Back to index of "this and that in my life" pages by Donald Sauter.
Conversations with me, No. 58b
Email highlights, from about February 2006
Dedicated to the proposition that every thought that's ever been
thunk may be of use or interest to someone . . .
THEE: Subject: very cool
I have really enjoyed reading your stuff. There is one point I'd
like to make and would love you to comment on, if you have time.
On your page about humans being special you commented that if we
are the only superior race who has discovered radio waves and
used them for communication we are special. True. But. I would
argue if we are talking about advanced races, such an ability
does by your definition make us special, just not very special.
ME: Thanks for visiting. Hmmmm... even without rereading all my
thoughts in that page, I'm doubtful that I could make my points
more clearly. Not that I'm saying they're already clear! - I
just have my limits as far as pulling words together is
concerned. I think my argument boils down to transportation and
communication being two of the defining aspects of advanced
civilizations. If we're the only life forms in the galaxy who
have the ability to communicate with and travel to other solar
systems, that makes us pretty darn special. Admittedly, our
abilities in both those regards are pretty modest right now, but
we are engaged in both of them (unmanned, as far as interstellar
travel is concerned.) The common wisdom is that there is nothing
particularly special about our planet or sun, and that the
appearance of life is no big deal, and the emergence of highly
advanced life forms is downright *guaranteed* by darwinian
evolution. So of the potentially billions of advanced
civilizations in our galaxy, billions of which may have had
billions of years headstart on us, if we're the only ones
travelling and communicating between stars then, I don't know how
else to put it, that makes us pretty darn special.
I guess what you're saying is, what if all the other billions of
most-advanced races out there never developed opposable thumbs,
so they could never actually develop anything or alter their
environment, but they can do 20-digit exponentiations instantly
in their head. Doesn't that make humans a bunch of low-life
morons in comparison? all of our communication and
transportation and potential for colonizing the galaxy just a
"parlor trick"? I guess it would be pretty fruitless arguing
against such a position.
Does that clarify anything, or just muddy things up even more?
Sorry!
yahoo search:
Daniel Hannon
1611 W Las Lomas St Yuma, AZ 85364-4470 (map) Tel.: (928) 329-
0841
D Stalder
1572 E Windy Ln Yuma, AZ 85365-3516 (map) Tel.: (928) 341-1839
ME:
Hi Ivorybill, gpskink444, Daniel Hannon and/or D.D. Stalder,
How many people are you and do you know each other and did any of
you receive the 15 fingerstyle magazine guitar cds, plus the nice
homemade greatest hits compilation? They never came back to me.
THEE: Can Borax be used to kill ants or roaches?
The Dial Corporation cannot recommend Borax to kill ants or
roaches. The EPA has not authorized 20 Mule Team. as a pesticide.
How much Borax is in 20 Mule Team?
20 Mule Team. Borax is comprised of 99.5% pure borax, a
naturally occurring mineral composed of sodium, boron, oxygen,
and water. (The scientific name for borax is sodium tetraborate
decahydrate.) The remaining 0.5% is composed of trace minerals.
ME: to Persimmon Park Place
A few thoughts, suggestions, and offers:
1. About staining the clubhouse: You indicated it would be an
expensive job. I'd be glad to help - will work for chips and
soda (or for nothing, if the truth be told.) I'd like to think
there are enough able-bodied residents who would join in, make a
day of it, and bat out the job for just the cost of the
materials. How about a call for volunteers in the newsletter?
2. About the vandalized "P" on the entrance sign: I happen to
have a small bottle of yellow paint. I can't guarantee it's the
exact, right shade, but I suppose any shade of yellow would look
better than the black spray paint. Want me to paint the P yellow
until a more professional job gets done?
3. After you left, Les made the perfectly sensible proposal that
the newsletter have a *regular* column about recent problems in
the neighborhood, including the police report summary.
4. Something I've always wanted to see in the newsletter is info
on home sales. I used to scan the Dover Post "deed transfers"
for PPP activity, but it was a lot of effort for very few hits.
Is home sale info easily available? Any reason it couldn't be
published in the newsletter? I'm sure everybody would be
interested.
5. My "Double-wide dialog" idea never took off, and my
suggestion for an advice column from Brass Sales didn't go
anywhere, but I still have a bunch of questions about our
manufactured homes even after living here over 2 years - about
our roofs, plumbing, crawl spaces, furnaces, water heaters, etc.
My current idea is that maybe there could be meetings dealing
with house maintenance issues for people with questions, like me,
and people who might have some experience to share. Sounds like
the clubhouse is getting close to being usable, and maybe that
would be a good place for such a meeting now and then.
6. After sleeping on the street parking issue, I'm still
convinced it's an unbelievably bad idea. And I do not accept the
argument that city government has some need to force it on us
even if we don't want it. What do they care? They seemed to be
sympathetic with our desire for a 15 mph speed limit.
PPP was *designed* for no street parking. The streets are too
narrow for it and the houses have, what *should* be, ample
parking for each. This would open up the neighborhood to
families who will have four, five and six vehicles. I'm not
saying people can't have that many cars, just, if they have to
have them, find somewhere else to live. Up until now, all of the
sentiment I've heard at the meetings has been the *opposite*
direction - people *complaining* about cars parked on the street.
The argument given for street parking is, "What about people who
have a temporary overflow of visitors?" My response is that
that's nothing new, and most residents are sympathetic with it.
It's not a big deal on an occasional basis. What's the need for
a change now?
I don't claim we will have a rash of head-on collisions, but I
know from experience it is a pain in the neck negotiating around
parked cars on these streets. A few months ago we had to crack
down on someone who parked regularly on Persimmon Circle. To get
around him, you had to drive in the lane for on-coming traffic -
which you couldn't see because of the curve in the road and the
island.
Also, the clean, empty streets just *look* nice! Every time I
hear a call at our meetings for more of this, that, or the other,
something inside of me dies. PPP had what I would call a "modest
charm" that is being hacked away at - street lights (ugly as
sin), street signs, chipped up curbs from the (needed?) street
resurfacing, calls for police cruising, speed bumps, buses, mail
delivery to each house... And now streets crammed with parked
cars. Gad, people, if that's what you want, go live on Queen
Street.
When the homeowners take over the council, I know two things I'd
like to see for PPP: all houses owner-occupied, and a two car
limit per household. People who need fleets are not good fits
for PPP.
Here's my proposal - use the newsletter to take a vote on the
street parking issue and put your full weight behind majority
sentiment.
7. The street parking issue somehow got tangled up in an
unrelated issue - the swimming pool. My two cents on that is the
same thing - majority rule. Things you said make me wonder if
the majority of residents would prefer to get rid of the swimming
pool. If so, why not? My own position is that, while I don't
use the pool myself, I don't begrudge others enjoying it. I'm
not in a position to judge whether the costs and benefits of the
pool are in line with each other. What disturbs me is hearing
the simple position that the $300 condo fee is just for the pool.
With whatever shortcomings the council has and has had, obviously
the fees have kept up the neighborhood grounds. I view the fee,
the work of the council (such as it is), and the work of the
homeowners' committee as the "thin blue line" between our nice
neighborhood and a rundown trailer park. Again, I'm not in a
position to judge whether $300 per year is exactly right, but I
say to anyone who bought a very inexpensive home here and then
complains about the condo fee, save yourself the condo fee and go
buy a $400,000 house in some other development.
It took a bit of time and effort to get these thoughts down. Can
I ask you to forward an exact copy to other committee members?
Also, I encourage you to use any part of this, verbatim, in the
newsletter. Thanks for listening. Keep up the generally great
work!
ME: Dear Dover Post,
When I am in the voting booth on April 18 deciding on the mayor,
I know I'll be thinking about the Hanson House - Dover's
(formerly) oldest, most charming and strikingly situated building
- and under whose watchful eye it got sold down the river for a
handful of shekels so some real estate guys can build themselves
a club house, whooppee.
THEE: Re: lob a grapefruit over two moons
I didn't notice the "are we rolling Bob?" line. Maybe someone
was honking at me when it occurred. Sorry.
On instructions of counsel I am forbidden from addressing your
question about how the Three Stooges taught the Beatles
everything!
ME: pushing back the barriers of darkness
Made *huge* strides in trying to achieve 1970s-like stereo
functionality two days ago. I made a cd for my guitar friend Bob
that involved input from vinyl, tape, microphone and cd - all
direct-to-cd without computer involvement! (I need the computer
to make cheap copies). Keep in mind, this is not for the faint-
hearted. It involved receiver, microphone, turntable, cd
recorder, and not one, but "three", dual cassette decks. I'm not
all the way there, yet, though. I need one more cd recorder for
my stack. As it is, if I want to copy from cd, I am forced to
accept a track in its entirety, or at least from the beginning of
the track.
At just about the time I get this finalized, the cd will have
gone the way of the dodo bird. Maybe I can time it just right so
I die at that moment.
P.S. Do you remember your "Coronation Day" joke from a year ago?
Evidence that you had planned a Dover visit a year ago that was
cancelled due to weather.
The Christmas lights are still on downtown.
THEE: Re: fingerstyle guitar cds
From: Daniel Hannon
Donald: Hello again. I'm sorry for not keeping you updated more
often in regards to the cds....No, I still have not received
them, and have assumed the postal service has (as has happened to
another shipment from someone else) accidentally shipped it to
another address, & if so, the recipient of them has kept them,
not informing the postal service of the error. If they ever
Finally do arrive, I will definitely let you know immediately.
Thanks. Respectfully yours, D.D.
ME: Hi D.D.
I'm more curious than mad - 18 bucks isn't worth it. But you
have to know how weird this is from my point of view. Can you at
least clarify whether D.D. and Daniel Hannon are different
people, and whom I'm talking to, and what person and address I
was supposed to send the cds to? They weren't all that valuable,
but I put a lot of work and loving care into filling the order,
along with a freebie, nice, greatest hits compilation.
ME: Here's a get-together-from-a-distance cd I made for Bob. I
imagine you'll find some fun things in there, too. Hope it's not
an imposition loading such a thing on you - makes the effort much
more worthwhile for me.
By the way, I'm guessing the Cyrano you heard that afternoon was
the one by Damrosch - a guy who defies my attempts to find a
pigeonhole in my brain for. There was also a Cyrano by Alfano
which seems to have about the same low level of recognition now.
Alfano is the composer who finished off Turandot for Puccini, and
doesn't seem like the sort who would write the vocal acrobatics
you were describing. But I could be wrong.
ME: Here's a cd I made for Bob. I know that it will satisfy your
sophisticated musical tastes, too. As always, there will be a
quiz.
ME: I figure long about summer you might find time to dig around
this get-together-from-a-distance cd I made for guitar friend
Bob. Sorry about that; you know how I like to get multi-duty out
of my little projects. And yer such a good and positive
responder! I'm always saying "life is too short" and it applies
again to the Bach organ pieces. They grab you a little tighter
everytime you hear them, but who has the time in this day and
age?
Here's also Ye Olde Tyme Tale from St Nicholas Magazine, Jan
1892. It pretty much busted my gut - I'm sure I've never seen
anything a tenth as funny in the old children's magazines. I
meant to put it in an earlier mailing - sorry to keep you
waiting!
Here's also a memento of Dover's Hanson House, which I'm still
kicking myself over for not showing you.
THEE: Re: fingerstyle guitar cds
From: Daniel Hannon
ME: Hi again, Donald. Yes, I can clarify the name(s)...Daniel and
D.D. are the same person, and I listed the mailing address
correctly, as:
1572 Windy Lane
Yuma, AZ 85365
Sincerely, D.D.
ME: Hi D.D.
Thanks. That's the address I used, but at that time D.D.'s last
name was Stalder. And Daniel Hannon lived up on West Las Lomas
Street. Weird.
[No further response from liar and thief D. D. Stalder.]
ME: I had a major brainstroke today. It became clear how I can
do any and all transfers to cd, from vinyl or tape, without any
diddling on the computer. I thought I would at least have to
take the sound files to the computer to break continuous opera,
for example, into convenient tracks. Now I see how to do it on
the fly. Started modestly by transferring a problematic Carmen
highlights tape to cd. Moved the tape to a nice Maxell shell
first, which will be more or less standard practice for working
with tapes. It worked for the Carmen, but not so well for The
Merry Widow - and abysmally for a Fritz Wunderlich recital. The
problem, as hard to believe as it is, is that on these old (ca.
1984) commercial tapes, the lubricant in the oxide coating is
gone - and there is so much friction that the rollers and
capstans can't pull the tape across the head, even though the
reels turn perfectly freely! I was thoroughly convinced my
Proformance deck had given up the ghost, but then it spun my
Maxells perfectly. I'll have to look into a couple of "fixes" I
read about. One involves lubricating with graphite. And I
remember somebody saying he just bent the spring behind the pad
in the cassette so it didn't apply as much force.
Bought a box of books for $3 at the auction today, mostly to
complete my set of "Junior Classics".
THEE: Turn those lights off
Sorry for my decidely belated response. I was in Coral Gables
(next to Miami), getting a bit of soon.
Does the Deauville (sp?) Hotel still stand? I wasn't able to
find out.
ME: The doctor came bouncing in and said, "Well, I have nothing but
good news!" He even called my lab results "phenomenal."
Everything was in the good range. So how come I feel like I'm
falling apart?
THEE:
Staining: The height of one of the buildings to be stained is a
liability risk for Persimmon Park Place to allow residents to do
the job. An insured, licensed contractor with the required
equip- ment is being considered to do the job.
Graffiti Removal: We will be most appreciative for your
assistance in removing the graffiti from the entrance sign.
Club-House Usage: The Club-House will be available for usage
after maintenance issues are completed.
15 MPH: The request for a 15 mph has been approved by the city.
Parking: Parking restrictions has not been completely resolved
by city officials.
THEE: Hey Don, Been listening to the CD's and enjoying the stuff.
Thank you!!!! How did you record yourself? Right into the
computer? Cool stuff! Hey we are going to play at her faculty
recital and we need a few duets that are worth practicing and
playing. (Nothing too hard) Do you have and suggestions? What
kind of guitar do you have? I just bought a breedlove with an
extended neck and a cutaway (crossover) $800 I like it... it
came with a really nice case. When I wanted to get back into
guitar I dug out my classical from college but the bridge had
pulled off and the neck was bent which made the action bad. I
had the bridge fixed but felt it was time to get another. That
is great you got into teaching. When you get the teaching bug it
is a hard thing to shake. I love to see my students perform...I
get so into it I forget to do the things I am responsible for.
Tee Hee..........
ME: Glad you enjoy the cds. Did the crazy clash of music on the
Robin Adair album click for you? No big deal if it didn't!
For whatever it's worth one of the most recurring memories of our
times palling around is that murderous Sharon Isbin cd of Bach
pieces we tried to listen to in your truck. And how we couldn't
get your radio presets to work.
Believe it or not, I'm still playing the same old worn out Guild
guitar I've had since the mid 1970s. I'm not playing with anyone
now, so it doesn't matter much. And I've always had a thing
against shopping for another guitar, knowing *anything* I could
get my hands on has surely been picked over and rejected by
hundreds of other guitarists already. A really good guitar isn't
going to make it into the local music store. That's my dumb
belief, anyway. I'm not clear, is the Breedlove you bought a
classical guitar?
When you say you love to see your students perform, what do you
teach? I remember you used to work with people with problems, so
to speak.
All the trio work was recorded on Bev's equipment. The initial
recording was done to digital audio tape. It was only somewhere
down the line when cd-burning became common among the masses, and
our stuff made it to cds instead of cassettes. The compilation I
sent was my own doing, having added a cd-burner to my computer
not so long ago. If you get the bug for recording, I might
suggest recording to a "cd recorder", which is the same as a dual
cassette deck with cd trays instead of cassette. I absolutely
can't imagine all that diddling around on a computer - although I
have gotten used to things in the past I swore I never would.
Right now, what I'm trying to do with my collection of recordings
is make a copy to cd of the tapes or records I listen to as a
cheap and almost natural byproduct of listening. I absolutely
can't imagine doing that on a computer. (If I've got you curious
about cd recorders, ask me for a little more advice from my
experience before you take the plunge.)
By the way, my solo work was recorded with a cheap, plastic
microphone into an old cassette deck. To be honest, I think it
has a lot more life and kick than the recordings made with the
thousands of dollars of equipment.
Your mention of duets reminds me of an album of duets I made with
a friend. I'll send you a copy. I'm not so good with
recommendations, but you might hear a thing two that you could
track down.
THEE: Have you tried Grouper? It is a way we could share Mp3,
sheet music, software just between us. Go to www.grouper.com
get the program and then we can create a group just for us and
invite only us 3. Or others if we know them. This program let's
you instant measage each other!!!! It is really wonderful (I am
still finding out things it does) Do you want to try it out?
it's free Let me know.
ME: Sounds like an amazing tool, but very overwhelming for this
old brain! For instance, I make the piano&guitar music I got
from the Library of Congress available to whoever's interested
(almost nobody!) at 22 cents a page. When somebody asks,
couldn't you just scan it and email it?, I say sure - but that's
$100 per page for all the time and effort involved. (You never
know - you might be talking to a billionaire!) Also never caught
the instant message bug. We had it twenty years ago on our
computer system at GE and it always seemed about the most
inefficient way to communicate anything.
ME: Had a great success today. Couldn't work it into my allotted
minute, and it would glaze a normal person's eyes over, but I
have to unload it on someone. I found the exact answer to my
question in an old discussion group thread from 1993. I realized
lately that my best sounding tape deck, the Sears model
Proformance, plays slow. I finally opened it up figuring that
turning one of the resistor pots(?) would do the trick, as it did
on an earlier deck of mine. Nothing I turned had any effect on
the speed. I went to the discussion group, typed in "cassette
deck" and "adjust speed" and this is what I found.
>In most Japanese decks I've looked at the motor speed adjustment
is a trimpot *inside* the motor housing. This is not as bad as
it sounds: The pot is reachable via a hole in the back of the
motor. The hole looks like a round black dot; if you poke at it
with an alignment tool you find that it's a hole with a piece of
rubber over it, with slits cut in the rubber to admit the tool.
It may be covered with tape on a deck that hasn't had this done
since it left the factory.
I didn't have much hope that that would apply to me specifically,
and that I would be successful if I did find a tiny hole at the
back of the motor. You're really working blind, jabbing a tiny
jeweler's screwdriver half in inch through the rubber clogged
hole and hoping it seats itself in the slot of some microscopic
screw - but all of this truly came to pass and now both decks of
the machine are putting out a perfect A440. Yippeee!!!
On the down side, equipmentwise, my answering machine is acting
like it's ready to give up the ghost, and I can't face buying
modern phone equipment for the house. Guess I'll have to get an
old cassette style answering machine off of ebay. I've been
wasting too many hours of my life losing auctions on ebay.
After correcting the Proformance speed, I transferred my Rose
Marie highlights tape, with Bert Lahr in the role of a mountie,
to cd. It clocked in at a whopping 24:15! There aren't many
Beatle albums that short. It was my first transfer without the
cd recorder kicking out of the record mode on me. On the other
hand, I transferred my Three Tenors tape to cd tonight, and it
got about 50 minutes in before doing me dirty. That created
untold work, because the recording is continuous sound. I needed
to do some patching up on the computer, and one thing leads to
another and it becomes a "project" - exactly what I'm trying to
avoid forever with these transfers to cd.
Got another batch of 5 cd-rws in the mail today. I found out
quickly that 5 wasn't enough. This should do it though.
Think about The -(r)fest for -(r) Fans. I'm probably hoping deep
down inside there are reasons that make it unfeasible. But if
everything works out, maybe this is the year. I can't imagine
where we'd meet up, though, and it seems inefficient to drive all
way the separately.
THEE: Hello music inquiry - search
First, I do not know if you still are providing a music service.
I am seeking a Napoleon Coste Collection of Solo Guitar Works,
Vol 3 (now out of print) but published by Chanterelle Ref #403.
Is there any way you can assist me with obtaining a photo copy?
THEE: t'aint half as funny
My father, Arthur George Eiss, used to read to us a lot when we
were kids. By far, my favorite story was a lyrical poem of sorts
that was published in a very old text book called The Peerless
Reciter. The title of the piece was Ye Olde Tyme Tayle of Ye
Knighte, Ye Yeoman, and Ye Faire Damosel. Have a read and see
if you like it too.
I believe that the copyright on this may have expired, leaving
the works it contains in the public domain. I am slowly
researching that. If, however, you know this to be untrue,
please let me know and I will remove the writing from this site.
ME: Hey, I think Larry needs to see the pictures and the crazy
running commentary!
ME: Thought I'd write again in case the message box on your site
didn't work. Also, I'm noticing now how the spellings in your
version have been tamed (modernized"), much to the detriment of
the humor. Again, the artwork and the commentary that
accompanied "Ye Olde Tyme Tayle..." in the 1892 St Nicholas
magazine were hilarious. Would you like me to mail you a copy?
THEE: "done uppe browne"
Did I mention this expression to you a while back?
Read the poem this afternoon, and I'm still laughing. More on
the other great loot later.
Many thanks!
ME:
>Tip: Try removing quotes from your search to get more
>results.
>
>Your search - "done uppe browne" - did not match any documents.
>
>Suggestions: Make sure all words are spelled correctly. Try
>different keywords. Try more general keywords.
Stupid google.
THEE: Re: letter to editor - hanson house
The house is supposed to be rebuilt on another location. -- Don
Flood
ME: Bought my first box of records at Dover's auction on Friday.
I'm finally getting the hang of it. When the auctioneer gets to
a huge lot of books or records, the bidding will start "per box".
So the thing to do is, pick through everything and put your
choices all in the same box. Then you just have to either bid
high enough to get first choice, or hope the high bidder doesn't
grab your box. This worked for a nice box of books I got last
week. On Friday I was the only one to bid on the records, so I
got my box for $2. There were 33 discs total, so I think that
comes in under $.25 a record. After entering them in my
database, and doing a file compare with the previous version,
here's a list of the ones that have an opera connection.
Had quite a wrestling match getting "Great Handel Choruses" onto
cd last night. When will this ever smooth out? This ordeal
started with a missing felt pad, which caused a crumpling of the
tape when I fired it up, and I'll spare you a blow by blow
account. Biggest worry right now is, I truly don't know what cd
recorder to gun for, either new or from ebay. I have reasons for
rejecting each one that I know of.
Not so sure Peter & Gordon is any scarier than anything else
(r)fest could come up with at this point. But don't let me talk
you out of it...
F84: Harmonica Holiday by Richard Hayman and his harmonica
orchestra
Carmen, Bizet: harm. Hayman
F85: Mike Di Napoli plays Honky Tonk Classics
Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Offenbach: pn. Napoli
F86: Twistin' in High Society by Lester Lanin
Dreigroschenoper Die, Weill: OWOW Lanin
F87: Concert Encores by Mantovani
Sadko, Rimsky-Korsakov: OWOW Mantovani
Thais, Massenet: OWOW Mantovani
F88: Spring-Ford Senior High Choral Festival 1964
Carmen, Bizet: Rittenhouse Schimpf
Semele (oratorio), Handel: Garber Schimpf
F89: Harmonica in Hi Jinx by Danny Welton
Samson et Dalila, Saint-Saens: harm. Welton
F90: The Best of Spike Jones and his City Slickers
Guillaume Tell, Rossini: overture speak. Weaver arr. Jones-Weaver
La Gioconda, Ponchielli: ballet speak. Weaver arr. Weaver-Jones
Debussy, Claude: Suite from Pelleas et Melisande
Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy: OWOW Leinsdorf
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 1
Die Lustige Witwe, Lehar: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 2
Babes In Toyland, Herbert: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 3
The Red Mill, Herbert: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 4
Mlle. Modiste, Herbert: c. Piastro
Barbe-Bleu, Offenbach: overture c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 6
El Capitan, Sousa: c. Piastro
The Fortune Teller, Herbert: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 7
H.M.S. Pinafore, Sullivan: c. Piastro
La Traviata, Verdi: c. Piastro
Clari, Bishop: c. Piastro
Naughty Marietta, Herbert: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 8
The Mikado, Sullivan: c. Piastro
The LONGINES Symphonette: The Famous Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette; record 9
Les Cloches de Corneville, Planquette: c. Piastro
THEE: Re: "done uppe browne"
So much for google, Don. What about my questions? ;-)
ME: fumbling left and right!
a. Right after sending off my response
>I think Larry needs to see the pictures and the crazy running
commentary!
it hit me that you were saying the same thing in your subject
line: "t'aint half as funny". Oof.
By the way, I did shoot right off a message to Larry asking if he
wants a copy of the poem in St. Nicholas magazine.
b. Subject: "done uppe browne"
Double-fumbled this one. I missed that it was a quote from the
poem, and thought it was your comment on the poem - which I'd
interpreted as a positive comment (sort of like "painting the
town red".) Searching my disk to refresh my memory, this is what
I came up with:
>I've been trying to figure out a slang expression I've seen many
times in 1912 newspapers: "do [someone] brown." In the OED, I
just found an 1840s use meaning "to deceive, take in." It also
suggests that the expression might be associated with roasting--
to roast throughly until brown, to do thoroughly. If one takes
both ideas, they pretty well fit what I've seen. Sometimes the
expression seems to mean to trick or deceive. Other times it
seems merely to mean to do *whatever* bad to someone, such as one
baseball team doing another brown when the first team trounces
the second. Guess that fits with the "do thoroughly" notion.
This is the only lead I've been able to find other than getting
the basic idea of meaning from contexts.
