I've been hit by a bad case of One Thing After Another for several weeks now, including a major year-end crunch at work complicated by an unanticipated and, if I may say so, not altogether reasonable deadline for one task. Those who read my Sunday journal before I started this blog will have seen the legend there: Written on Sunday, generally published by Monday night, sometimes Tuesday, hardly ever as late as Wednesday.I've been doing pretty well at getting it posted by Monday night for a while now, but this one is going to be Tuesday night. It's the next in the Liberal Conservative series. I didn't quite finish it last night and have not been able to spare a minute for it today.

Also, Music of the Week is coming back after the New Year, but is, as they say, on hiatus till then. And it's probably going to be Music of the Fortnight. I started it mainly because I enjoy opinionizing about music, but it had begun to take too much time, especially as I've only been writing about pop music, and the self-imposed requirement to listen to something at least three times before writing about it was crowding out other kinds of music. I may continue it as a weekly thing, but if I do I'll also include classical music. Thing is, I don't know that I have anything particularly useful to say about classical music.

I mean, I've been listening to the first two Beethoven piano sonatas. They're...um...really good.... See what I mean? I can discuss classical music in terms of general cultural and historical trends, but I know almost nothing technically, and can't generally tell the difference between one performance and another. My friend Robert, who can, rolls his eyes when I say the actual sonic quality of the recording itself makes a bigger difference to me than the performance. The Beethoven I've been listening to is on the ECM label, which generally provides the expensive Scotch of recording technology. Some piano player named Schiff, seems to hit all the notes right.