The Continuing Sad Saga of Aquinas

In hilariously tragic news today, the guy who owns the Segway company died when he drove his Segway off a cliff. Really. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Saturday Jilly Moose and I went to Cornish Fest. It was a Celtic paradise! We ate pasties, toured historic Cornish houses, and spent way too much money. So don’t ask to borrow any for the next month, got it? I have been getting my Celt on the last few days, wearing my new scarf, shirts, and jewelry prominently emblazoned with Celtic knot designs. Why should they be co-opted by weird New Agey Neo-Pagans? I am reclaiming them on behalf of my ancestors (Celtic but not Cornish so far as I know) who have been Catholic since St. Patrick converted them.

The sad saga of Aquinas the Computer continues. As you may remember from a previous episode, it had been given some apple juice by Richard Bonomo and did not appreciate it. Rich took my 2x5” packet of Do Not Eat and put it in the oven to rejuvenate it, but he left it too long and the paper packet dissolved, leaving a bunch of little Do Not Eat beads. They did seem to do the trick, however, and Aquinas is now partially functional. However, its screen is not backlit so you can’t really see anything, and so Rich hooked it up to another monitor. I was transcribing a song from early notation into modern notation using the software on Aquinas, but the apple juice incident had shorted out its audio capabilities, so I was unable to listen to my work and see if it sounded good. (On several lines, I was not just transcribing but transposing from archaic clefs.) Kathbert had brought her own computer Praetorius, another MacBook Pro, and she said maybe I could listen to my work on that.

“But you have to put it into a program Praetorius can understand,” she informed me. “Praetorius can only read early music notation.”

“I am not transcribing it back into early notation,” I said.

I still have the bottom two lines to transcribe tonight, but late last night Rich informed me that Aquinas’s audio is working again. I always thought computers were like cars, and the damage you did was what you ended up with: it never got better or worse, unless you repaired it. But Aquinas appears to be convalescing like a human, slowly getting better as time goes on. Should we be frightened by this??

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