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It is a busy day/night in the Boston/Cambridge area...the Red Sox are playing at Fenway in a surprisingly tough battle for first against the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays...the historic NBA finals rivalry of the Boston Celtics versus the LA Lakers is rekindled at the Garden...Harry Potter's visionary JK Rowling is giving the commencement speech at Harvard...but me, I'll be rockin' and mellowin' to the sounds of the T-Bone Burnett-backed Robert Plant/Alison Krauss show at the Harborlights..er..Bank-whatever Pavilion.

I’ve always been a map geek. My elementary school projects always involved me drawing some type of map to help illuminate some point or another. I remember fondly an agriculture/industry map of France. In college one of my electives was Cartography. In those days we had to cut pieces of colored sticky-backed vellum and carefully lay them on a drawn map. I did a nice map of the percentage of local students in colleges in Massachusetts from some data that was published in the Boson Globe. The map of Massachusetts had circles on the location of each of the major colleges and universities. The circles were pie charts showing the percentage of Mass residents to noon and the diameters were proportional to the size of the school. It was a fun visualization. But these days one can do amazing things with this type of visualization. Gapminder has to be one of the most fun web pages I have ever found. It has a number of rich data sets that you can plot for different countries around the world, either on a map or on a multi-dimensional graph. I could play with this for hours. The other recent find is the contextual data that Google is providing on Google maps. Search for your favorite location and select “More” from the menu where Street View appears. You can now get direct links to Wikipedia entries or photos from the places on the map. Pure bliss for a map geek.

I've forgotten how much fun a new little kitty can be....

One of the best things in the Arlington School system is the music program. From elementary school all the way through high school music is encouraged and taught with much care and passion. The culmination of this is the annual AHS Pops concert where all of the music groups at the High School perform in a three-hour spectacle showcasing all of the talent. The whole program is presented twice, once on Saturday night and then again on Sunday afternoon. We went today and enjoyed a program that featured these highlights:
- the Concert band doing Henry Mancini’s Drummers Delight and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with an amazing piano solo by a freshman.
- The Women’s Choir singing Dream a Little Dream
- The Honors Orchestra performing two original Tangos by music director Pasquale Tassone, who is retiring this year after decades of service
- The Madrigal Singers performing a moving rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah
- The Jazz band playing an absolutely rocking piece, Tank by Yoho Kanno as well as a Dizzy Gillespie piece and a rousing rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown
- The Mixed Chorus signing a number of tunes including Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In
- The String Orchestra playing a virtuoso piece, Blue Fire Fiddler
- And finally the Symphony Orchestra plus the Chorus performing Solemn Overture “1812” by Tchaikovsky. I heard the orchestra play this piece earlier this year but with the chorus of 80 or so voices it was really moving.
There were a few down points like the overall length of the program and the inclusion on a few too many songs of Jennifer Truesdale (she was good but it took away from the youth performances), an alum of AHS who has gone on to a career in singing. But overall it was great to see some of the youth that I know so well and so many others performing such great music with such confidence. A great afternoon of music and hopefully a great sign of the future for music in Arlingon.

I have purposefully managed to stay away from any artists or performances presented on American Idol...until the other night. My older son has discovered this show through his friends and insisted on watching it (I wanted the Red Sox game). I learned that the show occasionally features a guest artist who becomes part of the theme for number for shows. In this case it was Andrew Lloyd Webber. Knowing that there were going to be a number of torturous Phantom of the Opera tunes sung, I left the room. I came back a little later to see Mr. Lloyd Webber conversing with a contestant, Carly Smithson. He convinced her to sing Superstar from Jesus Christ Superstar. I have to admit it was pretty good - shortened quite  a bit for American TV viewers attention spans, but still pretty good.  Of course, JCS is one of my favorite pieces of music ever so she would have had to completely butcher it to make me not like it. I still don’t like American Idol and I will not watch it again unless forced to...unless the guest artist is Christian Vander and they contestants have to sing their pieces in Kobaïan....but a good JCS rendition is not something to pass up...some favorites:

The Original

Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection

Gethsemane, Vanden Plas from Christ 0

Heaven on Their Minds, Queensrÿche from Take Cover