One of the joys of late winter early spring is the incremental expansion of the evening light. It begins to last longer minute by minute with each day or so, until one evening, say, in mid to late February, you say to yourself, "I feel the light gaining, it's longer now, and I was unaware of it constantly gathering, little by little. But here we are." You feel the large universal movements; a slow, steady, yet also rapid, widening release.

And then this daylight savings comes along and ruins all of it. Robs you of all the cherished drip drops of gathering time. Oh, you're wanting more daylight hours are you? Well, we can fix that for you - yes sir!

And just like that, like some stupid fix-it team followed by a brass band and baton twirlers comes running around the corner and uproots the whole damn thing, and then parades away, but not before leaving you with a credit card of ten grand and all you have to do is dial the number and you're good to go.

Whoever you are, (Saruman) you take away the struggle and the slow victory and thus you enslave us.

Stop it with daylight savings. End the five day work week. Make it four. Reduce the work day hours. Make them five or six.

Is Game of Thrones any good?

I have my serious doubts.

I have been hounded with two questions for quite some time. One of them is, "When are you going to get a cell phone?"

The other one is, "You haven't watched a single episode of Game of Thrones?!"

"You need to get a cell phone."

"You have to watch Game of Thrones."

And so on.

So I did get a cell phone - not through purchasing, but just by waiting, hand-me-down from family. Now I just need to get a SIM card for it, and use of the cell phone would only be for certain, strict, bare minimum functions.

Of course, getting that SIM card for the phone...LOL.

Why not just stick the SIM card in the wrist and be done with it?

And I did watch an episode of Game of Thrones! Not because I wanted to, but because I was at a family due, some weeks ago, and they were chomping to watch Game of Thrones, so I watched it with them, knowing I would be lost for not having seen anything previous - though I could gather from the one episode what the refrains are throughout the series.

The main thing that struck me while watching it was, "Why are they constantly talking in severe gravel undertones like Christian Bale's Batman? Are they trying to ruin their vocal cords or something? Huh, this is kind of bizarre."

Aside from that, I'm pretty sure the whole series is sort of plodding, second rate solemnity and generic neo-Medievalist storytelling punctuated with Professional Grade, five-star fornication that conveniently produces no babies.

And I saw from the trailer that the series has dragons. From what I could tell, they are all evil dragons.

"What", said I, "You mean there's no good luck dragons in this show? That is most unfortunate."

Probably the greatest opera of the Twentieth Century

Being around five hours long there are many following acts along with the between the act knee plays to be found on youtube. Also, because of its length, the composer Philip Glass encouraged people in the audience to walk about if they wanted - say, to go to the bathroom or whatever. This aspect makes the opera have something of the spirit of ambient music: something that's there like a surrounding to which one is not supposed to give too intense a listening attention. Which is actually a different kind of attention - not inattentiveness.

This seems to me the future of music. I remember reading about the Era of Peace in which a kind of ambient music will permeate the very atmosphere, without speakers and electronics. And people will be able to compose it somehow and it will be sort of ongoing in the rhythm with people's day to day lives, but not at all in an enslaving way as though one wouldn't be able to "turn it off". Like a breaking free from the rigid constraints of written bars and so forth, it will be in union with the music of the spheres. Not papered away in a book until it gets performed. What's interesting is how this ambient-leaning way which encourages spontaneity, like jazz, brings music closer to what liturgical music does, whereas the classical notion of traditional forms gets stuffy and musty and falls into meaningless decadence.