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We’re having a nasty confluence of sorts here, a heatwave combined with the smoke from forest fires in three of the cardinal directions. This is definitely a ‘first world’ complaint as the people with real problems like having your house consumed by wildfire are hundreds of kilometres away.
Professor google has come up with lists that cant be summarized like this:
1. Close blinds
2. Use Fan
3. Don’t use heat generating stuff
4. Keep your AC in the shade
5. Plant Trees
6. Turn on AC
Well, we don’t have AC and the tree solution is incoming next year, but it is kinda sucky right now.
Our current plan is to close the house during the day and then once the sun isn’t high anymore (around 9pm) we open all the things and let the cool air(?) in. It works moderately well, but if anyone has some whiz-bang advice, now is the time to share. :)
No, I don’t know where her head is.
Gaspar Sanz’s birth date is unknown but he was baptized as Francisco Bartolome Sanz y Celma in the church of Calanda de Ebro, Aragon on 4 April 1640 later adopting the first name “Gaspar”.
After gaining his Bachelor of Theology at the University of Salamanca,[1] Gaspar Sanz travelled to Naples, Rome and perhaps Venice to further his music education. He is thought to have studied under Orazio Benevoli, choirmaster at the Vatican and Cristofaro Caresana, organist at the Royal Chapel of Naples. He spent some years as the organist of the Spanish Viceroy at Naples.
Sanz learned to play guitar while studying under Lelio Colista and was influenced by music of the Italian guitarists Foscarini, Granata, and Corbetta. When Sanz returned to Spain he was appointed instructor of guitar to Don Juan (John of Austria), the illegitimate son of King Philip IV and Maria Calderon, a noted actress of the day.
John of Austria as he appears on the dedication page of Instrucción de música sobre la Guitarra Española
In 1674 he wrote his now famous Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española,[2] published in Saragossa and dedicated to Don Juan.[3] A second book entitled Libro Segundo de cifras sobre la guitarra española was printed in Saragossa in 1675. A third book, Libro tercero de mùsica de cifras sobre la guitarra española, was added to the first and second books, and all three were published together under the title of the first book in 1697, eventually being published in eight editions. The ninety works in this masterpiece are his only known contribution to the repertory of the guitar[4] and include compositions in both punteado (“plucked”) style and rasqueado (“strummed”) style.
In addition to his musical skills, Gaspar Sanz was noted in his day for his literary works as a poet and writer, and was the author of some poems and two books now largely forgotten.
He died in Madrid in 1710.
Influence
His compositions provide some of the most important examples of popular Spanish baroque music for the guitar and now form part of classical guitar pedagogy. Sanz’s manuscripts are written as tablature for the baroque guitar and have been transcribed into modern notation by numerous guitarists and editors; Emilio Pujol‘s edition of Sanz’s Canarios being a notable example. He has influenced some twentieth-century composers.
I’m curious as to how our military procurement system is intends to differentiate itself from the awesome-fun game of spitting into the wind.
“The Harper government is terminating its contract with Thales Canada Ltd., which was to supply new radar units to support Canada’s CF-18 fighter jet squadrons in Cold Lake, Alta., and Bagotville, Que.”
The idea behind the procurement process is to investigate the fine details of a piece of equipment and estimate how much the supplier intends to soak you with bullshit added-costs, delays and ‘upgrades’.
“The deal signed in November 2010 was initially worth $55 million for two tactical-control radar systems, with delivery to begin in 2013. Thales won the tender over one other bidder.
Defence Department documents show costs had risen to more than $78 million by 2013. And by November last year, the Public Works Department was deep in negotiations with Thales to resolve problems.
“In February 2015, Canada and Thales reached agreement in principle to terminate this contract by mutual consent,” said Public Works spokeswoman Annie Trepanier.”
Somewhere along the line our Master Procurers must have had a rectal cranial inversion as a jump from $55 million to $78 million dollars seems a little extreme. It is not like we enjoy spending money on overpriced non-functional military hardware…
“The botched deal is yet another military procurement gone sour, alongside the more high-profile F-35 Stealth Fighter project, the Cyclone helicopter purchase to replace the aging Sea Kings, and used British submarines that have been sinkholes for maintenance and repair dollars.”
Errr…whoops. I wonder when our lovely government will realize that we need our military primarily for domestic security – (full props to Canada’s army for mobilizing units to fight forest fires) and peacekeeping roles. Imperial ambitions and force project have never been our forte and we should stop trying to compete with more imperialistically focused nations.
