(Thanks to zenala and bittergem.)

I just wanted to post announcing that I passed my dissertation defense earlier today. So after I fill out some paperwork and pay some fees next week, I'll be able to get my PhD. Then I go off to work at Oracle starting in June.

This is the fourth and final post in a series of posts on handofluke and my adventures at SXSW 2007, detailing the events of Saturday March 17, the fourth day of the festival.
( The Polyphonic Spree, Mew, Cloud Cult, The High Dials, and more... )

This is the third in a series of posts on handofluke and my adventures at SXSW 2007, detailing the events of Friday March 16, the third day of the festival.
( Bob Mould, Buffalo Tom, Sloan, The Apples In Stereo, and more... )

This is the second in a series of posts on handofluke and my adventures at SXSW 2007, detailing the events of Thursday March 15, the second day of the festival.
( Bloc Party, Bob Mould, Mew, and more... )

Thanks to pestering from handofluke, this is the first in a series of posts on handofluke and my adventures at SXSW 2007, detailing the events of Wednesday March 14, the first day of the festival.
( Voxtrot, The Mountain Goats, Beirut, Midlake, and more... )

Video of George Bush "singing" Sunday Bloody Sunday.

This hilarious article from Godspy reveals the true secret to how Dan Brown comes up with the plots for his novels, such as The Da Vinci Code.

By the way, the article is written by the author of The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living, an extremely funny, and informative, book that I highly recommend. A seasonally appropriate excerpt from the book about Pentecost is available online, if you want a sample.

Tonight I went to see Neko Case and The High Dials play at La Zona Rosa.  I had nearly forgotten that tonight was the concert was tonight, but luckily I remembered in time.  I guess I've got too many things on my mind.

First up was The High Dials, who I had seen just a month ago at SXSW.  They put on a great show of their 60's style psychedelic rock, with great lush instrumentation and harmonies.  They started off with "The Holy Ground" and "Fields In Glass".  Towards the end they played "Soul In Lust" and "Our Time Is Coming Soon", both of which really rocked.  I had gotten there early enough so that I got a good spot to stand, two or three rows to the back of the stage.  Last time I saw them, they had a sitar that they had in a case on stage, but they never used it, which was a little disappointing.  This time I saw the sitar up there again, but I kept waiting for it to come out.  I was a bit worried I'd never see it, but they did not disappoint me.  It came out for the last song, which was a new song called "Open Up The Gate".  The song was excellent and they really jammed on it.  I thought the song sounded familiar, and my suspicion was correct, because it turns out it was one of the songs on a live recording of another of their SXSW performances that I had downloaded.  I'm listening to it again now, good stuff.

Then after a while, Neko Case came on.  The performance was good.  She has such a beautiful and distinctive voice.  She played for an hour and a half, and played a lot of the songs off her new record, and a lot of the best songs on her older records.  Her backing band did a good job as well.  I did have the distraction of an annoying photographer with a loudly clicking camera standing in front of me for half the show.  (How many pictures from the same spot does anyone really need?  He must've taken over 100.)  Thankfully, he eventually moved.  I think I enjoyed the show more after that.  The main set closed with "Hold On, Hold On", that was a highlight.  Then they came out for the first encore, which concluded with "John Saw That Number", which I had been hoping that they'd play.  So that made me happy.  They even came out for a second encore.  All in all, an enjoyable show.  And it ended just in time for me to catch the Night Owl bus home.

Tonight I went to a talk by John Allen at the University Catholic Center.  Allen writes the Word From Rome column for the National Catholic Reporter and is the Vatican correspondent for CNN.  The talk was on the first year of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.  He talks about a lot of the same things in his current column.  It was pretty interesting, although there wasn't much too surprising since I've pretty much been keeping up with the news on the Pope (thanks in part to Allen himself).  One interesting point he made was that only maybe 5% of the work of the Pope really has to do with doctrinal matters of faith and morals.  That leave 95% as matters of prudential judgment, and on these matters has done very well at consulting with other bishops to reach some kind of consensus and not just going off and doing things according to his personal preferences.

