TampaBLAB

Co-Worker #1: I was talking with one of our students, Zed*, and we were discussing lies and how terrible they are and I mentioned George Washington never telling a lie and the cherry tree and Zed had no idea what I was talking about.

Me: Okay.

Co-Worker #1: Social Studies teachers don't teach about George Washington and the cherry tree anymore? What's wrong with you people?

Me: Those stories never happened. Why would we teach something that never happened?

Co-Worker #1: I know they never happened, but they're good stories. They make people feel good. We've got to keep certain myths alive, Catherine!

Me: That's what Christian schools are for.

Thankyouverymuch. I will be here all ze week.

I dunno… Making a pop song out of Stairway to Heaven? 8 minutes condensed into 2:40? If you’ve never heard Stairway before, you might actually buy this as the standard.

Check out two hot offers on shows:

HATS! - The Musical - get buy one, get one free tickets for the May 11 Mother's Day Performance by using promo code MOM when you call or buy online.

Turtle Island String Quartet - save $10 per ticket for B-level seating (normally priced at $25.50) for the April 26 show by using promo code TISQ over the phone or online.

Both discounts are also good at the TBPAC Ticket Office window. They are not good, however, on prior sales or in conjunction with any other offer. All discounts are subject to availability. Sorry, no rain checks. Do not taunt happy fun ball.

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Sometimes we're slow in our household to catch up on TV shows, but we always DVR new episodes of Criminal Minds. At the end of the episode from two weeks ago, which I just watched last night, Dr. Spencer Reid tosses out this quote in a VO as the team is heading back on the plane to BAU:

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard

The quote is from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. To make it even more fitting, after the VO, Reid pulls a big coin out of his pocket, studies it, and begins flipping it around his fingers as the episode ends.

Plate of shrimp!

So here we are, getting ready for the last weekend. We have our pickup rehearsal tonight and then the final three performances.

I'm going to consider the Criminal Minds thing a good omen.

If you need more encouraging to come out, just scroll through the last few blog entries here. You don't have a good excuse not to come. Not even that.

  People need to learn Time-Management. It is getting worse every year. Almost nobody gets in my cab and talks to me anymore. Within seconds, they are on their damn crackberry or cell phone. I view it as a total waste of their time.

Today, at Tampa Airport, I pick up this business women who is on her way to a meeting. She mumbled a location to me and withing ONE SECOND was on her phone. I did not know where this place was so I had to interrupt her. She seemed a little annoyed. Tough shit. We have entered into a business relationship and think you should at least take 15 seconds to get clear with me on what I can do to serve you.

On the way to her destination she called several people to let them know that she had emailed them in response to their email and was texting a text about the text she got about the tenor of an email that a text had alerted them about from an email received by a caring worker who had gotten a text about the tenor email of an employee!!!  And they laughed a yogi.

There is a time management book out called Never Check Email In The Morning. It is about doing things that, at first seem counter intuitive, but actually work. Such as working less hours a day and spending only ten minutes a day on a cell phone. Her premise is why say in an email, text or cell what your going to repeat anyway on this meeting your going to. In short, cultivate real relationships

Three words I never want to think about again: Mascot camel toe. Cross-posted at the all-new Salad Spinner Tumbleblog....

Solo encores have fallen out of favor in the opera. Fairly common in the 19th century, the practice fell out favor when opera became more “serious.”

Buzz killer.

The Met has explicitly banned solo encores for much of the 20th century. In fact, the only one that has been documented was in 1994 (but we’ll get to that in a moment).

14 years later, history was made at the Met when Juan Diego Florez performed a solo encore of the challenging tenor aria “Ah! Mes Amis.” Filled with high C’s this “tenor tester” brought the house to its knees and provided a thrilling moment for all opera lovers. The challenging role is said to launch tenor’s careers at the Met and is credited as being the “star-making” role of Luciano Pavarotti (but we’ll get to that in a moment).

Juan Diego Florez currently stars with Natalie Dessay in a new production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has said that there would be no encore ban on his watch, to make opera “as entertaining and exciting for the audience as it can be.”

Cool.

So back to that 1994 solo encore – any guesses? It was Luciano Pavarotti, singing the second-act tenor aria in Tosca.

