The Queen's Gospel

Last week my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing Julia Fordham, possessor of one of the world's dazzling voices. It's rare when she comes to the northeastern U.S. As my wife pointed out we are spoiled as witness bearers. Such epic singing in such an intimate setting. It is a voice famous in all respects except fame and I must assume that Julia decided a long time ago not to perform for that fickle guest.

On this tour she has the backing of a piano, drum and bass trio that catch the elliptical notes that she sends into orbit. Their backing vocals are tight without sounding too sessiony or pre-cooked. The playing is attentive, never indulgent, and surprisingly original. For instance we were treated to the first ever drum-fill pounded out on the palms of the drummer. That's right. He clapped through the break.

As good as these arrangements and executions the road to our mesmerizing trances is the instrument of Julia. She snaps, and squeezes, and limbos, and bellys and flirts in and out of diagonals and loopings and motions only as lovely as the sounds pouring out of her. As classy as her elegance as a performer she is equally engaging as an entertainer. The musical presence is operatic but the jokes swivel out from the bar stool. The voice is precious but Julia is not. Her stories are grounded in a rapport that only a theater major who happens to be your drinking buddy could possibly stage (-- and pull off as she did when her microphone drooped out of range on her opening number).

The other improbable force at play when you take in a Julia Fordham show is just how broad a reach of genres her tonal scale covers. She is a category of one and I'm no less stumped trying to name it than the last time she played in Boston. Gospel, folk, blues, pop ... every style is transformed by her lucid flow, beguiling charm, and exquisite timbre.

Please visit her Myspace page. And if you're fortunate enough pay her a personal visit should she grace a venue near you.

The Queen's Gospel

Last week my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing Julia Fordham, possessor of one of the world's dazzling voices. It's rare when she comes to the northeastern U.S. As my wife pointed out we are spoiled as witness bearers. Such epic singing in such an intimate setting. It is a voice famous in all respects except fame and I must assume that Julia decided a long time ago not to perform for that fickle guest.

On this tour she has the backing of a piano, drum and bass trio that catch the elliptical notes that she sends into orbit. Their backing vocals are tight without sounding too sessiony or pre-cooked. The playing is attentive, never indulgent, and surprisingly original. For instance we were treated to the first ever drum-fill pounded out on the palms of the drummer. That's right. He clapped through the break.

As good as these arrangements and executions the road to our mesmerizing trances is the instrument of Julia. She snaps, and squeezes, and limbos, and bellys and flirts in and out of diagonals and loopings and motions only as lovely as the sounds pouring out of her. As classy as her elegance as a performer she is equally engaging as an entertainer. The musical presence is operatic but the jokes swivel out from the bar stool. The voice is precious but Julia is not. Her stories are grounded in a rapport that only a theater major who happens to be your drinking buddy could possibly stage (-- and pull off as she did when her microphone drooped out of range on her opening number).

The other improbable force at play when you take in a Julia Fordham show is just how broad a reach of genres her tonal scale covers. She is a category of one and I'm no less stumped trying to name it than the last time she played in Boston. Gospel, folk, blues, pop ... every style is transformed by her lucid flow, beguiling charm, and exquisite timbre.

Please visit her Myspace page. And if you're fortunate enough pay her a personal visit should she grace a venue near you.

Animals are Panicking (we spook easy)

I'm not sure it's a safe distance. But there's something about the cognitive impairments of outsiders like me that can score a ringside arrangement at the main event -- the end of wealth as we know it.

We feel no pain -- only wonder that we have the season box all to ourselves, reclining in seats that couldn't be scalped in markets gone by. The anxieties of looming job losses, spiraling health costs, and threadbare necessities? That's garden variety stress. But the anxiety as a flashpoint for pain? That can only be suffered by a "player" -- someone having financial self-destiny wrested away by nothing more diabolical or mysterious than uncertainty -- the fear of not knowing what's next.

Even spectators like me get that the asking price is under water. How far the mighty markdowns have fallen. How shallow the argument that market forces were meritocracies. That globalization tamed Darwinian impulses and imposed its own self-correcting cycles, capable of absorbing bubbles, and feeding new safe havens for tomorrow's betting pools ... um ... I mean hedge funds.

The spectacle? It's the late, great 2008 global meltdown. Even when the parachutes won't open and the main attractions have long since stampeded for the exits I can't take my gawking eyes off the stage of our sub-prime time together. So trickle-down was more convincing as a theory. So rising prosperity did not lift all boats.

And about us being in it together? It depends more on how you define who "us" is.

