Michael Bates: October 2015 Archives
Seven Steps to Learning a Song | Kristin Morris | LinkedIn
"In my years as a professional singer and voice teacher, I've nailed down, through trial and error, what I consider the most important formula for learning a song. I don't mean being able to say you're familiar with it; I mean truly know it and be confident you could pull it out and sing it years from now at the drop of a hat, even if you never memorized it...."
"LISTEN to the song, with your mouth shut.... PHONATE on pitch along with the demonstration.... RECITE the lyrics without thinking about the song, the melody, phrasing or any other aspect of the music.... COMBINE lyrics with music; here's the bulk of your practice, and often is the place people start when they want to learn a song.... SING A CAPELLA!... ACCOMPANY ONLY now, no other help!... PERFORM it!"
PDF::Reuse - Reuse and mass produce PDF documents - metacpan.org
"This module could be used when you want to mass produce similar (but not identical) PDF documents and reuse templates, JavaScripts and some other components. It is functional to be fast, and to give your programs capacity to produce many pages per second and very big PDF documents if necessary."
exiftool - Read and write meta information in files - metacpan.org
Perl-based utility that can read and write metadata on image files and can read metadata on audio and other file types.
Exploring Evangelicalism: The Presbyterian Church in America | The Exchange | A Blog by Ed Stetzer
Bryan Chapell, former chancellor of the denominational seminary, describes in detail the distinctives and history of the Presbyterian Church in America -- the largest Bible-believing Presbyterian denomination in the US.
How to pack light: tips from a master packer - Lonely Planet
Among other useful advice: "Three pairs of socks. Three pairs of underwear. Three shirts. Wear one, wash one, dry one. You can get more miles out of leg wear, so two pairs of pants and one culturally appropriate pair of shorts or a skirt should suffice. Choose light, flowing, quick-dry cotton-poly blends in matching colours that handle wrinkles well." Article includes a list of what the author packs for a multi-month trip to southeast Asia. Particularly interesting items: Using a heavy-duty trash-compactor bag as a liner for your backpack; using a Frisbee as international friend-maker, hard-shell protection for breakables, "cutting board, plate, bowl, bottle opener, fan, dry place to sit."
An online tribute to Art Satherley, the native of Bristol, England, who became the A&R man to discover and produce the music of Bob Wills, Gene Autry, Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Big Bill Broonzy, among many others in his lengthy career. Alan John Britton has written a biography of Art Satherley.
U.S. Senate: President Veto Counts
A useful proxy for how forcefully congressional leaders press their priorities in the face of presidential opposition.
Composition of Congress by Party 1855-2017
A handy reference to party headcounts since the advent of the Republican Party for the 1854 election.
The Alluring Art Deco Parkway That Winds Through Connecticut | Atlas Obscura
The Merritt Parkway, built in the 1930s, is one of the prettiest limited-access highways in America. My son and I drove it last October while touring colleges. It's no longer a toll road but it's still a convenient way to travel through southwestern Connecticut while avoiding the mess that is I-95. The official map of the highway highlights the distinctive and varied overpasses.
"The planners hired architect George Dunkelberger to design the bridges on the road. They also brought along a slew of engineers and landscape architects to make sure the parkway maintained a homogeneous and aesthetically pleasing appearance. The idea was to make a highway that was unobtrusive, as if nothing had really changed. The road was to look wooded and like a forest. If anything man-made was built, it needed to be classy."
A collector reveals the truth behind those alluring comic book ads. (Via Ace, who tells the story of his own childhood skepticism about those ads. Good memory-stirring comments there, too: Clackers, Kenner Give-a-Show Projector, Archie comics and a bottle of pop at the barber shop.)
MORE: One of Ace's commenters links to an episode of Chris Elliot's "Get a Life" in which he builds a mail-order submarine.
Zuckerberg's $100 Million Lesson - WSJ
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's immense donation to the Newark, New Jersey, school system has not accomplished much. "The bulk of the funds supported consultants and the salaries and pensions of teachers and administrators, so the donation only reinforced the bureaucratic and political ills that have long plagued public education in the Garden State." Similar top-down efforts by the Ford and Annenberg foundations were also failures.
What kind of philanthropy has worked? "In 1998, John Walton and Ted Forstmann each gave $50 million to fund scholarships for low-income children to attend private schools. More than 140,000 students have attended schools with graduation and college matriculation rates that exceed 90% instead of going to the failing schools in their neighborhoods.
