Holy cow, I wrote a book!
Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but either way, you're going to have to suffer through it. Here's the at-a-glance season guide for the 2012/2013 season. (Full brochure. Seattle Times coverage.)
Legend:
For those not familiar with the Seattle Symphony ticket package line-ups: Most of the ticket packages are named Masterworks nX where n is the number is the number of concerts in the package, and the letter indicates which variation. Ticket packages have been combined if they are identical save for the day of the week. For example, 7C and 7D are the same concerts; the only difference is that 7C is for Thursday nights, while 7D is for Saturday nights. The Beyond the Score concerts focus on only one of the pieces. The WolfGang series is available only to members of the WolfGang club.
This chart doesn't include "one-off" concert series such as the Mainly Mozart or Distinguished Artists series. A "one-off" series is a concert series which shares no concerts with any other series.
Changes from last season:
The comments column very crudely categorizes the works to assist my less-classically-aware friends. This is, of course, a highly subjective rating system, but I tried to view each piece from the ears of my symphony friends. Thus, I rated downward pieces that I personally like but which others might not and rated up pieces that I may not find musically satisfying but which nevertheless tend to be crowd-pleasers.
These predictions have, of course, proven wrong in the past.
Here's what the comments mean. Note that they do not indicate whether the piece is significant in a musicological sense; they're just my guess as to whether my friends are going to like it. (For example, I know that my friends don't like minimalism, and I suspect they don't like serialism, so I rated the Adams and Berg down even though I think they're quite good. They also don't like vocal pieces. On the other hand, it turns out that I overcame my Bruckner jinx, so I can at least give the Bruckner a positive score this time. Let's just hope it's not the Hass edition.)
In many cases, I am not familiar with the piece and am basing my evaluation on what I know about the composer (or am just guessing).
As I noted when I told the story of the computer programmer who dabbled in making change that my colleague had a lot of money-related quirks.
For some reason my colleague felt the $2 bill deserved more attention. Every so often, he would go to the bank and buy $100 in $2 bills, then reintroduce the bills into circulation and enjoy people's reactions to them. (Most cashiers looked at it and recognized that it was legal tender, but couldn't find a good place to put it in the till. It usually got tossed under the drawer with all the checks.)
It was a regular occurrence that the bank didn't have that many $2 bills on hand, but they managed to find them and let him know when he could come pick them up.
One time, the bank called him back. "Hi, we asked all our branches in the entire county, but all together we can't find enough $2 bills. If you want, we can place an order with the Federal Reserve. The catch is, though, that the minimum order is $2000."
"Sure, go ahead and place the order."
Some time later, he went in to pick up his huge stack of $2 bills.
My colleague now found himself in a situation where something fun turned into an ordeal, like a smoker who is forced to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes at one sitting. Or in this case, more like 1000 cigarettes.
At the end of group meals at a restaurant, after everybody had calculated their share and put their money in the bill holder (this being the days when people actually paid cash for things), he would raid the bill holder for change, taking out all the notes greater than $2 and replacing them with the appropriate number of $2 bills. As a result, when the servers came to collect the bill holders, they found them stuffed with $1 and $2 bills (mostly $2).
Too bad he didn't make a pad out of them.
Bonus reading: $1 billion that nobody wants. Follow-up.
Reader laonianren wanted to know more about this game Walls and Ladders.
"Walls and Ladders" is not a game. It's just a metaphor for a conflict in which one side wants to perform some action and the other side wants to prevent it. The defending side builds a wall, and the attacking side builds a taller ladder. In response, the defending side builds a taller wall, and the attacking side builds an even taller ladder. The result of this conflict is that the defending side constructs an ever-more-elaborate wall and the attacking side constructs a more-and-more complex ladder [link possible NSFW], both sides expending ridiculous amounts of resources and ultimately ending up back where they started.
There is a closely-related metaphor known as an arms race. In an arms race, each participant wants to be the most X, for some property X. An arms race tends to be all-attack, whereas wall-and-ladders tends to have one side attacking and the other defending.
Since many conflicts can be phrased either as an attack-attack scenario or an attack-defend scenario (some defenses may include counter-attacks), I tend to get the two confused. Notice, for example, that my arms race article contains mostly walls-and-ladders scenarios; for example, a case where one side wants to terminate a process and another wants to prevent it from being terminated. On the other hand, my wall and ladders example was really more of an arms race, with both sides wanting to take control of the screen.
