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constant stream of highly-compelling news
Wednesday, October 12 2016
[REDACTED]
The SQL class finally happened this afternoon, and it went very well. As expected, Te immediately grasped important concepts just from examples even when I didn't explain them. I didn't end up having to draw anything on a whiteboard. The key initial piece of information was an HTML export of the fundraising database from my Tableform tool. That export allows one to drag tables around with the relationships between them staying connected. By the end of our one-hour first lesson, we were already doing joins.
Meanwhile, there was a constant stream of news items about Donald Trump. Apparently his denial of ever doing the things he bragged about in the Pussy Tape was coming back to bite him. One woman after another who had encountered Trump in the way he described in that tape had had enough of his lies and were coming forward to confess he had done those things to them. The delay-free kiss, the immediate grab for the pussy. Those things. Trump (and even I) might've thought Trump did unexpectedly well on Sunday, but it was looking like that statement on Sunday had breached a seal that somehow held over all the months previously.
This evening I met up with Gretchen and our friends Jeff & Alana at the Station Bar in Woodstock. I found them, with Neville on a leash, waiting for their drinks at the bar. Eventually we had our drinks (I got a very good IPA, I forget which one) and moved to a table in a back room where the music from the speaker directly above us on the wall was decidedly too loud. (It played a mix of blues and Grateful-Dead-heavy classic rock.) I don't know what Gretchen and Alana discussed, since they were some distance away across the noise fog, but Jeff and I mostly talked about the crazy presidential campaign, now in its final month. Both of us admitted that the constant stream of highly-compelling news is keeping us from working on the things we're supposed to be working on.
The music blaring from the sound system (beginning with a song by Jethro Tull) got Jeff and I talking about the origins of our mutual interest in alternative rock, a path that began with exposure to prog-rock in the 1970s. Jeff grew up in Chicago and had broad exposure to various music sources, and would later become a music writer. In my case, though, I grew up isolated in rural Virginia with only radio as a source of musical exposure. I knew I didn't like the music of any of my friends, and only occasionally heard anything I liked on the radio. But when I did, I tended to obsess about it and seek more from the same band, sometimes saving up my meager income to buy vinyl albums. That was why, when I went off to college, my interests focused chiefly on Pink Floyd and the early Moody Blues (as well as a smattering of other prog-rock from the late 1960s and early 1970s). I wouldn't get into alternative rock until 1990 or so, after returning from college and setting up an antenna capable of picking up the small campus radio station (WXJM) at James Madison University 28 miles away, and even then I wasn't hooked until I heard them playing Syd Barrett.
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