Don't I have enough to worry about?

Word on the street is that a new super-collider in Europe has a nonzero chance of creating a black hole that could destroy the earth. One critic filing a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the operation of the project believes there is "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."

Well, I'll just have to add that to killer asteroids and every other cataclysm waiting to happen to the list of reasons I always seem to have trouble falling asleep at night. Fortunately, though, I don't have to spend many cycles on this issue, as there are many closer catastrophes that are a lot more likely to occur, like a global food shortage or oil shock. Oops, guess we're already there...

Another concert + inlaws

I got to play with my wife's band again last night. It was blazing hot during the concert; the sun came from behind the clouds shortly before it started and went back behind the clouds as we were playing our encore ("Stars and Stripes Forever;" what else did you expect for a brass band at this time of year?). Nevertheless, it was fun to be able to play in another concert. I may have a chance to play later in July at a concert in southern Utah, but I'm not sure if we can work out the logistics with kids and an unfamiliar setting. We've been fortunate to have my parents at the two concerts I played in, as well as my wife's parents last night, but we probably would be on our own this time around, so I may not get another chance. Once the fall concerts start, they'll have better musicians to sub, plus our kids don't really allow us to both attend rehearsals every Saturday morning. But I'm hopeful I can sub again next summer.

As I mentioned, my wife's parents are in town, but they haven't been staying with us. They've been at my wife's great-uncle's home about 15 miles away since Friday evening. Sometime today, they'll hit our place and be there the rest of the week. Fortunately, I get along with them pretty well, but guests are always a bit stressful under the best of circumstances, so I hope all goes well.

Not intended for use at the speed of light

Today, a colleague got a markup of one of our agreements whereby the customer asked for a license to use the software "anywhere in the universe." Our boss told him he should push back that we would cover the Milky Way, but that negotiations were still under way with Andromeda. Since our software excludes aircraft, nuclear, and missile applications, among others, it would be rather difficult to reach other points in the universe, but I told him that we should accept it with exclusions, such as, "Software not tested in zero gravity or black hole conditions," or "Any use of this product at the speed of light voids all warranties herein."

Playing the trumpet

So, I finally got to play with my wife's band on Sunday. I was happily pushed back a week, which gave me more time to practice and get my embouchure back. There were several hundred people at the park, which was nice to see.

Playing in the band was great. I didn't know if I'd ever get a chance to play in a real ensemble again, and this was the finest group of musicians I've ever played with. I only know of one other who didn't have at least a BA in music, and he was also subbing. He's a guy H and I actually used to play with in our college marching band, and he's also better than I am. Luckily for me, the summer concert series is a bit easier, with so much music to perform in such a short time, so with a fair bit of practice, I was just able to keep up. I only had to fake a few measures.

H played the repiano trumpet part for this concert, which is a lot more exposed and difficult than the second cornet part I played, and she did a great job. She got compliments from the band director and the usual repiano player.

Also at the concert, it happened to be baby R's first birthday. We ended up playing "Happy Birthday" for a couple of sponsors at the concert, and right during the song, R, who was sitting with the other kids and their grandparents on the front row, stood up and started walking for the first time! He had taken one or two steps a couple of times, but this time he took six or seven. I guess he was just waiting for a grand stage and his birthday celebration. He is certainly a cute kid, and every concert now total strangers have taken his picture, once for the arts commission and twice just people who wanted to email us cute pictures of him.

Well, I have lot more going on that's kept me from posting, but it's not all bloggable now, so hopefully I have more to report soon.

Hymn collaboration

I have a piece of cool non-work news. I am collaborating with an LDS composer and former professor and mentor of my wife's on a piece that could end up being performed at the BYU faculty/staff conference in a couple of months. It's based on Psalm 36:5-10, which is the theme of the conference. I've been working on a series of texts about the Psalms for some time, so it's gratifying to see something possibly germinating from this effort. I'll post whether anything comes of it.

Lord, whose mercy vast as heaven,
And thy faithfulness a cloud,
May thy righteousness, as leaven,
Lift our souls to praise aloud.

Chorus:
Wellspring unto life eternal,
Fountain pure and day star bright,
In thy law is joy supernal,
In thy light shall we see light.

Who can all thy judgments measure?
Who can all thy praises sing?
At the river of thy pleasure,
Shelter us beneath thy wing.

