Back to index of "this and that in my life" pages by Donald Sauter.
Conversations with me, No. 60b
Email highlights, ca. March 2007
Dedicated to the proposition that every thought that's ever been
thunk may be of use or interest to someone . . .
THEE: subject Campion-R.Pick
Found your web site and I have aquestion for you. I have an old
arrangement by R. Pick of F. Campion's Three Preludes and Three Fugues.
Are they re-arrangements of one of the others in your library (Behrend
or others) and do have any idea which of the Campion numbers apply to
these pieces. I am trying to get the original tablature to check on the
REAL notes and counter-point.
ME: I haven't looked into Campion in a while, but I hope I can help. I
presume I have the same Richard Pick arrangements of 3 Preludes and 3
Fugues by Campion. I have them in a Mel Bay book called Favorite
Classic Guitar Solos (1979).
It's a little bit fuzzy to me at this point, but the FCn numbering
system you see on my Campion web page corresponds to the Minkoff
facsimile, which had some pages in different places from my copies made
from microfilm. So I hope you can get access to the Minkoff.
Pick's Prelude 1 in C is what I called FC115. It's not on a numbered
page of the manuscript. (The Bransle FC116 follows on the same page.)
It is in regular tuning.
Pick's Prelude 2 in Amin is what I called FC104. It's on page "77" of
the manuscript. It is in regular tuning.
Pick's Prelude 3 in F#min is what I called FC1. It's on the first page
of tablature in the manuscript. (It precedes page "6".) It is in A C#
F# B E tuning. Thus, you can find Campion's exact string/fret
specifications from my web page.
Pick's Fugue 1 in Amin is what I call FC105. It is on page 78 of the
manuscript. The page isn't numbered, but it's between 77 and 79. It is
in regular tuning.
Pick's Fugue 2 in D is what I call FC119. There are no page numbers in
this section, so you have to rely on order. It follows a 5-page Fugue
allegro. It is in regular tuning. Pick's transcription (and also Bruno
Henze's) starts in Campion's 11th measure.
Pick's Fugue 3 in G is what I call FC123. Again, there are no page
numbers, but this would be the next to the last piece in the manuscript.
Actually, now I'm wondering if the "fugue" on the last page is a
separate piece, or a continuation of FC123, or just noodling. Pick's
transcription stops at a "double bar" on the 4th staff from the bottom
on the next to last page of the manuscript, and I'm not sure what the
following music represents. It is in regular tuning.
Just looking at the first few measures of Prelude 1, here are some
observations. I use "p" to mean rhythm place in the measure.
m1-m2p1. tab shows only fretted notes. Tab shows strum. RP adds open G
for strum (of course.) m2p3. RP adds open G. m2p4 and p5. RP adds open
G. These are not strums, however. m3. Tab shows 4er 4er 4er 8th 8th
rhythm, with double-stops at each place except for the F at the end. RP
turned this into flowing 8ths. He also lowered the open G an octave on
the first beat. Campion's gtr had no string 6, of course.
It's been a while since I've run my tablature program - it would have
made a whole lot more sense to just crank out a line or two!
I seem to remember the tablature is somewhere available on microfilm.
Good luck!
THEE: I'm not holding any celebrations until we get an invitation to
John Lee Saylor!
ME: the queen was in the parlour
It's ok about missing the Lincoln symposium; I was thinking I might give
him a rest this year, anyhow. Can't blame it totally on a drop in
quality; if it were closer, I'd be there with bells on.
And I guess that's my biggest problem with Beatlefest, too. Man, what a
fuddy duddy I've become (or have always been.) Don't they know my ship
was supposed to have come in long ago, and all I'd have to do is stretch
out in a limo up to the 'fest? Funny thing is, I had put it on my
calendar for Feb 17 (also a Saturday), and sighed a small sigh of relief
when that day came and went without comment. So your email gave me a
little surprise.
About Arbutus: aren't you getting close to another Stone Ridge sale?
Isn't that more convenient and cheaper?
Now I wish I had ripped open your Papa Townsend record. I mean, what
are house sitters for? The next weekend I was telling my cousin about
it, but couldn't get real specific based on the brown cardboard wrapper.
My little friend Mizan's school had a spelling bee on Friday. We had
gone into intense training for the previous week, and she placed 2nd out
of 84. Took a dive on PRACTICALLY, and her remaining opponent won it
with PRECISE. She tried PRACICTALLY, which sounds pretty good to me for
a 3rd-grader, out of the blue.
Today it hit me how to hook my computer into my stereo system, just like
another component. I fired up a folder's worth of opera piano roll
midis.
I just put up a Mother Goose and the Beatles page. Somebody had to do
it. Let me know what I missed.
THEE: subject Digitizing help?
You've mentioned converting your records to digital format. Would you
be willing to digitize a few pieces for me so that I can add them to a
W.C. O'Hare CD? Of course, you will receive the finished product(s).
If so, here's my question. Can you work from both tape and record?
Although the quality isn't very good, could you digitize the two
overtures from that silent film collection--Andante Cantabile and Solemn
Scenes from Nature? I think you have both. An archivist in Shreveport
has contacted me asking for any public domain recordings I may have, and
he has said that he will digitize them for me. That takes care of the
oldest O'Hare originals. However, I also have several O'Hare
arrangements. Three are on two 78s: two Broadway show tunes on one
record and a foxtrot arrangement of Charley Straight's "Humpty Dumpty"
rag on a side of the other. Anyway, I could send the two 78s and the
tape to you if you're willing to help bring W.C. into the digital age.
If you can help with this project, in the end, we will have two O'Hare
CD's because the one I've already made a trial copy of doesn't have much
extra space--no more than enough for a couple more selections. It
includes the piano rolls and several other things.
ME: I'd be thrilled to help with the digital W.C. project, but here are
the problems.
First of all, tape. I already made a highlights cd of the tapes you
sent me. I don't remember sending you a copy, did I? I'd be glad to
send you a copy, but my disappointment is, it was made from a dub, not
the master. There's almost guaranteed a noticeable step down in quality
in dubbing a tape. You'd probably say that it doesn't matter for your
purposes, but it would kind of eat at me. On the other hand, if you
sent the master tape now, I would not be able to make a copy that would
make me happy. About 6 or 8 weeks ago, all four of my individual decks
that I trust to play home-recorded tapes brightly and clearly went
belly-up in a span of about four days. This leaves my two expensive,
super-duper JVC dual cassette decks, but I can not coax them to play
home-recorded tapes as bright and clear as the el-cheapo decks did.
This is a mystery of the universe, and exasperating. I do have one
working el-cheapo tape deck that plays bright and clear, but it adds a
quiet hum. Again, few people would notice or care, but I hate to be an
accessory to an unnecessary drop in recorded sound quality, especially
on a finished product. By the way, just after the first one or two
decks went up, I passed up bying a pair of tape decks at the auction,
figuring I still had two good ones. Grrr... Hey, after you heard that
Eubie Blake track on B~~'s cd, you were 'posed to fire off a request,
"Make me a cd of both tapes! Here's the masters!"
Now, 78s. Believe it or not, I'm not set up for playing 78s. I have a
new turntable that has a 78 speed, but I don't have a stylus and
cartridge for 78s. If I did, I would have to blaze new territory with
my wave editing software to figure out how to undo the RIAA equalization
that is built into LP amplification, but is completely inappropriate for
78s. (An LP cartridge puts out an extremely harsh, trebly signal, which
has to be adjusted before we listen to it. For 78s, what the needle
puts out is what we want.) Not so many months ago, I put out a stereo
system in the trash that Mom gave me that played 78s and had a built in
tape deck. I had used that for my few 78s, not realizing the phonograph
amplification was all wrong for 78s. The main reasons for throwing it
out was because the tape deck was chewing up tapes, and I figured
getting rid of it would force me to get proper equipment for 78s, which
hasn't happened yet.
By the way, what with all this audio technology gab, just today it
hit me how to hook my computer into my stereo system, just like another
component, so I can listen to those recent midis, for example, on a real
system, as opposed to earbuds or my laptop's dismal built-in speakers.
Also curious, do you have wav files of those piano roll midis? If so,
did you convert them somehow yourself? I could look into how it's done,
but nothing beats a few words from a pro.
THEE: subject Re: trio reckoning
I was thinking it's time to archive all my DAT tapes (after reading a
scary warning about possible low longevity), probably starting with the
compilation tapes and then, possibly, all the rest. Wondering if you
have a DVD drive? That'd be DVD data disks (wave files as data) not DVD
audio. DVD's hold so much more than CD ( 4.7G vs. 600MG, nearly 8CD's
for 1 DVD).
I'm sort of surprised so much of what you have is on cassette tape
(versus CD), even the most recent. Ah, well -- guess I didn't get my
computer workstation with digital-audio-in until 4 years ago.
Do you want to help transcribe the notes on the DAT tape? I can scan
them & send to you to turn into a .txt file. Anyway -- wanted to let
you know I hope to start on this. The part of just dumping to digital
should be mostly unattended with minimal editing. Do you have audio
editing software? Here's a free one I've heard mention of (but have not
used): http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
THEE: Re: she you i we did it
Congratulations to Mizan! Second place is really cool. I've never been
good at spelling on my feet like that. Frequently, I find myself
needing to write a word to know if I have the correct spelling. I hate
it when one of my students asks me how to spell something. There have
been times when I would spell something, ask the student to write down
what I spelled, and then look at what was written. Then I've had to
say, "No. Change such and such to this or that."
I'm delighted to hear that the DVD has been such a hit. I've watched
several movies repeatedly, but I doubt I've watched anything more than
10 times even over 40 years or so. One of the highest would be 1776.
Not sure why E~~'s e-mail would think you're sending spam, but it
might be because the e-mail had more than one address. Two addresses
wouldn't send up any red flags to me, but I've had a couple of my
student's e-mail programs block my e-mails as spam when I've used a
group mailing feature to send the same message to an entire Internet
class at once. As for the PeoplePC-Earthlink connection, I don't know.
Maybe PeoplePC uses a spam-blocker created by Earthlink.
THEE: subject Link to the OED Entry for pease pudding, n.
1725 M. DAVYS Familiar Lett. in Wks. II. 275 A red earthen Pan, half
full of Pease-pudding, which I guess'd to be the Remains of her Dinner.
1758 T. WARTON Idler 2 Dec. 273 Pease-pudding not boiled enough.
1841 J. T. J. HEWLETT Parish Clerk I. 165 The roads were better, and not
so much like peas-pudding.
1878 Amer. Home Cook Bk. 143 Pease pudding. One pint of peas and one
potato.
THEE: subject And this is it!
Quick observation: I'm bettin' this weird one was some sort of game
similar to singing and playing "London Bridge," in which the bridge
falls and traps someone. In this case, someone might have ended up being
the "little white one." Maybe it was a counting game in which kids were
counted off with each word, and the kid that was pointed at in the last
word was the "little white one." In that case, it would be much like
"eenie meenie minnie moe" used for choosing someone or something.
I think so; don't you?
THEE: subject Opera link
Know anything about this opera?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Photographer
THEE: subject Antarctican territory
I am writing to you to ask a question to do with your Antarctican
territory. I know you probably have much better more important things to
do than listen to my comments, but hear me out. I have been trying for
about 1 year now to create an independent country, in order to better
understand modern politics, and also as a form of protest against some
of the recent laws passed. I have constantly hit the problem that in
order to have a country, you must have sovereignty over some land. I
found that there was almost no unclaimed land left on earth, therefore
almost impossible to gain sovereignty. A government has laws that state
they may not give it away. I then found that a large section of
Antarctica is owned by an independent person,who is you. So, I wish to
ask: Is it at all possible you could grant me, Mac Jones, sovereignty
over only a 1cm2 area of your Antarctican land? This land will remain
under the goverment of Unarchy, till at least 2020.
ME: Thanks for writing; your request intriques me. I might very well be
inclined to give you a skinny pie slice. I'm curious what you have in
mind for it now, and what might happen in 2020. I'm really serious
about unarchy as a form of government, and I wouldn't want to have to go
to war with a neighbor in 2020 (subject to the wishes of the citizens,
of course.)
THEE: Re: tech talk
Whatever you've done with the silent film music will work. The
recordings weren't that good anyway since made with a $25 tape player
sitting on my lap in the auditorium. Even so, they're a far and away
better quality of that Sousa's Band cylinder of "Levee Revels," if no
where near as historic.
ME: digitization and frogs, mostly
When I said "masters" I was only referring to the two (I presume) tapes
you made at the Buster Keaton festival. You say "the quality wasn't
that good anyway", and 99,999 people out of a thousand would say the
same thing, but I'm sure you, and they, are all off-base. An avoidable
and unnecessary step down in clarity and brightness is just as
unacceptable for a hundred-year-old cylinder as it is for a state-of-
the-art modern recording. Having said that, I'm inclined to agree that
what I have is probably fine for your purposes. For one thing, nobody
will know they're listening to a 3rd- as opposed to a 2nd-generation
recording.
I spun through the highlights disc again today, twice even. I think
it's that fun. I've probably played it more than a dozen times now.
I'm hoping that I'm not being swayed by "pride of editorship" and you
agree that the whole shebang would make a grand finale to your 2-cd set.
It's 33 minutes long, but keep in mind it contains 4 different W.C.
compositions - you forgot Sea Song - and W.C. pieces appear 10 times
throughout. Andante Cantabile is played on clarinet, violin, cornet,
and cello, besides the big finale version. In many other places one can
hear a real, live O'Hare descendant enjoying umself heartily. I think
hearing W.C.'s film music in "context" is a blast, and wins handily over
keeping the set "pure W.C." But you can consider all that when you get
the cd.
By the way, if you find the Buster Keaton masters, you can pretty easily
do an A/B comparison between them and my cd. Play the tape to a
recognizable spot and hit Pause. Play the cd until it gets to that
exact spot and unpause the tape. Then just punch the appropriate button
on the receiver to switch back and forth between tape and cd.
Unfortunately, you'll probably have to simultaneously adjust the volume
when switching back and forth. The way our ears work, we're generally
tricked into thinking the one that's a little louder is the one that
sounds best. But, again, I'm hoping that all just confirms the cd is
good enough.
I'm guessing the TCC media guy is the best bet for transferring the
78s. He would surely know about the RIAA equalization issue. It's not
just a matter of a 78 needle and cartridge; receivers modify the signal
from an lp in a way that is wrong for a 78. They boost the bass of an
lp signal WAY up.
Wow, you have a running search on Fulton County? I guess that's what
separates a real researcher from the rest of us. Take me, for example;
I signed into the TCC staff page for the first time in a long time, and
I couldn't even find the Oxford English Dictionary link (there's some
goofus Oxford Reference Online thing I don't know how to make use of),
or links to the major newspapers. No doubt they were all right there
under my nose, but I gave up.
Nope, I'd never heard of Glass's The Photographer. I could only find
two passing mentions in my library, meaning just listings and not a
single word about what it is about. What put you on to it?
Thanks in particular for the pease pudding link. You must have been
poking around in the big index of first lines to see that? (It wasn't
in the main part of the page.) I am definitely going to have me a
Mother Goose supper one night:
1878 Amer. Home Cook Bk. 143 Pease pudding. One pint of peas
and one potato.
A touch of salt and some bits of ham - how can it miss?
Thanks for the Edison cylinder release page. I see what you mean by the
funny text. "The remarkable features ... are the ridiculous words and
the peculiar droning manner in which they are sung." I'd buy it!
As you well know, everything's a rough draft until the earth is hit by
an asteroid. I thought with the web page more or less out of the way I
would have a nice relaxed time going through the Book of Knowledge
Mother Goose rhymes, aka "Small verses for very small people." I hadn't
actually given each one individual attention. Well, before you know it,
the other 8 books are hauled out again for comparison purposes, and I
find myself making gobs of little fixes to the index of first lines,
mainly, although I keep "improving" bits here and there in the main
section. Now you tell me, is there a single person on earth who cares
whether all the different printings of the same Mother Goose rhyme get
lumped together in that index??? I mean, nobody else has the same
books, even! But the answer, is, yeah, there's one person, and he
figures that if something's not right, it's wrong. And it's actually
fun bringing order to something.
One other thing I wanted to mention: in the discussion of Mother Goose
Alphabets, there must be a second appearance in my collection of the one
called A to Z that starts "A was an Archer, and shot at a frog." This
*may* be the elusive "official" Mother Goose Alphabet. I think that
because the "Nursery Rhyme Alphabet", in which each line refers to a
nursery rhyme, itself starts with the archer and frog. There's no
nursery rhyme, per se, about an archer and frog, so it must have taken
the line from the other alphabet, and would only have done so if it were
well-known. In fact, I see a note I wrote myself beside the Nursery
Rhyme Alphabet saying "this line starts Tom Thumb's Alphabet" - but, for
the life of me, I can't find a "Tom Thumb's Alphabet" anywhere, in that
book or any other, using my monster index, or turning pages one by one.
Talk about exasperating. Not that my brain doesn't pull tricks like
this all the time. (It would be quite a joke, me taking PhD orals.) I
haven't taken this little research project to the web yet, which would
either be frustrating, or cheating.
Well, I just bit the bullet, and found this easily:
Another, known as "Tom Thumb's Alphabet," enjoyed continuous popularity.
The earliest printed record of it is from c. 1712. In its
most familiar version, the rhyme begins:A was an archer, who
shot at a frog.B was a butcher, and had a great dog.
Still, where is it in my collection???
When google indexes my page, I was hoping it would be the only one on
the web with this string: "if if if ifs". But I just checked and
there's already one out there.
What's all this nattering? Time to hit the sack.
ME: This is my updated idea about the film music. When I started
looking into the Navigator tape this morning, I realized there's
important music there to add to the compilation. Hurry #24 can't be
left out, and there was the bonus track Plaintive. Also, Sea Song may
have some advantages over the Spite Marriage version, and there might be
something to be said for the party version of Solemn Scenes. The upshot
is, I'd like to try to put together a new, tight film score set, mixing
W.C. pieces from both films, and leaving in some short non-W.C. lead-ins
and lead-outs here and there for fun, variety, and authenticity of the
film experience.
To do this, it would make a lot more sense to start from scratch rather
than finagle the W.C. film music set I already have. And if I can start
from scratch, it would really, really, really, really, *really* be nice
to work from the MASTERS. I'm sure that would knock out one level of
tape hiss right there.
So how's about it? Might you turn your house upside down for those
tapes for a pal and buddy? Both tapes would come back in convenient cd
form. If the film score set idea doesn't work out, it still wouldn't be
wasted effort. From there it would be easy to pick out W.C. pieces and
treat them as individual tracks on the compilation.
By the way, when you make a compilation cd, you have the option of
choosing "no pause between tracks", I hope?
Also, I want to report a miracle: I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth
and put a junk tape in the deck that used to be my favorite, but started
crumpling tapes - and it didn't eat it! It's working fine now. This
means - no hum problem (as unnoticeable as it was)!
THEE: subject update on DAT tapes dump
Started transferring over the music tapes & found that I really need to
create a list of what's on the tapes myself, as I go (versus asking you
to transcribe). Besides, my notes on the tapes are rather cryptic.
Talked with Bob &, as you mentioned, he is interested in having the
multiple takes, too. They come in handy -- for instance, every so often
there are digital bloopers in the recording that aren't really our
fault, just imperfectly constructed or handled gear. At these points,
it's nice to be able to punch in something from another take. Of
course, Bob wants to take it further -- punch in over our own mistakes
to create a more perfect 'take.'
Still awaiting a reply re: whether your computer can read a DVD disk.
I'll be archiving the files to DVDs (as data files in .wav format, not a
DVD music disk). Also, whether you have a program that can cut out
selections from the larger wave file to get at the cuts you want.
ME: Sorry for the delay in responding - didn't know things were moving
that fast already! Funny thing is, I'm helping my internet friend put
together a compilation cd of her great-grandfather's music. He was a
prolific arranger and composer of all kinds of music for a few decades
from about 1900.
I'd like to help with the guitar trio project in any way I can, although
I'm not sure exactly how. Kind of relieved you're handling the tape
notes.
No, I don't have dvd capabilities of any sort.
The two sound editing programs I use are Wavepad and GoldWave. I
learned Wavepad first (not that I'm an expert with it), and Goldwave is
so different from it as to appear almost nonsensical to me. Mostly just
use Goldwave for "batch processing" - declicking batches of files,
and/or converting them to mp3.
To be honest, I have a more urgent hankering for all the WGS ensemble
pieces. If I had what you have, it might have more weight when I ask
Kevin again for what he has. I'd be glad to bash it into a final
product for any and everybody who'd like a copy. And I'm sure it would
be about as enjoyable to listen to as a guitar recording can be.
THEE: subject Re: Antarctican territory
Sorry, I meant the 2020 thing as more of a guarantee, not as a deadline.
I agree unarchy is notably reliable, and it is already what the majority
of this country wants, a pure democracy. Unarchy would almost certainly
remain the form of goverment past then; unless something really radical
changed.
THEE: I opened my inbox to respond to last night's note and spotted this
one, which changes things somewhat.
>and there might be something to be said for the party version of Solemn
Scenes.
That "Ah . . .," maybe? Did I tell you the story of that one? I wish I
remembered the man's name! Here's the story, though. "Solemn Scenes"
was repeated at the party at his request. This man is an actor, who at
the time was working on a new TV series based on the Supreme Court. The
series writers were the same ones involved with the highly successful
West Wing series. I don't know what happened to the Supreme Court
series, but apparently it was scrapped at some point. At the time,
however, he was playing one of the fictional Justices, and he was
envisioning this as a marvelous theme for the show. Listen to Solemn
Scenes again, picturing something like a sweeping panorama of DC,
gradually focusing in on the Supreme Court. Not exactly what WC had in
mind as indicated by the title, but as a Washington, D.C. boy, I can't
help thinking he woulda loved it!