Canadian foreign policy concerns aside some careful attention should be paid to this:
“Negotiations for a final termination agreement are still underway, and Public Works declined to provide any information about penalties, losses to the taxpayer or even the reason for the termination.
“Public Works is working with DND [Department of National Defence] to identify an appropriate path forward to meet their long-term capability needs on this project,” Trepanier said in a terse email.”
From a government whose platform trumpeted accountability and transparency to the high-heavens and back, this response from Public Works can be reasonably classified as neither accountable, nor transparent to the Canadian public.
If you have been watching our beloved conservative government the above response is not out of place with the deep centralization of power that our PM has undertaken. This government has been all about the control and management of information and unsubtle PR for the hoi-paloi. The Prime Ministers Office has subsided into the shadows, sorta like Sauron in LOTR – sure you can see the flaming eye up there on the tower – but you have no idea what it is doing or what policies it happens to be crafting. Canadians just have to brace themselves for whatever crap policy that magically appears on the horizon and hope for the best.
The idea of having to be responsible 24/7 for the life of another is, frankly, quite repulsive. I’m not sure as to the reasons why our society has a fetish for raising children, but it needs to stop. There are too many of us human types on the planet anyways.
However, Buddy the robot, is a different story. Imagine a house denizen that is reliable and attends to your needs. I’m down with that.
Wow, Cultural Marxism apparently is nightmare fuel to the wingnut, racist right.
Cultural Marxism? As the feminist tag in the wordpress reader becomes more diverse (read filled with dudes and their important ideas) this phrase is popping up all over as of late. I’ve never seen it before, and as a minor logophile my curiosity was peaked. The context of how the term Cultural Marxism (CM) is being used was my first clue that this is yet another sad portmanteau of the right-wingers/dudes to mischaracterize ideas and notions that make them uncomfortable.
It was this putrid nugget of a sentence, fresh from the high mountains of Turdistan, that started my logophilic escapade:
“Leftist ideology (cultural Marxism) ascribes all observed statistical differences in group performance to nefarious cultural forces, therefore nefarious cultural forces must be at work everywhere, therefore you must be oppressed at all times, thus you must dedicate yourself to finding the oppression in every aspect and moment of your life. “
What we can see above exhibit the hallmarks of what will be a reason-free mind-fap-festival of fail; usually with a side of misogyny or racism thrown in just for fun. But, apart from the haphazard generalizations, the erection of grand strawmen and a generally uncharitable starting point, the above sentence is perfectly fine.
So doing some arduous research, a.k.a typing “Cultural Marxism” into Duck Duck Go, the fateful shrouds of mystery were slowly pulled back. Oh the magic of Wikipedia:
“The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The school initially formed during the interwar period in Germany and consisted of dissidents who were at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed during the interwar period. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.[1]
Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions.[2] To fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[3] The school’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács.[4]
Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the establishment of rational institutions.[5] Their emphasis on the “critical” component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of human reality.“
Erm…ya. A lot of word salad that makes academics feel important and the basis of a school of interpretive historical though. In other words, nothing about leftist ideology and ‘oppression seeking’ going on there outside of arcane historical theory relevant mostly to academic historians. The Rational Wiki though has a pithy summation of Cultural Marxism which roughly aligns with my first impressions of the use of the word:
“In current wingnut usage, the term is a favourite of Pat Buchanan and, to the most dangerous extent, Anders Behring Breivik. It is a Cold Warrior’s way of decrying “political correctness” or “multiculturalism.”[2][3] It’s when capitalism and democracy are still the law of the land, but they don’t work exclusively for you anymore.
Despite its widespread popularity among the hard-right, many on the right have thoroughly debunked the concept as not being Marxist at all, including Christian Dominionist Gary North, Michael Acuña from Common Ruin, and How to Paint Your Panda.[4][5][6][7]
It’s become a favorite term of many of the nuttier Gamergaters—demonstrating the movement’s attraction of many anti-Semites, white supremacists, and MRAs — to explain why those bitch slut whores won’t shut up about sexism in video games. They got their collective jockstraps in a knot when discussions on Wikipedia predating their obsession with the term resulted in the “Cultural Marxism” article on Wikipedia being redirected to the “Conspiracy theory” section of Frankfurt School, restored after appealing to the God-King, no consensus after that, then deletion and redirection back to the conspiracy theory.“
Laughing out loud forever – you know when the gamergaters show up sexism and misogyny are never far behind.
Well, fellow word travellers, that’s all there is for this session. I’ve done the long form work here, but all you need to know is in the title of this blogpost. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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