘Andante moderato’) is alternation between cute, pokey melodies and big, dramatic, Beethoveny moments. It was OK, but by minute 5, I was done — felt like I’d heard it repeat one too many times.

The second movement (‘Allegro molto’) was one of the best of all the symphonies so far. The horn section is the star — they’re mostly in the background doing lots of quick, rhythmic pulses, as well as punctuating most of the strings throughout. This movement keeps up a pretty good energy — it reminds me of people hurrying to pack for a trip. Now and again it briefly shifts into a slightly darker mode for a cheeky little passage that sounds like something out of a musical. This one’s just fun to listen to.

The thing I noticed most about the third movement (‘Tempo di minuetto’) was that it occasionally sank to a particularly drama-laden atmosphere, a bit thicker than your average minor-key shift (eg, around 1:20). This section occasionally lifts itself back into bright tones and then sinks back down, like sunshine poking through the clouds. But I can’t honestly say this made much of an impression overall.

I rate this symphony 2.5 stars out of 5 — an OK beginning, an exceptional middle section and a passable finish.

Version listened to: Hogwood
Length: 14:54
Next up: Symphony No. 27

I’m trying to finish all 14 of the original James Bond books in the span of a year. I’m three months in and just finished the sixth, “Doctor No.” I was planning on writing just one blog post reviewing them all at the end, but I liked the fifth book, “From Russia With Love,” so much — and its follow-up, “Dr. No,” so much less — that I wanted to write about those two now.

“From Russia With Love” felt like a real step up in ambition compared with the previous four books. Bond never even appeared until almost exactly 3 hours into the audiobook, but I wasn’t missing him. Instead, for several chapters, Fleming takes us to the Soviet Union and introduces us to one link after another in the chain of its spy bureaucracy as it hatches a plot against the West — against British intelligence — against James Bond.

Probably Fleming’s greatest achievement in the series so far is the steadily mounting sense of dread that pervades the first half of this book. A chess master is called away in the last moments of a tournament match to lend his genius to the planning. An assassin who goes murder-crazy on the full moon is interrupted in his poolside massage. Officials gather in a smoke-filled room to hash out the nefarious details of their attack. I have to admit all this luxurious set-up was better than the payoff, but it at least made up a hefty percentage of the book.

The series has already showcased some of the kookiness James Bond is known for, but “From Russia With Love” never goes there. I’m not saying “kooky = bad, grounded = good” — I guess it’s probably the kooky factor that really makes Bond Bond — but this book had a refreshingly mature tone. It’s almost plausible as a Cold War thriller. It’s the first one in the series that’s actually felt like a spy story. Even “Casino Royale,” while a simple and believable story, was really just a card game, a car chase and a torture scene — none of that says “spy.”

Even though these books are short, most of them have felt long to me so far. Not this one. The evil plot is planned, the evil plot is executed, and Bond responds. I can think of one definite filler scene, but it was one of the more memorable scenes in the book and definitely worth including.

Which brings me to “Doctor No.” “Doctor No” turned away from all of this in a way that almost rubs in your face: Bond is sent to Jamaica on what everyone acknowledges to be a lame assignment tantamount to a vacation. Echoing the worst of the previous books, there’s a specific racial fixation, this time “Chigroes,” or “Chinese negroes” (or even, as Fleming writes at one point, “Chinese Negroid”). The obligatory love interest ends up being a young islander who is functionally the equivalent of a child that Bond constantly has to patronize and gently pat on the head… but maybe also eventually have sex with? The villain, Doctor No, is essentially a comic book character. He lives inside a mountain, served by a private army of Chigroes, and has “jet-black” eyes that he at one point taps with his steel claw hands for dramatic effect.

It makes me wonder why Fleming even chose to write it. Bond’s apparent death at the end of “From Russia With Love” stemmed from Fleming getting bored with his hit character, toying with the idea of killing him off. Around the time he wrote “From Russia With Love,” Fleming apparently wrote in a letter:

I am getting fed up with Bond and it has been very difficult to make him go through his tawdry tricks.

So how did the idea of “Doctor No,” a book composed entirely of tawdry tricks, convince him to lift the death sentence?

I found the answer in “Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica” by Matthew Parker. The summer Fleming was “fed up,” he got involved with a Jamaican TV project whose story was “Doctor No” in outline. Even though it came to nothing, the project got Fleming moving again, Parker writes:

The combination of the freedom from Bond, and the Jamaica setting – a ‘home fixture’ – reinvigorated Fleming. … Fleming found that he suddenly had a fresh and inventive new Bond story ready to go. … Responding to later criticism, Fleming would declare: ‘Dr No was very cardboardy and need not have been … The trouble is that it is much more fun to think up fantastical situations and mix Bond up in them.’

