Assorted thoughts that didn’t seem quite enough to justify their own blog:

• Check out the listings for Friday on my arts calendar: The evening features four — count ’em, four — musical events, all occurring at pretty much the same time. Even back in my days at the newspaper, I complained about this kind of scheduling gridlock, which seems to happen most frequently with musical events. Now, you could argue that these four events appeal to somewhat different audiences, and that’s true, to a certain extent. But I could make a case myself for attending any of these — Anthea Kreston’s evening of French chamber music at the Majestic, the Chicago ensemble Fandango! sponsored by Chamber Music Corvallis, the folk duo Robin and Linda Williams at the Whiteside, and the female a cappella group Noteworthy, from Brigham Young University, at the LaSells Stewart Center. I understand that many of these scheduling decisions are out of the hands of local promoters — they’re a function of which dates acts have open when they’re in the area. And it is true that this embarrassment of riches is much to be preferred over COVID isolation. Still, this type of scheduling guarantees that these four events will cannibalize each other to some extent.
• A note or two about donating blood: First, if you have the capacity and the time, you should do it — the Red Cross says it’s facing a national blood crisis, its worst blood shortage in more than a decade. Now, I frequently donate, which I note only because I want you to say something like, “Wow, what a great guy he is.” I’ll wait. Gosh, thanks! But as I waited to donate at a recent blood drive at Oregon State University, it struck me that one way to make it easier for people to donate would be to run more drives that lasted into the early evening — say, 7 p.m. or thereabouts, which would allow potential donors to swing by after work.
• Diane has been watching the ice skating events in the Olympics, and I always spend too much time thinking about the music selected by skaters for their performances. I got to thinking that what I really wanted to see was a world-class skater performing to “Mah Nà Mah Nà” from “The Muppet Show.” And it turns out that “Mah Nà Mah Nà” actually was a hit before the Muppets got hold of it.
• Here’s a follow-up to an item from the previous edition of “Quick Hits.” I was shopping recently at the Corvallis Fred Meyer and I went to the front of the store to see if I could find one of the store’s smaller shopping carts. (I recently complained about the store’s massive shopping carts, which barely seem to have enough room to navigate the aisles.) There was none to be found at the front of the store, and an employee, busily engaged in wrangling carts, saw me and said, without any prompting from me, that he didn’t have any of the smaller carts. This incident made me think that this wasn’t the first time a shopper had been trying to find a smaller cart. For the record, this employee told me that the store didn’t have any new carts on order (which seems plausible) and that he wasn’t sure anybody was making the smaller carts these days (which seems less so).