So thanks; that made that section of the poem, where there's all
that bouncing of opposites (dress uppe/dress downe) even funnier.
c. Make that a triple fumble. Figuring "done uppe browne" was
your doing, I could have at least played along with "stupidde
googoyle". Too late now. :(
Something that occurred later, though - since "done uppe browne"
is in the poem, how come google didn't come uppe with it? (I
know how english teachers frown on "how come?" I've been trying
to get more sophisticated and use Little Roy's formulation on one
of Mom's country gospel records: "Why come...?")
d. Neat Billy Possum card. Billy had also completely left my
memory banks. This item from a wish list, from Dec 2001, is all
I came up with:
>H.S. Taylor,"The Rag-Bag Rag" and "Billy Possum's Barn Dance"
(together)
I don't think I knew even then about the Taft connection. I'm
not totally clear on Billy. It seems that he never caught on, as
Teddy Bear did, but I see stories about Unc' Billy Possum from
1920. I presume that can't be a pure coincidence.
Yes, ebay is grand. I just got a copy of "The Dutch and the
Swedes on the Delaware, 1609-1664" by Christopher Ward (1930).
This wasn't one of the regular ebay auctions, but a buy-it-now
from some ebay store, I suppose? I don't really know what's up
with ebay stores, but, hey, it got me something I was looking
for.
Haven't started to read it yet. It was a wrenching decision
between that and "Robin Hood" by my man Howard Pyle, and I
figured it was time to come up to speed on Robin. I'm just
noticing now that there's no date of any sort on it. I'm
guessing it may be 1950s-era reprint. I get a kick out of Howard
Pyle - he really works me. Before getting to chapter one I went
to the dictionary for: butt, clothyard, throstle, greenwood,
sward, eke (also), yeoman, clout, rod (5.5 yards), an (if), wot
(dictionary gives as past tense of wit, but always seems to me to
be used as present tense), despoil, dingly, curtal, ell,
quarterstaff, trow, covert (underbrush, e.g.), broad arrow,
humming ale, ween. One thing I ween/wot/trow - I'll *never* nail
the distinction between them.
Robin Hood came in a box of books I got at the Dover auction for
$3. After all this time, I'm starting to get the hang of the
auction. There was a whole table full of boxes of books. I've
come to understand that it is a-ok to put together your own box
(since they come from the same dealer, of course.) One box had a
complete set of "The Junior Classics", and I always wanted to
complete my collection. So I dug through all the other boxes and
pulled out anything that vaguely interested me and threw it in
with the Junior Classics. Another nice one, already read, was
"20 Most Asked Questions about the Amish and Mennonites".
By the way, if you're interested in one of the facets of Howard
Pyle, look up "How Boots Befooled The King". It's surely on the
web somewhere. Apparently, our notion of what a pirate is comes
from Pyle's pirate stories and drawings. I only have one of his
pirate stories - in The Junior Classics.
At Friday's auction I applied the same method to a lot of
records. I found a few that had miscellaneous opera-related
tracks, so I gathered those together and then just filled out the
box with any ol' "dumb" thing that looked like fun. You'll note
your influence in some of the selections: Mister Ragtime, E.
Power Biggs Plays Scott Joplin (on the harpsichord), Your
Father's Mustache, Piano Roll Discoveries (with Zez Confrey,
etc.), Piano Roll Party in Hi-Fi, Honky Tonk Classics, Spring-
Ford High School Choral Festival 1964, etc.
Quite enjoyed the article on Bruthuh Vanderbilt's cakewalking.
Hope I never see an accident as bad as the one you described. I
can think of a few that were a thousand times less serious, and
they still made my heart pound.
Never letting anything die, I set out to destroy our wormy mayor
who oversaw the destruction of the Hanson House - and belittled
me when I tried to put in a word for it. We have elections in
April, and I sent this to the Dover Post. You'll see I couldn't
get it to all fit cleanly in one sentence - there's a problem
with what adverbs, adjectives and nouns link up - but it was the
best I could do and I figured the reader would get it.
>Dear Dover Post,
>When I am in the voting booth on April 18 deciding on the mayor,
I know I'll be thinking about the Hanson House - Dover's
(formerly) oldest, most charming and strikingly situated building
- and under whose watchful eye it got sold down the river for a
handful of shekels so some real estate guys can build themselves
a club house, whooppee.
I didn't really expect it to fly, and this is what I eventually
got back from the editor:
>Re: letter to editor - hanson house
>The house is supposed to be rebuilt on another location. -- Don
Flood
Now, if he had just hit the delete button, I'd be ok. But can
you imagine a response that misses the point any worse? Don and
I have shared some good laughs, and I think of us as friends, but
I could barely squelch the urge to shoot back a "So what?" Come
on, Don, I *know* all that - with emphasis on "supposed to be".
And even if it is, it will be nothing more than a mockup of the
original - and almost an hour from Dover! So what, so what, so
what???
THEE: Subject: Billy Possum
Ain't eBay grand? I managed to snag that Billy & Jimmy walking
to DC card for not to outrageous of a price. (Most of them were
starting at $20-$60). I did better. I has already arrived and
has a terrific message on the back:
3/29/09
Guthrie Okla.
923 W Warner Ave
Dear Friend I received
your card & was glad to get it but would rather get letters than
cards from you as you write such long letters and I like to get
that kind are you still at Aunt Beckies say I wish you would come
over and take me a ride in the Auto as I have never rode in one
and would like to very much well bye-bye. Your loving friend
Lillian
The friend is Miss Hattie Kerwood (or possibly Sherwood) at a RFD
address in Illinois. I can't make out the town--something like
Lathurce or Satlhurce but those both look strange.
It has a nice Guthrie postmark, too, just a couple years after
statehood and about a year before the capitol was moved to OKC.
I hope Lillian got her Auto ride!
Finally getting ready to pop in the new CD as I enter grades into
my online gradebook.
Remind me to tell you about the newspaper archive Billy Possum
search. It's a goody.
6 attachments -- Download all attachments View all images
Billy Possum dines on Roast Teddy Bear.jpg
Billy Possum moving day 1909 postcard pub Fred Lounsbury.jpg
Billy Possum Poem card 1.jpg
Billy and Jimmy Possum on the Links.jpg
Billy Possum poem postcard2.jpg
billypossum_teddybear March 4 1909 possum headed to White House.jpg
THEE: Congratulations on the tape deck success.
I'm mulling the Fest. I like the idea, though a Peter and Gordon
reunion sounds ghastly!
THEE: fumbling left and right
>By the way, I did shoot right off a message to Larry asking if
he'd like a copy of the poem in St. Nicholas magazine.
Good. Figured you'd do that, too. Let me know if Larry replies.
>b. Subject: "done uppe browne"
>Double-fumbled this one.
I didn't recall if I'd mentioned this to you although I knew I'd
discussed it with an Internet-only friend who was trying to track
down a word he'd come across in an African American newspaper:
buffay. It seems to be a put-down of white folks, but neither of
us has been able to find any other uses of the word.
>So thanks; that made that section of the poem, where there's all
that bouncing of opposites (dress uppe/dress downe) even funnier.
One of my favorite lines, although there are many, is "an wore a
look of honestie/likewise a flannel shirte." I guess it was the
contrast that tickled my funnybone.
You had a question mark in the margin beside binned on page 1.
Maybe it refers to storing what he reaped, as one stores wheat or
corn in bins. My guess, for what it's worth.
Am I write in assuming those occasional semicircles in the
margins are some of your laughing points rather than places where
you got spastic with a pencil?
>c. Make that a triple fumble. Figuring "done uppe browne" was
your doing, I could have at least played along with "stupidde
googoyle". Too late now. :(
It's funny even now.
>Something that occurred later, though - since "done uppe browne"
is in the poem, how come google didn't come uppe with it?
Maybe because Larry's version not only lacks the illustrations
and marginal annotations, but also lacks the archaic spelling.
;-) The St. Nicholas Magazine version is better all around.
>(I know how english teachers frown on "how come?" I've been
trying to get more sophisticated and use Little Roy's formulation
on one of Mom's country gospel records: "Why come...?")
As long as you don't make it "hows come" like a few of my
students.
>d. Neat Billy Possum card. Billy had also completely left my
memory banks. This item from a wish list, from Dec 2001, is all
I came up with:
>H.S. Taylor,"The Rag-Bag Rag" and "Billy Possum's Barn Dance"
(together)
I'm pretty sure I mentioned Billy Possum in one of the book
chapter's you've read and that you asked me to explain.
BUT THANKS! I'd forgotten about "Billy Possum's Barn Dance."
Looking through a stack of music copied last summer, I'm finding
"Rag-Bag Rag" but not "Billy Possum," which should have been
published with "Rag-Bag." Maybe I was running out of money on my
card, but I woulda thunk I'd at least have copied page 1. I
guess this means the name didn't yet mean anything to me at the
time. I don't recall making the connection until I read your
note, or rather, the paste in from my 2001 wish list. I've now
added "Billy Possum" to my May search list. Fortunately, "Rag-
Bag" is clearly marked M1350.T. There's a definite connection
here. They copyright date is 1909. I wonder if I can track down
the original sheet music, which might have an illustration. it
would be interesting to know how WC. got involved with this one,
too. This isn't a Witmark piece; H. S. Taylor seems to have
self-published it, using WC as orchestrator: H. S. Taylor &
Company, Elizabeth, N. J. I'll try the copyright catalog.
>I don't think I knew even then about the Taft connection. Yes,
I'd be interested in the newspaper archive search stories. I'm
not totally clear on Billy. It seems that he never caught on, as
Teddy Bear did, but I see stories about Unc' Billy Possum from
1920. I presume that can't be a pure coincidence.
A couple of weeks ago, I spotted a 1909 Billy Possum book on
eBay. The seller expressed puzzlement about it, mentioning the
popular 1920s stories. He didn't seem to be aware of the Taft
connection but obviously guessed that he had something rare. His
beginning price was $100. Needless to say, I passed.
>Yes, ebay is grand. I just got a copy of "The Dutch and the
Swedes on the Delaware, 1609-1664" by Christopher Ward (1930).
Sounds like a neat buy! My two latest eBay books are Marie
Corelli's Romance of Two Worlds, an undated Collier edition that
is in better shape than the clearly older edition bought a few
years ago, and a leather bound 1911 edition of Arnold Bennett's
Denry the Audacious. You probably have in past emails the
explanation of my interest in the Corelli book. It's the source
of WC's "Heliobas," and I bought this second copy mainly for the
drawing of the character Heliobas. Someday when I create that
website I keep thinking about, I'll need the drawing. Denry the
Audacious I bought mainly out of curiosity because of an allusion
in one of my hound dog articles. You know me; I like to be
able to explain those obscure references. The book arrived
yesterday, and I immediately read the first 10 pages, barely
forcing myself to put it down to do other things I need to do
this weekend. It's gonna be one funny book. In the opening
three pages, Denry, born of a seamstress/laundrywoman, who could
'wash flannel with less shrinking than any other woman in the
district, manages to make his way into a good private school as a
scholarship student by changing his geography exam score from 7
to 27 out of a possible 30 while the examiner is out of the room.
His educational career is treated very briefly: "He did not
shine at the school; he failed to fulfil the rosy promise of the
scholarshipl but he was not stupide than the majorityl and his
opinion of himself, having once risen, remained at 'set fair.'
He ends up with a clerks job in a law firm where he briefly meets
a countess, who has the office handling her invitations to the
ball she is giving. Denry falls for her immediately, and, since
he has the job of collating several lists of invitees, in to one
final list, he manages to insert his name toward the middle where
it won't be noticed. In a mere ten pages, it's clear how he
earned his name. His full name, by the way, is Edward Henry
Machin, but his mother "saved a certain amount of time every day
by addressing her son as Denry instead of Edward Henry."
>Robin Hood came in a box of books I got at the Dover auction for
$3.
Neat deal. It would be fun to create one's own box! I read one
Robin Hood book years ago as an adult and enjoyed it immensely.
I guess that was about the same time I read Treasure Island and
Tarzan of Apes and 2-3 other of the Tarzan books. These were
always "guy books" when I was a kid, but I had fun with them as
an adult. I guess this must have been during the 6 years that I
was home with young 'uns.
>Hope I never see an accident as bad as the one you described.
----I saw and heard nothing immediately after the event. A
couple of days ago, a colleague told me that she'd read that the
man died. Not surprising at all.
>>The house is supposed to be rebuilt on another location. -- Don
Flood
>So what, so what, so what???
Right. The point is that the house should have stayed in
Dover, preferably on site or, at least, on a museum site if it
had to be torn down and rebuilt. I'm enjoying owning a piece of
the house.
>P.S. For what it's worth, here are my new records with opera
connections:
Cool. Honky-tonk and harmonica opera. You find some treasures!
Any chance of our maybe getting to The Book Thing this trip?
ME: Once again, a step behind. After wondering in the email
about how google missed "done uppe browne", but before sending it
off, I realized it was surely due to updated spellings in Larry's
page. I hadn't looked that closely on the first visit; figured
the blandness was a natural result of a web presentation and lack
of pictures and wise-guy commentary. Right after sending it off,
I took another visit to confirm my suspicion. Hey, being a step
behind ain't so bad. I claim people who are always a step behind
see lots of things other people don't. That's my story and I'm
sticking to it.
I did get a nice reply from Larry, but he didn't take the plunge
and include a mailing address yet. (After all, how can anybody
know I'm not an ax murderer? My argument is that I'd probably
start next door rather than fly across the country first, but who
cares about logic.)
I'm sure you've nailed "binned". Falls right in line with the
farming chores leading up to it.
Yes, the little arcs are my shorthand for a smiley face. Who
needs eyes? I suppose it came about from worrying about somebody
finding smiley faces in my margins - how embarrassing! I've been
doing it since long before the web popularized smiley faces.
Denry the Audacious sounds like a funny guy. I read the first
few Tarzan books in the mid-1970s. I was totally knocked out by
the first one, and said, I've got to read them all! I seem to
remember thinking the second one was pretty good, but not up to
the snuff of the first, and the next one or two fell off a little
more, and that's as far as I got.
In the list of words I looked up in the prolog to Robin Hood, I
didn't admit that "humming ale" wasn't in my dictionary. Just
did a web search and the first hit gives the definition - and the
next two are web editions of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood.
I reread How Boots Befooled The King last night, and also the
story after it in the anthology, King Stork. The latter may have
a little more "color" to it. That's how I view Pyle's fairy
tales - Grimms with added "color" (but not full-blown, modern
technicolor). I think "The Apple Of Contentment" was the first
Howard Pyle story I read, and I thought it was really nice.
You got me wondering whose version of Robin Hood you read.
Here's a web page that lists loads (all?) of them. You'll see
how influential Pyle's telling was. The page doesn't give me the
year of my book, though.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ozfoxes/sherwood/rb2novl.htm
For the life of me, I can't make a buffay/ofay connection,
although it seems like there has to be one.
I forgot to mention that there's another Lincoln symposium coming
up, which H~~ might be interested in. I'm scared to death of
making recommendations, cuz you never know what other people like
and how good something is going to be. I had a great time at my
first three Lincoln symposia, but last year's - when it finally
worked out that my friend could make it, wasn't nearly as fun.
But, one takes one's chances. I'll just forward the announcement
to you.
And I see I just got a note from Larry with his mailing address.
Great!
THEE: Re: fumbling left and right
Oops, will get back to you later about Billy Possum search.
Looks like the name originated in January 1909.
THEE: Re: bought my first
Good deal! Some of those records sound awesome.
Some don't.
I tried downloading a DVD via hip bit torrent technology this
weekend. It took 43 hours. The result (a Who concert) is too
big to fit on a single DVD. I'm giving up on this particular
project, I think.
THEE: RE: ye olde tyme tayle
I would be interested in the artwork and commentary. I'm
surprised to learn that you have seen a version of this that has
alternative spelling. My version comes from the Peerless Reciter
(a compendium of writings to be used in training actors and
speakers) and I had always assumed it was the original version.
How did you come to learn of this tayle?
ME: I picked up a bound volume of St. Nicholas children's
magazine (Vol. XIX, Nov 1891 - Oct 1892) at an auction in Dover,
Delaware. It seems a lot of what I read is a) old, and b) for
kids. I wouldn't give up my computer and my stereo, but
otherwise, I was born in the wrong age.
I had sent a copy of Ye Olde Tyme Tayle to a college professor
internet friend, who laughed her head off, too. She instantly
and naturally does an internet search on *anything* - and found
your page.
All I can say is, don't delay! Shoot me any sort of mailing
address so you can enjoy the original in all its glory! You
deserve it for putting a copy on the web.
THEE: Subject: vinyl repair!!!
Hi, I was wondering if you had any idea about how to fix a record
that is warped at a tiny part of the edge. You know those records
where for the 1st minute or so, whenever the needle hits that
area, it just jumps right up? Its so frustrating and I was just
wanting to know if its possible to fix... maybe with heat or
something? or am I just screwed? thanks, ryan.
ME: Nope, I don't have any ideas on taking a warp out of a
record. I've had quite a few that sound like what you're
describing. I suppose you've tried cranking up the tone arm
weight for the first track? Most of the time that will do the
trick. One of my beefs with the design of cartridges and needles
is that there is so little clearance. I've had warps that will
scrape the cartridge even before it gets to the stylus. And if
you bump up the weight a little, the clearance is even less.
Anyhow, that's about the best I can say - try increasing the
tracking weight as much as you dare.
THEE: Subject: RE: ye olde tyme tayle
You can snail-mail me at . . .
I like your Web site. You have some impressive credentials as
well. It'll take me years to read all you have there.
THEE:
>Now that I know what's going on, I ask if you've caught the of/or
typo?
If you didn't point it out earlier, I probably missed it. BUT I
saw it this time. Definitely OR. That's one of my common
typos, as you know. Worse, though, is my tendency to hit s when
trying to type the word add. That's a common enough word in
handouts to my students, that I've put the a** version into my
autocorrect. Of course, if I ever mean to type it, it will now
come out as add.
>Yes, the little arcs are my shorthand for a smiley face. Who
needs eyes? I suppose it came about from worrying about somebody
finding smiley faces in my margins - how embarrassing! I've been
doing it since long before the web popularized smiley faces.
Definitely more subtle.
>Denry the Audacious sounds like a funny guy.
I think the book will be a hoot. And I was thinking that
Samuel Slimme might like to know Denry's ma, who can wash flannel
with less shrinkage than anyone else.
>You got me wondering whose version of Robin Hood you read.
Here's a web page that lists loads (all?) of them. You'll see
how influential Pyle's telling was. The page doesn't give me the
year of my book, though.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ozfoxes/sherwood/rb2novl.htm
I don't know what it was. I think it was a copy my parents had,
part of a series of classics. for some reason I think it may
have been Pyle because his name is so clear in my memory and I
don't know why. It was there before you first mentioned him.
>For the life of me, I can't make a buffay/ofay connection,
although it seems like there has to be one.
---Do you have the definition of ofay that comes from some
African language? Doesn't seem like this should be a typo for
ofay since it was in an African American paper, but no one seems
to be figuring it out.
ME: Let me take a stab at buffay before anyone beats me to the
punch. Now, I'm trusting you to not blabber this around, at
least with my name attached, if it's totally stupid.
I had seen the word ofay used by blacks in several stories as a
word for whites. Even though it had a pig latin ring to it, I
never made the obvious connection. I eventually read a story
where a black character defined it for a white character: "ofay"
= "foe" in pig latin. Pretty obvious, huh? I can only think
that I never got the final answer because I had a fixation on the
other possibility - "oaf" also maps to "ofay" in pig latin, and I
didn't reckon oaf as a possible solution.
So, *if* at some time blacks had a *thing* for pig latin, *maybe*
"buffay" is semi- or lazy pig latin for "buff": "1b. the color of
buff (a thick, soft, undyed leather...); pale, light, or moderate
yellowish pink to yellow, including moderate orange yellow to
light yellowish brown."
Notice that "buffay" works better as code than "uffbay", which
practically screams "buff".
Then again, this is only a wild-eyed theory. Mizan calls us
apricot.
P.S. Speaking of Mizan, I went to her school today to see their
Black History program. Mizan was the narrator for a Rosa Parks
skit. I learned a few things.
THEE: Subject: The Fest for People Who Like to Record CDs
We reviewed our calendar last night and I am OFFICIALLY on for
Beatlefest (delete and insert proper name).
PS. Sorry to report that the car deck adaptor thingie you got me
has shorted out. I replaced it with another brand, which has its
own quirks.
THEE: Re: let me take a
Interesting guesses and all that makes pretty good sense, but
look at the possible connections to African languages. Here's
what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say.
And what are Jiw-wauks? Does London Letter mean this is from
London? Maybe some black performing troupe in London? If so,
maybe Jiw-wauks are Jews, who are scarce as contrasted with the
numbers in, say, NYC? London certainly had Jews. Beats me.
U.S. slang (orig. and chiefly in African-American usage). Chiefly
derogatory or depreciative.
Brit. /fe/, U.S. /ofe/ Forms: 19- ofay, offay. [Origin unknown.
A large number of etymologies have been suggested (as in quots.
1932, 1977), but none are convincing; for summaries see J. E.
Lighter Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1997) II. s.v., and Dict. Amer.
Regional Eng. (1996) III. s.v.]
A. n. A white person. Cf. FAY n.4
[1898 Freeman (Indianapolis) 8 Oct. 5/1 'Ofay' Brooks sends regards
to 'Snapper' Edmonds.] 1899 Freeman (Indianapolis) 2 Sept. 5/5
London Letter... All the boys seem to like this side of th [sic]
water... 'Jiw-wauks' are scarce, but 'O-fays' are plentiful. 1925
Inter-State Tattler 6 Mar. 8 We hear that 'Booker Red' has three
ofays on his staff. 1932 Africa 5 506 The root of the word
appears to come from the Ibibio Afia, white or light-coloured.
Hence in Harlem Offay means any light-coloured person and
therefore a European. 1956 B. HOLIDAY Lady sings Blues (1973) v.
52 Most of the ofays, the white people, who came to Harlem those
nights were looking for atmosphere. 1977 Amer. Speech 1975 50 89
That this word [sc. Yoruba ofe] could have been brought to the
United States by slaves is altogether possible... Thus ofay may
be taken as a word said for self-protection in times of threat,
which was then transferred to the source of threat, and so came
to mean 'whiteman'. 1992 Folk Roots Sept. 47/3 Let's not get into
any ethno-political-socio-hoo-ha here 'cos it's so boring,
mainly this is entertainment: right, ofays?
B. adj. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a white person;
white.
1911 Adventure Jan. 446, I saw a mardi-gras suit of clothes that
might have been 'ofay' on a negro minstrel. 1927 Amer. Mercury
Dec. 392 Ugly people there are, certainly, but the percentage of
beautiful folk is unquestionably larger than among the ofay
brethren. 1940 New Republic 7 Oct. 472 When he goes downtown to
this civil-service office, they take him for ofay. 1956 B.
HOLIDAY Lady sings Blues (1973) ix. 89 'What will people think?'
is a big deal in ofay circles. 1971 Black World Apr. 62, I was
attendant in the ofay ladies lounge. 1999 J. ELLROY Tijuana, mon
Amour in GQ Mar. 276/2 He teed off on ofay oppression and segued
to sepia self-hate.
Following the link for FAY, I found this:
1927 Amer. Mercury Aug. 393 'What a lot of 'fays!' I thought, as I
noticed the number of white guests. 1946 MEZZROW & WOLFE Really
Blues (1957) 62 He was the first fay boy I ever heard who
mastered this vital foundation of jazz music. 1966 Publ. Amer.
Dial. Soc. 1964 XLII. 44 Fay is commonly used by Negroes to
designate Caucasians.
If we're to take ofay or fay for white, might bufay (should be a
single f) be someone a little darker, maybe a mulatto? Notice
that example above contrasting "ofay oppression" and "sepia self-
hate."
"Bufay" was applied to the manager of the traveling production
of Scott Joplin's lost opera A Guest of Honor. The guy ran off
with the receipts, thus stranding the troupe without money to pay
the boarding house bill. Then, allegedly, Joplin left his trunk
as security on the debt, and the opera was never seen again. By
the way, the one use of the term I'm aware is in the Indianapolis
Freeman, a major--perhaps THE major--black paper of the time:
"We are sorry to note the misfortune Mr. Scott Joplin met with
his Ragtime Opera company while filling an engagement in
Springfield, ILL. He has been doing big business, but his Bufay
representative embarks with the receipts, leaving them in a hole.
They are in Chicago for the present."
Good to hear you were able to attend Mizan's program and that she
was the Rosa Parks skit narrator. I bet she enjoyed that role!
Apricot, huh? Closer than white, maybe, but sounds a bit orange
to me.
ME: I just tortured myself with probably close to an hour's worth
of ordering my (r)fest ticket online - to find that I have to
still mail a check in anyway! grrrrrr....
I am close to certain this park & ride will work. According to
the web page
http://www.dartfirststate.com/parknride/
the address is
DE 896 & DE 4 (with 180 spaces)
Newark, DE 19702
It's mixed up with some unrelated church address.
These route numbers are close to worthless, and probably more
misleading than helpful. They appear on only the most detailed
road atlases, and really throw mapquest for a loop. But I am
almost certain this corresponds to S COLLEGE AVE and the point
where CHRISTIANA PKY becomes E CHESTNUT HILL RD (or vice versa).
DE 4 is DE 2 in this region.
