New Pals Club Web-Log

2012-02-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

by Randy and me, from 1980 (odd panels by me; more detail at flickr):

.

.

2011-07-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

well, I'm back

.
Oh, yeah, we're back from China. Flickr photoset here (~340 pix):
Shorter flickr photo subset here (~120 pix) because nobody's going to look at the long one. Both have captions that narrate the trip somewhat. If things are too obscure in the short set, refer to the long one and see if that helps. Or comment and I'll explain at length. Really.
.

2011-05-26T08:38:00.001-07:00

public service

I made this form when I was an academic secretary, and updated it recently so it wouldn't look like it came off of a dot-matrix printer.

It's available as a 4-up letter-sized (8.5 x 11") PDF, via me.
.

2011-05-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology, part 8

NO NAME*

[*in the Bandar tongue]

I was born to follow the proud destiny of my father

And his father, and his father, and all their fathers

All the way back to the first Phantom in 1536.

I trained rigorously for years, learning science,

Languages, literature, martial arts, armaments,

Just as my fathers had before me.

But our fathers could not teach us who to love,

Or teach a heart to weigh consequences,

And because my father followed his heart, rather than tradition,

I was not suitable for my own destiny. I was miscast.

Father seemed not to notice. Perhaps he was acting too,

Perhaps he was truly oblivious. I played my part.

He was pleased with me right up to the day of his death.

And then I did what I had to do. I looked around

And found another who could fill the role I couldn't,

And avenge my father's death.

I franchised my destiny. I gave my birthright to another

For the sake of the legend of the undying Phantom.

I found one, light-skinned, well-formed, strong, quick-thinking, ruthless.

Now his dynasty will continue the work my forefathers did.

Though I've grown fat and bald, I continue to advise him

Behind the scenes. It's best this way. After all,

Who could ever believe in the myth of the eternal Ghost

When confronted by an undersized half-Bandar

With a round head made to wear a lampshade?

originally published at the Comics Curmudgeon

2011-05-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

my wish for you

What are you waiting for? Start living it up!
.

2011-05-20T08:49:00.000-07:00

adjusted

I was looking at a Mona Lisa book and thinking that she looks sort of green-ochre. I leafed through the volume, which has x-rays and infrared and just about every possible way of taking a picture (though I didn't notice antique copies of the picture, some of which tell us just when and how much the original was sawed down to fit a frame they had), but none of them corrected the colors. So I did, using Preview. Oddly enough, I got better flesh tones with this little freebie that comes with a Mac laptop than I could manage in Photoshop! After that, I used Photoshop to lighten the whites of the eyes. I never liked how they're the same color as everything else. I blame varnishes for that, and maybe the way Leonardo was always trying new substances for his pigments. Anyway, here she is...

Larger size available at my flickr page. Originally posted at my LJ.
.

2011-05-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

a clown's clown

I was reminded today of a Superman episode where a clown goes bad (yeah, yeah, I know) and falls off of a roof. Superman gets there a minute too late, and the police fill him in on it. I always wanted to rewrite the cop’s speech:

“Yes, Superman. He was a clown who went bad. But I want to tell you: I’ve been a cop in this town for twenty years, and I never saw anything like it. He stood up on that roof, four stories above the street, and when he felt his balance going, he met the challenge, faced it like a true clown.

“His back was to the street. First he leaned in as far as he could, with his arms whirling like two windmills in a hurricane. Then he leaned back and those arms went even faster. Then his butt stuck out what seemed like a mile, and we could see he was going down.

“He went feet first! He went head first! He went butt first! He tried flapping his arms! He mimed like he was praying, on his knees and everything. He reached up and grabbed his hat and planted that tiny little thing back on his head. And it stayed! He pulled an itty-bitty umbrella out of somewhere and held it over himself until it turned inside out, and then he threw it away.

“Then he gave a big sigh. It was just as if you could hear what he was thinkin’. He shrugged his shoulders and looked sad and waved bye-bye. And he put on a brave little smile.

“And when he hit that street, he made the loudest HONK any of us ever heard. We were still clapping when you showed up.”

And where were you, anyway, Man of Steel? Getting popcorn?
.

2011-04-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

TOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

part 7

MARK TRAIL

I was a confident, take-charge guy,

Savvy to the ways of nature, a two-fisted he-man,

And a family man with a loving wife and a spunky kid

Waiting for me at home after each adventure

With a stack of pancakes to make it all perfect.

Yet I threw myself into peril

Over and over, risking it all on each toss,

Miraculously carried through by brute strength

And my abiding hatred of facial hair.

It was all too easy. I couldn't lose.

I started taking more risks, and more.

I even let myself get shot in the head,

And escaped with nothing but an inch-long dab of medical tape.