If you can name the aria – I have two tickets for you to the Friday night or Sunday matinee performance of Opera Tampa’s Tosca.

-Kari G.

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I fought watching LOST for a good long time. I really racked it up to being a bad combination of Survivor and a bad night time soap. Pretty People On An Island. I found this post back from 2006 that in brief explains how I got into it and caught up.

My most recent show-I-fought-but-am-now-hooked-on is the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. That's easily become my favorite show on TV, another in as a friend of mine says is "TV for smart people."

Trivia: Michael Emerson, who plays Ben on LOST was living in my hometown of Jacksonville when I was in high school. I worked with him at Jacksonville Actors Theater and got to watch him do things like A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild. He also provided an eery, sinister soundscape to a production of MacBeth we did in the park.

Michael was easily the best actor in town, and was simply brilliant. A fairly gentle, if eccentric, quiet guy - I'd be surprised if he even knew who I was from the rest of the throng of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts students that crowded JAT back in the day, doing whatever task we could just to be involved in a professional show. I had known Michael had moved to New York at one time, but then after years of not hearing anything from him assumed his star had never quite reached the firmament, which was sad to me. Another friend of mine once said when it didn't appear Michael would "make it" - it gave us all very little hope than any of us ever could - Michael was a the best actor we knew.

And it easily took me a few episodes once Ben had been introduced before I even recognized him, but when I did it him me like a ton of bricks.

Needless to say I am extremely stoked to have the show coming back as of tonight.

A thing I always try to impress upon my non-Lostie friends is that the show really is quite clever, and quite smart. The fusion of philosophy, theory, science, literature and sociology can get pretty compelling. Take a look at just the appearances/references of major literary works in the show, it's pretty dense. Of course I don't think you need to know those books to get the show (just looking at ABCs ratings v our literacy rate ...), but they certainly give you some clues as to what's possibly going on or where things may possibly go. In some instances, the show has actually encouraged me to go back and dig something out to try to get a better handle on an aspect of LOST's story.

Haven't managed to get hooked on the show yet? Start from the beginning. That's what DVDs are for. By the time you get caught up you'll likely be waiting with the rest of us for what's going to happen next season.

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Read this:

"Gas prices are rising for many reasons, including oil's record run. Light, sweet crude for May delivery rose to a new trading record of $119.90 before retreating to settle up $1.89 at a record $119.37 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract expired after the Nymex closed, which contributed to its spike higher as investors scrambled to square bets. June crude futures, which now become the focus of trading, rose $1.44 to settle at $118.07 a barrel, nearly $2 shy of the $120 level." Drudge Report.com

It's bad enough that the speculators drove prices of houses up to where a "starter home" in Tampa cost $700,000 but now they are really ruining our lives. Trading should be suspended on oil. period. The economic impact is not worth it.

Since getting Blue (my creative name for the Yaris -- it's all about efficiency, and "Blue" is one syllable shorter ;-) ...my goal has been to average 40 miles per gallon. The EPA rating for this car is less than that for highway driving. But with some conservative driving techniques (see, I can use the C word in a positive way :) ...I figured that I should be able to beat the estimates.

I'm not doing hardcore hypermiling, but I am doing easy acceleration, shifting at 2000 RPM, turning the car off if sitting at a stoplight ...sensible things. Given that I share the ride to work with a colleague several days a week, have Shirley in the car with me various other times, and my daily commute is a mix of city/hwy, with some stop and go mixed in there ...I'm happy to report that yesterday's fill-up revealed 40.01 mpg.

This is, of course, not as good as taking mass transit - as was easy in the Pacific Northwest. And nothing beats the low impact of riding a bike or telecommuting. I do hope to get back to telecommuting a couple of days a week in the near future. But for now, I'm happy that I've reached one goal, and my American footprint on the earth, while still quite large compared to most other areas of the world, is getting better. The next goal is 41 mpg :)

There is a human rights crisis in Florida's fields. Farm laborers are being paid poverty wages while working long hours without overtime pay. There is even physical abuse and wage fraud by crew leaders, supervisors, and growers.

