Grant Sawatzky

has an intl. player ever made world series appearance within weeks of a sitting POTUS announcing planned military operation on their country? prior to 2025 (1 Venezuelan per side), Leo Cárdenas (🇨🇺) pinch hit in the Reds' 1961 game 5 loss 6mo after Bay of Pigs, just 1wk before Cuban missile crisis

How the Dodgers and baseball shaped Bernie Sanders' world view Les Carpenter: When the Democratic presidential candidate was a teenager, his beloved Dodgers fled Brooklyn for Los Angeles – and those closest to him believe the shock of their departure helped inspi...

Bernie Sanders origin story

The Good Samaritan, by Joseph Highmore, 1744, 📸 by @patricksmith04

New episode of ‘free/composed’ going live today at 5:30-7pst (that’s 2.5 hours from time of this post).

Today’s theme: drumming it all up

An ecclectic mix of experimental, traditional, jazz, and morefeaturing the drumming and other percussion. Tune it at bside.radio or twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

Today! (3–5pm), an off-schedule ‘free-composed’ special:

‘Songstress Sunday’

Eclectic mix of women vocalists in early music, traditional, experimental, pop, classical, and more.

Tune in at bside.radio or twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

Hiring fair had lineup >100 people down the street waiting their turn to get inside where you get in another line to wait to hand a resume to middleman “placement company” who take a portion of the wage for any placements they make.

now THAT’s a gig (prerequisite: candidate is without a conscience)

If trickle down economics were real, then all those stores who replaced cashiers with self checkouts would have “free food for unemployed/former/would-be cashiers” discount programs—which they most certainly do not, since it most certainly isn’t.

New 90 minute episode of my bside.radio show, ‘free/composed’ today: 5:30-7pm pst. Today’s all-vinyl set is a feature of traditional, pop, and “other” quality recordings from around the globe that have made their way to the bins of the Pacific Northwest. fun and eclectic mix.

I keep thinking about how mega-corps (amazon/abe, thrift-books, value-village/savers) brute force acquisition/distribution power makes thoughtful curation and contextual knowledge of materials the distinctive "product" for booksellers, but I fear is automation will squash the already thin margins.

I think of my bookshelves as "the people's humanities library" built entirely of materials rescued from discarded book piles/thrift shops. I'm wondering how to make the curation work I've done in collecting useful/publicly accessible. not sure where to go with it beyond digitizing the rarest items.

out of curiosity, which production/conductor is it?

new episode of JC-spins' "free/composed" radio TODAY, 5:30-7pm PST streaming at bside.radio and via twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

Today: all vinyl summer special of eclectic pop and oddities rescued from thrift shop and bargain bins of the pacific northwest

an ancient bone flute found in modern day Germany. it's at least 35,000 years old.

annotated photo document of ancient bone flute found in present day Labrador, Canada. it was likely played 7000 to 10,000 years ago

On today's episode of 'free/composed' I'll be playing a diverse 90 minute program of music for flute—past present and future this afternoon streaming on B-side Radio, Vancouver. bside.radio and twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

5:30-7pm PST

I see it as critical students are taught to replace the pervasive idea being sold to by tech-corps “what we know is a thanks to computers” with the infinitely more accurate “what computers appear to ‘know’ is thanks to you/us” but I fear a majority of young students are get stuck on the former.

there is a good article in the 1997 book "Hamlet on the Holodeck" that reports on people who thought they'd fallen in love with "ELIZA" and her offspring, which were "early natural language processing computer program[s] [first] developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.

I propose a new rule: whenever the sitting US president is talking seriously about annexing Canada via gradual economic takeover; Canadians who are renting housing from US-residing absentee landlords are allowed—nay, encouraged—to pause rent payments indefinitely.

our brains: a lot like cuneiform
no, they're just like written scrolls
no, it's that they're typeset books
no, most like card catalogue
no, reeling thoughts are cinema
no, computer hard-drives describe it best
no—dim resemblance, these and the rest

F. M. Anayet Hossain: "empiricism is not to be totally accepted because it presumes that the world falls apart into two classes of entities. Firstly, “subjects” whose principal task is to perceive and secondly, “objects” which are only to be
perceived. But this whole idea is defective."

