Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Time for some short stuff for Saturday….

:: Admiral! There be robins here! Yep, the eggs are hatching. Attentive readers may (or may not) recall that a few weeks ago, a robin nested in the potted ivy plant that we have hanging just outside our balcony door. As of this writing, two of her three eggs have hatched. This means that we've pretty much lost the use of our balcony until the babies leave the nest, but that's OK, I guess. It's a nice little nature-lesson for the kid. (Oh, and baby robins immediately after hatching are…well, they're ugly: a mass of pink flash the size of my thumb, covered with little stubby-things that are feathers, I guess.)

:: Sean and his wife maintain a separate weblog documenting their experiences of raising their twins, mostly with those gently humorous moments that kids seem to provide in droves. They update in spurts, and they're in the middle of just such a spurt now. Check it out, if you're into such things. (My own daughter has discovered Slurpies at 7-11, and while she is fearlessly riding her bike at speeds that turn me into The Annoying Dad [tm], she has recently developed a paralyzing fear of slides. OK….)

:: I just finished reading the memoirs of Sir Georg Solti, the late and great conductor most noted for his stewardship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and for his staggering recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Solti was a hero of mine, but I was unaware that he had written memoirs until I spotted them on the library shelves two weeks back. I remember the suddenness of his death in 1997, and parts of the book are haunting in this regard, particularly the last chapter, in which he discusses his views on some of the great works of the orchestral repertoire. Occasionally he says something like, "I haven't conducted that piece since 1965, and I plan to do so again in 1998 or 1999…." Alas, it was not to be. Solti didn't retire, ever: he was still going, full-speed ahead, when he suddenly died in his mid-80s. (I should also note that for all my love of a great deal of Solti's recordings, the one time I watched him conduct on television I found his beat utterly incomprehensible. I have no idea how the orchestra followed him. But then, the Chicago Symphony comprises some of the finest musicians in the world.)

:: Gul Macet is on the trail of some Star Wars Original Trilogy DVDs. Evil bootleggers!

:: Good TV shows get canceled, but CBS resurrects the horrible show of theirs with the talking baby. A pox, I say. A pox!

:: Shorter Steven Den Beste: Blogger sucks.

No, I'm not taking over SSDB honors. But I pretty much agree with everything he says here, and I've been hoping to switch to Movable Type with my own domain name, hosted somewhere else, for a while now. The problem is, of course, money. Blogger is free, disposable cash is tight, and my goals as a freelance writer have to take precedence now. I know, setting up elsewhere isn't that expensive: while SDB went whole-hog, with his own server and all, I've actually done some investigated and have identified a few options that would cost less than $100 yearly, I think. But $100 is a lot of postage stamps, envelopes, card stock (for reply cards), paper, and ink cartridges. At this point, I'm stuck with Blogger, I'm sad to say.

:: One more parenting note: I'm not sure yet, but I expect that problems may arise when my daughter goes to preschool in a year. Why? Because she knows this song. The song is on a Celtic album of mine that I play a lot. So, in twenty years or so when you're reading about all those subversive young 'uns in the paper, I think one of them is likely to be mine. And yet, my position is: I'm fine with it. Sigh….

:: I've been forgetting to link this all week: Scott has launched a photo-log to go along with his weblog. (By the way, does the name "Ufez Jones" mean anything? Is that a literary allusion of some sort? Just curious….)

:: We can't find the WMDs. We also can't find Digby. Hmmmmmm....where's my tinfoil hat?