It was then that I understood I wanted to die.

My life, I realized, was a sustained falsehood.

And nobody would end it for me. I was too strong.

Well, I finally stopped relying on proxies and did the deed myself,

With organic, sustainable hemp rope.

I left no note. What would I have said?

"I'm sorry, Cherry, but I have been living a lie.

The man you thought you knew was a fraud,

And you may as well know this:

I was only pretending to love pancakes."

2011-03-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

George Tooker (1920 – 2011)

.

One of my favorite (if not my #1 favorite) American painters has left us. George Tooker, whose painstaking egg temperas showed us a sterile world of isolation and anxiety, lasted to the age of 90, somewhat secluded. A few years ago I knew he was still alive. For a while, I didn't know one way or the other: Schrödinger's Artist! He died today, March 29, 2011.

I first saw his painting, "The Subway" (top example) in the 70s and was fascinated by his creepy vision of a nightmare populated by strangers who didn't look happy about it either. On my first visit to New York City, I made a special trip to the Whitney to see it and was disappointed to learn that they didn't keep it on display most of the time. I bought a poster, though.

People in his paintings seem haunted. Like strangers on the street, they look at you (perhaps momentarily) with no joy or flicker of recognition. Each is isolated in his or her concerns. I wrote a paper on him for art history, almost thirty years ago, drawing on images from Raymond Chandler and dissecting "The Subway" on layers of clear plastic like animation cels.

He painted in the difficult medium of egg tempera, mixing his paints as he went along. He could make a mix last another day by putting it in the refrigerator. He was influenced by Reginald Marsh and Paul Cadmus. He and his lifetime partner, William Christopher, were active in the Civil Rights movement. I have a book about him, but I don't know an awful lot about him. Here is his self-portrait, from 1947:

More pictures can be found here..

2011-03-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

for Family Day (March 24)

On March 24, 2003, in China's Anhui Province, Cathy and I stood in a conference room at the Hefei Holiday Inn. Late in the morning, somebody handed us a thirteen-month-old girl named Xi Huan, who we renamed Sarah.

In honor of the occasion, here are some reprints from my Live Journal.

@ 2006-02-07 18:04:00

questions

I waited at the door with the camera tonight, to get a picture of the last time my three-year-old daughter came in after school. Tomorrow she'll be a big four year old. I took a couple of shots. Sarah demanded a tuna sandwich. I managed to get a word in, to tell Cathy I'd finally heard back from the insurance people, and we weren't covered for vandalism. "Angie's grandpa died," announced Sarah.

I expressed sympathy. She asked why he died. "Probably because he was old," I said carefully. We proceeded into the den.

She asked me what other reasons people die. "Well," I ventured, "sometimes if they're in a really bad accident, or if they get really, really sick." I didn't want her to think you die from just any sickness. "I hope you don't die," she said. "Give me a tuna fish sandwich!"

I parried the sandwich gambit. We were having supper soon. She wanted me to accompany her to the bathroom. She continued her inquiries. "Why do people die when they get old?" I tried to explain without scaring her, which she so far wasn't. This was a matter of curiosity. "Well. When we get really old, our bodies wear out."

"Why?" "Everything wears out if it gets old enough," I suggested.

"Like what?" "Well, cars..."

"And trucks!" "Yes..."

"And fire trucks." She was on a roll. "Yes, and..."

"And cars!" "That's right." "Why do they wear out?"

I tried to explain that our bodies repair themselves, but when they get really, really old, they can't do that any more. I still wasn't telling her that everybody dies, everything dies. Like my dad's cousin Marilyn, who lost her battle with cancer this past weekend; but Sarah never knew her, and now she never will. It's too bad, because she was a good relative -- she had been a real support for my sister Martha years ago, when Martha was diagnosed with colitis.

My answers seemed to satisfy Sarah, who was now more interested in something to eat. I told her it was too close to dinner for a tuna sandwich, but she "couldn't wait!" We settled on some more of the orange she'd started yesterday, as long as I removed the yucky parts. I turned my attention to making food. Cathy came downstairs. Death talk, for now, was over.

@ 2006-02-15 18:56:00

the other shoe drops

Tonight at dinner, Cathy remarked that Andreas Katsulis had died. I said I'd heard that. Sarah chimed in: "Angie's grandpa died." We said we were sorry.

"Why did he die?" Sarah asked, still looking for information. This time Cathy fielded it. "People die when they get very, very old," she said. "Their body can't repair itself any more."

"I don't want to die," said Sarah in a small voice. Uh-oh. It had hit home this time.

"Oh, honey, you won't die! Not for a long, long, Long time!" Cathy assured her.