Oh, bestow thy lovingkindness
Unto those who know thee, Lord.
May we wander not in blindness--
To the upright send thy word.

Carnival

"It's a city carnival ride. How bad can it be?" I thought, ignoring the ominous yellow sign stating, "WARNING: This is a thrill ride producing in excess of 2Gs of force," and warning young kids, pregnant women, people with heart problems, and anyone with common sense not to ride it. After all, my 8- and 9-year-olds had just gotten off, and they seemed to have suffered no adverse effects. I thought my 8-year-old might have had a look of terror on his face during the actual ride, but I couldn't be sure--he was spinning too fast to get a good look at his face--so I decided it must be okay. Besides, my wife wanted to ride.

Yes, it's city festival days again, the time when you trust your life to guys who put large spinning machines together in two days. Sure, most of them look like you wouldn't trust them with your lunch, let alone your life, guys to which every parent with a teenage daughter would bar the door, but that's all part of the fun, right? Luckily, the operator of this ride looked older than the doesn't-look-older-than-13 operator of one of the other rides.

As the ride began to spin, my wife told me how much she used to enjoy this ride as a kid. I, too, enjoyed a similar ride, but as we pick up speed, it seems to go faster than the one did when I was a kid. Not likely, as it's old enough to be the same ride. One of the nearby rides is called "Starship 2000," offering, um, a glimpse of what space travel was like in the recent past? Add the fact that the bolts holding this thing together are 40 years old to my list of worries. As the spinning accelerates and we lift off of the ground, my wife notes, "I'd forgotten what 2Gs feels like." I'm just hoping our unit doesn't detach and fly across the street. Still the spinning gets faster, and I begin wondering how long the ride is and whether I will throw up before or after the ride ends. Something about our inner ear changes as we age, and I find it much harder than I used to to go on rides like this without getting sick. I don't remember feeling queasy at the carnival when I was my son's age.

Mercifully, the ride soon ends, and I stagger off, not quite upright. Happily, I don't throw up, but I feel a little woozy for about 30 minutes afterwards and don't ride another ride the rest of the night. My kids, however, loved it, and my wife seemed fine, too, though I notice she decides not to ride the Zipper with our daughter, after all. Later, we see a teenager with his girlfriend who we remember as a young child from a previous Church ward. He apparently doesn't remember us, but that doesn't stop us from talking to him and telling him how we remember him was he was this small, holding up hands somewhere below our waists.

With my wallet $52 dollars lighter, we head home, and we remind the kids that it's late and they need to get straight to bed. I read my son a quick story from a magazine my mom used to read to me and head to bed early myself. It seems I've turned into my parents earlier than I ever would have imagined.

Hooray, IRS?

In an odd coincidence, I also got my stimulus payment today. Yes, it's a good day for this taxpayer. I do think that the stimulus program is a terrible idea and wonder how much it's costing to send out these payments, but as long as the entitlement has been created, I want my share. We'll be saving much of our money, but we're allocating some for my wife to spend and some for spending money on our family trips this year. And some to the Saudis for the privilege of filling up my gas tank, of course.

Tax studies finally paying off

My best grades in law school were in tax. I got the highest grade in the class both semesters of federal tax. I also enjoyed tax as an undergrad accounting major. I just didn't think I would love doing other people's taxes as a living.

So, it's with some joy that I report that I've just received word from the IRS that they are accepting my position on an audit of my 2006 return. The issues are complex, and some of them are governed by a confidential agreement, so I can't expound, but I had thousands of dollars at risk, so I'm very happy to report that the final result will be I will pay $25 to the IRS and we'll be done with it. Due to the IRS' slow response time, it's been months in the resolution.

What will I do with the money? Nothing. I've been keeping earmarked funds in CDs and other liquid accounts for a couple of years because I knew there was some ambiguity in the tax law that could possibly lead to an audit, which is always a crap shoot. Luckily, I also prevailed in my argument, so I really don't have to pay anything. So, the money will just stay in my emergency fund. With the economic environment we're in, it's not really a time to be out shopping for bling. Maybe I'll add a few hundred pounds of grains to my food storage in case we really hit TEOTWAWKI.

What's in a nerd?