You can confirm some of these findings at
http://www.aaroads.com/delaware/de-896.htm
Here's the most relevant paragraph:
In Newark Delaware 896 travels South College Avenue to junction
Delaware 2 & 4 (Chestnut Hill Road). A late 1980s realignment
relocated the state route from South College Avenue between
Chestnut Hill Road and Delaware Avenue (Delaware 2 Business & 273
eastbound) in an effort to reduce through traffic. South College
Avenue bisects the heart of the University of Delaware Campus
between the Amtrak Northeastern Corridor and West Main Street
(Delaware 2 Business & 273 westbound). Delaware
896 follows Delaware 2 & 4 (Christiana Parkway) west from South
College Avenue to Elkton Road (Delaware 2 Business). From there
Delaware 2 Business & 896 migrate northeast into downtown Newark
to the one-way street couplet of Delaware Avenue (eastbound) and
West Main Street (westbound). The north and southbound directions
of Delaware 896 partition between Delaware Avenue east, South
College Avenue north, West Main Street west, and New London Road
north for northbound and Hillside Road west, West Main Street
east, Elkton Road west for southbound. The split directions join
at the Hillside Road intersection with New London Road. Delaware
896 resumes a northward course along New London Road 2.
9 miles to the Maryland state line.
Whew, it sounds like 896 jerks around back on itself!
I found a road atlas at the Dover auction today that showed 896
on the route that becomes S COLLEGE AVE, and routes 2 and 4 on
the E CHESTNUT HILL/CHRISTIANA PKWY road. Note that mapquest
consistently calls CHRISTIANA Christina.
Let me attach a mapquest image making this mess clear. Note that
the intersection is maybe less than a mile north of Exit 1 on Rt
95.
For an evening of your own entertainment pleasure, try plugging
de 896 and de 4 into mapquest.
THEE: Subject: CD recorders
My friend just flagged thismodel. What do you think?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827196017
ME:
It may be just the thing to change my life.
What is it?
THEE: Re: i just tortured
I haven't investigated the ticket ordering business. I suppose
I'll give 'er a try tomorrow.
I will have to study this park-and-ride business closely, but I
like the plan.
THEE: Re: CD recorders
It is the answer! A CD recorder! I need it!
Exclaimation point!
ME: Now *this* is a cd recorder:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=Item=5872311841
(Note winning bidder.)
THEE: Subject: Still laughing
I've been enjoying the CD and laughed myself silly as I exited
the freeway and headed toward campus one day while listening to
the juxtaposed versions of the Peter and the Wolf intro for the
first time. What a contrast! If you ever tackle the fuller
juxtaposed scene CD, please make sure I'm on your mailing list.
Then, on my way home later in the day, I came to the Psychedelic
Amateur Hour and started laughing again. I suspected that "Old
MacDonald" recorder virtuoso wouldn't win, but I half suspected
that Dan's disappearing act would. Is life ever fair? So how
about trying out for American Idol? Any big prizes for that WFBR
contest?
The gamut of talent from Andrea, Mildred, and Bill the Great to
Senor Flamenco and Spookie Weirdness to Bach . . . . well, what
can I say? Maybe I'll try a continuous loop of Spookie Weirdness
played out the front window next Halloween.
Listening to all that Bach organ music made me think of the
closing quote in the old NY Evening Post interview with WC about
him being the man whose diversion is playing Bach on the organ.
You SAVE your answering machine messages???????
ME: let's get one thing perfectly straight was: Still laughing
I . . .
save . . .
every . . .
THING.
On 3/4/06, you wrote:
>You SAVE your answering machine messages???????
THEE: Subject: kapsberger
Hi, thanks for your website. I thought I was one of the only
guys (besides Paul O' Dette) who loved Kapsberger. I wonder if
you could help me find more music transcribed for guitar by
Kapsberger. I would love it if someone would transcribe the
whole Primo Involatura etc. for guitar. I have the music of
Kapsberger in tablature but It is a nightmare to transcribe. How
is his music read? Is it upside down from English lute tab? I
want to play the pieces that O' Dette does on his Kapsberger CD
but I can't seem to make it work. Has Kapsberger been
transcribed in complete fashion like Dowland or Mudarra. Do you
have any suggestions on how to best approach the acquistion of
this music so that I may play it on my guitar. Thanks so much
!!!!!!!!
THEE: Subject: Clear as mud was: let's get one thing perfectly straight was: Still laughing . . .
THEE: Re: CD recorders
I feel jealousy!
Good work!
ME: Get word to Chris she made a killing on the ketchup deal.
Those cucumber bath granules just sit on the bottom of the tub,
hard as pebbles.
THEE: Subject: Mt taranaki pictures
I kept a couple of pictures of Mt Taranaki from Harry's house
before it was sold. I believe you expressed an interest in having
one. If so let me know and I will send a description of the
pictures that I have.
ME: That's kind of you. Yes, I'd be interested in a picture I
don't already have that Harry thought was special. I know we
talked about the large picture hanging outside the office, but I
thought there was only one of that. If you're referring to a
framed photo, I wouldn't need the frame.
THEE: hey what's wrong with coming to Baltimore, just because I
beat you in scrabble? I'll will pass on the message to Diane.
ME: That was a fine game - I'm still feeling a glow.
Hey, now that I think about it, you had one more turn than
everybody else. That really stinks. Just kidding - you used it
very wisely.
While I'm writing, any chance Diane has a copy of the old
Christmas card picture with the horse and sleigh? This is very
low priority, but if it's handy, I could make nice use of it.
THEE: Subject: Amaranthine
I loved your word definitions but couldnt find Amaranthine which
I searched and searched for but probably bypassed it. I found
definitions elsewhere but would like yours. What a super site.
Take a bow
ME: Thanks for visiting. You say you couldn't find "amaranthine"
on my page after a search engine brought you there? I just
checked, and it's there, right in alphabetical order. The
definition I give is actually the second in my American Heritage
dictionary: Eternally beautiful. (The dictionary adds,
"unfading; everlasting".) No, I would not have remembered this
without revisiting the page, but I do see many other words on my
page that have managed to stick by now.
By the way, I now record my words direct to cd, though I still
need a tape recorder as a go-between for my cd recorder and
microphone. Current read is "Robin Hood" by Howard Pyle which
regularly sends me to the dictionary and recorder.
ME: minor case for Det. Boyd?
to: Ronald.Rodriguez@ci.yuma.az.us Dear
Supervisor Rodriguez,
Would you be so kind as to forward this message to Detective
Wayne Boyd, or whoever may be the most appropriate? Thank you
very much.
======================================================================
Dear Det. Boyd,
I was stiffed on the payment for an item I sold on ebay to a Yuma
resident. No one has to tell me how trivial $18 is in the scheme
of things, or, even if I did pursue the matter through the court
system, how it would take years, I would be out many thousands of
dollars, and the courts would still leave it in my lap to try to
collect the $18 (plus interest) from the loser.
Still, I think if a member of Yuma's fraud division had 2 minutes
to spare to give D. D. Stalder a call and ask what's up with his
confusion of identities, he'd get quite a surprise and might
think twice in the future. Also notice the implausibility of his
knowledge of mail that had been addressed to him going to someone
else. For the record, my packing jobs are superlative and my
printed address and return address labels are legible at 50 feet.
I don't think it was the post office.
Just 2 minutes of your time, that's all I'm hoping for.
Thanks.
======================================================================
According to a yahoo people search:
D Stalder
1572 E Windy Ln Yuma, AZ 85365-3516 Tel.: (928) 341-1839
Daniel Hannon
1611 W Las Lomas St Yuma, AZ 85364-4470 Tel.: (928) 329-0841
======================================================================
THEE:
From: eBay Mailed-By: ebay.com
Subject: eBay Item Sold: 12 Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine CDs -
many artists! (4800577670)
Dear iz710, Congratulations! The following item just sold:
12 Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine CDs - many artists! Sale price:
$15.50 Quantity sold: 1 Subtotal: US $15.50 Shipping & Handling:
check with seller - $2
Details for Item number: 4800577670 Item URL:
http://cm.ebay.com/cm/ck/1065-29323-2357-
0?uid=&site=0&ver=EOISSA080805&item=4800577670&lk=URL Sale Date:
Sunday, Dec 04, 2005 09:34:26 PST Listing format: Auction
Buyer: ivorybill444 (gpskink444@yahoo.com) [ contact buyer ]
Buyer's shipping address
D.D. Stalder
1572 Windy Lane Yuma, AZ 85365
(Please confirm with buyer that the address is correct) Your
payment instructions: All payment instructions are clearly
described in the item description.
============================================================= Jan
22 2006 To: ,
ME:
Hi Ivorybill,
I'm sure the cds should have arrived by now. Let me know what's
up. Thanks.
Donald
======================================================================
THEE:
From: Daniel Hannon Mailed-By: yahoo.com
Re: fingerstyle guitar cds
Hi Donald. No, I'm still patiently waiting for them to arrive.
And yes, it has been quite a while since the date of winning
them...I hope the postal service has not made some sort of
mistake with the shipment. I'll be sure to keep you posted on it.
Thanks again.
-Sincerely, D.D.
======================================================================
ME: Hi Ivorybill, gpskink444, Daniel Hannon and/or D.D. Stalder,
How many people are you and do you know each other and did any of
you receive the 15 fingerstyle magazine guitar cds, plus the nice
homemade greatest hits compilation? They never came back to me.
Donald Sauter
======================================================================
THEE:
From: Daniel Hannon Mailed-By: yahoo.com
Re: fingerstyle guitar cds
Donald: Hello again. I'm sorry for not keeping you updated more
often in regards to the cds....No, I still have not received
them, and have assumed the postal service has (as has happened to
another shipment from someone else) accidentally shipped it to
another address, & if so, the recipient of them has kept them,
not informing the postal service of the error. If they ever
Finally do arrive, I will definitely let you know immediately.
Thanks. Respectfully yours, D.D.
======================================================================
ME: Hi D.D.
I'm more curious than mad - 18 bucks isn't worth it. But you
have to know how weird this is from my point of view. Can you at
least clarify whether D.D. and Daniel Hannon are different
people, and whom I'm talking to, and what person and address I
was supposed to send the cds to? They weren't all that valuable,
but I put a lot of work and loving care into filling the order,
along with a freebie, nice, greatest hits compilation.
Donald
======================================================================
THEE:
From: Daniel Hannon Mailed-By: yahoo.com
Re: fingerstyle guitar cds
Hi again, Donald. Yes, I can clarify the name(s)...Daniel and
D.D. are the same person, and I listed the mailing address
correctly, as: 1572 Windy Lane Yuma, AZ 85365
Sincerely, D.D.
======================================================================
ME: Hi D.D.
Thanks. That's the address I used, but at that time D.D.'s last
name was Stalder. And Daniel Hannon lived up on West Las Lomas
Street. Weird.
Donald
======================================================================
I didn't hear any more from him after that one.
Donald Sauter
ME: I received the cd recorder today and started to put it
through its paces. Nothing I could do would get it to advance
the track number while recording in the analog mode, using either
the buttons on the machine or on the remote. I was definitely in
the "manual" mode. It sure looks like a problem with the cd
recorder. Any chance you have any tip (advice, secret) that will
advance the track number while recording from an analog source?
Thanks.
ME: how ebay has unchanged my life
The cd recorder I just "won" has a big problem. The manual track
number advance while recording doesn't work. This is killing me.
THEE: Subject: Amaranthine
Thanks for replying to my email. Yes I was very tired of and
looking for your definition of above word. I had already
encountered it several places but thought I might be missing
something else. I came across it in a quotation of Wm Cowper,
"The only Amaranthine flower on earth is truth". It also apears
in Gilbert& Sullivan's, Patience 1881 where Bunthorn sings, "The
writhing maid lithe limbe quivering on her Amaranthine asphodel
(Daffodil) In Oscar Wilde's, Salome, 1982 the quare one herself
whinges, "It was too late I diqscovered this Amaranthine aspect
of appetite". It appeared too, earlier, in the 9th and last
stanza of James R Randall's moving ode to John Pelham Confederate
"boy artellerist" killed at Fredericksburg on St Patrick's Day
1863. "How must he smile on this dull world beneath Fevered with
swift renown He with the maryyrs amaranthine wreath Twining the
Victors Crown"
Have you encountered the term "quare one" before? Brendan Behan
wrote a play called, The Quare Fella".
Thanks again Don 'Sauter, from the French, to jump.
James
ME: Thanks for the amaranthine quotes. Of course, I often wonder
where I met a certain word when I see it highlighted in my
dictionary, but the effort to record a pointer for each word back
to the book and page it came from would be staggering. In this
case, though, I'm wondering if you didn't nail it with
"Patience". I see "asphodel" is also highlighted in my
dictionary. That alone would be pretty flimsy evidence, but 3
lines down is "calomel" which is also highlighted. And 2 lines
further down is "colocynth", also highlighted. Flimsy evidence
against this theory is that my Gilbert libretto spells it
"amarantine", although, knowing myself, I suppose I would have
accepted the dictionary's "amaranthine" without making a meal of
it (britishism). More evidence for the theory is that when
"calomel" pops up again in the penultimate line, I penciled in
the simplified "(laxatives)". That's pretty darn close to proof
that I had my dictionary at hand during Bunthorne's recitation.
Still, how come (why) isn't "plinth" (4 lines after "amarantine")
highlighted in my dictionary? You can't tell me that I was so
secure in that word that I wouldn't wonder what the heck a
"poet's plinth" is. Even if I were rock solid on definition 1,
I'd still be wondering how the poet managed to get the statue out
of the way. The final mystery is, does the definition I chose
for my 1000 words page - "eternally beautiful" - really fit
Bunthorne's usage? Even there I have an explanation. In my
dictionary I highlighted the numeral "2." indicating definition
2. But Def. 2 goes on to say, "unfading; everlasting." and I see
those as the most likely synonyms for Gilbert's "amarantine" (as
opposed to 1. "resembling the amaranth" and 3. "deep purple in
color"). But by the time I put together my 1000 words page how
would I have known it was really the 2nd and 3rd choices of def.
2 that I originally had in mind? If you don't tell the world of
my little goof, I won't.
And thanks for prodding me to re-examine those 4 minutes of my
life from years ago. It'll make quite an engaging Chapter
MMMCMLXXVIII in my autobiography!
THEE: Subject: Ebay
From: Boyd, Wayne - Police Detective
Mailed-By: ci.yuma.az.us
Mr. Sauter,
Sergeant Rodriguez forwarded me your email. I did a little bit
of research and D.D. Stalder and Daniel Hannon are two different
people. They do appear to be related though and both live or
have lived at the Windy Lane address. D.D could be using
Daniel's email address and ebay account and that's what led to
the confusion. I don't know. Unfortunately if they claim they
never received an item and it was shipped without any kind of
delivery confirmation then there is no way to determine if they
received it or not. Even though it's unlikely, the shipment
could have been lost or misdelivered. There's no way to know.
Considering the value of the item and the only thing going on
here is that the buyer did not pay, the only potential criminal
violation is a misdemeanor theft which with all honesty will not
be investigated by a detective. I would look at the buyer's
feedback record. If he/she has a high positive feedback score
then I would guess the buyer is being honest with you.
I would, as seller, only send the item once payment has been
received. There is a lot of Ebay fraud out there but it usually
goes the other way where the buyer gets stiffed or receives items
not anything close to as described. Be careful out there.
If there's anything else I can answer for you let me know.
Sincerely,
W. Boyd
[About par for our system of law 'n' order . . . ]
THEE: Re: how ebay has unchanged my life
I admire your perseverance with eBay, but there seems to be a
message here.
THEE: Re: tdk cd recorder
hi- It is a very complicated machine to use, so I think that is
what you're dealing with. My advice? Read through the manual
carefully, as it explains how to do what you're asking. (It was
my husband's machine, and he tells me it took him many hours to
get it to work -- but that it did work exactly right). I know
that the remote control is an important part of getting it to do
its magic.
Let me know if the manual answers it. If not, I really don't know
how else to help, as my husband tells me he doesn't remember how
he did what you're asking -- but that he did do it.
ME: I read the manual thoroughly, even though the machine
operates the same way as the Philips recorder I had. I've even
gone to the TDK web site which says:
Q: How can I record seamless track marking? This unit can record
a disc of continuous music with multiple track numbers, but no
audible pauses between the tracks. This can be achieved only by
recording from an external device through the CD Recorder's
analog inputs.
Set DA 3826 input to analog Adjust record level (4 is
recommended) Set DA 3826 to manual mode via the remote control
(preferred) Press record DA-3826 Press play DA-3826 Play external
continuous source Press track + via the remote control (to add
seamless track mark) Finalize after finished (finalize process)
Nothing new or surprising there; that's what the manual says, and
is what I would have guessed without a manual. The manual also
says that the buttons on the remote and the machine will do the
same thing. None of these
3 buttons will advance the track number.
As far as I can tell the machine does everything else right, but
it's worthless to me without being able to mark tracks as I
record from lps or cassettes.
THEE: I am Julia and I live in Germany. In September I will be
visiting Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr). Instead of only
visiting all the famous Lochs, Castles,etc. I would even like to
visit places where the Beatles, or other famous groups/ persons
have been to before, or their houses etc.
When I read your article about the Beatles on scottish television
I thought that you would be the right person to be asked this...
I am looking forward to an answer!!!!!!
ME: Guten Tag, Fra"ulein Julia,
The best reference I can think of for locations of Beatle concert
appearances is Mark Lewisohn's "The Beatles Live". Here's a
complete listing for Scotland from the index.
UNITED KINGDOM: Scotland
Aberdeen Beach Ballroom, 143
Alloa Town Hall, 44
Bridge of Allan Museum Hall, 143
Dingwall Town Hall, 143
Dundee Caird Hall, 154, 178
Edinburgh ABC cinema;-l71, 178
Elgin Two Red Shoes' Ballroom, 143
Forres Town Hall, 45
Fraserburgh Dalrymple Hall, 45
Glasgow Concert Hall, 153
Odeon cinema, 151 (tour w/ Roy Orbison), 171, 178, 189
Inverness Northern Meeting Ballroom, 44
Keith Longmore Hall, 143 cancelled
St Thomas' Hall, 45
Kirkcaldy Carlton Theatre, 154
Nairn Regal Ballroom, 45
Peterhead Rescue Hall, 45
WEST GERMANY
Essen Grugahalle, 198
Hamburg Ernst Merck Halle, 199
Indra Club, 46
Kaiserkeller,46
Star-Club, 110, 117, 119
Top Ten Club, 48, 74
Munich Circus-Krone-Bau, 198
The ones on pages 44 and 45 would interest me the most. They
were performance dates on the Beatles first ever tour, backing
Johnny Gentle in May 1960, when they were called the Silver
Beatles.
Page 143 represents the Jan 1963 Scottish tour.
Pages 153-154 were an Oct 1963 mini-tour of Scotland.
Pages 171-178 were 1964.
Page 189 was Dec 1965.
I see they stayed at the Royal hotel in Forres - and skipped out
without paying.
They had an accident with the van "at a crossroads outside of
Banff" on the drive from Inverness to Fraserburgh.
Hope you can find the exact addresses easily enough. I left in
the West Germany locales since they were on the same index page.
Have a good trip!
THEE: Subject: "A fish weighs 10 pounds plus half its weight"
Not meaning to be rude but i believe that you have made an error
in you method of calculating the "weight of the fish" on your
website.
Let W = weight of the fish.
"A fish weighs 10 pounds plus half its weight" translates into
W = 10 + W/2
The next step should be
W -- W/2 = 10
NOT W/2 = 10
Because subtracting w/2 from both sides doesn't mean that you can
remove the w that was on the left side of the equation
originally. You just came up with the correct answer because the
problem dealt with dividing by two. for example if the problem
had dealt with any other fractional amount this anomaly would not
have occurred.
"A fish weighs 20 pounds plus one third its weight" translates
into
W = 20 + W/3
The next step would be
W -- W/3 = 20
Not W/3 which would incorrectly provide 10 as the answer.
THEE: Subject: Fw: Piano Roll for 03/16/06
Thought you might get a kick out of this. The music sure doesn't
fit the chariot race as I remember it from the Charleton Heston
film. Fast and exciting, granted, but not the same sense of
danger-- especially of those wheels equipped with devices that
would shatter the spokes of an opponent's wheels and almost
certainly cause a fatal crash. I can picture the Keystone Cops
running around madly to this music.
----- Original Message -----
From: Ragtimebill@aol.com To: Ragtimebill@aol.com Sent:
Subject: Piano Roll for 03/16/06
Brace yourselves for a real pot-boiler! "The Chariot Race, or
The Ben Hur March" was written in 1894 by E. T. Paull. Many of
Paull's published works were arrangements of other composers
work, but this was an original composition. When we think of "Ben
Hur," the 1959 movie of the same name starring Charleton Heston
is what comes to mind for most of us. However, the actual story
was first published in 1880 by Civil War General Lew Wallace and
was a mega-hit at the time. The story was made into a movie 'way
back in 1925 for the first time. That original movie has a
chariot race scene that rivals the 1959 film's race. This song
evokes the excitement, tragedy and victory of the famed chariot
race scene.
Chariot Race or The Ben Hur March.mid
ME: I checked google news this morning and don't see any
wildfires bearing down on your house.
Got a kick out of The Ben Hur Chariot race. I presume you didn't
think of me because I have a guitar transcription in my list of
LC guitar arrangements? Whew, hearing a pianist - even a digital
one - play it makes me want to smash my guitar (not for the first
time). I remember well being somewhat disappointed by that one
because the title and cover page held such high promise. And
then, it sounded just like your garden variety foot stomper,
hardly a chariot race! But I always try to enjoy something for
what it is. The midi showed that 2 measures were missing in the
guitar arrangement.
While I'm emailing, thought there was an outside chance you might
vaguely enjoy a little exchange with someone who found my 1000
words page.
ME: I'm not mad about the cd recorder. I don't think for a
moment that you knowingly concealed the manual track advance
problem.
How's this for a simple and fair deal: I put the recorder back
up on ebay, describing the one problem it has, and if it doesn't
bring as much as I paid, you reimburse me for half of the
differential. So if it goes for $20 less, we split the loss and
you send me $10.
That's fair, isn't it? Besides, I think there are many potential
buyers who would not worry about the manual track advance. They
might not need it at all, or they might split tracks on their
computer.
Let me hear from you. Thanks.
ME: I look forward to digging into this site - thanks! My
occasional efforts to uncover a motherlode of old opera
recordings on the web never turned up much of anything. I could
never square that with the impression I have of the web sagging
under the weight of all the music on it.
What I would do is take a flash drive to the library where they
have a faster connection (who doesn't?)
Eensy-weensy coincidence: you listed the Temptation Rag, and I
had just heard it last night - possibly just minutes before you
whipped up the email! All right, not one of the world-stopper
coincidences. It's on one of those records I got recently at the
Dover auction - "Mister Ragtime - Joe Fingers Carr of Course!"
"Henry Lodge was one of the giants of his day..."
I had meant to mention in the discussion of the "Ben Hur Chariot
Race" that the phenomenon is well known with Rossini. For
example, a potpourri of music from his heavy drama Semiramide
sounds more like cartoon music (very *good* cartoon music) to
modern ears.
And I enjoyed the fruits of your possum hunt (yuck). It only
occurred to me after seeing the newspaper picture of Billy Possum
what a weird idea it was, at least if everyone views the possum
as ugly as I do. Not that I would even recognize the doll in the
newspaper as an 'possum. I still chuckle internally when I think
of a college mate who put it something like - don't ask me how we
got on the subject - "How could any animal be blessed with such
ugliness???"
A little disappointed Larrye never commented on the original Olde
Tyme Tayle, but I'll survive.
THEE:
Re: bunking history
>Sure, I'd enjoy reading the paper, but can't figure what the
Communist Party has to do with it.
CR . . . CP . . . What the heck.
>I checked google news this morning and don't see any wildfires
bearing down on your house.
Maybe cuz I've been watering the lawn.
>Got a kick out of The Ben Hur Chariot race. I presume you didn't
think of me because I have a guitar transcription in my list of
LC guitar arrangements? Whew, hearing a pianist - even a digital
one - play it makes me want to smash my guitar (not for the first
time). I remember well being somewhat disappointed by that one
because the title and cover page held such high promise. And
then, it sounded just like your garden variety foot stomper,
hardly a chariot race! But I always try to enjoy something for
what it is. The midi showed that 2 measures were missing in the
guitar arrangement.
No, I hadn't noticed that it was on your website . . . of if
I'd noticed, I'd long forgotten. It somehow seemed like
something you'd get a kick out of, hard tellin' why.
ME: Thanks a million for digging up C~~'s card. Can you mail a
photocopy instead of the original (assuming you can shoot a copy
right at home)? I don't quite trust the post office all the way
any more.
Dover had a nice St. Patrick's parade.
THEE: Subject: Link to the OED Entry for amarant(h)ine, a.
This link will allow free access to the OED entry amarant(h)ine,
a. for the next three days.
Message: Hope you're checking this promptly. Looks like you'll
have access to this entry for only 3 days.
ME: (then what're they gonna do to me i'll just sneak in i
have my contacts hee hee hee)
ME: Great news - the manual track advance from the remote started
working! Now I know what you're thinking - that guy just didn't
know what he was doing, but I swear it wasn't working earlier.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it! And even though the
manual says in black and white "During an analog recording, the
track number may also be increased by pressing the | button",
neither of those buttons work yet. So I'll try to get
comfortable with the remote. I'm an old-fashioned sorta guy who
has always hated remotes and never used them.