Certainly the panic is not based on the manufacturing arm of the treasury. This is the new century. There is no tangible or electronic material that can't be over-supplied into distribution. Liquidity is not the problem in our most fluid circumstances. The problem is that mutual self-interest isn't holding that liquidity like it used to. Instead we're squirreling away our acorns in mattresses that are about to inflate even faster than the gas prices on escape routes from low elevation areas.

Speaking of evacuations how must those folks in Galveston be feeling knowing that their town was wiped off the map twice -- first by Hurrican Ike and then by this great capital flight of universal distrust.

I think what fascinates and saddens the most is how this calamity was not due to natural causes, or an act of war or terrorism, or a scarcity of some precious resource. In the war room of foreseeable doom scenarios this one wouldn't reach the radar. Menacing foreign powers are doing as poorly as us and oil at $88 / barrel doesn't even elicit a Bronx cheer?

We are not made of sterner stuff. We cave at the instant the alarm sounds. We have no more spine than the politicians we indulge to shield us from what we need to understand: That $700 billion rescue package? That's $700 billion we have yet to be taxed on goods and services not yet produced. But what's another breatheless emergency on top of another cash infusion?

Here's one stab at defining the future of certainty by a dumb, numb bystander: Until we're as certain about the "we" as the "it" in the "we're all in this together, we're not getting anywhere.

Animals are Panicking (we spook easy)

I'm not sure it's a safe distance. But there's something about the cognitive impairments of outsiders like me that can score a ringside arrangement at the main event -- the end of wealth as we know it.

We feel no pain -- only wonder that we have the season box all to ourselves, reclining in seats that couldn't be scalped in markets gone by. The anxieties of looming job losses, spiraling health costs, and threadbare necessities? That's garden variety stress. But the anxiety as a flashpoint for pain? That can only be suffered by a "player" -- someone having financial self-destiny wrested away by nothing more diabolical or mysterious than uncertainty -- the fear of not knowing what's next.

Even spectators like me get that the asking price is under water. How far the mighty markdowns have fallen. How shallow the argument that market forces were meritocracies. That globalization tamed Darwinian impulses and imposed its own self-correcting cycles, capable of absorbing bubbles, and feeding new safe havens for tomorrow's betting pools ... um ... I mean hedge funds.

The spectacle? It's the late, great 2008 global meltdown. Even when the parachutes won't open and the main attractions have long since stampeded for the exits I can't take my gawking eyes off the stage of our sub-prime time together. So trickle-down was more convincing as a theory. So rising prosperity did not lift all boats.

And about us being in it together? It depends more on how you define who "us" is.

Certainly the panic is not based on the manufacturing arm of the treasury. This is the new century. There is no tangible or electronic material that can't be over-supplied into distribution. Liquidity is not the problem in our most fluid circumstances. The problem is that mutual self-interest isn't holding that liquidity like it used to. Instead we're squirreling away our acorns in mattresses that are about to inflate even faster than the gas prices on escape routes from low elevation areas.

Speaking of evacuations how must those folks in Galveston be feeling knowing that their town was wiped off the map twice -- first by Hurrican Ike and then by this great capital flight of universal distrust.

I think what fascinates and saddens the most is how this calamity was not due to natural causes, or an act of war or terrorism, or a scarcity of some precious resource. In the war room of foreseeable doom scenarios this one wouldn't reach the radar. Menacing foreign powers are doing as poorly as us and oil at $88 / barrel doesn't even elicit a Bronx cheer?

We are not made of sterner stuff. We cave at the instant the alarm sounds. We have no more spine than the politicians we indulge to shield us from what we need to understand: That $700 billion rescue package? That's $700 billion we have yet to be taxed on goods and services not yet produced. But what's another breatheless emergency on top of another cash infusion?

Here's one stab at defining the future of certainty by a dumb, numb bystander: Until we're as certain about the "we" as the "it" in the "we're all in this together, we're not getting anywhere.

Twitter: Thought Bubbles Bursting into Messy Spaghetti

I've been on Twitter now for the past two weeks and here are my initial, unvarnished, naive impressions:

* I did not "get" that Twitter Search is deliberately bad and the whole point is to slog through the profiles of virtual passer-bys
* The effect of the speech bubble ambience is directly from the film Wings of Desire
* I am still hopeful that IM communion can happen but refuse to tether a Blackberry

On point 3 I tried the following statement:

Boston MA "days ago"

The parenthetical was designed to filter out casual or dormant twits and attract the more Type A participants. It doesn't work. So I qualified the location with...

consulting
jobs
investigations

Verdict: stemming is turned on.

One of my BU students is looking for a local handwriting analyst. I'm too focused on the 50 Boston area strangers I'm now "following" to even attempt a Googling of her request.

