Another catchall post.

I managed to fool the Apple Watch to get credit for 24 hours of Standing yesterday.

This morning I received the email to let me know that the $800.00 has been direct deposited into my checking account, though I shouldn’t expect to see it there for a couple days. I presume they mean business days. So Tuesday, I guess?

There’s a good article in the nytimes by Joshua Barone which argues that Stephen Sondheim Belongs in the Pantheon of American Composers. It’s worth a read, although there’s not really anything new for us confirmed Sondheim fans, and I do take exception to a couple things:

Sondheim’s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was both consistent and chameleonic, never more so than in “Sweeney,” which displays his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.

Aside from “Passion” (1994), it is Sondheim’s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, yet he bristled at the idea of “Sweeney” being called an opera or an operetta and once wrote that “when ‘Porgy and Bess’ was performed on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, it was an opera.” (That’s not true. It was always an opera, and played on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)

I hate that silly term “postmodern”. And when Sondheim was talking about whether or not Porgy was an opera, he was simply trying to define something that he knew was indefinable, so he used a cheeky definition. Apparently Barone has no sense of humor.

And finally, let me direct your attention to today’s edition of Electoral-Vote.com for December 15, 2023. Not only will it explain the title of this post, but there are excellent This Week in Schadenfreude and This Week in Freudenfreude as well as several other interesting items.