There is a simple solution. Workers have asked Burger King to pay just one penny more per pound for tomatoes and ensure that the increase is passed on to tomato pickers in the form of increased wages. While other fast food corporations have already agreed to this small change, Burger King has so far refused to help workers out of poverty.

Sign the petition today and stand up for workers.

Our friends at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have been championing farm laborers' rights for years. We worked with them to take on McDonalds and Taco Bell and won.

We'll win this one, too.

Wow. Just, wow. Err. Umm. Yeah.

Additional casting has been announced for the New York Philharmonic's upcoming production of Camelot.

Newcomers to the starry company include stage and screen star Stacy Keach, who will star in the national tour of Frost/Nixon (coming to TBPAC next season!), as Merlyn, King Arthur's tutor; and Erin Morley, a member of The Metropolitan Opera's Lindermann Young Artist Development Program, as Nimue, the nymph who lures Merlyn into her cave.

Keach and Morley join a cast that includes the previously announced Gabriel Byrne as King Arthur, Marin Mazzie as Guenevere, Christopher Lloyd as Pellinore, Marc Kudisch as Lionel, Christopher Sieber as Dinadan, Will Swenson as Sagramore, Nathan Gunn as Lancelot, Bobby Steggert as Mordred and Fran Drescher as Morgan le Fey.

The semi-staged performances of Lerner & Loewe's Camelot will play Avery Fisher Hall May 7-10.

PBS' Live from Lincoln Center series will broadcast the May 8 performance, which is scheduled to begin at 8 PM ET.

In Camelot, according to press notes, "idealistic King Arthur longs to create a perfectly principled kingdom, but sees his dream undone by a tragic love triangle involving Queen Guenevere and his best friend Lancelot. In this thoroughly engaging production, the medieval monarch's vision — a place where 'violence is not strength, and compassion is not weakness' — speaks to our time and for all time."

Camelot — featuring music by Frederick Loewe and book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner — originally opened at Broadway's Majestic Theatre in Dec. 1960, playing 873 performances before closing Jan. 5, 1963. The premiere company included Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet, Robert Coote, John Cullum and Roddy McDowall. The classic Lerner and Loewe score boasts such tunes as "If Ever I Would Leave You," "I Loved You Once in Silence," "Follow Me," "I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight" and the title tune.

Stacy Keach has appeared on Broadway in Danton's Death, The Country Wife, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, King Lear, Indians (Tony nomination), Deathtrap, Solitary Confinement and The Kentucky Cycle. The actor won a Golden Globe Award for his performance in the TV miniseries "Hemingway," and his numerous screen credits also include "Mike Hammer," "Fat City," "End of the Road" and "Titus."

(edited from material from Playbill.com)

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A local paper asked me to write a few words for each of the three major candidates, as if they were being sworn in as President on Inauguration Day.

This is what I sent them:

John McCain: "They said the nation wouldn't support an old man out of touch with reality. They said people would reject my plan to spend 100 more years in Iraq and eventually invade the rest of the world. They wrote me off when I chose Dick Cheney as my running mate, saying it showed an unwillingness to break with the Bush administration. But we showed them, didn't we, Dicky? Four more years!"

Hillary Clinton:"I did not get here on my own. Pioneers such as Jannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, and Hattie Carraway, the first woman elected to the Senate, paved the way. Heck, even Nancy Pelosi played a part. Our victory is the result of their hard work and sacrifice. Of course, they never had to campaign with an opinionated man who can't keep his hands to himself, but enough about James Carville. Maybe I do deserve some credit."

President Barack Obama: "Today we begin to move our country forward. All over this nation, people have been crying out for change. We must come together to build a better tomorrow. But first things first. Jesse, Al, Clarence, where you at? Let's get fabulous up in this piece."

The editor thought the last part was racist ("Ummm, I made it clear that he should be President. How is that racist?") but anyway, I rewrote it and to my surprise they published it yesterday.

Barack Obama: "All over this nation, people have made a choice between today and yesterday; with great hope and enthusiasm they have chosen the future over the past. To that end, it is my hope that in the future Dick Cheney takes George Bush on a few hunting trips and that Ted Kennedy drives them. Vice President Clinton, you feelin' me?"

