I forced myself to get started orchestrating the four big pieces. I had been dreading it because, as I’ve whined before, my nearly-four-year-old-laptop doesn’t have the power to handle even a small orchestra in Finale using Garritan Personal Orchestra.

I was right to dread it. For some reason, it couldn’t even burp out two horns, a cello, and a double bass plucking two notes. After getting not even four measures of Milky Way done, I gave up.

Which is not to say that I didn’t accomplish anything today. I redesigned a couple more pages of my website, which didn’t take any time of course. The pages that will take time are the ones that use formatting not already covered by my templated css stylesheet. I now have to actually tweak the css myself.

And a new feature of this column: I’ve decided to take paragraphs from Times articles about other places and substitute U.S. names and places in them. Where there are numbers, I’ll do like Juan Cole has done and extrapolate them to U.S. dimensions.

Today’s example, from “Bush, Facing Dissent on Iraq, Jettisons ‘Stay the Course'”:

Mr. Rumsfeld said Monday that the benchmarks under discussion included projections on when the U.S. might be able to take control of more of the country’s 50 states. Only five states are under full U.S. security administration, though officials say they hope the number will rise to sixteen or seventeen by the end of the year.

And they say the media doesn’t report the good news.