Overall, I'm pleased with the machine. In most of the ways it
differs from my Philips (which has its own pain-in-the-neck
problem with analog recording), I like it better. It does
everything a little faster. I wish TDK didn't make such tiny
buttons, almost flush with the face of the recorder. The biggest
pain, but one I can live with, is that it doesn't remember the
analog setting from my previous session. It fires up every time
in co-ax mode, and I have to punch the little "input" button 3
times, grrr. But I guess every machine has something idiotic
about its design.
After the manual track advance started working, I copied 6
cassettes to cd today - lots of fun.
Thanks for hanging in there while some poor joker was screaming
the sky was falling.
THEE: Re: opera recodings and more--not so instant (or
accurate) replay
What did we do before flash drives? Don't forget Chicken Little.
How appropriate to record this during WWI. When Disney came out
with the recent film, which I haven't seen, I recall thinking,
"What a great chance to work in some humor that would appeal to
adults." Between war, genocide, famine, mad cow disease, bird
flu, pollution, energy crisis, etc., who could better speak for
society than that ultimate paranoid of paranoids?
I have a fast cable connection at home and, of course, a fast
network connection at school, but only the public library has
access to certain resources such as the Historic New York Times.
Glad you enjoyed the possum hunt. Plenty of those little guys
dead by the roadside around here. Occasionally at night I'll
spot a live one running along side in a semi-rural area near
home. Can't miss those eyes glowing in the dark. Don't think I
ever told you the story of the friend who walked into her
bathroom one day and found a possum hangin' by its tail from the
shower curtain rod.
A pox on that Larrye!
Happy prospecting in the motherlode.
ME: and the message is...
EBAY UBER ALLES!
The manual track advance started working today, and I'm off and
running. In fact, I copied 6 complete tapes to cd today, all
sounding great and all with nice track markers, even the
continual flow ones like Carol Channing's Peter and the Wolf.
Cds, if it wasn't for those idiot cases I might have learned to
appreciate them years ago. I mean, have you ever counted up the
moving parts on a cd?
And that's not all, I also got a new Shure M97xE Audiophile
cartridge from ebay today. J&R and some other "real" sound
equipment business couldn't even come up with it, and wasted a
half year of my life with their "back orders". I think the
cartridge is going to be a winner, and side one of La Fanciulla
del West sounded noticeably better than I remember it with my old
cartridges, but it's still not a wide-open phonograph sound. So
I'll have to invest in a separate preamp, since logically, that
can be the only other culprit if I'm getting good sound from
tapes, cd and radio. If a preamp doesn't do it, I'll be stumped.
I started the morning by rearranging my stereo components. I
thought I could get rid of one of the 3 dual cassette decks since
the TDK cd recorder has a level knob, but I realize the cassette
deck has to be reunited, because every now and then I have to
reconfirm that my cheap Proformance does, in fact, sound better
than the expensive JVCs. That shouldn't be. I'm wondering if
it's because the JVCs make an internal determination of cro2
tapes. My cheap decks have always had a button for normal, cro2
and metal, and I've always found that all tapes sound clearer and
brighter on normal.
6 cassettes to cd today - is that living or what?
P.S. Maybe I'll do another one.
THEE: Subject: CD for Bob, Feb 2006
Sorry it took so long to reply about the CD. That was awfully
nice of you to put it together. I've been real busy with work
and don't seem to have much time for relaxing stuff anymore, like
listening to a 70 minute CD. However, I decided I'll finally get
to it today.
Comments: Tracks 1-11 Thanks for the Organ music. There's a lot
of stuff I hadn't heard before, and I'm always grateful to hear
something new from Bach. I actually have a solo arrangement of
Wachet auf. It isn't easy, but I can handle it.
Track 8: This is called the "Little Fugue" and I heard it many
times on the radio. This was one of the pieces I was trying to
work up with ~~, but he just couldn't get a handle on it. I'd
love to work it up with someone (hint). Take a look and we'll get
together sometime...
Track 12: I don't know where you've heard this before, but when I
was a kid, we had records of classical music which acommanied
stories which were read like in Peter and the Wolf.
Unfortunately, the records all got lost. There was lots of
Prokofief, Tchaikovsky, Grieg..... .
The Leutenant Kije was part of the story of a Greek mythology of
Atalanta and Hippomenes
All of the kids in my family would love to find those recordings
again... I think they were narrated by Derwood Kirby and were
around recorded around 1960.
Tracks 14-22 I loved Carol Channing! (Not!) Richard Hale
sounds so pompous!
Track 28: This is actually an transcription of one of Respighi's
"Ancient Airs and Dances", which he took a lot of old Italian
lute music and set and modernized the harmonies with full blown
orchestration. I highly recommend it. Listen to "Galiarda"
Isn't the second theme is something you and I play?
Track 33: I like the coughing.. Intentional? Sounds like the
yelling they do in actual flamenco!
Track 34: Nope, never heard it. Looked at Musipea search
http://www.musipedia.org/search.0.html and the closest thing I
could see was "Where have all the flowers gone", except that
one's in a major key.
Tracks 37-42 Pretty nice stuff! "Golden Slumbers" isn't
familiar to me... Sorry Don, but I don't hear the similarity
between the two.
ME: I have new glasses. Three days after I got them I was at
Diane's Groundhog Day party. Not one family member commented on
them.
When I was at the dermatologist, I gave him the go ahead to snip
off all my angiomas, probably a couple hundred of them. It was
just about as much pain as I could bear, but I figured, get it
over with rather than poke me with a lot of little needles with
pain killer poison. Plus, I've always been proud that I never
had a pain killer when the dentist drilled my teeth.
ME: Thanks for the guitar cd and music! I used to subscribe to
Fingerstyle Guitar magazine, up through 1997. Gee, that's a long
time ago, I guess. I played through some of the easier pieces.
I don't torture myself with things that are over my head any
more. There was a time whan I thought, I can't call myself a
guitarist unless I've played everything ever written for guitar.
Now I don't *need* an excuse not to call myself a guitarist!
ME: cylinder recordings on ucsb site
to: rec.music.opera
Even *better* than great. Enter search term "operas" instead of
"opera" and the hits go from 197 to 699. I think most or all of
the "opera" hits are included in the "operas" list. But there
must be even more that fell through the cracks; search on "35012"
for a Magic Flute aria missed by "operas".
Would anyone like to share the chore of getting all of these
historic opera cylinder mp3s onto convenient cds? If a project
manager-type doesn't step forward, contact me for brainstorming.
[No one ever did. Guess I'll just have to listen to my four mp3
discs containing 200 opera tracks apiece by myself.]
ME: For me, myself, personally like, you know, the best was Rick
Foster's arrangement of In The Sweet By And By. Kind of sweet,
and keeps you on your toes, rhythmically.
Yep, we're having some cooler days lately after some really warm
ones.
By the way, after years of thinking about getting a wall hanger
for my guitar, I finally did it. Much more convenient than a
stand or box, and looks nice hanging on the living room wall.
THEE: Subject: guitar/piano music
A friend and I have been working on the Guiliani Rondos 1 & 2 for
sometime along with two modern pieces, but, the music (other than
piano reductions of concerto scores) available commercially for
piano/guitar duos seemed quite limited. I was very happy to find
your site and am getting an order together. (My dial-up
connection is very slow and it takes a while to get the samples
up on the screen). I am assuming that everything offered has both
the piano and guitar parts. I was also wondering if the Trent
dissertation is available from you as well?
Thank you in advance for all your work in making this available.
My pianist friend and I are excited about having some fresh
repertoir.
ME: Hope you find some nice things among the LC pieces. Yes, all
the pieces are complete, and ready to play. Even if you had a
fast connection, and even if I had all the music scanned and up
on the web, I'm sure you would be looking at a year's hard labor
downloading and printing those thousands of pages of guitar &
piano music. And no doubt it would cost you far more - for lower
quality copies.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure of the best way to get Robert Trent's
dissertation. I would imagine it's available from UMI. I just
did some poking around - when you type umi in google, you get a
site called proquest - and didn't find it, but then I got no hits
on the search term "guitar", so I must not know what I'm doing.
Give it a try.
ME: This post embarrasses, offends and angers me.
Dear Google Groups,
A search on my name "donald sauter" will bring up this synopsis
in the hit list. At a glance, it looks like the offensive post
is my own work. I would be very grateful if you could delete
Oceanstrip's reply to my post. I think the world will carry on
just fine without it. Thank you very much for your help.
Oprah Winfrey on Baltimore radio, 1980 OPRAH IS A [...]
ME: 2nd try
11:24 AM 4/27/2006 Dear Google Groups,
A search on my name "donald sauter" will bring up this synopsis
in the hit list. Your summary makes the offensive and obscene
response to my post look like my own work. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
delete Oceanstrip's offensive and obscene reply to my post. The
world will carry on just fine without it. Thank you very much
for your help.
THEE: Re: Math League Press Book Order
I don't think the fact that it is a debit card should matter. For
some reason, my system declined your card. With credit cards,
that's usually because the card has maxed out. Do Debit Cards max
out also?
Yes, I think sending a check with your order may be the easiest
solution to this problem.
THEE: Hey, Maybe that is the answer for school...a wall hanger.
That would get it out of the way of little hands. Thanks for the
idea, I never would have thought of that.
THEE: Subject: Just fun
One day, you read me a letter from "Beatlefan" and now, this
afternoon, a mere 19 years later, someone else noticed it.
Enjoy:
In December 1981, in Beatlefan magazine, there's a letter from a
reader. It says:
"I have a friend who met John Lennon in Central Park in 1974. He
claims Lennon told him at that time that he had contributed
vocals to McCartney's 1973 album Band On The Run. He claims
Lennon told him he sang harmony on one line of the title track,
just before the 'link' where it says 'If we ever get out of
here.' I was skeptical at first but upon playing that particular
line from Band On The Run, I am convinced that the voice
contributing the low harmony is that of Lennon. If not, it is a
remarkable resemblance. I would be interested to learn if any of
your readers have heard of this before or if anyone has any
information to confirm or deny Lennon's presence on the song.
"Neal Powell "Charleston, SC"
The letter didn't spur a discussion in the columns of Beatlefan
magazine, and received no follow-up. After I read about it, I
listened to the track with new ears so to speak, and I now think
it really sounds like Lennon. It doesn't resemble a
doubletracked McCartney or even a McCartney/Laine vocal, it
sounds like John and Paul.
Now, of course I realize that if this is the real McLennon,
someone must have flown the master tape of this track from AIR
studios in London where Wings were doing the overdubs, to Los
Angeles where Lennon was having the start of his "Lost week-end",
recorded John's vocal and then flown the tape back to London.
And both John and Paul must have had some sort of agreement to
keep this moment a secret and an inside joke between the two of
them. Of course, all other participants must also have been
sworn to secrecy about the occasion.
With Band On The Run now available as a 5.1 DTS version of
the quad-mix and with all the various digital filters available
to anyone with a pc and sound editing/mixing skills, I was
wondering if it's possible to isolate just the vocals for this
single phrase?
ME: Who's the "someone else"? Everything after "Enjoy:"
constitutes a letter in a "recent" Reggiefan?
Absolutely astonishing coincidence: I was just assaulted by the
very song in question in Big Lots this evening. I lost, bad.
Major technological victory this morning, which I always have to
unload on somebody. My printer was going on the fritz, spitting
out test patterns every time I turned it on, and not letting me
do anything until I replaced the print cartridges. There's no
way the black ink could be gone, and I was skeptical about the
color, even though the color cartridge is original, going on
3 years old. Replacing both cartridges in such a printer costs
almost as much as the printer (on a real good sale, $60, say.)
The user manual gave a conflicting line, indicating the nozzles
and contacts were clogged. It said, "Do not clean with alcohol",
but it didn't say what *to* do. I called one printer cartridge
place and only succeeded in slightly annoying both parties. Then
I did what modern wisdom says I should do first - go online for
the answer. The HP site had just what I needed - how to clean
the ink cartridges. The secret is q-tips and distilled water.
Worked great, and the printer runs like new.
My internal cd-rom is starting to balk at reading my cd-rws. The
read process gets unbearably slow as it gets further into the
disk. Figured I'd have to replace the drive, but had a
brainstorm - use my external cd reader/writer to copy the cd-rw
to the hard disk, and then copy back to a blank. A little more
clicking on my part, but it's *fast*!
Gearing up for Sat., I read the Mad magazine version of Abe's
life. (This is not completely true.)
Got my Reggiefest ticket in the mail yesterday.
["Reggie" is my running joke for "registered trademark", as in
Beatles(R).]
ME: Dear Dover area elementary school,
I have about 600 children's books I want to donate. Most of them
are at an elementary school level, though some may be middle
school level or above. Some are older, but many are up-to-date
and in new condition. The majority are fiction. There are many
classics, Newbery award winners, and books on the Kumon
recommended reading list, for example. Surely, some would make
nice additions to the school library; others, nice giveaways.
I'll gladly drop them off at the school that sounds the most
enthusiastic about rooting through the hodge-podge. Let me know.
Thanks!
ME: I submitted an ad in the Dover Post for my folding tables, but I
don't see it in today's issue.
My proposal for using the neighborhood club house has not been
rejected yet. I hope they can see how nice the extra income
would be, especially considering the space isn't used for
anything.
My mastercard was rejected for buying some Math League books
online. Wish I had some idea what the goes on with credit and
debit cards.
THEE: Re: Just fun
Did you get all of my e-mail yesterday? It was about John's solo
on "Band on the Run."
Through strange circumstances, I find myself exchanging
occasional e-mails with Andre Gardner, who hosts a "Breakfast
With the Beatles" show in Philadelphia. Here's what he had to
say:
"There actually is an isolated 5.1 mix of all the songs on the CD
(a few of which I've played on BWTB) and it definitely AIN'T
John!"
Boo!
His next message revealed that there's no Santa Claus either.
I sent him the John Lee Saylor anecdote.
I have my Reggiefest ticket too! They added a few extra dollars
to the cost. I'm not sure why.
Also, I'm dense but I don't get "Reggiefest."
THEE: Subject: Lennon vocals on Band on the run
Hi, I read your Beatles book review recently and was fascinated
by that letter to Beatlefan you were talking about, the fan that
had met John Lennon in Central Park in 1974. So I took it upon
myself to relay this story to May Pang. This is what she had to
say about the matter:
Hi Roger,
Thank you for your email. I can assure you that John and I were
in LA in Oct/Nov of 1973 working on promotion for John's Mind
Games album and the preparation for the Phil Spector sessions
later to be called The Rock'n'Roll album.
John and I had no contact with Paul and Linda until March/April
1974. So there was no way that John did any vocals for Band on
the Run.
I hope this answers your question. And also, John was not living
near Central Park in 1974 or frequenting the Park.
Best,
May Pang
ME: Thanks a million! The subject has come up lately, and I'll
forward May's letter along. I'll have to refresh myself on the
exact dates in question to see if May has closed the case,
although it's looking very unlikely it could be John. Thanks for
the good work!
P.S. I see Castleman & Podrazyk say the Band On The Run album
was recorded in Sep 1973. And sending a cassette back and forth
in the mail would not require any contact with Paul and Linda.
Far fetched, I know, but I'm still waiting for someone to come
along who can convincingly say, "That was my voice!"
ME: Yes, I got the whole email, but it didn't say who was
responding to the 1981 letter. Is it being discussed in the
Beatlegs group? I just got the email below, which I presume is
coincidental?
I'm more doubtful all the time about it being John(R)'s voice,
but I haven't heard anything approaching a "case closed" yet.
This is part of what I wrote to Roger:
>I see Castleman & Podrazyk say the Band On The Run album was
recorded in Sep 1973. And sending a cassette back and forth in
the mail would not require any contact with Paul and Linda. Far
fetched, I know, but I'm still waiting for someone to come along
who can convincingly say, "That was my voice!"
Is Andre claiming the voice survives on a separate master track,
or did somebody tease it out of the mix? In the latter case,
they can choose whatever binary digits they want. They could
turn it into Boris Karloff or Madonna.
I've made Roger's letter safe for innocent eyes, but I don't know
how long I can keep this up. [Again, my running joke about the
legal necessity of registered trademark symbols following the
names of famous people.]
There was a $4 charge for paying by credit card. Did they add
something on top of that?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
THEE:
From: Roger Stormo
Subject: L*nn*n vocals on Band on the run
Hi, I read your B**tl*s book review recently and was fascinated
by that letter to B**tl*fan you were talking about, the fan that
had met John Lennon in Central Park in 1974. So I took it upon
myself to relay this story to May Pang. This is what she had to
say about the matter: . . .
THEE: While I would love to have more books, we are not an
elementary school. We are a middle school and a high school. I
would gladly take them if no one else steps up.
Thank you for the generous offer.
Director Positive Outcomes Charter School
ME: Yes, I should have known that - after all, I've worked with a
couple of your students. But it may have been a fortuitous
mistake to include your school in the mailing list. The books
went to the reading specialist at Booker T. Washington, and I
told her of your interest in the books. She said, "Oh, I drive
by Positive Outcomes every day." So, no promises, but it may be
that she will pass on the books she can't use to you. Thanks
for expressing interest.
THEE: Subject: RE: book donation
Thank you for speaking with her this a.m. She has been trying
to build home libraries for our students so this will help out
immensely! I appreciate you contacting the schools. Have a great
day!
Principal BTW
THEE: Subject: re: russian music
G'day Donald, the Russian scores arrived in this morning's post.
Many thanks for all the trouble you went through. I've paid your
PayPal account the amount of US$30.00. Somehow that doesn't seem
like enough for all that you did for me. All I can do now is get
down and play them.
As far as the instrument is concerned, I've had trouble with the
bolt that hold the neck onto the body. The nut inside doesn't
want to locate itself in the correct spot to hold the neck in
tightly ... so, I may be a couple more weeks getting it into
playable condition. The tang on the new fretwire isn't as deep or
as corrugated as the old worn out ones, so the refretting job was
tricky indeed. I achieved a good result without resorting to glue
of any kind.
I had to rebuild the original machine heads - the peg spacings
were unusual, so there was no option.
The body repolished pretty well. The whole thing now looks like a
well kept 40 year old instrument rather than an "as new" total
rebuild and I think I like that idea better. I added some thin
clear self adhesive scratchplate material (a la flamenco guitar)
which will prevent any surface scratches on the body. The bridge
bone and nut are cut and waiting for be fine fitted after the
instrument goes together and is strung.
I'm going to use a Hannabach Flamenco high tension nylon string
set because of the short scale. Then the strings will feel like a
normal classical guitar. The 7th string I'm adding is a 6th
string from an an ultra high tension set. I marked out the
grooves on the nut bone and the string spacing will be
practically the same as my Fender Tele. Getting used to having
another string at the bottom end may throw my technique out for a
while but if I can get used to a tenor banjo neck, I can get used
to anything - that was a real challenge.
Again, many thanks for your efforts on my behalf ... very much
appreciated. I'll let you know how I going over the coming
weeks.
THEE: Subject: 1915 Baltimore Co. Directory
Any of your family?
http://distantcousin.com/Directories/MD/BaltimoreCounty/1915/Page.asp?Page=164
ME: I think you'll find this page interesting that an internet
friend dug up and sent me. Had no idea there were *that* many
Sauters in the area.
THEE: Re: (R) vocals on Band on the run was: L*nn*n vocals on
Band on the run
Who's Roger now!?
Excellent. Someone asked May Pang. The issue did generate some
exchanges on the Beatlegs group; all very serious and
denunciatory. Doesn't anyone have a sense of humor?
Now, do you have John lee Saylor's letter handy?
ME: Thanks for your enthusiastic response to my book offer.
Unfortunately, you were second out of the gate. I had gotten an
excited call first thing that morning from the reading
specialist at Booker T. Washington. You'll be glad to know that
her main idea was much the same as yours - starting up home
libraries for her students.
ME: 922
I quite enjoyed the Lincolnfest, and more and more so every time
I think back on it. I understood most everything I heard and
believed most all of it. Well, I just double-checked the guy who
said "shizzem" and see only two possibilities in my American
Heritage - "sizzem" (huh???) and, as I always thought it was
pronounced, "skizzem".
I think the moderator of the panel discussion really goofed. He
had the clever idea of each panelist asking one question, to
which *each* of the other panelists were to respond(!) You can
imagine, that would have taken all day. Eventually, the
symposium moderator said, um, I think maybe we ought to let the
audience ask some questions. But before that, Jello [a presenter
with a voice like Jello Biafra's] made a good joke (I think?) on
the strange proceedings in asking, "Ok, everybody, was Lincoln a
genius? And, please expand on your answer." But the panelists
took it serious(!!!)
Most interesting for me was the eventual discussion of the current
state of history education in the schools. Everyone seems to
agree No Child Left Behind has murdered it. The woman who talked
on the Old Soldiers home made a bit too much, I think, of a tour
guide who told his group that Lincoln owned slaves. Lincoln?,
Jefferson?, Washington?, from this distance that's doing pretty
good, I say. Nobody knows everything. I asked her how it was
that Paul and Pete got home first after George was deported
first.
Jello expressed profound doubts about the younger generation.
He'd like to believe things go in cycles, but he's afraid it's
the end of the world as we know it. And everyone shared his
pessimism; no one put in a good word for today's youth. Ms.
Soldiers Home even backed up the doom and gloom with John Adams'
(Madison? Monroe? Starkey?) quote giving the U.S. republic 200
years, so we're living on borrowed time as it is. Scary. Think
I'd better kick out the jams in my search for a cd recorder.
THEE: Subject: You Won eBay Item: NEW Compact Disc Player / Recorder 5
Disc CD RCD-W500C (9704386001)
Congratulations, the item is yours. Please pay now!
NEW Compact Disc Player / Recorder 5 Disc CD RCD-W500C Sale
price: $225.00 Quantity: 1 Subtotal: US $225.00 Shipping &
Handling: Standard Flat Rate Shipping Service: US $19.95
to david: taking another plunge . . . . . . or going down for
the third time?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...
THEE: Subject: music
The music arrived today in good condition. Thanks!! My pianist
and I are looking forward to playing this. The check, as they
say, is in the mail.
THEE: Re: books
Thanks for the note about the books. I'm really glad that
children will be getting the books - no matter what school they
go to. The kids will appreciate them so much!
You are doing something very kind. Thanks so much for thinking
of the Capital School District.
THEE: Re: 922
Thanks for the scene report on the part I missed.
Declining to join us for dinner with the ~~~s was one of your
smartest moves ever. Next time we take a long car ride together,
I'll tell you all about it.
I noticed that mispronunciation of schism, too.
ME: Hey I thought long car rides were for talking about burning
cds.
In the process of fixing the the 4 glitchy tracks on three cds,
surely burning as much time and effort removing a few chic-chic-
chics as recording the cds in the first place, I am now the proud
owner of big pops on each cd. Falling between tracks is small
consolation, as you well know.
Another infuriating aspect of this is that I was immensely proud
of my track record on wasted cds - only one or two up to this
point. Now, in one fell swoop, I've more than doubled that,
grrrrr.
If Sony doesn't come through, I guess it's goodbye cruel world.
THEE: Re: taking another plunge . . .
I think you've bought this!
THEE: Re: 922
Long car rides are for throwing defective CD recorders out the
window!
THEE: Subject: Billboard!
Billboard reference info needed!
Does your book list the top songs by week? Do you still have
your book?
I must know what the other top songs were on the chart on the
week that Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" was at its
peak, probably in 1974.
Also, how high did the song "CD Recorder Blues" get? I believe
the performer used the stage name of Shortsighted Lemon Donald
Sauterson.
ME: shortsighted man of vision was: Billboard!
Now let's not be hasty. In the world of cd recorders, anything
less than 13 non-working functions may be considered absolute
perfection. (Wanna perfect cd recorder? How about two?)
Midnight at the Oasis reached No. 6 some time after 413 1974.
Hey, I'm finally catching the groove of this new date-talk. Used
to make me cringe; now I can listen to it 24/7.
Top Fives:
Apr 13 Bennie & the Jets Hooked on a Feeling TSOP The Lord's
Prayer Come and Get your Love
Apr 20 TSOP Bennie... Hooked... Best Thing That Ever Happened
To Me Come and Get Your Love
May 4 The Loco-Motion TSOP Bennie... Best Thing... Dancing
Machine
May 18 The Streak Dancing... The Entertainer The Loco... The
Show Must Go On
Hmmmm... can't guess which is the song of the hour amongst those.
Ooops. Turning one more page I see:
June 8
Band On the Run
The Streak
You Make Me Feel Brand New
Dancing...
Sundown
Don't tell me Maria's husband Geoff, formerly of Jim Kweskin's
Jug Band, was caught screaming "If we ever get out of here!"
locked in the men's room with a Wing's recording session going on
next door?
ME: The Dover Post refused to print my ad for the folding tables
again. I know they got it, because they did print my ad for a
set of encyclopedias.
THEE: Subject: Warning: Contains no refs. to CD burners
Thanks! I would have bet the farm that "Band on the Run" was a
1973 hit. Ah well. Frighteningly, I have four of the 45s on the
chart -- "The Streak" (of course), "The Loco-Motion," "The
Entertainer," and "Band on the Run." I thought I didn't buy
records in those days.
THEE: Subject: Meyerbeer Sicilienne
I have been trying to find sheet music for the subject music for
quite some time. I believe it is an aria from the opera Robert
Le Diable. I have noticed that you list a piece of music with
that same description under your number W0098. Performances I
have heard (Anne Sofie von Otter, Thomas Hampson) feature vocals
and piano. The sample you have listed for W0098 doesn't sound
like the same piece. Can you tell me if this is the same item?
