Meta and Meta

The Convenience Society

Guy sees a girl he likes the looks of, approaches her and says, "Hey, wanna f***?" And she says, "MMmmm! Your place or mine?" And he says, "Hey -- if it's gonna be a hassle, forget it!"

(Roughly as told by Jim Holt.)

"Morality" Defined

A morality M_n is a dynamic decision tree intended reliably to lead to the flourishing of an organism O_n (where O_n denotes an individual or a type).

There. Now that that's settled...

Crackers

I agree that P.Z. Myers' hijinks with a communion wafer is pointlessly rude.

But if doing violence to an arbitrarily sanctified cracker were at all relevantly similar to doing violence to a human corpse, we'd probably want to forbid eating the cracker.

Ma foi, je ne sais pas

My wife and I went to see Bizet's "Carmen" at the Hollywood Bowl Sunday night. In general, everything sounded as good as orchestral music amplified in the outdoors can sound.

The lead Denyce Graves, however, was bad. Truly bad. Weirdly bad. I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like it. When she sang the "Habenera" (the first we hear from her), I had to dip into the deepest wells of my own self-discipline not to laugh out loud. She sounded like a not-very-good amateur countertenor (albeit with an unusually big voice) in some cheesy cabaret. Ugly sound. No connection between registers. Serious problems with pitch -- I've never heard such consistently out-of-tune singing in a professional production. (As Mark Swed puts it, "[I]n a couple of places, she might as well have been singing Nono's atonal opera ['Intolleranza'].")

Graves is apparently a well-regarded mezzo-soprano, so I'm just left wondering what the hell went wrong. It was just...so weird.