Back to index of "this and that in my life" pages by Donald Sauter.
Dedicated to the proposition that every thought that's ever been thunk may be of use or interest to someone . . .
THEE: subject Lennon / Ono WPLJ 1971
Hello there. I found you quite accidentally when I was tracing links on
a recording of John & Yoko on the Howard Smith Show in summer 1971 on
WPLJ. You're the only person I've ever run across who not only knows
about this show, but appears to own a copy.
I agree with you 100% when you call this a desert-island recording! I
say this because I listened to this show the night it was actually on,
and I recorded it myself on my family's old-fashioned reel-to-reel deck,
probably at 1 7/8 ips (!). I was 14 at the time, I think, and this tape
was one of my treasured possessions, especially due to the fact that I
called the station while they were on the air. And got through!!!!! I
was so flabbergasted to have gotten through, that I couldn't take
advantage of the opportunity to speak with them. But I'd also observed,
as your tape will corroborate, that they wouldn't address any serious
questions, anyway, and quickly got rid of anyone trying to ask anything
"straight."
So I grunted. And Lennon loved it. He says: "This is WFBI
playing all your favorite tunes." Grunt. "Oh really, in your own back
yard?" More grunting / laughing. He ends up shouting "What kind of nut
is this!" And at that point, I actually hung up, if I recall correctly,
because I couldn't think of where else to take it, and I was too
overwhelmed at having gotten through at all. I was proud of myself
later on, that I'd responded to them "appropriately," and that John had
humored me for a little bit, using me as his foil for continued riffing.
It's still one of the most exciting things which ever happened to me.
My reel of tape from this show vanished years ago, and all I've got
is a many-generations-deep cassette copy of the bit where I called in,
because my best friend, at the other end of New Jersey, happened to be
unknowingly taping the show himself that night, and caught it on
cassette, along with one other bit.
Š
I count this one "other bit" as my favorite, I don't know why, perhaps
it's because it's one of the only surviving portions I still have, but I
think also because it's so great in itself. Here's my transcript from
memory:
"THE INCREDIBLE HULK!" By Edgar Allen Poo
(Narrator) Enter Sadie Hawkshears, wearing elastic underpants, rubber
boots, and imitation Bernie Kornfeld tickertape.
"What've you been doing to that animal?"
I ain't been doing nothing, Mama.
You've been doing something, it's got no legs!
It ain't got no legs when I bought it, Mama.
You little beast, put it away. Next time I see you wearing that, I'll
have you instigated.
Oh no, Mama, not instigated again!
Next time I see you wearing that, I'll have you castigated...
Oh no, Mama, I'm not in for it!
I don't care what you call yourself. Give that animal back to Daddy.
(Daddy) I dont' want it, I don't want it!
Yes you do!
Oh Mama!
(Narrator) Good God, this is rubbish!
*
And all the while he's blithering on like this, Yoko's keening and
talking away over him, like she does throughout. God Bless 'em!
Like the Firesign Theatre, my other beloved comedy influence at the
time (this was just before Python broke for me), this routine lodged in
my memory permanently, as things tended to do at that age. I can still
recite this happily for any occasion, summoning up all the voices and
their every inflection. And since I had the tape for several years
before I lost it to the mists of time, I committed many other lines and
passages to memory, but this was my favorite bit.
I really have enjoyed having my memory jogged by your page, and by
the delight of hearing those snippets I'd forgotten, but which were
instantly familiar as soon as I heard them again. Thanks so much for
posting them.
Š
If only John had published such things, how lucky we'd have been,
yet I think he didn't give them any value because he could ad lib stuff
like this 24 / 7. I recall that this radio appearance with Howard Smith
went on for quite awhile, yet I loved it all, even though Yoko annoyed
me, and I just wanted to hear John expound. Oh well, at least I heard
it!
Sincerely, Jeff Westerman
ME: Hi Jeff,
Send me a mailing address and I'll send you a copy on cd in regular cd
format (or mp3 if you prefer). Believe me, your story is more than
enough in trade - to think I've "met" one of the "performers"!
The story on my tape is that I got it from a fan who traded tapes via a
Beatle fanzine in the 1980s. You've got me curious now who I got it
from. I save everything, so the record is there somewhere. You've
heard the sound quality of the snippets on my web page. Even though
those are "reduced quality" (64 Kbit/sec, not 128) you can hear that my
tape was already a multigeneration copy. Still, I'm guessing you'll be
quite pleased with it.
A funny thing: Your "grunt" segment was a proven favorite of mine. When
I converted the tape to mp3 I broke it up into 16 tracks. (I wouldn't
break continuous music into separate mp3 tracks, but can bring myself to
do it for spoken word.) I always chose a favorite spot to start the next
track, and there you are, kicking off track WPLJ13.
Thanks for singlehandedly making all my effort worthwhile.
ME:
>Sort of reminds me of the daily news. And, yes, we're lucky we're not
the ones living in the war zones.
You're right, everybody who's plugged into current events at all doesn't
need a reminder like Cyril Broderick's book. But I've gotten very good
at insulating myself. I've probably given the war in Iraq less thought
than any other living American. I might see a related headline in
google news, but even if I half read it, I wouldn't click on it in a
million years.
>>the Scrabble dictionary committee, which has gotten a raging piece
of my mind.
>That was probably an interesting letter, and I'm guessing no one
replied.
Not yet, and maybe never, but I know it had to have made some sort of
impression. It didn't use obscenities, but you would be mildly shocked.
Out of 5 or 6 emails to the committee members, only one bounced back.
ŠHard to imagine they could avoid bringing it up in their discussions.
>tenner, n., Informal. 1. a ten-dollar bill. 2. Brit. a ten-pund
note.
The Am. Heritage has fiver, so I know they considered tenner and decided
it wasn't quite up to current American English standards. Fine with me;
keeps things interesting!
>seance? Because of the accent??? Otherwise, I have it.
Yes. So you're saying your dictionary, like mine, only has it with the
frenchified fly speck? Now that *is* crazy! What possible
justification could there be for bringing a foreign word into the
English language fold, but not spelling it with English letters???
Suppose we had to spell HAIKU in chinese-y heiroglyphics?
>piler--nope
My idea on that one was not just the basic "one that piles up or on",
which seems fairly reasonable to me, but I would have guessed that
laborers would have come to use it as a synonym for pile driver.
>flinger--appears as a noun under fling.
>So maybe you shoulda been using Random House Webster's College
Dictionary?
No way. You've indicated it has too much of the 2-letter trash that I
despise so intensely. Even the latest American Heritage has added AB,
BI, etc. It's a small price to pay to have an occasional borderline
word rejected. It actually adds an exciting element to Scrabble,
although, of course, that's irrelevant in the decision of what is and
isn't acceptable for a dictionary. I think there's a big competition
out there now to see which dictionary committee has the least shame in
calling garbage words. (Words is an objective complement there.) And I
suspect the Official Scrabble Dictionary played a big part in starting
this junk word race.
Sure, I know that languages evolve, and one day I might be saying AB and
AG with the best of them (although I doubt it very much). I'm sure word
experts can give tons of examples of lazy-mouthed ways of saying things
becoming acceptable words eventually. One that hit me recently was in
the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Nigger Boys" (apparently a British variant
on our "Ten Little Injuns"). The 1895 Mother Goose book needed to put
"Zoo" in quotes. I presume that was a slangy "zoological garden" back
then.
I was looking into Ten Little Injuns because Spaeth said Septimus Winner
originated that "musical jingle". I suppose that means words and tune,
both? I had looked Winner up to reread the story behind Listen To The
Mockingbird which I included on my fourth 200-song mp3 cd of UCSB
cylinders. (The mockingbird story isn't in my Spaeth.) But I mention
it here mostly because I learned that Winner "was responsible for the
nonsensical words (to the German folk-tune, Lauterbach) "Oh, where, oh,
Šwhere has my little dog gone?", etc. Winner brought out his parody in
1864, calling it Der Deitcher's Dog and using an exaggerated dialect."
Not sure if that's new to you; I don't think you have the Spaeth book I
have.
Interesting to think that Winner was responsible for two rhymes that
came to be included in various Mother Goose collections. I have four
with "Little dog", and four with "Ten little Injuns/Nigger boys/
bluebirds".
Had a good Scrabble night last night - 5 scrabeaux in 4 games: MICROBE
DARNERS SCOLDER TALLIES EDITION. I had the good sense to refrain from
trying out EQUALISE as an acceptable British spelling. It would have
been a *killer*! I felt bad when Vivian lost out on CAGER (basketball
player), figuring it was just the American Heritage being overly
conservative. But now I see it's not in the all-inclusive Scrabble
Dictionary, 1st edition, and is also failed by MS Word.
A word that's had me confused for years now is STENT. I've heard many
people use it as naturally as "tree". When I first heard it, it sounded
funny, like somebody trying to say STINT, but with a southern accent.
So I went to a dictionary or two and never found it. Strange. Judy
tried it last night, in spite of my expressed doubts, and got burned.
Again, I figure since everybody uses it and knows what it is, it was my
behind-the-times dictionary to blame. But, again, STENT isn't in the
Scrabble Dictionary, and is failed by MS Word. I'm baffled.
Here's a quiz for you. I'm thinking of a word that is probably used by
almost every speaking American, many times, every day. I would guess
that it is in our top 10 words used, maybe top five. It has plenty of
meaning, infinitely more critical to our communication than such
beautiful little gems of the English language like AH AW EH ER HM HO MM
OI OW OY SH UH UM and YO that modern word lovers will defend to the
death. But it's not in my dictionary, it's not the the Scrabble
Dictionary. It's not a proper noun. It has no punctuation. What is
it?
>>Are you aware that almost all of the published versions of what we
call "Rock-a-bye baby" start "Hush-a-bye baby"? I wonder how we got
switched. "Rock-a-bye baby" is a different rhyme, starting,
>> Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green.
>Strange.
I agree. Here they are. Only 3 out of 11 start "Rock-a-bye". mg16 is
a 1960s kids' record. mg8 is 1968. mg11 is 1955.
mg20 5 Hush-a-by Baby on the tree-top
mg5 126 Hush-a-bye baby on the tree-top
mg16 6 hush-a-bye baby on the tree-top rock-a-bye baby on the tree top
bk8 2770 hush-a-bye baby on the tree-top (music)
mgo 18 hush-a-bye baby on the tree top
mg3 53 Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top
mg4 21 hush-a-bye baby on the tree top 21 hush a by baby
Š mg8 26 hush-a-bye baby on the tree top 26 rock-a-bye baby on the tree top
mg7 HUsh-a-bye Baby on the Tree top 33
mg11 6 hush-a-bye baby on the tree top 6 Rock-a-Bye Baby on the tree top
mg1 Hush-a-bye baby on the tree toP! 25
So why do 9999, if not more, out of 10000 people know it as "Rock-a-bye
baby"?
>>>I know what you mean, though. In a perfect world, a hundred >or so
people would join in such a project [opera database].
>>A hundred? Why not a hundred thousand?
>In your dreams . . .
But everything that's ever been accomplished started with an idea, what
you call dream. Think of Wikipedia, which is only tens or hundreds of
millions times as big a project. And the more people who join in, the
smaller the crumb of "work" each has to do. Who knows, some of them
might even view their chosen hobby as play, not work.
>>Lo and behold, volume 9, "The Child In The Home" has "Who Stole the
Bird's Nest" on page 119. Now I can easily imagine little Bobby
curled up with that one.
>And if it was reprinted there, it was probably reprinted othe places,
too.
Nope, just there. I'm sure of it.
>My kids had a word game (Taboo, if I remember right) with a timer that
clicked loudly and then buzzed in a way that would make me jump even
though I knew it was coming. I was a nervous wreck.
I make the claim in my
http://www.donaldsauter.com/board-game-rules.htm
page that game makers intentionally design games to be nerve-wracking,
and suggest a way to eliminate that element. Taboo gets a specific
mention. It's a great party game (played without the timer or teams.)
>The gerund has to refer to an activity but in a way that the activity
is a noun. In your sentence with "readings," its clearly a thing rather
than an activity.
Clearly too subtle for me!
>>There, that's just the sort of explanation(?) that would be so handy
in an appendix.
>It'll be in the convention chapter, itself.
No doubt. And of course just because I'm always thinking about "the way
things should be" doesn't mean I'm telling you or anybody what to do.
ŠBut I'm sure that *everybody* can't be so different from me that a sort
of thumbnail encyclopedia at the back of every non-fiction, and many
fiction, books wouldn't be tremendously useful. For the most part, that
would just be a sentence or two for any character important enough to
pop up more than once or twice. Then the book will work for even those
people who can't, or choose not to, race through it in one shot with
perfect retention.
>>Y'know, I once had an internet pal who wrote back in Nov 2006:
>Couldn't have been 2006. Sounds more like 2000.
Right on. Now how does one explain a typo like that? The whole reason
for including the passage was to show the humorous change since
2000. But you certainly can't blame it on a finger slip when all I had
to do was tap 0 three times. I'll say this, my typos or more likely to
torpedo whatever it is I'm trying to say.
At Tuesday's auction there was a 2-volume The Cambridge Poetry Book on a
table full of other old books. Nothing quite compelled me to put in a
bid, although it included The Harp Weaver. I already have one Millay
book, for children, even, that I can't understand.
I listened to The Ballad of Baby Doe a few days after Beverly Sills
died. Took it with me on a Sunday trip to Baltimore County. The
strange thing was, it wasn't giving pleasure on the drive there, so I
aborted it, which is pretty unusual for me. But I gave it another try
on the way home, and it really hit the spot. Everything about it was
making me feel good. What in the world is the explanation for something
like that? Same music, same listening conditions, same ears, same brain
. . .
>Loved the "Good God, it sounds like Walton gone mad!" comment, the
Grammy coincidence, and your sound editing. Makes me feel behind the
times, though, because I have no idea how to do that sound editing that
everyone knows today. Obviously, you did a heap of this with your
Silent Film of the Mind score, but I couldn't have done it.
First of all, I'm sure it's still a small fraction of the population
that has such sound editing skills. Second of all, I think I could pass
on to you what I know about it in about an hour, even though it took me
a year and a half or two to stumble into a system. *Nothing*
substitutes for learning side-by-side with a master, notwithstanding the
pervasive wisdom that people learn best when they have to stumble around
on their own. What idiotic, insane, crazy, dumbheaded rot. In any
case, the sound editor I use is a freebie, Wavepad. The free version
doesn't have all the functions, but it's very powerful. I only
discovered about a year and a half later that fade-in and fade-out was
included in the free version. An expert could have told me that in 30
seconds.
>By the way, I decided I needed "Who Killed Davey Moore, " so I bought
Dylan's Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 a couple of weeks
ago.
Yikes, that puts you way ahead of me. I didn't even know there was a
ŠVol. 6! My last Dylan purchase was "Good As I Been To You", which
retains a very soft spot in my heart. In Froggy Went A-Courtin' I
almost choke up when he gets to "Next to come in was the bumble-y
bee..."
THEE: Re: Lennon / Ono WPLJ 1971
Wow! What a delightful response! A true fellow nutter like me out
there!
Thanks for going to the trouble of attaching those MP3 snippets,
too! I haven't actually heard INCREDIBLE HULK for many years, so it was
wonderful to do so again. Funny, my mind's-ear had tuned out exactly
what Yoko's contribution was, and the version I carried around in my
head was a pristine John performing his wordplay all by himself. Oh,
what a voice!
Actually, I found another reference to this recording on the Bootleg
Zone last night, and it has the CD divided up into 10 tracks. Maybe you
already know about this version. If not, who knows, it could turn out
to be worth owning. Please let me know if you get it.
What's most interesting about it is the statement that it comes from
Howard Smith himself. God, wouldn't you love to pick his brain about
that night on the radio?! I mean, he did a number of shows with J & Y,
but nothing resembling this! What WAS the story that day? While I
think the Lennons were in an altered state a lot of the time, I don't
think the nature of this recording has anything to doing with smoking
pot!!! Like I said before, I think they were capable of this atmosphere
24/7.
ME: My copy of the show is on a type I (low bias) Maxell
cassette, so you know it had to take a noticeable dive from whatever it
was copied from.
Believe me, I'd be pleased as punch to be the one to get you a copy of
the show, and it even makes me a little "jealous" to think there's
another source for the show out there. But I have to wonder, if there's
a good quality bootleg cd, wouldn't that be better for you? I couldn't
tell from my visit to the Bootleg Zone page whether the site sells
bootlegs or makes them available for download, or just lists bootlegs.
Didn't see any Add to carts or Buy it nows.
You might get a kick out of something sort of similar that happened with
this page of mine:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/beatles-vi-cover.htm
Shortly after adding a mention of a young girl who wrote a question to
dj Scott Muni about the Beatles VI album cover back in 1988, she googled
herself and was amazed to find my page.
ŠTHEE: subject Would you be interested?
I have some books that I thought I would check with you to see if you
might be interested in having them. You may have already seen them at
my house. If you don't want them do you have any suggestions as to what
I might do with them. Hate to just pitch them.
School Reading by Grades Third Year by James Baldwin Copyright 1897
Good Manners and Right Conduct by Gertrude E. McVenn Copyright 1918 and 1919
Self-Aids in the essentials of grammatical usage by L.J. O'rourke, Ph.D. revised edition Copyright 1927
Human Nature and Conduct by John Dewey copyright 1922 and 1930
Mother West Wind's Animal Friends Thornton W. Burgess
Our Wide, Wide World by Geral S. Craig and Sara E. Baldwin Copyright 1932
The Field Second Reader by Walter Taylor Field Copyright 1922
Problems In Arithmetic by John G. Gilmartin (A supplementary Book for Grandes Five, Six, Seven and Eight) Copyright 1929
The Silver-Burdett Arithmetics Book Two by George Morris Philips, LL.D. and Robert F. Anderson, Sc.D Copyright 1913
Stone's Silent Reading Book 1 by Clarence R. Stone Copyright 1924
Essentials of Plane Geometry by David Eugene Smith Copyright 1923 (some writing in it)
ME: I agree, it's seems sad to just throw books out. There's a
bunch in there that I wouldn't mind having. If you wanted to see if you
could make a little money off them, you could try a freebie ad in the
Gazette. (Is that still kicking?) Some people might suggest dropping
them off at the New Carrollton Library store, but I view that as a lot
of work for what is essentially throwing them out.
That was the 2nd time I received one of those lists of changing 4-letter
words. I don't see how it could ever stop. I think your sister either
goofed or cheated.
Had a new scrabble player last night. That made three, and we had a
good time.
THEE: www.vinegarbook.co.uk/heal_spur_with_vinegar_and_brown_paper.shtml
If you have a heal spur, you can now get relief without much expense.
All you have to do is take a piece of brown paper bag and soak it in
apple cider vinegar. Put this around your spur and wear it in your shoe.
Do this for an hour or two every day and you will notice in just a few
days you will have great relief!
ME: subject auto insurance
Can anyone anywhere justify using a person's credit score in setting
auto insurance rates when insurance companies get their money in
advance, anyway?
The final question is about those ridiculous driving safety courses.
I suppose it's been something like two years and I have to take a silly
follow-up to continue to get reduced rates? Of course, I'm hoping
that's all a bad dream, but please advise as to what I have to do in
that regard.
Š
I thought it was more beneficial to put my questions in a note rather
than blindsiding you in a phone call. As I've mentioned before, I know
how petty all my concerns are considering how low my rates are compared
to the average person's, but I have a friend with twice as big a
vehicle, twice as valuable, half as old, driven twice as fast (with a
radar detector), and with far more coverage than I have, and his annual
premium is only a few more dollars than mine. Things like that bug me.
THEE:
>But I've gotten very good at insulating myself. I've probably given
the war in Iraq less thought than any other living American. I might
see a related headline in google news, but even if I half read it, I
wouldn't click on it in a million years.
Wish I was that good at insulating myself. For some reason, I feel
compelled to know what's happening. Part of that probably comes from
teaching because issues come up in student papers and in class. Most
students are clueless beyond what they did last night, but some follow
the news. Also, a couple friends are interested in current events and
bombard me with Internet articles and questions about my opinions.
>lintier. I forgot. Does it need to have its own entry? If not, under
lint, I have --linty, adj., lintier, lintiest.
Not at all. All those little -y, -er, etc., constructs at the end of a
main entry are perfectly legit.
Good thing.
>>seance? Because of the accent??? Otherwise, I have it.
>Yes. So your saying your dictionary, like mine, only has it with the
frenchified fly speck? Now that *is* crazy! What possible
justification could there be for bringing a foreign word into the
English language fold, but not spelling it with English letters???
Suppose we had to spell HAIKU in chinese-y heiroglyphics?
Yup, only with the accent. As for Haiku, better make that one Japanese.
;-) Exactly right on your point, though, but I guess we've adopted the
accented e as in resume, cliche, blase. I'm slower thinking of others
with an interior accented e.
>>So maybe you shoulda been using Random House Webster's College
Dictionary?
>Nope. You've indicated it has too much of the 2-letter trash that I
despise so intensely.
VERY little.
>I think there's a big competition out there now to see which dictionary
committee has the least shame in calling garbage words. (Words is an
Šobjective complement there.) And I suspect the Official Scrabble
Dictionary played a big part in starting this junk word race.
Supposedly, dictionaries include words that they find in use. Maybe
they justify saying the words are used if they appear in a Scrabble
game? I'd be looking for use in books, magazines, newspapers, and
spoken English.
>One that hit me recently was in the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Nigger
Boys" (apparently a British variant on our "Ten Little Injuns").
"Ten Little Injuns" must be politically incorrect by now, too. Try
fitting in "Native Americans." Yet I still hear local Cherokees,
including the director of the Native American Studies program, talking
about someone as Indian or about the entire Native American population
as Indian.
Not exactly relevant, but I listen to the mockingbirds all the time.
Love 'em. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird in 10th grade, I got the
point about never killing a mockingbird because all they do is make
beautiful music, but it wasn't quite real until I moved to Texas and
started hearing mockingbirds. We have plenty of 'em here, too.
re: Der Dichter's Dog. The parody version includes a Coney Island
barker shouting something like, "Dogs, Dogs, get your dogs while they're
hot! Eat 'em alive." I started looking for sources that alluded to hot
dogs being made from dog meat and found sources galore, including lots
of newspaper cartoons.
>Interesting to think that Winner was responsible for two rhymes that
came to be included in various Mother Goose collections. I have four
with "Little dog", and four with "Ten little Injuns/Nigger boys/
bluebirds".
I had no idea about that, but try reading Philip Furia's The Poets of
Tin Pan Alley someday. He's writted several others, but the only one of
those I've read is Irving Berlin: A Life in Song . Furia can make "Tea
for Two" sound like a masterpiece, and I found myself loving it all.
>But, again, STENT isn't in the Scrabble Dictionary, and is failed by MS
Word. I'm baffled.
So all those folks who have had stents inserted in their arteries to
avoid dying of cardiovascular disease have been conned??? Those
dictionaries ARE behind the times. Here's the definition in my Random
House Webster's College Dictionary (1991--and looking at that date, I
think I need a new one):
stent, n. Med. a small, expandablel tube used for inserting in a blocked
vessel or other part. [1960-65; orig. uncert.]
>>>Are you aware that almost all of the published versions of what we
call "Rock-a-bye baby" start "Hush-a-bye baby"? I wonder how we got
switched. "Rock-a-bye baby" is a different rhyme, starting,
Š>>> Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green.
>>Strange.
>I agree. Here they are.
And seems like I remember that baby IN the tree top, not ON it, but none
of your versons use in.
>>>Lo and behold, volume 9, "The Child In The Home" has "Who Stole the
Bird's Nest" on page 119. Now I can easily imagine little Bobby
curled up with that one.
>>And if it was reprinted there, it was probably reprinted othe places,
too.
>Nope, just there. I'm sure of it.
AND . . . what makes you so sure?
>I make the claim in my page that game makers intentionally design games
to be nerve-wracking, and suggest a way to eliminate that element.
Taboo gets a specific mention. It's a great party game (played without
the timer or teams.)
Yup, I liked the game except for that blasted noisy timer.
>>The gerund has to refer to an activity but in a way that the activity
is a noun. In your sentence with "readings," it's clearly a thing
rather than an activity.
>Clearly too subtle for me!
Ok, then trust me. You're right when you say that gerunds can't take a
plural ending, but not all words that look like gerunds necessarily are
gerunds.
>And of course just because I'm always thinking about "the way things
should be" doesn't mean I'm telling you or anybody what to do. But I'm
sure that *everybody* can't be so different from me that a sort of
thumbnail encyclopedia at the back of every non-fiction, and many
fiction, books wouldn't be tremendously useful. For the most part, that
would just be a sentence or two for any character important enough to
pop up more than once or twice. Then a book would work for even those
people who can't, or choose not to, race through it in one shot with
perfect retention.
You're right, but publishers would never go for it except in some
textbooks. I find myself wanting to identify people repeatedly, but
doing so would irritate some readers. So maybe once per chapter will do
for minor figures that seem to need identification...
>In Froggy Went A-Courtin' I almost choke up when he gets to "Next to
come in was the bumble-y bee..."
ŠBy the way, your "Froggy" comment somehow reminds me that, of all the
versions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol I've seen, the one that chokes me
up most is The Muppet Christmas Carol. When the frog Tiny Tim dies and
his little crutch is sitting by the fireplace, it's strangely more
touching than all the human versions. I can't explain it.
THEE: I only have one item to bring to your attention, and I do
so because of your love for all things classical, though it's not my
metier. There is a fascinating article in the September 17th issue of
the New Yorker regarding a concert pianist named Hatto. If you have any
interest in this, I'll try to send you the article--as I say, quite
fascinating. This is the second article I've read there recently about
world-class hoaxes--the other was about Thomas Jefferson's wine
collection, and also made for great reading.
THEE: subject skipping scratching
I am amazed to find such detailed help on fixing scratch/pops. You give
the impression that if the helpee follows your instructions with the
same precision and patience that you have exercised in setting down the
instructions, success is unavoidable!
