Comical misreadings, gas leaks, honey and mushrooms

So it's been forever since I updated this thing, and today was amusing, so off we go.

• I was just checking my gmail, and the little link they give you up at the top was from "NYT Travel" with the headline "Hotel Spas Try to Lure Locals". Of course I misread it as "Hotel Spas Try to Lure Lolcats".
  
  
• Today I and thousands of other students, faculty and staff were evacuated from the University of Utah campus after crews installing an underground fiber-optic line nailed a gas line with their drill. Oops! The guy whodunit said that Blue Stakes, the local utility line locating company, had cleared the area that morning. Gj Blue Stakes! Apparently they nailed the line so hard that grass was waving and the asphalt was bubbling. You could smell gas as far over as the business loop, a good thousand feet away.
  
  
• I just watched an unduly fascinating episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown. It is quite possibly one of the coolest shows on television, because Alton Brown picks a particular food item and tells you everything you could ever possibly want to know about it - chemistry, history, recipes that use it, etc. etc. Tonight's episode was on honey. I knew a little bit about honey's antiseptic and preservative properties, but it turns out that it's way cooler than that - it's strongly hygroscopic, which means it will actually suck water out of the air to help keep foods made with it moist. Alton made a delicious-looking honey mustard thing that could be used as a salad dressing OR a dip for chicken fingers or whatever OR anything else your imaginative mind can think of. Cool. Then I got wikipediaing about honey and bees and stuff and found out that, holy cow, bees are AWESOME. Not only do they make honey, but they do a waggle dance to indicate to other bees how far away and in what direction a particular field of flowers is, they can kill wasps by balling up around them until they die of overheating, and that archaeologists have found sealed pots of perfectly good (if a little crystallized) honey in Greek shipwrecks and Pharaohs' tombs. How cool is that?
  
  
• Speaking of random wikipediaing, I learned a lot about mushrooms today. Did you know that there are a ton of edible mushrooms, a ton of inedible mushrooms, and a ton of quite poisonous mushrooms, some of which look rather a lot like certain delicious mushrooms? Did you know that Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died as a result of eating poisonous mushrooms, and that his death led to the War of Austrian Succession? Voltaire commented, "This dish of mushrooms changed the destiny of Europe." I bet you'll never look at a mushroom the same. Also, I want to kick this.

Sucks

Do you know what sucks?

I'll tell you what sucks.

In fact, that's the point of this post, as evidenced by its title.

Now, many things suck, but there's only one thing that I'm kind of on my soapblog about today, and that's the relative unavailability of good classical music.

I know what you're saying. You're saying, "Spencer, what are you talking about? There's a whole radio station full of it right here in the good old SLC." And I don't disagree with you - in fact, you've made my point for me, and I thank you, except it's really me putting words in your mouth, and you've not, in fact, said anything (unless you happen to make random catty remarks aloud while reading other people's blogs, in which case you have more serious problems than a relative unavailability of good classical music - but I digress). My point is that there is ONE classical radio station and like A GRAJILLION other radio stations.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the music that these grajillion other radio stations are playing, it's just like, what do you do when you want to hear some classical music? Well, you switch to Classical 89, of course, but what if it's playing something you don't like so much? Like, there's some sort of Bach playing, and you're just not in a very baroque mood today. It's understandable and it happens to all of us. Nobody is in a baroque mood all the time.

So then what do you do? If you've thought ahead, you have a couple of CD's full of classical music you enjoy, and you throw one of those in. Good thinking! But wait - where did you get those CD's in the first place? I challenge you to think of an even slightly obscure composer or piece and walk into your local music store and find a recording of it. Chances are you won't. For instance, good luck finding, say, some of Grieg's lesser-known works, or pretty much anything by Sibelius. And Gershwin? Unless you're looking for Rhapsody in Blue or Porgy & Bess, you're probably out of luck. Which is totally not the case if you're looking for the High School Musical 3 soundtrack, or the latest release from U2.

So thus I appeal to you, my faithful readers - where can you find good classical music for purchase? I'd prefer something local, because supporting local businesses is what all the cool kids are doing these days, and if there's a guy who's making a living selling classical music out of some hole in the wall downtown, I want to hear about it, because I am going to go drop like $40 in this guy's store.

_{ps - post number 100 on tophatrabbit! I know, can you believe it?}