Personal

Accompanying Son of the Sheik

This entry was posted in Music Personal and tagged music silent movies on by

The next silent movie which I’ll accompany on Twitch will be the 1926 Son of the Sheik on February 14, “Valentino’s Day,” at 8 PM Eastern US time. Following an old tradition, I’ll precede it with a short, Young Mr. Jazz, starring Harold Lloyd. If all goes well, I’ll have some new equipment to improve the sound.

Son of the Sheik was Rudolf Valentino’s last movie. He died shortly after its first, limited public showings. It was based on a novel that had no connection to his earlier movie, The Sheik, but was retrofitted to be a sequel. Valentino plays two title roles. He’s the Sheik as well as his son Ahmed. They sometimes appear in the same shot thanks to double photography.

Spoilers ahead.

(more…)

Accompanying Phantom of the Opera

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged music silent movies on by

Today I accompanied the 1925 Phantom of the Opera at the Plaistow Public Library. It got a good audience for a small-town library, and I got a lot of compliments. I really want to write down some of the musical tricks I used to improvise the music. It may lose everyone reading this; if you’re confused, just skip it and go on to the next post. I’m going to dive into technical musical language, because it’s the only way to explain some of the points.

(more…)

Harvard groups’ endorsement of murder

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Harvard on by

As a former employee of the Harvard University Libraries, I have to say something about the groups there who excused the mass murder of innocent Jewish civilians. The Reuters article says:

A coalition of 34 Harvard students organizations said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” following decades of occupation, adding that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

Saying that the Israeli government is 100% to blame implies that the people who committed the slaughter are blameless. That’s an endorsement of murder.

I’m disgusted though not surprised. We’re talking about a university that booted a dean for being a defense attorney in a criminal case. Harvard should not suppress the groups making these statements — it’s already bad enough that FIRE has given it an “abysmal” rating for free speech — but it should distance itself from them in the most emphatic terms. It has failed to do this.

This entry was posted in Personal on by | Open »

My email addresses on mcgath.com are temporarily not working. My outgoing mail was all being blocked, and HostGator was totally useless at helping me with the problem, so I’ve migrated my mail to Dreamhost. The DNS setup had a mistake, which I just recently fixed, and it will take a while to propagate through the Internet. At the moment I can send mail but not receive it.

Hopefully this fix will get everything working again. If you need to mail me and get a bounce, try again tomorrow. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Update: I’ve started getting email, so the problem appears to be fixed. There could still be glitches for a while, since not everybody in the world gets DNS updates at the same time.

Update 2: In the process of getting it working on Dreamhost, I determined that a major issue was a broken SPF record, which HostGator had created for me. The HostGator support people never recognized this issue, instead trying to put the blame on T-Mobile.

This blog is still on HostGator for the moment, because it isn’t broken and migrating a website is a pain. No promises either way for the future.

Thug threatens pro-China freedom activist — and me

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged China fandom Twitter on by

I’d wondered if China’s thugs would ever threaten me for all the posts I’ve made about the China Worldcon. Well, you know what they say: Be careful what you wish for, or you may live in interesting times. Before the sun came up this morning, I had my life threatened on Twitter. Since originally posting this, I’ve received new information and updated this post.

Let’s start at the beginning. In today’s news I read that one Xiaolei Wu was arrested for threatening violence against a pro-Chinese freedom activist. I did a search on Twitter to see what I could find about Xiaolei Wu and found a post by a person using that name. As we know all too well, names on Twitter prove nothing, but this person claimed to “represent the future of China” and was begging to the Chinese ambassador for help. I later learned that the holder of this account is an impersonator, so I was threatened, but as a bad joke and not by the same person who was arrested. Here’s the reply I got:
(more…)

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Internet on by | Open »

In case you’re interested, I’ve set up an account on Flipboard to post interesting links. You’re welcome to follow me.

Also, I’m taking a break from Twitter. This isn’t directly related to Elon Musk; I’m just not finding it very enjoyable these days. People use it to assert or insult rather than to inform.

This entry was posted in Personal on by | Open »

The period for this pledge has ended, and I have made the donations as promised. The album is still available.

This is off-topic from writing and more personal, but it’s a chance for you to support two worthwhile charities, so I hope no one will mind.

I currently have three albums up on Bandcamp. I don’t claim to be a musician of any distinction; they’re there for my friends, with payment optional. One of them is on the theme of The Magic Battery, so there’s a tenuous connection to my writing.

For the month of September, the net payments I get from Bandcamp for the latest album, Spontaneous Order, will go to Doctors without Borders. In addition, I’ve just announced that I’ll match whatever net payments I get during September 16-30 from any of my albums with a donation to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, to a cap of $250. Martha’s Vineyard is currently burdened with immigrants that Ron DeSantis dumped there with no warning, and MV Community Services seems to be the best-placed organization to deal with them.

You can download the albums for free or pay as little as one dollar. Even if you don’t like the music, you’ll have done some good.

To Hell with Twitter

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Twitter on by

I am furious. Therefore I will choose my words very carefully.

The ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad posted on Twitter: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” In context, he was cheering on the brutal murder of Samuel Paty. Twitter did not suspend his account and was slow to delete that tweet.

I responded with what I consider an appropriate level of outrage and called on Twitter to remove his account.

As a result, my Twitter account is now suspended. If Twitter went to the trouble of suspending an account as obscure as mine (524 followers, last I checked), it likely did the same to a lot of other people criticizing Mahathir Mohamad, though I don’t know.
(more…)