Futile Horn

09.01.2003 - 6:33 pm (absolutely superlative)

So I began my second attempt at putting together a musical group yesterday. There are only two of us and we practiced… two songs. Huh. Maybe we should call ourselves the Duce. That’d be funny cus he’s really Italian and when people saw it maybe they’d think it was the “doo-chay”. You know, like Mussolini. Anyway, we are supposed to practice again tomorrow… two days later.

I went to the Mets game on Sunday. I believe it was the first complete game I’ve seen all year. I haven’t followed a season of professional sports since 1994. See, I thought I was just watching a boring game, but when the Phillies pitcher beaned one of the Mets in the head in the bottom of the fifth, I realized that up to that point I had been watching a perfect game. Do you get that? Perfect! Those five innings? That was perfection! THAT’S AS GOOD AS BASEBALL GETS! Whoa Nelly!

I had four tickets to that game, but I could only get (get this) two people to come with me. People turned a free ticket to a Sunday afternoon, citing as their reason “I hate baseball,” and “I hate baseball. The only thing I hate more than baseball is baseball games,” and “I have to go to my humorless Greek friend’s wedding. Oopah!”

My sister has a swamp of data about amphibians and she has enlisted me to build her a database and an interface to input it all into her laptop. I’ve spent several hours in this endeavor (programming without any documentation for that awful VBA) and I thought to myself, God I hate this. I can’t believe I was thinking about doing this for a living. I’ve read whole books on database design. Whole books! Think of all the songs I could have written about stoners driving around town in a submarine.

I’ve been thinking about designing a database for word usage in Horace. I think it would be really useful, since it seems pretty clear that he is particularly careful about words and that he uses them to tie themes together. It would definitely be easier to manage than all the itty bitty notes I’ve made in the margins of my text in pencil. It’s possible that such a database would already exist, but I don’t know if it would have all the features I want mine to have. I was thinking in addition to records for dictionary entries, I could also group words with the same root, words with similar meanings, and categories of words such as words have to do with parts of the body, farming, nature, wine, so on and so forth. It would be a slightly messy job, but it is certainly doable. The only thing is I get dizzy thinking about the man hours entering all that data into the computer. Yech.

I’ve been wanting to rant about Horace again, but I’ve lost too many hours already with the ecology thing, and I have to plan practice for tomorrow, and I would like to read a couple poems today as well. So.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn