Tom y Caro’s Big Plans

1 hour and 8 minutes later Tom AKA DOOGIE, M.D. is done with his first tri!!! IMPRESSIVE!!!!!!!!

The silence before the gun goes off…

waiting at the start!!! he didn’t anticipate the battle that was his first tri swim!!

TOM out of the water quicker than expected!

THE BIKE!!!!!!!!!!

i WAS running everywhere, so I got pretty crappy pics of the bike portion !

THE RUN was the best portion, Tommy kicked some serious bootie-oooo!!!!

FINISHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING TIME AND AMAZING TIMES

sO PROUD! he did an amazing job…didn’t drown or fall from his bike or hit the floor when running!!!!!!! yey

Bicycle-Sharing Program Starting in D.C.

Found a great site called hype machine that searches blogs for mp3s of bands. http://hypem.com/

Search by artist — set up alerts for blogs, artists, etc.

For example, here is final fantasy’s: http://hypem.com/artist/final+fantasy

It also has links to great blogs too. In particular, I liked this one … check out the video “llorando” from Mullohand Drive and some of the Coachella videos.

http://www.deafindieelephants.com/

Also check out Emoglasses.org- http://emoglasses.org/

Which brought us the list of Final Fantasy Covers and Re-Mixes below.

http://emoglasses.org/2007/07/18/final-fantasy-bootlegs-covers-round-up/

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1208955621-gzyp8LQqzFPwitOdjowL0w

Shawn Poynter for The New York Times

Bryan Cloyd, a professor at Virginia Tech whose daughter was killed in last year’s shooting. To honor her memory, he takes students to repair homes in Appalachia.

“We realized there was no better therapy than doing more of that,” said Mr. Cloyd, an accounting professor at Virginia Tech, who began organizing trips for students to work in the hollows of Virginia.

But for the Cloyds, the trips were not just an attempt to heal. They were also a chance to redefine the memory of their daughter, a process that set an example for a university still struggling to move forward as the first anniversary of the worst campus massacre in American history approached on Wednesday.

“For us, this has become a way to remember these students, many of whom were very involved in activism and service,” Mr. Cloyd said. “They should be known for how they lived rather than how they died.”

This year, the Cloyds have ushered about 150 Virginia Tech students and faculty members on five weekend house-repair trips, and they plan to continue running regular trips from now on.

In the classroom, Professor Cloyd, 47, has shifted beyond his typical focus on taxes and begun offering an honors class titled “Inventing the Future Through Our ‘Ut Prosim’ Tradition,” a reference to the university’s motto, “that I may serve.” Students in the class spend one weekend working with the house-repair project and the rest of the semester developing proposals for other types of service.

In Jonesville, the Cloyds’ efforts brought 69-year-old Louella Moore to tears.

“Honestly, I don’t know how to thank these people,” she said, shaking her head as she peered shyly through her window, watching Mr. Cloyd and his students dig holes for corner posts that would soon support her new front porch.

A year ago, Ms. Moore said, her house seemed to be caving in around her. The water heater broke, then part of the roof and the foundation started to collapse. Ms. Moore said she had little money to do anything about it. Her life, too, seemed to be closing in, she said, as a daughter died of a heart attack, a brother-in-law died of a brain tumor, and her husband died of unknown causes, all in about three years.

But Ms. Moore stopped crying when asked about the Cloyds.

“What they have gone through, and now they have started all this,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It just makes me strong.”

For the Cloyds, repairing the homes of others was a way to restore their sense of humanity, they said.

It was this message that they took to university officials late last year, encouraging them to step up efforts to get students involved in public service. In response, the university started a program in October called V.T.-Engage, which asked Virginia Tech students and faculty and staff members to perform at least 10 hours of service each, for a total of 300,000 hours, in honor of the victims of the April 16, 2007, shootings, which left 33 dead, including the gunman. Members of the Virginia Tech community have already completed more than 200,000 hours this year.

“Purpose and hope — the raw ingredients of happiness, right?” Mr. Cloyd said, taking a break from offering support to two English majors who were trying to stand firm in foot-deep mud as they steadied a 16-foot pole in concrete at a house in Lee County.