ME: Thanks for the fun research question. When I plugged
"meyerbeer" and "sicilienne" into amazon, I came up with an album
called Lieder Melodies by Anne Sofie von Otter. Is that the one
you're trying to find music for? The sample amazon gives doesn't
match my gtr&pf version, and I'll stick my neck out and say they
are different pieces of music. More evidence is that my music is
for an opera aria while the album seems dedicated to art songs,
not arias.
I just fired up the Thomas Hampson sample and conclude the same
thing.
Good luck finding the music.
THEE: Subject: Music Recommendation
I stumbled across your web site looking for some duets for piano
and classical guitar that I can play with my flatmate. I play the
guitar and she plays piano, both to quite a good standard, so
hopefully we should be able to tackle most of the music on your
list.
I am a bit overwhelmed with the choice and wondered if you could
recommend any of the pieces to me? Perhaps some of the operatic
ones that you mention on the web site?
I am in the UK so if you are able to recommend some pieces I will
send you a letter with confirmation of the order and the money to
cover your cost etc.
Think your website is great.
ME: Thanks for finding me! Have no idea how you did it - I can't
find my own gtr&pf page from google, the web is so big.
Your request is perfectly understandable, but call it a gene of
mine that makes me uncomfortable with recommendations. I've had
fun with *all* the pieces, except Giuliani's Op 113 piece with a
guitar part painfully beyond my abilities.
I'd like to think that the cost of the music is so reasonable
that one wouldn't worry about ending up with a loser or two in
the order. Just bear in mind, what we have here - 19th C.
"gebrauchtsmusik", not masterworks by Beethoven, Brahms,
Schubert, etc.
Hope you find a few pieces that jump out based on the title,
composer, or some other vibe!
ME: cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds cds
cds cds....
How many people do you know with 10 cd decks and 6 cassette decks
on their stereo? If only some of them would work, I'd be set. At
least, after I get the phonograph problem licked. I some have
ideas on that.
THEE: Re: Meyerbeer Sicilienne
Thanks for your comments Don,
I just assumed that the piece was from that opera. I wonder if
he wrote two pieces with the same title. I'm starting to think
that I will just have to "listen closely" to the recordings and
transcribe it as best I can (another challenge).
THEE: Subject: Thingemebob
Searching the web today for various items I need for our
"Radio/TV" segment in each issue of Bandworld Magazine, I found a
reference to Thingemebob and Black Dyke Mills. The director at
the time is a close friend and famous conductor by the name of
Geoffrey Brand. He was the one who made the recording for that TV
show (and later Yellow Submarine intended as a backside of the
Thingemebob single. Geoff just loaned me his rough copy of the
original recording which I'm going to try to get to mp3 format
(if worth including).
Just thought you or whoever wrote the text might like to know.
M. Max McKee, Executive Director American Band College Editor,
Bandworld Magazine Board Chairman, Western International Band
Clinic
ME: That's interesting, thanks. If Geoff hasn't already been
interviewed by Beatlefan magazine, and if he's so inclined, they
are always eager to talk with people who have fringe Beatle
connections. I'm sure a google search on "beatlefan" will bring
it right up.
THEE: Subject: Invite me to Create gmail Account Please !
Good Day,
My name is Grace, I only write to ask for your help. I love to
have account with gmail but I have made several attempt to create
one but they always said it is strickly by Invitaion. So please I
beg of you to invite me so that I will create box with gmail.
I love the site so much and this is why I write you since you use
gmail.
Pls Invite me.
Grace.
ME: If it helps, you have my total sympathy regarding your
remodeling nightmare. It swamps my "piddly" $300 leak and
furnace repairs - which are never quite right. When I look at my
carpet I think, this had better last a lifetime because just
emptying the bookcases to get to the carpet would wipe me out.
re: the Lincoln Symposium
It was very nice again. Nothing explosive, but nice.
Interesting talk on interpreting Lincoln's comments that might
sound racist on their own. Quick summary: no way a racist would
have made them, and they all make sense in battling Stephen
Douglas's racist position. Interesting talk on Lincoln's
"melancholy". Most interesting to me was a talk making the point
that it was only during Lincoln's presidency that the lingering
disagreement about whether the states were sovereign entities
("countries" in my own terminology) more or less loosely
federated, or subdivisions of one great nation, was put to rest.
Sure explains to me why we never got around to giving our country
a name.
I unloaded my stuff from Dover Kumon today, figuring this is the
end. They won't talk to me, so I don't know for sure what's
going on, but I'm not renewing the lease on the center under such
circumstances.
My last session with Ashley was memorable. She's a math student,
but she found a little children's booklet of Aschenputtel, in
German, on my shelf. We had a great time talking Grimm's and
Perrault (pretending I know a little something about 'em.) Her
Spanish class had done the Spanish version of Cinderella. I had
never even thought about Spanish versions. It had major
differences with the French and German and English versions.
Besides moving lots of stuff today, I'll be heading up to
Secaucus New Jersey tomorrow with for a Beatlefest. I suppose
I'll enjoy myself, but I have to wonder what makes people do the
things they do. I guess a sense of obligation to not be a hermit
every once in a while. Anyhow, it won't be a "relaxing" weekend.
Last Beatlefest I went to was 1996.
I was hoping to find some opera fans who could get excited about
sharing the chore of getting the cylinder recordings off the UCSB
site, but no peep from anyone yet.
ME: back in the beatle saddle i mean saddle for fans of the beatles
Thanks again for inducing me out of hermithood for a day. I had
a great time. Sure glad all of our close encounters with alien
autos were of the first (or second? anyhow, not third) kind.
Here are a few wrapup thoughts and research results.
I thought the claim of 9 Top 40s for Peter & Gordon might have
been a wee inflated, but the Billboard book actually lists 10.
They had a No. 1 and two other top 10s. Man, I wish those
Billboard statistics were based on something.
In case I wasn't the only one wondering about the big line
upstairs, the program indicates that P&G were doing autographs up
there in the Robert Freeman room.
I had misanticipated the punchline of the Alan Livingstone story.
I figured the creator of Bozo would say, "Raw meat and baby dolls
- yeaaahhh!"
Didn't notice till looking at the program today that Roag was in
Pete's band. There's plenty of evidence that I might be too
easily impressed by lots of things people do, but I thought Pete
had some real good, sharp, musical drum moves.
What was the song that Peter Asher produced that Paul drummed on?
I had already forgotten the title by the time I got to writing it
in my note, whereas you still remembered it walking to the car.
A reason why Laurence wasn't loaded with fans at his table when
we were leaving may be because he had just gotten there. The
program scheduled him a signing from 8 to 9:30.
Refreshing myself on the first Beatle (legally speaking, "the
group with the name the Beatles") visits to EMI Studios, I see
that the technical engineers all wore white lab coats, not suits,
until the 1970s. Well, maybe they had suits under the lab coats.
"McArtrey" appeared in John & George's "Short Diversion..." in a
Mersey Beat, Jul 6-20 1961. "Beatle's [sic] Sign Recording
Contract" named "Paul McArthy" (not McCarty, my bad, as the kids
say) in a Jul 20-Aug 3 1961 issue. In the same date range, The
Mersey Roundabout quotes Howie Casey saying Paul McArtrey is a
better singer than Cliff Richard. The "Beatles Top Poll!"
McArtrey was Jan 4-18 1962. The next stab at the name was in a
Sep 6-20 1962 issue, "A Little Bare", by Paul McArtney (2x).
Finally, in a Sep 20-Oct 4 1962 issue, it appears correctly for
the first time, in the byline to "Hamburg".
I'm pretty sure I never mentioned I got an email from Bill Harry
recently. he doesn't make it obvious, but he's responding to my
little intro to my "Beatles in Teen Magazine" page. I'll paste
his email below.
Now I've forgotten the mileage on my trip meter in the Crown
Plaza parking lot. I think it might have been 195. If so, my
final mileage indicates we only overshot Secaucus by 10 miles on
the way up. Not so bad.
Occurs to me now why mapquest would not fork over directions to
the hotel, given the exact address. I confused it by still
calling it the Meadowlands Hilton.
Speaking of smooth vs. chunky peanut butter, the Acme near me had
an incredible Skippy sale this weekend - 10 for $10. Even twenty
years ago, $1.50 per jar was a buy, buy, buy! price. I got there
on the 2nd day, and there were mountains of superchunk left, but
no creamy that I could see. I eventually found a few jars in
another area, but the results of peanut butter sales are *always*
the same - the creamy vanishes right away and the chunky sits and
sits.
Thanks again for the cd drive, but after the import of 4x4x6 sank
in, I don't think I'll be hooking it up. I think my internal
drive is supposed to be faster than that. My $30 external drive
is 52x32x52. I'll spring for another, in good time.
I don't have the exact url handy, but if you search on "35012" in
the UCSB collection there's a Magic Flute aria apparently with
some strange vocal technique. Can you bit torment that one so we
can use it for a wav/mp3 comparison? I'll get the mp3.
Been thinking about Stone Ridge a lot and been meaning to ask,
but it sure is a bad time, what with me overwhelmed by all the
extra stuff in my house right now. On the other hand, the day
will charge in when I'll kick myself for skipping a year. If
only I could find an agent with a cell phone...
I observed the aftermath of the vandalizing of a USA Today paper
box today and figured it was worth calling 911. I won't type up
the whole story, but they nabbed some suspects fitting my
description. To be honest, I hadn't gotten a good enough look at
their faces to make a definite identification. That's fine. Not
such a big deal in the scheme of things, and I feel bad for them.
Funny thing, they didn't even pick up all of the quarters, or any
of them for all I know, as the sidewalk was still covered with
them. Funnier thing, there were more washers and slugs than
quarters. So who are the real crooks?
THEE: Subject: Bagged
I made it home fine last night. My playlist for the ride
home was Beatca...
We interrupt this program for a special announcement!
Stone Ridge sale next weekend!!!!
THEE: Subject: Johnny Walker on WFBR
Oh Don, what memories your article (actually focused on Oprah's
Baltimore stint) brought back when you described Johnny Walker's
"Psychedelic Amateur Hour". I listened to Walker just about
every weekday morning for the fourteen or so years he was on the
air at WFBR. I probably heard your rendition of Windy as I drove
to work. Somewhere in my basement I have a book he published of
the best from his "Little News of the Morning". He was just one
of the funniest guys I ever heard - such a sharp irreverent wit.
Do you remember the bits he used to play around the holidays from
an album of Christmas sketches by Dudley Moore and Peter Cook?
There was one where the shepherds visiting the manger were
observing the Baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and
discussing what a sloppy job Joseph had done with the swaddling -
maybe because he was pissed about not being the father of the
baby... absolutely hysterical stuff for those of us who
appreciated Walker's brand of humor. If you or any of your
readers have a clue where I might be able to get a copy of this
album - or even if someone knows the title of it - I would be
forever grateful. Still haven't given up on finding it after
twenty some years of looking.
Thanks for the memories.
ME: Thanks for writing. I'm glad somebody remembers Johnny
Walker and his shenanigans!
I'll always remember Little News of the Morning for a Johnny
Walker reversal. He *always* ended Little News with some zinger
of a joke. The morning after John Lennon was murdered, I didn't
know about it until after getting in my car, turning on the
radio, catching the Beatles "In My Life" in progress and
thinking, "Hmmm, that's odd", letting it play out and then
hearing Johnny tell the devastating news. A little later, at the
end of Little News, Johnny just said something like, "No joke
this morning; we'll miss you John."
A quick web search turned up this Peter Cook site:
http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/discography.htm
I don't see a Christmas album, but the sketch you're looking for
may be in there somewhere. Note the 3-cd "Complete Beyond the
Fringe" set.
THEE: Now I have your message.
I ran our meeting spot through MapQuest. It worked. I can say
no more.
ME: what me psychic?
O but I predict there will be much more to say.
THEE: Closing Kumon, gee. That's a surprise. No wonder I
haven't heard from you in a while. Are you talking about the
Kumon folks in Chicago or wherever it was that won't talk to you?
Seems like that's where you went for training. Anyway, having
your own place would be good. Do they have some sort of
regulation about not being able to open your own place for fear
of taking the students with you?
G~~ has a clause in her contract that she can't leave History
Associates to go to work in the WDC area for any of the
government facilities that have contracts with HAI. Really
stinks, but quite a few employees had gone over to regular jobs
for the government for higher pay, so the contracts were changed
shortly before she was hired. I think she'd have to be away from
the current job for a year to move into a gov't job there.
Fortunately, she's getting terrific experience and is sort of the
unofficial project coordinator now. That means she does the
work, but doesn't get paid more. She figures that her resume
will look good whenever she decides it's time to move on. She's
soon to hit the magic 3 years' experience that most employers
demand.
I've gutted my desk, which has shelves and cupboards rather than
removeable drawers. It's gonna be a bear to move, but Carlos,
the head carpet installer, had already made a trip to the house
just to see it because the saleman who did all the measuring was
afraid they wouldn't be able to put new carpet in room. You know
those stories about people building large boats in their
basements. Well, we built this desk in my office, and it won't
fit through the door. Smart, huh?
I'm officially pooped and taking a break. Whenever the tile guy
and his son leave this evening, we're going out to dinner. It's
not like either of us can cook anything. Our stove is sitting on
the back patio. I'm considering sticking plants in the toilets
on the front porch. They're very Warholesque.
Thanks for telling your story about Ashley. Imagine the number
of variations out there in the world of those fairy tales if only
we could read all the languages or find translations. What do
you suppose the Japanese have done with Cinderella, or the
Nigerians, or the Malays? Sounds like a dissertation topic to
me.
Have a good time at the Beatlefest. Just what happens today at a
Beatlefest, anyway, other than a lot of Beatles music and
screaming adolescent girls? Well, maybe now they are screaming
50-something women trying to relive their youth.
As for me, I'll join the octogenarians at the Joplin Fest in
June. I can feel young there.
I won't bother to go into the magic (a.k.a. nightmare) at home.
This tile/carpet business isn't something a working person should
consider having done.
ME: Thought you might be interested in the C-5 crash location. I
couldn't find a map on google news pin-pointing it, but
descriptions like "1000 feet south of Dover Air Force Base," and
"grass field . . . east of Del. 9" would put it about 2000 ft
(.4 mile) north of the John Dickinson mansion.
Sorry about your home improvement miseries.
You asked about what goes on at a Beatlefest, and I'll write more
later, but I bought a book of reproductions of post cards that
Ringo received from the other Beatles over the years. This was
mostly as a souvenir of the convention; I certainly don't keep up
with the tons of books that continually appear. A selling point
was the relatively small amount of text. Anyhow, in case you're
considering what Ringo did, listen to him first (p9): "I bought
half of the building firm that was working on it [his house in
Weybridge] because I thought they'd get the job done much faster.
Not a chance in hell!"
So perish the thought.
THEE: Thank you for all these tidbits. As usual, it's too
late for me to reply. Where does the time go?
THEE: Dear Sir:
Several Questions:
1. Who was the only man in history to hold the rank of general on
opposing forces during the same war?
2.Name the only woman to have been awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor, the nation's highest decoration.
3. How did the Iditarod start?
ME: Guess who I saw Friday night? Right! Fred Garbo! Thanks
for the heads up; it was a lot of fun. I borrowed Mizan. As I
told her, I laughed at all the funny stuff and she laughed at all
the dumb stuff, so between us, we laughed at everything.
Funniest for her was Fred falling 29 floors down the elevator
shaft. We also had fun punching the big balloons around the
theater after the show, *trying* to get them up into the balcony.
She got *two* sets of autographs, one on her program, and one on
the flip book.
Here's a really neat set of books I let slip through my fingers
at the Dover auction on Tuesday. Problem was, it was in a box
filled with really old, valuable-looking books, like the Bobbsey
Twins, and there was a dealer there to contend with. I thought I
could buy the "Wit and Humor of America" set off of him for about
what he paid for the whole box, but he was skittish. Said he had
to see what he had.
Looks like I should be able to get a set off the internet, but
it's not the same as a "find". Think there are any ragtime
references in those 10 volumes?
In the table full of books I had my eye on one other, another
nice, old British Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. Plan A was the
same as above, try to buy the individual book off whoever got it
in a box lot. But nobody was bidding on the other boxes, so the
auctioneer kept adding boxes. When the box with Mother Goose was
added, I piped up with a $2 bid - and got all 4 boxes for $2. I
needed the 4 boxes of books like a hole in the head, but I picked
out about one box-worth of juvenile material that looked half
decent and left 3 boxes for scavengers.
I'm about halfway through this Mother Goose. It's slower going
with each new book because there are more versions of each rhyme
in my collection to compare. I still get a kick out of each
little difference, e.g. "There came a big spider" vs. "There came
a little spider", and, "When the boys (girls) came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away."
Cleaning out my learning center, I gave away 625 books to a local
elementary school. The reading specialist there jumped on the
phone after reading only half of my email with the offer. She
was so thrilled with them. I also got a response from another
reading specialist who was also quite enthusiastic. So that was
the vague idea behind that last box of children's books, maybe
accumulating another collection big enough to donate to a school.
Problem is, it's getting a bit crowded around here.
The little story about A~~ was just the tip of an iceberg. I
left out the parts about her doing a cool little jigsaw puzzle I
had on my desk while I was going on and on about the beauty of
base 8, upholding both ends of the discussion, and her
challenging me to beat her time on the puzzle, and then hiding a
piece when it looked like I was going to, and the cool wooden 3-d
puzzles on my desk, and translating about half of Aschenputtel
and identifying the other Grimms stories advertised on the back
cover. I fumbled Dornroschen. Ashley could see from the picture
it was Sleeping Beauty and I knew we had changed her name. I
couldn't get "Rose Red" out of the way in my brain. As soon as
she left, I remembered - Briar Rose. Dorn = thorn, get it? Just
another of the hundreds of times I wished my sessions were
filmed. *Then* I'd show 'em (haha)
ME: to sony
It's extremely unlikely I will ever get used to the cd text
moving across the display. Besides being annoying, it
obliterates the time display just when I am most likely to be
interested in monitoring it. Question 1: Is there some way to
turn off the cd text? Question 2: Is there some way to record
cds so there is no default cd text added? What I get is "No05",
for example, and I sure didn't put it there. Cds I recorded on
other machines jump cleanly from track "4" to "5", for example,
at the exact moment the new track starts. That is all I ever
want to see. Thanks for your help.
THEE:
>Thought you might be interested in the C-5 crash location. I
couldn't find a map on google news pin-pointing it, but
descriptions like "1000 feet south of Dover Air Force Base," and
"grass field . . . east of Del. 9" would put it about 2000 ft
(.4 mile) north of the John Dickinson mansion.
Lucky miss. I had wondered about the crash site when I heard
that the crash was near the base. The mansion was an interesting
place. You should go sometime.
ME: Donald Sauter sent you this eBay item: This is a must
have for opera lovers! (#4862015562)
iz710 sent you this eBay item
Personal message: Or, if you're looking to get into opera on a
shoestring, I have duplicates of lots of these.
This is a must have for opera lovers! A opera collection of 129
records Item number: 4862015562
Seller: donnaz424 ( 8 )
Positive Feedback: 100% Member since Aug-28-05 in United States
Starting bid: US $525,000.00
Time left: 7 days 18 hours
Ends Apr-16-06 17:06:56 PDT
Price: US $1,500,000.00
Item location: Princeton, New Jersey United States Ships to:
Worldwide
Summary These are 129 Different opera records from 1940 to;
1970. These are in Excelent Condition, Some of the names are
Ferruccio Tagliavini, Callas, Poveratti, Wagner, Paliughi,
Sutherland, Siepi, Freni, Panerai, and on,and on. The reason the
shipping is so expensive is because of the total combined weight.
The reason the price is so high is because the records are worth
that amount,but also because Ebay take a large amount the selling
price. ; If you would like more information Please call 1-908-
907-2357 and I will give you any information you would like.
These records are what my mother wants me to sell, she has stage
3 Alzheimers Desasise, She has asked me to sell them, that way
she won't have to worry about the;her care in home now,
and;funeral costs when she dies. ; These are records in mint
condition, and will be a huge investment in the future. ;Some of
the titles are: "L'Amico Fritz", Pia Tassinari and Ferruccio
Tagliavini, Puccini, La Bohe'me, Carteri/ Tagliavini,
Tosca,Milanov, Biojerling, Warren, Rome Opera House, Orchestra
and Chours,;;Tannhauser and the German state Orchestra, and Three
Famous Scenes By Wagner.
THEE: Subject: Original (Brand new this second) Quote
Hi, I love a good quote. One just came to me from my other me:
"When people tell me to stop analysing everything and just go
with the flow, I ask them what the direction and relative
velocity of the flow is."
Have a good one !
ME: My doctor laughs off the idea that sugar gives you diabetes,
although I know as well as anyone how fallible doctors are. They
are people, after all.
The C-5 that crashed in Dolver didn't get me.
Dolver got me started on a funny conversation thread with my
friend M~~. He grew up in Baltimore, but has never noticed or
been alerted to the difference between the very pure, British
Baltimore long O versus the uglified, back of the throat,
guttural way the rest of the country says it. In essence, he
told me I was nuts. He said he *never* heard an L added after an
O, even in pop songs, so I made a recording of about 20 or 30
examples. I even threw in some British singers for comparison.
For some reason they sing "Yo-ho heave-ho" when Americans knolw
it to be "Yol-hol heave-hol." Most of M~~'s long Os are pure,
but I catch him every time he adds the phantom L, as in woln't
and holme.
THEE: Re: Donald Sauter sent you this eBay item: This is a
must have for opera lovers! (#4862015562)
Snatch 'em up at that buy-it-now price, Donald . . . with UPS
next day air and insurance. I'll spring for some of those
"shoestring" budget duplicates at $11,627 average. Egads, must
be a diamond-studded, platinum shoestring!
Who has Alzheimer's--Mom or the seller? For this price, it seems
like one oughta be able to revive the dead for a personal
performance.
And I thought $700 for an original Joplin rag was outlandish . . .
For this price, you could just 'bout buy that town for sale in
California.
THEE: Re: balloons and books
>Guess who I saw Friday night? Right! Fred Garbo!
So you didn't get them up into the balcony? I trust someone
did. The balloons made their way to the balcony several times
after the performance we attended. Sending the balloons out into
the audience was a nice touch.
>Here's a really neat set of books I let slip through my fingers
at the Dover auction on Tuesday.
Looks like a find for $20. What's the date? What looked like
it should have been a date is coming through as 191. Hope it
included Peter Finley Dunne, who wrote an Irish dialect column
called "Mr. Dooley." I've read all I've come across in old
newspapers.
>Again, if I've mentioned it before, the bone was me working
directly with the students.
You're supposed to run the place and not have any of the fun of
working with the students? They must want business men, not
caring educators. Ah, come to think of it, that describes most
college administrators, too. (Luckily, my immediate boss is an
exception and a gem.)
Btw, my husband was the victim of a "random" security check at
Tulsa International when he left for Virginia the second time
after being back home less than a week. (He'd returned home on a
Wednesday, received the news of his uncle's death late Saturday,
and was back on the plane Monday a.m.) The first time, with a
round-trip ticket, he had no problem. The second trip, with a
one-way ticket, he was waylaid for an extensive search. Random,
maybe. But I have a hunch that there may have been more to the
story. One round-trip to check things out, then a second one-way
trip to do whatever evil a Middle Eastern lookin' guy with an
Arabic surname might do. On the otherhand, if that is the story,
in a sense it's comforting to know that someone is paying some
attention to recent travel history.
>P.S. After composing the above, and before sending it off, I
sprang for the "Wit and Humor of America" set.
What a multi-tasking society we live in. I'm gettin' multi-
tasked out!
ME:
>Looks like a find for $20. What's the date? What looked like
it should have been a date is coming through as 191. Hope it
included Peter Finley Dunne, who wrote an Irish dialect column
called "Mr. Dooley." I've read all I've come across in old
newspapers.
The set I saw and the set I bought are 1911. The internet also
shows 1907 edition(s), as in the auction below. To answer your
question about Mr. Dooley, see the 6th photo. Unfortunately,
this set is missing volume 10.
>You have some kind of luck at that auction.
I won't go into all my misses. You'd think that someone who just
cleaned off a table for $2, for example, would be happy to get an
immediate $1 for a single piece o' junk out of that lot, but more
often than not he's very reticent. What I think happens is not
so much, "Hey, this must be really valuable if he's offering me a
buck!" but that a different mindset kicks in, as if the buyer
immediately steps into the role of shopkeeper of an antique or
2nd-hand store and applies those sort of prices.
>You're the only person I know who enjoys such little verbal
variations the way I do.
Some of the variations actually invert the sense. For example,
"And one (but none) for the little boy who lives (cries) in the
lane." Also, there are illustrations for most all of these to
compare, and the differences in artist conception are
fascinating. Two of the old drawings for Humpty-Dumpty don't
show an egg. Some drawings for "Young lambs to sell" show a
peddlar with toy lambs, which I would never have thought of.
Some drawings for "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross" are
perfectly literal, some show the boy playing in his room on a
hobby horse. Differences are fun, don't ask me why. I always
liked:
There was an old woman
Lived under a hill;
And if she's not gone,
She lives there still.
In my latest book, I just got to the novelized version:
There once was a giant
Named Bug-a-boo Bill.
Who lived in a house
On the top of the hill.
And if he's not dead
He lives there still.
My apologies if this is all way above your head.