Very much so—nicely put.

Like the physicists particle/wave duality music theory’s own “double slit” involves an analyst finding object must have been process, but process/relation must have been object (and so neither and both)…

Text: Implicit to any music-theoretical analysis is some degree of meta-level speculation as to which musical objects are considered especially relevant, salient, or "natural" to the given context. But the musical "object" is often slippery. Precise definitions of musical objects are inevitably scaffolded onto one's preconceptions about music perception and conceptualization. These assumptions are significant to our musical analyses. We, as theorists, must take a particular stance on what does or does not count as the musical object even (or especially!) where the position may be unconventional, idiosyncratic or controversial. The outgrowth from such discussions has wide ranging impact on the variety and breadth of analytic insights and intuitions as related to theoretic, hermeneutic, and cultural analyses. The SMT Philosophy Group solicits proposals for lightning talks that deal with the meta-level stakes of musical ontology to take place during our interest group session at the upcoming joint meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society in November. We welcome proposals that: highlight an analytic object exemplifying ontological particularity or complexity; are illustrative for ontological issues related to music theory pedagogy; or speak to distinctives of a musical ontology within a specific cultural context or repertoire, etc.

Varun Chandrasekhar and I are co-chairing the Society for Music Theory Interest Group 2025-27. Here is the call for papers on we sent out for our upcoming meeting (AMS/SMT Nov. 2025) on the topic: “ontologies of music theory’s analytical objects”

DM if you’d like proposal submission details

by default the modern University frames humanities subjects as past oriented, and sciences as future oriented:“History of Science” like “Humanistic Futures” is a niche in broader field. But “why (re)consider old science?” and “why (re)imagine new humanities?” shouldn’t require extra justification.

Above is Hudson’s Bay Company flag ad flown from 1707 to 1801. Preceded but red and white version (British Merchant flag 1682 to 1707) and followed by version with the Union Jack flag in upper right was flown from 1801until 1965 when Canada’s current flag was first introduced.

Hudson’s Bay Company flag in the version that was flown from 1707 to 1801. Great Britain Flag in upper left, on solid red field with company initials ‘HBC’ in white lettering at lower right. Updated version with the Union Jack flag in upper right was flown until 1965 when Canada’s current red and white maple leaf flag was first introduced.

The company whose commercial monopoly was so effective that for 200 years the corporation was the de facto government of the geographic area presently known as Canada—governing for a period almost twice as long as ‘Canada’ has existed—is shutting down for good today.

I forgot I remember it all
I remember that I forgot it entirety
I forgot I forgot it so completely
I remember I remember it so well

streaming old Pee-Wee's Playhouse episodes, interrupted by targeted advertising that is trying to sell me funeral planning services 🤡💀

a) space is in stasis while time flows
b) space is in flow and so is time
c) space is in flow while time is static
d) space is in stasis and so is time
e) paradoxically, options a–d are all right
f) options a–d are all wrong
g) experience is flow, apparent "objects" are in fact snapshots of process

on the (un)intuitive idea of "true randomness":
suppose the code/mechanism for a random number generator is concealed inside a black box.
we observe <1, 1, 1, 1,…> on the output display.
at no point could an observer know for absolute certain whether the machine is in fact producing random numbers.

will do, thanks!

I'd like to revisit Carolyn Abbate's keynote, "Lightness, Improvisation, and What Is Knowable” which was delivered at the joint American Musicological Society/Society for Music Theory (San Antonio, 2018). The SMT website links to the archived livestream, but the YouTube video is private. any leads?

web article: "wow—Bezos' house sale sets WA state record, $63 million." Instead headlines ought to convey $63m as a tiny sum compared to his hoarded assets. Say he is up ~$10Billion/y: so $63M is 0.656% of that amount.

The equivalent for purchase/sale for a median income household would be $492.