Depending on which group you work with at Microsoft, you may find a preference for walls and ladders over arms race, probably due to the same sensitivity to military terms that led to the War Room being renamed Ship Room. (I seem to recall that there was a lawsuit that among other things alleged that the fact that a Microsoft project called its daily meeting room the War Room was proof of Microsoft's evil essence.)
While I was at a group dinner at a Chinese restaurant, a whole fish was brought to our table. One of the other people at the table told a story of another time a whole fish was brought to the table.
He attended the wedding rehearsal dinner of a family member. The bride is Chinese, but the groom is not. (Or maybe it was the other way around. Doesn't matter to the story.) The dinner was banquet-style at a Chinese restaurant, and one of the many courses was a whole fish.
Two of the non-Chinese attendees marveled at the presence of an entire fish right there in front of them, head, tail, fins, and all. I guess they had up until then only been served fish that had already been filleted, or at least had the head cut off. One of them nudged my acquaintance and said, "We'll give you $500 if you eat the eyeball."
These guys inadvertently created their own sucker bet.
For you see, eating the eyeball is common in many parts of Asia. In fact, whenever their family has fish, my nieces fight over who gets the honor of eating the eyeballs!
I don't know whether my acquaintance cheerfully accepted the bet or whether he explained that their bet was a poor choice to offer a Chinese person.
What food-related sucker bets exist in your culture? (I'm not talking about foods like chicken feet or tongue, which are clearly prepared and served to be eaten. I'm talking about things that an uninitiated person might consider to be a garnish or an inedible by-product, like shrimp heads.)
Update: I remind you that the question is not asking for foods which are served as dishes on their own.
There was a report some time ago that researchers have developed a way to duplicate keys given only a photograph. When I read this story, I was reminded of an incident that occurred to a colleague of mine.
He accidentally locked his keys in his car and called a locksmith. Frustratingly, the keys were sitting right there on the driver's seat. The locksmith arrived and assessed the situation. "Well, since you already paid for me to come all the way out here, how would you like a spare key?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
The locksmith looked at the key on the driver's seat, studied it intently for a few seconds, then returned to his truck. A short while later, he returned with a freshly-cut key, which he inserted into the door lock.
The key worked.
As I noted before, many grocery stores in the United States have a printer next to the cash register which prints out coupons customized to your purchases. Here's a purchase and the accompanying coupon. What is the story behind this pairing?
Purchased: Diapers for newborn baby. Coupon: Save 75 cents on ice cream.
Bonus chatter: While waiting in line, I read the warning label on the diapers. It went on for quite a bit, but one part triggered my "I wonder what lawsuit led to this warning" sensor: "Like most articles of clothing, XYZ brand diapers will burn if exposed to flame." Did somebody say, "Oh no, there's a fire, what will I do? I know, I'll smother the fire with my baby's diapered bottom!"
When I was signing the papers for a house purchase many years ago, I noticed that the deed papers read
The Grantor «names of people selling the house» for and in consideration of TEN DOLLARS AND OTHER GOOD AND VALUABLE CONSIDERATION in hand paid, conveys and warrants to «me» the following described real estate...
I noticed that I technically was buying the house for ten dollars.
The closing agent explained, "Well, ten dollars and other consideration. This is just a convention, so that the actual amount paid for the house doesn't go into the record." It also saves them from having to revise the document each time the price changes. (I don't buy the "doesn't go into the record" argument, because you can still look up the actual sale price from public records. But this back in the days before Zillow, where this sort of information was not available online and if you wanted to look up this information, you had to gasp physically visit the county records office.)
When I told this story to one of my friends who was also buying a house, he said, "Cool. I'm going to ask them to put down $20 when they draw up the papers for my house."
Therefore, according to the title transfer records, he paid twice as much for his house than I did mine.
McClatchy Newspapers discovers, to everyone's surprise, that work-at-home job offers are mostly just scams. Of course, this is something Rob Cockerham discovered years ago. (He also has a rundown of all his articles on the subject, in case you haven't gotten enough.)
Researchers have determined that the key to losing weight is to consume fewer calories.
Okay, it's actually more interesting than the summary suggests. The researchers compared a variety of different popular diets and found that it didn't matter what diet you were on; the weight loss (and regain) was the same. The controlling factor was how many calories you consumed.
I feel sorry for the people who live near Abbey Road or who have to take that road as part of their daily routine, because tourists keep blocking traffic to recreate the cover of the eponymous Beatles album.
The recording studio has a webcam on the intersection so you can watch the mayhem as it happens.
Update: Just this morning, I checked out the webcam and within two minutes, another group of tourists posed in the zebra crossing.