>All you need is a trip to The Book Thing.
Too get back up to five- or six-hundred selectively chosen (I
know how redundant that sounds) juvenile books would probably
require several trips to the Book Thing. I think the batch I
donated may have had 3 or 4 trips invested.
>>Guess who I saw Friday night? Right! Fred Garbo!
>So you didn't get them up into the balcony? I trust
someone did. The balloons made their way to the balcony several
times after the performance we attended. Sending the balloons out
into the audience was a nice touch.
We just got one up there, no thanks to me. Those things were so
flabby and floppy. I knew that a smack wouldn't do any good, but
even a good push hardly had any effect. Either they had deflated
somewhat, or I'm even more impressed with Fred's ability to
juggle them.
Don't get me started on airport security, grrrrrr....
P.S. I see "discriminately" would have been a better word above.
THEE: Subject: Italian Opera Singers . . .
"That International Rag" By Irving Berlin, 1913.
Verse 1: What did you do, America
They're after you, America,
You got excited and you started something
Nations jumping all around
You've got a lot to answer for
They lay the blame right at your door
The world is ragtime crazy from shore to shore.
Chorus: London dropped its dignity,
so did France and Germany,
All hands are dancing to a raggety melody,
full of originality
The folks who live in Sunny Spain
dance to a strain
that they call the Spanish Tango
Dukes and Lords and Russian Czars,
men who own their motor cars
Throw up their shoulders to that raggety melody,
full of originality
Italian opera singers
have learned to snap their fingers
The world goes 'round to the sound of the International Rag.
ME: Whilst in an upbeat mode, thought I would pass on some
apparent successes of late. I had emailed Sony about one of my
dissatisfactions with the cd recorder, and their automated email
response did not address it, but they invited me to call their
Customer Information Service Center. Something like that
actually takes getting up a major dose of inertia for me, but I
took the plunge today. It was a big success. Here was the
problem I emailed Sony:
>It's extremely unlikely I will ever get used to the cd text
moving across the display. Besides being annoying, it
obliterates the time display just when I am most likely to be
interested in monitoring it. Question 1: Is there some way to
turn off the cd text? Question 2: Is there some way to record
cds so there is no default cd text added? What I get is "No05",
for example, and I sure didn't put it there. Cds I recorded on
other machines jump cleanly from track "4" to "5", for example,
at the exact moment the new track starts. That is all I ever
want to see. Thanks for your help.
My problem was even worse than all that. If I deleted the track
named "No05", for example, then the new track 5 would be named
"No06". What a pain! Sony supplied a fix. If I turn off the
recorder, or even just open the record tray, before finalizing,
all the cd text info is lost. I had interpreted the user manual
as saying, if you did either of those things, you would lose the
text *you* entered. So it's another step, but I can live with
it.
On the way up to Manhattan (almost) I mentioned I thought this
machine would allow me to use the play and record decks
independently, so I could extract just what I wanted from the
play deck. This would eliminate (almost) the need for a second
cd player in my system. When I starting testing this theory, I
found that could extract just the passage I wanted, but not fade
in or out of it, which stinks. Sony told me you could do that.
I didn't want to call them liars, so I just said I'd give it
another go. Lo and behold, it turns out you can! There were
statements in the user manual that led me to understand that in a
digital copy the level couldn't be changed. But what they meant
was, the final level after coming out of a fade in.
Then I asked about the digital rifle cracks I had gotten at the
end of tracks when I had erased and re-recorded the following
track. Their answer has the smell of getting the customer off
their back, but it may be correct in this case. They suggest
using Sony audio CD-RWs. Guess I'll spring for a batch, and hold
my breath. I've noted an instance or two when I've rerecorded a
track without getting a rifle shot, so maybe it's something
that's worked out of its system. I never mentioned that the
machine had a terrible time playing the first cd I put in it.
But it settled down after incinerating the dust on the laser beam
lens, I guess.
Life is getting good.
My current recording project is a 3-tape Cav/Pag set which, if I
can get the tapes to behave, will fit nicely on 2 cds, one opera
per. That's what it's all about. On the other hand, I had to
split a single 82-minute Pirates of Penzance tape onto
2 cds. That's not what it's all about.
On top of all this, the world changed on or before the most
recent Thursday. I went into a Metro grocery story - and the
music was not unbearable! Not great, but not the urban
contemporary that's been killing me in every store for the last 6
years or more. Just some more-or-less pleasant oldies, including
back-to-back Beatle/ Beatle-related: Another Day and And I Love
Her. These were the first two Beatle-related songs I've heard in
public in the last 6 or so years. I even asked at the customer
service counter what the story was, chain wide, or due to popular
demand at this store? She said it was a decision coming down
from Baltimore. I remember hearing employees at the Shoppers in
Lanham talking about how the customers hated the new urban music,
so maybe word finally went up the ladder. But, as unbelievable
as all this is, when I walked into another store in the same
shopping center, they were playing bearable music too! Now, if
you can't depend on Dollar Tree for hip-hop, then upon whom can
you? And it wasn't even the same oldies Muzak feed as Metro's;
every few minutes it broke to say, "This is the Dollar Tree radio
network." Dare I get up hope that it's safe to go into stores
again, everywhere? Of course, my advice, failing a return to
old-style muzak, is blissful silence. I bet a grocery store
could advertise that to its advantage. Everybody calls music the
universal language when its really just universal fightin' words.
ME: Dear Delaware State News,
When I am in the voting booth on April 18 deciding on Dover's
mayor, I know I'll be thinking about the Timothy Hanson House -
Dover's (formerly) oldest, most charming, and strikingly situated
building - and under whose watchful eye it got sold down the
river for a handful of shekels so some real estate guys can build
themselves a club house, whooppee.
THEE: Re: bugaboo bill
>>>Guess who I saw Friday night? Right! Fred Garbo!
>>So you didn't get them up into the balcony? I trust
someone did. The balloons made their way to the balcony several
times after the performance we attended. Sending the balloons out
into the audience was a nice touch.
>We just got one up there, no thanks to me. Those things were so
flabby and floppy. I knew that a smack wouldn't do any good, but
even a good push hardly had any effect. Either they had deflated
somewhat, or I'm even more impressed with Fred's ability to
juggle them.
OK, I confess to us not getting the balloons to the balcony
because we weren't in a position to, but they made it to the
balcony 3-4 times.
>P.S. I see "discriminately" would have been a better word above.
Which reminds me that when indiscriminate came up in my Reading
II vocabulary text, none of my students knew the word. When I
related it to discrimate and discrimination, they didn't know
the former and all thought that the later referred only to racial
prejudice.
THEE: Some days I think that cutting sugar cane would be easier
than giving lessons. I have a few students who are advanced
enough to have a little joy with. Most are struggling beginners,
who a lucky to remember which finger is next.
THEE: Subject: The price is right
Shall we go halfsies on the Buy It Now price?
We do not want to let this bargain get away!
THEE: I've been wondering if that transport had fallen on you,
but the news didn't mention your name. Back to the "O" subject,
the most glaring example is coke followed by home.
THEE: Subject: Digital Butcher cover
Big doings on the Capitol Albums Vol. 2 front. Let me see if
I can remember how it went.
Last Tuesday, someone on the Beatlegs discussion group posted
a message from an anonymous writer to another group saying that
the mono mixes on the box set were "fake mono"! They were just
the stereo mixes folded into mono.
I dashed off an e-mail to DJ Andre Gardner, asking if he knew
anything about it. Silence.
Wednesday, Andre wrote back to announce that he was the
anonymous poster! Apparently, he'd played his advance DJ copies
the previous weekend, detected the fraud, and got on the phone
right away. He caught Bruce Spizer in a cab, going to his hotel
in New York, ahead of the Fest.
Spizer agreed, as soon as he heard the discs, in his hotel.
The two then called Capitol. Capitol has since announced that
they will replace the offending discs. It looks like they may
even have pushed the release date (today) back a week or so.
ME: I've come back down a notch or two in the cd recorder realm,
but nowhere's near to hauling a high-powered rifle up the local
bell tower. I got a surprise rifle crack going from track 12 to
13 of my most recent cd project - tape 1 of Verdi's Macbeth. I
had even double checked that spot before taking the cdrw to the
computer, because I had deleted and rerecorded track 13. It's
absolutely clean on the cd recorder. Some troubleshooting
suggests that it's my external 56x cd drive, since the crack
doesn't appear when I use my pokey internal cd drive. Still, it
seems to suggest that the cd recorder does something that's hard
to handle for a cd drive.
The infuriating cd text is still there - powering down did not
kill it. Haven't given up, though.
Great story about the fake mono.
Any chance you're still up for a tape-to-cd frolic on Saturday?
In spite of my griping about my machine, I can guarantee a fine
product.
THEE: Subject: Meet Your Neighbor
Mr. Sauter, Independent Newspapers Inc. has introduced a feature
called "Meet Your Neighbor." These stories feature Downstate
residents who serve the community through various activities,
groups or clubs and/or who are concerned with community issues.
The profiles run in the Delaware State News (Smyrna/Dover area
and the beaches), The Journal (Harrington area), the Milford
Chronicle (Milford area), the Sussex Post (Georgetown/Millsboro
area) or The Leader & State Register (Seaford/Laurel area). A
simple question-and-answer interview, which we'd like done via e-
mail, would include the following inquiries: Of course, if the
interviewee is uncomfortable answering a particular question, it
could be skipped. We would publish the responses in their own
words and run a photo alongside the copy (which the respondent
could supply). The reason I am contacting you today is because
we'd like you to be one of the individuals profiled. There is no
obligation, of course. And if you can think of anyone else who
may be interested, please let me know. Your prompt response (at
least to let me know if you would like to participate) is
appreciated. Feel free to call or e-mail me. Thank you in
advance.
ME: Thanks for the opportunity to say hi to the community. My
first inclination was to decline. I couldn't imagine anyone
enjoying the responses that were coming to mind. Then I figured,
why not let you be the judge of that!
THEE: Subject: Sauter To Sauter
This is really strange but cool, but i typed my last name in to
google search and your website popped up. The thing that caught
my eye was that you were into guitar and seemed involved in
different political viewpoints. Here is where it gets cooler, My
last name is Sauter, and i've been playing guitar like a religion
since the age of 17 and am fueled extremely politically, writing
and recording politacal songs. Get back to me because this seems
interesting.
ME: Yeah, that's neat. I'm certainly no singer, though! I don't
have a link handy, but if you search on "patowmack guitar trio"
you should come to a page that has a few guitar trios with me in
there.
Oops, I just ran a little test - make that "potomac guitar trio".
THEE: With your interest in variations, how about becoming
involved with a revised edition of H. M. Belden's Ballads adn
Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society. The new
editor is looking for a large team of volunteers to see what they
can turn up in terms of updates on each song's "appearance in
books, journal articles, or recorded media since Belden finished
writing his annotations in 1949."
This, by the way, is sure to be a long-term project. It's not
really underway yet except for a little bit of preliminary work
that Lynn has been doing. I learned of it a few days ago when my
March Missouri Folklore Society Newsletter arrived. (Yup, March.
This is fast for this group.)
ME: I'd be happy to contribute anything I can to The Belden's
Ballads project. Obviously, the thing that comes to mind are all
the LC guitar arrangements I have which are mostly unknown.
Don't know if there's any overlap with Belden, but I'd jump in
with gusto. I think this is the way to do projects in this day
and age, and it tears me up that in my areas of interest there
seems to be no inclination whatsoever to band together. Just
this morning, for instance, I informed the Guitar Foundation of
America I was letting my membership slide. I didn't come out and
give my reason: that I hardly feel any connection with the
classical guitar community. And another recent example is the
lack of response to my call for a project to get the opera mp3s
off of the UCSB site. Yes, I could eventually do it myself, but
wouldn't sharing the chore be a million times more fun? Maybe
"infinitely" would be a better word since I'm not sure doing
anything that you don't share with anybody else is really any fun
at all.
With that in mind here's yer daily Mother Goose torture:
I bumbled "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross" when I brought it
up. The reason its pictures in particular come to mind is
because my fat British Mother Goose gives two pictures, by
different artists, both showing a child being dandled. That was
interesting after seeing the scene painted literally. My "Story
and Verse for Children" book lists it among rhymes "serving a
purpose in action games and pantomime."
You asked about the Humpty Dumpty illustrations. Both of them in
my fat British book, by different artists, show a chubby boy.
One's snoozing on the wall, the other is falling headfirst off of
it. I see now they both incorporate real eggs. A couple are
falling with the falling boy, and one is broken on the ground.
There are 3 round objects, eggs seen end-on, I guess, on the wall
next to the snoozing boy.
Two of my illustrations for "Little Nannie (Nancy) Netticoate
(Etticote) in a white petticoat..." just show a candle since
that's what the riddle is. But one cleverly shows a little girl
fitting the description of Nancy Etticote looking at a candle.
Neat.
There are hardly any examples of nursery rhymes in the different
books being word-for-word identical. I found one which is
identical in the 3 books except at one word:
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl,
If the bowl had been stronger,
My tale/story/song had been longer.
How's this for a mean variation?:
Rain, rain, go away,
And come on Grandma's washing day.
I had 2 bare-bones version of one that starts
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
I am going a-milking, sir, she said.
It has 3 or 4 more couplets like that. In my most recent
acquisition it's fleshed out to Lord Rendall proportions:
Where are you going to,
my pretty maid?
Where are you going to,
my pretty maid?
I am going a-milking, sir, she said;
Sir, she said; sir, she said;
I am going a-milking, kind sir, she said.
I like that, but why I had to mention it to you was because of a
surprising word in the last verse. The short version goes:
Then I won't marry you, my pretty maid.
Nobody asked you, sir, she said.
The technicolor version:
Then I cannot marry you,
my pretty maid,
Then I cannot marry you,
my pretty maid.
Well, nobody axed you to, sir, she said;
Sir, she said; sir, she said;
Well, nobody axed you, kind sir, she said.
Axed? Sound like good, ol' prim and proper British English to
you?
Finally, in Mother Goose land, I noticed something I never
noticed before - the closed loop of The House That Jack Built.
The 11th and final verse introduces the "farmer sowing his corn
that kept the cock that crowed in the morn... waked priest...
married man... kissed maiden... milked cow... tossed dog...
worried cat... killed rat... ate malt that lay in the house that
Jack built" Well, the "corn" is where the malt came from in the
first place.
I have a small collection of cassette tapes, and I'm copying them
to cd as I go through them. I got to Pagliacci a few days ago.
Most of the translations give the time for the clowns' play as
7:00. That always confounded me; even I could see that "a venti-
tre ora" is not 7:00. On the other hand, 2300 = 11 pm seemed
like a mighty late showtime for the villagers. And one or two of
my libretti agreed with my calculations and gave it as 11:00. In
pulling down about 50 of my opera reference books with main
sections on Pagliacci, I finally stumbled across one that solved
the mystery (for me, at least). It says in some parts of Italy,
they count the hours from 8 pm, meaning *our* 8 pm which is their
0 o'clock, I guess. So their 1 ora is 9:00, and so on to 23 ora,
which is 7 pm. Weird! But neat.
Comparing pictures sometimes turns up something fun. I have 5
different editions of the Victor Book of the Opera, spanning
several decades. The text and the pictures were always being
updated. I had all 5 opened to Pagliacci and looking at the
pictures, noting which were new in each edition, or holdovers
from earlier editions. In the earliest and latest editions is
the famous picture of Caruso playing Pagliaccio, with his right
arm held up high ready to beat a great big bass drum. I just
figured they were the same photo, each with a slightly different
contrast due to processing. But Caruso's smile seemed ever so
slightly different in one of them. I figured that had to be due
to the processing, but I eventually noticed his arm was moved a
few inches (relative to himself, that is.) No big deal, just
that it was quite a surprise, plus I didn't figure they had rapid
fire still cameras back then.
I think I made some remarks about the Kumon instructor in
Wilmington who was shut down by the kids in the branch office for
providing SAT prep material to his students. I wanted to give
you a web page address, but I see it's been removed. However,
the google cached page is still available:
http:...
Does he seem like the sort of person you wouldn't want helping
your kids with math? He's given me some much appreciated
direction in setting up my own tutoring business.
Ok, so I couldn't get the balloon up to the balcony. I'm a
loser. Stop rubbing it in.
ME: LATE BREAKING NEWS: FedEx just dropped off a "priority
overnight" envelope from Deven Klein, Kumon North America Inc.
Haven't opened it. You suppose they want me as a vice
president?
ME: Dear Soundboard,
I got my "Time to renew" notice last month. I've decided to let
my subscription come to an end, and I thought I would tell you
rather than leave you wondering if it got buried under a stack of
papers. It's been great over the decades. The last issue was
particularly fine, so thought I'd make that the grand finale.
Thanks again.
Donald Sauter #1291
ME: to audiophile group: subj: What's causing the loud crack
between tracks?
I have a Sony CD recorder (RCD-W500C) which is only a few weeks
old...
ME: (from my old friends page)
Cathy Samakouris? Cathy Samokouris? (Are you still creative? The
construction paper chains you pasted to your face and ears that
day was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. Why did the
teacher explode? Who knows, who knows...)
THEE: Hey Donald,
Can't say as I remember glueing paper chains to my face but good
for me! My daughter googled "Samakouris" and sent me your site.
Here's my life in a brief nutshell...
I'm still on the creative side. I cross-stitch, play the piano
and guitar and for years my hair was purple. Now it's just a
nice shade of Burgundy.
The last person I ran into from Featherbed Lane was Susan Krauss
when I attended Towson State.
Really wild! Seeing all those names and bringing back memories.
I wish I had an old class picture.
Thanks for the memories and getting my day off with a smile!
ME: Great to hear from you! My little snare has caught a few old
friends. You didn't answer the main thing I wanted to know: did
you grow up big and tall? Just joking! Sounds like you can take
the paper chain and paste incident in good spirit, so I'll remind
you of a little more. Miss Olsen really blew her stack, and made
you keep them on for the rest of the day, even going through the
lunch line. Is that the way to treat true genius? Thanks for
reminding me of Susan Krauss - I'll have to add her to the page,
although there's not much chance with common names. Working for
the Girl Scouts sounds real neat. At the request of a friend I
started volunteering in a local elementary school. I was scared
to death, but loved it immediately. It was obvious the kids
liked working with me. Couldn't get on with the school system,
so I opened up a learning center in Dover, Del. I had a nice
surprise meeting with one of our classmates last December. My
mom died, and Marcia Matthews, whom I hadn't seen since
Featherbed, showed up at the viewing. She was a neighbor of my
Mom's family - lived across the road from my cousin Alice
Chalker, remember her? Michael Tolson, who now goes by the name
tentatively a Convenience, tent for short, was the first to get
caught by my old friends page. He's still a character, actually,
much moreso than ever.
Have a nice Easter, and all the best!
ME: I'm hoping you'll go for something a little offbeat, picture-
wise. I'm not much photographed, and anything like a portrait
would go back to the days of big glasses. Here's my favorite
from the most recent "photo session". It shows me playing
roofball with my nephew Stephen Paul Bossom (airborne) on
Christmas afternoon, 2005, in western Baltimore County, Maryland.
Note the cool Christmas rainbow. The reason for the shoot was to
provide roofball pictures for an encyclopedia on sports in North
America. The author found my roofball page. Oh, yes, many
others *claim* to have invented the sport, but they're all a
bunch of charlatans.
THEE: Subject: RE: Meet Your Neighbor
We really would prefer a straight-on (what we call) mugshot, if
you've got one. We also could arrange to have one of our
photographers take one of you. Since this is an opportunity for
readers to meet you, we'd like you to be identifiable in the
photo. What do you think?
ME: Hmmm... All I know is my own brain, and I know I'd a million
times rather see a fun, out-of-the-ordinary photo than a mug
shot. Are you sure you're viewing this from the readers'
standpoint, as opposed to what's "allowable" for a newspaper?
Would one infraction bring Independent down? I think the
offbeatness of the photo is far more in tune with "me" than a
normal portrait. The caption might make the most interesting
lines of the profile. It's also hard for me to believe a tiny
feature like this is worth sending a photographer around for.
Hey, I didn't even answer half the questions! But in the end, as
one knows from my web pages, I believe in simple majority rule,
and if after considering my feelings and arguments here the
majority still says "Mug shot!", I guess that's the way it'll be.
But thanks for asking around and giving it a second thought.
THEE: RE: Meet Your Neighbor
Running the profile with a mugshot is the way my managing
editor has asked me to do these. If you'd like to send one in,
please do. If you'd like us to take a shot of you, please let me
know. Also, if you'd prefer not to participate at all, that's
your option.
ME: If you think it'll be interesting enough with a mug shot,
then that's ok with me. But I will need a photographer to come
out since I can't think of a portrait taken of me in decades.
Thanks for doing all of this for me - what did I do to deserve
it!
THEE: I cannot tell a lie: When i heard about the fake mono, I
ordered a set from Lapidos. I think my goal was to get a correct
box but a fake-mono sampler. Well, it arrived and the box is
fake mono. I gave "I'm Looking Through You" a quick spin. Now
I'm disappointed.
ME: I eventually need to understand the mono story better.
Everything happened that fast that you got the box set already??
And you're disappointed you got a future rarity??? And you can
hear fake mono without an A/B comparison???? (Or even with?????)
I see I goofed on the UCSB number for the Queen of the Night's
aria, which is unbelievable, by the way. The UCSB catalog no.
is 2352. If you search on 35012, you'll get it too, as the
Edison Amberol number.
THEE: Re: teachers, grrr...
Cathy Roberts? Cathy Roberts? (To heck with the paper chains;
I'd like to see the burgundy hair.)
ME: The "Wit and Humor" set arrived today - definitely a keeper.
Got chuckles from the first couple of things I dipped into. I'll
have to read it front to back. If O. Henry only gets one entry,
the standards must be pretty high! Enjoyed "Ye Legende of Sir
Ironcladde" muchlie; how did we ever let such a genre die out?
Got few books from a company called Math League that look like
superb material to use in my learning center, as soon as that can
happen. It's tremendously richer than the Kumon worksheets,
although they were quite acceptable with me running the show.
I'm plowing through all the Math League books now.
Got my first few cylinder mp3s from the UCSB site. So many
things pulling me this way and that - although I think you
probably know more about that than anybody. Chicken Little was
great story-telling. I'm surprised at how good the sound quality
of the cylinders is, in general. For a wild vocal technique that
doesn't exist anywhere in my record collection, listen to the
Queen of the Night's aria from the Magic Flute. Use the UCSB no.
2353, or search on "35012", Edison Amberol no.
If I didn't thank you for the 1915 Baltimore directory of Sauters
- thanks! I forwarded it to my sister Diane who is the most
genealogically minded of us. She can point out dilapidated farm
houses in the are that were formally inhabited by our ancestors.
Had meant to bring up the bufay thread one last time. Pretty
obvious my pig latin theory was a fiasco, but the theory of
derivation from an African word seemed pretty far-fetched to me.
Or maybe not, if we have lots of examples of that. But with tens
of thousands of African languages to choose from (I'm guessing)
it'd be pretty hard not to find a word to sound like anything you
want. But the main thing I remember is, with a few minutes of
searching, I never found a web page that spelled out, or even
took a stab at, the origin of pig latin. Was it around in the
late 1800s even? As always, maybe one more click would have done
it.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving my 1979 set of The Book of
Knowledge to a woman who ships things to an orphanage-school in
Kabul, Afghanistan. She was thrilled with it, and also the box
of kids books I got along with the recent Mother Goose at the
Dover auction, plus a crate of old National Geographics and a
stack of Ranger Rick nature magazines. It's one of her "causes".
She says neighboring Pakistan looks like Fifth Avenue in
comparison to Afghanistan - and we know how ritzy Pakistan is.
She has connections that allow her to ship APO, but still, she
spent $1800 in pastage last year. She also heads Delaware's
Salvation Army, etc. etc.
THEE: Subject: Beatles Movies
Mr. Sauter,
I have come into possession of some 16mm movies of the Beatles.
These Movies have these titles listed on them:
Splice of life
Its what's happening baby Murphy Thek
Beatles in America.
I noticed that you had a lot of Beatles information on your web
site. I am trying to figure out if these movies have any value.
There are not even on reels to play on a movie projector. A
couple of the movies appear to have no wear on them at all. Can
you help me out?
ME: I guess I'm not much of an expert on films made about the
Beatles; only the 2nd title sounds fammiliar (a Murray the K
quote). You might want to ask on the discussion group
rec.music.beatles . Or you might just want to describe them to
the best of your abilities and put them on ebay. Good luck.
THEE:
>So what was in the FedEx envelope from Kumon?
Who knows? I didn't want it to ruin my Easter weekend!
THEE:
>Maybe "infinitely" would be a better word since I'm not sure
doing anything that you don't share with anybody else is really
any fun at all.
It's too bad that the guitar group lacks community spirit. I
find that the ragtime crowd on newsgroups can sometimes be that
way, but other times they jump in and get excited about some
issue or topic for a couple of weeks. Then a person can ask a
question another time and get not one reply. When replies are
forthcoming to the poster, they're usually helpful and
supportive, but occasionally they are snide and critical . . . or
sure sound that way even if it may not have been the way the
remarks were intended. I haven't experienced any of the
"attacks" but have been ignored several times. Most likely that
means no one knows the answer.
>I bumbled "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross" when I brought it
up. The reason its pictures in particular come to mind is
because my fat British Mother Goose gives two pictures, by
different artists, both showing a child being dandled. That was
interesting after seeing the scen painted literally. My "Story
and Verse for Children" book lists it among rhymes "serving a
purpose in action games and pantomime."
