Mambo Taxi

This was an excellent weekend away.

The Laurie Anderson concert was good. I think it wasn't as good as her albums, musically, although some of her stories have taken hold in me. I have no way of judging whether these are true, mind you. One such story: NASA was working on a project to robotically augment space-suits for extra muscle-power (think exoskeletons), and splint body-parts that got hurt, and the ability to treat astronauts with shots of morphine or adrenaline or whatever drugs they needed. Then, the project got bought by somebody else... the US Army, for use in desert warfare. Another story, less depressing: she asked Thomas Pynchion if she could turn his novel Gravity's Rainbow into an opera. She wrote up a proposal, sent it to him, and to her surprise, he wrote back and said, "Sure. That would be wonderful, an opera. There's only one requirement- I would like the entire opera scored for one instrument. That instrument should be the banjo."

She said, "Can you imagine hours and hours of banjo opera? Some people have the nicest ways of politely saying "'absolutely no way possible.'"

Today, I walked Rover to Ithaca Falls and let her swim around. I went to Quaker Meeting, which is increasingly seeming less familiar to me , but somehow that feels OK and the way things go. There was good worship, and I did get to talk to some dear friends after Meeting.

In the afternoon, I played board-games at my hosts' house for a few hours. I can recommend Mystery of the Abbey, which plays like Clue, but with more variables to track, and a monestary theme (every four turns, everyone returns to start, which is Mass; you can give each other confessionals, which involves looking at cards in their hand; and so on.)

Oh, and in ten minutes on The Commons, I was accosted by both a Socialist Worker and a Jehovah's Witness. The Jehovah's Witness was polite, but the Socialist Worker wasn't, so I didn't pick up his magazine (sorry melted_snowball).

I had fun road-tripping with bats22. Among other things, he gave me some interesting ideas for things to do with a microwave...
And now, to bed, because tomorrow's a work day.