The overture performance is better quality, but I can see ending with
the party, "Plaintive," and "Solemn Scenes."
>By the way, when you make a compilation cd, you have the option of
choosing "no pause between tracks", I hope?
You mean "no pause" as in having to manually get the new track started?
If so, yup, no problem. There's no more pause than on any normal CD. I
don't know how to do anything fancy like fade ins and outs, nor do I
have any special software. I'm using the CD burner program, called
Record Now, that came with my computer.
Last night I began playing with something different--not WC's
orchestrations, but the orignal vocal recordings of many of the pieces
that he orchestrated, but that I don't have except as vocals. These are
a fun addition if for no other reason than to flesh out one's feel for
the music of the era. I recorded a bit over an hour on a CD, covering
1903-1910. Volume II will cover 1911-1916. My favorite title in the
first batch is "Lemon in the Garden of Love."
THEE:
>Nope, I'd never heard of Glass's The Photographer.
A friend sent me a link to the Wikipedia webpage on the photographer.
On that page, I clicked onto one that took me to the opera page. Then I
figured it was something that might interest you.
>Thanks in particular for the pease pudding link. You must have been
poking around in the big index of first lines to see that?
Nope. Curious about how one could stomach pea porridge, I started with
that, and the OED mentioned pease pudding, at which point I turned
green. When I found the recipe, I began thinking that it just might be
decent.
>(It wasn't in the main part of the page.) I am definitely going to
have me a Mother Goose supper one night:
Let's see . . . pease porridge, curds and whey, four and twenty
blackbirds baked in a pie
THEE: subject Sears guitars
I just stumbled across your website articles on 1890s Sears Roebuck &
Co. guitars. I am trying to assemble similar information on banjos from
1897 to about 1925. I have the usual reprint catalogs (1897, 1900,
1908, 1923) and one original from 1915. I can scan and email you the
guitar pages from those catalogs if you want them. In return, may I ask
what you have in terms of catalogs (originals, reprints, microfilm,
photocopies, whatever)? Perhaps we can exchange pages of interest
without buying original catalogues, which are beyond my means now.
ME: All I have are a few pages copied for their guitar content made from
microfilm at the Library of Congress. I've dug them out and a few do
have some banjo material. From the older catalog (1894, I think,
although I remember dating the catalogs was kind of confusing) there's a
column devoted to banjo items:
11153 German silver shell
11154 German silvered shell
11155 Professional banjo. Steward model
11156 Our Windsor Professional Banjo
11157 Banjo thimbles Banjo cases Banjo bags
Another page has Steel Banjo strings, and another page has Guitar and
Banjo Music.
In the later catalog (1897?) I have a column of "banjo furnishings", and
2 banjo instruction books which managed to survive on another page.
If this would be of interest to you until you get complete catalogs, I'd
be happy to mail it to you.
ME: what i'm up to
>When you say you are helping put together a compilation cd do you mean
that you have recordings or that you are performing & recording the
music in question?
Since U~~ found her great-grandfather on my LC guitar music page back in
2001 or so, I'm guessing I've mentioned her a few times along the way.
The family knew just about nothing about him, but U~~'s research turned
up that W.C. O'Hare was tremendously prolific in all kinds of music -
liturgical, film, pop, etc. Her research has brought her into contact
with tons of other O'Hare descendants. The family was D.C. based, by
the way. (Some trees taken from there property can be seen on the back
of a 5-dollar bill, or is it 10?) W.C. was more or less forgotten, but
U~~ has found various pieces of his recorded over the decades, even
including one recorded by the Sousa band on an Edison cylinder. U~~
herself is a college writing professor, so it's natural that she's
written papers on W.C. Right now she has about 2 cds worth of stuff
that she wants to put together and send to all of her recently-found
relatives. I'm sure she'd like me to record up the guitar arrangements
I have, but that would be folly, and she doesn't push it. A few years
ago she sent me some tapes she made of the live music played to two
silent movies at a Buster Keaton festival, both containing some W.C.
music. I had condensed one of the film scores down to a nice 30 minute
set, showcasing the W.C. pieces. Phyllis met U~~ last summer when we
took her walking tour of the U Street area. I gave Phyllis a copy of
the cd, figuring she'd like the fun music, plus having met the
descendant who made it happen, plus lots of nice violin work. Not sure
Phyllis ever listened to it, or paid any attention if she did. :( Very
much down the alley of a Lake Wobegone fan. For U~~'s current project,
I convinced her to let me have another shot at doing a similar thing,
but drawing in pieces from the second film, too. I had started using
the tapes I had, but said, hey, might as well work with the 1st-gen
tapes, which she dug up and is sending. She had asked me to tranfer
some 78s, but I still don't have full 78 capability. I have a turntable
that plays 78 - which isn't really necessary because the speed can be
adjusted by wav programs - but as far as I can tell, nobody has
incorporated the "undo RIAA equalization" into their wav program.
What's the big deal, I wonder? Then all I would need is a 78 stylus and
cartridge.
Yeah, I've been transferring lps for a long time. Am I "happy with the
hardware"? Well, you know me. I have a Sony cd recorder, which is the
only show in town, I believe. It's a monstrosity of a machine,
including the kitchen sink. I'm guessing that I am transferring lp to
cd with about as little effort as anybody, but if Sony made a simple
single disk recorder (this is 6-disk) and a simple single disk cd/mp3
player, each one designed to do just what was meant for, I'd be a 1000
times happier. As it is I spend my life just waiting for a drawer to
open, and watching "TOC READING" and "OPC" messages, etc.
Thanks for the Audacity tip. I downloaded it. I am so used to
Wavepad's basic operating philosophy, that I had to go right back to it,
but I think Audacity might make taking out a tape hiss easy.
If you're wondering what is it about Wavepad that I'm so hung on, it's
this. The basic action of a click just jumps you around to any spot in
the file, even while the sound is playing. The click doesn't do any
sort of selection, like in Goldwave. I don't see how I can live without
this. A double or triple action to jump to another spot and then start
play again is unthinkable. It looks like Audacity doesn't even have
function keys for playing and stopping.
The tutoring business still hasn't taken off. This isn't an area where
lots of parents think about paying for supplemental education. Right
now I have enough business to about pay the rent. I'm definitely
planning to hang in there. I absolutely love doing it; I come away from
a session feeling exhilerated. This wasn't for pay, but I have a little
3rd-grade friend that I just coached to 2nd-place, out of 84, in her
school's spelling bee.
Your idea of a business converting people's home movies to digital
sounds great - go for it. All you have to do pull out your portfolio.
Got an email just a few days ago from a guitar professor curious about
how some Campion transcriptions compared to the manuscript. Obviously,
it's been a long time since I've been involved with that, and to dig it
all out and make sense of it again (meaning my system of designation of
Campion's pieces, and relating it to the Minkoff facsimile, which is a
little different from my microfilm copies) was a lot more work than I
had planned, or was worthwhile. After all, he'll still have to track
down the originals and do the comparison himself.
Just put up what I think is a kind of nice Mother Goose page, if you're
interested in what I've been up to
http://www.donaldsauter.com/mother-goose-favorites.htm
You can see google has dragged me into the long filename age, grrr...
As always, let me keep putting in a little plug for the WGS ensemble
pieces. I made myself ridiculous trying to get that going for over ten
years, and not having the recordings is a gaping wound.
ME: to: rec.music.dylan sub: Origins of Who Killed Davy Moore? I just
put up a page of my Mother Goose favorites, and included a few Mother
Goose connections to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Nothing earth-
shattering, but I just did a quick web search and it looks like no one
has noted the similarity of a rhyme called "Who Stole the Bird's-Nest?"
to "Who Killed Davy Moore?"
I just found a web page that credits Mrs. L. M. Child with writing "Who
Stole the Bird's-Nest?", and the presumably original version that
appeared in an 1846 periodical is more rambling than the version in my
British Mother Goose book from 1895, which strictly alternates "Who did
it?" verses with "Not me" verses. Here's the original:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/query/r?ammem/ncps:@field(DOCID+@lit(ABR0102-0010-13))::
THEE: subject Re: Campion-R.Pick
Thanks very much. I will go to the originals and discover what is
actually written. Pick's arrangements are always part of someone
else's work and are often not too correct!
THEE: Thanks for your long note, very interesting. I'm wondering --
even if you aren't up to recording the O'Hare guitar arrangements, I bet
Bob would be glad to bang thru them. Trouble with Bob, though, is he
still doesn't have a mic preamp to get stuff into his computer, though
he says he has a nice enough microphone. Well, I could lend him my
Tascam portable DAT, if he wanted (the preamps on this aren' that good
-- the reason I always hesitated to record the trio on that). A
possibility, if you want to raise it with Bob. I chatted with him over
the phone a few days ago & he says he's been playing & that his sight
reading has "really improved." Can't imagine how it could get much
better than before -- perhaps now he's note-perfect on the first try?!
I understand when you say you like Wavepad's ability to jump around &
play at a click. I can do that with my Samplitude program. I'm a bit
pissed that I spent so much money for Samplitude 'cause the updates
started requiring a USB dongle, which is something I don't want. Plus --
it's rather hard to use & I still haven't gained much facility with it.
About a year ago I purchased Sony Vegas (video editing software) that
also does audio -- I find it much easier than Samplitude for music.
But, certain of Samplitude's features are top notch, especially noise
correction: get a sample of the noise (it has to be a constant
frequency, like tape hiss) and it'll remove it. Problem with this is
other sounds at the same freqencies get zapped so I have to be careful.
Try not to get too bent up over the WGS ensemble pieces. I'm nearly
done transferring my tapes & haven't come across much more than: Rocky
Pt., Tango, Pill O'Palles, & the Renaissance pieces. Is it that you want
these in .wav format? When you wrote, in relation to these pieces, that
you are reluctant "to go from wav to mp3 back to wav" do you mean you
want to do some editing of these files? Well, anyway -- I was
comtemplating just buying you an external USB hard disk which would give
you all 30Gig of our recordings!
ME:
>Problem with this is other sounds at the same freqencies get zapped so
I have to be careful.
I experimented with that one time with Goldwave - and it removed half
the music. I'll try again with Audacity on ~~'s audience tapes of the
film music.
>I'm nearly done transferring my tapes & haven't come across much more
than: Rocky Pt., Tango, Pill O'Palles, & the Renaissance pieces.
A quick search didn't bring up what I wrote about these last time, but
what I want is the Pill O'palles and Renaissance pieces. I have some
nagging memory that one or both of these isn't complete on your web
site.
>When you wrote, in relation to these pieces, that you are reluctant "to
go from wav to mp3 back to wav" do you mean you want to do some editing
of these files?
Nope. The thing about the multiple conversions is just that, yeah it
would be easy for me to get the mp3s off the web, but it just seems
funny taking something that was converted from wav to mp3 to get it on
the web, and then converting that back to wav for my own cd, even though
the sound quality would be perfectly ok. And there's still the question
of completeness of the sets if I did do the downloads.
>Well, anyway -- I was comtemplating just buying you an external USB
hard disk which would give you all 30Gig of our recordings!
Mentioned the man who asked about Campion; at the same time a man whose
mission is to "Save The Banjo" asked me about the banjo in old Sears
catalogs, having found my pages on the guitar in Sears catalogs. I
didn't expect to find much, but turns out there is a bit of scattered
material about the banjo on my microfilm copies, and he said he'd be
very interested in that. His catalogs don't go back that far. Moral
is, never throw out anything, no matter how junky.
Forgot to mention that if I could find the video of my mom on a
Baltimore flea market tv show, I myself would need to hire someone to
transfer it to digital form. I'd like to put it on youtube. My father
thinks she might have thrown it out.
Just got a call this morning from my sister that our sister-in-law's
mother just died a few days ago under almost the exact same
circumstances as our own mother Christmas before last. G~~ was
feeling weaker and weaker, and when it got bad enough to see the doctor,
the prognosis was leukemia, and only a couple of weeks to live. Our
families were close and I'll be spinning to Baltimore County and back
later today for the viewing.
THEE: subject mother goose & Davy Moore (RIP)
I've read your message on rec.music.dylan and the printed your page
about old mother goose... interesting, but i have to read it all yet. I
haven't understand the chapter about "first lines" but i'm italian and
maybe i missed something in your explanation.
Thanks anyway for your labour.
ME: Thank you for visiting! Your English is excellent. If you didn't
understand the section about first lines - it's because it's not really
meant to be read and it really doesn't have any great significance,
except to show what a huge number of rhymes have been considered "Mother
Goose". It also gives an idea of what the most popular Mother Goose
rhymes are, because they will appear much more frequently in the list.
It is only useful as an index to my own personal collection.
THEE: subject sorry ?!
Thanks for your views on sorry, and also the interesting article on the
quarters, and the math problem. I am not now nor have I ever been into
math, but this got me thinking. Good old fashion brain exercise !
Thanks, I needed that.
To pose a question, how many times a day does the average person say
"sorry" for all the right reasons ??
ME: Now you've given me a brain teaser. I see I use the word "sorry" on
about 27 pages, but I don't remember ever dumping my thoughts on the
value of apologies on my web site. Is the internet sticking cookies in
my brain?
THEE: subject 7 strings?
the sychras journal de petersbourg, 18 journals comprising 108 pages ,
144 pieces. are those for 7 string guitar or transcribed for 6 string
guitar? and if it is for 7 string how much is that?
ME: These are direct copies of the original editions for 7-string
Russian guitar.
THEE:
from charlie701 Mar 3 (14 hours ago)
subject Lunch?
THEE:
re: "When we get a "best version" for each piece, I'd like everything
else wiped."
No way! Store it away for eternity (or until an heir dumps it). As you
say later in your email: "Moral is, never throw out anything, no matter
how junky."
re: "Would it make sense to put all the takes of each piece on a single
cd, nd then divvy up those cds amongst us?"
How many CDs for 30GB of stuff? You do the math! At least with DVDs,
there's fewer of them.
ME:
>No way! Store it away for eternity (or until an heir dumps it). As you
say later in your email: "Moral is, never throw out anything, no matter
how junky."
Very shortly after sending the email, my little contradiction hit me.
Had to chuckle.
>How many CDs for 30GB of stuff? You do the math! At least with DVDs,
there's fewer of them.
Well, you've got a much better handle on this than me, but I would have
guessed we recorded maybe 60 individual "pieces" (counting a movement as
a "piece"), and that all of the work devoted to one piece would fit,
generally, on one cd. I'm not suggesting everybody wants a stack of 60
cds, but that would be the first step in producing a final edit for each
piece, and putting them all on two cds (cda format) or one cd (mp3
format.) That doesn't mean all the rough takes can't be archived
somewhere.
If I haven't mentioned elsewhere, I'm "sold" on mp3. I will stick with
cda as long as the whole "program" fits on a cd, but if not, it goes to
mp3. I have, for example, fit an entire 13-record set on one cd.
>re: the video of your mom on a Baltimore flea market tv show -- is it
VHS? Find it & I can transfer next time I go to Florida (my brother has
the machinery needed). I hope to go this spring sometime.
Thanks for the offer. The funny thing is, not only couldn't I find the
video tape in question, I couldn't find a single video tape in the
house. My parents only got a vcr in fairly recent years, and Mom only
accumulated a small handful of tapes. My father and my sisters and
brother don't have any idea where Mom kept them, either. You wouldn't
think this would be such an unsolvable mystery, after all, we all know
the house pretty well, having lived and/or visited there regularly for
50 years.
Don't get a whole lot of culture in here in Dover, but went out to high
school production of Li'l Abner tonight. Earlier today went to a very
interesting talk on the history of the whipping post in Delaware. It
was used into the 1960s.
ME: Make a mental or written note of your last electric bill for future
discussion.
M~~ was scheduled for 3:15 today. The phone rang at 12:52.
Still no internet access.
THEE: subject Library of Congress
I'm trying to solve a mystery, Donald. An e-mail has arrived in my
mailbox, marked 4:54 p.m. today. It contains an attached .pdf file
(out.pdf), but no message except what appears to have been automatically
added to the mail:
========================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540
Do not use email to reply to this message; email replies will not be
answered.
The internet information included in this email message was searched by
a researcher at a public workstation in a Library of Congress reading
room. Each researcher is solely responsible for the legal implications
of his or her activities, such as copying, uploading or downloading
files, and/or posting electronic mail. The Library permits research-
related email only. The Library will not assume or accept liability for
any violations of these conditions by researchers.
========================================================================
The attached file is 1.15 MB, and appears to be from the online catalog.
Not knowing what it is or who sent it, I'm afraid to open it.
Perchance, did you send it?
ME: Just managed to connect to the internet for the first time in a few
days. Don't know what the problem was, or what fixed it, assuming it's
fixed.
No, I didn't send the message or any pdf file. If you'd like, forward
it to me, and I'll open it up on a library computer. The message sounds
fishy to me, but I don't see how a pdf file can cause trouble.
THEE: I opened the mail, which I could see in a preview screen, without
opening the attachment. This is very strange because, although it
arrived today, the email indicates that it was sent June 19, 2006,
meaning I could have sent it to myself. I know that the Library of
Congress is slow . . . but THAT slow????? [about 9 months]
ME: This is a little funny, too. This email, which you sent today,
arrived *before* the other one, which you sent yesterday. Admittedly,
we're only talking minutes.
If an email really did take 9 months, that's one for the newspapers.
When I was growing up, it seemed like every few years there was a little
article about a letter that fell beneath some post office machinery and
got delivered 45 years later, or something.
THEE: subject Re: sorry ?!
Hi Donald, I've been known to tease a brain here and there. A friend of
mine recently sent me a list of words and what their origins are and it
got me to thinking and it set me oon a search for this query of how many
times a day does one use the word sorry and mean it. My friend is an
editor of various media publications and I am an avid scrabble player so
we share the love of words. I even subscribe to Merriam-Werbsters word
of the day,. your never to old to learn more despite having a deminished
brain capacity at times. Can you suggest any good sites for word
origins? I loved your piece of the 2 quarters and mind you I am not a
math person ! As for the cookies, the only kind I need are chocolate
chip :-) Cheers
ME: I've always been kind of baffled about "sorry" - or, at least, after
I started thinking about dumb things like this. It always seemed to be
"too easy" a way out. Saying "I'm sorry", even if sincere, somehow
neutralizes knocking somebody over the head? It was either a
justifiable act in the first place, or else you still owe, it seems to
me. So when you brought it up, you had me wondering if I had tried to
express that on any of my pages. I didn't think so - 'cause I try not
to sound like a negative old grouch *all* the time!
I get all of my new words from my reading material. My trusty American
Heritage is always at hand. As one very recent example, I met many new
words on my recent Mother Goose kick. In case, you missed that
masterpiece (ha ha), here's a link:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/mother-goose-favorites.htm
There's a section to just some of the words I looked up. Many of them I
actually already knew from reading lots of other old stuff, but I figure
most would be unfamiliar to most people.
I have a book, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories. I suspect it's
very good, but, to be honest, I've gotten almost no use out of it. I
struck out on my first few searches, and demoted it to a shelf in a far
room (of my small house). Hmmm, this wasn't the reason for writing, but
if you'd like it, you could have it just for reimbursement of media mail
postage. It's in crisp, clean, fresh, shiny unbroken-spine condition.
Subtitle: "The life stories of over 12,000 words". 560 pages.
THEE: subject RE: 7 strings?
let me get this right, so are you asking for $2592 for the complete
journal?
ME: Nope, asking for a promise of $24 for the complete set of journals.
THEE: Believe it or not, I came across your web site by Googling for
'daughter take "mother's surname"', which led me to your "Gender in the
language" page. Wow, I thought, someone who independently came up with
exactly the same idea as me! So I thought I'd spend some time reading
what else you had to say.
Out of interest, why do your prefer a base 8 number system than base
16? Hexadecimal is already much more established. But more importantly,
it is a lot more efficient. For example, 65535 in hex is FFFF but in
octal is 177777. So we save 2 digits even with such a small number.
I certainly agree with the sentiment of your new units of measure. Have
you ever come across the Planck units?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units). To me this seems like a
much more natural choice.
I also read your universal second language article with interest, but
was very disappointed with your dismissal of Esperanto. "Not knowing
much about Esperanto beyond its name, I've got big doubts about it." Is
this really fair?!
Finally, I spent some time looking through your thoughts on evolution.
One question for you: have you ever read any of Richard Dawkins's
evolution books?
ME: Pretty neat, finding me like that - thanks for visiting! Funny
thing is, I hadn't looked at that page in years, but just recently
reworked it a little. Problem is, something you wrote 10 years ago can
start to sound a little embarrassing! I had ISP problems for the last
week or so, so couldn't upload updated pages - which is why you got the
outdated version while the updated version was still on my hard drive.
About Hex vs. Base 8 - I'm certain *very* few people would ever learn
their single-digit addition and multiplication tables in Hex. Each
would have 256 entries! Believe me, people have enough trouble with the
100 entries in the Base 10 tables. With base 8 it would be a breeze
with 64 entries. If we went with Hex, we would need new numerals for 10
through 15. Using the same characters for numbers and letters is
absolutely unacceptable - 0 and 1 have caused more than enough trouble
already. Yes, when the base gets bigger and bigger, you can express the
same number with fewer digits, but I don't see that as being important.
In base 8 or 10, it's rare that anyone really needs more than 2-place
precision. To be honest, I'm guessing that 1-place is enough for the
majority of real-life applications.
You say the Planck units seem more natural - are you a man, or a
meson??? :-)
>I also read your universal second language article with interest, but
was very disappointed with your dismissal of Esperanto. "Not knowing
much about Esperanto beyond its name, I've got big doubts about it." Is
this really fair?!
