Weekend Update

As my Indian officemate would say, I sat for the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure this weekend. Aside from being brutally long, the tests were rather pointless. I had to read six passages and then answer questions to show that I could determine that a passage about, say, the Second World War, wasn't, in fact, about the history of clowns in American circuses. After doing this for an hour I had to correct punctuation, capitalization, and spelling for another. And so on. The physics part had its moments as well. For example, one question, after describing a physical effect, asked which physicist it was named after. Because such knowledge clearly demonstrates one's understanding of the concepts involved.

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32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is a pretty good movie for those interested in classical music. Plus it has a really awesome soundtrack. When I first heard the title I immediately thought, wow, that's cool. They must have been referring to Beethoven's piano sonatas, of which he wrote, as you may have guessed by now, thirty-two. But recently I realized that this was probably just a coincidence. Gould was not very big on Beethoven, he is known especially for his interpretation of Bach. In particular, his debut recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations is often considered among the top of his achievements. These pieces had never (or almost never) been performed on the piano before because of their technical difficulty. The Variations were written for a harpsichord with two manuals (i.e. keyboards). The voices in the music overlap a lot, making it difficult to play on an instrument with only one manual. The work opens with an aria. It is followed by thirty variations based on this theme, and then concluded by a repetition of the aria. Thus thirty-two movements comprise the Goldberg Variations.

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I was wearing my Great t-shirt today, and someone actually recoginzed it. He immediately asked me the same question that I asked the first person I met wearing this shirt, which is, are you from where I went to high school? This is because the program is so lame, it's difficult to beleive it is actually nation-wide. I was surprised to find out that it is in fact a program run all across the United States. He asked me if the program was helpful for me in my life. I told him that it was an inspiration. He replied that he never ended up joining a gang either.