I'll certainly give it ago. The recording I want to patch up is a
10-inch demo LP of Rev. Gary Davis recorded in Paris circa 1960. Aside
from a couple of really nasty canyons the record is generally extremely
noisy: that the platter is made of aluminium covered by a less than
dense layer of vinyl (which is beginning to peel off at the edges)
doesn't make matters any easier. However his playing at this time is
such a wonder that I must make some effort to salvage it.
I first saw the water trick being used by a classical music presenter
while compiling his programme at a radio station in Durban in the mid-
eighties. It struck me as an incredibly cavalier way to treat such
'delicate recording equipment' but I was assured by him that no harm was
being done. Since then I have used this method myself whenever I
transfer from vinyl, whatever the condition of the record, and it is
clearly apparent that any surface noise is hugely reduced. (A few drops
of washing up liquid added to the water in a small jug, then poured
carefully onto the record from centre hole outward as it's revolving,
spreading towards the edge with a flattened finger - the wu liquid seems
to 'stabilise' the water, slowing its flow outwards.)
So I'm nonplussed by your 'doubts'!
Thanks again for taking the time, I hope to report back on a successful
restoration project and look forward to exploring the rest of your site
which, judging by comments in the guest book, appears to be a cave of
wonder.
ME: Thanks for visiting. Good luck with the precious 10".
About the benefits of playing records wet, believe me, I'm as
Š"nonplussed" as you! I used to consider the results miraculous. About
the only outstanding issues were, Which gives more miraculous results -
soapy water, or alcohol-y water, or a combination of both? and, How do
you keep the surface wet the whole time it plays without having to sit
there and keep swabbing it?
I am really baffled at what has changed? Am I listening harder now, and
simply more critical and unaccepting of *any* little tick? I'm also
sure I often, or always, hear an added background hiss or swish when
there's liquid in the groove. Did I miss it before? Am I listeneing
harder? Is there something different about the equipment I'm using?
Are there different sorts of vinyl?
What I do now is play each record for its last time and transfer it to
cd. I always a "pop and click remover" in the process. So the dilemma
is, do I wash out a bunch of pops and clicks, which may be completely
eliminated by the pop and click filter, while potentially adding
background noise that will NOT be eliminated in the digital transfer?
It's very frustrating to me to feel like I should have to wrestle with
this at all. Certainly there must be experts out there who can spell
out precisely how to mix up the most effective solution and apply it to
the record, and also who have very carefully analyzed the results to see
how much noise has been removed, and what sort has been added.
I'm positive that playing records wet has had a permanent, destructive
effect on them. They're still playable, but have much, much greater
background noise which wetting again has no effect on. In some cases,
that's almost brought me to tears.
Very, very maddening and frustrating.
ME: Here are the ones that I would grab.
School Reading by Grades Third Year by James Baldwin Copyright 1897
(I have quite a few things by this James Baldwin in my collection.)
Mother West Wind's Animal Friends Thornton W. Burgess
(Sounds neat, whether fiction or nonfiction.)
Problems In Arithmetic by John G. Gilmartin (A supplementary Book for
Grades Five, Six, Seven and Eight) Copyright 1929
The Silver-Burdett Arithmetics Book Two by George Morris Philips, LL.D.
and Robert F. Anderson, Sc.D Copyright 1913
ME: Just stopped by the Smyrna hospital again today. Fun as
always. Vivian from my club won her game, and I won mine. HOORAY FOR
DOVER! (Just joking.) I had a bunch of scraboes I couldn't get down,
though. One was APOSTLE.
ŠTo the best of my memory, the three of us never played a game. I had
the impression your sister was the killer scrabble player. Well, just
because you beat her doesn't mean she isn't, of course. A good thing
about the game is that there's enough luck so everybody can win now and
then.
THEE: subject Many Thanks from France by musicien anarchist
Hello, I have been very happy descovering such a front page as I was
looking for baroque guitare tabs . Many thanks for the music and the
suprise.
Frangois Bonnet
THEE: I finished Thurber's little book, 13 Clocks. It's
adorable, and I could read it several times. How is it you have such
eclectic tastes? What catches your fancy really "runs the gamut".
ME: Really glad you liked 13 Clocks. That means you are not a
curmudgeon. (Not that anybody said you are.)
Here are some things I've been reading lately:
Democracy In Delaware
The Wit And Humor of America, vol viii (1912)
The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book
Can I Get There By Candlelight? (juvenile fiction)
Escape - Liberia, Africa and the USA: The Surrender of Harbel; War,
Accommodation, and Reconciliation for Peace, Agricultural Development
and Economic Prosperity
Baseball's Best Short Stories
Boys' Life magazine (I have a subscription.)
You call that eclectic?
I guess if Sharon's having a birthday, you must have one coming up, too.
Me, I announced this year that I'm finished with birthdays.
ME: On my most recent electric bill, 275 kwh cost $36.93. That works
out to $.134 per kwh, which is almost twice what you pay. That makes a
big difference. When we we compared your total bill for a winter month
with my combined gas and electric for the same month, it was something
like $180 vs. $120. If you were paying my electric rates, it would have
been $360 vs. $120. In one sense, that makes me feel better, my utility
Šusage being about a third of yours. On the other hand, it raises a
bummer of a question about me converting to all electric.
Cyril showed up at scrabble last night! Goes to show you can't be sure
about anything.
My most spectacular moment was ending game 3 with back-to-back scraboes.
Just before that I had J A _ _ T E R. I played off the J A and drew two
more blanks! I could barely figure out what to do with E R T _ _ _ _
but played R _ _ _ E _ T (reddest). Then I drew G I M N N O U. Looked
like a mess, but saw the ING and wrapped MOUN_ING (mounding) around one
of the blank Ds in R___E_T to go out.
ME: subject: not hiawatha
Here's the whole poem with the familiar first lines you never heard.
Pretty nice, eh?
THE ARROW AND THE SONG
I shot an arrow into the air;
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the. air;
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
- Henry W. Longfellow.
ME: No denying making cds takes a bit of time and effort, but it's all
recreational. Besides, I did it for myself as well. It was great to
hear the old tape [Beatles muzak] again. And the new one I put together
was a masterwork, sez me, and I'm stickin' to it. The cd covers are how
I do them all. I figured out a long time ago how to position the text
on a piece of paper so it comes out just right when you fold it into a
cd sleeve. I may have mentioned that I put all my cds in sleeves like
that, and throw out the plastic cd cases.
THEE: I'm going to mail you today a CD of the 100 guitars. As I
told you, our vynil record is in poor condition. My brother digitalized
it but he had to cut a lot of the 1st track because there was lots of
cracks. I felt sick with this massacre especially the first track was
one of my favorite. I'll try to do better some day. The others tracks
are more or less ok. I hope you'll enjoy this work of the 100 guitars
formation. It deserves its name of Serenata Sensacional.
Š
ME: Thanks a lot! I'm sure I'll enjoy the cd very much, even if it's not
quite perfect. I enjoyed the track that you emailed. It's still pretty
funny that we thought we were talking about the same 100 Guitars album.
ME: subject: have you brushed your teeth today
Glad the cd got there. I meant to send off an email with a few
comments. For one, you'll see my memory was playing tricks (what else
is new?) - the break between sides was not in The Incredible Hulk, but
in the "and if you think that's far out" segment. I notice that
nothing's missing. Side two starts up with an "o" sound that is the end
of "ago" right near the end of side one. Track 3 was just a track
advancement to keep any final digital "crack!" away from the real
tracks. My Sony cd recorder loves to do that.
I say "nothing is missing" at the turnover point, but you would know
better than me how much is missing at the beginning and end of the show.
Sorry I can't be of assistance with the John Lennon bootlegs; I have
just a few miscellaneous odds and ends, not counting 11 or 12 tapes of
music from The Lost Lennon Tapes.
By the way, did you get my invitation to a page of mine with something
sort of similar that happened with you? Shortly after adding a mention
of a young girl who wrote a question to dj Scott Muni about the Beatles
VI album cover back in 1988, she googled herself and was amazed to find
my page.
I still wonder what the quality of the Howard Smith bootleg is like.
Bet it's great.
ME: Got a record at today's auction autographed by the Beatles'
favorite American group.
The web is mum on the autographee: Admiral Bob Archer.
ME: I stopped by Citizens' Bank today to ask why my interest is
in a nosedive. Needless to say, their non-answers still have me shaking
with rage. Let me know if you see any changes in your personal money
market rate.
ME: I just received my statement and my interest rate has dropped
to your current rate.
THEE: I hope you didn't pay more than $1,000 for an LP autographed by
Sophie Tucker. It isn't worth a penny more.
ŠTHEE: Further to the question of whether using water on vinyl is
good/bad, below is the response of an audio student which I thought
might interest you (he has the ears of a dog!):
>I failed to mention that on his site he was expressing doubts about the
efficacy of using the wet to improve reproduction on bad vinyl:
I'd say that yes, he *probably* is listening harder. We all adjust to
things we're familiar with over time, and learn to discern subtleties
inaccessible before.
Interesting - I can accept that maybe more physical damage is done
because of the aquaplaning needle impacting harder on the groove walls
(harder to change direction?). The added hiss is an interesting one - I
guess it's possible, but not sure how you'd discern it separately from
all the crackle present on dry playing - is it possible he's just
hearing the constant noise previously masked by all the crackle? On the
other hand, he might be referring to a swishing of the signal itself,
which is conceivable if the needle isn't tracking properly (maybe
different frequencies suppressing each other, so treble response could
change with the intensity of lower frequencies - who knows! physics is
hard).
I'd certainly never claim that wet playing does no damage to the sound -
I've sometimes wondered whether the sound is more "wet" after wet
playing (dampened treble, blurry transient response?) BUT given the
choice between moderate to high crackle, and constant hiss, I'll take
hiss any day. My experiences with click/pop filters have been pretty
trying, and I tend to find that in the process of making the filter
stringent enough to remove all the clickle, some legitimate sounds are
impossible to preserve. A good example is horns - I've found it
virtually impossible to prevent the click/pop filter from distorting
them, because the wave shapes resemble vinyl pops too closely for it to
distinguish. I certainly couldn't find a compromise that got rid of
enough crap without noticeably distorting the horns.
I'd be the first to admit that maybe I was using a crappy click/pop tool
(the Audition standard one - I've certainly found its noise-/hiss-
reduction wanting, and since switched to using a separate plugin for
that purpose), but at the time I found the signal damage caused by wet
playing to be significantly more innocuous than that caused by having to
swab the signal hard with the click filter, so I opted to wet-play in
order to be left with the relatively tractable task of getting rid of
constant noise with a noise-reduction filter.
ME: Thanks a million for your efforts in getting some dialog
going on this issue of playing records wet. I've seen virtually nothing
on the web, and even less that inspires any confidence in the advice
being based on anything.
What I'm dying for is for it to actually get taken up scientifically in
well-equipped labs. It just doesn't seem so hard to me for some very
knowledgeable people to run a batch of tests and come up with some
solution that does the "best" job on crud in the grooves and the least
Šdetriment to vinyl; the most effective way to apply it; and the best
stylus shape and pressure for playing the wet record. It just doesn't
seem that it should be that hard.
I feel pretty sure there have been instances, but certainly not often,
of me applying a solution to a crackly record being played dry, and a
hiss kick in at the exact moment the needle hits the wet area. Low
quality or aged vinyl? Is my formula too strong?
Another thing I'm dying for is a noise reduction component on the input
side of my stereo system so I can actually enjoy the record while it
plays, and get a cleaned up copy as a nice byproduct, as opposed to the
regular method, (at least mine) where a few hours of work goes into
producing a cleaned-up copy *before* you get to hear it. Is that
dreaming?
THEE: Thanks for your tabs. With them, I have learned these
pieces on the charango...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9imB3lhGmlM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpVVlz_R4cA&mode=user&search=
Peace.
ME: Great! I really enjoyed the charango videos. I thank you
for finding the Sanz tablatures and making use of them. That's what
it's all about!
ME: At just about the same time you send me that funny Pachelbel
canon video, I got this nice note from a charango player who used some
Gaspar Sanz tabs (Baroque guitar) from my site. I'm delighted.
THEE: Re: 100 Guitars
You said you will enjoy the CD even if it's not quite well. This
is an euphemism!! The 1rst track is really bad. I'll try to digitalize
it again one day. My brother digitalized it in a butcher manner! Tell me
when you receive it. I sent it registered.
ME:
>I just received my statement and my interest rate has dropped to your
current rate.
Which is 3.64% (uncompounded)?
THEE: My current electric bill was $114.81 for 1014 kwh. That
works out to be $.113/kwh.
Š
My current Citizens Bank interest is 3.93% and 4.33% apy.
ME: Future discussion: why does your bill say $.07 per kwh?
Citizens Bank has goofy computers. For 3.93% basic interest rate (APR),
the effective, or APY, rate is 4.002% (monthly compounding) or 4.008%
(daily compounding).
ME: How many times do we know of the Beatles mentioning Sophie
Tucker? I had thought twice, but stumbled on a third one today. Any
more?
ME: Whew, I sure don't know enough about the brain to offer
anything useful on your cerebellum question. Don't even know what a
"fiber" is - a nerve cell or "axon"?
Whoa, now I find out I know less about the stock market than the brain!
Didn't know it was doing so well now. My understanding is there's not
an economist alive who really understands these things. I read most of
a book about the internet stock bust called DOT.CON, and that came out
over and over that no one could define "bubble" or predict when it would
burst.
Had fun on Saturday at a talk about Delaware governors; an associated
walking tour around the Green; the Governor's open house; First Saturday
activities at the museums with a little friend; and a library book sale.
THEE: subject Flexagon video
I was messing around with trying to convert that old flexagon video we
made into flash format. The camera I used for the original does not
take very good videos to begin with. Here it is:
http://www.dcguitar.net/FlexVid/Flexagon.html
Hope things are well with you. Things are rather crazy at work since we
just got a union, 1st time in 60 years at the GAO. There's no real
leader yet -- just a bunch of disgruntled employees who started it and
feel they now own it. Much work to be done there.
ME: It's funny you bring up the flexagon vid. It had crossed my
mind recently, for no really good reason though. Probably a passing
thought to putting up an ebay auction again, although that goes right
back out of mind.
Had a mindbending moment at the Dover auction recently when I saw a
folded up flexagon on top of a box of stuff. I mean, I'm surely the
only person in the state, and probably for a much greater range than
that, who makes the darn things. Within a few seconds I saw that it
Šwas, in fact, one that I had made. It was personalized to my young
friend Mizan. Her family was moving, which is why a row of their stuff
was put out at the auction.
Haven't been in touch with Bob for a couple of months. Plan to give a
call when the weather turns bad. If it ever will. Here it is the
middle of October, and my ac is still coming on - and I have it set to
85! What have we done to the earth?
Will look at the flexagon vid at the library, and download it there.
Will also forward an email with links to youtube vids of a charango
player who used a couple of Sanz tabs from my site.
ME: I'll be going though the opera cd lot I bought recently for a long
time - thanks again! Was wondering if you had more of the "Legato Classics"?
Those are old audience recordings that a normal person (if any opera
fans are normal people to start with) would find dreadful, but are a
thrill for me. If you've been holding back figuring your buyers will
blast you with negative feedback - never fear! (At least if I'm the
winner.)
THEE: I'm blanking on any more than two references to Sophie
Tucker by the Fabs.
That guy who does those Beatlegs Podcasts devoted entire episodes to
all the times the Beatles said "We've been together now for 40 years"
and "Harry and his box." The number of times is truly amazing in each
case.
ME: I'm guessing you got the Sophie Tucker by Royal Command and
the Sophie Tucker in Miami. There's a Sophie Tucker in Washington,
D.C., too.
A couple of days ago I thought I discovered a "40 years" on Beatles Talk
Downunder that the beatleg guy missed, but it turns out he didn't.
Drat.
Have you ever found yourself on my John Lennon page? Takes a lot of
reading (or a little quick scanning.) All in fun.
ME: Yes I did get your note and program a few years ago. Wed, 16
Jun 2004 17:44:48 -0600, to be specific. (I save everything, haha.)
And do I feel like a BUM. I kept putting it off until I started feeling
like I left it too long. Dumb excuse. You thought it might be a
"temporary experience" for you. I'll admit I was afraid to fire up a
program on my computer. I guess it was less than a year before that I
finally got pulled into Windows and a modern computer, and it had me
pulling my hair out. I still do almost everything the old-fashioned way
- working in the "command prompt" (DOS) mode, for example. You can see
how basic my web pages are.
Š
You wouldn't know from my web site that the guitar is sort of fading out
of my life. I beat my head against the wall for 10 years trying to
people to join in the good time at the Washington Guitar Society. Even
though my natural tendency is to just remember the bad times, there were
good times too. If you search on "potomac guitar trio" or the
"washington guitar society" you can easily find a page with a few pieces
our trio recorded. Not necessarily the *best* things we recorded . . .
Along the way, I also got torn limb from limb just trying to present my
system of fingering notation to the guitar world. Now why would that
make everybody so vicious? Nobody has to use it who doesn't want to.
A few years ago I moved from Maryland to Delaware to start a learning
center. That was a franchise operation, but now I'm tutoring privately.
Dover is sort of a nice, relaxed place, but, man, parents won't spend a
nickel on their kids' education.
THEE: We've signed up for a joint family project that will help
keep the USPS busy in Oklahoma, Maryland, Florida, and Mississippi. An
article caught my eye on the Internet recently about an Iowa congressman
who is doing his grocery shopping for several weeks on what is normally
allotted for food stamps--something around $21 per person per week, I
think. The article mentioned that he had been a sponsor for a Box
Project family for the past 2-3 years, and it gave the URL:
http://boxproject.org. You know how curious I can be, so I had to check
it out. When I began reading about this organization, I decided it was
something I had to do. So I talked to the kids, who wanted to join in.
Today we were matched with a family in Mississippi: a single mom named
LaShonda and her three (soon to be 4) kids.
If you look at the website, you'll see how this works. The sponsor
family decides how much it can allot to the project and then uses that
money to send boxes directly to the sponsored family. The website
contains all sorts of recommendations, but mostly what's needed are
basic necessities from toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, and household
goods to new or used clothing and school supplies. The family at the
other end is required to correspond, and rules say not to send the next
month's box before hearing from them. Oughta be fun hitting garage
sales, charity resale shops, and flea markets once I know what's needed.
Of course, I'll also start checking the neighborhood used bookstore,
hoping these kids will read. Several of the people in the newsgroup say
"their kids" love to get books. Anyway, I hope this works out because
it could be a good way to make a small difference, and possibly even a
lasting one, in some young people's lives.
ME: Why in the world do people get themselves so bent out of shape over
receiving a wrong number phone call???
ME: FTC Commissioners Deborah Platt Majoras, Chairman Commissioner
Pamela Jones Harbour Commissioner Jon Leibowitz Commissioner William E.
Kovacic Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch
Š
Deborah Platt Majoras
Office of Public Affairs
Federal Trade Commission
600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20580
Dear Ms. Majoras,
Please hear me out. I'm sure there are many others in my situation.
I am 54 years old and I have never opted in to the "credit card"
lifestyle. I have never made sense of sinking so much time, effort, and
expense into keeping payments out of synch with purchases. Flashing my
ATM card seems to do virtually everything that a credit card does,
including reserving airline flights and hotel rooms.
But now one's "credit rating" is being used to determine one's auto
insurance rates. Now I can't hope to shop around for better rates for
the completely irrelevant reason that I have no credit rating. Never
mind a spotless driving record for 38 years. I even wonder if I will
eventually be priced out of auto insurance for having no credit rating.
I am not asking you to talk sense to the insurance industry. What I am
hoping for is a common sense addition, or overrride, to the method by
which credit ratings are calculated. It seems to me that a person who
has lived decades, buying houses and cars, renting business space, never
being late on a utility bill, having tens or hundreds of thousands of
dollars in savings, and having no criminal record should be viewed as
the most responsible in financial matters. He should not be lumped in
with the high school kids, crooks, street people, and everyone
struggling with maxed-out credit cards. Actually, I'm guessing all of
those people score higher than I do. My application for a credit card
always comes back with the rejection, "Insufficient credit history".
Put another way, shouldn't the person who never gets into debt place at
at least the same level as the person who played the ridiculous game of
taking on debt just to prove that he could get out?
The only objection I can imagine is something along the lines of, "But
how do we really know we can trust that person when he gains access to
large lines of credit?" First of all, if he proves to be irresponsible,
his credit rating plummets, as it would for everyone else. Second of
all, the same objection applies to everyone who has dutifully played the
credit game. How do you know he hasn't been plotting for years just to
get dozens of cards to max them all out and skip the country or declare
bankruptcy?
I, and surely millions of others, thank you for your consideration.
ME: electric tankless water heaters
Dear This Old House,
ŠI have been stymied completely so far in my quest to convert my house to
all electric. I believe the benefits to me, both comfort-wise and
utility cost-wise, would be significant. No one I've contacted has been
at all helpful about converting from a natural gas furnace to a packaged
heat pump, so I started to look at the water heating part of the
problem.
So far, I've been stymied in that, too. In particular, it seems to me
that tankless, electric, point-of-use hot water would make a lot of
sense for someone like me, if not everyone. I live alone and use very
little hot water, only running it once or twice per day, and using
perhaps a couple of gallons per day, on the average.
But electric tankless water heating is not something that plumbers, in
my area, at least, have much experience with. They actually seem to
enjoy humiliating a person for even considering it. I believe that
these impressions are based on "wisdom" from decades ago when maybe a
gas water heater was perhaps significantly cheaper to use than an
electric one.
As far as I know, the issue of tankless electric water heating is
something your show has never dealt with, either.
It seems to me that it boils down to a simple math problem. These are
the contestants, in my case:
Natural gas water heater (tank) (what I have currently)
Electric water heater (tank)
Electric tankless water heater, whole house
Electric tankless water heaters, point of use
The question is, for each contestant, how many units of gas or
electricity is used to heat a given amount of hot water? Let's call it
2 gallons of hot water per day, in one shot. Surely someone somewhere
can crank those numbers. I can convert the kwh and ccf gas into
dollars.
There are only 4 places in my house where I use hot water. I will NEVER
draw hot water two places at once. Currently, the gas water heater is
on one end of my house, and my bathroom is on the other. Brilliant, eh?
With point-of-use hot water, I may actually indulge myself and use it
for washing my hands, say. As it is, I don't even consider drawing hot
water from the other end of the house and tough out the cold water.
If I didn't set foot in my house in the months when the furnace isn't
used, my gas bill would be close to $40 per month. That's what I pay
just to keep pilot flames going, and the 30-gallon water tank heated up.
Imagine what that $40 could be doing for me as electricity. In fact, it
represents about *twice* my electric bill in the months without A/C, and
I'm *always* using electricity! - clocks, computer, stereo, lights,
refrigerator, etc.
Š
I am desperate for expert advice. I think what I am shooting for would
be so clearly advantageous that such work on my house would serve as a
model to many other homeowners, perhaps starting a revolution in water
heating and conversion to packaged heat pumps.
In any case, I am more than willing to pay for your help or advice.
Please let me hear from you. Thanks.
ME: It all began with a long distance correspondence with an
internet pal in Oklahoma. Every time I relates hows I get burned on
this, that, or the other slightly risky 7-letter play (scrab-o) in
Scrabble, she shoots right back, "Well, it's in *my* dictionary." So I
starts thinking, hm (or hmm), maybe it's time to move up to 1991 and a
slightly less conservative dictionary. It'd be nice to play TENNERS and
FLINGERS, etc., with my heart only half way up my throat.
So I nail a Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1991) on half.com
for 75 cents. Aren't the 2007s grand? Well, the postage is 4 or 5
times that, but it's still a better proposition than waiting for one to
show up at Spence's auction. It even came with its dust jacket, only
slightly crumpled along the top and bottom edges. I doctor that up and
put it in a plastic dust jacket cover to make it look like a million
bucks.
What I have to do to make a dictionary scrabble-ready is take a list of
all the 2- and 3-letter words in the OSPD (Official Scrabble Players'
Dictionary) and check each one that is in the least suspect in the
dictionary under consideration. The OSPD has 101 2-letter words and
1015 3-letter words. So it's quite a bit of work, especially with
onion-thin dictionary pages that you want to keep nice forever.
After spending some time with the Random House (RH), I found I wasn't
getting very comfortable with it. For one thing, I got the impression
it's trying to be a little unabridged dictionary. Here are just some of
the words it has - in 1991 - that weren't even added to the OSPD until
2006(!): za bes cru dan def hos kye mic neg oda pst rai suk. And the
OSPD goes around grabbing words from every dictionary there is, and then
some! So I have no idea what's going on there.
Admittedly, I didn't take the days or weeks necessary to absorb all the
introductory material, but over and over I found myself confused.
For instance it doesn't show a common noun "lar", but gives a plural,
"lars", for it.
It never gives the second person singular -s forms for verbs, and
sometimes not even the past tense and participle thing, so can you
imagine what would happen when someone plays "haes", for example?
("See, it ain't in there!" "It don't have to be!") Never mind "haeing".
I'm still baffled by abbreviations. I'm pretty sure "amu" and "iff" are
abbreviations, by virtue of no supplied pronunciation, but they sure
look like words sitting there.
Š
The last, um, "thing" in the dictionary is "zzz". I *think* the
interpretation is, that since there's no part of speech or definition
given that it's not a word, but some sort of "representation".
Guaranteed to cause fisticuffs.
I don't like the way they lump all the different parts of speech and
their inflected forms right at the beginning. The noun definitions,
say, might be half a page down. And they don't even do anything to
alert you to where the definitions for a different part of speech start,
such as with numbering from 1 again.
It gives explicit plurals for bio and do (music note), but not for so
(music note) and the Chinese game go. It shows the plural for em, but
not el and en. One would have to conclude that they can't be
pluralized. If you view it as simply an oversight, and theorize that,
unless otherwise stated, any noun can be pluralized simply by adding s,
then what about bes? The plural is bess? Under ort it says, "Usu.,
orts." Interpreted literally, that says that orts is singular and means
a scrap of food.
"Pow" is defined as "the power of exciting". Huh???
What do italics mean on words such as rex and sic? Latin? Why not just
say Lat.? Cum and qua are not italicized, but maybe they're not Latin
even though they always sort of looked Latin to me. There's cee, but no
ef.
"Girlie" is offensive, but "ho" is perfectly respectable. If that's
right, you people sure are funny.
All that aside, how can anyone take a dictionary seriously that includes
squush/y and squoosh/y. I mean, it doesn't even label them slang or
informal. What it could say is, "pronunciations of squash going beyond
squish, even, in intended, childish silliness."
In any case, there's no way I could ever wrestle that one into a usable
scrabble dictionary.
I noted a few other things. "Brown study" has an entry, as it does in
the American Heritage. You remember me sending you a couple of those,
thinking they related to your own "brown" study.
The RH also lacks an "outcheer", which surprises me.
In the definition for "tun" it syllabicated liquids "liq-uids". I can't
say that's wrong, but it strikes my funny bone. I don't think I ever
saw a u get separated from its q before.
You sent me the definition for "stent", and it was classified as a
"Med." term. I was curious if that implied specialized jargon outside
of mainstream English, or whether they were just trying to be helpful in
giving us a subject area for the word. I tried to find other "Med."s,
such as for "hangnail" and "splint", but without success. For that
matter, I don't see "Chem." for azo, or "Baseb." for homer, so, at this
Špoint, one might say my study was inconclusive.
Since I use the American Heritage (AH) in my club, Vivian went right out
and bought one. Of course, hers is the latest edition, the 4th (2007),
and mine is the 2nd (1985). I felt like, uh oh, she'll be finding all
kinds of junky new little words in hers. Anyhow, I had her AH4 around
here to put a dust jacket cover on it. So, while it was here, and I
struck out with the RH, I figured I might as well update to the AH4. I
already knew it had things like AB and ZA that I'm not going to have
stinking up Dover Scrabble Club boards, but I figured I'd find some
consistent way to reject things like that. So I went through the 2- and
3-letter word lists again with the AH4. As always, that's a lot of
work, but it was accompanied by an exhilerating feeling of, "Ahh, back
in the saddle again - this is dictionary is class!" after the experience
with Random House's comic book of a dictionary. I should take its dust
jacket cover back off.
For Scrabble, I used the the AH2 straight; anything in it was valid.
With the AH4 I did everything in my power to find a general rule that
would eliminate the words I despise and leave the good ones. Rules like
"no slang" or "no slang or informal" or "no slang or informal less than
4 letters long" or "no slang or informal less than 4 letters long that
is simply a truncation of the proper word" or "no slang or informal...
using a high powered letter in Scrabble" all threw out plenty of babies
with the bath water.
So, to get rid of things I hate like AB ED BIZ COZ WIZ etc., I would
have to take down MA PA BIO PRO REF VET MIC MAX TUX UKE etc. I'd argue
most of those words have paid their dues. In the end I just had to
resign myself to picking and choosing the non-DS (Dover Scrabble) words.
I will take club members' feelings into consideration, though. I might
knuckle under to ZIG and ZAG, for instance. They weren't in the AH2,
and I'm still conditioned to view them as nonsensical as stand-alone
words. (zig v. to move in a straight line. zag v. to move in a
straight line.)
One straightforward rule I added was "no Hebrew letters". My position
is that letters aren't words and that Hebrew is foreign. I don't like
English and Greek letters either, but at least they have a lot of uses.
So PE HES MEM VAV WAW VAW and QOPH are out.
Here's a complete list of 2- and 3-letter words that would be allowed by
the AH4, but I personally vetoed, and my justifications. If you have
any strong feelings that I goofed up here or there, let me know. "Too
new" means added to Scrabble Official Word List in Mar 2006. They
haven't "paid their dues," in my view. Not being included in the RH is
pretty significant since it includes many more words than the AH.
AB - too new; failed by MS Word; singular form of ABS is ABsurd!
BI - slang; not in AH2; somewhat offensive?
ED - informal; doesn't stand alone; derived from "ed." not "education",
thus still an abbreviation; not in AH2.
JO - Scottish; mindless Scrabble points; not in AH2; failed by MS Word.
QI - variant spelling of CHI; too new; mindless Scrabble points;
failed by MS Word.
Š SI - French, according to my music dictionaries; not in RH; failed by MS Word.
WO - Archaic misspelling of WOE; not in Random House; failed by MS Word.
ZA - too new; too dumb; mindless Scrabble points; failed by MS Word.
AZO - good word(?), but tired of seeing on Scrabble boards; failed by MS Word.
DEF - too new; dumb slang.
DIS - too new; AAVE; failed by MS Word.
DISS - too new; AAVE; failed by MS Word.
HOS - too new; AAVE; offensive?; failed by MS Word.
IGG - too stupid; not in RH; failed by MS Word.
JEE - misspelled interjection; mindless Scrabble points; not in RH, MS Word.
POO - slang; all definitions vulgar; not in RH; failed by MS Word.
QIS - QI disallowed.
SUQ - misspelling of souk; failed by MS Word.
URP - too new; too dumb; failed by MS Word.
VUM - too new; not in RH; failed by MS Word; dumb interjection.
ZAG - stupid word; mindless Scrabble points; not in AH2; failed by MS Word.
ZAS - ZA disallowed.
ZIG - stupid word; mindless Scrabble points; not in AH2; failed by MS Word.
ZITIS - not in AH2; not in RH; failed by MS Word.
ZOA - good word(?), but tired of seeing on Scrabble boards; failed by MS Word.
Of all the words I vetoed, only these 3 are passed by MS Word: bi ed
def. And I wonder what MS Word has in mind for "def".
There are about 260 2- and 3-letter words which are valid in the OSPD
but not included in the AH4. It's interesting to look at a list of
those words which MS Word passes:
al de et ka mm mo op un ahs bal bam bas bys cig del dib dif dui dup eau
eek eng fem hic hmm jus kop lat les nom ole ops oxy rex ser tae umm yah
yum.
If that's good stuff, imagine what the other 220 OSPD words look like!
The only one I would fight for is del, used many times in my math and
science past.
I thought it was funny that, at the same time the American Heritage
brings AB on board, it deletes BOD!
Moving from the AH2 to the AH4, the DSC 2-letter word list lost BO
(dropped from the AH) PE SI and WO. It picked up AA OW TA UM and YO -
all junk, to be sure, but at least the last 4 have some meaning to some
Americans. (I still have to tell everybody what TA means.) I've given
in to AA because it seems that all dictionaries have it now. I saw it
used in running text once back in 1991, but even there it was
italicized, implying, I presume, that it was Hawaiian, not English.
So now my scrabbling is updated to 2007. It was a lot of work. Was it
worth it? At least it's safe to play LINTIER TENNERS and LOANERS now.
FLINGER is still out, but 3 outta 4 in't bad.
One final story: of course, I was curious to see if the American
Heritage gang ever considered my comments on "coward". Apparently so,
and they must have resented them so much they messed it up even worse!
ŠIn the AH2, coward meant "one who shows ignoble fear..." Now it takes
*two* steps: coward n. one who shows cowardice. cowardice n. ignoble
fear... But the interesting thing is an extensive word history for
"coward" beginning, "One who 'turns tail.'" The "cow" part of the word
derives from words meaning tail, and so it's all about turning tail, or
running with one's tail between one's leg. That's what it's always
meant to me, and I presume to everybody else, so how come none of that
survives in the modern definition??? Also, there's still no recognition
of how it's almost exclusively used in the media nowadays, as a synonym
for "bully".
Had enough? Sorry about that. A lot of this will probably go into a
scrabble web page, so don't feel like the burden of appreciating all
this babble is all on your shoulders. :)
THEE: The Aguado information was neat. Thank you.
Bryce (classical guitar student Ogden Utah)
ME: Your quite welcome. I haven't received a comment on the
Aguado page in years!
THEE: subject Land for Sale in Antarctica
I saw your website, and thought it was very cool! I would possibly be
interested in purchasing 500 Acres of Ocean front land (rather than a
degree slice) in Antarctica. I deal a lot in real estate, and could help
guide you through the selling process. First off you would want to issue
QUITCLAIM Deeds (I can email you a template) for the land so that you
would not be legally liable for issues that arrise in the future as to
the the legalities of title. And you could put your government as part
of the deed restriction. I think that everyone who purchases the land
should also have the legal right to construct a cabin. You should give
GPS coordinaces for all 4 corners of each lot as well as satellite
immages. All lots should be subdividable down to 10 Acre lots for resale
and once a QUITCLAIM Deed is issued the buyers need to have a place to
legally record their Deeds. For this I would recommend either you be the
"County Clerk" or pay a lawyer to do it so that copies of all deeds can
be safely kept in one central location. I am willing to pay $5 for may
500 Acres and will do all the work for locating my parcel and even
prepare the deed for you to sign and help you get this thing off the
ground as long as you figure out who to record the deeds with (possibly
some type of land owners association, yourself, or a lawyer). The more
people who feel they have a right to the land, the better the chance is
that real people could actually start their own country based on living
in harmony. Have a good one, Nate
ME: Wow, I laughed my head off through your whole message, even
though everything you said sounded great and made perfect sense! I wish
I could jump right in and implement all your ideas, but, as you
correctly gather, I have no experience in that area. The other ironic
Šthing is that, the way you present it, it actually sounds like it might
be a lot of fun for people to be able to buy Antarctica lots (I can
envision the ads in the back of comic books!), but selling the pie
slices was really just a joke, and I'm the crazy sort who wouldn't feel
right making money off of it anyhow. Just never had that killer
entrepreneurial gene.
An attraction I never considered is how the land may become more and
more habitable with global warming. I just read about a man who bought
an Arctic ocean port in Canada for $7 that now has the potential for
making hundreds of millions per year as an active port with the receding
Arctic ice.
Still, if you wanted to handle the business and legal end of selling
lots of my section of Antarctica - with a split *very* favorable to
yourself - please go for it! I am dead serious about unarchy as a "deed
restriction", as you put it. That would give me no end of pleasure,
hundreds (thousands?? millions???) of people buying their own little
countries in Antarctica where they *must* implement simple majority rule
- fantastic!
Thanks for the great brainstorm. Like I say, go for it!
THEE: Our winning rag for the $1000 "Tulsey Town Rag" competition
was excellent and played by the California composer. Two of the other
entries were also played at the festival. Only one received a prize,
but we gave two honorable mentions (title only), one of which went to
Bill Rowland of Broken Arrow.
The big surprise of the festival was the attendance of one very
prominent performer, Scott Kirby, who was not a performer for the
festival. Everyone was in shock to see him here and wondering what
brought him. He has performed in Tulsa 3 times over the past 8-9 years,
but no one expected to see him here. Saturday night we learned the
truth behind his being here. The evening's MC called Scott to the
stage, saying that since he'd come all that way, he was going to play
one rag as a special guest. When Scott reached the microphone, he began
talking about how he'd been commissioned to compose a rag for the
Ragtime for Tulsa chairman and how part of the commission required that
he come to perform it in person. He then played "The Redbud Two-Step,"
so named because it was a slow rag and, although he didn't mention it,
because he'd obviously done a tiny bit of research. The redbud is
Oklahoma's state tree, so, in a sense, it was a second new Oklahoma
centennial rag, of sorts.
As for the dictionary fiasco, well, I won't bother. You read
dictionaries a lot more closely than I do, but I'm not the Scrabble
player. It always works for me. And, by the way, my American Heritage
is in my office at school, but it's even older than your 1985 edition.
In this case, I don't think a first edition has much value.
THEE: RE: Land for Sale in Antarctica
ŠI have seen people sell land on the moon and their very own stars. This
would be the same, only the big difference is that the person could
theoretically go there if they wanted without leaving earth. I have seen
stats that show the tempature in antarctica reaching 59 Degrees F During
it's 6 months of constant daylight in summer! And it has a never-ending
rocky shoreline in the summer, and the ocean teams with fish. The way I
understand it anyone could actually move there anyway as it's pretty
much free game. The only thing keeping crazy people like me from doing
it is not having enough money to buy and ship enough building materials
and supplies to keep me alive. There are scientists trying to figure out
how to live on Mars if global warming gets too bad, when there's still a
whole uninhabited continent left! The way I see it is that you are the
rightful owner of all the land you made claim to because you are the
earliest known person to publically announce it. It's no different than
when people first moved to America and started making the first land
Deeds based solely on their false belief that they were the only people
making claim to it (later on the whole war thing acted as a deterant to
people not recognizing their land rights).
The whole idea with selling Antarctic lots would be to properly educate
prospective buyers that the Deed is only as real as they want it to be
and that it's highly speculative and risky. And let them know that it's
the fact that you are the earliest known person to publically announce
your claim that gives you the right to sell portions of your claim. Then
I thought about it and the whole government should be based on
transparity, so scaned images of all deeds should be up for public
veiwing on a website and the recording of deeds would be solely internet
based. You wouldn't want to make it a get rich scheme or take advantage
of anyone so you could sell the lots at a price that is maybe $10-$200
max above the cost to advertise them. It would be more for the fun of it
and to prove a point that people want a better government than what any
country can offer in this day in age.
I attached a copy of a Quitclaim Deed so you can see what I'm talking
about. It basically says that you the 'Grantor' quit your claim to the
described property and give all rights you have to the claim, if any at
all, to the 'Grantee'. It basically tells the buyer that they may be
buying nothing at all.
Even if you did want to do what I'm talking about, I may be
miscalculating the time and effort it would take to do something like
this and not be able follow through. I just like to think about outside
of the box fun ideas like this and it's neat to think of he history
behind land ownership. Did you know that no one owns land in Greenland!
Their government gives it's citizens land for a small fee to build on,
but it's laws state that no man can own dirt. Take it easy, Nate
ME: Once again, all very intriguing. If while you're turning it
over in your mind it comes into focus as something very possibly
feasible, count me in. I'm the sort who sinks tons of time and effort
into hobby interests for no financial reward (witness my guitar
tablature pages, for just one example.)
After reading the quitclaim deed, I just need reassurance that it can
Šinclude the requirement on the form of government on the property/new
country. The sample copy seems to say to my non-legal mind, "It's all
yours, I wash my hands." Would promises by the grantee to behave in a
certain way on the property be an example of "good and valuable
consideration"?
You've got me hoping something comes of it, although don't worry about
me losing any sleep over it. :) It's been great that you've opened my
eyes to the bigger picture, and also took my claim seriously. It was
something I did seriously, while laughing my head off, which isn't the
contradiction it sounds like.
Keep on thinking on!
THEE: Is Scrabble if played friendly good for a 7 year old 2nd
grader who is struggling to be
In the middle of her class and not fall behind? Having to recall and
learn to spell the words She knows verbally? Learning how letter
combination spell out with the sounds she already knows? I read your
treatise on Kumon methods. And Thank you.
She scored on the low even of there NWEA testing in a school system
where the Average score is 20 Points above the states average.
And is "X" a word or only a symbol? Like I sign with my X. X-ray. X
marks the spot.
X as in ten.
ME: Good question about the value of Scrabble for children. I
suspect regular Scrabble would be too much for a 2nd-grader. I'm
guessing strong 5th- or 6th-graders could begin to have good games,
meaning play well enough so it's fun enough to play another game. I can
envision a very friendly sort of game where an adult gives hints and
leads the child to good plays. There is a children's version of
Scrabble. I don't know how that works, but it says to me the makers
know regular Scrabble is too much for younger kids.
I'm guessing there are much more direct ways to bolster a child's word
skills. If you read my Kumon page, you saw that I was fairly positive
towards the reading program. The objection is that as the levels get
higher, the checking isn't stringent enough for the exercises to be of
value. But that's hardly a problem at the lower levels. Try it.
Well, you learn something new every day. I had already typed out a
response saying, "I don't think any dictionary counts X as a word, but
"ex" is." I just checked in my American Heritage dictionary, and it
gives all kinds of noun and verb definitions for x. In any case, as far
as Scrabble is concerned, one-letter words don't count anyway.
THEE: subject Thank you! Regarding my skipped record.
Š
I am a DJ based in New York City and thought that one of my most prized
records was ruined until I came across your repair method. After one
attempt, it was as good as new. I can't thank you enough.
Sincerely,
Brian Gibbs
"Integrity"
THEE: RE: Land for Sale in Antarctica
The term "good and valuable consideration" is just a way of saying that
the person paid money for it rather than it being a gift, and still
bypass the IRS by saying it's none of your business how much it sold
for. It may sound silly to people who don't deal in real estate
regularly that you can just tell the government to butt out and still
transfer ownership, but it actually shows up on deeds all the time and
it's perfectly legal. The reason you don't usually see the term on house
deeds is because most people get Title Insurance on them, and by showing
the actuall price paid it covers the Title Insurance Companies butts if
you claim that they underinsured you. You could also remove "good and
valuable consideration" and just put in "For $500".
To put the government as a deed restriction you would just put something
like this in where it says [Insert Legal Description]: "G.P.S.
coordinances XXXX, XXXX, XXXX being 500 Acres on the continent of
Antarctica in the Sovern Country of (whatever you want to call it). Upon
the completion of this instrument the Grantee agrees to all codes of
conduct hereby reffered to as THE ONE RULE SOVERN NATION OF (whatever
you want to call it). Penalties for gross misconduct could be forefeture
of all land rights up to deportation should the majority see it
neccessary, basically anything could happen in such a situation if
majority rules it and it's non-violent in nature. Prior to this document
being set into law the Grantee acknowleges they have read, fully
understand, and intend to abide by the THE ONE RULE SOVERN NATION."
Then in a separate piece of paper you would put the "rules" in. While
you would want to maintain one law, you would want small bi-laws like
"by purchasing land you agree to non-voilently support and defent your
land rights as well as the land rights of others whos deed originated
from Donald, the only known rightful claimant in the new country". And
other part of the small bi-laws would be a disclaimer advising Grantees
that as of the time of the deed being made they understand that there is
not currently a government or nation that currently recognizes our land
rights or sovern nation of one law. Or you could screw around contacting
hole in the wall 3rd world countries and try to get their endorcement so
you could say that the only country that recognizes our legal rights is
"XXXXX".
Just some Ideas. Take it easy.
ŠME: Your last email got really me laughing again. Who would
think of deeds as a source of humor? You seem like the perfect person
to bring all those latent little antarctic utopias to fruition. If the
economic incentive isn't enough to get you to quit your job, just think
of that sunny, ocean-front resort with your name on it!
ME: Dear Elizabeth W. Murphey School,
I saw your ad for tutors in the Dover Post. I am a professional tutor
with an office in Treadway Towers, a short walk across the field from
your school. My business is called Karate Brain Math Tutoring. I use
"math" in the business name mainly for the sake of simplicity; I am
completely comfortable with word skills tutoring as well.
My background includes having been a 99th percentile student myself
throughout school; math and physics major in college; graduate school
work in astronomy and physics; software engineer for General Electric
Space Division for ten years; five years of volunteering and working in
elementary schools in Prince George's County, Maryland; two years as a
Kumon Math & Reading instructor here in Dover; and private tutoring at
Treadway Towers for the last year.
"Knowing my stuff" doesn't hurt, but my tutoring talents are even more a
product of always having taken a close look at what is going on inside
my brain, at the nuts and bolts level, when solving a problem; having a
very clear vision of the straight and narrow path from counting through
advanced math; recognizing when the trouble a student is having stems
from weaknesses in more basic material; understanding that "teaching" is
saying something in different ways until it clicks; and all the time
keeping things as light and as fun as possible for the student.
If you want to know more about me, I have dumped large portions of my
brain on my web site. Just search for "donald sauter" in Google.
I have enclosed a flyer, a policy sheet, and a choice of plans of action
that I give to the parents to consider.
Thank you for considering how we might work together.
THEE: I ran across your comments on Scrabble. I thought you might
find the game below of interest.
http://www.wildwords.us
My motive was to render the Official Scrabble Dictionary and its word
lists largely useless.
Hope you will take a look.
Peter Roizen
ME: Hi Peter,
Š
I enjoyed your site tremendously - congratulations on a great idea! I
read every review and every press release, and chuckled the whole time.
I got my order in and look forward to my first games with my family.
(Don't want to rock the boat with my Dover Scrabble Club, which is still
aborning.)
I can barely imagine what it took to get the game produced. I produced
a little question and answer game in card deck format called Beatle
Significa. I can't imagine anything simpler, but it was a *miserable*
experience. Never cracked the marketing nut, so when the web came along
I threw it up there for free:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/beatles-trivia.htm
Regarding the generally accepted truism that tournament game competition
has to be one-on-one, I'm sure that is not true at all. See my page on
what I call the "Average Place Statistic" for the obvious way to take
partial wins into consideration.
http://www.donaldsauter.com/average-place-statistic.htm
About one player throwing the game to another player, that could happen
in one-on-one competition. If we met in a Scrabble tournament, I could
just sit there and let you play anything. You would break all records
with a 5700+ point game by playing all bingoes and setting yourself up
for a triple-triple-triple bingo with all the goodies on the premium
squares. The mind scrabbles . . .
Funny you should mention LOANERS. I got burned playing that a few weeks
ago. Guess my American Heritage dictionary, 2nd edition, is just a
little too conservative. It's in the 4th edition, though, and I've just
updated my club to that dictionary. Have to banish lots of stupid new
2- and 3-letter words, though.
The another night I was so excited to get SPINDLES down. Now you make
it seem so *puny* :-(
I know my Scrabble page is long. I hope, if anything, you had a chance
to read my scathing review of Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak. Maybe
between us we can make laughingstocks of tournament Scrabble players.
http://www.donaldsauter.com/scrabble.htm#fats
Finally, I trust we can remain pals if I play WildWords with no
bluffing? :)
[No response from Peter Roizen. :( I mean, we're the two greatest
forces on earth trying to get Scrabble back to a word game.]
ME: Dear LibertyLines,
You solicited "topic suggestions". Please, could you include a plain
talk discussion of the effect one's credit rating has on auto insurance
Šrates, and what credit and driving have to do with each other? I don't
have a credit rating by virtue of the fact that I never opted in to the
credit card lifestyle. I've never seen the point of spending so much
time, bother, and money on keeping payments out of synch with purchases.
Will I be priced out of auto insurance? Am I grandfathered? Might you
implement an override of the credit bureaus and consider all the houses
and cars one has bought, and a lifetime of on-time utility bill
payments, and cleanliness of criminal record? Thanks. My office is too
far to walk to.
THEE: RE: Land for Sale in Antarctica
The more research I do on it, the more livable Antarctica really seems.
The tempatures and seasons are almost identical to the extreeme Canadian
north and extreeme Alaskan north where native tribes have lived for
thousands of years. It also has an extreeme abundance of lucrative and
life sustaining natural resouces. It has minerals like gold and silver.
A person could have a green house to grow vegetables in the summer, and
store them to eat throughout the winter. And meat eaters like myself
would never go hungry because of the huge ubundance of fish, which could
also be caught in large quantity then stored in an uninsulated outdoor
shed for year round meals. I found the piece of Real Estate I want! It's
called Fletcher Islands. It's the first chain of islands closest to the
90 degree mark with an elevation of 300+ feet so even if
the whole continent melted someday it will still be there
(see attached picture). I also wondered, would there be property
taxes? My first thought was no way because I hate paying them, but if
lots of people paid small amounts on a yearly basis it could add up. And
if the new Country had money behind it, you could use it to make a small
shipping port, for community development, and for good lawyers to try to
get the whole thing legitament rather than speculative. That being said
I thought of a HUGE loophole. If you charged zero income tax, you would
have all kinds of rich people wanting to get on board especailly if you
had your own banks someday! You could also open up sport fishing cabins
to rent to tourists. I really believe that if a couple of people
actually developed land even if they never stayed for more than a week
out of the summer, you may be able to lobby with the United Nations for
a real nationally recognized claim (with the help of some good lawyers).
The UN just might do it to because they do recognize Antarctic claims
and if you applied for it after people are already there you'ld have a
better chance. The best way to sell the 'Deeds' would probably be on
Ebay, but I would be hesitant to do that because I frequently sell Land
I own on Ebay and wouldn't want to jeopordize my other auctions. Take
it easy, Nate
HERE ARE SOME INTERESTING FACTS I FOUND OUT WHILE SURFING THE NET! BASED
ON THE U.N. TREATY IF YOU SQUATTED AND BUILT ON THE LAND (AS AN
INDIVIDUAL), NO MILITARY ACTIONS OR ANYTHING UNPEACEFUL IN NATURE COULD
EVER BE BROUGHT AGAINST YOU!
Economy Overview: No economic activity at present except for fishing off
the coast and small-scale tourism, both based abroad.
ŠTransportation
Ports: none; offshore anchorage.
Airports: 42 landing facilities at different locations operated by 15
national governments party to the Treaty; one additional air facility
operated by commercial (nongovernmental) tourist organization;
helicopter pads at 36 of these locations; runways at 14 locations are
gravel, sea ice, glacier ice, or compacted snow surface suitable for
wheeled fixed-wing aircraft; no paved runways; 15 locations have snow-
surface skiways limited to use by ski-equipped planes - 11
runways/skiways 1 000 to 3 000 m, 5 runways/skiways less than 1 000 m, 8
runways/skiways greater than 3 000 m, and 5 of unspecified or variable
length; airports generally subject to severe restrictions and
limitations resulting from extreme seasonal and geographic conditions;
airports do not meet ICAO standards; advance approval from the
respective governmental or non-governmental operating organization
required for landing.
Communications
Telephone system: NA
Radio: broadcast stations: AM NA, FM NA, shortwave NA.
Television: NA
Defense Forces
Note: the Antarctic Treaty prohibits any measures of a military nature,
such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the
carrying out of military maneuvers, or the testing of any type of
weapon; it permits the use of military personnel or equipment for
scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes.
