First of all, congratulations to the Kenyon College Ladies’ swimming team, who deep sixed their competition at the Division III Swimming Championships. Not that I was in the pool in the Ernst Center more than once over four years at the school, nor did I ever attend a swim meet. But good job, nonetheless. Oh, and a note. Not that the achievement wasn’t impressive, but the Ladies didn’t “almost double up” on Amherst, as stated in the article. They scored 66% more points. I guess that’s what separates the Lords from the Lord Jeffs. Oh, and here’s a mostly unrelated article about a guy who wants to break into synchronized swimming.
An interesting op-ed from the Michigan Daily online about the diverging paths of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago vis-à-vis football. I assume that many students at the U of C still don’t know where Amos Alonso Stagg field is — if they did, they wouldn’t be Maroons — because that’s why they got into Chicago in the first place.
I suppose that IU getting an eight-seed in the Big Dance was only fair, given how they’ve performed recently, but I can’t say I blame the committee. What the team has done so far couldn’t be any worse than the rumored boycott of a couple of weeks ago.
The Wife and I saw two productions this past weekend at Lyric Opera of Chicago. The first, Eugene Onegin, had the brooding Dmitri Hvorostovsky (who always reminds me of Barry Bostwick) and a minimalist set, complete with a stage floor covered completely in leaves. The second was a revival of The Barber of Seville with the dreamy Nathan Gunn as Figaro. The music was from a new Bärenreiter edition supervised by [name-dropping ahead] Philip Gossett, who I took a quarter-long class from on the opera while in grad school. Since the planned for traffic didn’t materialize, we ended up downtown an hour pbefore we planned, and so we stopped off at a bar across the street from the Civic Opera House. The couple next to us overheard us talking, and asked about the opera. Luckily, I could give them a 10-second summary of the plot. Unluckily, I said that Gunn was playing Almaviva and not Figaro. Luckily, I got away before realizing my error. Sorry, couple!
Actually, the score of the weekend was the 16 boxes of 35mm slides that have been sitting at my parents’ house for years. When I was young, we used to have yearly viewings of all of these slides, during which we all made plans for later blackmail. I took them all, and the player, and am going to attempt to digitize them over the coming months, since many of them are fading due to age. Wow, did I have a lot of hair when I was 10.
Happy St. Patrick’s day to those who celebrate it. I was thinking of the time when my mother accidentally wore some orange to St. Scholastica. The nuns were none too pleased.