Mark Sharpe, a Republican Hillsborough County Commissioner, may be just the kind of rail support our area needs. Even if not, make way anyway, because Mark Sharpe is demanding progress.

But that was before I moved to Colorado Springs.

My community actually voted for this guy.

Where are all the Republican pundits who pounced on Obama for saying that Pennsylvania voters are bitter? Why aren't they condemning a truly elitist remark?

Then there's this - a musical about life in The Springs.

"The things people laughed at in New York were not at all the things that they laughed at in Colorado Springs," Ackerman said. "When I said, 'Every day I pray to Jesus in my car on my way to work,' people in New York laughed at that. But in Colorado, people were like, 'Yeah, I do that, too.' "

While the rise of evangelism isn't new to Coloradans, Blake thinks "This Beautiful City" will deliver a bigger shock to a New York audience.

"That's because I am a New York liberal, and I do think this piece is frightening. Just the idea that this rise in evangelicalism is not contained to Colorado Springs. It's spreading. And it's creeping into various parts of all our lives without our even realizing it. So it is actually quite threatening."

You might be thinking, "What's so embarrassing about that?"

Right. Well. You don't live here.

OK so I’m writing this on the Stonegauge as those who regularly stop by will see. I’m also testing out a Wordpress/Myspace bridge to see if I can post from my Wordpress blog onto my Myspace blog. Lets see what happens eh?

I was at the Sweet Bay supermarket getting some linguine and red clam sauce for my dinner. When I was in line there was a conversation going on about the current state of our economy and things in general. The man that seemed to be doing all the talking was convinced that the reason gas is so high is the environmentalist won't allow them to build refineries anymore. That may be true.

Will Rogers once said that everything he knows he read in the newspapers. I read in the newspaper that the oil companies are setting record profits in the billions. If that is the case, then things are Rosy and what would be the incentive for them to change anything?

I mean, I keep hearing that there is more oil in Alaska then Saudi Arabia. True? If so since the government is not in the oil extraction business (contrary to urban myth about war for oil) why would the oil companies go up there and get it. They would have no incentive to do anything other than what they are doing now. In the meantime gas will go up and we cab drivers will become extinct like the dinosaur wine that the yuppies are putting in their SUVs because nobody in the country is willing to make any kind of a sacrifice.

Hell, why do you think the Adkins diet was so popular? Along comes this doctor who tells people that they can lose weight by pigging out on steak and lobster and cheese and its "all you can eat" Damn! sounds good..just like my linguine and red clam sauce...yum.

Serious folks I am old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter was prez and we had the oil shortage. Folks back then just started driving Toyota's and Nissan and all kinds of small cars.  The rumor then was that tankers had dropped anchor off the horizon and were waiting for the price to go up so they could come in make a killing. No George Bush was not the master-mind behind that. For a guy that is supposed to be so dumb, he does get credit for a bunch of cleaver stuff.

Oh, this photo was taken 5 days ago...the price is 20 cents more!

This happened last week, but I wanted to run it today to show where my support is at.




Any leader who can reference historical figures one day and Jay-Z the next...




is my kind of candidate.

To my Pennsylvania peeps, don't forget to vote!

Here's a video of interviews about the making of Turtle Island String Quartet's 2008 Grammy Award-winning album A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.

TISQ plays Ferguson Hall on Saturday night!



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An ode to Earth Day, and the role HART can play in making it a meaningful one.

We've talked about this locally, but in Charlotte North Carolina it's actually happening.

The following comes from a reader. I saw what he's talking about too, but (to date) have been unable to learn anything more about it. Please chime in if you know more:

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I wanted to get something out there on the blog. Has anyone seen the big yellow sign on the side of the Verizon building at the corner of Hillsborough and Florida Ave? I have tried to read it driving by and it says something about an application to build an “air pollution source”. Sounds like something we should get some more details on.

Charles Haynie
Tampa Street Market

You know, I wrote a bitter remark about the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority’s web site and local mass transit a few weeks ago, and I gave a bit of a pass to PSTA after I figured out their Trip Planner and how to make it work. I ordered a couple of day passes in order to [...]