Gary McGath


About Gary McGath

I am a freelance technical writer in Plaistow, NH.

Auburn and Troy, NH: ICE hazard, seek alternate routes

The towns of Auburn and Troy, New Hampshire, have set up “task force agreements” with ICE. According to the Boston Globe, they let the local police ” interrogate people suspected of being present in the country illegally and arrest those accused of violating immigration laws.” The ICE standard of “suspicion” includes looking foreign or speaking with a foreign accent. Accusation (by whom?) is an abnormally low bar for arrest; probable cause is normally required. The Troy police have made at least a dozen arrests for ICE. The towns of Colebrook and Carroll, in the northern part of the state, also have entered agreements with ICE, as have the New Hampshire State Police.
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Comparing four Beethoven recordings

I’ve never been very good at noticing differences in performances of classical pieces and picking a favorite. Occasionally one really jumps out, like the Zurich Tonhalle’s recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but usually the differences are subtle. It takes careful listening even to notice that there are differences. As an exercise, I picked out four recordings of a piece I know well and listened to them repeatedly to compare them. There really are differences.

The piece I picked was Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. The recordings were:
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Accentuating the positive when opposing ICE

Recently Avelo Airlines announced it would no longer provide ICE with flights to transport abductees. CEO Andrew Levy wrote: “We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy. … The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.” Avelo didn’t admit that negative publicity motivated its decision, but businesses never like to say such things.
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Update for subscribers

Newsletters are popular these days. To keep up, I’ve changed the settings on this blog to send the full text of each post to email subscribers.

Let me know if this causes any problems.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can in the sidebar, under “Get all posts by email.”

Update: A post which appeared this morning is truncated in email. That may be because I scheduled it before changing the settings. (I almost always schedule my posts for early in the morning; it makes my posting more consistent and gives me a chance to think about them.) We’ll see what happens next time. Also, I’ve noticed that links in an emailed post go through WordPress and are uniquely tied to the recipient. If you want more privacy in the links you click on, open the blog in a private window.