I know I’m being no-fun to complain about this stuff — Doctor No’s mountain complex with the undersea viewing room was awesome, and I did actually love when he tapped his eyeball with his steel claw. For what it’s worth, Parker writes that this is “one of Fleming’s finest novels … one of the most fantastical, gothic and melodramatic; and at times frankly, even knowingly, over the top.” There’s certainly something to be said for all of that. It was just a smack in the face after “From Russia With Love.”

I listened to this one on Sunday, in between a session of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and loading the dishwasher.

Right off the bat, I liked the mood of the opening movement (‘Adagio cantabile’) — stately and serene, but somehow slightly off. The melody it keeps returning to has some off-color notes that give it an interesting hue. Time seems to compress and expand slightly as long notes give way to smooth runs of shorter ones, giving it a feeling of gently rocking back and forth. A noticeable element of this movement is the occasional tolling of low bell-like notes, backed up by the horns (0:42, 2:30, etc.). Camilla said this made her imagine a city waking up in the morning. The more I listen to this movement the more I like it.

The second movement (‘Allegro’) was mostly noticeable for its high, rapidly scraping strings. It gets dramatic in a fun way, with a crescendo bursting into a satisfying chord progression, but these moments have a tendency to suddenly go quiet and lose momentum. For good, loud, classical drama, though, this does the job well.

The third movement (‘Menuetto con trio’) seemed to match the courtly vibe of the first movement, but was a bit meandering and never quite caught my ear.

Then, as has become a pattern here, we come to the ‘Presto’ finale. The opening seconds hooked me in — quiet, fast and tense before fully opening up. From there, the frequent twirling of the strings tended to dominate my attention. Another particularly good finale.

That was a pretty decent one overall — two good fast movements, an interesting, likeable slow movement, and a redundant, slightly boring slower movement for good measure. I wanted to give this one 4 stars out of 5, but it didn’t feel like it could really earn a 4 while having an entire movement I frowned upon. So I’m giving it 3.5 stars.

Version listened to: Hogwood
Length: 21:56
Next up: Symphony No. 18

Here are some pictures from my walk today at Lakeside Island Park, an interesting patch of nature near me — one of the few patches reachable by foot. It’s a small island in a man-made lake outside a dead mall, the appropriately named Lakeside Mall. “Lakeside” is less appropriate for the island, since the island is in the lake, not beside it, but I only just realized that while writing this. “Lakeside” is a strong brand name here; the mall was super popular, and half the stuff in a square-mile radius is called “Lakeside” something or other. The word has even survived the mall itself: it is closed and pending redevelopment into a downtown-ish nucleus called Lakeside City Center.

That being so, this little park is probably headed for a new chapter. Access is currently limited to one bridge from a quiet residential area, but plans for a new bridge associated with Lakeside City Center were mentioned at a recent Sterling Heights City Council meeting. I’ll write about this island again soon to describe its current state in fuller detail.

Sterling Heights has recently been at work improving the island, presumably spurred by the broader Lakeside project. It was closed for most of last year while they replaced the bridge, making it smoother and wider. The previous one had uneven, buckling concrete and, if I remember correctly, a series of metal bollards down the middle. The new bridge has a single bollard at the front — I assume they’re able to remove this quickly if they need to.

Two days ago, I checked out the ITC Trail in Sterling Heights for the first time. It’s a new trail that opened last year, a roughly 3-mile paved pathway through what was formerly only a power line corridor with neighborhoods on either side. The acronym in the trail’s wonky name stands for International Transmission Company, which operates the power lines. Most importantly, the trail is just a couple of miles away from me, something not to be taken for granted in the car-dominant sprawl.

From one end of the trail to the other and back again, I walked 6.19 miles, spent 2 hours and 12 minutes, saw 22 other people using the trail and got barked at by three backyard dogs. The temperature was at its daily high of 87F for most of the walk. The fact of being beneath power lines meant there were no trees for shade, but a slight breeze made it tolerable.

Even a trail as simple as this is a huge boon to the experience of being on foot in this particular area, and there is talk of additional trails that could hook up to this one. They cut the ribbon on it last May after a couple of years of work and around $3.2 million from the American Rescue Plan Act. That money also went toward improvements at the obscure cul-de-sac that serves as the parking area. All in all it sounds like a pretty good and easy story for a new pedestrian path in metro Detroit; resident complaints must be buried in Facebook comments or City Council minutes, because news coverage of them is slim.

Keep reading for a timestamped log of everything I saw and thought along the trail.

This is the first delayed Haydn symphony post. I listened to Symphony No. 10 yesterday while resting my feet after a 6-mile walk down a new trail, which I’ll be writing about soon. But since I’d already published another post about our recent Cleveland trip, I decided to sleep on this one and save it for today. I’m still following the order laid out in the notes for the Christopher Hogwood recordings, so I skipped from No. 5 to No. 10. I listened to the Hogwood version.

