My snowy house

I admit, the amount of snow is kind of pathetic, but I have to celebrate what I have!

Snow in Goshen, Jan 2007

Streaming video and audio (or not)

The other day my friend Ryan, who works in the IT dept. at Goshen College, was complaining about the phenomenal amount of bandwidth people at the college were using to watch free streaming videos on YouTube.

Today at work, I was looking for some new songs to listen to and decided to see if I could find free streaming audio. As far as I can tell, there's no such thing. Yahoo has an extensive internet "radio station", but I can't choose a specific song to listen to. Ironically, I can find just about any song I want in video form, (and then just listen to it).

I can't help but marvel at the irony that the video, which takes more money to produce and uses more internet bandwidth, is easier to find than the audio.

Winter/Spring Art, 2007

I'm looking forward to a number of artistic endeavors over the next few months:

• mennosong has started rehearsing again, and we're planning to record another CD at the end of March (as well as perform a few concerts here and there).
• With New World Arts, I'm acting in the play Lysistrata, performing the weekends of March 9 and 16.
• Also with New World Arts, I'm participating in the 24/5 Film Festival this Saturday; I'm a camera operator for one of the five groups.
• Starting in April, I'm going to be working as an art assistant on the film Silk Trees, shooting in Goshen for 36 days.

In between all this, I'm still spending time with my wife, and learning to juggle :-)

Planting doubt

In the last few months I've encountered first a documentary film, then a question that made me double-take. On the surface they seemed innocent, or even positive, but both had an underlying implication of doubt that disturbed me.

The documentary film was An Inconvenient Truth. At face value, it seemed like a good and necessary documentary in the struggle to convince a brainwashed America that global warming is indeed real. But if Al Gore was arguing so vehemently, didn't that mean that it was possible that global warming wasn't real?

The Jan. 1, 2007 cover of Newsweek magazine asked (and I paraphrase) "Is America ready for a non-Caucasian or a female president?" I was horrified; asking the question seemed to imply that we weren't ready. How could a news magazine be so blatantly biased?

When Newsweek asks us if we're ready for a female president, or a documentary tries so hard to convince us of something, what impression are we ultimately left with? As our brains ponder the data, do they carefully separate the bias from the issue, or does everything meld into a smoky haze of indistinct memory....something about global warming being real or not....and something about America being racist and sexist....