Friend, our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.

How is it with this love,
I see your world and not you?

From: Rumi ‘The Essential Rumi’ Barks/Moyne

114 bugs squashed in the latest WordPress upgrade from 2.0 to 2.0.1. Oy!

Austria is in quite a tizzy over their favorite son’s 250th birthday.

Franz Joseph Haydn was reported to have said to Mozart senior:

Before God, and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me, either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.

Schuman said of Mozart that “[t]here are things in the world about which nothing can be said, as Mozart’s C Major Symphony (No. 41), much of Shakespeare and pages of Beethoven.” Tchaikovsky called him the “music Christ.”

In his all too brief lifetime, Mozart wrote at least 41 symphonies, 26 string quartets, 10 instrumental quintets, 17 piano sonatas, 42 violin sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 40 divertimenti and serenades, 19 masses, 42 arias, and many songs.

Here is but a sample:
Lodron, Concerto No. 7 in F Major, K252 — Rondo, Tempo de Menuetto [6MB mp3]

SOURCE: Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers of All Times and Their 1,000 Greatest Works (Ballentine Books, 1992), ISBN-0-449-90356-7.

From my e-mail inbox: A man wanted to get married. He was having trouble choosing among three likely candidates. He gives each woman a present of $5,000 and watches to see what they do with the money. The first woman does a total makeover. She goes to a fancy beauty salon and gets her hair and makeup done, buys several new outfits and dresses up very nicely for the man. She tells him that she has done this to be more attractive for him because she loves him so much. The man was impressed. The second woman goes shopping to buy the man gifts. She gets him a new set of golf clubs, some new gizmos for his computer, and some expensive clothes. As she presents these gifts, she tells him that she has spent all the money on him because she loves him so much. Again, the man is impressed. The third woman invests the money in the stock market. She earns several times the $5,000. She gives him back his $5,000 and reinvests the remainder in a joint account. She tells him that she wants to save for their future because she loves him so much. Obviously, the man was impressed. The man thought for a long time about what each woman had done with the money he’d given her. Then, he married the one with the biggest boobs. Men are like that, you know.

What will they think of next? www.pherotones.com (and unlike Rori, I’m going to defy silliness and give them plenty of linky love!).

Experience the ringtone secret I discovered in Denmark that can make you irresistible!

Okay. Now I’m curious. How did the good doctor discover this secret? Where in Denmark? What was she doing there in the first place? Did she accidentally sit on her cell phone? Did she drop it in her wine glass? She doesn’t reveal her secret in her blog, unfortunately, but she does hint about a mysterious man called Ekstrom. Indeed.

Intimacy expert Dr. Myra Vanderhood will soon be partnering {{snort}} with a service provider to make Pherotones widely available to the public. But before this can happen, Pherotone researchers need your help. Join us in unlocking the mysteries of Pherotones by sharing one of our sample Pherotones with your circle of friends.

(Emphasis added.) I swear, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried! Well, what are you waiting for, go get your fresh hot ringtones. . . . And then call me in the morning!

406 Not Acceptable An appropriate representation of the requested resource /wp-admin/plugin-editor.php could not be found on this server. Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.pixelita.com Port 80

And the damn file is there!? Yeesh.

I was going through some more of my MP3s tonight because I’m really trying to thin out what’s on the hard drive, and burn to CD the things I can live without. While doing so, I came across an old song that brought back a memory. Robert and I had driven to Corpus Christi for the grand opening of the Texas State Aquarium back in the early 1990s. We were still living in San Antonio at the time so it was a nice little drive. We had plenty of our favorite tapes and a sack lunch for the ride. One of the songs on tap was Crowded House’s hit single, Don’t Dream It’s Over. It brought back a flood of memories of our life in San Antonio, when we just took off for a road trip on a moment’s notice, Robert at the wheel. And that particular day, it was nice out, but I don’t remember it being too hot. We walked a long way, I always had to take two or three steps to match Robert’s one step.

I remembered a lot of things that now seem so far in the past, because they’ll likely never happen again. How when we stood next to each other, he would casually drape his arm across my shoulder. How he would holler at me to keep step with him. Him mostly driving us where we needed to go and me sitting in the passenger seat, usually with my eyes closed (either because I was into whatever music was playing or because I was terrified of his driving!).

When Robert first became paralyzed, we always just assumed he would walk again. In fact, we never spoke about the proposition that he wouldn’t. It’s like we were both afraid to say it. If we didn’t say it, then it couldn’t be true, could it? So for the first six months or so, while he was still in the hospital, and later at TIRR, we figured he’d walk again, even if it was with a walker or braces. It’s been just over two years now since his injury. And although neither one of us has come right out and actually said it, we both know he won’t walk again. And I am sitting here now, barely able to hold back tears, tears I have not let myself cry for a long time, because if I feel bad about this, how must he feel?

Even though I’m sad about what was, I can still take comfort in the fact that we’ve come this far together and, at least outwardly, neither of us has fallen apart yet. We still take road trips, but now I am the driver. (Oh, is that cruel irony or what? Robert always hated the way I drove. He says I drive too cautiously and timidly. No, I’m not the one with a jillion million trillion speeding tickets scattered across seven states!) We may eventually get hand controls on the car so he can help drive on long road trips. And there are no spur of the moment trips anymore; each trip must be planned carefully and packing must be done even for a day trip.

But the words of the song echo my sentiments and I can at least smile when I hear them:

There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost But you’ll never see the end of the road While you’re traveling with me

“This was fate destined by God,” al-Turki said. “Some of the pilgrims were undisciplined and hasty to finish the ritual as soon as possible.”

No, apparently, the Devil did not make them do it; God did.

They need to take some lessons in crowd control from Crowd Dynamics, based in the United Kingdom. Or find another religion. This one’s killing them!

That was the tagline for Sony for years with regard to its products and I myself am a die-hard Sony fan[1]. However, I’ve not bought any Sony music CDs recently that were “infected” with the “XCP virus” so I can’t complain about that.

But Sony finally got the slap upside the head [PDF file] that it needed. And now, it’s under court order to post the settlement on its web site before February 15 (happy Valentine’s day, Sony!). This just goes to show that people have a voice, and many pissed off people have a loud voice. Read the settlement FAQs here (nicely broken down into layman’s terms).

Remember, Sony: No baloney, now!

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[1] Currently, we own three Wega televisions, two Vaio laptops, a Vaio desktop, a Clie PDA, a Cybershot camera, an old Mavica camera using 1.44MB floppy disks, two Sony DVD players and a VHS player. We are “Sony’ed up” here at my house, yes indeedy!