The first movement (‘Allegro’) was a good fast opening, with more palpable emotion than has been in previous intros, plus punchy horns taking everything up a notch. It struck me as one of the better intros of this series so far, if not the best — the other one I remember liking a lot was from Symphony No. 1. The ending was awkward and sudden, though. Things slowed down for the second movement (‘Andante’), which was slightly interesting but mostly a bit boring. I’ve listened to it a few times now, and each time I end up thinking, “wait, this is still going?” It’s mostly a lot of high violin stuff; the melodies were momentarily interesting but forgettable, and the whole thing was a minute or two too long. A couple of cool repeated passages revolved around long held notes on the violin. The finale (‘Presto’) was peppy and chirpy, interlaced with some darker, quieter passages where the strings seem to all slide around together in a roiling mass, then go silent before the pep bursts forth again. The melodies weren’t as striking as the first movement, but this was still pretty good.

I rate this symphony 4 stars out of 5. The next is Symphony No. 11.

We recently got to spend a couple of nights in Cleveland. We spent most of our time walking all over downtown, visiting six breweries and finally checking a pair of lighthouses off our list.

We’ve passed through Cleveland a couple of times before, thought it seemed like a really cool city and always wanted to spend more time there. On the way down to see the eclipse in 2024, we went to their art museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a nearby submarine tour. We also hiked some Cleveland Metroparks last year, and we tried to stop downtown and see the lighthouses, but there was crazy traffic and we aborted the mission. This was the first time we really got to see all the Cleveland we wanted to see.

It didn’t disappoint. Coming from Detroit, it’s similar in a lot of ways, but nicer, cooler, bigger and cleaner. It feels like it’s been better taken care of. It seems like a more people-friendly place to live. Buses and trains were on the move. There were seemingly no homeless people, and only once did we have to navigate past a group of off-putting individuals on the sidewalk.

Cam and I listened to Haydn’s next symphony on my lunch break. She’s been following along with the daily listening so far. Today was Symphony No. 5, for which we used the version by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra & Ádám Fischer on Apple Music. No harpsichord in this one either.

The first movement (‘Adagio ma non troppo’) was mainly notable for the big, soft sound of horns. It was nice background music but didn’t do anything particularly striking or memorable. The second (‘Allegro’) was a step up, with some playful upturned notes, a cycle of enjoyable melodies that repeats a couple of times, and some palpable dramatic moments. This was a pretty strong movement.

This was the first symphony of the series to have the structure that later became traditional: four movements, the third of which is a minuet or some kind of dance. I think Haydn’s supposed to have been one of the key guys who made that popular. But in this instance there were no real sparks for the third movement (‘Minuet and trio’). On to the fourth movement (‘Presto’) — the only thing that really caught my ear was the rapidity of notes at certain moments. Otherwise it was another fine two-minute outburst to close out the symphony.

I rate this symphony 4 stars out of 5.

On a side note, I listened back to the second movement of yesterday’s Symphony No. 4 last night. It is a pretty interesting and entrancing bit, aside from the ‘haunted house’ metaphor I mainly focused on yesterday.

I’m still following James Webster’s chronology from the Hogwood recording notes, so it’s Symphony No. 4 next, not Symphony No. 3. They put No. 3 in another volume of symphonies with less certain dating. I listened to this one while warming up and eating a slice of leftover frozen pizza. I went with the harpsichordless Hogwood recording again.

Symphony No. 4 was a slight bit more interesting than No. 2, but still not quite as good as No. 1. The opening movement (‘Presto’) is again a fun, propulsive few minutes, occasionally buckling into a quirky moment and shifting into a mysterious moment. The second movement (‘Andante’) immediately sounded like haunted house music — or as Webster put it:

It welds three separate rhythms – freely developing melody, beginning messa di voce; sinuously syncopated, melodically active inner part; “walking” bass – into a mood that is not easily described, but once heard is not easily forgotten.

It was a tad bit interesting, had some pleasant moments and was definitely different to what I’ve heard so far, but it never really emerged from sounding like background music to a Luigi’s Mansion level.

The third movement (‘Tempo di menuetto’) was something new. The other two symphonies each ended with a big exciting Presto, but this was a slightly boring dance that didn’t feel like it had a good sense of flow or much going on.

I rate this symphony 3.5 out of 5.

Back with Haydn’s Symphony No. 2, clocking in at a crisp 8-and-a-half minutes.

The opening movement (‘Allegro’) had me tapping my foot. The foot-tapping was so strong that I kept tapping even through the lighter, softer moments where it briefly switched to more mysterious chords. The next movement (‘Andante’) really did nothing for me — just a wandering, uninteresting, and constantly trilling melody. Occasionally it generated a moment of interest by shifting to a darker key. The third movement (‘Presto’) had a decent energy level but never really caught my interest, though it did briefly suggest to my mind the image of a galloping horse.