After reading this article from the New York Times, I'm not sure whether I'm a nerd, a geek, or neither. I certainly played D&D as a youth and was one of the first ones in my city to have a modem. I work for a technology company. On the other hand, I'm an attorney and MBA and have worked in finance and corporate law. I have a BlackBerry, but I only use it to keep up on my email. I like technology that improves my life, and I read a lot about technology, but I no longer like to use gee-whiz devices for their own sake if they don't fill an actual need I have.

What's in a word?

My daughter recently had to prepare a book report, which consisted of two parts: an oral report and one the students were supposed to "write." Hoping to help her develop a theme and practice editing skills, I suggested she use the computer. I actually helped her type part of what she wanted to say.

The next day, she told me that her teacher had accepted her work, but that she had not written it, because it was done on the computer (Why he didn't want work typed was never explained). Rather, he maintained she had "composed" the work. He cited a dictionary definition of write as the process of inscribing characters on a fixed medium. Unfortunately, this denotation omits the other nineteen meanings of the word in the dictionary I looked in. I wrote a detailed response to the teacher and pointed out that it would be pretty silly to say that I do not write legal agreements or my brother does not write books because we do our work primarily on a computer. I told him that composing was the process of creation, just as it is for my wife when she composes music. Writing is the process of putting that composition into a fixed medium.

The teacher emailed me, conceding the point, but complaining that the modern usage of some words has become so broad that, because they mean everything, they mean nothing. I suppose he didn't think he should have to specify handwrite to the students. I disagree with the example used to prove the rule--the word write clearly can include typing electronically, and this is probably the most common usage of the word now--but I agree in principle.

Most people who care about such things agree that the average vocabulary of Americans has gradually shrunk over the past decades. Television and movies cater to the mass market, so they of necessity use a limited word set. Furthermore, people read fewer books than fifty years ago. As a result, the "classics" in English like Shakespeare and Milton are becoming ever less accessible to the general reader. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the change is what vocabulary is necessary to function in society, i.e., a shift in what words we know, rather than how many. Not many people need to know what a halyard or a epaulette is in this day and age, but you're probably familiar with the terms "flash drive" and "microprocessor," which obviously didn't exist in 17th-century England. Still, I do believe that there has been a general deterioration in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar over the past decades. The deterioration of grammar in particular has accelerated with the advent of email, and even more so with instant messaging and text messaging.

I love finding just the right word for what I'm feeling, but a word is no use if your intended audience doesn't know what it means. For instance, many people confuse the terms hoi polloi and hoity toity, which makes using either term in conversation problematic. If I say I'm just part of the hoi polloi and you think I'm stuck up, my word choice doesn't help either of us. And no politician better attempt to use the word niggardly, even if they know that the etymology is not related to that other "n" word. To quote:

"It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as 'niggardly.' Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say 'parsimonious' from then on." [Christopher Hitchens, "The Pernicious Effects of Banning Words," Slate.com, Dec. 4, 2006]

I worry that we'll all eventually end up in a world where all comparatives and superlatives are reduced to "very," "VERY," or "[expletive]," and the language has morphed so much that people will need to read the King James Bible or King Lear in dual-column translation to understand it any more than they understand Beowulf (Old English) without translation today.

So, there's my rant. Yes, I write contracts for a living. I think about subtle differences in the meaning of words and consider how a judge would interpret them. With such a rich language, why be niggardly with your usage of it?

Pull out the trumpet

My wife's concert on Sunday went great. The weather was nice, and it was good to be in the park listening to good music.

With the summer season, plenty of the musicians will be gone for one concert or another. My wife told me that she has arranged for me to be a substitute in a couple of weeks. Gulp. I love trumpet; I played in a British brass band in college. But at my best, I was barely good enough to keep up with the worst musicians in this group. Now, after barely touching my horn during the past 10+ years, I'm going to be playing in a concert surrounded by good musicians? And if I screw up, it makes my wife look bad for getting me as a sub. Oh, did I mention that they don't rehearse in the summer, so I've basically got a few days to figure out this music on my own, with only a little help from my wife? I'll be playing with the ensemble for the first time at the performance. Gulp, indeed.

On the bright side, the summer Sunday concerts are free, so people will get what they paid for if I ruin everything. Oh, and I love playing music (doesn't everyone with any musical talent dream of playing in a band?), so that part will be really cool. I could say no, after all. Great and dreadful, that's what it is.