Singing in the wild woods

I understand that there are now at least five people who know that this blog exists. So someone might actually be reading this. (Come on and say hi!) But how am I supposed to blog regularly if I’m hardly ever home?

I know, I know, theoretically there’s WLAN everywhere, but I’ll bet one of the places where they don’t have it is Wildwood, NJ. It’s a seaside resort south of Atlantic City with a summer population of 250.000 and a winter population of 5.000. Quite pretty, but rather empty this time of year, except when several thousand barbershoppers invade the town and hold their annual Mid-Atlantic District convention. The convention serves two purposes. One is to select a district champion chorus and a district champion quartet, who will represent the district (which consists of five or six states in this region) at the international contest next year. The other is to meet lots of other barbershoppers, form spontaneous quartets and sing stuff together. And we did that, until 3:30 or so on early Sunday morning. It was lots of fun overall, except that after the 20th chorus in the chorus competition, they all started to sound almost the same. I was pleased to realise that my own chorus is rather different from all the others, and delivered a hilarious performance of an Elvis Medley that involved guys dressed in go-go dancer headgear (a cheap trick, but it always works) and the cool but rather fat director changing into an Elvis costume off-stage. They were rewarded with a huge lead in the “presentation” category, but because the chorus of Alexandria, Virginia got such a (deservedly) huge score in the “singing” category, Alexandria won the competition anyway. Apparently they have won every single time in the past 10-15 years, and we were so close this time. Is a distance of 4 points out of 1500-something even statistically significant? It’s certainly very small.

Brad, the guy I shared a room with, indeed turned out to be quite cool. He’s been running his own little company for fixing people’s computers, which apparently paid quite well but got boring after a while. So he decided to buy a Yoga studio in the Village, both as a business challenge and as a vehicle to meet girls. I think I should take him up on his offer to come have a Yoga class one of these days. He also decided to spend the Sunday in Atlantic City, and promptly won $2500 at poker. And he’s taken me under his wing a bit and given me some tips on barbershop singing; it was quite amazing what a fantastic difference a small change in my singing technique made.

I also learned at this convention that almost nobody is both a Mets and a Yankees fan at the same time. One of the guys — a policeman from Brooklyn — kept sneaking out of the concert hall to listen to reports of the Mets game on his portable radio. In the end, they won (the Yankees didn’t, and are now out and in a crisis of self-doubt). As I am writing this, the Mets are playing their seventh and final play-off against the St. Louis Cardinals. I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed for them, but I don’t dare watch the live online report of the game, because they lose whenever I watch them. I’m kind of their anti-mascot.

Thursday to Monday I attended a workshop on presupposition accommodation at Ohio State University. It was a fun trip, except that we had temperatures below zero on one or two nights, and I brought home a cold. Highlights included: utterly efficient procedures at New York’s La Guardia airport, where I was through check-in and security ten minutes after I entered the terminal building, and then on the bus to Midtown fifteen minutes after my plane touched the ground on my way home; long discussions between semanticists and philosophers about the example “I have to take my cat to the vet”; really cute linguistics grad students from California; a possible collaboration with a colleague at OSU on a system that generates instructions for the player in a Quake 2 environment; and a hike through Ohio’s Hocking Hills with Mike White and his family.

Currently I’m fighting with my cold and feeling that I should really go and get some work done now. Nevertheless, I have already scouted out possible things to do for the weekend, so I might finally have something new to post in the “exploration” category soon. :)