For the listening order, I’m currently following a revisionist chronology laid out by the musicologist James Webster in the notes for a series of Haydn recordings released in the ’90s. Reading those notes yesterday, I was surprised when Webster said “Haydn almost certainly used no keyboard instrument in his symphonies, except in London.” I’d just got done listening to Symphony No. 1, which had a harpsichord through the whole thing! Somehow along the way it became traditional to play Haydn with a harpsichord. The recordings Webster was writing for, conducted by Christopher Hogwood, ditched it and are therefore “the first on original instruments to realise Haydn’s sonic intentions in this essential respect.”

So for Symphony No. 2, I switched to Hogwood. It’s definitely more peaceful without the harpsichord. As soon as I found out it wasn’t technically supposed to be there, the incessant harpsichord in Symphony No. 1 became the equivalent of a ringing cellphone in a movie theater. It’s just a redundant chime, never really doing anything interesting or adding anything other instruments aren’t already doing. So I think I’ll mostly be looking for non-harpsichord recordings.

I rate this symphony 3 stars out of 5.

Am I actually going to listen to all 106 symphonies by Joseph Haydn? I’m not sure, but I started with Symphony No. 1 today.

From what I’ve gathered, this was written around 1757 when he was about 25 years old, serving as the personal musicmaker of a Bohemian aristocrat. I listened to the Philharmonia Hungarica version from the Complete Symphonies album on Apple Music. The whole thing was a little under 15 minutes. My cat sat on my lap about halfway through.

The opening movement (‘Presto’) had a few really strong moments of rising notes and the feeling of building toward an explosion — I think in the business they call it a “crescendo”? The second movement (‘Andante’) was like a brisk dance that periodically shifted to a minor key and did some big low notes; it had potential, but by minute 4 my mind was wandering. The third movement (‘Presto’ again) perked back up and finished strongly; it’s short and wild and had my favorite bit of the whole symphony, a cartoonish melody that it kept returning to, with notes that quickly scooted upward in pitch.

Out of 5 stars, I rate it 4.

I recently finished the latest book in my series of biographies about all the kings and queens of England. For the life of Henry IV, who ruled from 1399 to 1413, I picked “Henry IV: The Righteous King” by Ian Mortimer.

This was one of the more interesting and unusual ones I’ve read so far. It’s told as the story of a basically virtuous and admirable guy whose reign is never quite allowed to flourish. He’s as promising a candidate for king as could be wished for, but he spends his 14 years as king running from one internal crisis to another until he finally expires.

Henry starts out as the richest young man in England, heir to the most powerful nobleman short of the king. He makes a name for himself with lots of knightly jousting, crusading with Teutonic Knights, and going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But he falls out badly with King Richard II — also a young man, the same age as him, but a bad, unpopular ruler lacking Henry’s steady, good-at-everything competence. Richard temporarily banishes Henry from England, then once he’s gone, he strips him of his inheritance and exiles him for good, leaving Henry with little choice but to risk it all in overthrowing Richard. He sneaks back home and starts making deals and amassing forces. He captures the panicking and ineffective Richard pretty easily and is swept to the throne in an ecstasy of popular support.

Then the gears shift. His reign is immediately swamped with internal revolts, whack-a-mole military campaigns against Scotland and Wales, and lots of annoying back and forth with Parliament. There were consecutive years of crop failure, feeding a rise in lawlessness and disorder throughout the country. All his energy was needed just to keep his head above water. As king he accomplishes virtually nothing of consequence.

Henry’s reign withered away along with his health, and his son, the future King Henry V, increasingly took charge. His main health problem seems to have been some sort of “skin ailment,” which flared up with a “burning” sensation in 1405 and may have been present decades earlier. It developed into a “wasting disease” that basically left Henry a zombified corpse, or so Mortimer makes it seem. Quoting a well-informed medieval Welshman, he writes:

Henry suffered ‘an infection’ which resulted in ‘festering of the flesh, dehydration of the eyes, and rupture of the internal organs’. … In this ‘festering of the flesh’ it would appear likely that Henry’s skin disease had grown progressively worse, from his burning skin … to a more general degradation of his lower body. … He was an invalid, dependent on others and in agony as his lower body, quite simply, rotted away beneath him.

Cam and I recently took a walk through downtown Mount Clemens, a walkable zone at the edge of the otherwise suburban and rural Macomb County.

