Assorted Afflatuses

Christmas — whoops, "holiday" — music tends to make me sick. Hearing the same overly treacly lyrics and conspicuously upbeat music over and over at every turn should make anyone sick. (Even when Frosty is on the brink of a meltdown, the song stays in major!) But, for whatever reasons, as soon as Thanksgiving has ended and people begin eating turkey sandwiches for a month, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer rears its obnoxious head. Or, in the case of Costco, the ballads and dancing Santa displays come out in August.

Nonetheless, at my family's behest, I began looking for some cheerful holiday music to play on the piano to spare them from the usual classical and jazz compositions I play. Trying to find something tasteful, or, at the very least, not overplayed, posed something of a challenge. After a few hours of auditioning songs in iTunes, though, I stumbled upon the only Christmas album I genuinely enjoy listening to: Lee Mendleson and Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Thrilled at my discovery, I rushed to sheetmusicdirect.us — my favorite source for downloadable compositions — and bought a few pieces from the Charlie Brown songbook.

Whatever the difficulty label may have said to the contrary, playing "Christmas Time is Here" is no walk in the park. I could not play some of the chords, like the C13 that requires the player to stretch his or her hand an eleventh from C to E flat.

Fast forward a day or two to this morning. Reading The New York Times Magazine, I came across this article about the Guitar Hero-Rock Band phenomenon sweeping the United States. I have never understood why someone would rather pick up a dinky plastic guitar-cum-game console controller and press a series of multicolored buttons instead of picking up a real guitar and playing real music.

Of all the impossible, fantastic places a video game could take a person, the land of Playing a Guitar seems very unimaginative. It is not legal to carry a machine gun through a deserted part of the American heartland and engage friends in a kill-to-win game of tag, nor is it possible for a plumber to fly through interstellar space and engage whimsical robots in an intergalactic epée. On the other hand, guitars of questionable quality can be found at any big box retailer.

But, as I continued to contemplate "Guitar Hero," I realized that it can and does take people somewhere they would not ordinarily go: to a place where they can play the guitar.

I find it incredibly depressing to think that a sizable chunk my fellow countrymen have grown so tired of physical and mental exertion that they must now resort to a simplified method of playing the guitar. I cannot play the instrument, but given the relative simplicity of most popular music — like the rock and roll anthems immortalized in Guitar Hero — I doubt it could be that taxing for the body or the mind to play on the guitar.

It seems to me like attaching a gyroscopic stabilization system and a motor to a bicycle with training wheels.

Of course, some people will probably write me angry emails asking me why I have never made the same statements about other "simulation" games, like Madden NFL of NBA Live.

Those games, however — unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band — take the player somewhere fantastic. Few people ever have the chance to play football for the NFL or manage a professional basketball team. But anyone with an instrument and a desire to learn can play a rock song. Even The Sims — in which players do nothing more than tell simulated people whether or not to laugh at another character's joke — allows a person to transcend reality and live life as a werewolf or a crazy cat lady.

Sorry Lou Dobbs. We need to mend our broken minds before we even begin to contemplate (if indeed we would even dare do that before taking action) our broken borders. Some have compared our current era to the Dark Ages, with people questioning sound science — intelligent design, anyone? — and demanding our politicians provide easy-to-comprehend sound bites. If people require their music spoon-fed to them via a series of multicolored dots, I may be inclined to agree. For my part, though, I will go back to the ivories and try to master "Christmas Time is Here."

Pure Genius
It's no iPhone, but it is quite clever.

While my effort a year ago — to save trees by posting this list online — failed, in the sense that it did not do what I hoped it would. That said, apparently people like knowing what I want.

So, here it is, for 2007.

$25 & Under

Books, books and more books. Perhaps ironically, I have a particularly strong desire to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

• How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (Pierre Bayard)
• Beethoven's Anvil (William Benzon)
• Made to Stick (Chip and Dan Heath)
• Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames)

$50 & Under

• Kitchen Chemistry (Ted Lister with Heston Blumenthal)

$75 & Under

• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2-Volume Set; W. W. Norton and Company)

$100 & Under

No, that's not a typo. I still want (and still do not own) an infrared thermometer.

• Reveal Watch (Daniel Will-Harris)
• Aromatic Milk Frother (Nespresso)
• Tall Electric Tea Kettle (Breville)
• IR Gun Industrial Infrared Thermometer (Thermoworks)

$200 & Under

Spending more than $70 for a tie would, under normal circumstances, constitute an act of insane, irrational behavior. Hermès, though, has produced a tie so incredibly clever, it more or less embodies the word. From afar, one sees a dotted purple tie. But, on closer inspection, it is revealed that the small dots are really cartoon octopuses. Pure genius.

