Dave’s Midlife Blog

My 17-year-old daughter, who is herself a Beatles fan, gave me the new CD/DVD set Love, the mashup of Beatles music produced by Giles and George Martin for Cirque du Soleil, as a Christmas gift.

I am the original Beatlemaniac, yet for some reason the CD sat on my desk for three or four weeks before I imported it into iTunes. (Maybe it’s a sign of the times that I had to wait until I had a few minutes to import it to my iPod before I got around to listening. Does this serve the Beatles right for waiting so long to join the digital music revolution?)

The album is fantastic. Beatles purists (mostly on discussion forums) who complain that it’s “messing around” with the originals must not remember what the Beatles did during their recording careers. They messed around all the time. John Lennon was one of the earliest proponents of reverse-tracking and using found sound.

On the other hand, many people criticized the CD for not being bold enough. And many reviewers seem to share my fascination with the combination of brilliant re-mastering and wild creativity from an authoritative source, the Martins. (Mercifully, the producers did not try to include any of “Revolution #9″ on this soundtrack. Wild creativity does have its limits.)

As a Baby Boomer, I will probably always have the feeling that the Beatles are somehow “cutting edge.” However, listening to and looking at the interviews with surviving Beatles and spouses reminds me that their music is now the music of really rather old people. Classic it may be, but cutting edge it’s not anymore.

But it is great music. I will go to my grave (hopefully several decades from now) maintaining that modern rock-and-roll owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the Fab Four and George Martin, for essentially inventing such things as massive multitracking and stadium rock shows. And the music remains fresh and strong. Why else would kids born in the 1990s be so into it?

Okay, that last post was an attempt to blog a picture from my Flickr account, pure and simple.

I moved this blog to a new server last weekend. I very, very stupidly had my domain name registrar point my domain name to both the old GoDaddy server and the new one, at mwsmedia.com, at the same time. This, of course, caused myriad problems, which are now solved.

EXCEPT…WordPress won’t allow me to upload a picture to my WP space since I moved servers. I have tried setting write permissions on the relevant directories, but I haven’t found the combination yet.

If anybody is familiar with setting WP write permissions from a Mac environment, using Fetch, I’d appreciate some input.

The sign is from Monument Realty, the company developing the area closest to the new stadium. It’s going to turn a grungy neighborhood street into a snazzy retail-and-restaurant strip.

Okay, a week and a half after Macworld, I find myself still abuzz about that iPhone.

Steve Jobs may be a genius presenter, but even so, it looks like a really neat product. Yes, I know it’s not open to the installation of other applications, but I don’t run any downloaded applications on the Sony-Ericcson W600i I use right now. The apps on the iPhone (Safari, in particular) are all I’m ever going to use on a phone/PDA.

I won’t buy one as soon as it comes out. I’ll give myself some months to cool off about it, and to let Apple get the bugs get worked out. But I probably will get one. I’m already a Cingular customer, so I wouldn’t have to switch. And I don’t have a video iPod, so that might be a marginal justification for that aspect of it.

Okay, y’all tell me now how stupid and starstruck I am. I don’t care. If it does the things Jobs showed off in the demo, and if it’ll connect up to my Prius’s Bluetooth connection, then I’m sold.

This Metro station is at Half and M Streets, SE, in Washington, DC.

As I write this, the station is actually closed for expansion, to accommodate the thousands of baseball fans who will come through it in 2008.

The stadium is one block ahead of you, at Half and N Streets.

Well, no, actually, today in the Virginia suburbs of DC it got up into the upper 70s. On our deck, when the sun hit the thermometer, it read 96 degrees at one moment.

But there’s no baseball in the newspapers. No baseball news on TV or the radio.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ great infielder Rogers Hornsby, “The Rajah,” summed up true baseball fans’ feelings when he said:

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

Yeah, that’s how I feel right now. Spring training starts in Florida in mid-February. Then the spring will eventually come, and baseball will be back!

During Christmas week I drove into Washington and took pictures of the construction site for the new baseball stadium:

My favorite part of this picture is the tiny bit of upper deck, on the left, where the cheap seats are being built. That’s my neighborhood, baby !

Yeah, so it’s been many months since I’ve updated this blog.

Sorry about that. I guess my main blog/Web 2.0 energies tend to go toward The Word Nerds and its attendant forum.

Tonight I’ve been all obsessed with trying to make the K2 theme for Wordpress work right. It’s not working right. Sidebar modules aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.

So I’m spending all this energy making the shell of this blog work right and look good, and in the meantime there’s nothing in it.

Okay. I’ve got to get myself to just spit out little blog entries without worrying about writing brilliant stuff.