Even if the bubbles don't expand to include an actual dialog I can see the value around the patterns:

* Over-representations of non-Geek networkers (especially PR)
* Ability to store strings-of-consciousness for reuse in some future recipe
* Shear gestalt of surveilling the mental maelstroms of the twittering mobs on a "want" to know basis

Need-to-know-basis need not apply.

Twitter: Thought Bubbles Bursting into Messy Spaghetti

I've been on Twitter now for the past two weeks and here are my initial, unvarnished, naive impressions:

* I did not "get" that Twitter Search is deliberately bad and the whole point is to slog through the profiles of virtual passer-bys
* The effect of the speech bubble ambience is directly from the film Wings of Desire
* I am still hopeful that IM communion can happen but refuse to tether a Blackberry

On point 3 I tried the following statement:

Boston MA "days ago"

The parenthetical was designed to filter out casual or dormant twits and attract the more Type A participants. It doesn't work. So I qualified the location with...

consulting
jobs
investigations

Verdict: stemming is turned on.

One of my BU students is looking for a local handwriting analyst. I'm too focused on the 50 Boston area strangers I'm now "following" to even attempt a Googling of her request.

Even if the bubbles don't expand to include an actual dialog I can see the value around the patterns:

* Over-representations of non-Geek networkers (especially PR)
* Ability to store strings-of-consciousness for reuse in some future recipe
* Shear gestalt of surveilling the mental maelstroms of the twittering mobs on a "want" to know basis

Need-to-know-basis need not apply.

Use Case: RSS Readers as News Radars

Here's a current use case to track "events on the ground" through Feed Demon. There have been reported instances in the media recently of attempts to confuse or intimidate potential voters, particularly new or youth voters. College age voters are traditionally the most under-represented part of the electorate.

Whether it's due to cynicism or naivete a third more concrete factor (inexperience) makes this group prone to believing falsehoods and misleading statements aimed at creating doubt about their residential status. Ahem. So participation in their democracy will jeopardize their financial aid or even come back to haunt their parents during next year's tax season. What could be more American than not voting?

One way to monitor attempts at voter suppression around college campuses is to use a broadly descriptive search statement on Google News:

location:nh college students registration election

You'll find a piece of syntax snuck in here. It helps us focus exclusively on content sources on Google News originating from the Granite State. New Hampshire is my location of choice as the nearest swing state to me with area colleges signifying the swingiest of voting blocs.

You'll also note that the semantics of this search statement are not in anyway prejudicial or skewed towards a certain outcome. Any attempt to tune this search at the outset would overly constrain the result set (n=109) as of yesterday's test run. In other words a more effective content analysis occurs by introducing results-based logic once the feed appears in Feed Demon.

That's where you can construct "Watches" to pull instances of terms like:

* suppression
* fraud
* misleading
* confusion, etc.

...from the New Hampshire tracking folder where these hits reside.

Don't forget to sample several of the more questionable hits. They will acquaint you with terms you hadn't considered or steer you away from outcomes that are clearly off-the-mark from your search objectives.

The second stage of tweaking your RSS reader as news radar is to harvest the feeds sprouting from the sources included in your search results. Gathering up the list is easier than confirming each source's deployment or policy regarding RSS. The range is huge! Some papers package their outputs by sections of the paper. Some don't. Some dispense with RSS altogether, figuring that it will only cannibalize their beleaguered media empires.

There are a couple of alternatives to site hopping in search of the bright, orange RSS icon. One work-around is to include the inurl: syntax in the regular Google web search:

inurl:rss OR inurl:xml [insert semantics from Google News search] intitle:new intitle:hampshire

This workaround should get you a pre-confirmed list of feeds although it doesn't guarantee that they originate from ground zero live-free-or-eat-granite country.

Another way is to work from the colleges themselves as news sources. The very first hit I pulled yesterday yielded this list of Students for McCain backers by their academic institutions:

State Co-Chairs

Greg Boguslavsky -- Dartmouth College
Shaun Doherty -- Rivier College

University Chairs

Lianna French -- New England College
Joe Doiron -- New England College
Brendan Bickford -- New Hampshire Technical Institute
Trevor Chandler -- Plymouth State University
Brittany Puleo -- Rivier College

Julie Kraus -- Southern New Hampshire University
Regina Federico -- St. Anselm College
Allison Krause -- University of New Hampshire
Brandon Mancuso -- Franklin Pierce College
Dasha Bushmakin -- Keene State College
Ryan Dorris -- Daniel Webster College

In closing the follow-up would be to Google each college with the inurl syntax, filtering the pages that can be used to build your tracking folder in Feed Demon.