Happy May Day

If I remember right, May Day is the day that we used to put things on people's front door, ring the doorbell and then we'd run away. Then we'd hide behind a tree and watch them stamp out the flaming bag of poop with their boot. "He called the sh**, POOP!"

Concerts are over with for a couple of months. There's a summer pops concert that I am going to pass on this year. I will probably still go to hang out with my friends from La Crosse, but I really hated that experience last year of playing in the intense heat/rain/humidity. Real good for a wooden instrument! But the real stuff will start up again in October. And no, I intend on practicing this summer on some excerpts and solo stuff so I don't lose all of my skillz over the next 5 months.

This past weekend went really well in La Crosse. It was one of the more fun concerts I've played in recent history. Our soloist is one of the assistant musical directors of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. We premiered his new Jazz Piano Concerto and then he came out and stole the show with our performance of Rhapsody in Blue. Then a little encore with Troy (and on Saturday night, Rich as well) in a jazz combo which is different from most traditional LSO concerts. A great way to end the season. Too bad Terry who writes our reviews in the La Crosse Tribune, once again wrote a dud of a review for us from Friday Night. I swear that he doesn't even stick around for the full concert. Terry, if you don't enjoy what you're doing - find something new to write about. I'd be more than happy to write a review for you once a month. I don't even need your "auto-write" MS-Word Extension Tool that you seem to use every time. It only insults the musicians and it's starting to insult your readers in the community.

Three links that I found this morning for Hazel, but I thought I'd share with the rest of you. I used to be a big fan of bragging how well I can "multi-task". Then I found the research and did some tests that opened my eyes and showed me how multi-tasking is definitely a myth.

Creating Passionate Users: Your Brain on Multi-tasking
Why More Is Less - CIO Magazine
Leadership Expert Shatters the Myth of Multi-tasking

For those of you that want the highlites - The myth behind multitasking is a perception of how many things we have going on at one time vs how many things are we actually concentrating on? Look how when we are trying to read directions in a car, or read numbers on a house, we instantly turn the radio down to concentrate on the task at hand. The driving the car part of what we're doing is on autopilot - a task done by the lower part of the brain. A task that we focus on is done by the cerebrum part of the brain. The more we do a function, the more it becomes habit or a function done by the brain stem. All of our respiratory functions or autonomic functions are done by the brain stem. When we are driving a car, riding a bike - these are done by a similar part of the brain stem as the autonomic functions that we rarely have to think about.

But back to multi-tasking..... in a similar style, when we have tasks that are "no brainers" such as walking down the hall, or reciting the alphabet - those tasks are done without a conscience thought so we are free to focus on a more difficult task such as balancing our checkbook, solving a quadratic equation, or TALKING ON THE DANG CELL PHONE. The problem becomes in a situation when the background task requires that focus. Such as driving a car and talking on the cell phone. Not a problem till there's an individual in front of you slamming on the breaks. Then your focus is there, not on the phone. My gripe is the delay it takes most of us to change our focus from the phone to the driving the car part is getting worse and worse.

So there's my disprove for multi-tasking. Try it at home by trying to perform two tasks at the same time. Take out a piece of paper and begin writing down every city and state that you have lived in, traveled to, spent a night in a hotel with a stranger in... then as you are writing those down, begin reciting outloud, all of your family members names - including your grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Both tasks are relatively easy when done separately. But as you try to do both at the same time, each task begins to suffer and not only does it take longer to do both tasks, but my bet is that the accuracy will also suffer. Hazel wanted a name for the ability to do many things at once... based on the articles above, it's not recommended and the only thing that you do when you try to "multi-task" is rob yourself of time and accuracy overall.

That's all I gots to say about that.

Song of the Day - Sledgehammer was on at the RAC this morning. And while I usually hate Peter Gabriel, I actually always thought the video for the song was funny.

Video of the Day - Late last week I watched Hostel which was directed by Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino was one of the Executive Producers. It was a gross movie that I didn't really find overly scary. I was more freaked out from watching the Saw movies than I was with this one. There's a 2nd one being filmed I guess and I'm sure I'll be curious to see it. Don't waste your time on this one though. You'll never want to travel to Europe again.

Webpage of the Day - The guy from Friday is almost at 30,000,000 hits now. I'm still thinking some folks set up some automatic scripts to keep reloading the page so he would get more hits. Still pretty funny if you ask me. Today, I give you Reservoir Dogs reinacted in 30 seconds... by Bunnies!!