Rehearsal for a concert I’m singing in on Saturday got a nice write-up in a local arts blog. As usual, my advertising is late and largely useless, but if you’ve no plans for Saturday night, I invite you to come to First and Central Presbyterian to hear the Mastersingers of Wilmington. We’re doing some old stuff (Bach, Schütz, John Sheppard), and some newish stuff (Desenclos Requiem, written in the early 60s but awfully modern in harmony and style). It really will be some of the finest choral singing you’ll hear anywhere in the Delaware Valley.
Warning: everybody tears up while watching this video. EVERY. BODY. (If you don’t, you are a zombie, and I’d prefer you go elsewhere and not eat my sweetbreads.)
My day has been improved markedly by Ana Marie Cox and Jason Linkins “live-blogging” the White House flickr feed. All the best stuff is actually just for the first picture:
JASON: Also back there is Arne Duncan, who I thought was a baller? He played in Australia though, where there’s trapezoids on the court and they wear hot pants and you have to account for the Coriolis Effect when you run your backdoor cuts.
ANA MARIE: But the star of this picture is, of course, Reggie Love.
JASON: This is what a real athlete looks like. Look at his face! Calm like a bomb. That vertical leap is what scares Glenn Beck the most about the Obama administration.
ANA MARIE: If I could make a related point about Reggie Love?
JASON: Please do.
ANA MARIE: Basically? YUM.
JASON: Ha! Who is that underneath Reggie Love, looking on in terror?
ANA MARIE: That’s Pennsylvania Representative and Iraq War vet Patrick Murphy, who’s spearheading the Congressional effort to end the ban on gays in the military.
JASON: Well, don’t ask and don’t tell anyone about that time he got cold postered by Reggie Love!
Keith “Large Head” Olbermann compiled a great post he calls The Nine Smartest Plays In World Series History. Absotively worth a read, even if I do disagree with number 1. Number 3 struck me, for some reason:
The story is well-known to this day; Gibson, aching, knees swollen, limping, somehow creeps to the batter’s box and then takes a 3-2 pitch from another hall of fame Oakland reliever, Dennis Eckersley, and turns it into the most improbable of game-winning home runs.
But the backstory involves a Dodger special assignment scout named Mel Didier. When the count reached 3-and-2, Gibson says he stepped out of the batter’s box and could hear the scouting report on Eckersley that Didier had recited to the Dodgers, in his distinctive Mississippi accent, before the Series began. On a 3-2 count, against a left-handed power hitter, you could be absolutely certain that Eckersley would throw a backdoor slider. He always did it. And as Gibson once joked, “I was a left-handed power hitter.”