Mr. Cloyd said Austin had gone on four weeklong trips with the Appalachia Service Project when the family lived in Champaign, Ill. More than any other experience, he said, those trips shaped her desire to become an international studies major and pursue a career in social service.

By honoring Austin’s passion for social justice, Ms. Cloyd said that she had been able to stay connected to her daughter’s friends, many of whom have joined the weekend outings.

“Really, we’re the ones who benefited from all this,” she said.

Like many of the victims who were involved in political issues or social service activities, Austin had an intense interest in raising awareness about the ethnic killings in Darfur and working to stop mountaintop removal, a controversial method of coal mining, Mr. Cloyd said.

Since its founding in 1969, the Appalachia Service Project has helped repair more than 13,000 homes in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. The trips are run year-round, and volunteers pay about $100 for a weekend trip and about $300 for a week. The fees help cover room, board and building materials.

“Over the years, we’ve drawn our volunteers predominantly from church groups,” said Susan C. Crow, the organization’s chief executive. “What the Cloyds have helped us do is better tap into the college student demographic, which is important because these young people are at a key moment when they are shaping their career and other priorities, and that’s when we want to push them to consider service.”

For Lauren Patrizio, a sophomore political science major, this push to reconsider priorities was proving to be disorienting.

Looking at the half-finished porch that she was helping to build, Ms. Patrizio said the tangible sense of accomplishment, the friends she made on the trip and the conversations she had with Ms. Moore had left her second-guessing her plans to go directly to law school after graduation.

“When you see what a concrete difference you can make for the better in a real person’s life, you start wondering about law school and where it will take you,” said Ms. Patrizio, 20, who was a lifeguard with Austin Cloyd at Virginia Tech.

“I don’t know — the whole experience has rattled my plans a little,” she added.

Told of Ms. Patrizio’s comments, Mr. Cloyd paused and smiled.

“Reflection on life can be really tough sometimes,” he said. “I know that firsthand.”

This is a fitting time to revisit Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha,” a landmark work of Minimalism. I take Mr. Glass at his word that when “Satyagraha” was introduced, in Rotterdam in 1980, he was following his own voice and vision, not firing a broadside against the complex, cerebral modernist composers who claimed the intellectual high ground while alienating mainstream classical music audiences. Happily, that divisive period is finally past.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Richard Croft, in white, at the Met as Mohandas K. Gandhi in the Philip Glass opera “Satyagraha,” which depicts Gandhi’s path to spirituality and political activism in South Africa.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In a swirl of newsprint: Richard Croft as Gandhi, who relied on the news media in his agitation for civil rights, in the Philip Glass opera “Satyagraha,” at the Met.

Metropolitan Opera patrons, mostly bound by tradition, might not seem a likely source of Glass fans. But when Mr. Glass appeared onstage after the Met’s first performance of “Satyagraha,” on Friday night, the audience erupted in a deafening ovation.

“Satyagraha” (a Sanskrit term that means truth force) is more a musical ritual than a traditional opera. Impressionistic and out of sequence, it relates the story of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s fight for the civil rights of the Indian minority in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The staging — created by Phelim McDermott, director, and Julian Crouch, associate director and set designer, for the Met and the English National Opera, where it was seen last year — makes inventive use of fanciful imagery, aerialists, gargantuan puppets and theatrical spectacle to convey the essence of a self-consciously spiritual work.

Without knowing the events of Gandhi’s struggles in South Africa you would have little idea what is going on, starting from the opening scene. Gandhi, portrayed by the sweet-voiced tenor Richard Croft in a heroic performance, lies on the ground in a rumpled suit, his suitcase nearby. The moment depicts an incident when Gandhi, as a young lawyer en route to Pretoria and holding a proper first-class ticket, was ordered to take his place with the Indians on board and, when he resisted, was pushed from the train onto the platform.

