To the cycling samaritan who stopped on the sidewalk of the Dunn Memorial Bridge yesterday, got off his bike, and used a piece of index card to diligently brush broken glass off the sidewalk: Thank you. What an amazing thing to do. Now I think I'm going to stick a piece of index card in my jersey pocket when I'm traveling across the river for exactly that purpose. (For some reason, and I'm not sure if it's drivers or pedestrians, smashing bottles on the Dunn seems to be something of a sport. There is always glass on the walkway, and I've picked up a large number of flats there over the years.)

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Mark Wood dazzles East Greenbush strings students before their two-day workshop, Electrify Your Strings

Times are hard, no question, and schools are faced with tough choices as they try to present budgets that can pass. The shortfalls are huge, and the cuts are deep. And the cuts, as always, include music. The current proposal in our district is to eliminate the elementary programs (and with them, because of the way these things work, an incredibly dedicated, inspiring teacher who leads the orchestra). And parents and students, understandably upset over the potential loss of one of the programs that makes our school district special (and is one of the best programs in the State, and probably beyond), are scrambling to find ways to save our music.

Usually this raises the question of why music is always on the chopping block, but that's not really the right question. The right question is, "Why is music optional?"

It is well-known that the study and playing of music not only taps into something extremely primal in our brains (and if you haven't already read it, I highly recommend Daniel Levitin's "This Is Your Brain On Music"), it promotes complex thinking in ways that support other learning - particularly maths and sciences, which we all agree are more important than ever and will be the highest-paying career paths for the foreseeable future. Simply understanding the concepts of octaves, intervals, frequencies, the circle of fifths - these are surprisingly complex concepts, but they are concepts that, more than any other part of the curriculum, can be experimented with and demonstrated in the real world, in the orchestra room, every day.

We are constantly being told we need to do better in the maths and sciences, yet despite years of increasing standards and forced testing, the beatings are not improving test scores or morale. Beatings rarely do. So now, faced with even more beatings (and don't think that a standardized test is anything else - it serves no instructional purpose, and the teachers' promises that they don't "teach to the test" are, unfortunately and necessarily, untrue), we are looking to cut the only instruction in our schools where math, science, personal expression and actual fun are brought into our schools on a daily basis. This makes no sense. It should be mandatory.

Music education not only gives you the tools for abstract thought and a daily application, it provides numerous other benefits that are always being stressed in the "core" academic classes. Teamwork? There's no team that needs more teamwork than a band or orchestra. Study and practice? Absolutely required. Ability to read another language? Musical notation is definitely another language. Public presentation? Every student in orchestra, band, or chorus knows what it's like to stand up in front of a crowded auditorium, with every person out there waiting to hear what you have to say. Problem-solving? These students, some of the most dedicated in the school, sit down in front of a fresh problem every few days and go about figuring out how to solve it. (Okay, so the bass players stand. Still . . . .) How can this be optional?

I suspect that music is frequently dismissed as an optional part of education because it is so ubiquitous - it is so much part of the background of our culture that we hardly notice it. Try to find a space in our lives that is without music - it's in our cars, our offices, coffee shops, grocery stores, elevators. Search for a moment on television without music in the background. The entertainment industry is one of our country's few growth industries, one of our biggest exports, and nearly every arm of that industry uses music.

How important is music to our everyday lives? With all respect to the sciences, no one invented a world-changing portable periodic table player that is in every teenager's pocket, and those kids aren't finding new ways to get hold of pirated copies of Fermat's Last Theorem. (It's free, and they still don't want it.) So does it make sense that our schools, which are meant to prepare the next generation, would deny them the education that would prepare them to take part in or even just understand something that is at the core of our culture? Does it makes sense that a school might be the only place you could go today and not hear music?

We're on the college tour circuit, and we recently visited MIT, the oldest (and many would say still the finest) institution dedicated to practical education, to the application of mathematics and sciences to real world problems. At MIT, students build robots for the hell of it, 73 members of its faculty have been awarded Nobel Prizes through the years, and its graduates are virtually guaranteed good-paying jobs in science and tech. And at MIT, 82% of undergraduates take arts classes. The number one minor at MIT, the top technical school in the country?

It's music.

Take music off the chopping block, and instead make it the centerpiece of a 21st-century education.

At Saturday night's "Electrify Your Strings" performance with Mark Wood, the first lead violinist of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Hannah was featured on electric violin on "Eleanor Rigby" . . . and she was awesome.

For rights reasons we were asked not to post video of the concert (and video is the work of the devil anyway), but the local news covered it and captured her having an amazing great time -- see it here.

The elementary music program is currently on the chopping block. Why music is always considered optional, when it's an integral part of our everyday lives and one of the most important things to our culture, is just beyond me.