THEE: Media mail must be s-l-o-w . . .
ME: Nope, haven't received it yet.
Oh yeah, had the third 500+ point Scrabble game of my life on Sunday
night. *Hard* to do with real words...
THEE: I often stumble across your site and always enjoy reading
your thoughts and articles. Some people consider me an obsessive
researcher and organizer - but I must admit you put me to shame. Where
do you find the time?
I'm also an amateur guitarist, and I too have fantasized about
organizing and indexing the REX library. Hard to believe you actually
have done that!! I'm also amazed at your piano and guitar page and the
work you have done restoring some of them.
ŠPS I have lots of thoughts, comments and opinions on all of your
thoughts, comments and opinions, but hardly enough time to even begin
putting them into writing.
I do agree with your bleak assessment of our corrupt legal system -
undoubtedly the best money can buy ;-)
Unfortunately simple majority brings to mind Franklin's quote...
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
ME: When I asked the question about the "Legato Classic" opera
cds, I sort of had in mind a lot of 4 or 5 for about what I won the
previous lot for (about $20). After I sent the question off, I did an
ebay search and found the things priced up to $60 apiece in ebay stores.
So you should take that into consideration, unless you know that nobody
really pays that kind of money for them. In any case, I'll just keep my
eye out for "opera lots", and add "legato classics" to my saved
searches.
To partially answer your question, what interests me the most would be
the "rarer" operas, such as the Francesca da Rimini you sold me, for
which commercial recordings are hard to find.
THEE: The legato classics were designed to give the feeling of being at
the actual concert. I'm not accusing anyone, but I wonder if some of
these weren't acquired by an extra wearing sound equipment. Opera fans
normal? My husband is both a baseball fan and an opera buff, and I can
assure you the opera fans seem normal by comparison...
ME: To be specific, the two Legato Classics in the batch I got
from you were Francesca da Rimini and Andrea Chenier. I'd really hate
to try to name a price. For one thing, it depends on the opera, for
another, I'm sure you would do better by just letting auction forces
take over. And it's not like I need any more music right now - I've got
enough to last a few lifetimes! If and when you put them up,
individually or in batches, I'll look them over. In retrospect, I guess
I just complicated things by sending you my note - sorry!
>My husband is both a baseball fan and an opera buff, and I can assure
you the opera fans seem normal by comparison
Coincidentally, just tonight I reread a favorite baseball story - "The
Hector Quesadilla Story" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. What a nutty thing!
THEE:
>Nope, haven't received it yet.
ŠFigures. Media mail stinks.
>I'll catch up shortly, although, unless I miss my guess, not too much
that's earth-shattering has been happening lately. Been enjoying life,
though.
Enjoying yourself is probably better than earth-shattering. Keep it up.
THEE: subject Salary raise problem
I ran across your problems looking for brain teasers. I had trouble with
this one
One of the most prominent goofs is the "Which is more profitable?"
problem. Your starting salary is $1500 and the question is, would you
choose a $300 raise every year, or a $75 raise every 6 months? Marilyn
vos Savant must keep this book on her reference shelf; she dished up the
same wrong answer in her Parade column. For a fun discussion of vos
Savant's blunder, by a real writer (not like me), click here.
I did a spread sheet and got
5062.5 for the $75 /6mo and 5400 for the 300 per year
pd salary raise Salary Pay Cum raise Salary Pay Cum
1 1500 1500 750 750 1500 750 750
2 75 1575 787.5 1537.5 1500 750 1500
1 75 1650 825 2362.5 300 1800 900 2400
2 75 1725 862.5 3225 1800 900 3300
1 75 1800 900 4125 300 2100 1050 4350
2 75 1875 937.5 5062.5 2100 1050 5400
your answer was
"The $75 raise every 6 months is a better choice. Over a 3-year period,
for example, the total wages paid would be $5625 as compared with $5400
for the other arrangement."
Can you show me how you got 5625 or did you Freudean slip 50 625?
My spreadsheet worked on this one or at least it agreed with charlie.
>Some weeks back, Marilyn vos Savant (who along with the world's highest
>IQ also has the world's most suspicious name) posed this question: Say
>you're making $10,000 a year. Your boss offers you a choice between a
>$1,000 raise once a year and a $300 raise every six months. Which do you
>choose?
>
>pd salary raise Salary Pay Cum raise Salary Pay Cum
>1 10000 10000 5000 5000 10000 5000 5000
>2 300 10300 5150 10150 10000 5000 10000
>1 300 10600 5300 15450 1000 11000 5500 15500
>2 300 10900 5450 20900 11000 5500 21000
>1 300 11200 5600 26500 1000 12000 6000 27000
>2 300 11500 5750 32250 12000 6000 33000
Š
ME:
>Can you show me how you got 5625 or did you Freudean slip 50 625?
Keep in mind $5625 was the *wrong* answer given in the puzzle book. It
would be arrived at by (wrongly) bumping up the pay for each half-year
period, after the first, by $75.
5625 = 3x1500 + 0 + 75 + 150 + 225 + 300 + 375
It looks to me like you worked the problem out the *right* way, which is
why you didn't get the *wrong* answer that the puzzle book got, which
used the same *wrong* logic that vos Savant used. Clear?
ME: Thanks for pointing out the broken links and doing the
legwork finding the correct ones. I think they're fixed in my page now.
It was a matter of changing "www" to "www2".
THEE: I am listening to "L'Orfeo" now, not because it's more
appropriate than Beatle outtakes, or something, but because it's risen
to the top of the pile, of course.
ME: I was digging through my files today for something and stumbled on
the City Paper contest. Besides the one about the circumstances
surrounding "How Do You Do It", all my other extended answers sound like
a complete jerk!
ME: One of his friends is Guy, who's a comedy writer for
Conan O'Brien. So a big surprise, and a really nice one, was when I met
up with Guy at the reception, and about the first thing he said was how
nice my tribute page to my mom was. He found it after getting to my
site site for something else.
ME: I'm really pleased that the Mother Goose posters were
enjoyed. You had mentioned the possibility of sending them around to
other libraries. No doubt, that might be more trouble than it's worth,
but if you know another trustworthy librarian who'd like to display them
for a while, go for it. I'd love to keep them in circulation in
perpetuity.
Did I ever mention I got the Opie's "Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book" at one
of the auctions here in Dover?
ME: Can you handle a bit of scrabble talk? Spreads things out a
little, rather than lumping everything in one catch-up email, whenever I
get around to that.
ŠYou might know I wrote a little scrabble game analyzer program, more of
a summarizer, actually. I just made some enhancements so that, for
every game, it tells which words have been played before in the club and
which are 1st-timers. I thought it would be interesting to see if, as
the years go by, if it gets harder and harder to make 1st-timers, or if
the pool of words with scrabble-potential is so large that games will
have more or less the same number of 1st-timers indefinitely.
Here are a couple of games from last week's session. I'm guessing the
boards will be uselessly distorted to you, courtesy of microsoft's
always knowing what we want better than us ourselves. If you can view
it in fixed-width font without making a project of it, so much the
better. The second grid is the same game board as the first, but with
the letters flipped across the diagonal so that down words read across
* REVAMPED * * V HOOF ERN
S CZAR A I SARGE HEWER O Total points: 762
VAT V V I T T E COZ N W
R E FINNY C N N E Scrab-o: SEEDIER ENNOBLE
GENTs IS T Z T WOULD
HE GAP RAVEs B Total tiles played: 106
O C U ER L
OHO CABS B V FIG CuBE A Unplayed tiles: I O S G
FEZ u E PA A VISA A A D
W W BANE IN M N PUB N F DO Power tiles: 11 X X X Z Z _ _ S S S S
ENNOBLE DAFT PAINT SEEDIER
R U FIX AX E Y AX AH Anomalies: no J no K no Q 3X
E L E DIT F YO
ROWED DRAY PITA A Percent expected vowels: 93%
N ADO HOAX * BAN X X
Old-timers: VAT IS HE GAP ER OHO FIG FEZ PA IN PUB DO PAINT FIX AX AX AH
YO DRAY ADO BAN
1st-timers: REVAMPED HOOF ERN CZAR SARGE HEWER COZ FINNY GENTS WOULD
RAVES CABS CUBE VISA BANE ENNOBLE DAFT SEEDIER DIT ROWED PITA HOAX
It's particularly interesting (to me) to see which longer words have
been played before, and which short words got played for the first time.
I was pretty happy with ENNOBLE. I was ready to play BONE (while saving
good letters L E N), when I saw NOBLE (saving E N), and then I thought,
hey, what's this?, I can stick the leftover EN in front! They *laughed*
when I played FINNY, but I didn't even break a sweat. Vivian was
uncertain about playing HEWER, but I assured her it would be good. One
of my favorite words, for some reason. There was a line in The Lord Of
The Rings angrily calling man "hewer of trees".
And one more. Really, I'm not trying to kill you. But I can't deny
being very proud of the beautiful scrabble boards we create in my club.
I assure you, there's nothing like them anywhere else on earth. Pure
poetry!
* * Y S * * SNOB
ZEALOT E I I L Total points: 670
Š ME O V O X U
C STOW HEWN T N Scrab-o: ORATIONS
Q CROCK T QUA O HI IT
U A MED OOZED M Total tiles played: 107
HA EVIL ER C ER WE B
*EVE ORATIOnS C * CRAVAT D U* Unplayed tiles: B M
WOO T G O O IT WEN
ION Z FRAMED Z C LI F H O Power tiles: 11 Q X Z Z _ _ S S S S S
HEW E ERE E K OGRE I G
S TIDED END YAMS MEn A SAG Anomalies: no J 5M no P
NIX WHISK LETTERS MEEK I
O IMBUE A O O D ERN N Percent expected vowels: 96%
BLUNT *NOGGINs STOW CODED s
Old-timers: ME QUA HI IT HA ER WE WOO IT WEN ION LI END YAMS MEN NIX
BLUNT
1st-timers: SNOB ZEALOT STOW HEWN CROCK MED OOZED EVIL EVE ORATIONS
CRAVAT FRAMED HEW ERE OGRE TIDED SAG WHISK LETTERS MEEK IMBUE NOGGINS
STOW CODED
I got really lucky on my first play with ORATIONS. It had to fit in
with the E I and L of EVIL.
THEE: The "Miracles" poem from Leaves of Grass is outstanding,
but few people see the world that way. Too bad. I found myself
marveling at all sorts of things the last three days.
ME: to Dover Post editor
Here's a letter to the editor for your consideration for publication.
It's completely normal.
Dear Dover Post,
Last week the United Nations issued a report prepared by 388 experts and
scientists. It presents evidence, if any is needed beyond opening your
eyes and looking around you, that we humans are living far beyond our
means and damaging the environment at a far greater rate than it can
repair itself. The UN report speaks of nearing "points of no return."
If there is any reasonable hope for the future of the earth and mankind,
perhaps Kent County, Delaware, could make its mark by becoming the first
political district in the United States, on planet Earth, to come to its
senses and say, "That's it. Enough is enough. No more new development.
Ever."
ME: I just want to make sure we're on the same wavelength as far
as unarchy and Antarctica are concerned. I'm dead serious about unarchy
and am completely inflexible. Unarchy means NO government except for a
common sense and conscience-based system of justice. Better yet, even,
Šthat would be handled privately, so there'd be NO government whatsoever.
So there couldn't be property taxes, for example (except in the far-
fetched case that the people themselves believe that everyone must
contribute annually to the justice system, and his contribution be
proportional to what he owns. I'm pretty sure that any common sense-
based justice system, if it costs anything at all, would be funded by
"loser pays.") Under unarchy, you could build a harbor - if the
majority doesn't object. You could start up a military - if the
majority doesn't object. Etc., etc. But you have to get private, not
coerced, funding.
What I envisioned when I half-joked about selling one degree pie slices
was that the buyer was getting his own, new nation, operating under
unarchy. I think you think people will be buying property within "my"
country, which is not what I have in mind. My vision is any number of
completely independent little unarchies. Most of them might be family-
sized, but somebody might get together a larger colony of unarchists.
What I want in the sales contract is a clause to the effect that if the
government deviates from unarchy, the sale is voided and the country is
vacated and ownership reverts to me. In practice, I can't say I know
how to make that happen, but it really doesn't bother me. If you say,
what's to stop somebody buying his country in Antarctica and then using
force to take over all the peaceful little neighboring unarchies?, I
say, what's to stop that from happening to hundreds of defenseless
little countries all over the world, now, every day?
Any of that make sense?
I hope you get your Fletcher Islands!
THEE: "There is a really good reason why, across the world, literacy
training is not begun until 5 to 7," Wolf says. "Some countries, such as
Austria, don't want children taught reading until 7." For what it's
worth, that's the same Austria with a per-capita Nobel-laureate rate
many times higher than that of Japan, the land that spawned Junior
Kumon.
THEE: Re: poetry 102
Who were the old women with walkers watching the frisbie game and the
double-decker bus? Don't ask for a literary analysis.
The scrabble board must be pretty scrambled. I can make out some words
but others are single letters. This is a time when pdf would work.
Your computer analysis should be interesting!
A few days before going, I noticed that our Thursday night reception was
to be held at the "Harlin Museum." The name rang a bell. I would be
talking about Mayor Harlin of West Plains. A quick Internet search
found the "Harlin House Museum" in West Plains, and, sure enough, it was
the home of James P. Harlin--actually, home with modern museum built on
so that one can walk between the two by passing through a very short
Šhallway. I quickly emailed my contact person to ask if the museum might
be able to provide a photo of Mayor Harlin. She borrowed one from the
museum, took it back to campus, removed it from the frame, scanned it,
and sent it to me in jpg format. I received in Wednesday. Friday it
was part of my presentation.
The museum had an incredible exhibit of several dozen huge charcoal
drawings done in the 1930s and 40s by L. L. Broadfoot. Words can't do
them justice. Each was a picture of an Ozarks resident, most performing
some typical sort of task such as chopping wood, hunting, quilting.
making soap, etc. A few were more focused on an activity than on an
individual person. One terrific example was a night time possum hunt
with several people in the forest with lanterns. Several scrawny houn'
dogs graced the drawings. Each of Broadfoot's pictures had a story
beside it, telling about the person or the activity. These would have
been worth the trip, but they were all the more fun because of the kids'
charcoal drawings stuck up on the wall beside many of the framed
pictures. These had been done earlier the same day and the previous
day.
Here's a website with a small sample. Be sure to click on the links to
find photos of the kids' event and sample drawings. The kids were
asked to pick a portion of a picture but a few tackled the full picture.
The Broadfoot drawings you'll see are only tiny portions of the full
picture. Faces all had bodies and most had other surroundings for their
activities.
http://www.watersheds.org/history/historyworks/index.htm
One of the things I love about Missouri is the sense of history that
many of these people have, perhaps stronger in the Ozarks than in other
parts of the state. Of course, the symposium draws those with that
sense, but the attendees came from all walks of life and clearly live
and breathe their history. They take tremendous pride in it while still
being able to laugh about some of its oddities. You would have loved
the variety of speech patterns--everything from highly educated with
only minor traces of Ozark accent on a few words to voices that you
would have sworn were coming from hillbillies with corncob pipes and a
pack of coon dawgs.
Wish I'd had time to hike along White River and Eleven Points. Another
time.
Oh, I did have one surprise. I'd wrongly assumed that Mountain Grove
would be larger than West Plains. West Plains today has a population of
a little over 10,000 while Mountain Grove is under 5,000. Not sure how
they compared in fall 1911. Guess I should find out. West Plains is
restoring its downtown to its historic appearance by removing all
"modern" store fronts tacked on over the years. The town has some
marvelous old structures, such as the restored Grand Opera House
constructed in the 1880s and restored inside and out. It's again used
as a theatre.
Folks tell me that they have a big old-time music festival the third
week of June every year.
Š
P.S. I'm starting to worry about the fate of that media mail package .
. . but I've seen a couple of 'em take up to three weeks. I'm not
going to be happy if it doesn't reach you because it contains goodies I
can't replace.
THEE: BTW, forgot to mention to you that I'm going next month to see a
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Beatlemania combined performance. It comes
highly recommended to me from a performance last year that some friends
saw. I'm looking forward to it........................
ME: You've made it clearer what it's all about. I had just
figured she was talking about a concert of Beatle songs played by the
BSO. I have them doing Twist & Shout on a record, by the way.
I'd say you got out of Mary's page just what I intended, or hoped for.
Obviously, it would be absurd for me to write a bio, or any sort of
tribute. All I'm saying is, here are two little souvenirs from my own
archives - add 'em to the big portrait! Even if I don't fully
understand the poem, it's got some kickin' lines and some great images.
Which about describes a Dylan song.
ME: a candle burns dogwalkers
>Regarding the dogwalking, I can recommend the person that does
petsitting/dogwalking for my sister. Her name is Donna and both she and
her husband run "Peace of Mind Petsitters" and my sister recommends her
highly as very competent and nice. (My sister has a dog, birds and
turtles but has had numerous pets that Donna has cared for at times)
THEE: subject 19th. c. style guitars, gut strings.
Don't know if you'll remember me, it's been a long time, but we
exchanged conversations about pre-Segovia American guitar music a couple
of years ago. I'm writing because I'm looking at a guitar on ebay and
wonder if you've seen them, and about how gut strings do on these
guitars. If you're willing to take a minute to look, it's at...
I assume, because of the price, that they're made in China, but I've
seen some fairly good quality instruments coming out of China lately.
Since it has bridge pins and steel tuners, they have steel strings on
it, but it looks like all the illustrations and photos in the old
tutors, so I assume that they at least started with gut strings. Also,
I know that whether it's like the old guitars on the inside is another
matter! Anyway, any advice or opinions would be most welcome, thanks in
advance for any time you take.
ME: That's pretty neat that someone's making facsimiles of old
guitars. I've always wondered myself about the effect of swapping gut
or nylon for steel, or vice versa. So your guess is as good as mine! I
agree with you that they seem to be steel-string guitars, but even so,
some of the features may be the same as on old gut-string guitars. In
Šthe 1894 Sears catalog, all the guitars were gut-string, but among the
guitar accessories, they sold guitar bridge pins. Does that mean some
guitars came with bridge pins? The pictures of the guitars don't seem
to show bridge pins, but the microfilm copy pictures are poor enough to
not be sure. The 1894 catalog sold tail pieces and a note made it clear
that it was essential to attach a tail piece if you were going to use
steel strings. That would seem to imply the bridge pins were for gut
strings. The guitar descriptions mention all the parts of the guitar
except for the bridge, funnily enough. It's also not obvious to me from
the catalog pictures and text whether the guitar patent heads had steel
rollers or something else. None of the Sears guitars had that pot-
bellied shaped bridge or angled saddle, though.
Sorry to be so wishy-washy. Good luck!
THEE: Re: 19th. c. style guitars, gut strings.
Thanks for the reply, and good to hear from you again, too. It would be
nice to catch up on DC guitar society, LoC, what you're playing now,
etc. I'm doing a lot of shamisen (a mid-life crisis following of a long
interest, even though the price of Japanese instruments violates my
principles), playing in a guitar trio (yes, we do a few American
pieces),and we've got a little nascent guitar society here in the
Pioneer Valley. It's nice, but the trouble is that all these guitar
players keep showing up!
But, to the Republic (the guitar brand, not the regime): Yeah, I think
I'm going to go for it, though I do hate to buy unseen. I know the
pictures in the Sears catalog aren't detailed enough to show the bridge
details, but the drawings in early tutors show bridges with pins, and
I'm talking like Kelley in 1855, and I don't think anyone's questioning
whether they were using gut strings! I've seen a guitar about that
vintage with pins, too. I know my 1921 edition of Winner doesn't say
anything about it, but it's just a posthumous reprint of the 1891. And
the photo of Wm. Foden (obviously a publicity shot, and could be as late
as the 20's) that Doug Back used in "Pioneers of the American guitar"
shows him with a very similar guitar, including the angled saddle,
(though I suspect these guys are just using a manufactured standard
bridge). Of course, he may have been using steel strings by then. Too
bad all these guys died just before it occurred to anyone to talk to
them!
It is nice that people are making replica vintage guitars, and at an
affordable price, too, though I wonder where they're made. The seller
says he's in Texas and has them "made to (my) specs", but doesn't say
where or by whom the work is actually done. He seems basically into old
blues, and has a lot of decent looking resonator replicas besides the
parlor guitars. So anyway, I think I'll try it and see. At the worst,
I can resell it, or brush up on "Terraplane Blues". I'll let you know.
Be well, and keep playing!
ME: it's all your fault
Š
See, you didn't specify whether you wanted Sea, Air, or Surface Mail -
so the post office sent it, apparently, by Coal Mine post! [envelope
was all smudged blck.]
Thanks for a great care package! Everything's a highlight. The Mother
Goose rhymes are a hoot. Do you remember that I sent you a link to some
wacky little tales by the same writer, Carolyn Wells, that I thought
were so neat? The stories were constructed to support conflicting,
familiar sayings. I think you sent me your original. Do you remember
if all of the rhymes were familiar to you? The rarer ones would have
been, "There was a man in our town" or, "There was a man of Thessaly";
"Where are you going, my pretty maid?"; and "I had a little pony".
I boned up on "The Charge of the Light Brigade" - and the Crimean War -
for the Lenten Ditty. Don't know if I ever properly read The Light
Brigade before. So that's where "reason why/do or die" comes from(!) I
don't know if I would have been so obedient without a steak to fry.
Very interesting essay on boxing, and the way the writer wrapped it
around Dylan's song. The questions at the end strike terror in my heart
though. Funny thing is, I sort of think I understand what the writer is
saying as I'm reading it, but the study questions dispel that notion
fast enough. Don't think I'll go back to school any time soon.
And, of course, the Shrine to Music Museum book is outa-sight. What a
beautiful job, and what cool instruments. Most intriguing to me on the
first pass were the guitar-shaped violins of the 19th C. Never heard of
that before. A couple days ago I got an email from a guitarist I had
supplied with some music some years ago. He mentioned that he also
"doing" a lot of shamisen now. The name wasn't familiar, but when I saw
the pictures on wikipedia, it looks very familiar. Was hoping to find
one in the museum book, but didn't. Just opened your package an hour
ago, so I have a lot more reading to do.
Scrabble story for this email: I had a rack of great tiles, except there
was an F and a W, which aren't the most complementary letters. I also
had two blanks, so I gave it everything I had. You know I stepped up to
the 2007 American Heritage. I seemed to remember it bragging about all
the computer words it's added. What I saw was FREEWARE, which I felt
pretty confident of. Vivian said no way, having never even heard of it,
but the dictionary backed me up. But what makes it funnier is the way
the word looked on the board. I had to wrap it around a blank that
Vivian used as the R in ARIA, so it went down as FREEW---. You'll never
see that on a scrabble champ's board!
Met up with Mizan and a couple of her friends for trick-or-treating
tonight. I pulled out my trusty, old, blind-in-one-eye cyclops in a
tuxedo costume. Actually, you don't see many of those anymore. I did
get a tin cupful of candy - all from benevolent trick-or-treatin' kids
themselves.
Donald
$2.13.jpg
Š44K View Download
THEE: Re: it's all your fault
And it was whole? Amazing. More later . . .
ME: Perfect condition and everything there - except for all the gold
dust that must've shook out the one slightly torn corner.
THEE: Re: it's all your fault
Darn, I was worried about the gold dust!
ME: Here's a recent ebay win for me that's pretty exciting.
I had a search going on the Judge Fisher book for a long while. This
was the first one to come up. I'm a-thinkin' that's a darn good price.
If it arrives tomorrow, I can take it to the Second Annual Delaware Book
festival on Saturday where, among lots of authors and family activities,
they offer appraisals on books. That was one of the most popular
attractions last year, it says.
ME: I took a look at direct banking. If it's fun for you, take a
look at Capital One's page. Can you think of any reason not to go for
it? What I think I understand is that I can "link" the Capital One
money market account to my Citizens Bank checking *and* money market
account. Then I would just drain the Citizens Bank money market.
Potential scam is that the 4.75% is for $100, and the rates go down for
higher balances.
What are "withdrawal limits"?
ME: Did you go out trick-or-treating? (I can guess the answer -
grown-ups don't do anything fun!) I went around with a little friend of
mine in that blind-in-one- eye cyclops in a tuxedo shirt costume I
believe I modeled it at the house once when you were in town. Remember
that? First time I actually used that costume. People got a big kick
out of it. Other trick-or-treatin' kids filled up my tin can with
candy.
Just had a letter printed in the local paper yesterday. [See above.]
Think it will do the trick?
ME: first class
Meant to comment on your 37-cent stamp. Were you hoarding them???
Š
ME: book festival report
Had a great time at the Delaware Book Festival today, and feel moved to
unload a partial account on somebody (not just anybody).
The first event for me was the Define-athon, sponsored by American
Heritage. I would have never gotten up courage to join in, except
Vivian in the Scrabble club had some notion it was *me*, all my stage
fright prostestations notwithstanding. So I figured I could never face
Vivian again if I wimped out. I was the first one there and the host
assured me it was all friendly and non-threatening.
His name was Steve and it turns out he's on the American Heritage
dictionary's panel, which for me is like a baseball fan meeting a Hall-
of-Fame baseballer. The subject of Scrabble came up and Steve asked if
I had read Word Freak. I told him, yeah, the most despised book I ever
read.
Steve mentioned that he was the one to get JO in the Am. Her. 4th, and
it was for the benefit of Scrabble scoring! But he wouldn't sign off on
my theory that the Official Scrabble Dictionary has been at the root of
escalating ridiculousness in formerly prim and proper dictionaries. I
sure hope he'll spend a little time with my Scrabble page. I'd also
like to invite him to my 1000 words page. Didn't have a chance to ask
him what the heck's going on with that definition of coward.