I think that's a fair statement. I go on to mention that I've only ever
met one person who had a few months of instruction in it. I object to
the Spanish "r" in the name. I have to wonder why, if Esperanto is
good, the universal second language people keep coming up with other,
newer languages. Did anyone ever ask Orientals about Esperanto? These
are all just a basis for doubt.
I've spent countless hours reading posts in the talk.origins discussion
group, which is clearly a platform for Dawkins disciples, so it's a very
safe bet I know what Dawkins has to say in his books. I got a little
jab in recently. I asked:
Subject: anybody read The God Delusion?
Does Dawkins get around to explaining the difference
between "GOD did it", and "NATURE did it", besides
spelling, I mean?
I just did a search, and the thread is missing. I submitted a follow up
essay, which I will eventually add to my site, especially since it looks
like Google groups has lost it. You might search on some of that text
to see if it's come back.
Thanks a million for writing. Unless you object, I'd like to use your
email in my guest book.
THEE: I had a spare 40GB laptop drive that I put in an external USB
enclosure so I copied the trio wave files to it (finally tally around
24GB) and sent it to you this morning via USPS for you to 'borrow' for a
few years or so. I attach (to this email) a text file with a list of
contents (this contents file is also found on the drive you should be
receiving).
Note that I've lost the original Pill O'Palle recording! It may be on
one of the wave files, though I clicked through the most likely
candidates and did not find this. A mystery. Luckily, we have the mp3
I uploaded to the web. At some point I had it on my computer's drive
'cause I made an mp3 out of it but I experienced a drive crash a while
back & hadn't back it up.
Notes about using the external drive: On most computers it gets power
directly from the USB port (no need to plug in). However, I heard that
Dell laptops have low powered USB ports so if it doesn't power up just
plugging in the USB cord (included) then I also sent the power adapter.
There's a switch on the back to set power source between 'PC' and 'DC'
(currently set to PC). To actually work on a file, I recommend
transferring over to the computer's internal hard drive rather than
leaving on the external drive.
ME: I got the external drive in fine condition. Thanks a lot. Will
definitely get it back to you when done, or when you ask, although my
suspicion is it will have become antique technology long before then,
and you will have ceased to think or care about it.
Of course, it solves the original problem of filling out my collection
of trios, but getting the whole shebang opens up the potential of years
of work! I might try to see if I can improve a "best take" or two, and
if noticeably successful, I'll report back to you and Bob and we can
discuss what effort we want to put into making a grand, final product.
Have an idea about further trio work bouncing around my head, but will
keep it under wraps for the time being.
Hadn't been able to get online with Stowetel since about Saturday.
Don't know what the problem was, or what fixed it. Maybe running the
network trouble-shooter actually fixes things up? Been online all
morning catching up on emails.
P.S. Are you sure the drive was a "spare", and you didn't go out and buy
one? I know your generous tricks.
THEE: Kumon
My name is Asure Merritt and I came accross your write about your
experience with operating a Kumon center while researching Kumon
franschise opportunities.
I was wondering if you had heard any other horor storied about working
with the franchise? I must admit, after reading your comments, I'm
somewhat skeptical. Would you rate your overall experience as Poor?
ME: About other "horror stories", the one that comes to mind was another
Delaware Kumon instructor who was helping students with SAT preparation
in addition to the Kumon worksheets. Kumon got on him for that and he
decided to close down. At the time, one could search for his name on
the web and a page would come up showing him at a Nobel prize ceremony,
for his assistance to a Noble prize winner in chemistry. Besides being
brilliant, he was a very nice guy; somebody I think any parent would be
thrilled to have helping her children.
Based on that, and my own experience and a few other lesser incidents, I
have wondered if there isn't a simple-minded "girls vs. the boys"
mindset at work in the Washington D.C. branch. But I'm not much on
psychology. Maybe the branch office feels it has to put pressure on a
few centers in order to give an appearance of "doing its job." Or,
maybe, in a bigger picture I don't see, this was all proper and fair.
Obviously, there are hundreds of happy Kumon instructors out there, so
don't base your decision solely on my experience. I will say that right
from the beginning there was a feeling of being treated like a child -
nothing at all like a feeling of being my own boss in my own business.
But, trying to see both sides of the coin, maybe that's the way it "has
to be" with franchises. I can imagine a franchisor being scared to
death of the least, little personal touch of a franchisee.
THEE: subject Bootlegs of Gladys Swarthout
I was doing a search on Google using the words Bootleg Bizet Carmen
Swarthout and your website was one of the results, so I thought I would
check it out. I noticed that you have the following Gladys Swarthout
recordings and I'm a bit envious.
Swarthout, Gladys: The Art of Gladys Swarthout
Carmen, Bizet: Swarthout Leinsdorf
Carmen, Bizet: Swarthout Vinay Leinsdorf
Mignon, Thomas: Swarthout Pelletier
Faust, Gounod: Swarthout Pelletier
Romeo et Juliette, Gounod: Swarthout Pelletier
Chants d'Auvergne, Canteloube: Swarthout pf King
Werther, Massenet: Swarthout Morel
Samson et Dalila, Saint-Saens: Swarthout Morel
La Perichole, Offenbach: Swarthout Morel
I already have the Carmen highlights with Vinay & Merrill as well as the
Naxos release of the broadcast with Wilfrid Pelletier conducting. I
also have a tape of Carmen with Swarthout and George Pretre conducting
which has not, to my knowledge, been reissued by anyone. I have The
Art of Gladys Swarthout, and a 10" LP who's title I have forgotten, and
the OASI Gladys Swarthout as well.
Do you trade recordings or copies thereof?
I used to work for "Club 99" records as the tape editor from 1970-1980
so I have 99% of those recordings and whichever CDs were issued by
Qualiton. Are you familiar with that label? I can make good copies as
I have very good equipment. Would you be interested in trading copies?
ME: Whoa! no need to be envious! I'm afraid the format I use for my
database misled you. The list of entries under Gladys Swarthout there
indicates the individual selections on a *single* album (which you
have.) I document opera names, not aria names, which would not be
useful to me and would involve a tremendous amount of work and cause
more trouble than they're worth. So, for instance, if I've just
listened to La Perichole, I would likely go to my database and plug in
"perichole" to see where else it pops up in my collection. In this case
I would see that there's an aria from La Perichole on "The Art of
Elizabeth Swarthout", which I would pull.
Your collection of Gladys Swarthout beats me by a mile! You have the
album mentioned above. The only other appearance of Swarthout in my
collection is the Carmen highlights, which you also have.
I don't know of any recordings that I have that are particularly rare,
and I have a huge backlog of records to listen to thanks to ebay, so I'm
not a good candidate for trading. But if you notice anything in my
collection "to die for", we can talk.
Again, sorry for the letdown!
THEE: Don -- the drive really was a 'spare' -- I'd upgraded my
notebook drive from 40G/5400RPM to 60G/7200RPM so I bought the
enclosure for the spare drive. If you ever crash your notebook's
drive, the enclosure can be used to try and read stuff off it.
I've subsequently also purchased enclosures for 'big' drives for
backup (of video, photos, music, etc.) and have filled over
400G of stuff!. That's cause video files take up a lot of space --
13G/hour for semi-compressed video files -- also 'cause some things I
want duplicate backups. The trio files I sent you also represent an
additional backup version.
I'd be curious to know if the drive works fine on your laptop pulling
power from the USB connection or does it need to be plugged?
ME: The drive works fine without the transformer.
I have a few questions.
Are you *certain* these wav files correspond completely to *all* the
recordings on the dat tapes? Or, hoping against hope, did you do the
transfer on some sort of autopilot, and maybe some dat material didn't
get transferred? For instance, I jumped right into Tango_Renaiss.wav.
Your notes say that Volta goes to 54'27, but the file only goes
to 49'30. If some material didn't get transferred, maybe that's
where Pill O'Palle is. (Unlikely for a few reasons, I know.)
The other thing that has me wondering about the transfer process are the
choppy starts and stops. Did you really run up to the recorder and turn
it off while we were just starting to applaud for the final take of
Tango? And would you have been turning the recorder on for the
Renaissance session while we were in the middle of playing Volta? Not
impossible - it might have been a section rehearsal. And at the very
end, where we record an edit piece for the faster Volta, did you run up
and turn off the recorder while the last chord was still ringing, and
Bob was in the middle of saying "Much bett..."?
Did you stitch together the pieces of the fast Volta into a good keeper?
And where is Summerset Follies? You sure there isn't another case or
drawer with another dat or two lying around?
How about some thoughts on this game plan: I split all the trio files
into conveniently-named files with individual takes. This would be
passed on to Bob. Then he could listen to the "keeper" in each case;
determine if it has problem spots; and easily check those spots in other
takes to see if there's a good cut and paste. For example, here's the
whole Tango_Renaiss.wav separated into convenient files:
180,911,624 Tango01_junk.wav
75,678,156 Tango02_take.wav
63,508,932 Tango03_keep.wav
24,639,076 Volta01_junk.wav
21,305,184 Volta02_take.wav
15,527,272 Bransle01_rhrs.wav
11,933,896 Bransle02_rhrs.wav
22,907,432 Bransle03_take.wav
16,953,260 Bransle04_keep.wav
15,725,076 Ballet01_junk.wav
24,339,660 Ballet02_keep.wav
10,863,256 Volta03_junk.wav
18,877,556 Volta04_take.wav
14,798,752 Volta05_keep.wav
6,051,664 Volta06_edit.wav
The filename gives the name of the piece, sequence no., and what to
expect: "junk" (talk, section rehearsals, etc.), "rehearsal" (*might*
have decent material for a cut and paste), "take", "keeper", or "edit"
piece.
To do this, I'd replace each wav file currently on the drive one by one
with a folder containing the separated files. In any case, some folders
would have to go, since they take up more than half the disc. I know
it's your secondary backup, but if you trust the hardware, you can trust
me.
This idea is very tentative. This part of it alone would involve months
of work - when really all I wanted was the keeper take for a few
remaining pieces, which I might only listen to once or twice more in my
life and hang onto as a souvenir of a period of my life. Do you think
the effort required to create the best final edit for each piece can be
justified? Might they all go up on the web, at least, all the ones
we're proud of, and where we can get permission?
WGS FOLDER:
Tango_Renaiss.wav
"Tango Estampie," by Luc Levesque Tango (best take at 23'40"; ~7min)
Praetorius: 3 pieces from "Terpsichore,"
directed by Bob Wysong (starts around 30 min) Session 2 includes
'Volta'
part 3 42'53 - 44'17
part 1 45'53 - 48'04
part 2 53'04 - 54'27 (Volta)
RockyPt.wav takes plus compilation of best takes at end
Lost (! may be in one of these wave files?): "Pill O'Palle's Dance
Collection" composed by Torsten Ratzkowski, 1989; including:
Pity o'Piper's Hornpipe
Mrs. Dream-Nelly's Jump
Mr. John Hope's Last Galliard
Pill o'Palle's Thank You
ME: I always meant to get back in touch, and figured I'd use an
invitation to a recent web page as an excuse. No problem about
any of the emails. I'm quite used to it. Of course, it's more
fun to hear an occasional, "What a good idea!" A couple of days
ago I got an excited email from a man:
>Believe it or not, I came across your web site by Googling for
'daughter take "mother's surname"', which led me to your "Gender in the
language" page. Wow, I thought, someone who independently came up with
exactly the same idea as me! So I thought I'd spend some time reading
what else you had to say.
A psychologist is the last thing on earth I am, but if I were forced to
play one for a moment, I'd say there's something about people that
objects to ideas coming from a "regular" person. Limiting myself to one
example, me suggesting that Base 8 is much superior to Base 10 somehow
rubs people the wrong way, but nobody bats an eye when Isaac Asimov
argues for Base 12 - and that with Base 12 being certifiably idiotic.
(Oops, there I go again.)
Here's my web page that tells people which Mother Goose rhymes they
should like (ha ha):
http://www.geocities.com/donaldsauter/mother-goose-favorites.htm
THEE: Just received my electric bill and it is the highest cost
so far at $235.
THEE: subject Re: Goofy
>This is a little funny, too. This email, which you sent today, arrived
*before* the other one, which you sent yesterday. Admittedly, we're
only talking minutes.
Right. The Library of Congress mail was long enough for pretty much
full-term fetal development. I suspect this is something I sent myself
because I know I did try to send by clicking on an e-mail link in the
online catalog. Maybe I'll get brave and open it. On the other hand,
maybe I'll see if it forwards successfully to my web-based mail, and
then open in the computer lab at school. :-)
>If an email really did take 9 months, that's one for the newspapers.
When I was growing up, it seemed like every few years there was a little
article about a letter that fell beneath some post office machinery and
got delivered 45 years later, or something.
I still see those articles from time to time.
THEE: subject Digitization
Tell me about this dawn of LP digitalization.
[I sent him my first scan of a record label. Somehow the grooviness did
not register. Oh well.]
I need some good news in the digitization realm. I just listened
to a CD I made from a "Lost Lennon Tapes" tape and the results were
disappointing.
I usually assume that I can split files as much as I want and, if I
do it right, they'll play through seamlessly.
This was the case for about three-quarters of the tracks on the
"LLT" CD. I could blame GoldWave, but I suspect the culprit may be my
burning software. I upgraded from Roxio 8 to 9 and, as I may have told
you, have had tons of trouble since.
I'm seeing the Who tonight downtown.
ME: tried to work in a who reference
> Tell me about this dawn of LP digitalization.
I take it the attached image didn't come through? I guess you'll have
to take my word for it, as with all my emails, it was a masterpiece.
I've had trouble with Goldwave adding electronic crackles. The at-risk
situation seems to involve simultaneous declicking and conversion to mp3
on "large" files, meaning I haven't observed it on typical 3:20, board-
approved, pop song-length tracks.
THEE: subject Ronnie Wells-Elliston
Friends,
This note is to tell you that my former vocal coach of 5 years and co-
founder of the East Coast Jazz Festival passed on Tuesday night. She
was a phenomenal teacher and beautiful lady. I learned so much from
her. Her workshop program is just amazing. Ronnie had surgery for
Lung Cancer in October. There is a "write-up" in this morning's
Washington Post (Page B7) if you would like to know more about her.
Jacqui Simmons
ME: I keep looking for the silent film tapes in the mail, and now I'm a
little concerned. Did you get them off?
ME: to alt.internet.searchengines
Among my questions and confusions regarding search engine optimization,
this is the most important one, I think. After being
www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7049/
for some years, Geocities gave us Yahoo!-based alternate names. Mine
was
www.geocities.com/donaldsauter/
That seemed much neater so I started to use it. Now my pages appear
both ways in Google and other search engines. Is this working against
me? If so, what should I do about it? I have only used the second form
for years, within my own web site and in all communication.
Thanks for your help - much appreciated.
ME: I've given the Dover Library long enough to respond to my second
offer of the antique, 3D posters for a Mother Goose display. Are you
still interested?
Did you ever get a "local musicians" category going in your cd bins?
THEE:
>Pretty neat, finding me like that - thanks for visiting! Funny thing
is, I hadn't looked at that page in years, but just recently reworked it
a little. Problem is, something you wrote 10 years ago can start to
sound a little embarrassing! I had ISP problems for the last week or
so, so couldn't upload updated pages - which is why you got the outdated
version while the updated version was still on my hard drive.
I'm not sure why you should be embarrassed :)
In fact, I am getting married later this year and am probably going to
suggest to my fiancee that we adopt the policy that any daughters we may
have will take her surname!
>About Hex vs. Base 8 - I'm certain *very* few people would ever learn
their single-digit addition and multiplication tables in Hex. Each
would have 256 entries! Believe, people have enough trouble with the
100 entries in the Base 10 tables. With base 8 it would be a breeze
with 64 entries.
Yes, I must admit that I hadn't considered this point.
>If we went with Hex, we would need new numerals for 10 through 15.
Using the same characters for numbers and letters is absolutely
unacceptable - 0 and 1 have caused more than enough trouble already.
Yes, when the base gets bigger and bigger, you can express the same
number with fewer digits, but I don't see that as being important. In
base 8 or 10, it's rare that anyone really needs more than 2-place
precision. To be honest, I'm guessing that 1-place is enough for the
majority of real-life applications.
Yes, perhaps I am biased because I work with computer internals in my
job and know that the brevity afforded by using hex rather than octal is
important. But in "real life" you're probably correct.
>You say the Planck units seem more natural - are you a man, or a
meson??? :-)
:)
>I've spent countless hours reading posts in the talk.origins discussion
group, which is clearly a platform for Dawkins disciples, so it's a very
safe bet I know what Dawkins has to say in his books.
I haven't read talk.origins, but I'll probably take a look when I find
time.
Since the folks on there appear to have failed to convince you about the
merits of evolution, and since it seems that you genuinely are
interested in understanding the theory, I really would recommend "The
Selfish Gene". It was written before he started lowering his tone to
that of some of his critics, and everyone I know who has approached it
with an open mind has found it very informative. Anyway, take it or
leave it, your choice.
>I got a little jab in recently. I asked:
> Subject: anybody read The God Delusion?
> Does Dawkins get around to explaining the difference
> between "GOD did it", and "NATURE did it", besides
> spelling, I mean?
>I just did a search, and the thread is missing. I submitted a follow
up essay, which I will eventually add to my site, especially since it
looks like Google groups has lost it. You might search on some of that
text to see if it's come back.
Unfortunately I was unable to find it with a brief search, so it looks
like it has gone missing.
My interpretation of the difference between God and Nature is the
supposition of intelligence or purpose. I think that it is possible to
conceive a physics which is utterly simple and all the complexity we
observe derives from sheer vastness of numbers. By invoking an
intelligent God as an axiom, to me nothing seems to have been explained.
ME:
>>Problem is, something you wrote 10 years ago can start to sound a
little embarrassing!
>I'm not sure why you should be embarrassed :)
In particular, it was my letter to the editor that put the blame on the
feminist movement for the doubling of house prices in the 1970s. That
bit the dust. Not that I've changed my mind, just trying to lighten my
image! (in case anybody has gone to the trouble to form an image :)
>In fact, I am getting married later this year and am probably going to
suggest to my fiancee that we adopt the policy that any daughters we may
have will take her surname!
Great!
>I really would recommend "The Selfish Gene". It was written before he
started lowering his tone to that of some of his critics, and everyone I
know who has approached it with an open mind has found it very
informative. Anyway, take it or leave it, your choice.
Thanks for the recommendation; sounds very useful. My prejudice going
into it will be, if he's promoting the idea that evolution is the result
of dna strands gone awry, then we are back to the wild theory that
*nobody* has ever take seriously - that the information for all the
species that have ever formed and will ever be formed was all contained
in the dna of the very first life form. Not to mention, all the messed-
up fruit flies with big red eyes and legs sticking out of their heads
they've produced with radiation have absolutely *nothing* to do with
darwinian micro-step evolution.
>My interpretation of the difference between God and Nature is the
supposition of intelligence or purpose. I think that it is possible to
conceive a physics which is utterly simple and all the complexity we
observe derives from sheer vastness of numbers. By invoking an
intelligent God as an axiom, to me nothing seems to have been explained.
I agree with the last sentence completely, although it's not impossible
that "the ultimate high power" will make itself known to us some day and
demonstrate its powers unequivocably, by changing physical laws, for
example, or whipping up new universes in front of our eyes. Of course,
I'm not holding my breath for that. I'll die just like everybody else,
wondering what the heck is going on. Try as I might, I don't see how
any physics, no matter how "utterly simple" will explain anything. The
*best* science can do is describe, it does not and has never
"explained". Let's just suppose the string theorists do come up with
something that "explains" all physical laws. Aren't we then left with,
why are there strings? As for me, if all the universe were nothing but
completely empty space, I still couldn't imagine the whys and wherefors
of such a ridiculously complicated universe. Why should there be empty
space, even?
>>Thanks a million for writing. Unless you object, I'd like to use your
email in my guest book.
>No objection at all. Please go ahead.
Thanks. I hardly get any guestbook comments anymore. It's not like in
the *old* days . . .
Donald
P.S. Before shooting this off, I see I mispoke when I said I'll die
like everyone else "wondering what's going on". I think many, maybe
most, people have come to believe that science explains everything, or
at least is on track to do so, when, for example, nobody anywhere can
explain why two bodies move toward each other. We have a sophisticated-
sounding word for it, yes . . .
THEE: subject Re: trio drive
Don, re: your questions --
"I jumped right into Tango_Renaiss.wav. Your notes say that Volta goes
to 54'27, but the file only goes to 49'30."
If I had personal stuff (as outlined above) I chopped it off that .wav
file. As I mentioned in my notes file, the notes simply reflect what I
had written on the tape jacket. In a few instances, can't recall which
tapes but I wrote it on the jacket, I found bad, ruined sections on the
tape -- 5 to 10 minutes worth. Never use "Quantegy" DAT tape is the
lesson (not that they make it anymore, anyway).
"If some material didn't get transferred, maybe that's where Pill
O'Palle is."
I'm perplexed as to where it is. Perhaps I have another tape around
that will show up?
" ... the choppy starts and stops. Did you really run up to the
recorder and turn it off ... "
Usually I had the recorder at my side. What you hear is what you get!
Actually, to reduce file size, once and a while on these things I'd chop
out chit chat.
"Did you stitch together the pieces of the fast Volta into a good
keeper?"
No. All takes I previously put on compilation tapes or made
into MP3s (whether the trio or other) were unedited. That's cause I did
the transfer between 2 DAT machines. Now it's possible to edit bad
spots using other takes, if desired.
"And where is Summerset Follies?"
Don't know -- either I did not bring my machine to this session or
Kevin taped it or it's on the mysterious missing tape along with Pill
O'Pale. Do you remember whether it was recorded?