But this abstract production takes its cues from Mr. Glass, who was not interested in fashioning a cogent narrative. What continues to make the opera seem radical comes less from the music, with its lulling repetitions of defiantly simple riffs, motifs and scale patterns, than from the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is.

The libretto, assembled by the novelist Constance DeJong, consists of philosophical sayings from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu epic poem. Mr. Glass honors the text by keeping it in the original Sanskrit and setting every syllable clearly. This production dispenses with Met Titles on the theory that the audience would actually be distracted by paying attention to the words, which at best serve as commentary. Instead key phrases in English are projected on a semicircular corrugated wall that forms the backdrop of the production’s gritty and elemental set.

“Satyagraha” invites you to turn off the part of your brain that looks for linear narrative and literal meaning in a musical drama and enter a contemplative state — not hard to do during the most mesmerizing parts of the opera, especially in this sensitive performance. For example, in the hauntingly mystical opening scene when Gandhi reflects on a battle between two royal families depicted in the Bhagavad-Gita, Mr. Croft, in his plaintive voice, sang the closest the score comes to a wistful folk song while undulant riffs wound through the lower strings.

That the impressive young conductor Dante Anzolini, in his Met debut, kept the tempos on the slow side lent weight and power to the repetitive patterns. At times, though, during stretches in the opera when Mr. Glass pushes the repetitions to extremes, as in the wild conclusion to the final choral scene in Act I, the music became a gloriously frenzied din of spiraling woodwind and organ riffs.

Even in this breakthrough work Mr. Glass does not come across as a composer who sweats over details. He tends to rely on default repetitions of formulaic patterns, the only question being how often to repeat a phrase. Sometimes the daring simplicity just sounds simplistic. When he does work harder, fracturing the rhythmic flow or injecting some pungent dissonance into his harmonies, I am more drawn in.

In this regard Mr. Glass is different from another founding father of Minimalism, Steve Reich, whose music is just as repetitious as Mr. Glass’s. But Mr. Reich has always had an ear for ingenious, striking and intricate detail.

See the article below:  They canceled 25% of their flights on Tuesday, and 50% of their flights (1000 per day) Wednesday and Today.  Hopefully, everything will be worked out by next Wednesday, but the below article says that delays are likely to continue into the weekend and next week.  Lets keep our fingers crossed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/business/11aircnd.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Q. You’ve spent your career in a profit-making business but want your work to be more in line with your personal values. The idea of working for a nonprofit is appealing, but is this the right reason to make a switch?

A. It is a good reason but not the only one. It’s important to analyze why you are drawn to this kind of work as a career, rather than as a volunteer, said Steven Pascal-Joiner, midcareer transitions coordinator for Idealist.org, a Web site that posts nonprofit job openings and information for job seekers.

“It’s not enough to say, ‘I want to work for a nonprofit,’ ” he said. “You need to know what kind of organization you want to work for, the role you want to play and why.”

Many people think that work for a nonprofit will be less stressful, compared with the for-profit world, said Jean Erickson Walker, a managing partner at OI Partners, a career coaching firm in Portland, Ore.

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “In most nonprofits you’ll be expected to work longer hours — including evenings and weekends — for less money.”

Q. Are you likely to take a big pay cut by moving to a nonprofit?

A. Nonprofit salaries vary, depending on geographic location and budget, but they are generally lower than those at for-profit companies, said David Schachter, assistant dean for career services at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

According to PayScale.com, a salary Web site, typical pay at nonprofits for entry-level to midlevel employees is about 5 percent to 10 percent lower than it is at for-profits; for midlevel executives it is 20 percent to 25 percent lower. For executive directors, it is at least 50 percent lower, compared with a C.E.O.’s salary.

Q. You know the issues that are important to you. How do you find the right nonprofits to seek out?

A. Start by looking at nonprofits within your industry or a similar one, because that’s where the transition is likely to be easiest, said Raymond D. Horton, director of the social enterprise program at the Columbia Business School. “If you work for a private educational institution, you could go to a public charter school,” he said. “If you work for a private health care provider you could switch to a not-for-profit provider.”