Anyhow, there were 7 contestants. The format of the Define-athon wasn't
as scary as the name. Not only did you not have to define words, you
didn't have to choose the right definition from a list. It was the
other way around; they gave a definition and you chose the correct word
that fit. There were three levels of difficulty, and after we all
passed the first and easiest we went on to the next level. That's where
people started dropping out - one strike and you were gone.
When it was down to the last two, me and Lisa, the format was best of
five. Lisa slipped up on her 3rd word, quisling, so, at the end of 4
words apiece, it was me-4 to Lisa-3. Steve told Lisa she had to get her
last one to hope for a tie, and she got it. Wish I could remember all
the words that were asked. So then I needed to get mine right for the
win. I didn't. I don't remember what word that was, but after the 4-4
tie it just went back and forth until somebody won.
The words were getting pretty unfamiliar, so we both had a string of
missed ones. In no particular order, I remember some that I missed.
The plate of armor that protects the thigh = cuisse. Something about
the sharp point on some leaves, and I guessed (wrongly) bract.
Something about the action of leaves that curl or point themselves to
the night sky, and I guessed (wrongly) lunation.
You can see I was falling into all their traps. But the psychology
involved is, "I'm pretty sure they put that choice in just to fake me
out, but if I reject it and it turns out to be right, I'll *really* kick
myself!". I think maybe my last word was alpenstock, which was right,
but by that time I was scared to death to give what sounded like the
right answer! So that gave me the victory.
As I sit here, the only other word that comes to mind was for the
definition, "disgusting; loathsome". That was the only one for which a
particular word jumped right to mind. Choices A, B, and C, were wrong,
and I was greatly relieved to hear ugsome as the fourth choice. I
immediately said, "Ugsome."
I knew one of the prizes, at least, was an American Heritage dictionary,
4th edition, which wouldn't hurt, but I wasn't too sure I needed. We
leave Vivian's copy at the office for Scrabble, and I'm not sure how I'd
switch over from the 2nd to the 4th at home, what with over twenty years
of highlights in the 2nd. I mean, I had planned to die with that one.
But Steve gave me a choice, the conventional 4th edition, such as Vivian
bought, or a much heftier, deluxe edition. If you buy the conventional
edition, you get a code number to download a digital version, called the
eReference Suite. Steve said the bigger book had everything the
conventional one has, plus the downloaded material. I'm not so sure
that's true, but the big one is a gorgeous production, "richly
illustrated in full color", and I'm thrilled to pieces. I'm guessing
something like this would have to cost at least $80, maybe a lot more.
It needs its own stand in some convenient place in the house. No doubt
I'll think of some way to switch over. I saw a storyteller tell four
dragon stories. The "whimsical performance" of Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland was mainly an enactment of the Jabberwocky. That was neat;
now it will make sense to any of the kids when they first read it.
I couldn't miss Mother Goose, and she was impressed that I knew the 2nd
verse of Jack and Jill, the "vinegar and brown paper" verse. I talked
with her afterwards and it turns out her British accent was authentic;
in fact, she grew up in the same neighborhood as A. A. Milne, right near
the Hundred Acre Woods, really called Ashton- or Ashburton-something
Woods. A little coincidence there is that just yesterday at Spence's
Bazaar I bought a really nice "Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie the
Pooh". It was a 75th anniversry edition with all the original artwork.
The reason for the purchase is that I always have to stop and reread
Disobedience whenever I come across it, and after reading a few other
poems I said, hey, this guy is pretty good. If he brings the same thing
to the Pooh stories, I surely need to finally read them after all these
years.
I made a swatch of paper at the museum of small town life. I'm sure
Mizan would have liked that, but she had too much going with her
birthday. Krystal rented a room at the Red Roof Inn here in Dover for
Mizan and some friends. I tried to get invited for some pizza and cake
and some games, but I guess they had enough to do without me, waah.
I brought a bunch of books to the festival for appraisal. See below.
While I was lugging them around, I bumped into Nate, the interpreter who
knows me well by now. He was knocked out by all the things I had to
show him. He would know Christopher Ward's works on Delaware very well,
but he was floored by that "Funny Fiction" book I told you about once -
and you had me quickly retrieve from the trash can. Nate was almost
unbelieving that it could be the same Christopher Ward, but I assured
him it was. He also got a big kick out of the signed books I brought,
such as the Norman Rockwell. Of course he was amazed that I find these
things, including the 1821 "History of New York" for little or nothing
at Spence's.
Oh yeah, another Define-athon word comes to mind. The definition was
"the west wind". The choices I remember were chinook and zephyr.
Actually, I had eliminated zephyr and was torn between chinook and
another word which I forget. I guessed chinook because I associate it
with the west, although not necessarily a westerly wind, but . . . who
knows? Turned out the answer was zephyr. :( I thought that was just a
light, possibly aromatic breeze. So it may have been Chistopher Ward
who gave me that impression! Remember that passage from "The Enchanted
Hell"? - "A zephyr light as an angel's breath swept by, bearing on its
perfumed wings the odor of the desert and a bullet that hit Lee Birdie
just above his left eyebrow..."
The appraiser was the wettest wet blanket you ever met, so much so that
I chuckle thinking back on it. His response to most everything on my
list was, "Who cares?" All my Delaware history books; an 1821
Washington Irving; Christopher Ward, maybe Delaware's most important
writer; a pre-election campaign Hillary bio; a Norman Rockwell autograph
- "Who cares?!"
When I said Ward was Delaware's greatest writer (don't know
if that's true), he said, "That's like talking about Montana's
greatest astronaut!" I said, "That would be a big deal if we were in
Montana!" He said, "Well, we're not!", or something. You get the idea.
I threw the Hillary book in as a joke, more or less. He said, "There
have been 6 books written in the last half year!" I said, "This one was
written before all the hoopla!"
Anyhow, get this guy to appraise your book collection, and
you'll never worry about it again. In fact, you're bound to be
greatly relieved when it gets stolen or destroyed in a flood or fire or
tornado, etc.
He did take an interest in the limited edition, signed,
Beatle-related books. The one thing of interest I did take away relates
to my John Lennon book signed by Yoko. It was a limited edition of 500,
but they goofed up and didn't fill my order, which was certainly among
the first placed. When I saw the book in stores, and I hadn't gotten my
limited edition copy, I gave them a piece of my mind. They very
graciously sent me a limited edition copy, but with a letter, "E",
instead of a number. I always figured that made it a little inferior to
the numbered copies. The appraiser said that lettered copies of limited
editions are rarer and more desirable.
Still, he didn't place any great value on the Beatle books,
"a few hundred dollars". I know that the Derek Taylor book was
trading for a thousand dollars immediately after the limited
edition run of 2000 copies was sold out. He might be right though;
not that it matters since I'm not looking to sell, anyway. The books
will last me a lifetime. If I convert them into money, that'll go
up in a few tanks of gas.
Delaware Book Festival - books for appraisal
Recollections of Dover in 1824
by Judge George Purnell Fisher
Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware, 1912
A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the
Dutch Dynasty
by Diedrich Knickerbocker [Washington Irving]
London, 1821
Very poor binding.
The Dutch And Swedes On The Delaware, 1609-64
by Christopher Ward
Philadelphia, 1930
Foolish Fiction
by Christopher Ward
New York, 1925
Hillary, Her True Story
by Norman King
Birch Lane Press, 1993
The Norman Rockwell Storybook
Told by Jan Wahl
New York, 1969, third printing
Signed by Norman Rockwell
Skywriting By Word Of Mouth
by John Lennon
New York, 1986.
Limited edition in slipcase, No. E(?) out of 500.
Signed by Yoko Ono.
Fifty Years Adrift
by Derek Taylor
edited by George Harrison
Genesis Publications, Surrey, England, 1984
Limited edition in slipcase, No. 1962 of 2000.
Signed by George Harrison, Derek Taylor, Pete Best.
ME: internet banking
How does one deposit cash or a check?
THEE: Can you help me find the correct ruling on the below item?
Is it fair or foul?
If a ball is batted on the ground and it starts out in fair territory
but before reaching the infielder goes into foul territory. The fielder
catches or touches the ball while he is in fair territory but the ball
is in foul territory. All this happens before the ball reaches third
base or first.
ME: Don't quote me, but my belief is that that's a foul ball.
That's the basis for my suggested rule change about balls that fly past
3rd or 1st fair, but come down in foul territory. According to the rule
book I read decades ago, that's a fair ball. That leads me to believe
that, in baseball, it's all about where the ball is - over fair or foul
territory - and nothing about bodies that contact it. But maybe there's
a separate rule for the infield. And maybe the rules have been reworked
over the years.
THEE: Re: book festival report
Wow, Donald! Sounds like you had great fun at the Delaware Book
Festival, and it sounds like more fun than the big DC festival, which
seems to focus more on formal speakers . . . and MAJOR crowds. Stella
has gone a couple of times, including this year, and enjoys it overall,
but this year she said it was horrendously hot and impossible to get
seats for some speakers. She didn't stay as long as last time and,
overall, seemed to enjoy this years Folk Festival more.
That Define-athon victory and prize were terrific. I'd have gotten
caught in the same traps, I'm sure. When you don't know an answer, what
can you do except pick whatever sounds most logical . . . only to have
them trap you with a choice such as "lunation." And who could forget
that "zephyr light as angels breath" that carried the "bullet that hit
Lee Birdie just above his left eyebrow." (What kind of mind would think
of that line?) Sounds like you made the right choice on that Deluxe
Edition. In the garage, I might even have a stand that would work...
How many babies have a cradle built by their great-great grandfather? In
our attic, we have one that Jessica and Carrie used that my grandfather
built. OK, so he didn't build it for my mom or her brother or for my
brother or me, but he built it. Actually, he built if for my mom's
brother's step-son's first child. After Jessica was born, Cousin Jake
returned it to Mom to give to me. His kids had used it as a toybox but
were, by then, to old to need it as such. I was thrilled that he passed
it to us rather than saving it for his grandkids.
Sounds like you had fun with the Jabberwocky, Mother Goose, and all
other Book Festival events, including that laughable appraiser. Would
he say that a Gutenberg Bible isn't worth anything because we're not in
Mainz, Germany, or that nobody would care about an original Middle
English Canterbury Tales because the words are spelled funny and we're
not British? I don't care what an idiot like that would say about my
1892 anthology titled The School Master in Literature which came
complete with crumbling bookmark inside containing the program of "The
Teacher's Institute to be held in Bosworth Saturday Oct. 5th, 1895,"
which includes an 11:00 a.m. talk on "How Rousseau's 'Emile' Was
Educated" by L. G. Venard and mentions at the bottom that "The Teachers'
Reading Circle will make a careful study of the "Schoolmaster in
Literature" to page 73. (Get's 'em through the first 4 of 21 sections,
which overall include greats (Moliere, Rousseau, Goethe, Bronte,
Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, Irving).
You're sure right about the value of such books, though. They're worth
to us what they are worth to us. Who cares about the outside value when
the books weren't bought as an investment in the first place. What
matters is the enjoyment in them, not what someone else might or might
not pay for them. Speaking of gas, it went up 10 cents per day here for
the past two days. I havent' been out of the house and yard today, so
hopefully it hasn't jumped another 10. The next time I want to leave,
I'll be filling my tank.
ME: english going to pot
I should mention there were about 30 authors at the book festival to
listen to, but I missed them all.
Just finished up "Baseball's Best Short Stories" tonight. There were
some sidesplitters in there. In fact, I wouldn't trade places for
nothin' with the guy I found on librarything.com reading "Mah Jong's
Most Thrilling Trilogies". The one I finished up on, "Casey At The Bat"
by Frank Deford, brought "Ragtime" to mind. It brought in various real-
life personages of the 1888 time frame. I had a hard time telling where
truth and fiction stopped and started. Good job; it tells "the rest of
the story" behind Thayer's poem. Too many other neat stories to
discuss. I'll just say that I was mightily impressed by some of the
authors' ability to come up with "something else" in the do or die scene
where you figure there's only two choices: "...and he walloped it a
mile, hooray!" or "...and he swang and missed, boohoo." The most
amazing example (sez me), if you ever come across it, is "The Hector
Quesadilla Story". With a title like that, you probably don't need an
author. If my doppelga"nger would stop slacking off, I could have
skipped about a third of the stories, but that's still a good succes
rate. Somewhat better than math stories.
Does this line from the Acknowledgments bring a smile? "The publishing
staff deserves credit, particularly Brian Feltes, whose editorial
knowhow was indespensible..."
Here's a line that brought me to mind: "Maybe there's nothing in the
rules says you can't pitch a monkey but you can't tell me it's according
to the spirit of the game."
There was a passage in a Zane Grey story that predates that "Not!"
business of the 1980s. "You pitched a swell game last Saturday in
Rochester, didn't you? Not!"
Damon Runyon used one of those what I would call a pluralized gerund:
"...but Hattie is so happy about the baby that she does not mind these
pastings." Also found one in A. A. Milne: "It wasn't that he didn't
care/For blips and buffetings and such..." They sound pretty natural to
me, not "for the nonce" usages, as Steve described them before the
Define-athon. I didn't come off well because I couldn't whip up a good-
sounding sentence with "rainings" on the spot.
Hey, I thought of one more word at the contest. It was my very first
one: "a unit of length equal to 100 meters." I was thinking, holy
smokes, that's an odd one, but cleared my head to listen for the hekta-
prefix - and it wasn't one of the choices! I thought I was doomed on
the first word! But Steve said, "Oops, I misread that. The answer is
'none of the above' (chuckle)." Then he reread it, "... *1000* meters."
Whew, that was better. One of the choices was "kil-om'-e-ter". I said,
kil'-o-meter, but he gave it to me. Hmmm, I just checked it in the
dictionary, and it doesn't give my pronunciation at all(!) I will
defend it to the death, though.
Neat story about your cradle. Brings to mind a story about my
grandfather on my mom's side, even though the stories are hardly
connected by a cobweb. After my grandparents had both died, there was a
longstanding mystery as to what happened to one of the four legs on a
dresser stored in the garage. You can appreciate that ancestors of mine
are not the sort of people to lose or wreck anything. One day one of
the relatives took closer notice of a carved, black, wooden bird hanging
from the rafters that my grandfather had made to scare away birds from
some crop or another. And the light bulb went off . . .
The honeymoon with the deluxe American Heritage 4th Edition is already
over. You might think I'm exaggerating, but the new dictionary mindset
is that *nothing* is wrong. Anything anybody ever utters in any area of
the country or in any social strata gets a great big seal of approval
with a smiley face on top. "What up?" "Wha's up?" "I's me." . . . If
you or I goof around like that, I think we know we're being dopey. Like
when my brother and I used to say, "Pass the butt" at the dinner table.
Oh, but we were hilarious. But for major dictionaries to take it all
down with a straight face makes me want to go out and knock heads. Get
a load of this, not only do they give "career" (move at full speed) as a
definition for "careen" (lean, tilt) now, but the usage note explains
that the confusion is so well established that "it would be pedantic to
object to it"(!!!) What are dictionaries for if not to get us to use
words correctly??? It isn't like we're exactly unteachable. Think of
all the years we were saying 17-year "locusts" when we finally got it
right last time around - "cicadas".
I feel like I have more than a passing awareness of thousands of people
in history and entertainment and sports and the various arts, but my hit
rate on the few hundred people they chose to supply photos for seems
like about 50%. Who are these 1993 Pulitzer Prize winners, etc., etc.?
It's a brave new world for dictionary makers. Goodbye language
custodianship; hello social engineering.
Here's a really weird one, but completely unrelated to my raging above.
Almost insignificant, but weird. You might know why I chose the
American Heritage dictionary in the first place, back in the 1980s. I
think I mention it in passing on some page. My friend A~~ had one,
which I now know to be the first edition. It looked good - plus it had
a nice picture of the Beatles beside their entry. Pretty cool (even if
I don't really think pop artists need to be in dictionaries.) So I
bought an AH, the second edition, and guess what? - no Beatle picture!
Kind of a surprise, and kind of curious, but, in the scheme of things,
so what? But guess what again? This deluxe 4th edition doesn't even
have an *entry* for the Beatles! Popsters like Chuck Berry, Jerry
Garcia, Bob Marley . . . get entries *and* nice pictures! Now, what I
don't know is staggering, but one thing I do know is that, even if I
manage to never hear another note of Beatle music as long as I live,
even if somebody manages to prove conclusively they had no talent as
composers or musicians, they were still hands-down the greatest pop
music phenomenon ever. I really need to track down Steve of the Define-
athon and ask him some questions.
Regarding the email "it's all your fault", you promised "More later . .
." Well, there wasn't much to sink one's teeth into there, and I'll make
your job even easier. Just fill in the blank: "Wow, a blind-in-one- eye
cyclops in a tuxedo costume! That's the _____________est thing I ever
heard of!!!!!!!!
THEE: quitclaim deed
When recorded mail to:
Name:
Address:
Space above this line reserved for Recorder's use
QUITCLAIM DEED
THIS INDENTURE, made this _____ day of __________, 20___, by and between __________, hereinafter referred to as the Grantor and __________, hereinafter referred to as the Grantee.
WITNESSETH, that the Grantor, for and in consideration of One Dollar
($1.00) in hand paid by the Grantee, and for other good and valuable
consideration, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, has remised,
released and Quit-claimed and by these presents does remise, release and
quit-claim unto the Grantee, and its heirs and assigns, forever, all the
right, title, interest, claim and demand which the Grantor has in and to
the following described lot, piece or parcel of land to wit: [INSERT
LEGAL DESCRIPTION LAND]
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD THE SAME, together with all and singular, the
appurtenances there unto belonging or in anywise appertaining, and all
the estate, right, title, interest and claim whatsoever of the Grantor,
either in law or equity, to the only proper use, benefit and belief of
the Grantee its heirs and assigns, forever.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Grantor has hereunto set its hand the day and
year first above written.
Signed: ____________________________
STATE OF:__________COUNTY OF:___________
Notary Public, personally appeared _______________, personally known to
me (or proved to me on the basis of satisfactory evidence) to be the
person whose name is subscribed to the within instrument and
acknowledged to me that he executed the same in his authorized capacity,
and that by his signature on the instrument the person, or the entity
upon behalf of which the person acted, executed the instrument.
WITNESS my hand and official seal.
___________________________
Signature of Notary Public
THEE: Re: direct banking
You mail a check to the address that they provide.
ME: Sounds primitive, and expensive. Is the normal procedure to
maintain a checking account at a local bank and transfer funds from it?
ME: Funny thing is, until a couple of days ago, I would have been
totally baffled by your experience with 411. How could they not have me
and my number??? I've been here 4 years, and I don't hide anything!
The solution to the mystery is that when I changed my number in April, I
changed it to a business line. But I think of it as residential since
it comes to my house. When I called my brother-in-law a few days ago,
he was baffled to see "Karate Brain Math Tutoring" on the caller ID.
Came as a surprise to me, too!
THEE: Good letter to the editor! The closest moratorium on
building that I'm familiar with, is here out on the ocean no more
condo's can be built in Martin county.
THEE: hi my name is stacy and me and my brother were playing tonight,,,
he made a word tamarin.. which i knew as an african monkey.. but i knew
that he was thinking of the fruit tamarind,, i challenged and asked him
what it was he said that he didn't have to explain as long as it was in
the dictonary.......now... even though he had a correct spelling he
thought he was spelling something else or had no idea what he was
spelling is my challenge accurate?. or is he correct that it was still
a word even though it wasn't what he was thinking?..
sincerely,
stacy confused challenger...
ME: I'm afraid if you want to require a scrabble player to be
able to define every word he plays, you'd have to implement that as a
house rule. The tournament players hardly know *any* of the words they
play - which is why I think tournament scrabble is idiotic. But even
the more recreational players play some words, often the small, "useful"
ones, that they don't know, or think they know, but don't really. An
example that jumps to mind is TA. Every scrabble player I've ever asked
gets it wrong. They think it's either baby talk or "bye", as in half of
"ta-ta". It's really british for "thanks". There are lots of other
examples in the 2- and 3-letter words. One problem with your position
is that defining words is extremely difficult! Quick! Define "mumps"!
"But that's not what it says in the dictionary!" Get my point? The way
I've always viewed it is, it's ok if every now and then a person will
misspell a certain word, but get lucky spelling something else. An
example that comes to mind I saw once was "brail". It would be a pretty
dumb game if it happened all the time, but it's rare, so I just view it
as a funny little "special touch". It could happen to you!
THEE: subject Antarctic Land
Do you still have claim to any of the land in Antarctica?
If so, what land do you still own, and what would you be willing to
sell?
ME: Yes, I still have the earliest known standing claim to the
area between 90 and 150 degrees west. My offer to sell pie slices was
more or less tongue in cheek, although I am dead serious about my system
of government being maintained in perpetuity. Even you, the founder of
your new Antarctican country, will have to abide by majority opinion of
all the citizens. Recently an out-of-the-box thinker with experience in
law and real estate contacted me with some ideas on actually selling
parcels to the public, with real deeds and precise coordinates, etc. I
don't have any experience with that, so I've left it in his court to get
the ball rolling. If you know of anyone who'd like to get it
rolling,let me know!
THEE:
>Just finished up "Baseball's Best Short Stories" tonight. There were
some sidesplitters in there. In fact, I wouldn't trade places for
nothin' with the guy I found on librarything.com reading "Mah Jong's
Most Thrilling Trilogies".
Trilogies, no less? Mah Jong could be fun if it included Amy Tan.
>The one I finished up on, "Casey At The Bat" by Frank Deford, brought
"Ragtime" to mind. Another amazing example (sez me), if you ever come
across it, is "The Hector Quesadilla Story". With a title like that,
you probably don't need an author . . .
Do you suppose Quesadilla can be a surname? On the front page of
Thursday's Tulsa World was a photo of Leonarda Chihuahua raising a
candle during a candlelight vigil in protest of Oklahoma's House Bill
1804, an anti-illegal immigration law that went into effect that day.
If one can be named Chihuahua or President--or Gift-from-God, for that
matter--why not Hector Quesadilla? When he's too old for baseball, he
can always open a restaurant. As for baseball v. math stories, I'd
probably understand the baseball stories better. But, but, BUT . . .
you're really leaving me hanging on Casey's alternative ending.
>Here's a line that brought me to mind: "Maybe there's nothing in the
rules says you can't pitch a monkey but you can't tell me it's according
to the spirit of the game."
Gee, I wonder why . . . it brought you to mind, that is. ;-)
>There was a passage in a Zane Grey story that predates that "Not!"
business of the 1980s. "You pitched a swell game last Saturday in
Rochester, didn't you? Not!"
Who'd 'a' thunk it!
>Damon Runyon used one of those what I would call a pluralized gerund:
"...but Hattie is so happy about the baby that she does not mind these
pastings." Also found one in A. A. Milne: "It wasn't that he didn't
care/For blips and buffetings and such..." They sound pretty natural to
me, not "for the nonce" usages, as Steve described them before the
Define-athon. I didn't come off well because I couldn't whip up a good-
sounding sentence with "rainings" on the spot.
I agree that those two look like gerunds, and they even sound ok. On
the other hand, Runyon and Milne had a way with words that wasn't always
kosher.
>One of the choices was "kil-om'-e-ter". I said, kil'-o-meter, but he
gave it to me. Hmmm, I just checked it in the dictionary, and it
doesn't give my pronunciation at all(!) I will defend it to the death,
though.
That's what we always said in school when I was a kid, but what did
Iowans know about metrics--especially way back then? I'd say kil-om'-e-
ter today, but would have guessed both pronunciations would make the
dictionary, and, guess what, your pronunciation came close to making MY
Random House Webster's, but with a schwa rather than that long o.
>What are dictionaries for if not to get us to use words correctly???
It isn't like we're exactly unteachable. Think of all the years we were
saying 17-year "locusts" when we finally got it right last time around -
"cicadas".
Nope. For better or worse, dictionaries are designed to be democratic,
not authoritarian. Otherwise, they'd never change:
http://www.wordcentral.com/edu/gettingin.htm
>I feel like I have more than a passing awareness of thousands of people
in history and entertainment and sports and the various arts, but my hit
rate on the few hundred people they chose to supply photos for seems
like about 50%. Who are these 1993 Pulitzer Prize winners, etc., etc.?
Other than David McCollough for Truman, I doubt anyone will remember
'em.
>This deluxe 4th edition doesn't even have an *entry* for the Beatles!
Popsters like Chuck Berry, Jerry Garcia, Bob Marley . . . get entries
*and* nice pictures! Now, what I don't know is staggering, but one
thing I do know is that, even if I manage to never hear another note of
Beatle music as long as I live, even if somebody manages to prove
conclusively they had no talent as composers or musicians, they were
still hands-down the greatest pop music phenomenon ever.
Still in my 1991 Random House Websters, but no picture. Does include
full names, birthdates, and death dates as relevant.
>Regarding the email "it's all your fault", you promised "More later . .
." Well, there wasn't much to sink one's teeth into there, and I'll make
your job even easier. Just fill in the blank: "Wow, a blind-in-one- eye
cyclops in a tuxedo costume!
That's the __logical-est thing I ever heard of!!!!!!!!
Why shouldn't Cyclops dress for the occasion? And why shouldn't he be
blind-in-one eye if ordinary folks can be blind in both? But if he had
a brain, he woulda enlisted the help of seeing-eye Cerberus so he could
find the doorways and collect more goodies.
ME: There's still a few emails from way back that need replying
to, but so that that the backlog doesn't go into some sort of
uncontrolled chain reaction fission . . .
>Mah Jong could be fun if it included Amy Tan.
Just curious if you would know something like that out of your brain, or
did a quick web search. My money's on the former.
>If one can be named Chihuahua or President--or Gift-from-God, for that
matter--why not Hector Quesadilla?
Read the nice letter from Lashonda - thanks. Checked my phone book for
local Presidents and found just one - Pandora President(!).
>When he's too old for baseball, he can always open a restaurant.
Heeheehee, the story takes place on Hector's ??? birthday, and of
earth's 8 billion inhabitants, he's about the only one who doesn't think
he's too old for baseball!