Or one weekend. Spent the whole day yesterday shooting the great kids in the East Greenbush Central School District strings program preparing for their massive concert tonight with Mark Wood, formerly of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and now the driving force behind the Electrify Your Strings program. It was extraordinarily cool to get to watch them rehearse, see how brilliantly prepared they all are, and watch them have fun by stepping out of their classical training to get a little rock on. They're doing "Eleanor Rigby," "Born To Be Wild," "Live and Let Die," "Stairway to Heaven," and a few other rock chestnuts that sound very very cool when played by an orchestra that is stomping on its strings, accompanied by a group of electric violins and cello, led by the guy who made the instruments. The concert is tonight, and it will be amazing. Plus also, Hannah's rocking the Viper during "Eleanor Rigby."

Best quote of the day yesterday? "Cellos! You only have one note!" "But it's a really great note!"

Also, even as we speak, Rebekah is at NYSSMA, the big annual evaluation, rolling through a ridiculously complex piano piece and I'm sure doing very well. It kinda required a third hand, as far as I could see.

Just in time for the Olympics, this post is. Or it will be if I backdate it.



The folks at All Over Albany dug up an amazing test of the knowledge of eighth-graders in Albany in 1882. Not least amazing, besides the assumption that schoolchildren should know how to divide opium to the smallest scruple, was this instruction: "Write an exercise of 15 lines on the pass time of bobsledding."

Several years ago, it was asserted that scenic Albany, New York, and not scenic St. Moritz, Switzerland, was the original home of the bobsleigh. Writing on the debate back in 2002, the Times Union's Tim Farkas said a report from Albany City Historian Virginia Bowers listed the year of origin as 1885. This test would make it clear it was on the minds of Albanians at least three years earlier than that. The story goes that the earliest bob sleds were adapted from their use as lumber sleds, where two short ("bobbed") sleds were linked together and hitched to teams of horses that could carry enormous loads of lumber. It certainly makes sense -

A few weeks back Paula at Albany Daily Photo wrote about the Hawk Street Viaduct, which prompted me to dig up an old postcard I'd put in the files, waiting for a reason to figure out just what the Hawk Street Viaduct was, because I'd never heard of it other than this postcard. For 82 years, this marvel of engineering loomed over Sheridan Hollow, connecting Arbor Hill to Capitol Hill, and then it disappeared with hardly a trace. Thanks to the holdings of the Library of Congress and the incredibly valuable Historic American Engineering Record, I've found some much more detailed views of the Viaduct, and some of its story.

Read more about this "monument of another age . . . "

It's March, which means the start of the cycling season I've been waiting for since the Last Best Ride back in November. A few jaunts out on the warmer days and even fewer miles logged on the rollers have done nothing to preserve my base, and my muscles are tighter than they've ever been, which is saying something. Every day, Facebook reminds me that my high school classmates are all hitting the half-century mark, and even my own body has to admit that flexibility is a privilege, not a right. I've already learned that nothing heals anymore so I'd better not tear or break anything.

So to get ready I've got a crack squadron of trained ballerinas (made them myself: sugar, spice, Chemical X, spandex) improving my floor exercises, giving me points on form, and telling me what Miss Madeline would say if she could see me. (It wouldn't be anything good.)  I've had the Olympics to train to for two weeks (watching elite athletes always inspires me to new heights of stretching), and I've even been getting the rollers out. Rollers are vastly superior to trainers in that you're actually riding a bike, rather than being bolted to a flywheel. Your pedal stroke becomes smooth as glass, or else you meet the floor (clipping in: not recommended). However there is no classic rock album, no podcast, not even an extended Groucho Marx impression by Gilbert Gottfried that can overcome the simple fact that on rollers, you're not going anywhere, and you can't coast. So ultimately, I've just gotta get out there.

The last two days the temps haven't been bad, a couple of degrees above freezing but with no wind, but the wetness is at flood stages and the spring ritual of our roads crumbling into nothingness is well underway. Where I live, that means that the shoulders that don't exist, already littered with winter's pointy debris, are slick and lined with chunks of asphalt. When you're cruising along at 20 mph with about 3 square inches of contact with the ground, all of this matters. But I will get out there this week, and find out what parts work and what parts don't. On me, not the bike.

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From an 1860-something Albany directory. I don't know what's wrong with the eye on the right, but I'll say this: I don't want it. Also, whatever the surgical cure would have been in the time of the Civil War, I don't want that, either.

When they designed the new Palace Theater marquee, they didn't fool around. In fact, they went back to the source, the old Palace Theater marquee. It was run by various companies through the years, including Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO) and Fabian, but the marquee remained the same for a long time.

That 1951 picture accompanied a Life Magazine article on how the movie industry was battling "T-V" by showing things such as live boxing matches. The cutline was "Crowds gather early for telecast at Fabian Palace Theater in Albany, N.Y., which seated 3,000 and turned away 3,000." The battle between media was intense in those early days, as movies saw a precipitous drop in attendance as television spread throughout the land. "Last week NBC was at work on a plan to make its own movies from television shows and to release them in movie houses." God help us, nothing has changed. But in the case of the marquee, that's a good thing. (Because when it was changed, it looked like this.)

Static electricity. And a sporran.