But if you want a change from your current profession, begin your search by looking at the groups financed by your local United Way chapter, Mr. Schachter suggested. Or contact the Chamber of Commerce to find the various nonprofits operating in your region.

Q. When you find nonprofits that look like a good fit, should you send a résumé?

A. That isn’t likely to get a response, Mr. Pascal-Joiner said. Nonprofits tend to obtain referrals from staff members and other nonprofits, or to look to their volunteers when they hire. So consider working your way into an organization by volunteering first, either at your chosen nonprofit or one with a similar mission. Be sure to volunteer in a way that uses the skills you already have or helps you learn new ones.

Before applying for a paid position, meet with the leadership to get a sense of the organization’s financial state and the challenges it faces, said Darian Rodriguez Heyman, executive director of the Craigslist Foundation in San Francisco, which provides education and resources to emerging nonprofit leaders.

“There are good nonprofits and poorly run nonprofits,” he said. “The best management situation is a board that empowers staff to make decisions, rather than micromanaging them.”

Q. When you are ready to apply for a job, can you use your corporate résumé?

A. Revamp it for the nonprofit world, said David Yarnold, a former executive editor at The San Jose Mercury News who left the paper two years ago to take an executive position at the Environmental Defense Fund. Job descriptions should showcase your skills, not your title. “You have to translate your experience into what the nonprofit world needs,” he said.

Highlight work on multidisciplinary projects and across departments, which shows that you are flexible, said Kathleen Yazbak, managing director at Bridgestar, which recruits executives for nonprofits. Those traits are crucial for someone who will need to work with staff members, external stakeholders, donors, board members and other nonprofits. And mention your volunteer experience, which shows that you have been preparing for this transition.

Q. What are the biggest misconceptions about switching from the corporate world to the nonprofit world?

A. Many people are surprised to find the hours longer and stress greater than in the corporate world. Brian Olson, who left the private sector for a nonprofit in 2006, found the decision-making process to be unfocused.

“No matter how good a volunteer board is, it’s not the same as a corporate board, because everyone has a different agenda,” said Mr. Olson, who returned to the private sector a year later to be vice president for public affairs at Video Professor Inc., a company in Lakewood, Colo., that sells self-tutorial programs. “There was a purity to corporate life I missed,” he said.

There is value, he said, to “a company just getting the job done based on the needs of the marketplace.”

In about a week I will load up my car with amplifiers and guitars and drive to Nashville to begin recording my next record. I don’t drive much anymore and I’m glad for that except that I used to write a lot while on the road. Solitude, boredom, and the desperate need to entertain oneself are ideal stimuli for songwriting.

I’ve spent most of the last year inside a tour bus. I’ve spoken more words to journalists than I have to my friends and family. All of this has kept me from what I realize now is my job, and that’s to daydream. Now I bring my bike on tour and ride every day. Wandering in an unfamiliar town, the rhythm of walking or riding and a few hours to kill is nearly the perfect recipe for a new idea.

I’ve got 11 songs mostly written and several dozen distinct melodies. I never worry about the melodies drying up. Since I can remember, I’ve had melodies in my head. I chew my food to them.

Almost every breath contains some fragments of an escaping melody. If I shape my lips so as to whistle, my breath will take on a musical shape like sonic vapor. Words are much trickier. I would forgo words altogether if I didn’t love singing them so much. My choice of words and my voice betray so much and that’s what’s so terrifying and attractive about it.

I’m not the most forthcoming person — I only speak when I have something to say. What is becoming more challenging of late is dealing with so many fully formed melodies that are unwilling to change their shape for any word. So writing lyrics becomes like running multiple code-breaking programs in your head until just the right word with just the right number of syllables, tone of vowel and finally some semblance of meaning all snap into place.

I’m kind of the opposite of the confessional singer-songwriter who fills notebooks full of poetry and intones them over a bed of chords. Meaning or “the truth that’s in my heart” usually reveals itself well after the record is released. I’m often surprised that the things I care about actually end up in my songs. Until then I’m mostly concerned with shape, tone and texture. I’m really an instrumentalist who sings words and if you care to pay attention you might enjoy them. So in this post, I will begin reporting on the progress of an as of yet unfinished song, with all my doubts and insecurities laid bare.

