SketchUp

The kids and I have been playing around with Google SketchUp over the long holiday weekend. It's a free 3D modeling program from the fine folks at Google.

I found that it's best to watch a couple tutorials before diving in - there are some key concepts that are not intuitive. But after watching a few and messing around for a few minutes it's not difficult to get the hang of doing basic modeling.

The kids like to create buildings and playgrounds and then populate them with people and animals from the large library of available components that other people have created.

But there are things that I just could not figure out how to do. For example, it won't let you extrude one perpendicular cylinder from another, so it's not clear to me how to connect two perpendicular cylinders.
Jim on 11.30.08 @ 05:53 PM ET [link]

Turkey Time

It's that time of year again. Here's a link to our recipe and photo album for our Dryer-Cooked Turkey.
Jim on 11.27.08 @ 12:02 PM ET [link]

Coffee and silence

I'm writing this from my local non-chain coffee shop on my iPhone, sipping coffee and people-watching. But what makes me happiest is that they've finally turned off the music. I mean, I like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue as much as the next guy, but geez, give it a break.

But now, just blessed silence.
Jim on 11.23.08 @ 12:50 PM ET [link]

Doctor Atomic

Doctor Atomic (YouTube Trailer), John Adams' third opera, is now playing at the Met. The opera is set in Los Alamos during the days leading up to the first atomic bomb test.

Today I saw a high-definition broadcast of the opera in my local movie theater, beamed live from the Met in New York. It was an amazing production, both musically and visually. The text is a mixture of poetry (John Donne, for example) and the character's own words from memoirs, interviews, and letters.

Baritone Gerald Finley sang the part of Robert Oppenheimer, and beautiful and talented mezzo Sasha Cooke sang the part of Kitty Oppenheimer. One of the highlights of the production was an intimate aria of text from the Muriel Rukeyser poem "Am I In Your Light?" that Kitty sang to Robert on their bed. The second highlight was Robert Oppenheimer's heart-wrenching aria from John Donne's "Batter my heart" that closes out Act I. Here's a clip of Kitty's aria from a different 2005 Dutch production with Finley as Oppie and another mezzo as Kitty, with Dutch subtitles.

I bought my tickets online weeks in advance and I arrived about an hour early, knowing well that the seniors would be there in force. Sure enough, there were about fifty elderly people lined up ahead of me when I arrived. I was probably the youngest person in the audience.
Jim on 11.08.08 @ 08:28 PM ET [link]