Kolo kolo mlynsky :::

After a few late late nights out with Caroline, visiting with friends in town for a wedding, tonight I stayed in with her and she fell happily asleep at 8, leaving me with free time and only a little work to finish before I could play.

So play I have, downloading Firefox (recommendable - a little slow on some sites but has instant ease of use, good security, and a better organizational structure than IE) and a nice wikipedia referencing tool put together by Matthew Gertner and Stefan Magdalinski. The tool cleverly indexes pages of your choice, matching terms with wiki topics, and then lays a barely-there interface over those pages so that you can link to the relevant articles. Takes me back to 1994, UNC, and our dreams of where the web would go, sure does.

But the best downloads of the evening are the Beethoven symphonies available on the BBC's website this week. I have headphones on my computer, so I can turn up the music loud and listen without bothering Caroline. Loud so that I can imagine the floor boards humming and smell the rosin, maybe even see the spit under the horns and the worn through soles of everyone's dress black. And now I’m listening to the last movement of the 5th, and they’ve worked through the final theme (the bassoon call at 30:45), climbing from one key to another until they are back at the tonic, and now all the stops are coming out – strings and woodwinds together, horns weaving a triumphant counterpoint until they too join and then only the timpani.

As usual, impossible to write about. But you can listen too! And besides the obvious, try Beethoven’s 2nd, the slow movement is delicious.