Receiving a gift certificate for amazon.com for filling in a survey, I decided to buy a book to teach myself Perl. I needed another item to reach $25 so I could get free shipping. So, to broaden my cultural horizons, I bought a CD of Ned Rorem's art songs. Ned Rorem was born in 1923 and adapted hundreds of poems (by the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and Theodore Roethke) to music. It's really... odd music. But I guess that's what I expected. There are some songs during which I ask myself, What in the world was he thinking?? But then there are others I can sit back and appreciate the beauty of how complementary the music is to the already elegant poetry. So if you have a few extra bucks to throw around, go get yourself a Ned Rorem CD. You'll probably only ever listen to it once straight through.