"Earlier this summer, hedge-fund manager John Paulson pledged $8.5 million to the Success Academy charter-school network, where 93% of students are proficient in math, compared with 35% of their traditional public-school peers. His gift will allow more such schools to open. The financier Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine, a former attorney, donated $40 million to help endow the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, which provides financial aid to needy children attending Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York.
"Philanthropists will not be able to change education and improve student outcomes unless they can circumvent the bureaucracies and interest groups that are responsible for the problems they hope to solve. If they act independently, though, their money has the potential to alter the lives not only of individual students, but entire communities."
Ben Carson Has It | The American Spectator
"Carson is presidential material -- in fact the most plausible president among the front runners.
"In a long and grueling campaign he has shown patience, adamantine dignity, a thorough grasp of the issues. He has remained calm under fire.
"He has answered the objection that he lacks political experience: the campaign has salted him there, and in any event, the professional politicians in the race have not shown themselves any more competent.
"His astonishing early life and career are adequate testimony to his splendid intellect and, most important of all, to his strength of character. No one can read of his early life without being staggered at the obstacles he overcame on the path to high achievement.
"Unlike Obama's ridiculous Nobel Prize, Carson's rewards have been earned. His life story, unlike that of many contemporary leaders, is a testament to what can be accomplished by sheer willpower.
"In a Western world led by political featherweights he offers gravitas and as fundamental seriousness of purpose.
"Though it is a relatively minor matter, in his first speech that I heard I was struck by his comparison of the gargantuan rewards offered to sports stars and rock musicians as against those offered science 'geeks' from school days onwards. It was, early in the piece, an example of brave and necessary iconoclasm, a real and needed assault on a destructive sacred cow...."
What No One Seems to Know About Ted Cruz's Past | PJ Media
Cruz's service as director of the Federal Trade Commission's Office of Policy Planning. Cruz developed policies that opened markets and reduced barriers to new entrants, and he almost always won the unanimous support of the bipartisan FTC board. According to the writers, who worked for Cruz at FTC, "a Cruz administration would seek meaningful change, and where possible, broad bipartisan support. Cruz is not one to nibble around the edges or bow to entrenched interests, but he does listen to experts and seek support from all quarters. If President Cruz becomes a reality, future historians might point to his time at the FTC as a harbinger of a presidency that is both conservative and consequential."
The Last Gasps of Texas German | VICE | United States
In the late 19th century, Texas welcomed large numbers of immigrants from Germany and other countries in central Europe. Thousands of miles from the homeland, Texas Germans evolved their own dialect, with variations across the state. The German language fell into disfavor during the World Wars, and the last generation to speak German at home is dying out. A University of Texas professor is doing his best to document Texas German before it's gone.
Cherokee blood: Why do so many Americans believe they have Cherokee ancestry?
Gregory D. Smithers, author of The Cherokee Diaspora, says that Cherokee openness to intermarriage, education, and travel in search of opportunity, and the fact that some Cherokee were slaveholders, gave people all over the US and of all races a plausible connection to the tribe. In addition, Smithers says that after the nation's removal to Oklahoma, "the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother." A commenter, Geoffrey Sea, has some interesting assertions: "[After the Dawes Act of 1887], the Cherokees actively pursued enrollment and intentionally inflated their rolls in order to increase federal allotments. Cherokee recruiters fanned out through the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, enrolling many Native Americans as Cherokee who in fact had different ancestries. In particular, in the hills of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia many of the Shawnee, Miami, Sac-Fox and Potawatomi descendants who had escaped removal were enrolled as Cherokees around the turn of the century, because they encountered no recruiters from their own tribes. The grandchildren of those enrollees genuinely believed they were Cherokee.... In addition, many fake "Cherokee" organizations and "bands" sprung up, claiming bogus connections to the tribes. Near Portsmouth,Ohio, there is a burial ground where bones from a nearby construction site were reburied, along with markers that pretend to be Cherokee Tsalagi language but are actually gibberish."
MORE: The blog Thoughts from Polly's Granddaughter, written by Twila Barnes, an expert in Cherokee genealogy, frequently deals with mistaken claims of Cherokee ancestry. She points to extensive official rolls going back to 1817. The most popular post on the site lists celebrities who have made unsubstantiated claims of Cherokee ancestry. She has looked carefully into Elizabeth Warren's claims and has found them to be without factual basis.
