In my own less-than-sophisticated words I would say that program music is music that is about something.

From Wikipedia:

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece’s title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. (more…)

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Well, this really is what progressives are all about: more inclusion and better education.

But are smarter and kinder people really destroying our country?

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I just came back from the gym where, unfortunately, they have one of their televisions locked on Fox News.  I noticed a segment called Voters Eagerly Await Trump’s Return to White House.

This is a good example of a key aspect of Fox programming:  It’s dishonest.  Trump won with just under 50% of the vote.  Given that the (slim) majority of ballots were cast for someone else, it would be far more candid to say Trump Voters Eagerly Await his Return to White House.

 

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For better or worse, there will never be another revolution here in the U.S., given our nation’s annual military budget that’s just shy of $1 trillion.

That said, what Che Guevara said here about revolutionaries and education is quite interesting.

 

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Here’s something from 20th Century playright Thornton Wilder.

The problem is that “nonsense” comes in a variety of different flavors, and some of them are more harmful than others.

Just turn on the news, and you’ll see what I mean.  Gaza, Trump’s cabinet choices, and our ignoring environmental collapse are just a few examples.

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It’s hard to know exactly what Kurt Vonnegut was referring to when he used the word “indecent” here. Maybe it’s just an amorphous combination of war, poverty, denial of healthcare, lack of clean water, and injustice.

He was also a huge advocate of abolishing the death penalty; he mentioned Sacco and Vanzetti in several of his books.

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When my kids were in elementary school, I loved to volunteer as a chaperone on their field trips, and I remember with great fondness one of my daughter’s favorite teachers, Englishman Martin Cook, whom she had for 5th Grade.

Mr. Cook took the class out for a nature hike in a nearby forest, and began by explaining when we arrived, “This experience is best had with our ears and eyes, and not with our mouths.  Please try to stay as quiet as you can.”

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A reader asks: When you say “He’s not as happy as ______” do you say “me” or “I?” 

Because the verb “to be” never takes an object, the correct answer is “I”; this is called a “predicate nominative.”

The problem with it is that it sounds stilted, and should be avoided if possible.  As an alternative you can say, “He’s not as happy as I am,” which is both correct and doesn’t make you sound like an English teacher from the 1950s.

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If you think this guy should have been tapped to be attorney general, our nation’s highest law enforcement official, you have the moral sensibilities required to be a  member of the MAGA crowd.

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I had a physics professor in college who told our class, “When most people go to Germany they tend to take river cruises and drink white wine.  Physicists visit Boltzmann’s grave.”

I hadn’t thought about this statement in a very long time, until just now when I happened to run across this photo of . . . you guessed it.

Boltzmann was best known for his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics, which he expressed in the elegant equation that you see at the top of the monument.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy (randomness, chaos) never decreases in a closed system.  Boltzmann explained this in an entirely new, and more precise way, in his equation that says that entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the number of different states that a closed system can find itself in.

OK, plenty of that.  If I may be allowed a bit of gallows humor, a textbook chapter on this subject begins,

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying Statistical Mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study Statistical Mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”

 

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