For me, some of the audience questions were perhaps the most interesting part.  One person asked about the national makeup of the new cardinals created recently.  Allen noted how the Pope didn't seem to care as much about making sure that the cardinals were geographically balanced so much as just picking the most qualified bishops regardless of their country.  Also, apparently some people thought that making Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong a cardinal was a bad move for relations with China, but Benedict went and did it anyways.

The other interesting question also regarded the geographic distribution of the Catholic Church, I think specifically the question was on the possibility of a Pope from Africa or Latin America.  His answer focused on what he termed "the upside-down church", which will be the focus of his next book.  His thesis is that with more and more of the members of the Church coming from the "global south", the leadership of the Church will drastically change to reflect that reality, with a different worldview to go along with it.  He gave an example of a fictional "Pope Raphael I" from Africa in 2060, with the examples of what the "Pope" does based on things said by various African bishops today.  I'm not sure I buy that in 54 years the bishops will have the same preoccupations that we have today, but the overall thrust of his argument was intriguing.

I just got back from hearing Jorge Cham of Piled Higher & Deeper fame give a talk here at UT.  The Avaya Auditorium in ACES was packed with people.  Luckily I got there just early enough to snag one of the few remaining seats.  The talk was great, it was extremely funny and even somewhat insightful.  The outline slide for the talk was very succinct:

• Present Outline
• Talk
• Answer Questions
  

In a survey of graduate students in popular culture towards the beginning of the talk he mentioned how Real Genius was about "four graduate students who are shocked to discover that the research they're doing has military applications.  Imagine that."

The later part of the talk was focused on The Power Of Procrastination.  One key point was that procrastination is not equal to laziness.  A lot of the material related to Newton's Three Laws Of Graduation.  The slides were also very well done.  As he mentioned at the end, one of the key skills he learned in grad school was Powerpoint.

After the talk there were a few questions.  He verified that he does not write Cecilia's blog in one of his answers.  Unfortunately, he didn't have books for sale so I couldn't buy them and get him to sign them.  I  still need to pick them up from somewhere, possibly Book People, since he mentioned they had them there.

I compiled statistics on the number of musical acts handofluke and I saw at SXSW this year on each day, and it's as follows:
Wednesday: 14
Thursday: 16
Friday: 17
Saturday: 5 new acts, 6 duplicates from previous days
Total: 52

The final entry detailing handofluke and my SXSW experience, detailing the events of last Saturday.
( Rogue Wave, Superchunk, Robert Pollard, and more... )

The third and final part of handofluke and my adventures on Friday of SXSW.
( The Mendoza Line, Metric, Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey, and more... )

The second part of handofluke and my Friday at SXSW.
( Britt Daniel, Robert Pollard, and more... )

This entry covers the first part of handofluke and my Friday at SXSW.
( Ted Leo, Swearing at Motorists, Elf Power, and more... )

Now we come to the second day of the account of handofluke and my adventures at SXSW. (Updated 24 March 2006 @ 15:43.)
( Nickel Creek, Morrissey, The Minus 5, and more... )

This is the first in a series of posts on handofluke and my adventures at SXSW, detailing the events of last Wednesday, the first day of the festival.
( The New Pornographers, Belle And Sebastian, Mogwai, and more... )

I just found this article about a man brutally murdering his sister and brother-in-law in El Cerrito, CA (only a few miles away from where handofluke lives). Here's the interesting part:

Wycoff said he went to a Coldplay concert on Monday night at Arco Arena in Sacramento -- the first concert he had ever attended in his life. He said he didn't drink or use drugs, which he says he never does.

"I thought it could be a bit of an alibi," he said. "It seems like somebody who goes to a Coldplay concert wouldn't do this."

No further comment is needed, I think. (Found via stereogum.)

I know that it's about a month late, but I've gotten a lot of new music recently, and I wanted to wait to see if any of it was good enough to make my list. Some of the stuff I've gotten recently was good enough to make the cut, but I'm not sure exactly on the placement yet. Plus my waiting was ultimately somewhat futile since I just downloaded several more 2005 albums from emusic. So expect some changes to this list in the future, and consider this version 1.0. Without further ado...
( My Top Albums Of 2005 )