" ... thoughts on this game plan. I split all the trio files into
conveniently-named files with individual takes. This would be passed on
to Bob. "
Well, you'd have to ask Bob since it involves him. If it were for me,
I'd say I wouldn't need your chopped up files 'cause I have the wave
files myself. You input as to which take you like best could be conveyed
by noting the file name & time ( e.g. Tango: Tango_Renaiss.wav, 23'
15"). I also sent Bob all these files, by the way. Remember -- I did
create compilation tapes (included on the disk) of what I considered the
best take.
" ... really all I wanted was the keeper take for a few remaining
pieces."
Well, why don't you just concentrate on creating the additional wave
files you want from what's included? What I'd like to do is stitch
together a few edited takes of pieces I was never happy with because we
didn't have what I considered a good enough final take. Say one would
have been good enough except for a blunder. Well, I pull that section
from another take and bandaid over the bad spot. We could no longer
claim that the recording offered was 100% a live take but what the heck.
I even played with speeding up the tempo on a piece -- made it sound
better but is it kosher?
"Might they all go up on the web, at least, all the ones we're proud of,
and where we can get permission?"
Yeah -- I'd like to put more stuff on the web but worry/wonder about the
permission part. I'd made inquiries with some publishers & some
responded, others didn't. So, in a sense we don't have permission on
everything that's up there now. I don't know what's o.k. and what
isn't.
THEE: Thursday a.m. I have oral surgery again for phase two of this
dental implant business. This part sounds nasty although the
periodontist/surgeon swears it's not as bad as the earlier surgery even
though it's more invasive. Basically, in involves drilling a hole in my
lower jaw to insert a hollow screw. The bone then grows around it for
about 4 month at which time my regular dentist can take care of having
the implanted tooth made. It will have a post on it that inserts into
the hollow screw, and it's glued in place. To make this even more fun,
I have a 2:00 meeting on campus that afternoon, and it's one I don't
want to miss and shouldn't miss. I may go with my ice pack.
After one more week of classes, I'm on break for a week. I figure
that's my recovery time from the surgery since I was first putting ice
packs and then hot packs on my jaw for more than a week after round one.
ME: take a break
Whew, you make my head spin - and my jaw hurt! Good luck with all that
craziness. This is just a little 20 seconds worth of relaxation. I
have an aunt and uncle (hosts of our huge Thanksgivings since time
immemorial) who unload a variety of things on my brother Steven to put
up on ebay. These just ended last night. Here's one of the item
descriptions:
>This is a very old ,antique , birthday card that is most unusual. It
has a picture of a young blackface lady with umbrella, and a "real" pair
of diamond earrings.(Pretty sure they are rhinestones.) The verse is
written in old ebonics, that could be offensive , so be aware of this
before purchasing.
Steven's ebay id is sbs51, if you wanted to see the auctions, but that
would take you beyond your allotted 20 seconds. They all went to the
same buyer, who I think got a good price.
ME: otto of the silver hand
Thanks! Looking forward to reading the book and adding to my Howard
Pyle collection. Don
ME: It struck me that I already have the recording of Summerset Follies
with Phyllis conducting. Still, tracking down that DAT may turn up
other discoveries.
Maybe I jumped in right at the most confusing spot in all the wav files,
but how's this for a headscratcher: the version of Volta up on the web
is not to be found in Tango_Renaiss.wav . Any chance you did a cut
instead of a copy when extracting that for the web? Not a big deal in
itself, but will cause lots of confusion if it happens elsewhere in the
collection.
Still, I think I've now got all the WGS recordings that you had, which
gives me a little more fortitude in approaching Kevin again for the ones
he has.
About the trio material, my basic position is that it's very inefficient
for each one of us to go off on his own with it. It would be very nice
to create "best final edits", but that would involve lots of work.
Still, it may be worth it if we have in mind to "do something" with it.
About the only thing that comes to my mind is putting up on the web
everything that we're proud of and can get permission for. As far as
I'm concerned, if a publisher doesn't respond, that is tacit permission.
Heck, even if we didn't ask for permission, we haven't done anything
wrong, and we've given the publisher free advertising.
ME: I began a "search engine optimization" campaign, to the best of my
understanding, on my web site several months ago. This involves not
only modifications to the page contents, but also to the filenames.
Using one example, mykumon.htm became kumon.htm for the extra advantage
in web searches on "kumon". (Google doesn't see the "kumon" in
"mykumon".)
Basically, I'm wondering if there's any advice on the best way to get
the new page to kick in and pick up where the old one left off, so to
speak. In this example, I want kumon.htm to "take over" mykumon.htm
(which had a page rank of 3, for what it's worth.)
I've retained a tiny mykumon.htm page which just directs the visitor to
the new kumon.htm . I wanted to keep mykumon.htm for the sake of links
and bookmarks pointing to it, and to pass its page rank on to the new
page. (I don't pretend to have a great understanding of page rank.)
But after several months, Google still seems fixated on mykumon.htm .
It still has the full mykumon.htm cached, and that concerns me because
I'm afraid the contents are similar enough to the new kumon.htm that
Google sees them as duplicate pages and ignores kumon.htm.
Is there anything to my concerns? Or is it just a matter of waiting for
kumon.htm to "get out of the sandbox"? I've used one example here, but
it applies to dozens of my pages. Any advice would be greatly
appreciated.
THEE: Those cards remind me of many of the old sheet music covers and a
few of the cakewalk postcards I've seen. Those aren't exactly what
I've attached, but I think you'll enjoy their variety. This is part of
a collection I've saved to my computer from eBay, so they are small
files and should be easy to open at home.
I've now finished all the midterm exams for five courses, and grades are
pretty decent--not as many F's as usual and a smattering of A's and
B+'s, albeit only a smattering. My boss, the Associate Dean of Liberal
Arts, once observed, "I see that you had no A's last semester." I
expected to be chewed out for being too tough and contributing more than
my share to the college atrition rate. Instead, she added, "That's
probably as it should be. Your students aren't A students." When I
have one of those A students, I'm happy. When I have a B or C student
who tells me how much he or she (usually) has gained self-confidence by
succeeding in college classes, I'm thrilled. They are the reason that I
don't go batty dealing with the students I can't reach.
THEE: subject Fer cryin' out loud
No bids on the poker playin' sea creatures . . . What a pity!
THEE: I went searching through some backup disks and found mp3's for WGS
recordings: Sommerset Follies & some other Follies (Duarte?). Still
don't know where the wave files are, though. I clicked through the tape
dump files and didn't find these either. Strange that of the missing
files 3 are WGS recordings? A continuing mystery. Well -- do you have
these 2 MP3 files? If not I can post for you to download (around 6 &
5.5MB).
ME: I have the Summerset Follies on cd already. I had an email ready to
go, but didn't go online last night. I'll just stick it on below. I'm
confused by "Follies (Duarte?)" since Summerset Follies was by Duarte.
I think it's not likely it's the one conducted by Kevin, but it's not
impossible he sent it to you for some reason. Any chance you could fire
them up to at least determine if one of the other is Phyllis's
Summerset? That would be a lot of downloading to determine I don't need
one, or either.
THEE: hey donald
this is in regards to ur web article
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/7049/roll.htm
[now http://www.donaldsauter.com/rolling-circles.htm ]
i have known about this for quite a long time, but do u have a
mathematical proof or derivation for this? i have searching for the same
(after unsuccessfully trying to derive it myself).
it would be gr88 help.
ME: I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I don't have a proof. I
suppose I always figured that there was a simple and elegant way to
demonstrate it, along the lines of proving the total number of degrees
in the interior angles of a polygon of n sides, but I never tried it.
If you say you've searched for a proof, and tried yourself
unsuccessfully, I'm intrigued. Might it be not so trivial?
THEE: Hello Donald, Glad you thought to take a look. Did you see the
valentine cards befor they ended? Had one group of 5 go for $27.00,
another for $10.51. Thought that was great. Got lots of lead soldiers
going up . I think there will be interest in them. PS Let your friend
know those sea creatures are still available, and think of the money she
can save in shipping if you pick up! Saw the family today. Played some
cards and had a little meal. Pop seemed to be in good shape. He's been
to the Dr. for prostate problems. They drained 3 1/2 quarts from him. I
think it was 7up .
ME:
>PS Let your friend know those sea creatures are still available, and
think of the money she can save in shipping if you pick up!
She lives in Oklahoma. Think of how much *I'd* lose in shipping.
>Pop seemed to be in good shape. He's been to the Dr. for prostate
problems. They drained 3 1/2 quarts from him. I think it was 7up .
How much of this is not a joke?
THEE:
re: "It would be very nice to create "best final edits" ... "
Some of our stuff I haven't posted to the web is because of glaring
glitches that, if corrected, I'd be glad to see up. One other
consideration, though, is the 'mastering' of these files for creation of
either CDs or mp3's. Software packages handle this differently, to
varying degrees of success. An interesting place to see this is at the
site below. Note they are comparing success at converting audio from
96KHz to 44.1KHz, which we don't need done, but I'm sure any other mild
mastering (e. g., slight compression) or conversion to mp3 is done
better or worse by the packages. See:
http://src.infinitewave.ca/
re: permission -- of those that answered, only the Paulsen-Bahnsen
publisher didn't want more than 2 min. up (so we should exclude from
this publisher; don't remember what else is from them). Of those that
didn't respond, I thought it best to go with an excerpt vs. all
movements ( e.g. -- 1 movement from Kruisbrink vs. all movements).
Orphee, though, gave permission & wondered why we didn't put the whole
piece up. If you wanted to go ahead and seek permission from other
publishers, feel free.
THEE: subject RE: thanks!
Hi, Going to cross my claws and see how "Un Bel Di" sounds. Might have
to put it up a key. We'll see. Thanx again for the Lyric CDs. Hope you
are well. Clux, O~~
ME: Nice to hear from you, and good luck with Un Bel Di!
I still feel bad about that messed up record - probably my worst
transfer to cd :( Murphy's law at its finest...
My transfer tonight was a nice old RCA Camden lp of Miliza Korjus. That
was obviously a collection of old 78s.
78 ->lp ->cd ->what next?
THEE: subject different Follies mp3
Don: It's definitely a different "Follies" (see link below -- this is
a 1MB extract of the 1st minute):
http://www.dcguitar.net/WGS/MP3/FolliesExtract.mp3
Or, if you want the whole file (5.5 MB):
http://www.dcguitar.net/WGS/MP3/Follies.mp3
ME: Will look into this. If it's not Kevin's session, then I wonder
what it could be.
THEE: All true , Pop went from 215 pounds to 198 after draining him.
He's got to see a urologist. You'd never know hes sick to look at him.
THEE:
>Thanks for the recommendation; sounds very useful. My prejudice going
into it will be, if he's promoting the idea that evolution is the result
of dna strands gone awry, then we are back to the wild theory that
*nobody* has ever take seriously - that the information for all the
species that have ever formed and will ever be formed was all contained
in the dna of the very first life form.
I think I've missed your point, but isn't this rather like saying that
when, say, Intel create a microchip, all possible future software
applications that will ever be written are contained in its design?
>Not to mention, all the messed-up fruit flies with big red eyes and
legs sticking out of their heads they've produced with radiation have
absolutely *nothing* to do with darwinian micro-step evolution.
Again I'm not really sure I understand the context. Are you saying that
you don't believe it's possible for significant anatomical changes to
happen due to natural genetic mutation, or that such mutations could not
survive natural selection? Or something different again?
(If somebody is performing random genetic mutations on fruit flies and
hoping to observe "useful" side-effects then they are likely to be
waiting a long time, but I don't think that's the point you are making).
>>My interpretation of the difference between God and Nature is the
supposition of intelligence or purpose. I think that it is possible to
conceive a physics which is utterly simple and all the complexity we
observe derives from sheer vastness of numbers. By invoking an
intelligent God as an axiom, to me nothing seems to have been explained.
>I agree with the last sentence completely, although it's not impossible
that "the ultimate high power" will make itself known to us some day and
demonstrate its powers unequivocably, by changing physical laws, for
example, or whipping up new universes in front of our eyes. Of course,
I'm not holding my breath for that. I'll die just like everybody else,
wondering what the heck is going on. Try as I might, I don't see how
any physics, no matter how "utterly simple" will explain anything. The
*best* science can do is describe, it does not and has never
"explained". Let's just suppose the string theorists do come up with
something that "explains" all physical laws. Aren't we then left with,
why are there strings? As for me, if all the universe were nothing but
completely empty space, I still couldn't imagine the whys and wherefors
of such a ridiculously complicated universe. Why should there be empty
space, even?
I appreciate that this is probably unorthodox, and certainly not
complete, but I'll offer the closest to an explanation I have been able
to come up with so far.
My axiom is that Mathematics exists. Within maths there exist *patterns*
of all kinds. My claim is that some of these patterns can somehow
translate into something we could recognise as "physics". This is the
hardest conceptual leap to make, and I'd really like to be able to
understand/explain better what it means. Once the physics exists, there
emerge certain stable fundamentals, be they strings or particles/forces
or whatever, which have the property of persistence which leads to
universe(s) which look like the one we live in. The question "why"
simply never existed until something came along which became able to ask
it.
>Thanks. I hardly get any guestbook comments anymore. It's not like in
the *old* days . . .
Do you have any feel for why that might be? Technology moved on and
people spending their on-line time doing things other than browsing
personal web sites? I don't have a web site but would assume you'd get
more traffic as more people go on-line.
>P.S. Before shooting this off, I see I mispoke when I said I'll die
like everyone else "wondering what's going on". I think many, maybe
most, people have come to believe that science explains everything, or
at least is on track to do so, when, for example, nobody anywhere can
explain why two bodies move toward each other. We have a sophisticated-
sounding word for it, yes . . .
Personally I suspect that there are at least as many people who won't
die wondering what's going on because they believe that their theology
explains everything. I agree that it's deluded to feel that science has
answered all the questions. Indeed I couldn't say that I'm certain it
will ever do so in the future. But to me the whole point of science is
that the more questions we ask, and try to answer in a scientific way,
the more likely we are to improve our understanding.
THEE: subject Re: What IS a good math program then?
Do you give such detailed responses to everyone who happens to visit
your website? Thanks for you time and thoughts on math programs.
Why don't you come up with one? I think you have a good feel for what
the kids may need. When you have a good background in one program, as
you do in Kumon, and you've seen the good and the bad and what it lacks,
I think it's doable.
I've seen ads for the Indian Math Program. I'll check it out. If you
need to check out any other math programs, I've been hearing good things
about Singapore Math. I want to check that one out too. Good luck with
your search. (It sounds like you are...) I'll let you know if I find
anything.
ME:
>Do you give such detailed responses to everyone who happens to visit
your website? Thanks for you time and thoughts on math programs.
You're more than welcome. I always wish I could be more helpful.
Actually, only a tiny, tiny fraction of visitors stop to send a message.
>Why don't you come up with one? I think you have a good feel for what
the kids may need. When you have a good background in one program, as
you do in Kumon, and you've seen the good and the bad and what it lacks,
I think it's doable.
I'm sure I'm not as qualified to do it as you think. And if I were,
it's something that would still take years. And if it were accepted
anywhere, it would just be supereceded by the next thing in a year. I
spend a goodly portion of my life beating my head against various walls
(must be in my dna; take a look at my tribute page to my mother for a
clue as to where it may have come from :) In education, my "thing" is
adding a one-on-one component for *all* students in every elementary
school. The requirements for the position would be, a) was top-notch
student, b) natural ability to connect with kids, c) at least
15 years of real-world experience, d) no course work in education. This
would make a killer combination with the classroom work. I claim it
wouldn't cost schools an extra cent, as there are positions of far less
importance on any faculty.
Me, I'd do it for minimum wage and no benefits. Somehow, the education
establishment has still not beat down my door.
ME: strike 4
That page with the Verbena de la Paloma libretto only had a measly 5
songs on it - the insert to my record has more than that! And keep in
mind, it's only "the greatest zarzuela of all time."
The web didn't answer my question about the username/password problem
with Stowetel.
The web didn't indicate whether PeoplePC is any good, or if it's a virus
itself.
The web didn't shed any light on "online companies going back to
1969".
Good try, though! :)
Man, this computer is acting like it's been injected with some Adult ADD
drugs! Even my Wordstar word processor is on speed.
Looking forward to the Opera Scraps session!
Don
ME: to Johann Strauss Society,
I found myself at your faq looking for info on "One day when we were
young". Thanks for the good information. Mike O'Sullivan wrote:
>Sadly, I dont know whether a recording of the 1938 version (transposed
to 3/4 time) was ever made - Ive never come across one myself.
Is the Miliza Korjus rendition preserved on an old lp, "The Voice of
Miliza Korjus" (RCA Camden CAL 279) what he's looking for? (Don't know
whether I'm hearing 3/4 or 6/8.) The lp tracks are from older 78s, of
course.
ME: I put up my parts of that talk.origins thread I mentioned on a web
page. It's no great deal, but if you're interested:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/god-delusion.htm
>>if he's promoting the idea that evolution is the result of dna strands
gone awry, then we are back to the wild theory that *nobody* has ever
take seriously - that the information for all the species that have ever
formed and will ever be formed was all contained in the dna of the very
first life form.
>I think I've missed your point, but isn't this rather like saying that
when, say, Intel create a microchip, all possible future software
applications that will ever be written are contained in its design?
Yes, I think that is an almost perfect analogy. If an old microchip,
left in the elements to corrode and rust and get stepped on, etc.,
naturally evolved into a more sophisticated, next-generation microchip,
then I would be more likely to accept that something analogous happens
with dna. But old microchips don't degrade into something better.
>>Not to mention, all the messed-up fruit flies with big red eyes and
legs sticking out of their heads they've produced with radiation have
absolutely *nothing* to do with darwinian micro-step evolution.
>Again I'm not really sure I understand the context. Are you saying that
you don't believe it's possible for significant anatomical changes to
happen due to natural genetic mutation, or that such mutations could not
survive natural selection?
Yes, the latter. Try as I might, I cannot conceive of how the
probabilities would ever allow the mutant to pass on its anatamical
change (singular) and sire so many descendents that they would somehow
strangle out all the members of the species without that one new
anatomical change. Even the former strikes me as somewhat far-fetched.
Those extreme cases of fruit fly mutation are the result of intense
efforts to mess up their dna. Do we often, if ever, see anything like
it among humans or other animals or plants? I wouldn't think so - I
haven't - but I'm no expert.
>(If somebody is performing random genetic mutations on fruit flies and
hoping to observe "useful" side-effects then they are likely to be
waiting a long time,
Why should it take a long time to produce one useful side effect, given
the millions(?) of fruit flies that have been zapped by now? If
evolution works as advertised, why don't we see useful mutations
occurring all the time in nature?
>>Thanks. I hardly get any guestbook comments anymore. It's not like
in the *old* days . . .
>Do you have any feel for why that might be? Technology moved on and
people spending their on-line time doing things other than browsing
personal web sites? I don't have a web site but would assume you'd get
more traffic as more people go on-line.
My gut feeling is, yes, people spend much less time on personal web
sites. I know I do. I've corresponded with Google and pleaded with
them to brainstorm a way to get interesting, content-heavy pages near
the top of a search hit list, or maybe add a "no commercial pages"
filter, or maybe implement an "exact keyword" meta-tag, and allow the
searcher to click on a link to see *just* pages with the *exact* keyword
specified. I know I'm not saying that clearly. Using "scrabble" as an
example, I have what I think is a page that would be interesting to many
scrabble buffs that doesn't even make Google's hit list on the word
"scrabble". (They stop after 900 and some.) I would like people who
type the single word "scrabble" to have a chance to find it, and then
vote it up or down the list with a "Was this page useful?" sort of
button.
I've rarely taken a look at the traffic my site receives, figuring what
I don't know can't hurt me, but it seems in the "old days" I would get
about 500 visitors a day, with spikes of a thousand after a discussion
group post, and now it might be closer to 400.
>But to me the whole point of science is that the more questions we ask,
and try to answer in a scientific way, the more likely we are to improve
our understanding.
Agreed, 100%.
THEE: subject found the problem
I figured out what the problem is -- there aren't 2 Follies -- I named
one file Sommerset,mp3 and it's really the Tango (that Phyllis
directed). Sorry for the confusion!
THEE: Never woulda thunk it . . .
DIEGO VARAGIC & VIS SMELI(CARL PERKINS)YUGO ROCK`N`ROLL Current bid:
US $9.99 (0 bids) Shipping: Not Specified End date: Mar-20-07 19:31:09
PDT
EP DIEGO VARAGIC
(`RTB` EP 50279)
DIEGO VARAGIC was excellent Yugoslavian singer from 60`s. He recorded
some EP`s with his covers of popular worldwide songs. This EP has the
following songs: 1. Lutke (cover of `Les Marionnettes` by Christophe;
2. Na Nasem Uglu (cover of `Mes Mains Sur Tes Hanches` by S. Adamo);
3. Krcma Na Putu Za Tenesi (cover of `They Gotta Quit Kickin` My Dog
Around` by C. Perkins); 4. Ako Dodjes (cover of `Meme Si Tu Revenais`
by B. Kesslair). He sang those songs on Yugoslavian language. He
recorded those songs with the bands: Soprani; Koral; Smeli. Paper
picture sleeve is near mint. Vinyl is excellent (graded visually). He
recorded this EP in
1967.
THEE: subject tablature
Bonjour, donaldsauter,
scuse me sir but i don't arrive to read your tablature , wich send not
be in accord with the tuning of baroc guitar
it's writed like a vihuela ...
can you explain me
if you can in french
tanks best regards
THEE: subject Re: Comments on your web site
>I put up my parts of that talk.origins thread I mentioned on a web
page. It's no great deal, but if you're interested:
> http://www.donaldsauter.com/god-delusion.htm
"The point is, if evolution is science, shouldn't it be able to make
predictions?"