I had to look up the verb dandled. But I suspect quite of
few of these rhymes could have been used for similar purposes.
>You asked about the Humpty Dumpty illustrations. Both of them in
my fat British book, by different artists, show a chubby boy.
One's snoozing on the wall, the other is falling headfirst off of
it. I see now they both incorporate real eggs. A couple are
falling with the falling boy, and one is broken on the ground.
There are 3 round objects, eggs seen end-on, I guess, on the wall
next to the snoozing boy.
Huh, I've always found that a strange rhyme even when I was a
kid. What would the king's men (and especially the king's
horses) be doing trying to put an egg together? And if a boy
that they can't put together, it's a morbid tale, and perhaps
warning, for kids. But why combine the boy and the eggs?
Just tried a Google search. In one modern picture, Humpty, as an
anthropomorphized egg, falls off the wall and bounces off of a
trampoline. He's pictures flying toward the roof of a house as a
girl looks on from the yard and some sort of animal from the
house. Looks a liddle like the cat and the fiddle but maybe more
like a squirrel and a banjo . . . Humpty appears to have been
holding a cup of coffee or hot chocolate because it's flying
through the air, too. Haven't looked through all the pages of
hits, but here's my favorite so far--from the London Times:
http://www.londonstimes.us/toons/cartoons/richdiesslin_humpty.gif
And how about this origami Humpty?
http://www.kalei.com/origami/models.html
And I like this one a lot:
http://www.playswithmusic.com/plays/humptydumpty.html
Do you suppose that egg was a symbol for the earth all along?
The king's horses and king's men make more sense that way. The
military never has done a very good job of bringing order out of
destruction.
>Two of my illustrations for "Little Nannie (Nancy) Netticoate
(Etticote) in a white petticoat..." just show a candle since
that's what the riddle is. But one cleverly shows a little girl
fitting the description of Nancy Etticote looking at a candle.
Neat.
Reminds me a little of the at scene in Lady and the Tramp (or is
it 101 Dalmations?) in which a succession of people walk down the
street walking their dogs, and dogs and owners all look alike.
Which reminds me of one of our instructors on campus. I was at
her house once. Her chihuahua looked and acted just like her.
It was the most nervous dog I've ever seen. Repeatedly, it came
to me as I sat at the kitchen table and put its paws on my leg as
if it wanted attention. If I looked at it, it ran. A few
minutes later, the process repeated. This happened more than a
dozen times, always the same. Then I tried something else. I
kept my eyes on E~~ across the table, but reached out my hand
sideways to pat the dog's head. The dog stayed.
>How's this for a mean variation?:
Rain, rain, go away,
And come on Grandma's washing day.
Mean, yes, but funnier than the original (or at least the
common) version.
>Finally, in Mother Goose land, I noticed something I never
noticed before - the closed loop of The House That Jack Built.
The 11th and final verse introduces the "farmer sowing his corn
that kept the cock that crowed in the morn... waked priest...
married man... kissed maiden... milked cow... tossed dog...
worried cat... killed rat... ate malt that lay in the house that
Jack built" Well, the "corn" is where the malt came from in the
first place.
That was always one of my favorites as a kid, but I don't recall
the corn although it may have been there. Is it not in the other
books?
>Most of the translations of Pagliacci give the time for the
clowns' play as 7:00. That always confounded me; even I could
see that "a venti-tre ora" is not 7:00. On the other hand, 2300
= 11 pm seemed like a mighty late showtime for the villagers.
And one or two of my libretti agreed with my calculations and
gave it as 11:00. In pulling down about 50 of my opera reference
books with main sections on Pagliacci, I finally stumbled across
one that solved the mystery (for me, at least). It says in some
parts of Italy, they count the hours from 8 pm, meaning *our* 8
pm which is their 0 o'clock, I guess. So their 1 ora is 9:00,
and so on to 23 ora, which is 7 pm. Weird! But neat.
Wow, I'll have to ask Alessio if he knows anything about this
method of telling time.
>Ok, so I couldn't get the balloon up to the balcony. I'm a
loser. Stop rubbing it in.
Who, me?
THEE: Re: soundboard subscription
Thanks for the notice, Donald, much appreciated. Take care,
THEE: Serial numbers ending in SK1 are OK
Wait a minute! You goofed on the UCSB number for the tune you
wanted me to download for you? Too late: It's already enshrined
on "Digital Don VI." Fortunately, it's awesome! To these
untrained ears, Maria Galvany's "Il flauto magico" is all the
opera anyone needs!
I had the weirdest dream the other night. You sent me a CD
which consisted of a recording of you describing your problems
with your CD recorder. (Don't let this give you any ideas.) You
got mad at me because I just threw it in my regular backlog pile
and therefore didn't notice that you'd recorded it using your
Boris Karloff impersonation voice.
Weird!
Here's Andre Gardner's press statement on the mono crisis!
Last Thursday, 12 days before its official release, I received a
copy of the Capitol Albums Volume 2 boxed set, to use in the
production of my show "Breakfast With The Beatles." Needless to
say I was thrilled, and immediately began listening to the set.
When I put on the mono mixes of RUBBER SOUL, in particular
"Norwegian Wood", I noticed the mono mix wasn't like the ORIGINAL
mono mix. There was a very distinct cough after one of the lines
of the song that was always on the US mono mix, and on the set I
had just received, it wasn't there. I then put on the mono
version of "I'm Looking Through You", and noticed a 'false start'
at the beginning of the song, which should only be heard on the
US stereo mix of the song. It was then I realized that the mono
mixes on RUBBER SOUL were NOT the original mono mixes, but a
stereo "fold down" into mono, whereby the stereo mix is combined
to create a mono mix. I was stunned. I then put on the BEATLES
VI CD and listened to the mono mix, only to realize THEY were not
the original mono mixes either...they, too, were the stereo to
mono fold-downs. Since the EARLY BEATLES and HELP! US albums
were ORIGINALLY stereo to mono fold-down mixes, I knew the ones I
heard on those CDs were correct. But the BEATLES VI and RUBBER
SOUL mixes were definitely the wrong ones. I then called Chris
Carter, a noted Los Angeles DJ and also a host of an excellent
Beatles show, to frantically tell him the news, thinking he would
also have received a copy of the set. He had not, and he put me
in touch with several people at Capitol Records, as well as Bruce
Spizer, noted Beatles historian and expert, who in fact, wrote
the liner notes for the Volume 2 boxed set. Mr. Spizer had just
arrived in New York for the Festival For Beatles Fans that
weekend, and had not heard the finished version of the set. When
I explained to Mr. Spizer what had happened, he, too, was very
surprised, and after hearing the set himself, realized that
indeed a mistake had been made. After many phone calls to Mr.
Spizer and Capitol Records and myself, the label then determined
that an error at the mastering lab had been made, and new masters
were immediately sent to the pressing plant. While I am not
exactly thrilled to be the first person to have discovered this
mistake, I am grateful that the error was caught early enough
(albeit at the eleventh hour) for correction discs to be
manufacured in time for the April 11th release.
Andre Gardner
THEE: Re: The Former Cathy Samakouris
I figured it had to have been either Miss Olsen or Miss Botton
(2nd grade) cause I think I rubbed each of them wrong. I just
wish I could remember.
Big and tall, huh? I got really excited when I finally reached 5
foot in 8th grade. Didn't grow much after that so now I'm a
whopping 5'2". My daughters are almost a head taller than me!
ME: to: Laurence Juber guestbook
Have you ever heard "Belshazzar's Feast" by William Walton?
Listen about 3:50 in, after the line "Sing us one of the songs of
Zion." It's cool. A recording of "Belshazzar's Feast" won a
Grammy the same year (1973) as George Martin's arrangement for
"Live and Let Die" - a weird coincidence? Thought you might get
a kick out of this since you play the song. Thanks for
listening!
ME: Is it ok to upgrade my original responses to "Meet Your
Neighbor"? I presume nothing's been etched in stone yet.
If it's not too much to ask, I was wondering how I was chosen. I
figured that a slightly offbeat letter I sent recently to the
Delaware State News triggered it, but it doesn't look like that
letter was used. Not a big deal, but I'd like to think there was
*some* sort of selection criterion. That would help to ease my
mind against imagined accusations of "Showboat!"
THEE: I know what you mean about getting away from guitar. It is
a major life issue for me: I want to get back to it in a
disciplined way but my lifestyle (as a bureaucrat &
Internet/computer junky off hours) gets in the way. If I could
find a solution to the problem of musicians losing their
motivation I think I'd be rich. But, I think it is good for the
soul so I don't sell my instruments (though I contemplate selling
my baroque guitar, bodhrans, & cittern, not the Roberts
classical).
THEE: The Little Red Hen is a single mom . . . makes pizza . . .
and leaves her great grandson and heirloom cookbook
>Got few books from a company called Math League that look
I'm sure that you jazzed up the Kumon materials. That was
obvious from what you were doing with the folk/fairy tales alone.
With math, you'd really be in your element.
>Chicken Little was great story-telling.
Always one of my favorites. I probably couldn't count, even
today, the number of times that story was read to me when I was
too young to read myself. Probably as many times as "This Is the
House That Jack Built" and "The Little Red Hen." Great version
of the latter, too. Instead of words, it used small pictures
here and there scattered through the text where some of the words
appear in most versions: little red hen, cat, goose, rat, wheat,
bread. From the time I was maybe two, that gave me the feeling
that I was doing part of the reading as I said the word for the
pictures.
>But the main thing I remember is, with a few minutes of
searching, I never found a web page that spelled out, or even
took a stab at, the origin of pig latin. Was it around in the
late 1800s even? As always, maybe one more click would have done
it.
Don't know when pig latin (or Pig Latin) originated, but it
must have been before 1912 because reporters had fun with the
coined "dog latin" when the dog song came out in Latin
translation attributed to the satirist Juvenal.
THEE: RE: Meet Your Neighbor
Mr. Sauter,
Basically, the only requirement is that you live Downstate and
are willing to participate.
THEE: Subject: Spontini
i found in your opera recording list: :Fernand Cortes, of
G.Spontini: (EJD EMp69 ..)
i was wondering if you have also an english synopsis..and if it
is possible to get it somwhere
greetings from Italy
ME: I wish I could be more helpful, but the most complete
synopsis I have in my opera reference library is from the
Dictionary of Opera and Operetta by James Anderson.
Fernand Cortez or La 'Conquete de Mexique
(The Conquest of Mexico)
Opera in three acts by Spontini. 1st
perf. Paris, 28 Nov 1809; libr. by
Victor Joseph Etienne de Jouy and
Joseph Alphonse Esmenard, after Alexis
Piron's play. Revised version, 1st perf.
Paris, 28 May 1817. Principal roles:
Cortez (ten), Amazily (sop); Montezuma
(bass), Telasco (bar), Alvaro (ten). One
of Spontini's finest and most
spectacUlar operas (the original version
included a cavalry charge), it was
enormously successful at its appearance
and is still occasionally performed.
Plot: Mexico. The conquistador
Cortez loves Amazily, daughter of the
AZtec King Montezuma, and hopes by
their marriage to bring about peace.
After putting doWn a mutiny by his
troops, he burns his boats and with the
help of Amazily (now a Christian) he
rescues his brother Alvaro from being
sacrificed to the Aztec gods.
Montezuma finally agrees to his
marriage with Amazily.
A Guide to Opera Recordings (called "EM" in my opera index), by
Ethan Mordden mentions a recording of the opera. I presume they
would include a plot summary, if not the whole libretto. Here's
what EM says about three Spontini operas.
Spontini's later works [after La Vestale] are more enjoyable but
less admirable, so long out of fashion that all the sets are
pirates. As with Cherubini, MRF [a recording label] has extended
itself, to Fernand Cortez, Olimpie, and Agnes von Hohenstaufen.
Cortez, with its piquant Aztec pastiche, points up what was to
become a favorite grand-opera plot line: Romeo and Juliet against
a background of political upheaval (like Guillaume Tell's
Mathilde and Arnold, she of the Austrian tyrants and he of the
native Swiss freedom fighters). MRF's 1974 RAI Cortez under Lovro
von Matacic, in Italian, is decent, though sabotaged by the shaky
Angeles Gulin. MRF's RAI Olimpie, suddenly, is in French, though
filtered through the international slant of Yasuko Hayashi,
Alexandrina Miltscheva, Werner Hollweg, Alexander Malta, and
Alexander Zagrabelni under Gianandrea Gavazzeni. It's a poised
but uncompelling performance, lacking the oomph of the 1966 Scala
revival with Pilar Lorengar, Fiorenza Cossotto, Franco
Tagliavini, and Giangiacomo Guelfi (Melodram). Again, the love
plot is set in a political context, in this case the squabbles of
the generation that succeeded Alexander the Great in Macedonia.
Agnes von Hohenstaufen is most interesting historically, as it
marked the climax of Spontini's reign at Berlin's Royal Opera.
There he attempted to popularize the French style, meanwhile
demonstrating grand opera's paradoxical relationship with the
European ancien regime: cultural-capital opera, in Paris and
Berlin, was subject to royal authority, yet the operas' plots
hammered away on the theme of democratic idealism. (The paradox
becomes itself paradoxical when L'Africaine features a hero who
defies Church and state-to further colonialist expansion.) As it
was, Berlin's nobility and the opportunistic bourgeoisie
supported Spontini, while the general public preferred the less
pretentious subjects of Weber. MRF's Agnes (Caballe, Stella,
Prevedi, Guelfi, Bruscantini; Muti; RAI, 1970) presents a good
account of what may be Spontini's greatest opera. It is certainly
his grandest, with much ceremony, huge act finales, and a cast so
big it has three characters named Heinrich and two named Philip
(one of the latter, forgivably, is mentioned but never appears).
MRF knocks the whole thing down to three discs. The complete work
is so long that the first act was presented by itself when Agnes
was premiered in 1827.
Hope that helps a little bit!
THEE: Subject: wine/water
Thank you, Mr. Sauter, for providing such an exhaustive and well-
written explanation of the wine/water problem. It proved most
helpful in supporting my assertion that I was, in fact, correct.
ME: Thanks for visiting. Nice to know that the page made sense
and was helpful to someone!
ME: There's a neat picture here. I thought it was really odd
that after the C-5 crashed there was not a single, related story
with the term "dickinson". We're talking a miss by only a few
football fields.
>Subject: What does an Easterner know about jackalopes?
I, for one, used to know *everything*. Now you mean to tell me
they're imaginary??? Dang.
>>Enjoyed "Ye Legende of Sir Ironcladde" muchlie;
Oops, make that Sir Yroncladde. I *used* to know how to spell...
At the auction on Tuesday I picked up a set of books called "The
Library of Wit and Humor". The date is 1917. I got volumes
1-9 and I'm guessing there was at least a volume 10. The first
5 is "American," and 6-9 is "British", and I'm guessing the set
was balanced. A web and ebay search didn't turn up much on this
set. There are other books and sets with the same title, in
particular, one by Mark Twain, and one not by Mark Twain, but
using his name and thereby provoking a lawsuit. Cost me $2, and
I figured it would be fun to compare with the "Wit and Humor of
America" set I got recently. They're all indexed on my computer
now. Found a funny writer named John Kendrick Bangs; ever heard
of him or his "genial idiot"? He also pops up in my collection
writing children's poetry.
At my sister's house on Easter I had the chance to fire up
the 1915 Baltimore directory with also my father present. My
sister lives out in the "country" and it was entertaining to hear
my father say, "They lived just up the road there," etc. If you
ever revisit the page (not worth it, realy), my grandfather is H.
Benton Sauter. I was sort of surprised to see him up and running
as a farmer in 1915, considering my father was only born in 1927.
My father clarified it for me, yes, his parents had children
late. My grandfather was born in 1883. My father was the 2nd
youngest of 7. A story I sort of knew, but got refreshed on,
involved Oliver Sauter and his wife Meta. Oliver was my
grandfather's brother, and Meta was my grandmother Ella's sister
- so my father had a set of "double cousins".
We also all enjoyed the Jacquie Lawson Easter card - thanks.
>That was always one of my favorites as a kid, but I don't recall
the corn although it may have been there. Is it not in the other
books?
Good question. I just go to my KIDX program, type in "jack
built", and out pops:
Search string = jack built 04-23-2006
BOOK: Story and Verse for Children
MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES
69. This is the house that Jack built
BOOK: Best in Children's Books 1958.8
The House That Jack Built
BOOK: Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes & Fairy Tales (British 1895)
The House that Jack built 173
BOOK: The Real Mother Goose (American 1916)
This is the house that Jack built 68
BOOK: Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (Castle Book)
155 This is the house that Jack built
Out of those 5, only the Castle Book edition omits the "corn"
verse. That one is published in London, but I found on the last
page that it was "Printed in Romania." Seems a little odd to me.
Wish I knew the year.
I've got half a mind to try the Humpty-Dumpy origami. I helped
Mizan make a neat folding puzzle called The Sheep and Goats
puzzle the other day. Unfortunately, the "playswithmusic"
Humpty-Dumpty page wouldn't come up.
Thanks for the updates on The Little Red Hen. As for me, I'm
afraid it's too late - gimme *musty*!
Dover reelected the guy who leveled the Hanson House, thanks to
the Dover Post and Delaware State News, neither of which printed
my devastating letter.
Thought you might get a kick out of one sort of "math" problem
that pops up in the material I plan to use. The company is
called the Math League. One of their neat little quirks is to
lump our calendar system in with math. So you get problems like
this one aimed at 8th grade:
My cousin Vinnie testified he was born on a Tuesday in March
of a leap year. Long ago, Vinnie told me that his birthday had
fallen on a Wednesday exactly twice in his life. What was the
youngest age (in years) Vinnie could have been when he told me this?
a) 6 b) 7 c) 8 d) 9
Keep in mind you have 30 minutes (but 39 other problems to
complete in those 30 minutes.) There's a funny picture of our
cousin Vinnie looking thoroughly gangsterish with his hand on
Bible in a court of law.
ME: Glad to hear you enjoy the Patowmack guitar trio album enough
for repeated listens. That's definitely the highest kind of
praise, and certainly not what I expect when I give such things
out. I view it as sort of a greeting card - one spin and toss it
out is ok with me. I know most people are "too busy" for
anything extra in their lives nowadays, at least they believe
they are, and since we're positively drowning in music performed
perfectly by world-class freaks it takes an out-of-the-ordinary
constitution to appreciate amateur music-making.
I may have mentioned I caught the opera bug maybe 8 years ago or
so, and that accounts for most of what I listen to. It takes
"work" to tackle a new opera, but that's actually a lot of fun
for me. Something about the more you put into something, the
more you get out of it. Currently working over Mozart's opera
seria Idomeneo. One before that was Verdi's Macbeth. So besides
great music and great (ok, sometimes wacky) stories, opera brings
you to all sorts of historical and legendary and mythological
characters. The big problem is whether to stick with an opera
that's knocking me out, or move on to a fresh one. So many
operas - so few years. Well, if that's my most stressful
decision, it's not such a bad life, I guess.
I also have a bit of a thing for "Americana", and I've acquired
some neat books recently. At Spence's auction in Dover, I was
outbid on a box of books that had a 10-volume set at the bottom
from 1907 called "The Wit and Humor of America", and the winner
didn't want to sell it. I figured he was probably after all the
valuable, old Bobbsey Twins books in the box. So I checked ebay
and they had a set for about what I was willing to pay, and I got
that. Then the next week at Spence's I spied an old, 1917 set
called "The Library of Wit and Humor". The first 5 volumes are
American and the last 4 British. (I suspect it's missing a
volume.) I've already found many neat stories and poems in both
sets.
THEE: Here's one in return to help thee with thy procrastination.
It's all about Arkansan high culture a half-century before they
got into dawgnapping. It's by Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and I read it
by accident when I was reading all my John Kendrick Bangs
stories. Oof. No facility for numbers and no facility for words
- is there any hope for me, doc?
http://docsouth.unc.edu/thorpe/thorpe.html#thorpe145
THEE:
>>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hardtime.htm
>hee hee hee hee hee! Can't stop chuckling! Never knew carpet
stories could be so funny!
One of my favorite chapters in all of literature. When Dickens
is at his best, he's close to unbeatable.
>A bit of a stretch, but here's one in return to help thee with
thy procrastination. It's all about Arkansan high culture a
half-century before they got into dawgnapping. It's by Thomas
Bangs Thorpe,
http://docsouth.unc.edu/thorpe/thorpe.html#thorpe145
My washing machine lets out some memorable tones now and then,
too. Mo Mercer had better stick to those woodchucks when he goes
to Little Rock. Funny story . . . and one of my favorite
websites.
Thanks for the laugh. I'll think of pianos every time I see a
woodchuck . . . or pass through Little Rock.
ME: ye olde club house
At the neighborhood watch meeting, the subject of what to do with
the club house came up and I noted that absolutely no one had any
ideas of what to do with it. I'd like to think that that works
in favor of my proposal of renting it for a few hours a day, 5
days a week, for $200 a month, say. If no one has any idea of
what we can do with it, they should be happy to make money off of
it. And just to reiterate, if uses for the club house do come
along, it would be available until about 3:30 pm and after about
6:30 pm.
It's like free money for Persimmon Park Place. You seem to have
no objections to the idea; any chance you could nudge the council
in that direction?
P.S. I still think a few able-bodied PPP men could slap some
varnish on the club house, or at least most of it.
P.P.S There are TOO MANY SIGNS in Persimmon Park Place! Who
needs them! Let's keep Persimmon Park Place beautiful!
Here's the "rest of the story" regarding Jack and Jill:
1. Jack and Jill went up the hill.
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown.
And Jill came tumbling after.
2. Then up Jack got, and home did trot.
As fast as he could caper.
To old Dame Frown, who patched his crown,
With vinegar and brown paper.
3. When Jill came in, how she did grin,
To see Jack's paper plaster.
Her Mother, vexed, did whip her next,
For laughing at Jack's disaster.
I found that on the web. I didn't find any versions on the web
exactly like the ones in my library. Here are some of the
endings from my Mother Goose books.
2. But up they got
And home did trot
As fast as they could caper.
And Jill had a job
to plaster Jack's nob
With vinegar and brown paper.
2. Then up Jack got
And off did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
To old Dame Dob,
Who patched his nob,
With vinegar and brown paper.
2. Up Jack got,
And home did trot,
As fast as he could caper;
Dame Jill had the job
to plaster his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.
3. Jill came in and she did grin
To see his paper plaister,
Mother v'd did whip her next,
For causing Jack's disaster.
So now you know!
Don
THEE: Alrite mate,
Have just read your piece on fixing scratched Records and found
it very interesting. (just to make sure this method can be used
to fix normal vinyl records cant it?) I have recently
scratched one of my very rare vinyl's and have not been able to
replace it so when i found your method i was very pleased... (as
you say it is the only information available on the web on this
topic) I am going to give it a try on some old worthless stuff
to make sure i can do it before i try it properly.
Is it a technique that needs to be mastered or can anyone do it??
Also if i failed and was unable to fix it, if i was to send the
vinyl to you would you think about repairing it for a fee, i
would pay all postage there and back and would make it very much
worth your while.
If so please let me no it would be much appreciated!!
ME: You have the idea - try it out on a worthless old record. I
promise you - anyone can do it. You'll realize you didn't even
need the practice run. Of course, if the vinyl is gouged
*really* bad, nothing might work. There's a few reasons against
mailing it to me to do, but the main one is, anybody can do it as
well as me. Good luck!
THEE: Re: Spontini
Thanks for your help, In May i will see the new F.Cortez
production in Erfurt theatre in Germany.i let u know if its worth
to go
ME: TO SONY
How do I make recordings WITHOUT cd text? Besides being
indescribably annoying, it can be confusing and downright WRONG.
If you delete a track then the track no. in the track NAME
disagrees with the ACTUAL track no. GRRRR....
Please can I communicate with someone who knows this machine
thoroughly?
ME: Realized when I got home I had left my stupid pillow in the
vending room at the surgery center, grrr.... Those were the
hardest chairs I ever sat on!
ME: I have a parent who wants the completed worksheets back. He
won't take no for an answer. He says, "They give them back in
Chicage; they give them back in Boston; they give them back in
Wilmington; there's a girl in Dover who has a complete set."
Giving them back is a large, extra burden on me. It doesn't fit
in with the system I've developed. I've always viewed the
worksheets as the consumables they were designed to be. When I'm
finished with a student's assignment, the worksheets are
something like a pile of shrapnel. I never got any impression
during training that worksheets should be returned. I would
think that Kumon would not want people collecting a complete set
of worksheets. Charlie has mentioned that the branch office was
shocked to find he returns worksheets.
In spite of all these reasons in support of not returning
worksheets, when I brought it up during FUT, the answer was a
very middle-of-the-road, "It's up to you. Some instructors do,
some don't." What I was hoping to hear was that Kumon officially
disapproves of the practice. Can I get any support on from on
high, or am I on my own in confrontations with immovable, know-
it-all parents?
One thought: If Kumon is so unconcerned about this, can I offer
to sell parents the bound worksheet booklets from KDC?
THEE: Subject: RE: completed worksheets
I do apologize for not replying sooner.
In answering your question, it is really up to the Instructor if
they want to return the worksheet or not. We do not discourage
Instructors from giving back the worksheets. Most of the Kumon
Instructors prefer to give back the worksheets so that the
students and parents can see their progress. There are far more
benefits in returning the worksheets then keeping it. When
returning the worksheets, the students and parents will see where
their hard labor is going to and see their progress. They will
understand why they are repeating and they will be more involved
in the lesson planning. It is also an excellent way to
communicate to the Kumon family.