The song in question is called (for now) “Oh No.” It began, as do most of my songs, with a sound. It could be a creaking door or a delivery truck or the sound of multiple stereos wafting out of bedroom windows. For the last four years the same dancehall beat has been has been rattling the foundation of my Chicago apartment. When I stay at my farm, sparrows, coyotes, chickens and frogs find their way into my songs as well.

In the instance of this song I was on a flight from New York back to Chicago and a young mother and her 3-year-old son sat in front of me and it was looking to be the classic scenario of the child screaming bloody murder. However, I was struck by the mournfulness of this kid’s wail. He just kept crying “oh no” in a way that only someone who is certain of their demise could. Pure terror. Completely inconsolable. It was more moving than annoying.

So when I got home I picked up my guitar and tried to capture the slowly descending arc of that kid’s cry. It fit nicely over a violin loop that I had been toying with which moves from C-major to A-major.

I’ll spend days at my farm creating loops with my violin where I record a phrase and layer on top of it, often starting with pizzicato followed by multiple string lines. This is a handy compositional tool I also use in performance. I can follow any whim and instantly hear how it works in counterpoint with other ideas. It’s perfect for someone who plays by ear and improvises as I do and who is too impatient for notation. This helps keep ideas fluid and ephemeral but with an instant gratification playback option. I’ve found that I can be completely satisfied for weeks by the simplest four-bar phrase repeating over and over again. It’s a fragile thing where your perception of it can change it completely. You can reconstruct all the elements the following day, note for note and go by physical memory but the feel can be elusive.

Back to “Oh No.” All this child knows is that he needs to get off this plane and I can empathize. I often find myself in a crowded room and all I know is “I need to get out of here.” So begins the song with a child’s half-dream of climbing out a window and venturing into the ravines around Lake Bluff, where I grew up.

let’s get out of here
past the atmosphere
squint your eyes and no one dies or goes to jail
past the silver bridge
oh the silver bridge wearing nothing but a one-sie and a veil.

When I was little the “silver bridge” spanned the ravine and marked the boundary of my known world.

Words get under my skin the same way melodies do. Something catches my attention and I file it subconsciously. It often begins with an archaic or obscure word I have not defined. I just like the sound of it and its elusive meaning gives it a mysterious shine. On the menu of a local cafe is an item called “salsify.” Before I reach for the dictionary I let my imagination run wild and decide that salsify is a burrowing bronchial root like a rickety old mine that burrows deep into something. It turns out that’s mostly correct which encourages me further. All I know is “salsify mains” sounds good to me.

Then I might think of what I want to say, what have I been fixated on of late? I have been thinking about how as adults we bury our emotions and I almost envied that kid on the plane who had license to express what we all were probably feeling. And how I have felt frozen and numb of late. (The process may seem more deliberate than it actually is — it’s only because I’m breaking it down for this article and have hindsight that it appears that I know what I’m doing).

In the salsify mains of what was thought but unsaid
the calcified charismatists were doing the math
It would take a calculated blow to the head
to light the eyes of all the harmless sociopaths

What does it take to wake us up, we who feel so little? Aren’t we almost like sociopaths, only the kind that don’t kill people?

The only thing I don’t care for in this lyric is the “calcified charismatist” — it just feels too clever. I’m known to make up words but this is too heavy-handed. So I’m still searching for the right words. For a while it was “unemployed ex-physicists,” but that’s too typical of something I would write. Lately I’m considering “calcified arhythmitist” or just “arithmatist” — something that conveys a physicist’s sketch or formula for what will revive our harmless sociopath. Then the cheerful refrain of “arm in arm we are the harmless sociopaths/in the calcium mines buried deep in our chests.” Followed by the chorus which has only taken shape in the last day, which is “Oh no, we’re deep in a mine/Oh no, a calcium mine.” Sounds a bit bleak as I break it down, but it should be a rousing little number.