This is an interesting question. One answer is "Yes, it should and it
does: given certain conditions - namely (1) reproduction with inherited
characteristics (2) some source of variation, usually provided by
mutations in the copying process (3) competition for limited resources
("natural selection") - we can expect the replicator to adapt to become
ever more adept at reproducing in its environment."
But I suspect that is not as specific a prediction as you were hoping
for :). It's certainly not "F=ma". But remember that, as soon as you
have 3 bodies in gravitational interaction, it's impossible to write
equations of motion for the bodies. Yes, impossible. We can create
models, to whatever degree of accuracy we require. But we can't write a
mathematical equation. So, in that respect, it's not at all surprising
that evolution can't make 'specific' predictions. Again, we can create
models...
"If evolutionists won't touch this question, is anybody working on it?"
Dawkins himself is certainly happy to take on the question, and does so
from many different angles in the "God Delusion", some from a very
evolution-oriented perspective and others from stances unrelated to
evolution.
My personal belief is that it is theoretical physicists who have the
best chance of finding a satisfactory description of the ultimate
origin. As for an *explanation*, see my previous speculation about the
origin of "why".
>Yes, the latter. Try as I might, I cannot conceive of how the
probabilities would ever allow the mutant to pass on its anatamical
change (singular) and sire so many descendents that they would somehow
strangle out all the members of the species without that one new
anatomical change. Even the former strikes me as somewhat far-fetched.
I think this is an important point. The key requirement is that the
mutation in some respect increases (in some way, no matter how small)
the mutant's expected number of offspring relative to the non-mutants.
No more and no less. Given that as the definition, it follows that once
the mutant gene begins to spread, after some amount of time (which may
be very large), it must eventually strangle out the non-mutant gene
(assuming that the environment hasn't changed in the mean time).
>Why should it take a long time to produce one useful side effect, given
the millions(?) of fruit flies that have been zapped by now? If
evolution works as advertised, why don't we see useful mutations
occurring all the time in nature?
Essentially I think because in general the numbers involved really are
huge.
>Using "scrabble" as an example, I have what I think is a page that
would be interesting to many scrabble buffs that doesn't even make
Google's hit list on the word "scrabble". (They stop after 900 and
some.) I would like people who type the single word "scrabble" to have a
chance to find it, and then vote it up or down the list with a "Was this
page useful?" sort of button.
I'd seen your web site and hadn't even found the scrabble section yet!
Thanks for the tip - I will be sure to take a look.
As for Google, I agree that having some kind of "was this useful?"
feedback mechanism would be great. My guess is that they've done the
research and convinced themselves that there just aren't enough people
like you and me that would bother to provide the feedback to make it
worthwhile.
ME: scrabble and democracy . . .
. . . unbeatable in their own rights, but even I wouldn't suggest mixing them. Here's how to avoid scrabble riots:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/scrabble.htm
[That was a facetious response to a Don Flood column about a scrabble
experience with his family.]
ME:
>I think this is an important point. The key requirement is that the
mutation in some respect increases (in some way, no matter how small)
the mutant's expected number of offspring relative to the non-mutants.
No more and no less. Given that as the definition, it follows that once
the mutant gene begins to spread, after some amount of time (which may
be very large), it must eventually strangle out the non-mutant gene
(assuming that the environment hasn't changed in the mean time).
This brings to mind the argument I make in my main evolution page
regarding Wilt Chamberlain and whether his mutation will give rise to a
7-foot species of humans - or, even if he might be the first baby step
towards a 100-foot species of humans. That sure sounds to me like what
the biologists are saying. If you've got the inclination, just search
on "wilt" in this page:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/evolution-faq.htm
>>"If evolutionists won't touch this question, is anybody working on
it?"
>Dawkins himself is certainly happy to take on the question, and does so
from many different angles in the "God Delusion", some from a very
evolution-oriented perspective and others from stances unrelated to
evolution.
Thanks again for another good reason to check the book out.
ME: a penny saved spoils the broth
A lot of this might be a bit stale by now, but I'll bet you can handle
it.
I used the 1878 pease pudding recipe to make my pease porridge. (The
dollar store was out of pudding bags?) It used one potato. Grading on
a very generous curve, it was was ok-. I kind of knew from previous
experience that no amount of soaking and no amount of cooking will
actually get dried beans or peas soft for me. Something about the water
in the two places I've lived?
You sent me a link or two to The Old Foodie; he's quite amazing if he
can turn out something like that daily! I enjoyed the column on Samuel
Pepys and pease porridge.
>Let's see . . . pease porridge, curds and whey, four and twenty
blackbirds baked in a pie
Our family had curd regularly. It was made by the old Germans who had
the farm back the lane. I never liked it, being a picky eater. I'm
forgetting if curd is 100% synonymous with cottage cheese, but if so, I
still don't like it.
About the blackbird pie, do you know "the rest of the story"?
http://fairy-tales.classic-literature.co.uk/frank-l-baum-mother-goose-in-prose/ebook-page-03.asp
You might remember me pulling my hair out trying to figure out where I
saw the Tom Thumb Alphabet in my collection. Never did find it, after
many page-by-page searches. Best guess is that I stumbled on it in a
web search that completely left my mind. I mention it because in my
desperate efforts to find it in one of my books I came across a couple
of neat little Mother Goose- related items. One was the poem Little Boy
Blue by Eugene Field. Do you know it?
http://www.bartleby.com/104/5.html
The other was a humorous, one-column story in my Twilight Zone Magazine
called "Hickory, Dickory, Dock". The mouse had been performing his
routine "since 1620" but had a go-round with "Mother" when, on this
particular evening, there was a fat Tabby lurking below.
I'd missed a lot of auctions this winter, but am back in the groove now.
There was a set of Junior Classics there yesterday, but it was missing
volumes VII and X. That gave me enough of an excuse not to add it to my
collection, but whoever bought that lot left it and a bunch of books
behind, so I scavenged it. Glad I did. This is the 1912 version and
it's completely different from and much larger than the 1949 edition I
have. I already have it indexed (might attach the index to this email)
and have read a few things. I'd like to read it from beginning to end,
but am particularly intrigued by Vol IX - Stories of Today.
A recent opera I'd been playing was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. That
picks up after the riddle of the Sphinx, so I got the whole story out of
Vol II - Folk Tales and Myths. For what it's worth (not much!), the
Oedipus story had a spot that reminded me so much of the TZ Magazine
story "The Burden of Indigo". During Oedipus' final days of wandering,
"the hope sprang up in his heart that the gods had not forsaken him, but
would wipe out the stain of his sin... Daily this hope grew stronger
and brighter, and he felt that the days of wandering and expiation were
drawing to a close..."
This telling also uses the phrase "stranger in a strange land" two
times. I seem to remember when that book was a big deal, it was a
matter of interest where the title came from. Have to look into that
next time I'm online. [It's from Exodus.] Also have to research if the
teller of the Robin Hood stories in this set, Mary Macleod, became Mary
Macleod Bethune. I should know something about her by now. I think she
was known as an educator. I saw her statue all the time in a park near
Capitol Hill in D.C. [Two different Marys; not to mention, Ms. Bethune
was "McLeod".]
I also scavenged a nice book of Grimm's fairy tales, needing it like a
hole in the head. Figured it would either replace one of mine or become
a freebie at the office. Unfortunately, it had just enough advantages -
dust jacket and two extra color plates - that I have to keep it. At the
same time, I can't unload the other edition, because that one fits in a
slipcase with a book of Andersen fairy tales. Why is life so cruel . . .
Still reading the 10-volume Wit and Humor of America. In fact, only
half way through volume 4. One of the funny little things I wanted to
pass on was the little trick that Carolyn Wells came up with of
concocting fables with two contradictory morals. Two good examples, The
Two Business Men and The Two Automobilists, are on this page:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:zfiEYxBnEO0J:www.gutenberg.org/files/18734/18734.txt+%22carolyn+wells%22+automobilists&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
Hope that works now. It was a cached google page. Turned out to be
easier for me than using Project Gutenberg directly, which was asking if
I wanted to download this, that or the other. The subject line is one
of Carolyn Wells' Maxioms.
Don't think I mentioned that of the 12 nursery rhymes set to music by
Henry Cowell on those two piano rolls, about the only definite
identification I could make was The Lion and The Unicorn.
L~~ and I had lunch at a new Chinese buffet a couple of weeks ago.
They were playing muzak, or muzak-like, music. Haven't heard it in
years, and it was *fantastic*. One song was from La Boheme. I've never
heard opera done in muzak, and I was paralyzed; couldn't talk or eat or
think or do anything.
Went to a fascinating talk about the whipping post in Delaware a couple
of weeks ago. National outcry against it in the 1900s didn't change
Delaware's mind, but it finally was quietly dropped from the code
without debate or discussion in 1972. The last man sentenced to be
whipped (he wasn't) was 1962. The last whipping was 1952. The last
woman whipped was 1865. Whippings were always only *part* of the
punishment. Thus, that woman was sold into servitude for 5 cents. Even
in 1893 new offenses for whipping were being added to the books. In
1925 reformers pointed out that men were getting whipped for stealing a
pair of shoes, but men who embezzled $200,000 weren't. So upper class
crimes were *added* to the list, and the reform movement threw in the
towel.
Went to see a high school production of L'il Abner a few weeks ago.
That's just about old enough for me.
Saw Mizan's marching band in the St. Patrick's Day parade. That was a
cold day. Mizan's school, Academy of Dover, has been in the papers
regularly for a while due to financial trouble and some questions about
performance. It's a charter school that until recently was run by
Mosaica Education, which is slightly coincidental and ironic. Dr. Iris
Metts was the School Superintendent of Prince George's County, where I
lived. She left that job to go to Mosaica, and I blast her in a web
page, asking, if charter schools have something so great, why not do
what they do in the public schools? Also kind of coincidental that
Metts came to Prince George's after her job as state Superintendent of
Schools in Delaware.
One last anecdoate from the spelling sessions with Mizan. I mentioned
once how funny I always thought the words firstly, secondly, and so on,
are. They came up in our sessions and they struck Mizan the same way.
She said, "Firstly??? Is that a word???" When I assured her it was,
and got her going on secondly and thirdly, she took over and went up
through the -teenthlies all the way to twentiethly, rolling on the floor
laughing.
>Obviously the last two aren't public domain recordings, but I'm not
worried since I'm already including some recordings that are even more
recent. This is purely a family/friends project, and I assume no one
will squeal.
In my opinion, there's nothing to even think about, much less feel
guilty about. It's the same as having a bunch of people over and
playing them records in your collection. If anything, you're doing
advertising, and somebody should pay *you*.
>Worse yet, I fell asleep last weekend watching the Mikado. Gosh, darn,
it seemed to go on for hours and I'd started after 11:00 p.m.
Nothing to be ashamed of, in my book. I never play a whole opera in one
day, except for maybe the real short ones that fit on one record. Maybe
I have Adult ADD, but I think plays, operas and concerts are generally
too long for one sitting. On the other hand, I can see that if they
were crafted for a nice comfortable hour, people might feel like it's
not worth getting dollied up and going out for.
>Never woulda thunk it . . .
>DIEGO VARAGIC & VIS SMELI(CARL PERKINS)YUGO ROCK`N`ROLL
Neat! I had no idea what to expect, or what your interest in Carl
Perkins was. I need to go back and visit the completed auction to see
how high the Carl Perkins fans ran you. I 'spose you sent off a bunch
of frantic messages, "*Cy*, NOT Carl, *Cy*!" [No bids??? Gonna get it
off itunes?]
>No bids on the poker playin' sea creatures . . . What a pity!
Steven says they're still available :) Last weekend I heard the whole
history of that objet d'arte(?). My cousin's wife got it from a friend
for dogsitting for 3 or 4 days. You can imagine their thrill. They
found a souvenir petrified iguana or something on a vacation and gave
that to the friend. The plan backfired, as she loved it, and has it
hanging in the middle of her living room. My sister-in-law hauled out
the trusty old, "Don't you hate when that happens?"
Got a Howard Pyle book, "Otto of the Silver Hand" off ebay recently.
I'm enjoying it, even though it includes an amputation. It's off-
screen, but still, it's something I've always been very uncomfortable
with.
Had another round of problems with my ISP Stowetel and finally said
enough is enough. I set up an account with PeoplePC figuring that, even
though it's twice as expensive, at least it offers a little more than
Stowetel did, in particular, the accelerated page retrieval for dial-up.
Don't know if I'll get used to PeoplePC; I despise their attitude that
"We can do whatever we want in your computer." For instance, they
completely redid my setup of Internet Explorer. I finally got that back
the way I want it, but there are other little things. Since then, I've
found some other $5 isps that look perfectly legitimate, so I might
change again soon.
I got an email from someone who wanted a tiny chunk of Antarctica. I'm
inclined to be generous, but he wouldn't say what he wanted it for, so I
let the email exchange fizzle out.
>>My biggest surprises were the earthy language in The History of Tom
Thumb, and the main character in The Three Bears was an old woman.
>Whiteylocks?
Good one, but not a complete joke. The main character soon came to be
called Silver-Hair. In 1849 a storyteller made her a young girl. (The
original was 1837). Try as I might, though, I can't figure out whether
the introductory material is saying "Silver-Hair" ever applied to the
old woman, or was devised for the young girl. Silver-Hair became
Silver-Locks in 1858. 1868 saw Golden Hair, and Goldilocks came along
in 1904.
I mentioned a couple of favorite stories from that a book discussion
devoted to fairy tales at the library. You asked if they were on the
web. Here is Kupti and Imani, which was my very favorite, and
independently named by two others. I suppose it's just because Imani is
such a *good* person.
http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/335.htm
THEE: Hi. I just read your thoughts on Kumon as I was about to sign up
my daughter. I agree with most of your opinion of their method ( my
boys did it briefly years ago and hated it). For my daughter,I thought
it might be useful. She is 14, in 8th grade. She had a speech problem
for many years which made reading impossible to learn. Very dyslexic
(whatever that has come to mean these days) Anyway , after two years
through the Lindamood-Bell Learning System she finally learned to read
and do some math when she was 12-13. She is in public school now, but
learning nothing. She has held on to her reading skills, but what
little she learned in math is completely forgotten.. She really needs
to learn from the bottom up, really starting at a K level. Kumon is the
only way I can think of to drill these facts into her head and build a
sequential study. Unless, by chance you have any ideas on better
methods???? I'd appreciate any ideas as you sound like you understand
the teaching of math. Thanks-lisa
ME: To be honest, I think Kumon's lowest math levels might very well
benefit your daughter. It sounds like she's years away from getting
into Kumon's really painful material, and it sounds like you are being
realistic about your daughter just getting her basic number and
arithmetic skills back, for now at least.
You might at least check to see if there is an inexpensive tutor in your
area who knows what "number sense" is. Also, I would guess that there
are good online math programs. A student might find it a lot more
enjoyable typing in answers at a computer than working with "dreary"
paper and pencil. I don't know if Indian Math Online goes that low, but
you might check them out.
THEE: subject Re: White Rabbits and White Guitars
Hi Donald Further info on Jimi and the left handed Fender strat. It's
apocryphal,urban myth an absolutely deceased Norwegian Blue parrot.(more
about the parrots later) But there is a tale to be told.My former next
door neighbour and friend,Gari Brown(no relation)is the guy who done all
of Pimk Floyds lightshows back in the sixties, some people think Gari
invented the the Rock'n'Roll light show. He also worked with Frank
ZappaThe Grateful Dead Cream and Bob Marley and other rock luminaries.In
fact anyone who is anyone 69/70s rock.Gari done the fist light show in
rock for the Floyd back in 1966 at a place called Gandalfs Garden in
London. Like myself he is a Glaswegian.And unlike myself he grew up with
Jack Bruce and was a friend of Davie Mason John Martyn Donovan Leitch
and the great Alex Harvey,who shared a bill with The Silver Beatles back
in the Hamburg days, and his younger brother Les-Excuse the digression
Les Harvey is arguably the only person to realise the Rock'n'Roll dream
of dying on stage(If your interested I'll fill you in on the details
some other time)Apart from doing lights Gari is also an artist,and was
hired by Eric Clapton's new girlfriend Patti Boyd,previously the consort
of George Harrison, to paint a mural at their place along the road from
Jimi's house. While Gari was there painting Patti arrived with a new
white Fender which was given to her by George for Jimi, she said. Eric
was in Montreal with George at the time, so the story goes. This is the
guitar that Jimi played at the Isle of Wight,His last gig, he died
shortly afterwards. That guitar has 'gone missing' and is the subject of
much speculation not least because it is deemed to be very valuable, and
is considered by some to be the 'Holy Grail' of guitars. Others think
the guitar is cursed and it's all too libellious to discuss
here.Apparently there were three guitars in the house when Jimi died,one
was buried with Jimi another was 'acquired' by the detective sergeant
sent to investigate the death.He gave it to his daughter, and she not
realising its significance put up for auction a couple of years back and
was bought by an anonymous buyer.(rumoured to be Paul McCartney Bill
Gates Yoko Ono David Bowie Patti Boyd 'The Japanese' The Mormons The
Scientologists and the list goes on.)The third and final guitar'The
White Guitar' of Isle of Wight fame,played in public only once at Jimi's
last gig, and was destined to be given as a gift to Jimi's father. Thats
the missing guitar. The three main characters in the tale have died, and
the only possible leads(sic) to the whereabouts of the missing guitar
Jimi, Monika Danneman and the policeman.A real Rock'n'Roll mystery. If I
hear anything more I'll keep you informed. Now for the surreal tale of
the green parrots The English county of Surrey the preferred shire of
the rich and famous and one time home county of the aforementioned Jimi
Hendrix. Young Mr Hendrix was once given a gift of two green parrots'
one male and one female, to help decorate and add to the style of his
new abode in poshest Surrey. But Jimi couldn't abide keeping the
creatures caged and released them into the wild.Today there are some
30,000 green parrots resident in poshest Surrey The natives are getting
jolly cross and are demanding a cull of the aforementioned polly's.
Others are threatening to defend the parrots not least because they are
a part of Rock 'n'Roll history.And yet some others argue that that is
how various species propagate and survive. Thats how rabbits arrived in
Britain, the Romans brought some as pets and they made it into the
wildand now there are millions of them. They breed like themselves
apparently.Catch it on the news. Best wishes, Duncan. PS there is such
a thing as a left handed Fender Strat. Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd has
one. Gari told me he is left handed but plays right handed in public
because he taught himself to play that way because he never had a left
handed guitar when he started playing as a young lad,
ME: Dear This Old House,
I have a 19-year-old double-wide manufactured home in Dover, Delaware.
I am almost certain I could increase my comfort, lower my utility bills,
and simplify my life by converting everything - furnace, water heater,
and stove - from gas to electricity. I have struck out miserably with
contractors in the area in my first step of installing a packaged heat
pump. It seems I am doing something very out of the ordinary and they
don't want anything to do with it. The second part of the idea is even
more "radical" - on-demand hot water, since I only run a bit of hot
water once or twice a day. Again, this just isn't done in this part of
the country.
If I'm wrong about the benefits or feasibility of this plan to convert
to electricity, could someone lay out calculations on paper showing I'm
wrong? It seems that in these matters, gut feelings rule.
Thanks for any help or advice.
THEE: subject Re: White Rabbits and White Guitars
Hi Donald. Thanks for the email. Dont know anything about Bellshill
other than that Sheena Easton comes from there and that she and another
lassie called Sharleen Spiteri who fronts a band called Texas once acted
as baby sitters for my daughter at my friend Gari's house when I was
busy attending the opening night of an art exhibition I was having in
Paisley. The Exhibition was of poetry Illuminations and Rock 'n'
lyrics(if your interested I'll send you some images) I'm trying to keep
up with 'Jimi's parrots' at the moment.The parrot cull has taken own a
life of its own with many references to Monty Python are appearing
various media outlets.The trend is to try and involve Paul McCartney,and
his newly estanged wife, as both are animal lovers and have property in
the area. And you can see where that is heading its quite vicious on the
quiet.The divorce is a fairly serious 'who side are you on' media frenzy
over here.With Jimi, parrots ,Paul,Stella, the memory of Linda animal
welfare, vegetarianism. John George and Ringo, sex Rock.n,Roll and mega
millions. iits tabloid heaven. I might write a play about it, Thats what
iIdo I am a writer and artist by professionAnd rock'.'roll is the
subject.Im taking an exhibition of poetry illumination and Rock'n' roll
lyric pictiures and a play about Elvis and Marylym Monroe to The
Edinburgh Festival in August 2008. I'll send you a poster and a
catalogue when ithey're done. In the meantime take care and watch out
for the parrots
THEE: Independent, Mar 15 2007 RING-NECKED PARAKEET: Flying high
Legend has it that Jimi Hendrix, during his late-Sixties London sojourn,
released a pair of parakeets in Carnaby Street, since when these lurid
green, long-tailed parrots have added a dash of the exotic to the
capital's swinging bird scene. Apocryphal, of course, but in any case,
they would have escaped from captivity. They number around 30,000 across
London, and have been recorded in as many sites as the ailing house
sparrow. They are long-lived, eat berries and fruit, and roost in tree-
holes. Their shrill squawk may be your first sign that they are hanging
out near you. They have been seen in Leeds and Sheffield.
THEE: Oh, you might also want to check out the Library of Congress' new
newspaper archive. Idiotic, crummy printing system. Every newspaper
archive I've used previously yielded better results. H~~ sent the
official release statement the day after the release. She gets in on
all sorts of neat stuff from the archivists listserv.
http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/
ME:
>Unfortunately, no time right now since I'm still hustling to get ready
for tomorrow's classes after doing too many other things during "break"
this past week.
No problem whatsoever. Responding instantly to incoming emails is your
own ragtime rule. (I think that means excellent.) Glad you found a few
things that looked worth revisiting.
