It’s lily season. This year’s Botanica pictures can be viewed here.

The rematch:

(Via John C. Wright.)

A bit of Copland:

(Via dm00.)

And a little dance:

(Via Mark Sullivan.)

The last one reminds me of this classic.

One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.

Identify the speaker:

1. “I have actually outlived myself.”

2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”

3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”

4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”

5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”

6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”

7. “Beethoven was wrong!”

8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.

9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?

10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?

11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism’”?

12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies’”?

13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?

14. What is 8′37″ better-known as?

15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?

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… or, less melodramatically, I finally got the new glasses I needed. I’ve read far less than usual these past few years because reading has been a tedious process: read 20 minutes, holding the book and my head at uncomfortable angles so the print is within the narrow zone of close focus, until my vision blurs; wait 20 minutes, until I can focus on nearby things again; read 15 minutes, until my vision blurs again; throw the book against wall and listen to a CD instead. My health insurance covers eye exams but not the glasses themselves, and even at the cheap mall outlets a new pair of glasses is still beyond my budget, so I tried ordering a pair from 39 Dollar Glasses.com. I need varifocal lenses with hefty corrections for nearsightedness and astigmatism, so my glasses cost about twice $39, but they still were only about a third the price quoted by the salesman at the mall.

Am I satisfied with them? Not entirely. The frames need a bit of adjustment, which I’m hesitant to do myself, and while I do have good distance and close-up vision now, intermediate vision, such as is necessary when working at a computer, is confined to an annoyingly small region. I may need to get a second pair specifically for work.

However, I’ve never been completely satisfied with any of the glasses I’ve purchased in the last 20 years. My new pair, even with its problems, is a better fit than the second-last pair, which was expensively mis-manufactured and ill-fitted by the optician at his shop. And my new pair does pass the crucial test: I can read all evening long.

I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.

Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright’s trilogy.

… to Wichita???

More very miscellaneous links:

An excess of empathy?

Jimmy Webb, theologian.

“Lord Byron was a vampire? You would have to pay me money not to believe that.“

The rains have stopped for the moment, and my Echinocereus triglochidiatus finally opened. The grey blotches on the epidermis are due to the workers who painted the house last year, who painted the cacti, too.

Béla Anton Leoš Fleck is a guy.

Here’s a curiosity I recently came across: “Uta ni Katachi ha Nai Keredo,” by Doriko, featuring Hatsune Miku on vocals:

Yes, it’s just another instantly-forgettable ballad featuring one of the many nasal sopranos that infest Japanese popular music, but there is something remarkable about this recording.

(Via Martin.)

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The Maximum Leader says he doesn’t know who all the Steves are in the current poll. Let’s see if we can do something about that. Here are several of the Steves in action.

Stephen Bennett: “C.E.O. (Comanche Executive Officer)”

Steven King: “Medley: Puttin on the Ritz/42nd Street/It Don’t Mean a Thing”¹

Steve Lukather: “Naima”

Steve Morse: “Cruise Missile”²

Steve Stevens:”Melt”³

Steve Vai: “The Attitude Song”⁴

For Steves Hackett and Howe, dig out your old Genesis and Yes albums.

I regret that I don’t have any Steve Kaufman handy (what I have is on cassette, but my tape deck died several years ago). He is the only person to place first three times in the National Flatpick Competition at Winfield (Mark O’Connor only did it twice). If flatpicking is what you like, he’s your guy.

If you don’t know who Stevie Ray Vaughn is, you have some remedial listening to do.

Update: In celebration of April 15, here’s Stevie Ray:

1. The bass you hear is actually the sound of the two lowest strings on King’s guitar run through a separate pickup and electronically transposed an octave down.↩
2. Jerry Peek, bass, and Rod Morgenstein, drums↩
3. Tony Levin, bass, and Terry Bozzio, drums↩
4. Stuart Hamm, bass, and Chris Frazier, drums↩

At the Easter Vigil Mass at the cathedral Saturday evening:

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I visited Botanica this afternoon for the first time this year. Here are a couple of the things I found there.

Bluebells

Lenten rose (for Eve)

There’s more at my photo gallery.

I’ve lived in Wichita for the better part of my life, and I still don’t know what normal Kansas weather is. Does this look like spring to you?

That’s the view from my front porch this afternoon. Aside from a few patches of green at ground level, it looks like February, not April.

There are more hard freezes predicted for tonight and tomorrow. I wonder if this will be another year without lilacs. Here are pictures of the last few daffodils. They most likely will be gone Tuesday.

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From a discussion in the comments at TSO’s place:

>Reminds me of my System/360 days when we had to suggest to the programmers that rather than ask the operator at the console to type “1 for Yes, 2 for No”, the program should request “Y for Yes, N for No”.

>And what’s wrong with “1″ for Yes and “2″ for No exactly?

>One for yes and two for no is great if you have at least one position to the right of the decimal point.

>”And what’s wrong with ‘1′ for Yes and ‘2′ for No exactly?” 1thing.

If you want your child to be a great guitarist, what should you name him? See the new poll for a hint.

Regarding the old poll: Only twelve votes since August — doesn’t anybody read anymore?