In Japan, most Instructors give back the worksheets so that the
students and parents can see their progress and effort. It is
motivating for students to see they finally got 100% correct or
reached their time goal.
We can support you in your right to set class policy of not
returning worksheets, but for good customer service please
consider giving back the worksheets. If you choose not return
the worksheets, be sure to add this in your center policy letter.
If a parent specifically requests the worksheets, the worksheets
should be definitely returned. It is the right of the parent and
student.
Finally, we cannot sell bounded worksheet booklets to parents.
That is a violation of the franchise agreement. The Kumon
organization provides a service and we do not sell worksheets.
Section 8.3 states
Services, Programs and Products Developed by Franchisee. You may
not sell or otherwise distribute the Additional Materials to
other Kumon franchises or to any other person or entity.
I hope this answers your question. If you have any other
questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.
Emily Kim
ME: will rice etc
I know I'm way, way behind. One of my excuses is my memorial
page to Mom, which I forced myself to finally wrap up before
Mother's Day.
http://www.oocities.org/donaldsauter/mom.htm
Of course you're not obligated to read every word, but figure
you're probably the only invitee I don't feel any need to
apologize to regarding the length.
Happy Mother's Day! (You're allowed to say that to somebody
else's mother, aren't you?)
ME: Hope you don't mind me "saving postage" with one mailing.
Here's a memorial page I finally pulled together for Mom. I used
Mother's Day as the incentive for finally wrapping it up. It's
way too long for anyone to read all the way through, but I
*think* there are some funny bits in there which I hope you can
find. For instance, there's the time Beetle locked himself in
the truck, and more!
THEE: The Genealogy of a President
Dear Editor,
In his Anglophobic vent ("Postmarks," Nov. 29), Todd Alan Smith
refers to the crowning of George Sr. and his royal sons. Smith
may be interested to know that George Walker Bush does indeed
directly descend from Robert II of Scotland in the 21st
generation, Edward I of England in the 25th generation in one
line and the 28th in another, William I of the 29th generation
(Gary B. Roberts, The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants, pp. 92,
211, 234, 267, 333, and 362 for the ancestries and sources). In
noting this, I in no way endorse any acts of President Bush. It
is embarrassment enough that he and I are 23rd cousins three
times removed.
Sincerely,
David L. Kent December 6, 2002: austin chronicle
THEE: New football/baseball rules
I came across your website while searching for the definition
of infield fly rule (which you not only educated me on, but also
taught me why it should not be in place.) I found your new
layouts regarding softball to be fantastic. As a matter of fact,
I am having a BBQ soon and I think I may implement them (living
in Toronto, it's difficult to find many people who want to play
softball at a BBQ, let alone do anything but drink (those
hosers!), so I may have to adjust to playing with only a six or
so people).
After learning about why I was playing both base and soft ball
incorrectly all my life, I browsed around your website and came
across some football ideas you had regarding kicking. Seeing that
you only had negative feedback (and enough of a sense of humour
to post even the most poorly written feedback), I thought I'd be
the (evidently) first person to tell you I also can't stand when
teams punt on the fourth down (it's the third down here in
Canada, but it's the same thing.) It's just not exciting.
(Practical? Yes. But I didn't tune into the "Practical Sports
Network," did I? No, I didn't.)
After reading that, I found myself browsing around for quite
some time and even wrote down your recipe for gourmet cereal. The
point of this last (and dare I say, most exciting (not really))
paragraph, is basically just to tell you you're done a good job
on that Internet, there. Yep, to find a personal website that
isn't just a teenager complaining about driving lessons is rare,
and you've even made your stories interesting, to boot!
I feel I must remind you at this point that you shouldn't think
anything negative of me. I'm actually a very interesting person
with tons (millions) of friends and I usually don't have time to
read a stranger's personal website for hours. I mean it. I'm a
real laugh riot. A hoot, my friends say. Why I'm wasting my time
with this email, I'll never know. So I'm going to go now. To a
real big party with hundreds of people who know both my first AND
last name! That'll show you.
ME: Hey, your email was just in the nick of time. I'd taken so
much abuse for that no-kicking proposal that I was about to
remove it from the page, figuring that my latest idea of best-
out-of-five quarters would liven up football enough, and not make
anybody mad except for people who resent it when they didn't
think of something themselves.
P.S. You don't have to lord your popularity over me - I'm a
hermit by *choice*!
THEE: Re: will rice etc
If I didn't read every word, I was darn close! Wonderful
memorial page, Donald. I feel as if I knew your mom. Getting to
know her, even if too late, also makes be see why you are the
kind of person you are.
A few quick observations in random order.
Now I know why you were reading that biography of MMO'H. Must
admit I was curious.
She made Barbie clothes! I'm impressed. Those shiny dresses
were a breeze compared to that. I tried Barbie clothes only
once. Trying to attach a sleeve that is maybe an inch around
that top at most to a bodice was more than I could deal with.
Maybe she made hers by hand. A person would need a miniature
sewing machine. Mine wouldn't do it.
Mizan's card choked me up.
The Will Rice article cracked me up. What a coincidence. In
case you don't know how Will Rice College fits into Rice
University, Rice undergrads are assigned to a college--pretty
much at random, the best I know. Their college is their home
(dorm) and family. Each college has a live-in professor and
family. Will Rice, as you've probably guessed by now, is one of
the colleges. William Marsh Rice was the millionaire behind the
university.
The notes from Betty Ford and, especially, Lee Harvey Oswald's
mother really surprised me. I can only imagine what she must
have said to Marguerite Oswald. What a dramatic ending for your
webpage (well, if I ignore the final appendix which follows)
Everyone should have a Jewish beagle--a true multicultural houn'
dawg.
Wish your mom had been here to help pull weeds today.
Thanks for sharing your mom's memorial page. Wonderful Mother's
Day gift to your mom.
P.S. When I receive the English translation of Tha Doc Sonc War,
I'll read your comments carefully. They're always helpful. I
did read one: the question about recorded versions of the dog
song by Buffy Sainte Marie, Ian Whitcomb, the St. Louis
Ragtimers, and Bob Darch. Yup. All of 'em.
Btw, do you recognize Ian Whitcomb's name--one of those British
one-hit wonder rock stars? Check your archive to see if I've
described him. Made him a character in a dramatic skit I wrote
back in 1999 but don't know if I can find that now. It existed
only in e-mail--a couple of computers ago--but I know I have a
hard copy somewhere.
ME:
>What did you mean about not feeling any need to apologize about
the length? Do I sense an unspoken "That crazy person who's
writing an unending book about a ??? couldn't possibly mind
this"?
No no no. Just that you have a blazing brain; you (apparently)
enjoy reading; you take an interest in what interests friends
(*very* admiral trait); and are on the lookout for what's neat
about something, as opposed to what's stupid about something.
You don't need to be told that of the other invitees who can
actually muster the energy to click on the link, *none* of their
responses will be *anything* like yours.
>Now I know why you were reading that biography of MMO'H. Must
admit I was curious.
I figured you'd be at least mildly curious. Of course, I didn't
offer an explanation which would have ruined the surprise,
assuming I ever managed to pull together a page for Mom.
>Btw, do you recognize Ian Whitcomb's name--one of those British
one-hit wonder rock stars?
In fact I was the first one to drop Ian's name. I couldn't have
imagined in a million years you would have known it, much less
him. If your reputation of being impossible to be outdone wasn't
already cemented, that did it.
From old email:
>>I was taking another stab at "After The Ball; pop music from rag
to rock" by Ian Whitcomb. I've started it several times before
and never finished, although I'm not particularly interested in
finishing it. At the beginning of the "Ragtime" chapter is a
song lyric:
Got more troubles than I can stand
Ever since ragtime has struck the land ...
I'm certainly leading a ragtime life!
>Remind me to tell you about Ian Whitcomb. (If I can find it,
I'll even send you a skit--if it can be glorified with that name-
-that I once whipped out in which Ian and wife Regina play a
small role.) Don't get too anxious; I haven't seen it in several
years.
If your reputation of being impossible to be outdone wasn't
already cemented, that did it. But I see I'm repeating myself.
This is what I wrote back then:
>>Again, you amaze me. I mean, what ~~ doesn't know would hardly
fill a thimble, but I would have guessed Ian Whitcomb would have
been in there. I don't think of you as a big, '60s pop music
fan, and Ian only had one hit. But, of course, your connection
is personal. Lemme ask this, if you relegated Ian Whitcomb to a
bit part in your play, who did you give the lead roles to? Your
buddy Ralph Richardson? Sir John Gielgud? Katharine Hepburn?
Just out of curiosity, can you say you remember his hit from when
it was current? Lemme guess, you went around singing it
backwards in French.
>Slow getting this book in the mail, but you'll know what to do
with it.
Sure, read it, highlight it, scribble notes in the margin, slice
out the table of contents, send it to Kabul... Just joking.
Thanks a lot. That was very nice. It was a good book; the sort
of thing that supports the contention that if you want to learn
about something, go to the children's books section. I'd be
doing good if I remembered a quarter of what I read.
I saw Krystal and Mizan a couple of weekends ago at the annual
Old Dover Days festivities. We watched a really funny puppeteer,
for example. Mizan made a feathered mask, had a balloon hat
made, got to keep the inflatable guitar she "played" for the
puppeteer, and accumulated little frisbees and who knows what all
- made out like a bandit. We also helped paint a mural for an
artist. Funny as it may sound, a highlight of the festival for
me was watching a spinner spin. Guess I've never seen it before.
Made me feel like I was in a Grimms fairy tale.
I remember having to hurry from the auction. Just in the nick of
time they got to the item I wanted - after I snuck it from the
back end of the table to the front. It was a facsimile reprint
of Mark Twain's "Library of Humor", which I had just heard about
while trying to track down something on my "Library of Wit and
Humor" set. I should read the Twain collection first since it
was earlier (1888). It has about 32 stories which appear again
in my two later sets. It set me back $2.
A day or so after you sent me the funny Dickens chapter on
filling little pitchers I came across a passage in a story in my
Wit and Humor of America set called Wanted-A Cook.
"You, Letitia," I retorted, "remind me of Mrs. Nickleby. You ramble
so."
Letitia looked offended. She always declared that Dickens "got on
her nerves." She was one of the new-fashioned readers who have
learned to despise Dickens. Personally, I regretted only his
nauseating sense of humor.
This particular story was pretty funny itself - but missing the
last page! My Volume I skips from 54 to 87, and the funny thing
is, it doesn't appear to be a missing signature. Notice that 34
pages isn't even a multiple of 4. Wonder what happened. And the
web let me down.
Funny thing happened at last Tuesday's auction. There were about
6 big boxes of books in a lot. I went through them all, book by
book, and found about 4 things of interest. I put those together
in a separate box and filled it up with things that I thought
would be great for the Kabul orphanage. This was probably about
an hour's worth of "work". Figuring that there's not much
interest in books, I felt no need to stick around and protect my
box. As the auctioneer got closer to it, there were, in fact
several people hanging around, trying to look cool. Well, my box
had been gutted - guess I made it look too good! I was feeling a
little sick and almost left, but then decided to stick around to
see how it played out. In particular, there was a woman who had
made herself at home there, beside my box, knitting away, and
even piling her knitting stuff on top of the stack of books she
pulled from my box. I eventually got it out of her that, yes,
that was her stack. There was another older man hanging around,
not letting on what he was interested in, if anything. Turns out
because he's an old pro at auctions, even has an account going.
They know how loose lips sink ships. Anyhow, I figured I would
at least run up the woman's bid, even though my original plan was
to get the whole box for $2 or $3. I ran it up to $10, and when
the auctioneer turned to me again, I said she could have it,
but... somebody else stepped in and took it into the 20s! And
when he gave up the older man I mentioned stepped in and took it
up to $37 whereupon the lady finally gave up, no doubt wondering
what hit her. I'm sure the auctioneer was just as baffled. I
suspect it was mostly all spite bidding, like mine was. When the
older man won his stack of plunder from my box, for another large
winning bid, and the dust settled, the woman asked if he would
part with a few of the books on the top of his stack for $11. He
immediately agreed, which a) supported my suspicion he didn't
need any of them *too* bad, and b) gave me the courage to jump in
with an offer. The woman didn't get the one real prize in the
whole caboodle - "Opera Cavalcade - the Story of the
Metropolitan" (1938). Besides being old and neat, I had noticed
a fantastic autograph in it - Lucrezia Bori's. So I offered the
man $4 for the opera book and he agreed - and right away the
woman let out a big groan, "Ohhh, I forgot about the opera book!"
She shouldn't have given me that satisfaction! What fun! And
then... when I got it home I found 3 more autographs, including
Kirsten Flagstad and Edward Johnson, the manager of the Met for
the 15 years before Rudolph Bing. Yee-ha!
THEE: Subject: Ed Sullivan
As the bass player in Spanky & Our Gang - a musical recording
group back in the '60s - I appeared on the Ed Sullivan show
several times. We got to know the camera men, the director, and
the like. They had some great stories about their boss. I will
relate a couple of them here.
Ed had a funny way of referring to things. He one time
introduced the Supremes as "three young Negro performing girls."
Until he mentioned their name I was expecting to see an acrobatic
troupe.
He one time misread his cue cards while doing a public service
announcement about tuberculosis by saying, ". . . so everybody
pitch in and try to help stamp out TV."
On one of his shows he said, "We are very fortunate to have with
us tonight members of the 343rd Paralytic Ward. Stand up boys
and take a bow."
I thought of this because Ed's comment about Segovia.
I enjoyed reading your Web site.
Kenny Hodges
ME: A minor coincidence hearing from you at this time. I grew up
on 60s' pop music, but have almost completely forsaken pop music
in recent years to free up quality opera-listening time. But a
few weeks ago at the auction here in Dover, Delaware, I put
together a box of records with mainly opera connections, but let
a few neat-looking pop albums stay, including Like To Get To Know
You. Had a good time with it! I suppose Lazy Day was my
favorite Spanky hit.
THEE:
>Funny as it may sound, a highlight of the festival for me was
watching a spinner spin. Guess I've never seen it before. Made
me feel like I was in a Grimms fairy tale.
I've never seen spinning either and would be interested. We have
a complete spinning wheel in our livingroom although I have no
idea how to use it.
>Just in the nick of time they got to the item I wanted - after I
snuck it from the back end of the table to the front. It was a
facsimile reprint of Mark Twain's "Library of Humor", which I had
just heard about while trying to track down something on my
"Library of Wit and Humor" set. I should read the Twain
collection first since it was earlier (1888).
You always find the best of bargains! Without my searching, did
I mention reading Twains "War Prayer" over the weekend. It
doesn't belong in a humor book, but, man, did it get to me. It's
one of the terrific supplemental items in the back of the new
text I've selected for our Reading II classes.
>This particular story was pretty funny itself - but missing the
last page! My Volume I skips from 54 to 87, and the funny thing
is, it doesn't appear to be a missing signature. Notice that 34
pages isn't even a multiple of 4. Wonder what happened. And the
web let me down.
Missing the last page? Egads, that's even worse than spending
days on a jigsaw puzzle to find that the last piece is missing.
ME: math rules
Here's an example of one of the many really neat Math League
problems. Be glad I don't unload them *all* on you.
Action Comic #1, which originally sold for 10 cents, now sells
for $18500. This comic has increased in value by what percent?
THEE: Re: math rules
18,500,000%
ME: Try again!
THEE: Re: math rules
18499900%
THEE: Kumon and success?
I am a mother of a boy aged 13, turning 14 in June. He refused to
learn: story behind this: we are from Africa, well he is black
and I am white. This is in America enough to drive a child a
school nuts. He wanted to belong to the "typical" black kids. We
came four years back to the US. He first stayed in his grades
which were A und B to join the club of losers! Now he is fighting
from D to C and F. I changed his school to a private school. But
the boy was still delaying or not handing in homework etc. This
is now the reason that he is in danger of failing: meaning he has
to attend summer school for math and English. Do you advice me
to suggest to the school to send him to do Kumon over the summer?
Do you think he will, if he really works succeed? He is in Grade
8 now. Please try to answer this morning, because I am having a
meeting with the school today.
ME: My most honest answer is: I doubt that Kumon is an answer to
your son's problems. For one thing, Kumon is a "long-term"
program, at least if you want to see big, obvious results. (I
claim that Kumon is beneficial right from the start, but people
would not generally notice the strengthening of the basic
skills.) A student starts Kumon far below his current level, for
many good reasons. The downside is, a student who is in junior
high or above would typically take years to get up to his grade
level in Kumon, if ever. At the end of the summer, your son
would probably still be doing basic addition in Kumon.
Also, based on what I think you are telling me about your son, it
sounds like he would resist Kumon with all his might. It takes a
lot of commitment to give up that half hour or so per day to plow
through a lot of math worksheets.
But, on the other hand, Kumon may be just right for your son.
Sorry I can't make a guarantee.
THEE: Subject: Bill Harry
Dear Donald, I don't know whether I've contacted you before about
the Mersey Beat site. I have now got a second site
www.rockandpopshop.com
Best
Bill. Mersey Beat - Merseyside's Own Entertainment Paper The
Beatles, The Liverpool Sound, The Swinging Sixties... It's still
happening, man: http://www.mersey-beat.com
Imagine, and it's true.
THEE: Subject: RE: Kumon and success?
Thank you so much for taking your time to answeer my e-mail.
Well, I am the one who is convinced that Kumon is the answer to
the problem. Of course this is not the truth. However he agreed
to take Kumon, which he 2 years back resisted like hell. so I
could not really force him.
So, my question back to you: If this boy is going to work through
all these worksheets, do you believe he will improve? This is
what counts and I believe that, if he works he will. There are no
magic behind this.
ME: That's right; there's no way someone can apply themselves to
the worksheets and *not* improve.
ME: Curious about how you interpret "some" in this problem from
an old textbook: "How many positive even integers can be formed
from some or all of the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 if no number is to
have repeated digits?" Does "some" imply two or more?
Since you got out of me my view of modern medicine, I'm curious
if you can think of one human ailment for which our medical
industry has an actual "medical" cure, as opposed to mechanical
(slice and dice, cut and paste, hack and slash, blast to kingdom
come, etc.)
ME: old as my birth year
Thanks a million for the birthday loot! Now for Christmas I
want... Just joking. Yep, I've never stonewalled being born in
1953. If I ever got annoyed at the question, which I'm sure I
didn't, it must have been attached as a rider to some radio talk
show issue that is not my battle. I had always figured it was
common knowledge that we were all born in consecutive years, with
one gap between me and Steven, since that's the way our school
grades went, but now I realize I'm not 100% certain that follows
through to Susan. Yes, I found the letter from Cleo. It was a
case of "the purloined letter" - hiding right out in the open.
It was in the basket of Christmas cards and get well notes on the
coffee table in the living room. I had figured that the
Christmas card basket would be gone by Easter, especially after a
major straightening and cleaning by the Bossoms, but no. The
best way I can describe how I feel about Mom being gone is, every
time I think about it, it just hits me as being very, very
*wrong*.
ME: hello old friend (not in the literal sense)
I had been thinking to write lately, even before the mess with
Paul McCartney. I haven't clicked on a single news article so
far, but just the headlines makes one wonder if you called it
from the beginning. Funny thing was, just the day before I was
in a doctor's office. I always bring my own reading material and
never pick up a magazine. But I saw what looked like a familiar,
upside down face on some Modern Maturity magazine. I picked it
up and the cover article made it sound like everything was going
fine in Paul's marriage.
ME: to Kent County Planning Commission Chairman Albert Holmes.
Dear Mr. Holmes,
Just an idea, offered up in the spirit of "nothing ventured,
nothing gained": Might the people of Kent County be willing to
dig into their pockets to make the next wave of farmers in line
to become fabulously rich, fabulously rich *without* having to
plant *any* houses?
Developing over the earth has to stop somewhere, sometime; why
not Kent County, now?
Thanks for considering "radical" (in reality, common sense)
solutions.
P.S. Here are two letters I wrote to the Dover Post. The first
was printed, the second wasn't.
1. Dear Dover Post,
Being of sound mind and pretty good soul, I propose Garrison's
Lake Golf Course Scenario 5, if it's not too late. You will see
that my proposal is a complete inversion of the current, small-
minded visions. I propose that, instead of preserving a few-acre
golf course while paving over the rest of Kent County, those few
acres be allocated to dense, cramped, high-rise - the sky's the
limit! - condos for everyone desiring to live in Kent County who
is not willing to move into existing housing, and a moratorium
placed on any further development of Kent County.
But it is too late, of course.
Donald Sauter
2. Dear Dover Post,
You recently reported that the Levy Court decided 4-3 against
Allan Angel's proposed six-month moratorium on accepting major
subdivision applications while the county planning staff takes
stock of the situation. I don't know, but I suspect that the
Levy Court may have acted in opposition to public sentiment. I
suggest that in this day and age, with our quick, cheap, and easy
electronic communication, public servants never need to presume
whether or not they are acting in support of, or disregard for,
majority will. How long could it take to tally a few hundred, or
thousand, even, "yeas" and "nays" in email subject lines?
That piece reported Commissioner Donald A. Blakey saying that
"growth is positive for the county." In an opinion piece in the
same issue, Jim Flood Sr. wrote, "Much of this change [the rapid
growth in Kent County] will be good." This is always taken for
granted, but I've always wondered, when you have something good,
why not preserve it? Isn't MORE MORE MORE! BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER!
a surefire recipe for eventual disaster? For the sake of
argument, consider the extreme case - a complete and indefinite
moratorium on new construction in Kent County. Who would be
hurt? Probably not Realtors, since our property would become
extremely desirable and property values would skyrocket over
night. Some of the new construction business would shift over to
replacing, repairing, and modernizing old housing and commercial
buildings. We could pay off developers and builders through a
transition period until the workforce has adjusted to this new,
"steady state" Kent County. In any case, county boundaries are
just a few miles away in any direction for developers who can't
stop. All the while, outsiders would look at Kent County with
drop-jawed envy.
If what I've written is simplistic - and how can such a huge
issue boiled down to one paragragh not be? - it is no moreso than
"Growth is good." I have no crazy hope that such a moratorium
will come to pass, only a wish that everyone take a step back to
get a bigger picture.
Donald Sauter
THEE: Kumon and success?
I guess your suggestion is ok for someone who actually wants to
work. My son needs still structure and control. This might not
what he likes, but for now this is the only answer. He hope he
gets through and over this phase. We as parents can only "lead"
for these kids the way, but the actual work they need to do
themselves.
THEE: A Hard Day's Night Chord
I know you've probably heard just about everything about this
"mystical" chord. It's been a great debate for years. An
acquaintance of mine who met George Harrison, told me that George
claimed he couldn't remember exactly how he played it!
Several years ago, I came across a CD bootleg of the very first
takes of the song, complete with breakdowns...and just plain
studio chatter. At times you can hear each Beatle rehearsing
their piece of the "chord." Here's what you hear:
Paul is playing a D in octaves John is playing a G chord on an
acoustic guitar, probably his Gibson. 320033 George is playing
what amounts to a D7sus that's close to the F9 he uses at the end
of the song for that chimey ending. The only difference is in the
opening chord he leaves the 4th string open to match Paul's bass.
So...here's the simple chord that launched a classic song.
XX0213 Put all 3 together and voila!
ME: Thanks a lot for the clearest rundown I've ever heard. I
haven't heard the bootleg you describe. I've just played the
recording on cd an vinyl a few times and may be willing to
concede that most or all of that is in there. I know there are
people who will swear, for instance, that there is NO low G in
the chord on the recording. But I'm satisfied this is close
enough, if not exact. There must be concert footage showing them
striking the chord together, you'd think.
THEE: A Hard Day's Night Chord
Thanks for entertaining my AHDN guitar ramblings. One factor that
some guitarists may omit is that they don't have access to a
Ricky 360-12 that generates a lot of overtones. I've got one
modeled on my Line 6 Variax that reproduces the tone nicely.
Since I wrote my note to you, I have revisited the recordings.
The bootleg on the Yellow Dog Label is takes 6 & 7 recorded on
Thursday April 11, 1964. Take six breaks down when George
Harrison misses a chord change and John blurts out "I heard a
funny chord!" From the control room, George Martin responds "So
did I." That's the point where everyone starts rehearsing their
parts individually (as bands are wont to do) until John counts
them down for take 7. At one point, you can hear George all by
himself strike his part of the chord on the Ric. The triad that
rings is clearly G (on top) C and A. I also listened to the take
that's on Anthology 1 (with that gawd awful delay) and the final
released version. I agree with those who don't hear the low G
that's produced by the (incorrect in my opinion) barre chord
version of the "chord." The dominant bass note is Paul's D in
octaves. Although I believe John is playing a G chord on his
acoustic, it's recorded in a thin trebly manner where you don't
hear a pronounced low G. George is only striking his guitar from
strings 4 - 1. Now the wild card in all of this is the addition
of a piano overdub. It's obviously missing from the early takes I
have, but you sure can hear it contributing to the sustain of the
chord on the final version. I doubt I'll ever convice some of the
skeptics...but, hey it's fun to discuss.
Take care and rock on! Steve
Contact Donald Sauter: send an email; view guestbook; sign guestbook.
Back to
Donald Sauter's main page.
Back to the top of this page.
And if you liked this one, please visit my page of Scrabble for word lovers!