>Just assume it's yesterday . . . better make that Saturday since it's
already Monday at your end.
Actually, about 9 min after Monday when I opened the email.
>http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/
Does anybody else see that as chronic linga 'merica?
Forgot to mention that I have a regular student at the adult literacy
center now. He's a young man named Y~~, and we have a good time. I
took in one of my favorite kids' book called "We Were Tired Of Living In
A House", which has a touch of poetry to it. Y~~ did a page or two
in a mild sort of rap.
Saw the owner of the house across the street putting on a new roof this
afternoon, and went over to volunteer my services. It's not like
putting on roofs is my favorite activity, just that it's so backbreaking
miserable that neighbors should all pitch in. I'll help out again for a
few hours tomorrow morning, then to the literacy center, then to the
auction.
THEE: subject Hard day's night chord
Yo, donald, I was searching for that "lost chord" from Hard Day's Night
and I came upon your discussion. Has that discussion ended yet? If so,
what was the ultimate verdict. If anyone is interested, I have a
suggestion:
3
6
5
3
5
3
I may well be far too late (and/or totally wrong) but there you go.
Thanks for an interesting article.
ME: I like it! I'll definitely add it to the page - unless you don't
think you can handle the fame (ha ha).
THEE: Our Director March
I have a favor to ask. I am a performer (guitar, mandolin, early banjo ,
English guittar) of earlier American music and my wife (a singer) and I
have been putting together a program that would greatly benefit from the
inclusion of "Our Director". It is part of a more long-term project of
music connected to our hometown (Salem MA).
I was quite pleased to find the tablature that you posted (thanks for
that) but would still prefer to see the actual sheet music.
Do you have a copy of it that you could scan and send as a pdf? or
would you mail me a photocopy? I would certainly cover copying and
postage.
I would be happy to respond "in kind" also. I have a modest but
interesting collection of old and out of print plucked instrument music
as well. Perhaps there is something in my own collection that you would
be interested to have a copy of... If so, what kind of things might you
be looking for?
I appreciate your attention in this matter.
Again, thanks for posting the tab.
ME: I'd be happy to mail you a hard copy. Just email me a mailing
address.
I don't know if you could have made use of the optional guitar
acccompaniment to Our Director, but the Library of Congress did not have
it, as far as I could see.
THEE: A living gale is better than a dead calm.
>I kind of knew from previous experience that no amount of soaking and
no amount of cooking will actually get dried beans or peas soft for me.
Something about the water in the two places I've lived?
Don't think it's the water. Did you soak them overnight? Lentils get
soft, peas not quite so soft, beans . . . I've had little luck. I
learned a yellow split pea soup from S~~ that I like. It's pureed
in the blender. Just when I thought I was learning something Sardinian,
he confessed to making up the recipe. He's a good cook.
>About the blackbird pie, do you know "the rest of the story"?
>http://fairy-tales.classic-literature.co.uk/frank-l-baum-mother-goose-in-prose/ebook-page-03.asp
Neat story! I recall a picture in an old book of mine in which those
heads are peeking out of the crust.
>I mention it because in my desperate efforts to find it in one of my
books I came across a couple of neat little Mother Goose- related items.
One was the poem Little Boy Blue by Eugene Field. Do you know it?
> http://www.bartleby.com/104/5.html
Nope! You dig up some pretty surprising things.
>A recent opera I'd been playing was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex.
I was on a Greek tragedy kick for a couple of years after my
introduction in Denmark. I'll never forget the night that my Danish
family and I went to the movie theater to see Elektra. It was a black
and white film, filmed in Greece . . . in Greek . . . and with Danish
subtitles. I could make out a Danish word here and there. Amazingly,
I understood quite a bit by watching, and it has an intermission,
allowing for the best English speakers of the family to fill me in. I
loved the story, though, and started reading Greek tragedies after I got
home. I guess that lasted the next couple of summers because I didn't
have much time during school.
Over the years, when I've taught Introduction to Literature, I've often
taught Antigone. It's one that holds up well today with its conflict
between the king's law and God's law.
>Went to see a high school production of L'il Abner a few weeks ago.
That's just about old enough for me.
So high schools are still performing L'il Abner. Amazing . . . I'll
bet most of my students don't know L'il Abner. But, then, they don't
know Fidel Castro, either.
>She said, "Firstly??? Is that a word???" When I assured her it was,
and got her going on secondly and thirdly, she took over and went up
through the -teenthlies all the way to twentiethly, rolling on the floor
laughing.
Twenty-firstly, I'm with her.
>Got a Howard Pyle book, "Otto of the Silver Hand" off ebay recently.
I'm enjoying it, even though it includes an amputation. That happens
"off-screen", but still, it's something I've always been very
uncomfortable with.
I regularly shut my eyes during movies. I draw the line at most
contemporary war movies, regardless of the nature of the war. I don't
see a point in severed body parts on the big screen . . . or exploding
heads.
>Hope the dental surgery went well. I guess you just finished up your
week break?
It beats an amputation. :-)
I wait a few more months for the bone to tighten around the threads, and
then the tooth is made, the cap comes off, and a post on the tooth
inserts into the hollow screw. This is one strange procedure. Hard as
it is to believe, this was done with local anesthetic and no pain at the
time or after. The worst part was the series of gradually widening
drill bits. By the last, the vibration made me think of a jack hammer
in my mouth.
into bed tonight around 10:00 with a novel I'm reading (Rilla Askew's
Fire in Beulah),
Intense and very well-written novel set here at the time of the Tulsa
Race Riot.
THEE:
>I mentioned a couple of favorite stories from that a book discussion
devoted to fairy tales at the library. You asked if they were on the
web. Here is Kupti and Imani, which was my very favorite, and
independently named by two others. I suppose it's just because Imani is
such a *good* person.
> http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/335.htm
Sweet story. If only we could really turn a penny into straight legs,
gold pieces, nice homes, and happily ever after for all.
By the way, I must have been very tired last night because I forgot to
mention how much I laughed at the dramatic Dylanesque rendition of "Who
Stole the Bird's Nest" and the amazing resemblance to "Who Killed Davy
Moore." You convinced me. Search your e-mail archive. Did I ever
mention "Who Killed Davy Moore"? Huh, did I? If not, I shoulda.
ME: bionic tush (archaic def)
>Search your e-mail archive. Did I ever mention "Who Killed Davy
Moore"? Huh, did I? If not, I shoulda.
A search turned up no hits. Now I'm curious why or how it would have
come up.
>Sweet story. If only we could really turn a penny into straight legs,
gold pieces, nice homes, and happily ever after for all.
Tough for us, I suppose, but while I was reading the story, at least, I
completely believed Imani could do it.
>>I got an email from someone who wanted a tiny chunk of Antarctica.
I'm inclined to be generous, but he wouldn't say what he wanted it for,
so I let the email exchange fizzle out.
>Did I miss something?
One of my earliest web pages, I guess.
http://www.donaldsauter.com/antarctica-land-claim.htm
On second thought, no, you didn't miss a thing.
>Over the years, when I've taught Introduction to Literature, I've often
taught Antigone. It's one that holds up well today with its conflict
between the king's law and God's law.
Thanks for the hot tip. I have a record with "scenes IV and V" of Karl
Orff's opera Antigonae. I've listened to it a couple of times, but it's
in German and the English translation is missing. Antigone shows up 3
times in my own library, so it's time to try to match up what I'm
hearing with the story. Even if I can't figure out what's going on line
by line, it makes all the difference in the world just having the basic
scene in your head when you're listening to opera.
>implant.jpg 617K View Download
Now that, I can just about handle. Actually, looks like it needs a
funny caption.
THEE:
>>Did I miss something?
>One of my earliest web pages, I guess.
> http://www.donaldsauter.com/antarctica-land-claim.htm
I'll take a gander . . . (and resist bad puns.)
>Thanks for the hot tip. I have a record with "scenes IV and V" of Karl
Orff's opera Antigonae. I've listened to it a couple of times, but it's
in German and the English translation is missing. Antigone shows up 3
times in my own library, so it's time to try to match up what I'm
hearing with the story. Even if I can't figure out what's going on line
by line, it makes all the difference in the world just having the basic
scene in your head when you're listening to opera.
Antigone is one of the more accessible tragedies. My students always
seemed to like it. I told them not to worry too much about some of the
incomprehensible gibberish from the Chorus. The main dialogue is no
problem. Knowing a few facts will simplify it further: Before the play
opens, the two brothers of Antigone and Ismene have killed each other on
the battlefield. Brother Eteocles became king after Oedipus was
banished. Polyneices, also banished, has reappeared to claim the
throne. (In some versions of the legend, the two were to share the
throne, with Polyneices taking over after a certain number of years,
making his return a rightful claiming of the throne for his time as
king. ) Either way, Eteocles isn't about to give up his power, so the
two face off and die.
Creon now becomes king and declares that Eteocles will be buried with
all rites that will ensure his afterlife but that Polyneices is to rot
on the field to become buzard bait. Ismene warne Antigone of Creon's
power and tells her that she shouldn't defy his order, but Antigone
believes there's a higher power and that Polyneices must be tended to.
That's plenty to get you started. You'll enjoy it.
>>Here's another by Mary Macleod. If you don't know this website, you
should.
>I'm going to treat this like a little puzzle. If I can't guess the web
site, I'll came back and ask.
Oooops . . . . I'll save you the puzzlement.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/sfq/index.htm
The Sacred Texts website is full of great stuff. (And don't tell my
students that I use that word cuz I won't let 'em get away with it!)
>>implant.jpg 617K View Download
>Now that, I can just about handle. Actually, looks like it needs a
funny caption.
Yeah, most people wouldn't believe that it's the real thing. Luckily,
'tis way back where it doesn't show.
THEE: double plus ungood
Here's an amusing note accompanying a link in the Utopia/Dystopia
section of sacred-texts.com:
Due to copyright restrictions, an etext of George Orwell's 1984
[External Site] is not available in the US. This link is to a copy on an
Australian server. This file is not to be downloaded or read if you
don't live in Australia, because that would be double plus ungood
thoughtcrime.
KARATE BRAIN MATH TUTORING
3.14
y=f(x) (7,2)
a(b-4) \ 9x8
| /
5 \ 0000 / 20%
/ 00 0000000
6 0 00 /
\ 0 000
0 + 0
0 + 0
0 0
0 0
0 7 0
0 0
0 ======== 0
0 0
0 0
0 ======== 0
0 0
0 0
00 00
00000
EEEEEEEEEE-
YAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!
Catch up . . . tune up . . . or blast ahead!
Word skills, too. All grades. Cheap.
Not your father's 2nd-grade teacher!
Located in Treadway Towers (next to the Post Office).
ME: 4/3/2007 found beat up copy today at Spences: googled:"history of
new york" knickerbocker london 1821 "w sharpe" found just 1 copy on
web, accessed by 3 links: Knickerbocker (Washington Irving), Diedrich:
A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the
Dutch Dynasty. "A New Edition", Published by: W. Sharpe & Son in London:
1821. Very good+ in 3/4 black leather and brick red cloth covered
boards with a red label with gilt text on the spine. The leather is
lightly rubbed at the fore corners of the boards and in small areas at
the edges of the spine. There is light foxing to the front end papers
and the rear free end paper is heavily tanned. Without a dust jacket.
The full title reads: "A History of New York from the beginning of the
world to the end of the Dutch dynasty. Containing among many surprising
and curious matters, the unutterable ponderings of Walter the Doubter,
the disasterous projects of William the Testy, and The Chivalric
Achievements of Peter The Headstrong, The Three Dutch Governors of New-
Amsterdam; being the only authentic History of the Times that every hath
benn published." 372 pages of text. Complete in one volume. Not listed
in BAL. (Langfeld) TB19860 $175.00
THEE:
>This brings to mind the argument I make in my main evolution page
regarding Wilt Chamberlain and whether his mutation will give rise to a
7-foot species of humans - or, even if he might be the first baby step
towards a 100-foot species of humans. That sure sounds to me like what
the biologists are saying. If you've got the inclination, just search
on "wilt" in this page:
> http://www.donaldsauter.com/evolution-faq.htm
I must confess that Wilt Chamberlain's fame has not reached this side of
the Atlantic, but I had a quick look on Wikipedia to get an idea about
who he was. I did also search to try to find how many children he really
had, but was unable to get a decent estimate.
But your basic reasoning is absolutely correct. If there really is a
genuine reproductive advantage in being 7 feet tall then this will be
the first step towards 7 feet humans. In practice I'm not sure it would
really work like that though. Say he had 100 7-foot sons. Would all of
these 100 have the same reproductive advantage that their father had?
Probably not, not least because part of his appeal to women was
presumably due to his uniqueness. I stress that this is itself fairly
unique to humans - AFAIK there is no evidence of sexual advantages in
other species due to "fame". But, as I said, there is absolutely nothing
wrong with your reasoning except the debatable claim that being 7 feet
tall is inherently a reproductive advantage.
One other slightly facetious point - who's to say that in some culture
somewhere there was a 5-foot jockey (Frankie Dettori?) who was renowned
for his sexual conquests. Using the same reasoning we could argue that
this was the first step towards 5-foot humans. So now, being much
shorter than average becomes a reproductive advantage. In practice, the
selection pressures cancel out and people of all heights have more-or-
less equal reproductive success.
The case of giraffe evolution must have been in an environment where
clearly there was a decisive advantage in being taller. To me this seems
perfectly reasonable given that we know that giraffes eat leaves from
tall trees.
"And how come we aren't all beautiful?"
Compared to humans of, say, 50,000 years ago, don't you think we are? :)
"...how come someone who's given it as much thought as Gould doesn't get
it either?"
It's no secret that Gould and Dawkins had disagreements about various
aspects of evolution theory. But, as Dawkins makes clear in several of
his books, there is no doubt that Gould believed the fundamentals of
Darwinism were correct. To quote Gould's review of "Climbing Mount
Improbable":
"In this important uphill battle for informing a hesitant (if not
outrightly hostile) public about the claims of Darwinian evolution, and
for explaining both the beauty and power of this revolutionary view of
life, I feel collegially entwined with Richard Dawkins in a common
enterprise."
Clearly you've been through many iterations with other advocates of the
theory and remain sceptical, and I've no reason to believe that my
attempts to convince are any more worthy than any others. But what I
would recommend is first to make sure to understand exactly what the
theory does and does not claim (as I said at the very start, "The
Selfish Gene" is the best book for this), then ask if it was true what
can it help to explain (as with all good science). Personally I love
watching nature programmes on TV (David Attenborough on the BBC is
great) and am constantly amazed by the power of the theory to "explain".
---
Still haven't got round to looking at your scrabble pages - will likely
be back with other musings when I do :)
THEE: Re: mother goose page
Hi, Donald. Checked out the Mother Goose page. Interesting. I didn't
notice any dates for when they were written. Did I overlook something?
Are we talking 1600's or 1800's, everywhere inbetween? Any earlier?
I recently picked up a translation of early French fairy tales, which
I'm looking forward to seeing how different they are from the
illustrated Golden Books versions.
Watching an interesting video called "Guns, germs, and Metal". It's
also a book. It's a guy's take on why white men have so many pocessions
and New Guinean (have nots) have so little. So far, very interesting.
Worth checking out. A guy at work told me the book was better than the
video, more indepth. The video has great visuals, though.
ME: get government out of education
When you click on the Google News/Kumon article from the Washington
Post, click on "View all comments" to see my pithy contribution.
12:39 AM 4/7/2007 Your Comments On...
'Education Standards' Are Not the Answer It is the competitive pursuit
of excellence spurred by market forces that drives up standards, not the
other way around. - By Andrew Coulson
Get government out of education.
By donaldsauter | Apr 6, 2007 5:34:03 PM
ME: inverse karaoke
in Audacity:
Open Split Stereo Track Make each mono Select "bottom" track (was right)
Effect - Invert Play together ("solo" on for both tracks) - get just
surface noise, no music
Now is there any way to subtract all this junk noise from the original?
ME: I saw some interesting books at last Tuesday's auction. One was an
1821 edition of "A History of New York - From the Beginning of the World
to the End of the Dutch Dynasty..." by Diedrich Knickerbocker, which I
knew to be Washington Irving's joke. I thought it was "referenced" at
the beginning of "Rip Van Winkle", but I pulled out all 8 or so of my
Rip Van Winkles, and didn't see it - par for me and my brain. Anyhow, I
didn't really need the History of New York - I'm sure I'd miss 90% of
the humor - but whoever bought the lot left it amongst his rejections
so I scavenged it. It's also partially fallen apart, although the pages
themselves are in excellent condition. I mean, what do you want for
1821? A web search only turned up one reference to this particular
edition, although 3 or 4 pages point to the same thing:
http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailsgg.asp?b=TB19860&m=245
There was also a classy, limited-edition Candide from 1937 - another
thing I didn't really want but couldn't just let go to the buzzards.
The main value was that it made me take a closer look at the paperback
Candide I already have, but never read. It's a "Collateral Classic"
edition with all kinds of interesting supplemental and explanatory
material. For instance, the limited edition wouldn't stoop to
explaining that "pangloss" is Greek for "all tongue", or windbag. To my
mind, it's a given that books should be published with whatever it takes
to understand what the author wrote. Who is richer for plowing through
something, only getting half of it? And what sense does it make for
every reader having to reinvent the wheel for himself, assuming he has
the inclination? Brings to mind:
>I told them not to worry too much about some of the incomprehensible
gibberish from the Chorus.
Why shouldn't the editor give a translation in understandable English
right alongside? I also have to wonder if it's the poetic translation
that made the gibberish, and if a word-for-word conversion into English
wouldn't be clear as glass.
>(In some versions of the legend, the two were to share the throne,
with Polyneices taking over after a certain number of years, making his
return a rightful claiming of the throne for his time as king. )
Here's another minor variant. In my Book of Knowledge: "The two
brothers who ruled the city had quarreled, and one brother, Eteocles,
had driven out the other, Polyneices, that he might reign as king
alone." I did manage to pick out a few German words in the opera here
and there to peg the sound to the story.
Here's a word-for-word conversion that I can't quite make out in my Otto
of the Silver Hand book. The new motto for Otto's family, given by the
emperor, was "Manus argentea quam manus ferrea melior est." That's
"hand silver how hand to bear better is." I'm betting you, if anyone,
can unscramble that into something conversational.
I finally used the web to track down something I heard 25 years ago and
really enjoyed - a musical setting of The Wind In The Willows by John
Rutter. I had caught part of it off the radio on my reel-to-reel and
thought it was so fun I played it over and over till I finally reused
that tape. Over the years I made a few attempts to find it in record
stores, with no luck. I wasn't even 100% sure it had been released.
But Amazon and the web make it a cinch. The cd is called "Three Musical
Fables", the other two being "The Reluctant Dragon" and "Brother
Heinrich's Christmas".
I forget what put me onto it, but I heard of a "children's" opera,
"Where the Wild Things Are" by Oliver Knussen. It's based on a book by
Maurice Sendak. Turns out it's been released as a diptych with
"Higgledy Piggledy Pop", with the same composer and writer credits. How
could such a thing miss? In fact, I would hazard that this is the
biggest loser in my opera collection. If these operas are for kids,
they could only make kids hate serious (non-pop) music. The music is
unrelentingly anti-melodic and anti-harmonic. It makes "Leonora
Christine, Dronning af Blaataarn" sound like the Archies in comparison.
I know I've warmed up to lots of things lots of times on repeated
listens, but I can't see myself spinning these again. And the packaging
is so delightful, even containing a pop-up when you open the cd book.
There was one redeeming feature, though - and I'm kicking myself for not
catching it beforehand. "Higgledy Piggledy Pop" is a Mother Goose
Rhyme, and the rhyme itself is performed as a mini-opera within the
opera. The characters in the main opera are characters from the nursery
rhyme, and they come together for a performance at The World Mother
Goose Theatre. My excuses for missing it are that Higgledy Piggledy Pop
appears exactly once in all my Mother Goose collections; it's a
"derivative"; I was mostly fixated on getting "Wild Things", which I
listened to first, and just figured "higgledy piggledy pop" was a bit of
nonsense that such an author would make up; and I'm basically the
easiest person on earth to pull the wool over.
At a recent auction I bought a box of books, mostly for giveaways at the
office. There was also a Boy's Life magazine, and one of the articles I
read plugged, in passing, a book called "A Year Down Yonder".
Coincidentally, that was one in the box. It was also a Newbery winner.
With all that going for it, I dove in - for about 3 chapter's worth.
Darn if I could see any reason to keep reading about a snide and
sarcastic girl and her malicious grandmother.
Another reason for buying the box was "Through My Eyes" by Ruby Bridges.
It looked like a nice one for Mizan, if she doesn't already have it.
There was hardly a page I could read with a dry eye.
There's a local tax preparation company called Liberty Tax service that
hires Uncle Sam to stand out front and wave at all the drivers-by. I
always wave. Yesterday the regular Uncle Sam was on vacation or
something, and so we had a black Uncle Sam.
There are some pretty good stories in the "Stories of Today" volume in
the 1912 Junior Classics set. There's all kinds of heroics - rescues
from fires; kids trapped in a bakery oven; a runaway dray with a forty
ton granite block; a bend in the Mississippi washed away while the boy
responsible for lighting the signal for boats is up in the tree; facing
guerilla gunfire stuck on a mud bar in the Philippines; being wheeled
across a tightrope in a barrow when the tightrope walker is hit by a 4th
of July firework; flying down the bicycle ramp at the circus for the big
jump when all the lights go out; broken up ice on an Alaskan river
bearing down on the boys in a canoe on an important mission; etc. The
hero is always a kid. It sounds like these stories would be pretty
corny, but the authors do a great job avoiding that. That Alaska story
is by Jack London, and others are in a similar vein. The first story is
a Brer Rabbit story that's not in what I had figured was my complete
Uncle Remus book. Not even halfway through, and there have been a
couple of stories about the almost life-and-death importance of a doll
to a little girl, which brings to mind my O. Henry favorite, Compliments
of the Season, from the same era.
