In the last of my weekly (for now) entries of Bertrand Russell quotes, I offer what is perhaps the sagest advice thus far:

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

~Bertrand Russell

The fourth installment in my Bertrand Russell quotations:

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about others things.

~Bertrand Russell

The wise teacher leaves his (work related) troubles at the door of the school.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year and has only become so in recent years as I’ve begun to gain the wisdom to truly appreciate all that for which I have to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is the third in a series of quotations from Bertrand Russell that I thought were pretty interesting:

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

~Bertrand Russell

I initially found this offensive, at least until I started thinking about the days when as a teacher, I forget exactly why I’m teaching my students. I’ve taken to reciting this quotation to myself as I prep every class I teach and find that it is keeping me focused on who I’m teaching rather than what I am teaching.

I want to thank my sister for letting me know about a site called FreeRice where you can improve your vocabulary and donate food to help end hunger through the United Nations. The project is sponsored by a variety of advertises on the site and since the site opened on October 7th, they have donated 1,712,371,750 grains of rice.

So, go improve your vocabulary and don’t forget to tell your local SAT prep. classes all about it.

According to this article, an Italian musician uncovered hidden music in Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’:

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo’s particular writing style.

The result is a 40-second “hymn to God” that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo’s time for spiritual music. A short segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage played on the organ. The tempo was almost painfully slow but musical.

Ummmm…. I call bullshit for a variety of reasons.

Is that a melody I detect?

Then again, maybe not…

Good thing Notre Dame isn’t playing New York these days!

It was announced that the Giants are scheduled to wear their Red Alternate jerseys for the game, no doubt to take advantage of the national television audience and perhaps generate a bit more income through the sale of this unusual uniform top.

If you believe what you read on the internet, the red alternate is quite controversial among fans of the team that carries the nickname ‘Big Blue’ but after looking at this poster of a charity game from 1930, it seems that the red jerseys were standard back in the the very earliest days of the organization, one of the oldest in professional football.

If you were reading last week, you’d have read the first of the Bertrand Russell quotes that caught my attention. Here is the second:

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

~Bertrand Russell

This of course, is at the heart of the populist politician and the accusations of elitism that seem occur during every election in this country.

Clearly, as this video demonstrates, the internet is a good thing when it comes to teaching a world music course.

What’s the old saying? Something about a thousand words and a picture?

I’m not sure if you all caught the news at the beginning of October, but Julia Fischer was named Artist of the Year at the 2007 Classic FM Gramophone Awards ceremony.

A brilliant violinist, I made a post mentioning her amazing performance at this summer’s Eastern Music Festival. What I didn’t explicitly mention in that post was that of all the great artists that I’ve seen perform at that festival, she is by far the most memorable. The best part is that when she was first a guest artist at EMF in 2004, she was only 20 (or 21?) and was willing to go and interact (including a rather risky, for a violinist, game of frisbee!) with the students at the festival, some of whom were actually older than she!

Though I’m late with my praise, this was a well-deserved award and we look forward to seeing her here in St. Louis when she performs the Dvořák concerto with the Symphony.