Despite being the main Walkable Downtown near us, we’ve only ever been here a couple of times, briefly. Nothing’s drawn us in; instead we go to other, farther downtowns like Royal Oak or downtown Detroit itself. I’ve come for the used book store, the Beatles-themed river bar, but never came away with much impression or appreciation of the city itself. I started to feel like this was a problem after coming across that “Clinton River Chronicles” movie, which had a lot about Mount Clemens. It’s situated at the mouth of the area’s biggest river, it’s the county seat, and for the last three years we’ve lived in a town that surrounds it on three sides. So I figured it was time to walk around in Mount Clemens.

We parked in a public lot outside the Three Blind Mice Irish Pub, in what seemed to be the north end of downtown. I plotted a 2.95-mile route that took us south into downtown, then veered east into a residential neighborhood, arrived at a riverside park, crossed a bridge over a manmade “spillway,” then over another bridge and straight back north again.

Here’s one of our first views of downtown, at the intersection of New and Main. This area felt like a real mixture of different eras of development.

I recently got my hands on a copy of “The Clinton River Chronicles,” an obscure local history movie from 1995. It’s all about the Clinton River, one of the main bodies of water where I live in southeast Michigan. The town I live in shares its name, and most of the good trails and parks are along its banks.

In response to Michigan’s governor declaring 1995 as “the Year of the River,” a whole gang of local officials were enlisted to stand in front of a camera and awkwardly but charmingly outline this river’s history. It’s cheesy and goofy in all the ways you’d expect it to be (and more) but it genuinely sucked me in, at least as someone already inclined to be interested. They pack a ton of stuff into this hour, covering the river from just about every angle: early settlements, cycles of industry, fish populations, property values, pollution, the importance of bridges and the politics of water treatment plants. Some particularly interesting sections were about the boom and bust of the “mineral bath” era, the river’s “cesspool” status by the 1960s and subsequent clean-up, and the miserable annual flooding of a black neighborhood, finally fixed by the creation of a “spillway” that posed environmental issues of its own.

The movie doesn’t seem to have made the leap to the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube and fully transcribed it for ease of access and research.

It was directed by one David M. DuBay, whose archived website shows him to have made a variety of films for local governments, a handful of “erotica” movies (writer and director of “Sexwaves,” in which a “brain transfer does job on housewife’s sex drive”), among other projects. He now appears to be a realtor.

One grim aside: District Court Judge James Scandirito appears in the film to discuss John Hacker, a master boatbuilder who set up shop along the Clinton River. In 2018, parts of Scandirito’s body were unearthed at a golf course in Florida. His son was charged with murder but ultimately convicted only of dismembering the body and burying it. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Anyway, back to the movie. Here’s the full transcript.

Secretary of State Candice Miller: Earlier this year, Governor Engler signed an executive declaration observing 1995 as the Michigan Year of the River. As Michigan Secretary of State and as a resident living on the banks of the Clinton River, I joined the governor in encouraging the citizens of the Great Lakes State to recognize the vital role that rivers play in the overall quality of our lives. The documentary that you are about to see explores the lives and times along one of the major rivers in southeastern Michigan. The Clinton River touches 56 communities. It is a critical habitat for all kinds of plants and wildlife in addition to providing recreation and natural beauty to our citizens. I hope that you will enjoy its rich and colorful history. Perhaps the appreciation of this natural treasure will instill a renewed river ethic to help preserve and protect it for future generations.

On our recent trip to Nashville, one of the things on my “must do” list was to visit The Hermitage, the cotton plantation that Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, called home. It has Jackson’s well-preserved mansion, a museum about his life and career, a bunch of open land to amble around on and a few outbuildings to peek into. The Hermitage isn’t one of the official presidential libraries and museums currently administered by the federal government, but it’s effectively Jackson’s presidential museum.

The Hermitage spans a little over 1,000 acres and is a short drive east of downtown Nashville (or, as one sign on the property put it, “a four-hour carriage ride”). We got there at noon on a cloudy March 30 and spent about three hours walking the grounds. Here are some of the highlights.

I’ve added a page that’s usually the cornerstone of any blog: an About page.

I figured this site needed something that at least said who’s writing it and what they’re about. The content can speak for itself to a degree, but so far the stuff on this site has been pretty scattershot. It made sense to ground it all with a single statement describing myself.

In other site news, I’ve already retired the Quest Log. It was a fun evening vibecoding it into existence, and I might revisit the idea, but ultimately I didn’t feel like it was adding much to the site. It was mostly just a list of books I’m reading, which I already log on Goodreads. I also already keep a daily log of my life, so I didn’t need another personal archive.

A final note: I made it so the Notes feed on the homepage shows a preview of the image, if the note has one. Hopefully makes it a bit more interesting to look at and inviting to click on.

That was much better. Same set list, same gray hoodie with the hood up, but everything was better. The band was locked in. The crowd was quiet, except for the occasional whoop. The Masonic Temple is beautiful, and the sound was perfect. I heard everything that came out of Dylan’s mouth clearly, unlike the previous night’s performance in Saginaw.

He only did one harmonica solo, a short and rather flat bleat at the end of “Every Grain of Sand.” Saginaw had two harmonica moments – another one at the end of “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Maybe he hadn’t appreciated the shouts of “HURRICANE!” that came his way as soon as he took it out.

It was the usual Yondr pouch setup, but someone still taped the whole thing and put it on YouTube.

I just got back from my fifth Bob Dylan concert. It was at the Dow Event Center in Saginaw, Michigan.

He came on stage in a gray, unzipped hoodie and kept his hood pulled up the entire time.

It was the most rickety, least remarkable show I’ve seen from him. Arrangements that sparkled at previous concerts, like the “When I Paint My Masterpiece” that sounds like “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” were flatter this time. It felt like they were going through motions. Even the closing “Every Grain of Sand” was basically devoid of its usual grace. The crowd kind of sucked, too; the hum of their conversation never quite died down, and they started shouting for “HURRICANE!” as soon as he blew into his harmonica.

The only times that Dylan and his band perked up were for two old school rock’n’roll covers: “I Can Tell” by Bo Diddley and “Nervous Breakdown” by Eddie Cochran. Dylan seemed to be enjoying himself with these. He even raised his voice loud enough for us to hear it; with most of his own songs, his voice was almost inaudible for half of every line. I hope he’s working on an album of these covers.

I recently finished reading “Richard II: A True King’s Fall” by Kathryn Warner, a biography of the boy/man who was king of England from 1377 to 1399.

This is the second book I’ve read by Warner. The other was about Richard II’s great-grandfather, Edward II. It’s interesting that she wrote about these two kings, because they’re both notorious failkings of English history, the first to be deposed from their thrones, and their misfortunes, many of them self-inflicted, seem to rhyme. They were both letdowns after their towering, long-lived predecessors, Edward I and Edward III. They both elevated gay lovers into the nobility and lived to see them executed by the other nobles. They both had a taste for finer things more than they had a taste for ruling. They both did much to cause the situations that led to their downfalls, and they both died as prisoners in obscure circumstances. Richard himself recognized many of these parallels and developed a “near-obsession” with his infamous great-grandfather, making “strenuous” efforts to have him canonized as a saint.

When Warner writes about Richard II and Edward II, she is consciously trying to bring a fresh view to kings traditionally written off as misfit failures. While she can’t totally rehabilitate them, because they were genuinely inept, her approach tends to render them more as hapless and tragic — the true victims, even, having never asked to be kings in the first place — rather than as malevolent mad tyrants.

This book was strongest, and felt the most purposeful and coherent, when it was describing Richard II as an individual. By combining scraps of details pulled from royal expense logs and cross-compared between various chronicles, Warner paints a reasonably clear picture of this young man from 700 years ago. Here are a few of the highlights.

• He was “refined and artistic.” His portrait at Westminster Abbey is the earliest an English king is known to have commissioned for himself.
• He was “personally fastidious and enjoyed being clean and well turned-out.” His tailor is credited with fashioning him the world’s first handkerchief.
• He had little control over his emotions. He blushed easily and was “vindictive, petty, irrational, cruel, prone to overreaction and quick to anger”; time and again he displayed an “inability to discern bad and self-interested advice from wise counsel or to stop himself overreacting.”

Outside the confines of Richard’s cranium, the book was less useful. Analysis of the actual events rarely extends beyond Richard’s personal bubble. To be fair, Warner states on page 1 that the book is “intended to be more a portrait of an individual than a thorough account of all the politics of the reign.” But when the individual is this remote, we need more context to understand him. The narration consistently hovers above ground level, skipping over the sights, sounds and smells of Richard’s England. The “kingdom” always feels like some distant thing, inhabited by an amorphous mass of country folk who exist mainly to harbor vague grievances against him.

As an example, here’s how Warner describes one of the major catastrophes of Richard’s reign: an angry mob ransacking London and executing the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The king and his companions leaving the Tower was the cue for an invasion of the fortress: apparently the guards simply opened the gates and let the mob in. Sudbury and Hales, the rebels’ main targets, were discovered hiding in the chapel of St John in the White Tower, the oldest part of the Tower of London. The two men were beaten, dragged out of the fortress, and beheaded on Tower Hill. Walsingham says that it took eight strokes of the axe to remove the unfortunate Sudbury’s head.

