Greetings from Washington, D.C., where I gave a colloquium yesterday at Goddard Space Flight Center. Had fun catching up with old friends, and listening to NASA scuttlebut. (Science-wise, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, although not completely hopeless.) Less fun was when my laptop, for the first time ever, balked at transmitting my talk to the projector. I managed to convert my OpenOffice presentation to PowerPoint, saved it to a flash drive, transferred it to another laptop, and used that. (I don’t have PowerPoint on my computer, and nobody else has OpenOffice.) So it was salvageable, but about 10% of my figures didn’t show up, which was disconcerting.
In lieu of substantive blogging, the good news is that I am now empowered to participate in everyone’s favorite blog game: the Friday Random Ten, in which you put your iPod (or whatever) on shuffle and list the first ten songs that show up. I think I saw it first at Rox Populi (who disowned it, but can’t seem to give up), but also at Feministe, Pandagon, Pharyngula, Grammar.police, Majikthise, Yglesias, and Crescat — so an eclectic crowd indeed. After buying the damn iPod six months ago, I have finally gotten around to downloading my CD’s to it (half of them, anyway), and am now equipped to play along. Day late, dollar short, whatever.
- Pat Metheny Group, Double Blind
- Maria Papadopoulou, Maskaremeni
- Aretha Franklin, Hello Sunshine
- Cecilia Bartoli, E’ Amore Un Landroncello
- Living Colour, Time’s Up
- PJ Harvey, Is That All There Is?
- Duke Ellington, Wig Wise
- Yes, South Side of the Sky
- Isaac Hayes, Chocolate Chip
- Lauryn Hill, I Used To Love Him
Not sure how accurate a window into my soul this is supposed to provide. But any technology that juxtaposes Yes with Isaac Hayes can’t be all bad. The world needs more progressive soul. (Or hot-buttered pretension, depending on your view.)