Bear with me for a brag moment; on Saturday, the ETSBOA Jr. Clinic performance was held at Carson Newman College. Gamma made the “blue” orchestra — the more advanced of the two — and performed stunningly. At least it sounded that way to me, although the rational side of me knows that there’s no way in the world I could pick out the sound of one viola in ten, amidst all the other instruments as well.

Oak Ridge schools were well-represented in this event, in which students are selected via a grueling tryout of scales, a prepared piece, and a sight-reading segment. Yeah, the orchestra is not a mandatory program, but it’s one that has paid off over the years. Early music instruction has been shown to boost academic potential through the creation of new neural pathways… the improvements show up in everything from math scores to improved reading and written expression.

My piano teacher always tried to tell me that music and math are closely related; I thought she was full of it until I had to learn binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbering in college.

Music is simply a graphic expression of octal numbering.

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On the way to Carson-Newman, I tweaked the WordPress PHP code that controls this page, so that the address for the memorial fund remains in the sidebar. I wasn’t sure until today that it would work, but it did. If you’ve followed this story and wondered what you could do to help this family through an extremely difficult time, there’s an option.

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Saturday evening, we dropped by a 50th birthday bash for one of the rare, lucid contributors to the Oak Ridger Forums (Regular Guy). RG hasn’t posted anything in the longest time, but I know now he’s been trolling lurking (thanks for the correction, Joel) since he made mention of the treatment I’ve received there lately.

Truthfully, I’ve been stopping by there less and less frequently. For a couple of years now, I’ve thought that it was a reasonable way to answer questions and address issues about the school system, but I’ve almost concluded that it’s dominated by a few trolls who aren’t really interested in the truth.

That’s a shame. This city deserves better, and that forum was at one time a pretty good place for discussion of public issues.

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Just a few minutes ago as I was finishing up a pot of chicken and dumplings for supper, I heard John Kerry complaining that the Republicans hijacked his “joke gone bad” (stay in school or you’ll end up in Iraq), then just moments later, ran across a story in the Commercial Appeal where Democrat Charlie Rangel is proposing to reinstate the draft.

Trying to make Kerry’s bad joke come true? This seems like an incredibly bad idea — with the all-volunteer military, we’re served by those who choose to do so. I can’t imagine how bad it would be if they took those who didn’t want to go, and aren’t up to the task.