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Leonard Bernstein's life was, more dramatically and certainly more publicly than most, a life of dualities.

We tend to be reluctant these days to say that one piece of music is better than another or that one composer is better than another. Often this reluctance is a good idea, especially if the ranking serves no useful purpose, and because “better” is sometimes hard to define. But sometimes the reluctance is a mistake, and it’s a mistake based on confusing taste with judgment.

In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a music director woke up in a bad mood and decided to fire an orchestra musician on the spot, he could… never mind that it might instantly deprive that musician of his livelihood.

Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light, or charming, or profound, when no two people ever have precisely the same reaction to the same piece? One person’s “sad” may be another’s “noble,” and one person’s intense and penetrating may be another’s pretentious and annoying.

If you cut your own Christmas tree, you may find some unexpected "gifts" from nature.

Lyssomanes viridis, commonly known as the magnolia green jumper, is a species of jumping spider of the genus Lyssomanes, for which it is the type species. The species is native to the United States, being found in much of the Southeastern United States and Texas. It has also been reported from parts of Mexico, with sightings as far south as Guatemala and as far north as Delaware.

Schizachyrium scoparium, commonly known as little bluestem or beard grass, is a species of North American prairie grass native to most of the contiguous United States (except California, Nevada, and Oregon) as well as a small area north of the Canada–US border and northern Mexico. It is most common in the Midwestern prairies. Little bluestem is a perennial bunchgrass.

A listener inquires about gulls on the rocks in the Congaree river near Columbia...

Happy winter solstice!

Juniperus virginiana, also known as red cedar, eastern red cedar, Virginian juniper, eastern juniper, red juniper, and other, local names, is a species of juniper native to eastern North America from southeastern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and east of the Great Plains. Further west it is replaced by the related Juniperus scopulorum (Rocky Mountain juniper) and to the southwest by Juniperus ashei (Ashe juniper).