Commencement

Sitting here waiting for the ceremony to start, listening to the fifth consecutive performance of "Pomp and Circumstance", in its entirety, with repeats.

I wonder how the musicians and conductor can maintain their focus and enthusiasm. When I'm playing for a dance with fifteen repeats, I can ornament and embellish, sometimes even in connection with the dance steps (e.g. ladies' solo and men's solo); the Elgar has to sound identical every time.

The fifth one has ended, and we're on the sixth now....

ETA: after six repetitions, they've switched to Berlioz (Damnation of Faust -- what does that say?) for the procession of the platform party.

ETA: Senator Schumer has once again shown up unannounced and put himself on the speakers' list. There will follow one of his two stock graduation speeches, both of which most of the faculty have heard... but the students and parents haven't.

The End of the World

My local NPR station did a program on the end of the world tomorrow, and end-of-the-world movements in general. The host pointed out that Revelations is quite specific about the number of people to be saved: 140,000. I'm not sure whether that's drawn from the currently living, or from the entire history of humanity, but let's assume the former. There are something like 7 billion people on Earth, so approximately one in 50,000 of them will be saved. For example, that's about 160 people in New York City. Who would notice?

Which raises the disturbing possibility that Mr. Camping could actually be right, and the remaining 99.998% of us would never know. Not to mention the even more disturbing possibility that he was actually right the first time around, in 1994; the rest of us slept through both the Rapture and Judgment Day, and we're already started on the Millennium without noticing.

What if they gave an apocalypse, and nobody came?