Boring. Dry. Compare that to how the same events are described in “Henry IV: The Righteous King” by Ian Mortimer:

The archbishop could expect no mercy. He had prevented Richard from disembarking at Greenwich to meet the rebels the previous day. On the list of men to die, his name appeared second, just below that of Henry’s father, the duke. He knelt and prayed in the chapel of St John in the White Tower. Those who were with him had already heard one Mass; now they listened to another. They could hear footsteps running through the keep. The archbishop chanted prayer after prayer, the seven psalms and the litany. As he said the words ‘all saints, pray for us’, the rebels burst in. In scenes which must have been truly terrifying for everyone present, the archbishop was seized and dragged out by his arms and hood along the passages of the castle, across the bailey and out to the yelling masses on Tower Hill, where they set up a makeshift block. It was said that they took eight blows to cut off his head.

Even the simple suggestion that it “must have been truly terrifying for everyone present” is enough to place me in their shoes and force me to briefly imagine such a scene unfolding around me. Warner never brings you this close.

Another significant problem is that Warner’s personal fixation on medieval genealogy was allowed to run completely rampant. Sentences like this are constant and quickly turn into mush:

In strong opposition to Lancaster stood Edmund Mortimer, the young earl of March (born in 1352), who was married to Lancaster’s niece Philippa of Clarence, only child of Edward III’s late second son Lionel, and who was the great-grandson of Roger Mortimer, the man Edward III had had executed for treason in 1330.

This book sags with chunky paragraphs detailing the tangled relations of people who barely deserve a Wikipedia entry, let alone mention in these pages. An obscure French nobleman, Duke Antoine of Brabant, is name-dropped precisely once by virtue of having married Joan, the daughter of Richard II’s half-sister Maud, who had married Waleran, a French count captured in battle by the English, who was only tangentially related to the story in the first place.

Warner clearly finds the “fiendishly interrelated” nature of the nobility immensely interesting, and it is. Her passion for this pocket of history jumps off the pages. You only need to visit her 20-years-running blog, edwardthesecond.blogspot.com, to understand her fervor. But it needed to be reined in. For much of this book, especially its first half, Richard’s story is drowned in a wall of noise about branches of the family tree and distant relations in other kingdoms.

This book is also weirdly sloppy on the editing front. It sometimes repeats itself, often has little sense of flow, and has a grating habit of ending long paragraphs with one completely unrelated sentence.

Sometimes Warner just throws you a riddle. Try understanding this sentence on the first read:

His elder daughter Maud made a most unhappy marriage to Queen Philippa’s nephew Willem, count of Hainault and Holland, who became insane and was confined for more than thirty years, and died in her early twenties in 1362.

Overall, I’m not sure I can recommend this book. Coming after the enjoyable “Edward II: The Unconventional King,” this was a disappointing and confusing read. This felt like it went through a different set of hands.

This blog still doesn’t have an About page. But while I was trying to write one, I thought of a different page to add: the Quest Log.

It’s basically a running list of things I’m making progress on. Once I’m done with something, it goes in the “Completed” section.

Calling them “quests” at all is a gross overstatement, but the current quests are:

• a few books I’m reading,
• a video game I’m playing,
• a trip I’m preparing for, and
• the ongoing adventures of transitioning to Linux on my desktop PC.

(For that last one, I’m not exactly sure when to mark it as “completed” — maybe after I’ve been using Linux for a year. Or if I end up switching back to Windows, I’ll have to add an “Abandoned” section.)

On the way back from West Virginia, we stayed a night in Logan, Ohio, and checked out Hocking Hills State Park.

The stop felt almost obligatory. People have been telling us we need to go to Hocking Hills for a few years now. It’s definitely on the upswing: they built a huge new visitor center in 2019, had a nice Covid bump and have been reported to be growing in popularity faster than almost any other state park in the country.

All for good reason. These were very good hikes — a total of about 5.13 miles across one evening and the following morning. I loved the staircases carved into the sandstone, the caves and hollows, the “honeycombed” rock faces, chaotic piles of huge, eroded stones – and, because of the time we went, dramatic walls of icicles.

It’s been a fun couple of weeks with the Photofeed, but it’s time to say goodbye. I’ve renamed it to Notes because I want to start posting text, too.

My original plan was for the Photofeed to be a faster, more visual feed that I could update from my phone, while the main blog would be a slower, writing-focused feed that I needed computer access to work on. But since implementing the Photofeed, I’ve found myself wanting to post little text bites to it, without any photos attached. The code allowed for text-only posts, but I had to rethink the design a little bit to accommodate them.

The transition appears to have been successful. Old Photofeed URLs should redirect to Notes, and the old RSS feed should work, too.

I guess it’s sort of a Twitter page now instead of an Instagram page. I’ll use it to post little updates about where I’m going, what I’m seeing, interesting things I come across, etc. That’s the same as before. But now, they may or may not have photos. It’ll be nice to have the option.

At the beginning of December, we took a road trip to New River Gorge National Park in southern West Virginia.