• Cashmere Scarves (Paul Smith)
• AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED (Nikon)
• Clever Octopus Tie (Hermès)

$200 & Up

• Agatha Christie 24-Volume Hardcover Set (Agatha Christie)

Nigella Lawson — the slightly hipper, more down-to-earth British equivalent of our Martha Stewart — has long been mocked for using uncommon ingredients in her recipes, among other peculiarities. (This article from the Guardian does a particularly good job). Granted, I tend to watch Nigella Express more to hear how she communicates than anything else. Ms. Lawson has a preternatural ability to extemporaneously devise incredibly witty phrases. Or, perhaps, she simply has a very good team of writers and an excellent cue card holder.

But back to the ingredients. On this week's episode, for her ice cream cake, Ms. Lawson made use of some newfangled chocolate-peanut butter swirl chips from Nestlé's American Toll House subsidiary. According to her, the chocolate-peanut butter chips have come to market so recently that one cannot purchase them anywhere in the United Kingdom, save the Internet.

Something about that proclamation impelled me to do a little research and, after a few minutes of sleuthing, I stumbled upon VeryBestBaking.com, the online home of Nestlé's US food products branch. I clicked on the "Toll House" page and, lo and behold, there were the "all-new" swirled chocolate-peanut butter morsels.

Having tracked down the hybrid morsels, my curiosity led me to investigate Ms. Lawson's claim that the somewhat off-putting mixed chips could not be found in the UK. But before I managed to track down the Nestlé page for the UK, I stumbled upon the French food products, at nestle.fr.

The difference French and American websites speaks to what is wrong with American diets. Visitors to VeryBestBaking.com can select from a wide variety of absolutely revolting recipes, ranging from Tuna Casserole — complete with condensed cream of mushroom soup and a potato chip topping — to a baked Dijon Chicken that would make someone in Dijon very sick and very unhealthy. On the other hand, Nestle.fr features dishes like pan-seared salmon with potato gratin and hazelnut-pancetta-Mimolette risotto. Delicious!

Before people have liposuction or a gastric bypass, they might consider spending a little more time in the kitchen, preparing real food, instead of loafing on the couch and eating some disgusting pile of sludge that took five fewer minutes to prepare. Pharmaceutical and medical research dollars ought to go towards something that might make a real difference, like cancer research, not an effort to find a fix for a problem that already has a solution.

I feel no need to conceal or contort the following statement: At long last, I have been accepted into a college. And, for that matter, a very good college. For, contained in an envelope, which was itself inside a larger envelope, I received a letter of acceptance from the fine folks at Bates College.

But, to my great dismay, my acceptance to Bates has only served to complicate my life.

I need to re-read the letter, but, from what I understand, I only have until 28 November to make up my mind. That, of course, throws something of a wrench into my seemingly well-conceived plan to simultaneously apply to the University of Chicago, which, in a best case scenario, would have given me a choice between two colleges.

Fortunately, the 28 November deadline would give me just enough time to fly out to Lewiston and give the place a thorough examination, so I would not have to accept sight unseen. At the same time, I might be squandering the opportunity to attend the University of Chicago or even another institution. Of course, I might still choose to attend Bates, even if another school accepts me.

On the whole, though, I feel much better knowing that at least one school thinks me worthy of gracing their hallowed halls of learning.

*Just after I clicked the "Publish" button on Moveable Type, I realized that the title of this entry could be misinterpreted as a made-up verb meaning "to rid oneself of anything to do with Bates." That, however, was not my intention. It was meant to be a play on "Debating."

Unfortunately, the strange absence of posts over the last week (or week and a half) stems from a server problem, not a sudden burst of business to fill my obnoxiously empty schedule.

Despite my best efforts to secure everything, someone or something managed to upload a slew of extraordinarily large files into obscure folders. In fact, the mysterious files form nowhere occupied so much space that I was temporarily barred from accessing my own server via Safari. Then, of course, I realized I had forgotten the extraordinarily cryptic password to my server's FTP login. Apparently the Keychain item was deleted in my migration to Apple's new Leopard operating system.

Fortunately, however, I remembered that I still had an image of my hard disk stored from the upgrade. After a great deal of digging I managed to find the password, which brought me to this point. The entries should return soon.