Improved

Reasons this year's Country Music 1/2 Marathon was better than last year's:

1. Last year's finishing time: 2 hours, 20 minutes. This year's finishing time (unofficially): 2 hours, 7 minutes.
2. Last year: Had to stop running and start walking around mile 11 for fear of death. This year: ran the whole thing, didn't feel so bad at the end.
3. Last year: Bloody nipples. This year: Not so much.

Music 2007 (thus far)

2007 has been an unusual year so far, music-wise. There has been a succession of releases from artists that I have been fans of, in some cases, for many, many years. Norah Jones, Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin-Carpenter, and Alison Krauss all popped out discs within a few weeks of each other, and thus have consumed the majority of my music-listening time. Of the five, give the gold star to Patty; that's a pretty amazing disc. Sadly, all five of those discs are pretty mellow, which was nice for winter, but I need some peppier music for summer.

Best surprise: Barenaked Ladies: Barenaked Ladies Are Me. A fan of their earlier work, I had kind of written them off a disc or two ago. This one was very good.

New music: She's Spanish, I'm American; Dolorean; Peter Bradley Adams; the 2-disc compilation The Other Side: Songs From East Nashville; Sam and Ruby

Bedtime song of the week: Alejandro Escovedo's cover of "I Wish I Was Your Mother". Set to just an acoustic guitar and a string quartet, this beautiful song has some of either the saddest or creepiest lyrics I've heard in awhile. I can't decide which.

Concert ecstasy : Norah Jones on Thursday, Patty Griffin next Tuesday, both at the Ryman. I'm stocking up my happy place. I don't know what that sentence means.

Two Hours, Eleven Minutes

That was the time between the first 9-11 call to police about shots being fired and the first warning sent out to faculty and students, via e-mail, that a gunman might be loose on campus at Virginia Tech. A little over twenty minutes later 31 more people are shot to death in a educational building across campus.
I realize that this is a big campus (at 26,000 students, 10,000 more than live in my hometown), and that hindsight is 20/20, but there seems to have been some sort of communication breakdown. Should they have locked down the campus earlier? Perhaps some sort of public address system that wasn't e-mail? What was Cho Seung-Hui doing during that time? Why weren't his behavioral warning signs better investigated? (For some of Seung-Hui's literary work - he was an English major, but his dramatic skills seemed lacking - click here).
Sadly, everyone is shocked and outraged, just like the last school shooting (the Amish schoolhouse), and the one before that, and the one before that. And our underlying culture of violence hasn't changed, and probably won't. Personally, I'll still like a good violent movie, say Kill Bill, as much next week as I did last week. An Italian newspaper called the Virginia Tech shooting "as American as apple pie.", and they're right. Though those closest to the tragedy will never forget, for the rest of us it will fade into collective memory, so we can shocked and outraged anew when the next shootings come along.