Just read one called "On A Slide-Board" which gave me a surprise. The
slide-board is for a single person to get down a steep mountain on the
tracks of a cog railway. The bizarre thing was, except for the print
shop at the top of the mountain, everything in the story reminded me of
Mt. Washington, in N.H., and its cog railway, but they never named it
explicitly. In particular, there was this passage, "Guide books say
that the three and one-third miles from the summit to base may be
covered by slide-board in twenty minutes. Actually, the record is two
minutes and forty-seven seconds." That rang so much like something I
read in a display at the top of Mt. Washington. Only near the end, the
author gives it away by mentioning the Ammonoosuc bridge. The
Ammonoosuc Ravine trail is one of the routes I've climbed. The last
sentence mentioned the town of Bethlehem, the destination for the papers
on the slide-board. I didn't remember Bethlehem, but a check of the
road atlas puts it 20 miles from Mt. Washington, just where the story
says. Obviously, there was a print shop up there a hundred years ago.
You might guess the brakes gave out for the poor guy on the slide-board.
He was hurtling at 40 mph into a 40 mph gale of "rain, snow, sleet, and
hail." I could feel for him. Ronnie and I got caught in a similar
thing on Mt. Jefferson, the next peak up from Washington. We were only
going 0 mph, and it still hurt like anything. Also, Ronnie had a
previous experience of freezing up stiff on a mountain, so I know he was
thinking it might be curtains. We managed to find some rock face that
provided a little shelter.
By the way, the ground was covered with snow the day before Easter.
I don't have any water pressure in the house right now. I'm presuming
it's a water company problem since my neighbors are experiencing the
same thing.
Keep meaning to bring up the "multiplication by lines" video. I finally
saw it the third time I tried. It's kind of clever, but as some of the
visitors pointed out, it's really the same thing you do when you
multiply, and it would get *very* cumbersome with numbers involving
large digits. Much easier to remember 8x9=72 than cross 8 lines with 9
lines and count up the points of intersection.
I also never reported back on that book of math stories. Made me wish,
as usual, for a doppelga"nger to test the waters for me and just tell me
which stories (books, songs, operas, etc.) are sure to knock me out. In
this case, there were just 3 stories I liked, and only 2 I really
"needed" to read. One of them, "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney,
was (for me) as good as it gets; it made a killer point about scientific
thinking, and was hilarious, to boot. It's based on the old probability
thought experiment of a bunch of monkeys typing out everything that's
ever been written, given enough time. This group of chimpanzees goes to
work, cranking out book after book in the British Museum - without a
single typo, without spoiling a single page. The scientist Mallard
(like evolutionists) forces himself to see "nothing marvelous in the
situation". Simple probability says they would do it - there's no
reason some of the books shouldn't be produced right at the start.
These chimps even start with a fresh sheet of paper for each new book,
and the title in caps! Mallard holds out as long as he can, but
eventually cracks - and blows away Bainbridge and his 6 chimps. When
the butler comes in, Chimpanzee F is still hanging on. "Painfully, with
his left hand, he took from the machine the completed last page of
Florio's Montaigne. Groping for a fresh sheet, he inserted it, and
typed with one finger, "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Chapte . . . " Then he, too, was dead."
"Young Archimedes", by Aldous Huxley, would be the most "important"
story in the book (by conventional literary standards), but was kind of
disturbing (for me.) Before they determined the peasant boy Guido's
genius lay in mathematics, they wondered if maybe it were music. They
found his compositions weren't in the same class as Mozart's - "anything
less than a Mozart, it seemed to me, was hardly worth thinking about."
And later: "Perhaps the men of genius are the only true men. In all the
history of the race there have only been a few thousand real men. And
the rest of us - what are we? Teachable animals."
>Here's another by Mary Macleod.
The Faerie Queene stories look great. Hard for me to imagine, though,
ever reading a full length book on a computer screen. They'll have to
come up with an electronic device that mimics a book - with "pages" you
can turn individually or in big clumps, and that you can "write" on.
>Due to copyright restrictions, an etext of George Orwell's 1984
[External Site] is not available in the US.
Slight coincidence here in that the next day I saw a copy of Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward at the auction. It was one of the books,
along with 1984, that I read in a college course on utopias. There was
also Walden Two, and Thomas More's Utopia. I have fond memories of that
course.
>The Sacred Texts website is full of great stuff. (And don't tell my
students that I use that word cuz I won't let 'em get away with it!)
I know the feeling. I cringe whenever I let it slip out, as, for
example, on at least one of my cd post cards. As crummy as the word is,
I can have the dangdest time finding something better.
>By the way, I must have been very tired last night because I forgot to
mention how much I laughed at the dramatic Dylanesque rendition of "Who
Stole the Bird's Nest"
You also forgot to mention how after hearing "Leonora Christine,
Dronning af Blaataarn" you determined to destroy all your books and
records and videos and tvs and radios and quit your job and disown your
kids and dawg and divorce the hubby and sell the house and car and devote
the rest of your life to opera.
No?
P.S.
Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eaten the mop;
The pig's in a hurry,
The cat's in a flurry, Higglety, pigglety, pop!
ME: straight down broadway filter
Thanks for the time you gave me on the phone the other day.
I tried all the choices in Filter/File Conversion, but none of them did
what I was wishing for - kill *everything* that isn't straight down the
middle of the stereo tracks.
Even if for a particular music sample there are other ways of getting a
"good" result using other filters, I still feel like this would be the
best first step for anything recorded in mono. When I hear the karaoke-
ized version of such a recording - with everything in the middle killed
- I can't help feeling how fantastic it would be to simply subtract out
all that noise. We're not talking bacon and eggs; we're talking a train
going by. And this would be *natural*; you wouldn't be artificially
diddling with a waveform - the stuff on the left and right isn't and
never was meant to be there. It's an "organic" solution.
Again, I know I'm not the only person who wants this inverse karaoke
filter (although I am surprised the call for it isn't a lot greater).
You can search various sound editing discussion groups.
What I'm hoping you'll do for me is, even if I haven't convinced you how
tremendously useful such a filter would be, is bring it up in Tracer
brain-storming sessions to see what everybody thinks.
If there's some reason it is impossible to do (I know you can't just
subtract the karaoke from the original), or if you can convince me the
results would never be acceptable, I'd like to hear that.
Thanks again.
ME: to Governor Ruth Ann Minner Tatnall Building Dover, Delaware 19901
Dear Governor Minner,
I read about your upcoming Open Door After 4 session, and thought I
would drop a note. That saves a few minutes for you - and a lot of
nervousness for me! Some of the ideas below might be considered
"radical". They are not. All I ask is that you let them percolate.
1. Like every other Delawarean, I am concerned about development.
Actually, being a Doverite, I think first and foremost about Kent
County, but I'll throw this out for consideration at the state level.
Proposal: a COMPLETE MORATORIUM ON NEW DEVELOPMENT in Delaware -
buildings and roads. Paving the earth over has to stop somewhere; might
as well be Delaware. Nobody except the developers and the next round of
farmers ready to make their killing want it. What makes that
microscopic segment of the population such a protected class? Couldn't
we find some other way to make them filthy rich and send them on their
way? For the other 99.99% of the population, our property values would
increase ten-fold over night.
2. About no new roads: there's nothing radical there. If you didn't
need to drive there today, you don't need to drive there tomorrow. So
what to do with DelDot? Perhaps they should be working on a plans for a
dike around Delaware, what with the projected rise in sea level due to
global warming.
3. This is certainly not a state issue - just looking for some sympathy
from someone with clout. The open fields next to Dover Downs racetrack
used to make for the prettiest drive in Dover. Now it's the ugliest,
with all the gravel paths, signs, concrete barriers, chain link fences,
and light poles. What made all that ugliness so necessary all of a
sudden? Maybe somebody in your department could talk to the Dover Downs
people.
4. Someone needs to be tarred-and-feathered for that recent Capital
School District referendum scam. It was like those fund-raising drives
for public tv: "Vote now for this $13 million tax increase, and the
state will triple-match it to make up $47 million!!!" And then the
state says, "Hold it; we've only got $5 million for the /whole/ state."
Forget the tar and feathers, we need a firing squad. By the way, the
way a referendum should work is, the people who vote YES split the cost.
5. On the subject of education, I realize the most sensible approach is
not likely to happen tomorrow: get government out of education. In view
of that, how about a modest first step: get the federal government out
of Delaware education. We don't need their d-mn dollars or their d-mn
NCLB.
6. Perhaps Delaware could be the first state to move to a system of
pure democracy on every issue? Why do we need representatives in this
age of total information sharing and instant communication?
7. I read that your legislative agenda includes "adding math
specialists in middle schools." I am certain the critical time for math
is at the elementary school level. Here's my proposal in a nutshell.
The math coach will have been a 99th percentile student himself, and he
will have a talent for passing it on. In addition, he will have had
years of real life experience. He will work all day with students two
at a time, which is superior in every way to one-on-one. He will have a
knack for making it all seem like fun, not work. He will work with the
whole spectrum of students - pulling up the topmost students also pulls
up the bottom-most, believe it or not. He will create exercises for a
whole grade based on weaknesses he observes among the students. He will
be as free as possible from administrative chores in order to maximize
teaching time. He will work with students on classroom material, but
always have in mind how it relates to some important standardized test
(as long as we have them.) His job will depend on how the students
perform on the standardized test. He will work happily for minimum wage
and no benefits for as long as it takes for the school system to come to
recognize the amazing power of classroom teaching in combination with
individualized coaching for all students.
Does the school system have room for such a person?
THEE: Comments on your web site
>Using "scrabble" as an example, I have what I think is a page that
would be interesting to many scrabble buffs that doesn't even make
Google's hit list on the word "scrabble". (They stop after 900 and
some.) I would like people who type the single word "scrabble" to have a
chance to find it, and then vote it up or down the list with a "Was this
page useful?" sort of button.
Just read your scrabble page at last, very interesting. The part about
deciding the allowable set of words to use for a game certainly struck a
chord with me, having been irritated by the absurd words used when I saw
games on TV, and also having experienced arguments with several friends
on playing together for the first time. This came as a great surprise
having, as a kid, only played against my mum, whose rule was simply that
she had to approve all of the words! (Since she had no interest in
cheating, this worked fine). I certainly never played in tournaments
though, and never really appreciated how much of an issue it would be.
The 3-letter-minimum sounds like a good idea. But, wouldn't it cause a
problem for getting rid of awkward letter as the end of a game? I also
liked phone scrabble and bingo bop - nice ideas!
ME: Really appreciate you taking the time to read the scrabble page,
among the others. Thanks! Yes, the 3-letter minimum rule makes it a
bit harder to play out at the end, but it's the same rule for everybody.
And if nobody can go out, that's no problem; the rules already handle
it. Everybody simply deducts what's on his rack, while nobody gets the
going-out bonus. But more than all that, it *adds* a really fun and
interesting twist at the end (for me, at least!) If you can't use your
remaining letters, you have to find a play that leaves letters you think
will make a valid play the next time around.
>and I've no reason to believe that my attempts to convince are any more
worthy than any others.
And the same thing from my end! Here's a short story that, to my mind,
shows how the mind of an orthodox darwinian microstep evolutionist is
obliged to work. You might see no connection whatsoever, but the story
is a blast!
http://janda.org/c10/readings/monkeys.htm
discard:Thanks again for the Selfish Gene recommendation. Maybe I'll
"review" that one, too, on my web site. I have to admit, Dawkins' title
"Climbing Mt. Improbable" surprises me. I'd think his side can never
let on that there's anything the least bit remarkable going on. has to
stick steadfastly to, "There's nothing improbable about evolution at
all." sounds like an admission of
THEE: Fixing Vinyl
Any idea how to fix a record the keeps repeating the same groove?
ME: Take another look at my web page - the technique is the same for
forward and backward skips. If you're converting to digital while
playing your records, consider my suggestions for giving the tone arm a
little forward nudge at the skip point.
THEE: Il Signor Bruschino
Hi, Donald. Thanks. Of course I am interested in your copy of this
great and funny opera since I still have not been able to get a decent
copy of that performance.
THEE: Bonjour, donaldsauter,
scuse me sir but i don't arrive to read your tablature , wich send not
be in accord with the tuning of baroc guitar
it's writed like a vihuela ...
can you explain me
if you can in french
tanks best regards
ME: I am sure that all of the tablature on my site is completely in
accord with the instrument the music was originally written for. Some
is for vihuela, some is for guitar, some is for baroque guitar, and some
is for baroque guitar where the composer used a different tuning - for
example the Campion pieces. Let me know which pieces in particular you
have doubts about.
THEE: get gorvernment out of education
I wasn't sure if I would ever get through your lengthy comment.
THEE: another one to grade
>There was also a classy, limited-edition Candide from 1937 - another
thinng I didn't really want but couldn't just let go to the buzzards.
The main value was that it made me take a closer look at the paperback
Candide I already have, but never read.
Freshman humanities class in college. a couple other pieces by Voltaire
that I later read for papers in a Continental Short Story class were
Zadig and Micromegas. By the way, for Chrismas, G~~ gave me a small
tin of candy that pictures Candide traveling the world and bears the
words Candides, The best of all possible candies. it was an extreme
exaggeration, but the tin, all inch and a half by inch and a half of it,
is a keeper. I later ordered that one and some others for my old
college roomate from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild, http:
//www.philosphersguild.com, along with a mug picturing the wives of
Henry VIII. When you fill the mug with hot liquid, the wives disappear.
Great website for quirky gifts.
>It's a "Collateral Classic" edition with all kinds of interesting
supplemental and explanatory material. For instance, the limited
edition wouldn't stoop to explaining that "pangloss" is Greek for "all
tongue", or windbag. To my mind, it's a given that books should be
published with whatever it takes to understand what the author wrote.
Who is richer for plowing through something, only getting half of it?
And what sense does it make for every reader having to reinvent the
wheel for himself, assuming he has the inclination?
Good point, but it won't happen. Publishers don't want to waste pages on
anything extra. Ed Berlin told me that he had to do battle with Oxford
University Press to allow him to use extensive endnotes.
>Why shouldn't the editor give a translation in understandable English
right alongside? I also have to wonder if it's the poetic translation
that made the gibberish, and if a word-for-word conversion into English
wouldn't be clear as glass.
It wasn't so much the translation that was the problem as it was the
alusions to family history and Greek beliefs that aren't a part of our
typical knowledge base today. Graduate students might wade through all
the notes, but I'm delighted to get my community college students to see
that the main story is interesting, enjoyable, and still relevant to the
world.
>Here's another minor variant. In my Book of Knowledge: "The two
brothers who ruled the city had quarreled, and one brother, Eteocles,
had driven out the other, Polyneices, that he might reign as king
alone." I did manage to pick out a few German words in the opera here
and there to peg the sound to the story.
Good. That will help a lot when listening It would be interesting to
know how many variants exist. Since the tragedies are based on what
amounted to a mixture of history and legend, there must be many.
>I forget what put me onto it, but I heard of a "children's" opera,
"Where the Wild Things Are" by Oliver Knussen.
Where the Wild Things Are was one of my children's favorite stories when
they were very small. A funny story that could apply to that one as well
as to Sendak's In a Night Kitchen, which aroused the firestorm involved
idiot parents who wanted the story banned from school and public
libraries because the animals wore shirts but no pants. Heaven knows,
we don't want our preschoolers corrupted by the likes of that!
>And the packaging is so delightful, even containing a pop-up when you
open the cd book.
I've never seen a pop-up in a cd book, but perhaps that is because we
were still playing only records and casette tapes records when they were
kids. That reminds me of my favorite dinosaur records, which must still
be around here somewhere. If they're now available on cd, I'd buy them.
>and I'm basically the easiest person on earth to pull the wool over.
Do you know the origin of that expression?
>At a recent auction I bought a box of books, mostly for giveaways at
the office. There was also a Boy's Life magazine, and one of the
articles I read plugged, in passing, a book called "A Year Down Yonder".
No boys? Seems like an odd book to plug in Boy's Life.
>Another reason for buying the box was "Through My Eyes" by Ruby
Bridges. It looked like a nice one for Mizan, if she doesn't already
have it. There was hardly a page I could read with a dry eye.
I haven't read that one, but I'll bet it's good. Also haven't seen the
Disney Ruby Bridges film.
>Yesterday the regular Uncle Sam was on vacation or something, and so we
had a black Uncle Sam.
If we can have black Jesus, why not, right?
>It sounds like these stories would be pretty corny, but the authors do
a great job avoiding that. That Alaska story is by Jack London,
. . . .as long as the protagonist isn't trying to build a fire when the
reader knows from the start that he's gonna freeze to death . . .
>You might guess the brakes gave out for the poor guy on the slide-
board. He was hurtling at 40 mph into a 40 mph gale of "rain, snow,
sleet, and hail." I could feel for him. Ronnie and I got caught in a
similar thing on Mt. Jefferson, the next peak up from Washington. We
were only going 0 mph, and it still hurt like anything. Also, Ronnie
had a previous experience of freezing up stiff on a mountain, so I know
he was thinking it might be curtains. We managed to find some rock face
that provided a little shelter.
Interesting. I think a rode a cog train in Colorado as an 8-year-old
kid because I remember photos, but my only vivid memory is of the cog
train on Mount Snowdon in Wales. A British friend and I actually walked
up the mountain. It's more of a long hike than a climb--which is to say
that there's no mountain-climbing involved that takes any know-how. You
can walk it all on your two feet easily enough, but we took the cog
train down and I got sick from the jerkiness. Not on the train itself,
fortunately, but just after getting off. I'm not sure if it was totally
from the jerkiness or a combination of that and the local currant brew
that my friend conned me into trying at the summit. You know me and
anything resembling a raisin, at least if they aren't unadulterated ones
straight from the box. I tried to be brave, and I guess I had a two or
three sips or the vile stuff before I decided those were two or three
sips too many. Never again will I let a good looking young man talk me
into anything like that--or an old one, good-looking or not.
One of the funnier incidents of that trek was the fact that we were
engulfed in clouds at the top of Snowdon. I took photos which show
nothing but what looks like fog. You couldn't see other people at the
top if they were more than about a yard away. You can imagine the
pictures. A few years later, when I was taking a Wordsworth seminar at
Rice, we read a poem about Wordsworth's vision on Mount Snowden. The
clouds suddenly parted. The day we were to discuss that poem and others
in class, I took my photos for a touch of reality.
>By the way, the ground here was covered with snow the day before
Easter.
Big, fat, hairy deal. Oklahoma had snow on Good Friday. OK, so ours
melted as it hit the ground, but the flakes were huge. It was enough to
delay my planned errands until later in the day . . . just in case. The
temperature at the time was 38.
>Keep meaning to bring up the "multiplication by lines" video.
It's appalling to know that many (dare I say "most") young people today
aren't learning multiplication tables. Far more TCC students are
required to take developmental math than developmental English despite
the requirement to take at least three high school math classes. Even
so, they can't do basic math. On reading tests a few times, I've asjed
a few questions over graphs and tables, sometimes including questions
such as how many more of _____ than _______ did this or that? Students
who can answer the other questions over the graphics often make simple
math errors trying to subtract something like 24 from 36. When I listen
to my colleagues who teach developmental math, I feel lucky to be
teaching reading and writing.
>And the rest of us - what are we? Teachable animals."
Huxley isn't known for his cheerfulness and optimism.
>They'll have to come up with an electronic device that mimics a book -
with "pages" you can turn individually or in big clumps, and that you
can "write" on.
PDF files almost fit the bill. You can "turn" 'em and if you have Adobe
Acrobat, you can easily create notes that pop up when you point at a
particular word. Knowing that my students won't stop to check a
dictionary, there have been times when I've considered using that
feature for a couple of stories. Unfortunately, though, my only copy of
Acrobat is version 5 and I think version 8 is now out (or about to come
out).
>Slight coincidence here in that the next day I saw a copy of Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward at the auction. It was one of the books,
along with 1984, that I read in a college course on utopias. There was
also Walden Two, and Thomas More's Utopia. I have fond memories of that
course.
I read three of the four in freshman humanities . . . along with
Candide, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the Theban trilogy, The Prince,
Frankenstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Communist Manifesto,
Students gripe about taking one three-hour humanities course at TCC.
The University of Northern Iowa required two four-hour humanities
courses of all freshman. These were two of the best courses I've ever
taken--certainly two that introduced me to so much I hadn't studied in
high school. My professor couldn't have been much over 30 but he was
such a dynamic lecturer that, on any given day, more students attended
class than were enrolled. He was a fluent German speaker with a German
wife. He left the next year to teach in Germany--a major loss to UNI.
>You also forgot to mention how after hearing "Leonora Christine,
Dronning af Blaataarn" you determined to destroy all your books and
records and videos and tvs and radios and quit your job and disown your
kids and dawg and get divorced and sell the house and car and devote the
rest of your life to opera.
>No?
No . . . No . . . NO . . . NOT the dawg!
Loved Les Huguenots.
>P.S.
>Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eaten the mop;
> The pig's in a hurry,
> The cat's in a flurry, Higglety, pigglety, pop!
Higglety, pigglety, pine!
The hillbilly drank the moonshine,
The hillbilly got sick,
His ol' houn' got a kick,
Higglety, pigglety, pine!
THEE:
>A web search only turned up one reference to this particular edition,
although 3 or 4 pages point to the same thing:
> http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailsgg.asp?b=TB19860&m=245
Not bad, considering that your copy was free . . . falling apart or not.
We've just been pummeled with hail. The ground is still white.
