The new furnace is up and running, so it stands to reason that something else has to be fixed. It's my computer again. This time, though, it's a fairly pedestrian problem. The letter "U" key has broken off. I'm really getting tired of hanging out at the Apple store. I have it on good authority that the first Mac I bought, a Mac SE30 I purchased in 1990 and gave to a friend after I purchased a laptop in 1994, was still working as of 2001. This laptop is less than 4 years old and oh, the troubles I have seen!

But I will stop moping. It's a beautiful day. My house is clean and well heated, my taxes have been mailed and we're going to see the White Sox play the Texas Rangers tonight with a bunch of IRS workers (My brother-in-law works for that unpopular branch of the government. We are all hoping they don't announce the group over the loudspeakers on Tax Day). AJ is singing to himself in his room. I cannot hear the words, but the tune is a Renaissance dance arranged for brass ensemble that Mr. Spy has been playing a lot lately.

Which reminds me of something that happened a few days ago.

Scene: Harriet's driveway. AJ and The Girl Next Door are drawing with sidewalk chalk. Harriet is pulling weeds from one of the flower beds.

The Girl Next Door: [Hums "The Skater's Waltz," by Johann Strauss, Jr.]

AJ: I know that song!

Harriet: That's a famous song. It's called "The Skater's Waltz."

The Girl Next Door: I know.

AJ: [pretends he's skating on the driveway]

Harriet: It was written by a man named Johann Strauss. He lived in Austria a long time ago.

TGND: No it's not. It's from Spongebob.

I mention this because I've noticed that AJ is singing a lot of classical songs lately that he seems to have learned from a show I abhor called The Baby Einsteins. I'm not sure where he's seen this show. Not in our house. But he is picking up well known classical tunes. The problem is, he doesn't know what they are. They are just background music that work into his brain. So I wonder, what is the point? The Baby Einstein project grew out of the so-called Mozart Effect study years ago that supposedly demonstrated that listening to Mozart made people smarter. The idea is that if you expose your kids to classical music and great art, they will be smarter. This has since been largely debunked. But the idea lingers on. And it's making millions for Disney, which bought the Baby Einstein franchise a number of years ago.

I think there's something to the idea of this type of learning increasing intelligence in that learning important cultural artifacts enables you to understand/fit in with/react to your cultural surroundings better and understand your culture's values. Because AJ knows the melody from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, he knows when it's being parodied on Animaniacs cartoons. Because he knows the "Morning" theme from Peer Gynt, he knows what it means when it plays at the beginning of a Bugs Bunny Cartoon. And because he knows Miles Davis' "So What," he knows when it's begin quoted in another jazz artist's work. The basic knowledge of a few musical artifacts helps him make sense of other aspects of his music-cultural world. And while at the moment that world might consist largely of cartoons, it won't forever.

Maybe it's my ethnomusicological bias, but I don't understand how this can help him unless he understands the context from which the pieces were derived and also why and how these pieces have become canonized. I wouldn't, of course, subject a six-year-old to such language, nor would I expect him to understand the point at first. But I do think it's worth a bit of effort in explaining why, for example, I think "So What" is an incredible piece of music (or the whole Kind of Blue album, for that matter.

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