HEY!!! Just a reminder, since I haven't shared one in a little while, that in addition to all the other places I share content, I also have a newsletter! And there's a new installment from just yesterday, a feature I call "And Now, a Photo", in which I share a photo of mine that might be older or maybe isn't one that I would feature on my Photo Gallery Instagram but which I still think is interesting or useful in some way. Check it out and subscribe! It's not just photography over there, after all. I have more coming! Wazzat? Oh yeah, the link. Here you go!

Here we have a student piece written by a young composer, when he was only 19 years of age. But not just any composer: it's 20th century Russian great Sergei Prokofiev. Prokofiev is, I admit, something of a tough nut for me. I don't always respond readily to his music, for one reason or another. But this piece grabbed me immediately, perhaps because it is to my ears a fascinating blend of lyric Romanticism and of atmospheric Impressionism. I hear a wild melding of Tchaikovsky and Ravel here, and that is absolutely amazing to me.

YouTube video by Katie Phang

The Wife and I just got back yesterday from a long weekend in Rochester, Ithaca, and the Finger Lakes. We have been going there more or less annually (we missed a couple of years because of reasons) s...

A traveler who was infected with the contagious disease was in Terminals B, C, D, F and E on the night of Sunday, Sep. 13.

Fifty-five is kind of a strange number, isn't it? It feels significant, but I'm damned if I can figure out why. It's not halfway to anything in particular. Maybe it's lingering from 55 being the upper speed limit on American roads for many years...and really, how did they choose that number, anyway? Why 55? Why not 50, or 60? How did they land on 55? It gave Mr. Hagar a nice rhyme for his classic song, sure...but I don't know why 55 other than that. (Maybe if I actually looked it up, there's a good reason.)

OK, here we go! We just got back from our annual trip to Ithaca for Apple Fest, and I also just turned another year older, so I'll get back in the swing with this, a Quiz. 1. If you were trapped in a TV universe for a month, what TV show would you choose? If I had to actually live in a teevee universe for a month? Am I actually hobnobbing with the cast, or am I just some Joe Schmo living there? Normally I'd take an easy way here with…

It's FALL, y'all! So here's a fall song. No, the leaves aren't turning yet, except for a single tree here and there where the color is starting to nibble around the edges...but Nat King Cole is never really out of season, is he?

I'm going to pause the exploration of Japanese composers for a bit, kind-of, because as I write this, the Autumnal Equinox is just under four hours away. The sun is scheduled to cross the equator at 8:05pm ET, and right now it's------4:12pm. So, for the next bunch of weeks, I'll be featuring autumnal music. I'll likely be doing this up until Halloween. But I don't have to make the transition super sharp! I can feature Japanese autumnal music! Composer Toru Takemitsu wrote a lot of music inspired by autumn; apparently this season fueled his musical imagination quite a bit.

As I write this, we are at T-minus 58 hours, 21 minutes, and a few seconds away from the Autumnal Equinox. This one has been a long time coming, folks, but it's COMING!!! This summer was, in terms of weather, rather unpleasant. We usually get our fair share of hot and humid here in the 716, though not so bad as the actual Eastern Seaboard and the cities of the Atlantic northeast. But what usually happens is a lot of low 80s, with some humidity, along with a few stretches here and there where the humidity spikes and we're into the 90s.

YouTube video by Forgotten Stars: the channel of Kelly Sedinger

I wanted to get back to Japanese music, but I didn't get a lot of the pre-listening done this week that I like to do when I'm presenting music I'm not familiar with, so this week I'm going with something I'm very familiar with...but still Japanese! This is a cue from Kiki's Delivery Service, music by the great Joe Hisaishi. It's called "A Town With an Ocean View". This is heard when young witch Kiki, on her first journey out into the real world, ends up in a city that's much larger than anything she's known before.

I was planning to take a break from Sunday Stealing this week, but I kind of like this format: it's ten statements and you indicate if they are true or false for you. So, here we go. I'm marking the TRUE ones in BOLD ITALICS. TRUE OR FALSE 1. I'm married. (Nearly 30 years, huzzah!) 2. I'm raising a teenager. (Nope, they are 27 now, so we're 7 years past the teenager point. But they have turned out amazingly well. I don't write about them here because it's their life and I don't think it's my place to chronicle it, but they have done a lot of amazing things the last several years to improve their life and explore who they are.

ALT: Kyoshi: Run Away! (Monty Python)

It's been a quarter-century since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. I barely know how to process that it's been that long. Over on Threads, someone asked these questions about the experience of that day, and I'll answer them here: 1. Where were you when you found out about 9/11? I was in my car, on my way to work. This was when I was working in pharmaceutical telesales, and my shift started at 9:30am. I got in my car and put on NPR, which was my habit at the time, and they were reporting on the breaking news that "an airplane" had struck one of the World Trade Center towers.

YouTube video by Rachel Maksy

We all need some Star Trek music, don't we?

Today is the 60th anniversary of Star Trek's first appearance on teevee. On this date in 1966, an episode called "The Man Trap" of a new science-fiction show aired, and I guess that at the time this seemed like just another airing of some new show. New shows arrive every year, most of which are completely forgotten eventually...but somehow that particular new show made enough of an impact that it lives on as a huge franchise, over half a century later. Most of the people involved with making that very first episode are gone now...but their memory endures through the legacy of this great show.

This one's easy, and it also falls into the FAB category, which I haven't utilized in a while. FAB stands for Film, Audio, Book...as in, what have you been watching, listening to, and reading of late. To Sunday Stealing we go! 1) What’s something you want to do before summer slips away? Sigh. You know what, folks? This summer wasn't great, in a lot of ways. The weather wasn't awful...but it still sucked. There are degrees of this, after all...but while we never really had that long stretch of low-90s, high humidity that usually stops summer dead in its tracks, it was never…

Ever wonder how life would turn out for you if you could literally be dropped into the live of any person ever? Well, there's a tool that lets you envision just that: Any Human Ever. History, let's face it, is a collection of stories. We walk around with a grab bag of anecdotes in our heads: Abraham Lincoln kept his papers in his top hat, Henry VIII's leg smelled terrible, Vikings didn't actually have horns on their helmets, and so on. For many of us, this set of stories is part factoid, part anecdote, and part moral arc.