>As for baseball v. math stories, I'd probably understand the baseball
stories better. But, but, BUT . . . you're really leaving me hanging
on Casey's alternative ending.
Ok, but keep in mind this is the equivalent of about four writing
assignments you'd lay on your kiddies. :) But I can't resist. For one
thing, knowing the story in advance won't hinder the reading experience
if you ever come across the story. At least, for me, it was one of
those stories that's even better the second time around when you see how
all the little pieces fit. In a nutshell, it was the happiest of happy
endings, guaranteed to leave you misty-eyed. The writer set Mudville in
the vicinity of Boston. Besides setting up a connection with the major
league Boston Beaneaters, he worked Jim Naismith, inventor of basketball
at a YMCA in Springfield, and John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy,
into the story. The night before Casey's "at bat", he had an
altercation with Sullivan in McGreevy's Third Base Saloon, the first
"sports bar". Nobody knows this, but Casey beat Sullivan in a hushed-up
fight out on a ball field that night. The author did a great job with
fight, a real white-knuckler for the reader. I can't do it justice
here. Casey collected his 20 to one bet on $500 ($10000), which kept
him quiet, and Sullivan agreed to finally fight the pretender champion
Kilrain, which kept Kilrain's promoter quiet. That fight was the famous
one that went 95 rounds, the last bareknuckle bout, that kept Sullivan
the last bareknuckle champion. So with that little episode, Casey
arrives late at the park the next day. The snake-in-the-grass developer
who's paid off Casey to take a dive thinks it's a master-stroke on
Casey's part, whipping up even more enthusiasm from the fans in order to
let them down even harder. Casey's fiance Flossy has cottoned on to the
shady dealing between Casey and scum Drinkwater. The manager is ticked
at Casey for being late and says he'll finish the game with the players
who started. Flossy tears herself away from her housekeeping chores and
arrives at the park in the 9th inning. The Mudville pitcher begs the
manager to let Casey play, since they're down by a couple of runs. The
manager relents; if they get around to Casey's replacement in the
batting order, he'll let Casey bat. This, of course, is what happens.
Bottom of the ninth, two down, runners on 2nd and 3rd. This is where
the author starts working in little word blasts from Thayer's poem - so
cool! Of course, the story is constructed so the typical reader doesn't
know for sure if Casey is on the take or not - probably is. After the
first two strikes, Casey is as cool as a cucumber. He's seen the
pitcher's complete repertoire now, and Casey is known as a two-strike
hitter. Casey sees Flossie out in center field; he waves his hat to
her; he even points with his bat, indicating he's going to knock the
next pitch over her head! The audacity! The fans are jumping out of
their seats so much that Thayer doesn't see what Casey just did. He
asks his friend what just happened, but he didn't see it either! A darn
shame! The ball comes in, hanging there as big as a cantaloupe (my
imagery); Casey takes a mighty stroke . . . and misses. He had to, it's
in the poem. But the catcher can't handle the pitch; a sequence of
miscues; the runners score; Casey himself comes around - and the
Mudvilles win! The fans go wild! They rush the field to carry Casey off
- all except Flossie sitting alone in centerfield crying. Casey makes
his way out to her. She tells him the wedding is off; she doesn't want
anything to do with the dishonest bum. He tries to explain; he really
was going to smash it out, but he just missed, he couldn't help it. The
young, losing pitcher makes his way out to say a few words to Casey. "I
don't know what happened, sir. That was the best pitch I ever made,
sir. Yes, ma'am, it really was."
And here's the rest of the story. The young pitcher, Kenny Landis, was
so hot and nervous he was trying to find something, anything, to dry his
fingers on before the pitch. He had touched his moustache. The
combination of sweat and moustache wax on his fingers combined to serve
up the first knuckleball ever thrown. It wouldn't be discovered again
for 14 years. Not only did Casey miss the knuckleball by a mile, but
you can't blame the catcher for not being able to handle it either.
When I was a kid, Baltimore had the famous knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm.
Only one catcher would catch him, and he had to use a great, oversized
mitt.
The author gives a little rundown on everybody in the story. Kenny
never managed to figure out how he made that pitch, and gave up trying.
He went into law, the renowned Kennebuck Mtn. Landis, and later
commissioner of baseball. Casey gave up baseball after that season and
he and Flossie went around the country making sensible investments.
They settled in California. Casey went back to school - in the first
freshman class of Leland Stanford Jr. University. Etc., etc.
There's a little remaining mystery for me, which I haven't researched
yet. There are two references in the story to Casey's left-handed twin
sister Kate. There must be some significance to that.
The author did a neat thing putting the whole story in place around the
publication date of the poem - Jun 3 1888. So the game was on Saturday,
the 2nd, following two days off after a Mudville doubleheader on
Memorial Day. I was going to report that this was one little flaw in
the story, that Memorial Day was called Decoration Day back then, but a
quick spin through my encyclopedias, leaves open the possibility that it
went by both names from the beginning.
>>One of the choices was "kil-om'-e-ter". I said, kil'-o-meter, but
he gave it to me. Hmmm, I just checked it in the dictionary, and it
doesn't give my pronunciation at all(!) I will defend it to the
death, though.
>That's what we always said in school when I was a kid, but what did
Iowans know about metrics--especially way back then? I'd say kil-om'-e-
ter today, but would have guessed both pronunciations would make the
dictionary, and, guess what, your pronunciation came close to making MY
Random House Webster's, but with a schwa rather than that long o.
Yes, the schwa pronunciation is in my dictionaries, too, but that makes
me just as sick. I was taught kil'-oh- (and Baltimoreans know how to
say "oh"!), and a moment's reflection should tell anyone any variation
from that is an absurdity, given what the metric system is all about
(cast-iron standardization). If that requires too much mental huffing
and puffing, just consider the lunacy of sen-TIM'-uh-ter, kil-AHG'-rum
and kil-AHL'-uh-lee-ter, for example. I made particular note the three
years working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory - I never
heard a single scientist, American or European, say anything but kil'-
oh-meter. I started hearing the faux-classy pronunciation more and more
in later years, and every one was a twisted dagger to my heart. And
that's even with *hating* the metric system!
>>The honeymoon with the deluxe American Heritage 4th Edition is already
over. You might think I'm exaggerating, but the new dictionary mindset
is that *nothing* is wrong. Anything anybody ever utters in any area of
the country or in any social strata gets a great big seal of approval
with a smiley face on top.
>Nope. For better or worse, dictionaries are designed to be democratic,
not authoritarian. Otherwise, they'd never change:
Now, now, now... Nobody would deny we need new words when we invent and
develop new things.
>http://www.wordcentral.com/edu/gettingin.htm
I'm too writ out (hey, somebody call American heritage!) to argue in
full, but I'm sure that page supports my position. They say, clear as a
bell, that a word, after it's learned to walk for a while, has to
*crawl* before they'll accept it. And *nothing* the uncleansed masses
say has a chance. If I get up the energy, I hope to write up a web page
about the American Heritage 4th Ed. I promise you, I'm not imagining
things. A sea change has taken place. They even make fun of their own
usage panel of 20 years ago for being so squeamish about a perfectly
respectable word like "ain't". Hey, it started in the upper classes
with "an't", and even now ladies in sequined gowns will listen happily
to "It Ain't Necessarily So".
>And something for Mizan:
>http://www.myspellit.com/
About their "misused homonyms", I don't know if "misused" is the word
they mean to use there, or simply mistyped and not caught. In that
category, the pairs that come first to my mind are through/threw and
no/know. I think we've both done those a few times. Tickles my funny
bone how often a person types the ridiculous mess "through" when all he
wants to say is "threw". Maybe o-u-g-h is just so satisfying to type?
>http://www.wordcentral.com/
>I'm not quite sure what to make of that Build Your Own Dictionary
feature. It seems to contain everything from real words that I've
known for ages, such as forte and tome, to flights of fancy. Guess
that's the result of "build your own."
I'm afraid I could spend too much time with that page! I just called up
the O's and found a bunch of funny things. Here are a few:
oyopop: on your own piece of paper
obsane
Function: adjective
Definition: something that is obsurd and insane [obsurd?]
Word History: Invented, 2002.
Example Sentence: That man's purple hair is obsane!!
Submitted by: Anonymous on 07/09/2007 02:13
Octember
Function: noun
Definition: September and October combined
Word History: It doesn't have a word history. [That's tellin' 'em!]
Example Sentence: I can't believe it is almost Octember.
Submitted by: Linz from VA on 09/12/2007 03:51
Yep, Jaugly is almost gone.
>>This deluxe 4th edition doesn't even have an *entry* for the Beatles!
>Still in my 1991 Random House Websters, but no picture. Does include
full names, birthdates, and death dates as relevant.
It would be astounding if it didn't. The AH4 has achieved the
astounding. One nice thing about the AH4 biographical entries, it gives
one important piece of information about the person beyond the bare
dates and "writer" or "artist" or "politician", etc. - something to
flesh out the name and profession.
>But if he had a brain, he woulda enlisted the help of seeing-eye
Cerberus so he could find the doorways and collect more goodies.
I'm afraid he'd need two hands for Cerberus, and how would he hold the
tin can with the sign, "BLIND (in one eye)"?
Oddest anecdote from scrabble last night: Judy played FATSO. I double-
checked it mainly because I didn't *know* for sure it was good, even
though I couldn't imagine it not being good. The AH4 labeled it
"offensive", which is disallowed in my club, so poor Judy had to take it
back. (Sorry if I offended anyone's sensibilities by typing out F*TS*
in full above.) While we were on the subject, I brought up G*RL**
again, and asked Vivian and Judy if they'd be offended to be called
that. They said, not at all, at their stage of life, they'd be happy to
be called *anything*.
Donald
THEE: Re: Antarctic Land
I in no way intend to disestablish your stystem. In fact, I've read it
to quite an extent and believe Unarchy to be fairly synonymous to my own
ideals.
The idea of founding an Antarctican country is not something I take
lightly and will not be a half-drawn plan. It is a long-term idea that
will most likely take years to develop, but the land itself is an
invaluable asset.
For the sake of precision, the land I will be most interested in are
coastal regions with a low rate of degeneration. However, I would like
to request a form of internationally recognized claim on the land before
I divulge any more information.
ME: Thanks for your considered reply. If it's ok with you, I'd
like to forward your emails to the man who had some ideas about getting
international recognition of my claim. Maybe your interest will provide
him with a spark to take the first step.
ME: I'm also hoping you'll visit
http://www.donaldsauter.com/word-power.htm
which shows some of the effect of the American Heritage Second
Collegiate Edition on my life. At the time I put the page up, I had
looked up and highlighted about a thousand words. By now, I'm guessing
it's almost tripled that.
P.S. We need to talk about "coward".
ME: I got an inquiry recently about my Antarctica claim which I
thought might be interesting to you. Perhaps you and Tom might even
have some ideas to share about getting this thing rolling and
"official". I'll admit, it's not likely I'll move things forward under
my own steam. On the other hand, I'd really like to see a bunch of
little unarchies set up down there.
THEE: subject Playboy/Beatles interview/Jean Shepherd
Hi, I'm the author of the only book about humorist Jean Shepherd, who
interviewed The Beatles for Playboy (published 2/65).
For further research, I'm seeking photos that may have been taken of
Shepherd with The Beatles during the week he spent with them in October
1964.
Do you have any information as to where I might find such photos, such
as in published books or other sources?
Eugene B. Bergmann (author of EXCELSIOR, YOU FATHEAD THE ART AND ENIGMA
OF JEAN SHEPHERD)
ME: I'm afraid I'm stymied. I don't have access to any of the
magazines now. In any case, I don't recall ever seeing seeing a photo
of Shepherd and the Beatles together, in the magazine itself or in any
of my other Beatle books. I'll try to think of what book might possibly
contain one, and if I stumble on one, I'll surely let you know.
ME: I got the Delaware books very quickly - in time for the Delaware
Book Festival last Saturday, at which they made a nice impression on the
historical interpreters I met there. Mostly wanted Recollections of
Dover, but have found interesting passages in the other books. Thanks.
THEE:
>>Mah Jong could be fun if it included Amy Tan.
>Just curious if you would know something like that out of your brain,
or did a quick web search. My money's on the former.
Then you can keep your money. I'm an Amy Tan fan. A lot of things send
me searching, but not that one.
>>If one can be named Chihuahua or President--or Gift-from-God, for
that matter--why not Hector Quesadilla?
>Read the nice letter from Lashonda - thanks. Checked my phone book for
local presidents and found just one - Pandora President(!).
The comment that President prompts is too obvious to make. We were all
>Yes, the schwa pronunciation is in my dictionaries, too, but that makes
me just as sick. I was taught kil'-oh- (and Baltimoreans know how to
say "oh"!)...
I agree that the preferred pronunciation today isn't logical, given how
we pronounce the others. As for the schwa, we Iowans were lazier with
our pronunciation than you Baltimoreans, which today made us right with
one of the dictionary pronunciations . . . for whatever that's worth . .
. probably nothing.
>>Nope. For better or worse, dictionaries are designed to be
democratic, not authoritarian. Otherwise, they'd never change:
>I hope to write up a web page about the American Heritage 4th Ed. I
promise you, I'm not imagining things. A sea change has taken place.
They even make fun of their own usage panel of 20 years ago for being so
squeamish about a perfectly respectable word like "ain't". Hey, it
started in the upper classes with "an't", and even now ladies in
sequined gowns will listen happily to "It Ain't Necessarily So".
And I hear college professors--even English teachers--use it to get
their students' attention. Some students understand the purpose.
Others never notice. I'll look forward to that webpage.
>>http://www.myspellit.com/
>Tickles my funny bone how often a person types the ridiculous mess
"through" when all he wants to say is "threw". Maybe o-u-g-h is just so
satisfying to type?
Somewhere I have a poem on that intentionally misuses many of these and
another that carries over the pronunciations to other "made-up" words.
Take the pronunciation of THROUGH, and you can say that someone DROUGH
pictures. Becomes a bit of a reading challenge.
>I just called up the O's and found a bunch of funny things. Here are
a few favorites:
>oyopop: on your own piece of paper
Too much like instant messenger talk . . . although that doesn't require
paper.
>Octember
Function: noun
Definition: September and October combined
Word History: It doesn't have a word history. [That's tellin' 'em!]
Example Sentence: I can't believe it is almost Octember.
Submitted by: Linz from VA on 09/12/2007 03:51
>Yep, Jaugly is almost gone.
Here I was worrying about Ocvember.
>One nice thing about the AH4 biographical entries, it gives one
important piece of information about the person beyond the bare dates
and "writer" or "artist" or "politician", etc. - something to flesh out
the name and profession.
And it should. For people, though, I use the Internet. Far better
luck. More detail for the famous and relatively famous, and often
tidbits about the long-forgotten.
>I'm afraid he'd need two hands for Cerberus, and how would he hold the
tin can with the sign, "BLIND (in one eye)"?
So . . . maybe Cerberus has been to obedience school . . .
>Oddest anecdote from scrabble last night: Judy played FATSO. I double-
checked it mainly because I didn't *know* for sure it was good, even
though I couldn't imagine it not being good. The AH4 labeled it
"offensive", which is disallowed in my club, so poor Judy had to take it
back. (Sorry if I offended anyone's sensibilities by typing out F*TS*
in full above.) While we were on the subject, I brought up G*RL**
again, and asked Vivian and Judy if they'd be offended to be called
that. They said, not at all, at their stage of life, they'd be happy to
be called *anything*.
Funny that she had to take back FATSO. Probably the only person who
calls me GIRL is my black friend Lisa.
ME:
>Probably the only person who calls me GIRL is my black friend Lisa.
The offensive G*RL** in question is actually the long form, ending in
-IE. But your reply got me curious, and, yes, even G*RL is now offensive
in the American Heritage.
One correction to the Casey At The Bat synopsis: should have said
cranks, not fans.
And one fascinating follow-up: "The area is now known as Covent Gardens
Estate, and on the actual site of the diamond where Casey struck out is
a 24-hour convenience store." It must be true!
ME: for newszap
Description: Dover Scrabble Club meets every Wednesday night at 7 p.m.
at Treadway Towers in Dover. All Scrabble fans are invited to join the
fun. Style of play is friendly, not tournament. The program is free
and open to the public. For complete information, call Don.
Name: Donald Sauter
DaytimePhone: 302-678-7100
GroupName: Dover Scrabble Club
SiteURL: http://www.donaldsauter.com/scrabble-club-rules.htm
THEE:
>The offensive G*RL** in question is actually the long form, ending in
-IE. But your reply got me curious, and, yes, even G*RL is now
offensive in the American Heritage.
Obviously a white dictionary. Blacks use that word and other
"offensive" ones with impunity. I mentioned only Lisa [but there are
others.]
(Betcha didn't know there's a company building rockets in Norman,
Oklahoma.)
>One correction to the Casey At The Bat synopsis: should have said
cranks, not fans. And one fascinating follow-up: "The area is now known
as Covent Gardens Estate, and on the actual site of the diamond where
Casey struck out is a 24-hour convenience store." It must be true!
And is it part of Boston? I've seen a newspaper version of the poem
with "Boston" in place of "Mudville." Don't remember if I kept it, but
I certainly looked twice.
ME: dames who can figure
>>While we were on the subject, I brought up G*RL** again, and asked
Vivian and Judy if they'd be offended to be called that. They said,
not at all, at their stage of life, they'd be happy to be called
*anything*.
How's this for a weird little coincidence - in today's Delaware State
News, on the letters page, a middle-aged+ woman recounts an incident at
a stop light where some young guys in a car with a rumbling sound system
pulled up. She wasn't to pleased about the noise pollution, but when
they looked over and yelled, "Hey! G*rly!", it made her day, week, and
month. (Obviously, the newspaper didn't know she snuck an offensive
word in.) She said that hasn't happened in three decades! I won't try
to figure out whether these anecdotes are coincidences or just the
expected result of the workings of the female mind. All I know is that
if I were ever to so much as smile at a female stranger, I'd be facing a
stack of charges a foot thick.
>(Betcha didn't know there's a company building rockets in Norman,
Oklahoma.)
Norman sounds sort of familiar; do I know it for anything else?
>>And one fascinating follow-up: "The area is now known as Covent
Gardens Estate, and on the actual site of the diamond where Casey struck
out is a 24-hour convenience store." It must be true!
>And is it part of Boston?
Tip: Try removing quotes from your search to get more results.
Your search - "covent garden estates" boston massachusetts - did not
match any documents.
Suggestions: Make sure all words are spelled correctly. Try different
keywords. Try more general keywords. Try fewer keywords.
>I've seen a newspaper version of the poem with "Boston" in place of
"Mudville." Don't remember if I kept it, but I certainly looked twice.
When I read it (I'm sure I didn't memorize it) at a Cub Scout meeting, I
substituted "Hebbville" to the evident delight of the audience.
Hebbville is the place, not much more than a crossroads, I guess, where
the Cub Scouts had their meeting, and is probably the most specific
place name for me to use when I say where I grew up. I know I've
discussed my eternal confusion over the significance of place names. In
this case, I don't know if Hebbville is within Woodlawn within Baltimore
County, or if Hebbville is on the outskirts of, or actually borders
Woodlawn. I don't even know if Hebbville or Woodlawn have borders; I
know I've never seen such a sign for either in my life. I suspect the
phone company would know Woodlawn if you answered that to, "What city
please?", although there's not a chance in heck that Woodlawn falls
under the broadest known definition of "city". I'd bet the bank the
phone company would choke on Hebbville, although I just plugged it into
Google maps and they came up with it. The USPS just choked on it, as did
zipinfo.com.
Do you know what "slaw" is? The American Heritage has downgraded it
from a real word to "regional".
ME: what is truth
Here's what George Martin says about Please Please Me in "All You Need
Is Ears" (1979). I like this version better than in Lewisohn's
"Recording Sessions" (1988): "George told them that the song could be
much better if they increased the tempo..."
With the publishing arranged, the immediate job was
to get the next record out, and when the Beatles and I
next got together I played them 'How Do You Do It?'.
There [sic] were not very impressed. They said they wanted to
record their own material, and I read the riot act. 'When
you can write material as good as this, then I'll record it,'
I told them. 'But right now we're going to record this.'
And record it we did, with John doing the solo part. It was
a very good record indeed, and is still in the archives of
EMI. I heard it recently, and it sounds quite good even
today. But it was never issued. The boys came back to me
and said: 'We've nothing against that song, George, and
you're probably right. But we want to record our own
song.'
Somewhat testily I asked them: 'Have you got anything
that's any good?'
'Well, listen to this, George. You've heard it before -
'Please Please Me' - but we've revamped it, and we've
done it this way. . .'
I listened. It was great. 'Yeah, that's good,' I said. 'Let's
try that one.' I told them what beginning and what ending
to put on it, and they went into Number Two studio to
record. It went beautifully. The whole session was a joy.
At the end of it, I pressed the intercom button in the
control room and said, 'Gentlemen, you've just made your
first number-one record.'
Remember I claimed P.S. I Love You is a much better song than Love Me
Do? In "Recording Sessions" Ron Richards says they wanted P.S. I Love
You as the A-side but couldn't have it because there was already a
record with that title.
In case Ringo and George Martin lead one to believe in Anthology that
Andy White was at the first session when Ringo showed up, dispel the
notion. On Sep 4 the Beatles recorded How Do You Do It and Love Me Do
with just Ringo there. Andy came to the next session, Sep 11. Ringo
played no drums on Sep 11. So the version without tambourine (and Ringo
on drums) is from Sep 4, and the other is from Sep 11. Norman Smith
remembers Paul not being happy with Ringo's drumming on the Sep 4 Love
Me Do.
Amazing, the all the things I knew somewhere along the line.
I was afraid to stick my neck out and say that Marsha Albert heard about
the Beatles on Walter Cronkite's CBS news. Hear the real poop below.
What's a marsha bug?
ME: Besides Steel Pulse and Al Hudson, what are the other
commercial recordings you've played on? For instance, I think you and
Cathy played violin on some sessions back in Detroit in the 1960s?
Remember the artists or records?
Funny thing - after composing the above note, I got a call from my
sister-in-law this evening saying she saw you on the evening news. It
was a piece by Sally Kidd from Washington. She said to tell you you're
famous (as if you never were!)
ME: Is it the transfer amount one worries about, or the size of
the account being transferred from? Actually, with millions of people
doing it, I'd rather hear that there's nothing to worry about.
THEE: subject Thanksgiving
Hope we will see you. Bring a shopping bag if you would like any old
books, magazines or records.
THEE: Re: dames who can figure
>How's this for a weird little coincidence - in today's Delaware State
News, on the letters page, a middle-aged+ woman recounts an incident at
a stop light where some young guys in a car with a rumbling sound system
pulled up. She wasn't to pleased about the noise pollution, but when
they looked over and yelled, "Hey! G*rly!", it made her day, week, and
month. (Obviously, the newspaper didn't know she snuck an offensive
word in.) She said that hasn't happened in three decades! I won't try
to figure out whether these anecdotes are coincidences or just the
expected result of the workings of the female mind. All I know is that
if I were ever to so much as smile at a female stranger, I'd be facing a
stack of charges a foot thick.
Add 20-30 years to your life and that will change. Every single man in
the place Mom lives is being chased by the majority of the single women,
Mom excluded (though sometimes I wish she'd join in)--and some of the
married ones. One woman has a husband in a nursing home and another
octogenarian on the side in the retirement community... Anyway, I guess
this isn't exactly like strangers since these comments involve people
who at least live under the same huge roof, though is separate
apartments, but it does seem that the rules change.
>>(Betcha didn't know there's a company building rockets in Norman,
Oklahoma.)
>Norman sounds sort of familiar; do I know it for anything else?
Didn't know if you'd remember it, but it's the home of the University of
Oklahoma. I made occasional trips there when the daughters were there.
It's about 30 miles beyond OKC--from here, that is.
>>I've seen a newspaper version of the poem with "Boston" in place of
"Mudville." Don't remember if I kept it, but I certainly looked
twice.
>When I read it (I'm sure I didn't memorize it) at a Cub Scout meeting,
I substituted "Hebbville" to the evident delight of the audience.
Hebbville is the place, not much more than a crossroads, I guess, where
the Cub Scouts had their meeting, and is probably the most specific
place name for me to use when I say where I grew up. I know I've
discussed my eternal confusion over the significance of place names. In
this case, I don't know if Hebbville is within Woodlawn within Baltimore
County, or if Hebbville is on the outskirts of, or actually borders
Woodlawn. I don't even know if Hebbville or Woodlawn have borders; I
know I've never seen such a sign for either in my life. I suspect the
phone company would know Woodlawn if you answered that to, "What city
please?", although there's not a chance in heck that Woodlawn falls
under the broadest known definition of "city". I'd bet the bank the
phone company would choke on Hebbville, although I just plugged it into
Google maps and they came up with it. The USPS just choked on it, as
did zipinfo.com.
That's what you get for growing up in the boondocks. The "town" nearest
the farm where Mom was born no longer exists. That's not to be confused
with "This-or-That Valley," Iowa, nor Valley Junction, IA, nor any other
sort of valley--just plain-ol' a couple-of-deserted-buildings Valley,
IA.
>Do you know what "slaw" is? The American Heritage has downgraded it
from a real word to "regional".
Cabbage salad. Granted, it's normally coleslaw around here . . . or, if
you want to get fancy, forget the cabbage, and make broccoli slaw. BUT
I'd be willing to bet just about anyone here would know what "slaw" is--
or in Iowa for that matter. So if folks out your way know, it must be a
darn big "region."
ME: internet banking
I've been looking into internet banking, and while I'm not an expert in
any way, shape or form, it all looks pretty simple and safe and
sensible. I'm in the process of opening a savings account with WT
Direct (Wilmington Trust). The current interest rate is
5.06%. No minimum and no fees. Maximum of 6 withdrawals per month.
Besides the good interest rate, they let you link any number of your
accounts to it. Other internet banks might only allow two. Not having
a limit seems good to me because it allows you to switch your local bank
without any complications, for example. (Switching my local bank is
something I want to do.)