This corner of the United States had never been on my radar until moments before we decided to go. We wanted to fit in one last vacation for the year and went looking for something new to us that was within driving distance. I was worried we’d end up regretting this trip for one reason or another, but I’m really glad we went. It was basically four consecutive days of good scenery, friendly people and pleasant surprises.

I’ve added a new feature to this website: the Photofeed.

The Photofeed is a place for me to post pictures from my life and travels, accompanied by short captions. It’s sort of like a basic Instagram page. I’ve set the tone already: the first two posts are about food and the weather.

Use this link to subscribe to the Photofeed on RSS.

Usually, I have to use a computer to update this website. It runs on Hugo, and updating it involves Visual Studio Code and some terminal commands. It’s not a convenient workflow, but it’s been fun to tinker with and learn from. Still, I wanted some ability to update the site from my phone, in case I want to express myself while I’m out of the house or on vacation. I settled on the idea of a feed of photos, separate from the main feed of written content, that I can treat as a visual life log.

I vibecoded the Photofeed using Claude Opus 4.6. I interact with it using an iOS Shortcut on my home screen, which asks for an image from my camera roll and gives me a text box to write the caption. It sends the photo and caption to a Cloudflare Worker, which builds them into a Photofeed page and commits it to GitHub, which triggers Cloudflare to redeploy the website from that commit.

We recently had the privilege of seeing the only lighthouse in the landlocked state of West Virginia. It was our 62nd lighthouse overall.

It’s made from a wind turbine tower that rolled down a hill during construction, rendering it unusable. The owners of a nearby campground and RV park got ahold of it and converted it into this “lighthouse.”

I recently finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis for the first time. Over the years I’ve heard about the series being some kind of Christian allegory. Christian overtones and occasionally outright references were pretty obvious from the outset, but I felt it really kick into gear in the fourth book, “The Silver Chair.”

The preceding books had splashes of detectable Christianity here and there: Aslan is like Jesus, the main kids are referred to as Daughters of Eve and Sons of Adam, etc. It was enough enrich the story with another layer of potential meaning and get me thinking, but not so much that it felt like it was the whole point. In “The Silver Chair,” and really only in “The Silver Chair,” the balance teetered.

I live right next to a big mall that closed a couple years ago: Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights, Michigan. They have flashy plans to demolish it and erect a pedestrian-friendly, mixed-used utopia off one of the busiest highways in suburban Detroit. It could be a cool thing, or it could be another embarrassing attempt to inject “Main Street” into the car-centric sprawl. It’s hard to tell. After two years of hearing about it, nothing seems to be happening. I went over on my lunch break to monitor the situation.

In 2025, I kept a daily log of snippets from the news. Below is the result: more than 500 total entries, a mixture of U.S. news, global events and a few items of local or personal interest.

It’s not a comprehensive list of everything that happened. It’s more like a personal log of events that I thought were important enough to write down. Here’s what I saw happening in the news, in the order that it happened.

01-01 AP: A U.S. Army veteran driving a pickup truck that bore the flag of the Islamic State group wrought carnage on New Orleans’ raucous New Year’s celebration, killing 15 people as he steered around a police blockade and slammed into revelers before being shot dead by police.

01-06 BBC: Under growing pressure from his own party, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced he will step down and end his nine-year stretch as leader.

01-07 AP: President-elect Donald Trump told residents of Greenland that “we’re going to treat you well” as his oldest son visited the mineral-rich Danish territory that’s home to a large U.S. military base, heightening speculation that the incoming U.S. administration could seek to acquire it. The president-elect later told a news conference he wouldn’t rule out using military force or economic coercion to take control of Greenland, saying that “we need it for national security.”

01-15 NPR: Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement on a multiphase ceasefire that commits them to end the war in Gaza, President Biden and Qatar’s prime minister announced separately on Wednesday.

01-15 NBC: Nicotine levels in cigarettes sold in the U.S. would have to be drastically lowered under a proposal released Wednesday by the Food and Drug Administration. If finalized, the change would mean that cigarettes would lose their ability to hook most people into addiction.

01-15 AP: U.S. regulators on Wednesday banned the dye called Red 3 from the nation’s food supply, nearly 35 years after it was barred from cosmetics because of potential cancer risk.

I recently finished reading “The Russian Revolution: A New History” by Sean McMeekin (2017). This was my first time reading a full book on the Russian Revolution; until now I’d been relying on a working knowledge gleaned from Twitter threads, YouTube videos, and things that were mainly about other topics. But when a friend mentioned they were reading this book and learning a lot, I took it as my signal to finally go in depth. I listened to the audiobook over the course of 11 days in November, mostly while going on walks and doing chores.

I recently paid my second visit to Grand Traverse Lighthouse on a chilly, overcast day in November. Unlike our first time here over the summer, the tower was climbable and the gift shop was open for business, so I was able to see much more of what the property has to offer. Here’s a rundown of the experience.