Fortunately, it was only pea-sized, so I doubt it's done any big damage.
I'm supposed to be going to Mom's for dinner, but that will hinge on the
weather. If I do go, I take the old car in the driveway rather than my
car, which is in the garage.
ME: solemn scenes from the digital world [written Monday night, but couldn't
get online.]
Got the tapes, thanks, and processed 'em. I'm very pleased with the
results. Your "master" tapes were noticeably brighter and clearer, so
I'm glad I stuck out for them. There's something that has me confused,
though. The first piece on side one of the Navigator, Jack Tar March,
fades in. I'm willing to bet your portable recorder doesn't have a
record level knob of any sort, so it's hard to imagine how the original
recording could have a fade-in. On the other hand, if the tapes were
dubbed from a master, that wouldn't explain a fade-in either. Just a
matter of curiosity - these results are plenty good enough, even if
slightly better masters turned up.
I started by making a nice cd for each evening's music, with convenient
track divisions, of course. Which reminds me, can you dig up your
"programs" for the two films and email them to me so I can make a nice
jacket with track listings for each of the cds? I have hard copies you
sent, but it would save a lot of typing.
Making a cd for each of the films was a not completely necessary first
step in putting together a set of W.C. silent film pieces. But they
came out very nice, and I hope you find time to revisit them - not to
mention share them with anybody else who would be interested. They make
fun listenin'. I'm hoping D~~ has no problem with noncommercial
sharing of his work. Besides the huge convenience of cd over tape, I
made lots of nice little fixes, such as smooth connections where the
recorder clicked and clacked on and off. I put the second evening's
overture back where it belonged. I found a high frequency cut-off that
completely eliminated a dentist-drill scream through the tapes, and
which had no effect whatsoever on the music, to the best of my listening
abilities. Unfortunately, as improved as the sound on the cd is, I'm
afraid most people will still just hear it as "portable tape recorder"
quality. Which would be a shame, because the quality is plenty good
enough make the music thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, I find myself
marvelling at the lowly portable tape recorder as almost a miracle of
technology.
I fiddled with trying to subtract out the background tape noise, but
without acceptable results. It might be my lack of experience, but I've
had similarly unacceptable results with at least two sound editing
programs on several pieces of music, and I get the impression that it
helps only in cases of very little and very uniform background noise.
In any case, I've kept cd copies of all the music without any tampering
with the equalization (in this case, the high frequency cut-off) just in
case somebody comes along some day and says he can make low quality tape
recording sound like digital recordings if he had the originals to work
with. (Far from likely.)
So I put together a set of W.C. music that runs like a 14-minute silent
film score. Had to write the names of all the pieces on slips of paper,
along with descriptions and timings, to work, them into a nice sequence
- and then hope that I could make a good transition between each pair of
consecutive pieces. I'm thrilled with the results (and would be
distraught if they don't meet your approval!) There were just one or
two spots where I wished I had another second or two of music to work
with to make a slightly more natural and relaxed transition, but I don't
think anybody will be listening that critically. They'd *better* not!
It's pretty darn great. Of course, Dramatic Suspense precedes the set
as an overture, and a "new and improved" Solemn Scenes from Nature is
the "postlude". The liner notes will tell you what I did to pull it
together.
Thanks for the first cd of the set. Very entertaining! Just think if
some radio station had the brains to play that sort of music. I liked
the way it worked out that the piano roll pieces were mixed up with the
band recordings. Really liked the pair of piano rolls at the end,
though - a veddy sophisticated closing. Is your Sousa Band recording
going to be on the final copy, or do you have to stonewall that? Your
notes say The Mouse And The Clock is played by Prince's, but the
announcer says Edison Concert Band.
Borrowed Mizan to go to the governor's open house on Saturday. It was
ok, but not as many activities as in previous years, in particular, no
hot dogs. I tried to coach Mizan on how to win at musical chairs, but I
guess I should stick to spelling. Actually, she hung in there until
about 8 were left, out of a starting crowd of about 45. In the way of
old-time sports, we rolled a wood hoop around the field with a stick -
not nearly so easy as it looks. Coincidentally, I had sent a letter off
to Governor Ruth Ann Minner the day before with a batch of superlative
suggestions, and when I had a chance to say hi, I told her to be on look
out for it on Monday. We'll see if they get started on a dike around
Delaware on Tuesday.
The subject of Akeela and the Bee came up again with Krystal. I knew
she liked the movie, but this time she was gushing over it, saying the
actor is one of her favorites, etc. Must be good.
Bought a cd of Le Postillon de Lonjumeau off of amazon recently, knowing
full well that this series of "EMI Classics" doesn't come with a
libretto, but figuring I should be able to piece something together from
my opera references and the web. There's a german version on the web,
and I went to work converting that to english using google's translator.
Of course, computerized translations are very rough, but I figured,
after editing a text file with the german and english side by side, I
should get most of it. (The recording's in french, of course.)
Everything went well - until I got to act 2, where the wheels fall off
the cart. In retrospect, I know operas can get reworked when they cross
borders. The german libretto even dispenses with one of the characters
mentioned in all the synopses and in the cd booklet. Dang. One of the
reasons for buying this opera is that I didn't have one by Adolphe Adam.
(I picked up a used "Giselle" once, thinking it was an opera, but it's a
famous ballet.) Adam wrote the music used for "O Holy Night", which
always intrigued me because it sounds to my ears like it has a strong
20th-century pop element to it - not straight early 19th C. "classical".
I changed my residential phone service to a business line so my tutoring
business will be in the next yellow page book. At the same time I asked
for a snazzier number, and I jumped on 678-7100. Pretty sharp, eh?
Sound like something they'd reserve for IBM or something? I mean, when
I walk down the street now, you should see the way people stare.
(Exaggerating a tad.) Whole number is 302-678-7100.
>>And what sense does it make for every reader having to reinvent the
wheel for himself, assuming he has the inclination?
>Good point, but it won't happen. Publishers don't want to waste pages
on anything extra.
I'd think a publisher with business sense would do what it takes to sell
his product. This Candide, for instance, is only 124 pages. I'm pretty
sure there have been lots of books willingly published by lots of
publishers with even *more* pages than that. I'm guessing it all has
more to do with the universal notion, completely misguided, in my view,
that a person or student is better off for "figuring out something on
his own." It's a nice theory, makes things especially easy for
"teachers", but the two main problems with it are that only 1 person in
a thousand will make any effort; and he'll only do a partially complete
and partially accurate job. Hit me over the head, I say.
In my 1912 "Stories of Today" I started "The Man Without A Country"
tonight. Before I was done with the third page, I stopped to look up
Aaron Burr in 3 encylopedias. Can't imagine a reader in
500 knowing enough about Burr's shenanigans to make sense of what
happened to Philip Nolan.
Here's another chance to hit me over the head with this:
Manus argentea quam manus ferrea melior est
hand silver how hand to bear better is
What's that mean? It's significant enough to be on the darn cover of
the book.
>>and I'm basically the easiest person on earth to pull the wool over.
>Do you know the origin of that expression?
Looked it up on the web and found that "wool" meant "wig". Is that it?
Somebody else said "pulling wool" had an earlier usage of pulling
someone's hair, a possible way of getting the better of that person.
>>At a recent auction I bought a box of books, mostly for giveaways at
the office. There was also a Boy's Life magazine, and one of the
articles I read plugged, in passing, a book called "A Year Down Yonder".
>No boys? Seems like an odd book to plug in Boy's Life.
If the weather weren't so inclement lately, I would have dived my
dumpster to pull out the exact reference. I forget what sort of column
it was in, not one about books. I think I'm about the most careful
person on earth regarding making sure what I throw out is well and truly
trash. So how come I spend more time than anyone else on earth with his
feet sticking up out of his trash can? Luckily, I only set it out every
few months, so it's a trusty archives.
>A British friend and I actually walked up the mountain. It's more of a
long hike than a climb--which is to say that there's no mountain-
climbing involved that takes any know-how.
That's mountain-climbing, no apologies needed. The crazy stuff, with
pitons, etc., is called technical climbing. At least, that's what I've
been told, and I buy it. Ok, I know deep down inside that I'm really
just a mountain-walker (stroller? stumbler? sashayer?)
>>By the way, the ground here was covered with snow the day before
Easter.
>Big, fat, hairy deal. Oklahoma had snow on Good Friday.
But, see? the day before Easter is a day *after* Good Friday.
>>They'll have to come up with an electronic device that mimics a book -
with "pages" you can turn individually or in big clumps, and that you
can "write" on.
>PDF files almost fit the bill.
Doesn't that require a computer? I have to have something booklike.
>I read three of the four in freshman humanities . . . along with
Candide, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the Theban trilogy, The Prince,
Frankenstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Communist Manifesto,
You can rattle that off from memory??? Every book you read, term by
term, throughout your life??? I don't even know what I read last month.
I mean, I hope some of it stuck, but don't ask me for a single title.
ME: Had to chuckle at the most recent kumon alert:
Kumon Summer Smarts Camp , sponsored by Kumon Math and Reading Center ,
will meet at 8787-M N. Owasso Expressway , Owasso , June 4-Aug. 30 , 2-7
p.m. , for ages 3 and older. Participants will receive one-on-one
instruction in math and reading. Cost: $125 monthly , plus $50
registration fee. Registration deadline: July 31. Call Cathy Sung ,
272-7323
Some camp!
THEE: It's an ADJECTIVE!
>Thanks for the first cd of the set. Very entertaining! Just think if
some radio station had the brains to play that sort of music. I liked
the way it worked out that the piano roll pieces were mixed up with the
band recordings. Really liked the pair of piano rolls at the end,
though - a veddy sophisticated closing.
"Comic Hurry" is fun, though not the quality of music that we get with
something like "Solemn Scenes" or "Plaintive" or even "Andante
Cantabile." "Marcheta" is a terrific ending. Strictly speaking, "Comic
Hurry" probably should go with the silent film music, but don't worry
about a re-edit. The different quality wouldn't mix well with the $25
portable recorder fragments, overtures, and party piece.
>Borrowed Mizan to go to the governor's open house on Saturday. It was
ok, but not as many activities as in previous years, in particular, no
hot dogs. I tried to coach Mizan on how to win at musical chairs, but I
guess I should stick to spelling.
You mean to say that there's a secret to it? Does it also work for
cakewalks? (not the ragtime type)
>The subject of Akeela and the Bee came up again with Krystal. I knew
she liked the movie, but this time she was gushing over it, saying the
actor is one of her favorites, etc. Must be good.
Laurence Fishburne is good. As coach, you had a tough act to follow.
>I changed my residential phone service to a business line so my
tutoring business will be in the next yellow page book. At the same
time I asked for a snazzier number, and I jumped on 678-7100. Pretty
sharp, eh? Sound like something they'd reserve for IBM or something? I
mean, when I walk down the street now, you should see the way people
stare. (Exaggerating a tad.) Whole number is 302-678-7100.
Start playing with the letter equivalents to see if your can come up
with an even snazzier, easier to remember version for those of us who do
better with words than with numbers. Only kidding, really, I hate
trying to dial those "word" numbers on the phone. They're easy to
remember, but horrid to dial. Do we still "dial" numbers? Somehow that
doesn't seem appropriate today.
>I'd think a publisher with business sense would do what it takes to
sell his product. This Candide, for instance, is only 124 pages. I'm
pretty sure there have been lots of books willingly published by lots of
publishers with even *more* pages than that. I'm guessing it all has
more to do with the universal notion, completely misguided, in my view,
that a person or student is better off for "figuring out something on
his own." It's a nice theory, makes things especially easy for
"teachers", but the two main problems with it are that only 1 person in
a thousand will make any effort; and he'll only do a partially complete
and partially accurate job. Hit me over the head, I say.
I think the idea is that publishers figure most people don't bother with
the notes. That tells us something about how much most readers really
care to understand.
>Here's another chance to hit me over the head with this:
> Manus argentea quam manus ferrea melior est
> hand silver how hand to bear
(no, no, no. It's an adjective, not a verb)
>better is
So you're gonna force me to show off, huh?
A silver hand is better than an iron hand. (In other words, "Better to
rule with wisdom than with an iron fist.")
I read the last chapter and the Afterword. Otto Silver Hand couldn't
hold a weapon but was listened to by all for his wisdom.
Now, it's your turn to make like Emperor Rudolf . . . and give me a
hand.
>>>and I'm basically the easiest person on earth to pull the wool over.
>>Do you know the origin of that expression?
>Looked it up on the web and found that "wool" meant "wig". Is that it?
Somebody else said "pulling wool" had an earlier usage of pulling
someone's hair, a possible way of getting the better of that person.
That could make sense. Either way, it would blind the person.
>If the weather weren't so inclement lately, I would have dived my
dumpster to pull out the exact reference. I forget what sort of column
it was in, not one about books. I think I'm about the most careful
person on earth regarding making sure what I throw out is well and truly
trash. So how come I spend more time than anyone else on earth with his
feet sticking up out of his trash can? Luckily, I only set it out every
few months, so it's a trusty archives.
I never thought about an outdoor "filing cabinet." Sure would save
space.
>>>By the way, the ground here was covered with snow the day before
Easter.
>>Big, fat, hairy deal. Oklahoma had snow on Good Friday.
>But, see? the day before Easter is a day *after* Good Friday.
Somehow I figured you'd point that out, but Oklahoma is farther south.
So there!
>>PDF files almost fit the bill.
>Doesn't that require a computer? I have to have something booklike.
I agree wholeheartedly and will try to remember to send you something
written recently by one of our TCC librarians if I haven't thrown out my
copy of the typical incendiary Faculty Forum. Some other paper still
needs to come your way.
>>I read three of the four in freshman humanities . . . along with
Candide, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the Theban trilogy, The Prince,
Frankenstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Communist Manifesto,
>You can rattle that off from memory??? Every book you read, term by
term, throughout your life??? I don't even know what I read last month.
I mean, I hope some of it stuck, but don't ask me for a single title.
There were more, but those stuck. I told you that I liked the class.
>>Higglety, pigglety, pine!
The hillbilly drank the moonshine,
The hillbilly got sick,
His ol' houn' got a kick,
Higglety, pigglety, pine!
>You didn't say "Off the record"! Big mistake! That's going on my
Mother Goose page!
Mother Goose is alive and well in the Ozarks, but who will understand
the deep philosophical message? And . . . do I get a byline?
The past couple of days are a case in point for not owning a TV. I've
caught myself watching far too much of the CNN coverage of the Virginia
Tech massacre. The one good part of it, though, was seeing the way the
students are pulling together as a community, supporting one another and
determined not to let one horror of a day destroy their love for their
school. I don't think I'd have watched as much as I have if I didn't
know Virginia Tech fairly well after having visited campus several times
over the years. Michael and I met at Rice, but he had graduated from
Virginia Tech. I'm now determined to keep the TV off, though.
ME: my idol's in here somewhere
>'Fraid I can't because O~~ handed them to me at the festival as hard
copies.
Ah so. I had considered that as a possibility, but was led astray by
the comment in brackets for Old South "[In case I'm off, you'll
recognize this one--includes "My Old Kentucky"]". My best guess was,
that was a note from you to me. It seemed to refer to the recorder
clicking off and on just prior to Old South, apparently deleting a piece
of music that is not listed on the page. So I figured you had deleted
the listing for a piece of music you only recorded a snippet of, and
then put in the note to try to help someone listening to the music stay
in sync with the printed song listing. (So many confusing words to try
to say something so simple.) In any case, it sounds like there isn't
anyone else who will get the complete cds, so I'll forgo making up a
sleeve with the track listing. I assume you still have the hard copies
O~~ gave you? They would be close enough. For instance, The Navigator
list goes through 34b; the cd goes through 41, including the 3 party
recordings.
>This all sounds marvelous. I promise you'll here no complaints from my
corner.
The one little thing I didn't mention was working two little shorties
into the short silent film set that have no W.C. connection: Sorcerer's
Apprentice introducing Sea Song, and Spite Wedding March
(Rodney/Mendelssohn) which I thought fit nicely before Plaintive. I
think they add variety, humor, and authenticness. They're both well-
known, but the track listing can make it clear W.C. had nothing to do
with either the composition or arrrangement. Hope they don't corrupt
your cds.
>"Comic Hurry" is fun, though not the quality of music that we get with
something like "Solemn Scenes" or "Plaintive" or even "Andante
Cantabile."
Hmmmm. Not so sure what an musically cosmic alien would have to say
about that.
>I assume you recognized the dog song when you heard it in "The
Delight."
Here's the hard evidence, from Feb 6 2007:
>>4 attachments - Download all attachments
>> QRS-41636_DelightThe_eRollMIDIWexp.mid 48K Download
>> Universal-92675_KingMedleyOverture(1910)_eRollMIDIWexp.mid 44K
Download
>> Aeolian-65735_StarThe_eRollMIDI.mid 41K Download
>> Universal-91025_MeetMeWhereTheLanternsGlow(1909)_eRollMIDIWexp.mid
20K Download
>The piano roll scans ->midi are another feather in the web's cap. Just
think of how many links of the chain in acquiring them to hearing them
that would be well nigh unthinkable without the internet. I guess that
was a real surprise, hearing the dawg song in the one with the least
documentation? And now you've got me scrounging around for midis of
opera piano rolls - as if I need more music to drown myself in!
>>I tried to coach Mizan on how to win at musical chairs, but I guess I
should stick to spelling.
>You mean to say that there's a secret to it? Does it also work for
cakewalks? (not the ragtime type)
Turns out it's not much of a secret. A woman who heard me coaching
Mizan was laughing and agreeing with the strategy, and when I told
Krystal about Mizan's defeat, she turned to Mizan with a sort of, "Sure,
*everybody* knows that!" The strategy is to leave a gap between you and
the person in front of you, and move ve-wy slow-wy when you're beside an
empty chair seat, and then shoot ahead as soon as the person in front of
you moves beyond the next seat.
>>We'll see if they get started on a dike around Delaware on Tuesday.
>Hopefully you won't be asked to stick your finger into it.
'D be happy to. Can't imagine an easier way to get in the history
books.
>>this time she was gushing over it, saying the actor is one of her
favorites, etc. Must be good.
>Laurence Fishburne is good. As coach, you had a tough act to follow.
With some trepidation as to the effect it will have on my reputation, I
am compelled to bring up my all-time favorite Simpsons. Some time
within the first two years there was an episode about Lisa and her
subtitute teacher, Mr. Bergstrom, played by Dustin Hoffman. I certainly
can't claim I'm a Mr. Bergstrom, but he sets the standard for teaching,
in my book, and I like to *think* I'm not too far behind. Remember
Mizan's spelling bee coaching? Junior Monopoly and jacks and flinging a
rubber frog around, for example? Not a person in 10,000 would see what
that has to do with spelling, although everybody seems to understand
easily enough when you explain. Knowing when to ease up... Getting
more out of a happy student...
>When were the words written for "O Holy Night"?
Good question. Wikipedia gives a clearer answer than the page above it
in the hit list for "o holy night". (Dang. I have an unfounded "thing"
against Wikipedia.)
"O Holy Night" ("Cantique de No l") is a well-known Christmas carol
composed by Adolphe Adam in 1847 to the French poem "Minuit, chr tiens"
by Placide Cappeau (1808-1877), an accomplished amateur.
In the carol, the singer recalls the birth of Jesus. It was translated
into English by Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight, editor of
Dwight's Journal of Music in 1855 (note the abolitionist reference in
the third verse: "for the slave is our brother"), and lyrics also exist
in other languages.
On 24 December 1906, Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor, broadcast
the first AM radio programme, which included him playing "O Holy Night"
on the violin. The carol therefore appears to have been the first piece
of music to be broadcast on radio.
>So you're gonna force me to show off, huh?
Yes, yes, yes! Hit me over the head already!
>A silver hand is better than an iron hand. (In other words, "Better to
rule with wisdom than with an iron fist.")
Thanks, I needed that! And something that little makes the book ten
points dearer to me. Now how many kids read that book without knowing
what the motto meant? I'm still blaming authors, editors, and the
education establishment generally, before publishers, for works
appearing without helpful explanatory material.
ME: read no evil
Thanks for another great one. Coincidentally, I'd been talking typing
monkeys with a couple of friends lately - unaware of Dan Oliver's work.
If you have time for the "classic" monkey story - meaning a *big*
favorite of mine, and not just within the monkey genre:
http://janda.org/c10/readings/monkeys.htm
It's short.
THEE: Comments on your web site
>And the same thing from my end! Here's a short story that, to my mind,
shows how the mind of an orthodox darwinian microstep evolutionist is
obliged to work. You might see no connection whatsoever, but the story
is a blast!
> http://janda.org/c10/readings/monkeys.htm
This isn't the first time I've seen a comparison drawn between evolution
and monkeys typing on keyboards in the hope of producing books, but I'm
afraid this analogy is not valid. Clearly if six monkeys were typing
away randomly for a million years then it is inconceivable that they
would come up with very much. But let me suggest a couple of counter-
analogies which are more realistic and which have very different
outcomes. I'll assume that the goal is to produce just one book, say the
Bible, since, I hope you agree, it doesn't change the situation very
much.
Consider the case where the monkey types randomly but when it gets a
letter right then it keeps that letter. If it types incorrectly then it
keeps typing randomly but it keeps the letters which so far it has got
right. In this way the correct letters it has typed will accumulate, and
it is inevitable that it will indeed produce the Bible with most of the
million years to spare.
In the second case the monkeys don't get to keep the letters they got
right, so they still have to type them all in the correct order without
any mistakes in between. But in this case, every month each monkey
spawns 6 new monkeys with their own typewriters which also go about the
task of random typing. In this case, after the million years have
elapsed it is vanishingly unlikely that at least one of the monkeys has
_not_ recreated the Bible verbatim!
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