When I first started looking into internet banking a week ago, I was
thinking of using Capital One, figuring I had heard of them, and 4.75%
sounded pretty good to me. It's already down to 4.50%.
If you go for WT Direct, one of the first pages might confuse you. It
says "You will need mortgage or loan info to verify your identity".
Don't worry about that. When that part of the application process comes
up, you will just check "None of the above" to everything.
THEE: what is truth
Is it your belief/claim that it was not George Martin's idea to speed up
Please Please Me but that the boys did it on their own, bringing it to
George Martin's speed afterwards?? IF so, then it seems their words
"Well, listen to this, George. YOU'VE HEARD IT BEFORE-Please Please Me-
but we've revamped it, and we've done it this way..." sounds to my ears
like he probably HAD made a recommendation to them previously (when he'd
heard it before) and they were returning the selection to him after
"revamping it", with his obvious approval.
I have to agree that George Martin's lengthier explanation in All You
Need Is Ears is better than the brief one by Mark Lewisohn, though
Lewisohn more directly made his point on the subject of the speeding-up
matter.
I have seen mention of a "P.S. I Love You" song from the old days (50's)
in my YesterMusic catalog and was surprised to see an earlier song with
that title...So that story is real interesting!
BTW, never did get "the real poop" on Marsha Albert and the marsha bug,
as mentioned at the end of your email. Was there supposed to be a link
there?
ME: Yeah, when the subject came up, I put forth the clain that I
had read something authoritative that gave the Beatles credit for the
sped up Please Please Me. It quickly occurred to me it was George
Martin's own book. Wherever there are words there will be the potential
for variant interpretations, but what I read in George M.'s account is
that he was quite surprised by the new version the Beatles came up with.
"I listened. It was great. 'Yeah, that's good,' I said. 'Let's try that
one.'" That doesn't sound (to me) like anything he would say if they
had just implemented his own detailed instructions. And he goes on to
detail what his contributions to the song were: "I told them what
beginning and what ending to put on it." Nowhere does he take credit
for the tempo. And the Beatles say, "WE'VE revamped it," and "we've
done it THIS way," not, "we've done it YOUR way." Finally, note that
the passage in Mark Lewisohn's book is Mark talking, not George Martin.
I have a recording, I think, of the old P.S. I Love You somewhere in my
collection. Maybe it's the sheet music - the old memory is gone, gone,
gone! Personally, I think the fact there was another song with that
title is the world's dumbest reason for not letting it have an A-side.
What the heck could that matter?
About the question of what put Marsha Albert on to the Beatles in the
first place, yer quite right - you weren't around for that. It came up
the next morning. Darren got a call from Bill, and Darren recounted the
episode with Dublin Drive and me the night before. Bill was not up on
the Carroll James/Marsha Albert/Washington D.C./I Want To Hold Your Hand
story, and I heard Darren tell him Marsah had seen the Beatles on the
Jack Paar show. I knew that was wrong; the Jack Paar film clip of the
Beatles was in January 1964, not all that long before the Ed Sullivan
show. But I realized I wasn't sure if Marsha had seen the Beatles on
Walter Cronkite, or if maybe it was the Life magazine mention in
November 1963, or something else. So that was the reason for digging up
the sound bite of Carroll James telling the story.
I always thought it was neat how welcoming the Beatles were to Marsha in
the van before the Coliseum show with Carroll James. I thought it was
funny, John goofing around with her name, "Marsha Mallo". A little
later he says, "Marsha Bug", which I'm either hearing wrong, or else
don't get. Were there "marsh bugs" when you were in Liverpool?
THEE: Nice to hear from you! Must be telepathy. I just
retrieved the music by Clarence Cameron White that you helped find at
the Library of Congress and beautifully preserved in a bound volume.
For years, I've wanted to record them. Just over the weekend I asked a
fellow Levine teacher if she would be interested in such a project.
Levine has a recording studio at NW and in SE at THE ARC. I really
should be taking advantage of these resources.
My Detroit recordings were all non-union and underground. It was during
my college years. At the time, it was a fast $20 buck for a single side
on a 45-rpm "doughnut". I do recall "A Toast to You" by Harold Melvin
and the Blue Notes. There was another one with Edwin Starr I'd have to
scratch my brain for others.
Me on the evening news? Yikes! What was I doing? I'll have to keep a
lid on my public beer drinking. 'Never know where those cameras will
pop up. I was at Colonel Brooks Tavern Sunday night, enjoying a great
bowl of chili (with lots of beans) and a seasonal pumpkin brew that had
quite a kick.
ME: a toast to you II
Never fear, you, or your angelic twin, was seen in the background giving
violin lessons to a student in a segment about the benefits of music
lessons on a student's academic performance. The name Sally Kidd
doesn't ring any bells? Mind you, Carol said you weren't given a
speaking part.
Are you sure the Harold Melvin song was "A Toast To You"? The web
doesn't seem to connect the two, and it seems too coincidental that you
worked on Al Hudson's "A Toast To You" too.
Shake some of them cobwebs loose before they petrify - I need to
complete my record collection category "Favorite Studio Violinist".
Good luck with the Clarence Cameron White project. I'll listen to it!
THEE: Yes he did enjoy doing your even/odd puzzle. I did one along with
him but was careful not to get ahead of him so he didn't feel like I was
"winning". The other thing you gave us a sheet that described your
approach and the results we could expect based on how much we could do
with him at home. I thought that would be helpful to Dr. Asay and
Laura, particularly since they do psycho educational evaluations and may
have other referrals for you. I hope it was O.K. to share that with
them.
THEE: Re: a toast to you II
No bells, at the moment. We have PR people in and out of Levine all the
time. The kids hardly react any more. They probably filmed some
lessons and later put the piece together. We've all signed waivers to
permit this kind of media coverage. I'll ask around here to see if
anyone remembers.
You're probably right about the "Toast". I think that was the name of
the album. I don't even remember the "cuts". No royalties, anyway.
If the Clarence Cameron White project comes to fruition, I'll definitely
list you in the credits for your research. I had never even heard of
him.
THEE: It was nice to meet you in Dover!
I read your review of Word Freak - it's very engaging. Although my
Scrabble playing is much more in line with the way you play it, I would
imagine it's doubtful that one could ever change the way it's done
competitively!
- Steve
ME: I agree 100%. My mission is to make Scrabble a great,
airtight game for the millions of people who haven't yet been messed up
by the OSPD. Playing Scrabble with a conventional dictionary has always
been a problem, so I've shared my solutions with mankind. If the
tournament players ever take a look at my "beautiful boards" and feel a
twinge of jealousy or shame, well, so much the better.
Did you spin by my "American Heritage" page?
http://www.donaldsauter.com/word-power.htm
That's actually gotten quite a bit of attention. No need to put me on
the payroll. :)
P.S. Even with a conventional dictionary we had a game last night with 3
scraboes: DELOUSE LOOTERS RIGHTER.
THEE: subject: the liver bug
I'm a detailed reader just as I'm a detailed writer, good OR
bad...Ha-ha
Re: P.S. I Love You, maybe they thought recording the song would mean
little, title-wise, unless it became a HIT(A side), in which case they
might get sued???
Re: Marsha bug....maybe the thought was Mash-a-bug??? That's just my
immediate thought/guess on that. Don't really know.
ME: I like your theory: fits in with laugh/larf, ask/arsk,
*ss/*rse, etc. Maybe I missed it because I squarsh bugs, not marsh 'em.
It's always risky believing anything anyone has to say about copyright,
no matter how definite they are, but I have heard and read often enough
that I believe it that titles are not copyrightable. Almost any song
title you can think of has multiple songs to go with it. Yoko tried to
copyright "Why" and failed.
ME:
>You are an mp3-making maniac!
Strickly lightweight. Why do my mp3s at 64kbps sound so lousy compared
to the originals at 128kbps? (128 sounds as good as cd sound to the
unbiased human ear.) It might seem obvious that 64 should sound
horrible, but then how come the Damon Runyon mp3s sound as good as they
do? They must be down around 8 or so to fit a day's worth on one cd,
but I'm betting they sound about as good as the original recordings.
This is all just wondering out loud.
Angie had an interesting theory on what John meant by marsha bug. I'm
curious to see if you came up with the same answer.
THEE: Re: dames who can [sing]
Do you, by chance, own a copy of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera? If
so, I could use a little info. Other books could help, but that seems
to be the standard reference source to cite.
ME: Unfortunately, I don't have the New (or old) Grove Dictionary
of Opera. You know how behind the times I am in everything I do. I
wouldn't mind taking a crack at your opera questions with what I do
have, of course, even if it needs confirmation in the Groves. There's a
chance some of my old books would do a better job on the opera scene ca.
1912 than a new Groves.
All four games of Scrabble last night were especially good, hard- fought
close games. In one game, Vivian had her second-ever scrab-o in the
club, DELOUSE, but both Elsie and I came back with our own: LOOTERS and
RIGHTER, respectively. I had 3 scraboes total on the night, including
DIALECT. I'll make a quiz of the third. I had two blanks, and figured
my best bet was a word in this form: _EE_IES. The first letter had to
tack onto the front of an open E. For each candidate letter in the
first spot I had to race through the whole alphabet for the second
blank. I only came up with one stupid word, but the dictionary upheld
it.
THEE: subject Mississippi Kids
They've all been working hard to prepare Temeka for a math competition.
Lameka is in the next group of kids to get into the math club. Must be
some sort of club that one must qualify for. Destiny was happy about
getting a certificate for good results on a state exam. Let's home
Mississippi's is better than Maryland's.
ME: Ask Destiny, "If you have $25 and you spend all but $3, how
much do you have left?"
THEE: Re: mother goose posters
The senior librarians were not interested in a local musician bin That's
ok. At the rate the online distribution system is evolving, CD's will
be history soon.
ME: While I'm writing, any chance you know more about the pop
music sessions that Phyllis has done than Phyllis? I thought it would
be fun to track down as many as possible on itunes. I know of the Al
Hudson album and the Steel Pulse track. Phyllis wrote:
>My Detroit recordings were all non-union and underground. It was
during my college years. At the time, it was a fast $20 buck for a
single side on a 45-rpm "doughnut". I do recall "A Toast to You" by
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. There was another one with Edwin
Starr I'd have to scratch my brain for others.
I always thought A Toast To You was the Al Hudson album. Can you think
of any titles for these artists?
I was given a $20 itunes card that's been sitting around here forever.
Could never think of a darn thing to do with it (unless they count opera
acts as a single track). Then I thought of Phyllis's work. I thought
you were involved, too.
At the recent Delaware Book Festival I won the Define-athon contest
sponsored by American Heritage Dictionary. I few of my best moments
that come to mind now were "ugsome" and "naiad". Also met Mother Goose.
She grew up in A.A. Milne's neighborhood, next to the Hundred Acre
Woods.
THEE: subject al goodman
I was just wondering if you could give me a little direction in finding
out more about a RCA VICTOR album that I have aquired. I'm not shure
what year it was recorded in or much of anything about it? The album in
question is Victor Huberts's "Eileen "by Al Goodman, Frances Greer,
Jimmy Carrol, Earl Wrightson, The Guid Choristers, lyrics by Henery
Blossom. This is a original complete set of 78's with black labling and
a series # 45-0204.
ME: I had a good time pulling books off my shelves in the hopes
of finding something about your record, but no luck. Didn't see anything
on the web, either. Amazing what the web doesn't have, innit?
Me: Persimmon Park Place homeowners committe; Our goal as I see it
To give the majority will of the PPP residents representation on all
council matters.
THEE: subject Just started a school Scrabble club....have
questions
I am an elementary school teacher in Georgia. I have just started
a weekly Scrabble Club that meets each Monday right at dismissal. We
have 43 fourth and fifth grade students who play. So far, we have had
to add 2 more school kits. It's thrilling to see how enthusiastic the
kids are! We have plenty of the latest Official Scrabble Dictionaries,
but I have questions.
When a word is challenged, but doesn't show up in the Official
Dictionary, are the kids allowed to use a larger dictionary? If the
word is found in the larger dictionary, what then?
How would YOU end the games in the space of one hour? We have not run
out of tiles yet. I was asking the students to total the remaining
tiles' points and then deduct them from their scores. What would you
suggest?
Would you mentor my group?
Stevens Creek Elementary; Martinez, GA
ME: 43 enthusiastic elementary grade kids playing Scrabble -
that's fantastic! Congratulations!
>When a word is challenged, but doesn't show up in the Official
Dictionary, are the kids allowed to use a larger dictionary? If the
word is found in the larger dictionary, what then?
First of all, I invite you to give careful thought to my suggestions in
my scrabble page:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/scrabble.htm
You will see my disdain for the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary.
It contains way to many obscure, obsolete, and/or foreign words. Many
appear in no other conventional dictionary. I assume your kids play QI
and ZA in every game? It breaks my heart to think of kids starting out
on that abomination. But to field your question, I absolutely can not
imagine 5th graders knowing words that are not in the OSPD. Except for
very specialized jargon, I can't imagine any highly educated adult
knowing words not in the OSPD. Choose one dictionary, the OSPD if it
has to be, and go with it. Even the boxtop rules say to choose a
dictionary, not run around and check every one you can put your hands
on, and then the online ones, until you find one with your funny word.
In case you're being misled into thinking that a collegiate dictionary
with a larger volume has more words than the OSPD, perish the thought.
The OSPD is more compact because it only goes up to 8-letter words and
provides a single definition per word.
>How would YOU end the games in the space of one hour? We have not run
out of tiles yet. I was asking the students to total the remaining
tiles' points and then deduct them from their scores. What would you
suggest?
I would set an alarm. The instant it goes off, the game stops; nothing
can be added to the board. There is nothing special about this
situation and, you're right, each player must deduct the value of the
tiles on his rack at that point.
If you want to nudge the games into being completely finished in the
hour, I would suggest two-minute sandtimers. I just bought a batch from
this company:
http://www.officeplayground.com/
With shipping, they're just a tad over $1 apiece. To my mind, that's a
splendid deal. As I lay out in my club rules
http://www.donaldsauter.com/scrabble-club-rules.htm
the timer tells you when you must stop thinking and play *something*. A
player doesn't lose his turn the moment the timer stops. But, the idea
isn't to use up all the time every play - it's a worst case scenario. A
player should shoot for about a minute per play, on the average.
>Would you mentor my group?
Hey, I can talk Scrabble all day long! I don't know how I could offer
much of value from this distance, but if anyone wants to ask a question
or tell me about a great play or game, I'd love to hear. In particular,
I'd like to see some of the final boards produced by the students. Take
a look at the sample boards produced with a conventional dictionary
under my club rules on my main Scrabble page - the most beautiful
Scrabble boards on earth, if I do say so myself.
THEE: subject Bragging Rights
In our anniversary album you mentioned "bragging rights" for
Thanksgiving dinner attendance figures. This year may top them all.
There are still a few questions marks. Stay tuned!!!
THEE: Re: dames who can [sing]
>Unfortunately, I don't have the New (or old) Grove Dictionary of
Opera. You know how behind the times I am in everything I do. I
wouldn't mind taking a crack at your opera questions with what I do
have, of course, even if it needs confirmation in the Groves. There's
a chance some of my old books would do a better job on the opera scene
ca. 1912 than a new Groves.
I'm looking for an accepted source documenting the following Oscar
Hammerstein I "song birds": Mary Garden, Luisa Tetrazzini, and Nellie
Melba. I need the direct connection to Hammerstein. I have Internet
sources, such as Wikipedia, but those won't work. I could also use
names of any other well-known Hammerstein "song birds." In short, a
lot of bother for a credible endnote. Don't feel that you need to
bother. The downtown library has the New Groves, which is listed
as a Wikipedia source for at least one of these song birds. It's just a
matter of getting there, but I can combine that stop pretty easily with
my next trip to campus since there's a downtown exit off near the campus
exit, off the same Interstate.
>I'll make a quiz of the third scrab-o. I had two blanks, and figured
my best bet was a word in this form: _EE_IES. The first letter had to
tack onto the front of an open E. For each candidate letter in the
first spot I had to race through the whole alphabet for the second
blank. I only came up with one stupid word, but the dictionary upheld
it.
The one that pops into my mind is JEEBIES, but I don't think it works
without HEEBIE. Not in my dictionary, anyway. What letters were in
your rack? That's only fair, isn't it?
Re: the trip to the Ozarks--though stretching the boundaries slightly.
One stop was the Laura Ingalls Wilder house and museum in Mansfield, MO.
It turned out to be a great place, much better than expected. The museum
was great fun: letters from the kiddies to Laura in the 1950s when she
was in her 80s; a large display of her books translated into languages
from Spanish, French, German, Danish, Swedish to Arabic and Bengali--
just to name a few; photos of the REAL Ingalls family, of course (Pa
looked nothing like Michael Landon, even had a long beard); Pa's fiddle
and a chance to hear it played; a long newspaper article written to the
old home paper by Laura during the long move by wagon from SD to MO, in
which she describes Fort Scott, KS, and a "lovely place" (quite funny to
one who knows Fort Scott and used to live close to there; all sorts of
opportunities to learn similarities and differences between the TV shows
and real life (for instance, older sister Mary really did go blind but
did not become a teacher for the blind); oodles of info on Laura and
Almanzo's daughter Rose, who became a prominent journalist and was the
oldest war correspondent in Vietnam, white hair and all. There are two
Ingalls homes in Mansfield. The one next door to the museum was built
room by room after Laura, Almanzo, and Rose moved to Mansfield. It was
given to the town along with a couple acres of the surrounding property
by Rose after Laura's death at 90. (Almanzo had died about 8 years
earlier at 92.) The house is filled with their belongings since Laura
had lived in the house to the last. The other house was built in the
late 1920s by Rose, then well-off, for her parents. It would have been
a mansion for the area at that time and is still a lovely home. Laura
and Almanzo lived there 8 years while Rose lived in the original house,
but they moved back into the old house as soon as Rose decided to move
to NY. They preferred the old home place to the modern one.
Most of the day, things have been falling around here (as contrasted
with "hopping.") Not falling as in the case of tripping or breaking.
I've been playing Paul Bunyan" and felling trees. Well, not exactly
trees, but some of those crepe myrtles I was cutting had a few trunks up
to 3-1/2 inches diameter. While I was at it, I took a couple of branches
off of a maple tree by the patio, too. Great weather for outdoor work,
but about 24 hours from now, I anticipate feeling the day's labor.
ME: oops and whoops
>I'm looking for an accepted source documenting the following Oscar
Hammerstein I "song birds": Mary Garden, Luisa Tetrazzini, and Nellie
Melba. I need the direct connection to Hammerstein. I have Internet
sources, such as Wikipedia, but those won't work. I could also use
names of any other well-known Hammerstein "song birds." In short, a
lot of bother for a credible endnote. Don't feel that you need to
bother.
I did sneak a quick peek in my 1935 Groves Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, but couldn't come up with your smoking gun. The Hammerstein
(no I) entry connects him to the Manhattan Opera, and the Garden entry
connects her with the Manhattan Opera House, but a direct connection
between Hammerstein and Garden would take a death-defying logical leap.
>The one that pops into my mind is JEEBIES, but I don't think it works
without HEEBIE. Not in my dictionary, anyway. What letters were in
your rack? That's only fair, isn't it?
That was my rack: _EE_IES - two blanks. You're right, the American
Heritage 4th doesn't recognize JEEBIES, although if you called them up,
I'll bet they'd add it for you. Also, the chosen first letter must tack
onto an E to make a two-letter word, _E. By no means worry about
something like this if it isn't fun for you. I get a kick out of it;
obviously, or I wouldn't be a Scrabble bug. Seems like there should be
a few possibilities in there, although I only found one. If I could put
the S first, which I can't, it would have been a baby play: SEEDIER.
Maybe there's something in the form _EESIE_ I didn't see.
The Laura Ingalls Wilder house sounds right interesting, although, I
have to admit, I haven't read any of the books and never saw the tv
show. I have had lots of the books as giveaways in my centers.
Another word from the Define-athon popped to mind while lying in bed one
morning. I said that "ugsome" was the only word I knew in advance of
hearing the choices. There was another one, "a nymph living in a
stream or brook". Got it?
My collection of Mother Goose albums is up to 7, one of which is a
double album. I also have two 12-inch Mother Goose 78s which I haven't
played yet. (I don't have the proper needle for 78s, although I don't
really know how much difference it makes.) I mostly mention this to say
I got my first Aesop's Fables album a week ago. It's pretty good.
Turns out I had heard of Amy Tan before. She's on my hard drive by
virtue of getting a mention in a Washington Post article, ca. May 1998,
about a yard sales, including one held by a friend of my friend V~~'s,
and which mentions some of the things my friend was selling.
[Appositives are by my friend.]
At our next stop, the driveway of a postwar brick house, the
chocolate chip cookies for 25 cents [baked by Rachel] are moving
faster than an old Zenith 286 with DOS and Word Perfect for $25
[we later sold it for $15]. But before David [author's
annoying kid] can decide which Silver Age comic book he wants, some
guy buys the entire collection, three boxes full, for $220. [Actually,
the guy gave me a $60 deposit, took some comic books, and vanished. I
don't think I was ripped off.] The books are $1 for hardbacks, half
as much for paperbacks, "but if you take the law books, I'll take the
price down," says discarder [yours truly - a good gag!]. Thanks, but no
thanks. However, planning a midwestern vacation, I snatch up the
Smithsonian guide to the Great Lake states. "You're selling this?"
says his wife, chagrined. "We don't live there anymore," he replies.
For Sandy, my spouse, I find Amy Tan's "The Hundred Secret Senses,"
read by the author on audiotape [from my wife's collection], balm for
Beltway bottlenecks, and for myself seven vintage LIFE magazines, 1937
to 1946, and including a wartime issue published six days before my
birth. By dealer standards, they are priced quite low. By my
standards, they are priceless.
If you need a break and want a recommendation on a short story, try "Mr.
Carteret And His Fellow Americans Abroad" from the old Wit And Humor
set. No claim it's the greatest or funniest thing ever, but will make
you feel proud to be an American by association with Native Americans.
Oops, not on the web yet, sorry.
An old book I read not long ago was Mother West Wind's Animal friends
(1912). It was among several old books a Maryland friend gave me. You
can guess by the title it's a kids' book, which is about all this ol'
brain can handle. The stories were rather rompin' (I'm sure I overuse
that word). One of the main characters is Peter Rabbit. The author's
name, Thornton W. Burgess, had a sort of familiar ring to it, and I
finally looked him up when I was about 4/5 done with the book. Turns
out I was reading about *the* Peter Rabbit, not just any ol' Peter
Rabbit! He's a cool guy. My encyclopedia say Burgess wrote 15,000 of
these tales! Whoops. Here I thought I had gotten myself cleared up on
something that was always sort of confusing - all the different famous
bunnies out there, particularly the Peters. I thought Beatrix Potter's
Peter was the little brother of Flopsie, Mopsie and Cottontail, but now
I see Potter's character was Peter Rabbit, too. Don't ask me where
Peter Cottontail fits in, and which one is the Easter Bunny. I give up.
THEE: Not a real reply (too late, or too early for that) . . .
BUT Thorton Burgess also wrote Billy Possum stories. :-)
As for Mary Garden, somewhere I have a newspaper article that covers her
Hammerstein connection, but not for the others. Can't say I've looked,
though. Too busy hunting for goofy things such as why Taft was suddenly
associated with a goat rather than a possum. Found it, too!
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ . . .
THEE: the Chord
The main problem for me is that A hard days Night is in G and nigh
impossible to sing unless you're a warbler. Our band plays it in D
which is great for vocal and on the Rick 12 string 'the chord' can be
played very easily as below:
Playing around at the 5th fret its possible to get very close to the
sound with this set of notes, as below, but in the key of D not G as the
Beatles played it.:
1st string 5th fret gives you A
2nd string 3rd fret gives you D
3rd string 5th fret gives you C
4th string 5th fret gives you G
5th string open gives A
So - thats all the notes in the chord, although not necessarily in the
right order!!
(You could also play the first string at the 3rd fret for an even easier
chord shape, doesn't sound bad at all.)
ME: Sounds good, thanks!
THEE: Re: what is truth
A debate between 64 and 128kbps is way beyond my understanding.
ME: 64 vs. 128 kbps? Well, see it's like record speeds, and the
more spins the better, which is why 78 rpm sounded so much better than
33 and 1/... Um, maybe I better think about this a little more.
This year will be the last Thanksgiving hosted by my aunt and uncle, a
tradition dating back to, literally, before I can remember. Louise
hints it will be the biggest ever. They will be moving and downsizing,
and ask everyone to bring grocery bags for books and records, etc.
Thus, "In appreciation for all those decades of hosting Thanksgiving
celebrations, I am walking off with a bag of your stuff." Good deal?
THEE: I'm back at work, and very happy to be alive; something I
did really take for granted. Hopefully, this gratefulness will linger.
ME: I'm just starting on baking a Peachy Pie Supreme. Were you
around in the days that Mom made that? It was always a big hit.
Whatever happens next year at Thanksgiving will be ok. There was some
talk of renting a banquet hall or something.
PEACHY PIE SUPREME
3/4 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 (3 1/2 oz). pkg. instant vanilla pudding
3 tbsp. butter
1 egg
1/2 c. milk
1 can sliced peaches
1 (8 oz.) cream cheese
3/4 c. 10X sugar
3 1/2 tbsp. peach juice
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Combine flour, baking powder, pudding, butter, egg and milk to form a
wet dough.
Pour into greased 9 inch pie plate. (This forms the moist crust or
base).
Drain peaches, saving 3 1/2 tablespoons of juice.
Lay peaches on top of crust mixture.
Mix cream cheese, 10X sugar, and reserved peach juice in bowl.
Place cream cheese mixture over peaches to form top crust.
Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35
minutes (if middle is not firm, turn off oven and let sit in oven until
it is).
