DECODER

posted by James Reel

    While I was doing an Internet search just now for something completely unrelated (information on the Warehouse District downtown, if you must know), I stumbled upon this great list of the origins of radio and TV call letters. KUAT's is one of the more straightforward: the UAT stands for University of Arizona, Tucson. (The call letters of broadcast stations west of the Mississippi begin with K, and those east of the Mississippi begin with W. Our list-maker, Tucsonan Barry Mishkind, doesn't explain this part as far as I can tell, but the K stands for Kaiser Steel, and the W for Westinghouse, the two companies that owned the most radio stations in the 1920s when the call-letter scheme was being systematized.)

THIS IS A RECORDING

posted by James Reel

    During my vacation, I not only soaked up a great deal of Tuscan and Venetian scenery, drank too much wine, ate too much oily high-carb food, hiked up and down too many steep hilltown streets, and stared numbly at too much Gothic and Renaissance art; I managed to read six issues from my year-old-plus pile of New Yorkers. One item I thought may be of particular interest to you, assuming you didn’t read it in the summer of 2005 when it was fresh, is an insightful Alex Ross column on “how technology has transformed the sound of music”:

Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, … reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.

DOWN IN THE DUMPS

posted by James Reel

    Drew McManus has released the results of his annual review of orchestral web sites, one area in which orchestras of almost any budget can compete on a level field. The Tucson Symphony’s site has dropped 22 places since last year’s evaluation; it’s ranked 62 out of 80 sites reviewed, and Drew awards it an F overall. The TSO comes out better than the Milwaukee Symphony, but worse than the orchestras of such metropolises as Dayton and Elgin. The top-ranked site, by the way, touts the Nashville Symphony.
    Drew’s criteria:

    Between 8/26/06 and 8/31/06, I examined 80 professional orchestra websites and ranked them by how well they presented their concert schedule, sold tickets, provided organizational information, facilitated making donations, and on overall content and functionality. …
    [Whether] or not an orchestra has a budget that accommodates professional graphic design and photography to create an aesthetic web signature isn't as important as simply allowing a graphical interface that allows users to easily absorb crucial information.

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

posted by James Reel

    I’m back, and pleased to be here. I’ve never had a vacation I didn’t enjoy, but in the end I’m always happiest at home. (The finale of this vacation wasn’t especially pleasant, though. After getting up around 5 a.m. Florence time, trudging all of five minutes in a light rain to a bus station to catch a ride to the airport, making an effortless two-hour hop to London, working our way through Gatwick with far less security-measure chaos than we’d experinced two weeks earlier, watching three pretty decent movies during the 10-hour British Airways transatlantaic flight, and landing in Dallas-Ft. Worth with the satisfaction that the journey was nearing its unremarkable end and without at any time involving a body-cavity search by over-eager security personnel, then, after all that, bad weather delayed our flight to Tucson more than three hours, and once we finally got back in the air and approached our fair city, we circled for a good 45 minutes waiting for somebody at Tucson International Airport to figure out how to turn the runway lights back on. We wound up being dumped in Phoenix, and caught a ride with another passenger who was renting a car and driving to Tucson immediately. We got home at exactly midnight—more like 9 a.m. the next morning, as far as our bodies knew—although our checked bags didn’t show up until dinnertime the following day.)
    Anyway, I’m still catching up and settling in, so no worthwhile blogging today, insofar as I ever do any worthwhile blogging. While I gather my wits, why don’t you amuse yourself with this classical-music quiz, which is tougher than it initially seems. (Warning: A few of the images display so small that you can only guess at what they are.) I am disappointed to report that I scored only 60 out of a possible 74, although the automated tallyer praised me for my astuteness nonetheless.

OFFLINE, OFF CONTINENT

posted by James Reel

    I’m absconding to Italy for my first vacation in two years, and I anticipate spending much of the next two weeks exploring towns in Tuscany so quaint and backward that they have no Internet connection. Or at least I’ll pretend they’re that quaint and backward, so I won’t have the slightest excuse to look for an Internet café and check my e-mail. I’ll be off the air and offline for the next two weeks, so you’ll have a chance to get a little better acquainted with former Phoenician Michael Dauphinais (who’ll be taking most, but not all, of my air shifts) and explore other fine Web sites, including the blogs in the panel on the right side of your screen.
    Oh, and don’t even think about breaking into my house while I’m gone. It’s guarded by an imposing dog and a tough house sitter, and we have many observant neighbors who are home most of the time.