After years and years of all of us wondering what would be so hard about this, and of envying our colleagues in foreign Navies who already had them, the U.S. Navy is finally considering moving to blue & grey BDUs as the primary working uniform for the service. All I can say is IT'S ABOUT TIME!

George W. keeps saying it in one shape or another: “No, we’re not going — we don’t need the draft. Look, the all-volunteer army is working. I know Senator McCain and I agree on this issue for certain, the all-volunteer army works.” But the Democrats—up to an including John Kerry—keep pumping out the claim that if Bush is reelected he WILL reinstate the draft. Here's a couple of particularly good takes on this issue; first, Joanne Jacobs in the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

“Uncle Sam doesn't want my 23-year-old daughter or my 17-year-old nephew either. Not as draftees. A modern military has little use for the unskilled and the unwilling.

Yet the draft rumor is stalking the political landscape like a particularly persistent zombie. It just won't stay dead.” Read On...

And this from Bruce Chapman, long-time advocate of a volunteer military:

“ 'The most potent campaign rumor of the year is the web-induced claim that if re-elected Bush President will reinstitute the draft,' says Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute and a pioneer in the 1960s movement to institute an all-volunteer military. 'It's potent, but it is also false.'

'Whether the Kerry camp originated the story or simply followed it, the Democratic presidential candidate has employed it repeatedly in speeches to sway college-age voters,' adds Chapman. 'and MTV and Rock-the-Vote have highlighted the issue continuously.' ” Read On...

Spreading false rumors among the young is one of oldest and most long-standing Democratic ploys and even though I disagree with many of my own party's stances, this type of activity ensures my continuing tenure as a Republican. When I was a little kid, in 1960 and in 1964 and again in 1968, rumors ran rampant in elementary schools that whoever the Republican candidate was, he WOULD MAKE KIDS GO TO SCHOOL ON SATURDAY. They have a name for people who prey on children, and that's all this is.

By the way kids: BUSH WILL NOT MAKE YOU GO TO SCHOOL ON SATURDAY. Nor will he reinstate the draft.

Disclaimer: I am not a Bush partisan. My opinion of this election mirrors one I saw in an editorial cartoon: “Two hundred and forty million people and these two are the best we could come up with?” My position is the same as that held in the 19th century Royal Navy as they shook the weevils from their hardtack: “Always pick the lesser of two weevils.” I just think Kerry is a bigger weevil.

OK, so I was wrong about Martha Stewart; it seems she's using her time in prison to learn “innovative ways to do microwave cooking”. Sheesh...she's unrelenting!

I was in my office at IIT's Main Campus today and I realized I had no tunes to listen to! Well, I had to do something about that so I jumped on All the Web since they have an audio search function. I made some great discoveries!

1.) Since I'm a choral music kind of guy, I discovered a great choir! There is absolutely no info about them on their site, since the site is very clearly just for them and they all know about each other. It would appear that they are young folks from all over Europe who get together to form a choir every two years in Szekszárd, Hungary. The choir is Éneklö Hét and all three of their CDs are on the site in .mp3 format. Very nice work over a broad range of the classical literature and even spirituals. Bravo, Éneklö Hét (whoever you are)!

2.) A jazz artist, Kellye Gray, who has a “bootlegs” page on her site with three nice downloadable tunes.

3.) A whole library of music at Ibiblio (the public's library and digital archive)! You can find it (or actually you probably couldn't if it weren't for me stumbing across it) at http://music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/. It's pretty raw but there are some tremendous directories there. One is nearly the entire catalog of a now-defunct Seattle record label, Pandora. Their catalog covers mostly classical and is available in both Ogg Vorbis and mp3 formats. The whole Pandora catalog is also mirrored at http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/Pandora/.

Other directories on this server (which on further investigation all turned out to be linked from the iBiblio music page) feature a lot of “freely tradable” music, most of which is in a format that's entirely new to me, the Shorten (SHN) lossless compressed audio format. I had to research the shn format (the FAQ at http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/shnfaq.html is not working right now [update: woking as of Midnight]) then find some software that would play it (there are plugins for WinAmp and for Foobar2000—another new one on me—at the etree.org wiki Software You Need page.). Finally I learned about wget, an open-source command-line application that will download files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP and will even recursively download entire directories if they are open to that [Update: best place to download is Heiko Herold's Windows wget spot for SSL (HTTPS) support]. Rumour has it that there is even a version that will support SFTP although I have not tracked that one down.

Learning new stuff is alway fun. (Never mind that I should have been finishing homework or grading midterms!) Martha Stewart always says at the end of her radio spots, “ You can learn something new every day on Ask Martha”. Well, Martha, I can still can learn something new everyday but I'll bet you have a pretty tough time trying to do that right now.

No, not the Marine Corps, although they can be pretty tyrannical. In this case I mean drum corps, specifically the 24 Division I Drum & Bugle Corps of Drum Corps International. Just about every high school band in the United States—and there are over 15,000 high schools in the U.S.—has elected to model their band on these elite drum corps. The uniforms, the composition of drum lines and the percussion “pit” at the side of the field, the style of marching: all this is driven by these 24 elite drum corps. Now don't get me wrong; I don't dislike drum & bugle corps. I was in one myself and it was a lot of fun. The problem is that this conscious aping of drum corps has produced high school bands that are appallingly homogenous. When I was in high school band [mumble mumble] years ago, there was a lot of diversity, and many bands modeled themselves after outstanding contemporary military bands; others followed the pattern of historical bands, while still others developed a distinctive style all their own. The point is that there was no one pattern! I was fortunate enough to belong to a band that had a distinctive identity, based on the British Household Division, particularly the Scots Guards. It was fun and it gave us an identity different from everyone else; we played a lot of Kenneth J. Alford, Edward Elger and Sir William Walton, as well as arrangements taken from a broad range of traditional English, Scottish and Irish folk tunes. And I played the bagpipes!

The bands we saw at the Illinois State Invitational Championship were made up of wonderfully talented kids but the homogeneity was really apparent: only two styles of headgear, black West Point-style shakos with tall plumes or fancy bush hats a la the Cavaliers or Vanguard; short jackets in modern cuts, many with metallic highlights; black pants and shoes. Drum lines had six or seven snares, three or four quad drums, and 6 various sized rudimentary bass drums. Most had no marching cymbals, exiling those to the pit. No tenor drums. No straight bass drums. No marching glockenspiels. No triple drums. No spinning sticks. No drum majors with maces or even “sissy sticks”. Hey band directors: SOMEONE NEEDS TO BUCK THE TREND! Every high school band in the U.S. should not be a drum corps clone! Not even the Division I Corps themselves are this homogenous; look at the Troopers or the Phantom Regiment. The tradition of marching bands is a long and distinguished one and can stand on it's own.; draw on that tradition and add something new to create a distinctive identity. Help stomp out drum corps clones!