Serve warm with vanilla ice cream, or cold. Diet recipe substitute: Diet
pudding, diet cream cheese, fresh peaches, 2% milk and omit the regular
sugar.
ME: dang if i know
Thanksgiving was good, as usual. There were 60 of us.
The Dylan meets Dr. Seuss was amazing. Could have fooled me. I'm glad
other people felt the same way, saying the vocal likeness was uncanny.
It does bring up something that I've never come to grips with in life.
That's the question of how much of a role "authenticity" plays in our
enjoyment of something. If it really were Dylan, I'm sure I'd've been
completely knocked out, and wishing for the whole set. As it is, it
just falls into the category of "really neat", an excellent joke. Which
is crazy. What does it matter who or what produced the final product?
It might be twice as good as what Dylan could have done, himself, if he
had done it. Also kind of scary to me what people can do nowadays,
counterfeiting *anything*.
>BUT Thorton Burgess also wrote Billy Possum stories. :-)
Neat. Unless I was asleep at the wheel, there weren't any Billy Possums
in this book, "Mother West Wind's Animal Friends". And I see there's a
Billy Mink, which makes a Billy Possum even more unlikely.
No need to reply with a thesis, but I was wondering if you have all the
bunnies named Peter/Peter Rabbit/Peter Cottontail, etc. crystal clear in
your mind? I wouldn't think a person in a million could claim that.
But if anybody can, you're the one I would "phone a friend" on Who Wants
To Be A Millionaire.
>>My collection of Mother Goose albums is up to 7, one of which is a
double album.
Already up to 8. I got another one from Louise at Thanksgiving. Also
took a few Christmas records sung by various famous opera singers, not
that I really need those in my collection, but there might be some nice
things in there, and we were doing them a favor(!) taking books and
records and magazines off their hands. How's that for a fine "Thank
you"???
Did you ever get the water nymph word? It's just a matter of picking
the right -ad word, the other being the wood nymph.
You got WEENIES right. I'm sure I just didn't make it clear how it had
to attach to the board. There was only one spot open enough for a
scrab-o, and the first letter had to connect to the front of an
available E, as follows
WE
E
E
N
I
E
S
So the first letter had to be a B, H, M, etc. And then, for each one of
those, you have to spin through the whole alphabet, checking for a hit
in the 4th spot. It just seemed to me there should be something more
common and obvious.
>>All I know is that if I were ever to so much as smile at a female
stranger...
>Add 20-30 years to your life and that will change.
Well, gawl dang . . . *now* you tell me! How come they don't tell you
that when you're 7, "Just wait'll you're 80, and it'll be ok." Simple
as that!
>>Norman sounds sort of familiar; do I know it for anything else?
>Didn't know if you'd remember it, but it's the home of the University
of Oklahoma. I made occasional trips there when the daughters were
there. It's about 30 miles beyond OKC--from here, that is.
I remember *every*thing, haha. In fact, this is what I remember from
May 2003:
>More seriously, though, we did come a bit closer to tornadoes this
past weekend than I care to come again. We were drivin' through
Oklahoma City on your way to the daughters' (yup, both of 'em)
commencement exercises when . . .
>Before you get too excited, our drive was actually Friday afternoon--
24 hours after the first tornado and approximately 5 hours before the
second. We passed some big damage in Moore, about 10 miles from Norman
where OU is located.
And this is what I remember from June 2003:
>As for me, I'm off in a few minutes to Norman, OK. Time to meet the
future son-in-law who flew in last weekend from Sardinia via Rome and
London...
Most interesting Scrabble anecdote of late: I am often heard expounding
my theory that it doesn't pay to try to find and remember "good" words
for use in scrabble. It just doesn't work that way. I'd be curious if
any of the 3000 words highlighted in my dictionary have ever appeared on
a Scrabble rack of mine. Ok, the page it's opened to right now has a
highlighted "ween" - just above "weenie", coincidently - and I have used
"ween" in scrabble. And I'm not referring to memorizing odd words
appearing on lists compiled for their value in Scrabble, which I have no
desire to do. But, coming across a word and thinking, "I'm going to
play that in Scrabble!", well, don't hold your breath. In one of the
games last week, there was the word FEAT a few squares in front of a
triple-word score. Of course, I wondered if there's a verb definition
for FEAT, opening up possibilities like FEATING and FEATERS. In the
post-game analysis we found there was no verb, but there is an adjective
definition, complete with FEATER and FEATEST. So, guess what the very
first play in the very next game was? FEATER! Amazing! Still, I'm not
conceding that shoots my theory down, just a one-in-a-???-million long
shot.
>I've shared a google document with you called...
I played around with this a little, and as usual for anything new to me
without an experienced pro in the copilot seat, I didn't quite get it.
A couple of messages I got were:
>Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are
sorry for the inconvenience
and
>changes conflicted with a collaborator and were discarded
There was something about choosing a color for my comments, but I didn't
see my material look any different from the original. If you want to
send an ABC sequence of steps on how to insert such-and-such a comment
at such-and-such a point in the text, and close out, it would be
helpful.
>The scrabble board must be pretty scrambled. I can make out some
words but others are single letters. This is a time when pdf would
work. Your computer analysis should be interesting!
Really, the "analysis" is not much more than a "summarizer" of what
happened. And, believe it or not, even with the billgate brigade's best
effort at keeping the recipient from seeing what the sender wrote,
everything is readable to you. What I do is present the board twice,
the second time with the letters flipped across the diagonal. This
makes the "down" words on the original board "across" words on the
flipped board. So every word that was played can be seen by reading
left to right. In fact, it's best to just ignore what is going on
vertically. Here's another example. You see the word BASTING in the
2nd grid; can you find it snaking downwards in the 1st grid?
* VIE * * * qUEEN* *
A PRAY U BOT Total points: 715
qUILTER EYE I Z U
U E I SOLE P VALE GAZER N Scrab-o: BASTING QUILTER
E C E A I T N LACE
E G BEAUX FAD E E BY J D J Total tiles played: 103
N ZANY R ABA PRICE F AI U
* Z FIG AXLE *R ARID LORD Unplayed tiles: E I S U
EL DORMs I A U GO I
B RAJA T E Y SEX R J E Power tiles: 13 J J J X X Z Z _ _ S S S S
O C I JAILS O A M A ASP
TUNED L N EL BAsTING U Anomalies: no H 3J no K no Q no W
O AGO YE FAX L O R
JURIES E A LIES E Percent expected vowels: 113%
* D PURER * PAD E R
The analyzer tells us there were 13% more vowels relative to consonants
in this game than would be expected in the standard game. No K or Q is
not so out of the ordinary, but no H or W is unusual. Three J's, of
course, is just plain wacky. For one of my scraboes, I could have
played the humdrum LU_TIER ("lustier"), but thought it would be funny to
use the blank as a Q and spell QUILTER, incidentally putting a worthless
"q" in shooting distance of a triple-word score. Take my word for it,
that's *funny*.
Speaking of quilting, I enjoyed the web site with the artwork from the
Harlin House Museum.
Most recent opera is Nausicaa by Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Remember the
name Nausicaa from your Greek tragedy days? She's a relatively minor
character in the Odyssey. She's the daughter of the King of Phaeacia,
and showed kindness to Odysseus when he washed up on that island, which
was his last stop before Ithaca. This is a reworked telling with a
feminist touch in which Nausicaa sort of takes on the role of Penelope,
and at the same time demands that the court minstrel singing and
laughing about Penelope and her 50 suitors clears Penelope's reputation.
Thus, Nausicaa becomes one of the "Sons of Homer" herself, partly
responsible for the setting of the Odyssey that's come down to us. All
kind of twisted in on itself, if you know what I mean. (I sure don't.)
Had fun going to a bunch of Odyssey excerpts and condensations in my
collection before playing the opera. Nice music.
I still have a lot of fun with my searchable book index. This is what
comes up for "odys" (as if you need to know):
Search string = odys 11-17-2007
BOOK: Adventures in Reading
AN EPIC TALE
The Odyssey (Lotus-Eaters, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Isle of the Sun) HOMER 187
BOOK: The Bookshelf for Boys and Girls; Stories and Songs From Many Lands; Volume 4
Greek and Roman Myths and Legends
WANDERINGS OF ODYSSEUS, THE
BOOK: The Family Treasury of Children's Stories, Book 3
A Taste of . . . The Pleasures of Great Books
The Adventures of Odysseus The Cave of the Cyclops (adapted from Homer's Odyssey by Padraic Colum 278
BOOK: Story and Verse for Children
LEGENDS AND HERO TALES
The Story of Odysseus, Padraic Colum
BOOK: 101 of the World's Greatest Books
The Odyssey HOMER 203
BOOK: The Junior Classics 4 - Hero Tales
THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER
The Adventures of Odysseus Padric Colum 15 ill. John Flaxman
BOOK: The Wit and Humor of America, Vol I
Odyssey of K's, An Wilbur D Nesbit 209
BOOK: The Book of Knowledge, volume 1
THE BOOK OF STORIES
The Dog That Remembered Odysseus I46
BOOK: My Bookhouse Five - From The Tower Window
HOME-COMING OF ULYSSES, THE From the Odyssey of Homer 423
BOOK: The Fireside Book of Dog Stories, edited by Jack Goodman
THE ODYSSEY OF RUNYON JONES Norman Corwin 134
Going way back,
>>"Pow" is defined as "the power of exciting". Huh???
Any idea what the Random House means by that? I keep thinking I'm
missing something obvious, but it never clicks.
I guess that about catches me up. About the only thing left on my list
is the game WildWords, which can wait.
ME: electric tankless point-of-use water heaters
Dear This Old House,
I thought I write one last time before giving up and doing something
reckless with my house.
What is the state of the art in electic, tankless, point-of-use water
heating? Is it possible they can land a probe on a moon of Saturn, but
can't heat up just the water you need, where you need it?
The system I envision would have room-temperature water coming from a
holding tank to each fixture in the house. Each fixture would have a
single spigot with a single flow valve and a temperature control knob.
Turned all the way down, you would get cold (room-temperature) water.
If the temperature dial is turned up before the water valve is opened,
water will not flow until the temperature has been reached, or nearly
reached.
For my part, I'd gladly make these concessions:
The hotter the water, the less the flow rate - no problem. Who needs
gushing, blazing hot water?
I can wait a few moments while the water heats up before it starts to
flow. No worse than waiting for the hot water to flush the cold water
out of the pipes with the old system, anyway.
I will never run hot water at two places simultaneously, such as bathing
while washing dishes. No need to rewire the house with enough juice to
run Manhattan.
If it's possible that no one has already designed such a water heating
system, could you encourage someone to devote a couple of working days
to it? It would make tanked systems obsolete overnight.
ME: Is it easy for you to stick a page on a scanner and shoot it
to me in an email? And if so, do you think it would be worth the effort
for those pages you went back to the originals on? Besides being
interesting to me for dynamics and repeats, etc., I'm wondering if
you're playing any notes which I may have transferred to gtr 2 for the
sake of playability, in which case, I might need to modify my part. It
can't be a big deal, but the point is, you're working from the untouched
original, and I'm working from a set already edited for playability. If
I had it to do over, and had a crystal ball, I would have left the
originals untouched for us, and saved myself thousands of hours of
wasted work and years of misery.
THEE: subject advice...huge instrument design
I am a grad student and I am researching strings for a musical
installation project for a school. (basically a 17 foot string
instrument) What are your thoughts on string usage? diameter, material,
a manufacturer, stresses on strings at that length, tension needed for
correct pitch, etc.
I want this to be pluckable by children's hands, but breakage must be
eliminated as a possibility. I play bass guitar so I know that breaking
the E string is quite difficult...I have never done it or seen anyone.
So...nothing smaller than the E string for breakage and nothing bigger
than 7mm? How does that sound? Do you know of any projects with large
scale string gauges? Thank you for any insight you may be able to give
me.
ME: Sounds very interesting, and I wish I could help, but I'm
afraid not. In fact, when I put up my page on "calculating" strings,
and giving the relation between tension, frequency, length and mass per
unit length, I was hoping string makers and others would take up the
baton and work up all sorts of useful strings for people like you and me
who want to deviate from the standard instruments.
Again, it sounds like you've got a neat idea going. Best of luck.
THEE: Re: oops and whoops
One question: If you were adding a full word to an open E, why did the
first letter added before the E need to create a full word? If all the
letters you added created a word, shouldn't that be fine? Has it been
WAY too long since I played Scrabble, or is this one of your rules that
I don't remember reading?
Btw, if I'm following you, my new word (and perhaps your word) is
WEENIES.
THEE: Re: all the stuffings
It sounds like you had Thanksgiving at Stone Ridge during bag day.
THEE: Re: address, phone, poetry
I am convinced that the soaring cancer rates are tied to the
environment.
I am having dinner with librarian friends, so I will accept your offer
to keep Mother Goose moving. It will be fun (sort of like that Flat
Stanley book character) to see how many stops she can make!
THEE: subject from gonfalons to maxilla of a mole
http://visual.merriam-webster.com/about-visual_overview.php
[Address for a visual dictionary.]
ME: What a great idea. Coincidentally, just tonight I was
thinking I could use such a thing. I was composing a message to This
Old House about plumbing, and I realized I wasn't sure what the parts of
a faucet are called. Thought maybe there was a better or more specific
word for the "handle", for instance. Believe it or not, I blanked on
the word "spout" even, although I worked that out of the message.
Little miffed why come gonfalons is in your subject, but not found in
the dictionary.
THEE: As you can see, Darryl & I have found your web site. You
have certainly been busy researching and thinking about lots of things.
Hope you got all the records home and that you are enjoying more opera!
ME: Thanks for stopping by the ol' homestead. I wouldn't wish
all those pages on my worst enemy, but one that comes to mind for you
would be my memorial to Mom, if you haven't seen that:
http://www.donaldsauter.com/mom.htm
Thanks again for the great batch of records. There were a bunch of
opera-related cuts on the piano and dance records, even. Lots of
listening cut out for me!
THEE: A Question Regarding Spanish Guitar Terminology.
I am learning to play the classical guitar using Julio S. Sagreras's
lesson books. I am nearing the end of the first book, Lesson 76, where
the instruction reads, "The Teacher should explain how to play the last
note of lesson 76, the natural harmonic D on the 4th string. I advise
that natural harmonics be played with the thumb using rest-stroke,
coming to rest in this case on the next higher string and with the right
hand held closer to the bridge."
The final measure of the lesson consists of a lower D-middle D chord,
then this miniature lower D. Above this final note is the abbreviation
arm., below which is the Roman numeral XII, which I assume means the
final D should be played after the XII fret. But this makes the note
sound just like the middle D. So what's the point? And what's a natural
harmonic, and what the heck does arm.stand for--armature, armpit, wha??
Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated.
ME: From what you write, I'm not 100% sure you know how a harmonic is
produced. In this case, you just barely touch the 4th string at the
12th fret with a left hand finger, and pluck it with the rh thumb,
immediately pulling your lh finger from the string. If you time the
action just right, you get a nice, pure, ringy harmonic. The different
sound quality is usuall the point. A "natural" harmonic is done on an
open string in the manner described above, usually at frets 12, 5 and 7.
This is distinguished from "artificial" harmonics, which involve
fretting the string, and using the right hand to simultaneously touch
the string 12 frets higher, and plucking it with some other finger.
I've always figured "arm." stands for "harmonic" in italian, -
"armonico"? If you see "flag.", that's French for harmonic -
"flageolet", or something.
Hope that helps. In this case, having somebody show you is worth a
thousand words.
THEE: Gonfalon is in the dictionary! No time for more.
>The Dylan meets Dr. Seuss was amazing. Could have fooled me. I'm glad
other people felt the same way, saying the vocal likeness was "uncanny".
It does bring up something that I've never come to grips with in life.
That's the question of how much of a role "authenticity" plays in our
enjoyment of something. If it really were Dylan, I'm sure I'd've been
completely knocked out, and wishing for the whole set. As it is, it
just falls into the category of "really neat", an excellent joke. Which
is crazy. What does it matter who or what produced the final product?
It might be twice as good as what Dylan could have done, himself, if he
had done it. Also kind of scary to me what people can do nowadays,
counterfeiting *anything*.
I agree that the voice was convincing, but I missed the guitar.
>No need to reply with a thesis, but I was wondering if you have all the
bunnies named Peter/Peter Rabbit/Peter Cottontail, etc. crystal clear in
your mind?
I'm not much help. Peter Cottontail I know only as the song bunny
"hopping down the cotton trail." The "hippety-hoppety, Easter's on its
way" guy. Peter Rabbit is, of course, the one invented, made famous,
and illustrated by Beatrix Potter. Coincidently, I watched the recent
film Miss Potter Saturday night. Good film. I haven't read enough to
know how authentic the bio-pic is, but it seemed to do a good job
telling how an eccentric "old maid" of 32 got her publishing break, how
the younger brother in a family of publishers got his first assignment
(because his older brothers didn't want it and wanted him to fall flat
on his face), and how, after success and mishaps, she eventually started
buying up farmland in the Lake District, saving it from developers, and
willing it to the British government. Naturally, Peter Rabbit, Jemima
Puddleduck, and their like played crucial roles--occasionally coming to
life on the page. One Jeremy Fisher bit was very disturbing. As for
Peter (JUST Peter), I don't know.
>>>My collection of Mother Goose albums is up to 7, one of which is a
double album... How's that for a fine "Thank you"???
You're right. When people start downsizing, most of them are delighted
to know someone will enjoy their hand-me-downs. Mom never fails to
remark about things of hers in our house, particularly when I use them.
For instance, she gave us a set of very nice Norwegian dishes that my
parents mainly used at Christmas because the design can pass as holly.
In reality, the pattern is called Brasil, and they're coffee beans and
coffee plant leaves. I use them year 'round as "company" dishes. The
rest of the time, it's the old white everlasting (until someone drops
one and watches it chatter into needle thin shards) Corelle.
>Did you ever get the water nymph word? It's just a matter of picking
the right -ad word, the other being the wood nymph.
Un . . . er . . . I forgot that one didn't I? A wood nymph is a dryad .
. . so a water nymph is a naiad. I'll admit to having to check the
spelling though. I tried "ny" first.
>You got WEENIES right. I'm sure I just didn't make it clear how it had
to attach to the board. There was only one spot open enough for a
scrabo, and the first letter had to connect to the front of an available
E, as follows
WE
E
E
N
I
E
S
Oh . . . now I understand. I thought you were talking about the WE at
the beginning of WEENIES needing to be a word, and THAT really confused
me.
>So the first letter had to be a B, H, M, etc. And then, for each one
of those, I had to spin through the whole alphabet, checking for a hit
in the 4th spot. It just seemed to me there should be something more
common and obvious.
The only other one I thought of was BEENIES, but that's a brand name and
maybe not in the dictionary. Not in mine, for sure, because 1991 is too
durn old.
>>>All I know is that if I were ever to so much as smile at a female
stranger...
>>Add 20-30 years to your life and that will change.
>Well, gawl dang . . . *now* you tell me! How come they don't tell you
that when you're 7, "Just wait'll you're 80, and it'll be ok." Simple
as that!
For what it's worth . . .
The women are the ones left out by 80. Too many of them for each man.
The place where Mom lives had it's first wedding recently--not the first
couple to meet there to get married, but the first wedding in the place,
in its garden that is. Both bride and groom sat throughout the
ceremony. I forget their ages, but he's nearly 90. She looks like an
elderly Liz Taylor, died black hair and all. Dresses the part, too,
although she has toned down a lot since she caught her 4th husband.
That may not quite put her in Liz's league, but close.
>I remember *every*thing, haha. In fact, this is what I remember from
May 2003: ...
>And this is what I remember from June 2003: ...
Yup, my life history in your hands. Man, am I in trouble.
>In one of the games last week, there was the word FEAT a few squares in
front of a triple-word score. Of course, I wondered if there's a verb
definition for FEAT, opening up possibilities like FEATING and FEATERS.
In the post-game analysis we found there was no verb, but there is an
adjective definition, complete with FEATER and FEATEST. So, guess what
the very first play in the very next game was? FEATER! Amazing!
Who'd a thunk it? Never heard of FEATER or FEATEST.
>>I've shared a document with you called "Chapter 9 or 10_Champ, Champ,
Champ Revised_November 2007":
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfd7fjsj_2cs6267&invite=f8bx2hq
>The kid is amazing. Best of luck to 'im. I'm curious where he'll end
up in the music world.
I was impressed. Did you also watch the two-year-old girl with the big
hands and the wedding ring???
>For one of my scraboes, I could have played the humdrum LU_TIER
("lustier"), but thought it would be funny to use the blank as a Q and
spell QUILTER, incidentally putting a worthless "q" in shooting distance
of a triple-word score. Take my word for it, that's *funny*.
Someday I should try Scrabble again.
>Speaking of quilting, I enjoyed the web site with the artwork from the
Harlin House Museum.
Wish you could have seen the real thing. The drawings were amazing--so
many, so big, so detailed. Getting to meet the impersonators of two of
the subjects and of the artist made them double-fun. The juxtaposed
kids' drawings made them quadruple-fun.
>Most recent opera is Nausicaa by Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Remember the
name Nausicaa from your Greek tragedy days? She's a relatively minor
character in the Odyssey.
Sorry, but the Odyssey is an epic, not a tragedy. I'll have to admit to
never reading all of the Odyssey, the Illiad, or the Aenead although
I've read portions of all.
>She's the daughter of the King of Phaeacia, and showed kindness to
Odysseus when he washed up on that island, which was his last stop
before Ithaca. This is a reworked telling with a feminist touch in
which Nausicaa sort of takes on the role of Penelope, and at the same
time demands that the court minstrel singing and laughing about Penelope
and her 50 suitors clears Penelope's reputation. Thus, Nausicaa becomes
one of the "Sons of Homer" herself, partly responsible for the setting
of the Odyssey that's come down to us. All kind of twisted in on
itself, if you know what I mean. (I sure don't.) Had fun going to a
bunch of Odyssey excerpts and condensations in my collection before
playing the opera. Nice music.
Sounds interesting. I wonder how many different takes have been done on
this story. One of my favorites is Tennyson's "Ulysses"--Ulysses years
later.
>I still have a lot of fun with my searchable book index. This is what
comes up for "odys" (as if you need to know):
>Search string = odys 11-17-2007
>BOOK: Adventures in Reading
AN EPIC TALE The Odyssey (Lotus-Eaters, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis,
Isle of the Sun) HOMER 187
Ah, parts of the Odyssey that I know--except for Isle of the Sun.
>BOOK: The Family Treasury of Children's Stories, Book 3
A Taste of . . . The Pleasures of Great Books
The Adventures of Odysseus The Cave of the Cyclops (adapted from
Homer's Odyssey by Padraic Colum 278
Was he blind in one eye?
>BOOK: The Book of Knowledge, volume 1
THE BOOK OF STORIES
The Dog That Remembered Odysseus I46
And dropped dead when he returned. Such a faithful ol' dawg . . .
>>>"Pow" is defined as "the power of exciting". Huh??? Any idea what
the Random House means by that? I keep thinking I'm missing something
obvious, but it never clicks.
According to my Random House, that's an 1880-85 definition. Sounds like
we don't need to feel stupid--just young!
THEE: The most important question I have for you now: Is your
copy of "Keely Smith Sings the Lennon-McCartney Songbook" in stereo?
ME: five bits
I don't see "stereo" or "mono" anywhere on the Keely Smith album, so the
presumption is not stereo. That presumption was confirmed within the
first fraction of a second of a listening test. Why mono might not have
been an iron-clad certainty is that my copy is a "Promotion Not For
Sale". As far as I can tell, the vinyl is not clear [jokey reference
to Quiex II vinyl.]
I'm just about wrapping up my "Beatle interview records to mp3 discs"
project. I dragged my feet on Louise Harrison Caldwell and the John
Lennon "Reflections and Poetry" two-record set on Silhouette. Louise
turned out to be quite enjoyable after all these years. My favorite bit
that I hadn't remembered was Louise giving her favorite bit in A Hard
Day's Night. I forget if it was on the Beatleg podcast - thankfully not
another "bit in the field", but the bit in the hole. The Lennon album
was every bit the chore I thought it would be. I think this material is
known as the RKO interview, although you couldn't prove it by the liner
notes.
Does this passage from A. A. Milne's introduction to Winnie-the- Pooh
ring any bells? "Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to
think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was." [reminds of John
Lennon's "man on a flaming pie" story.]
THEE: subject Flaming Pooh ... oh, gross!
Was he Winnie the Pooh, with an A?
My favorite part of the Louise album is, of course, when they discuss
the "Playboy" interview.
THEE: subject $100 Words longer than "INAPPLICABLE"
LONGER THAN "INAPPLICABLE": abbreviatable adiabatically algaeological
craniomalacia decalcomanias disparageable incongealable reaccelerated
talocalcaneal
AS LONG AS "INAPPLICABLE": acenaphthene adelocodonic agamogenetic
aichmophobia amphisbaenic anapodeictic antigalactic archdiocesan
archibenthic backtracking bibliophobia bombacaceous bridgemaking
cacophonical cannibalized cardioplegia cataphracted chamecephaly
chaplaincies cheesemaking chemigraphic chloranaemia clearhearted
climatarchic commandeered confederated credentialed debaucheries
deescalating deglaciation dephlegmated desegregated differencing
dioctahedral doubleheader enflagellate enneadianome flaccidities
galactagogue gobbledegook haemophiliac hemiablepsia inapplicable
indetectable maenadically mammalogical marginicidal medicamental
microbrachia needlemaking nonamendable nonblockaded nonbreakable
nonteachable paedological parachaplain pediculicide saccharifier
scabiophobia semibarbaric semichemical specificated straddleback
subalgebraic tessaradecad unamerceable unbarricaded unbedraggled
unbridgeable underbalance unshamefaced
ME: Thanks for the research. I'm guessing most of these didn't
come out of your own conversations, readings, and writings!
Particularly pleased that none of the longer words are in the same
league with INAPPLICABLE familiarity-wise, although you can't say
they're all disparageable.
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