"And you won't die?" She looked at Cathy, and then me. She seemed to see us, maybe for the first time, as people who could die.

"No, honey. Not for a long, long time," said Cathy.

"We have to take care of you!" I added, "And we love you."

I looked at her beautiful, dark eyes. She was very quiet, and I couldn't tell where she was looking. I put my hand on her shoulder and leaned closer. "Ow," she said, half-heartedly.

We told her again that we loved her. Then the conversation somehow changed to other topics. The room felt a little colder as we finished our mac & cheese.

@ 2006-04-30 21:43:00

bedtime lines

"Sarah, take these dead flowers off your bed. They don't belong there." Referring to some wild flowers (aka weeds) she picked out of the yard just before I mowed it.

"They're not dead. They're alive."

"They were alive when you picked them, and now they're dead."

"Well, they're not dead to me!"

* * *

"I have tattoos on my toes. You can't see them because they're under the skin, but I can feel them."

@ 2006-04-08 13:40:00

boxes

Sarah and I were on our way to get a bagel (for her) and a souffle (for me) at Panera's. As we passed the cemetery on King's Highway, a backhoe was digging a new grave. Sarah said something about people in boxes that I didn't quite catch. I asked her what she said.

"That's where there's people in boxes in the ground that are dead." she told me.

So she knew. I hadn't ever volunteered the information that the cemetery was full of deceased people in boxes, but she had learned it somewhere. I confirmed the accuracy of what she had said. "There's a whole bunch of them by my school," she went on. Indeed there were. Her pre-school is across the street from a very large graveyard. I have a photo I took of it while I was backing out of my parking space there -- I took it in the rear-view mirror, with the words "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY LOOK" showing. It seems that she picked up the information about cemeteries at school. Lucky me! The stuff I'm leery of telling her, she picks up on the street, as it were. We drove past another one, and she said, "There's some more people in boxes."

Then we went to Panera's, and she had a plain bagel with plain cream cheese, and our morning continued.

@ 2006-05-23 22:19:00

sensations

The fact, as of today, that Sarah has a couple of caterpillers in a cup with a vented top on it, and a stick and some leaves, fills me with a strange feeling. I don't know what it is. Is it that I remember doing this? That she's now old enough that she's doing things I remember doing? I just don't know. She's such a kid, you know?

@ 2006-05-29 23:23:00

she wants

Sarah's wants are simple. She wants the bed we looked at today, with a ladder up to the top and a desk and dresser underneath (and some shelves). And she wants a slide that goes around three times (actually two), like the one at Stanley Park. We explained that these things are very expensive. She counters that the slide costs a couple of dollars, and she is willing to contribute her own money (that is, the change she picks up here and there in the house). Whichever parent she is talking to, she cites the other parent as an authority who has okayed the whole deal.

Anybody want to buy some of our old furniture? Cheap.

@ 2006-06-10 08:53:00

in the car

Sarah and I were driving home from the playground yesterday.

Sarah: I want to take a bike ride when I get home!

Me: Well, I'm kind of tired from the playground right now.

Sarah: Can I take a bike ride with Mommy?

Me: I don't know. We'll have to ask her.

Sarah: (hideously loud) MOMMY! CAN I TAKE A BIKE RIDE WITH YOU WHEN I GET HOME? I CAN? THANKS!

Sarah: She said yes.

Me: Really? I didn't hear her.

Sarah: (again loud) MOMMY! CAN I --

Me: Shhh.

Sarah: Okay.

@ 2006-06-11 21:22:00

motherhood

It was so touching when Sarah put two caterpillars in a cup, with a stick, and leaves for them to eat. It brought back a lot of memories somehow, and the feeling of innocence that the bugs will eat the food you give them, and prosper. I was encouraged when one of them spun a cocoon (the other one apparently didn't make the grade -- or perhaps it was more successful in its escape attempts -- in which case it didn't meet any enviable fate anyway).

Then as time went on, I started to wonder just how long a thing like that is supposed to take. Were we peering in, every couple of days, on a sarcophagus instead of a cocoon? Just today we went to try and look up the information online, but we didn't know exactly what kind of caterpillar we had anyway.

Tonight as I was helping Sarah get to sleep, Cathy came in with news. The cocoon was now empty. A moth had emerged, so recently it still hadn't gotten around to flexing its wings. Sarah and I took it out on the porch and watched it continue to sit on the edge of the cup for a while. "I'm cold," Sarah said, so we went inside.

I'm hoping the moth will get it together and be gone by morning, off to a life of success. At least it made it farther than those poor butterfly wannabees I saw in sixth grade -- the younger sibling of a classmate had disturbed the chrysali early, and there were these wretched insects that weren't what they were supposed to be, vainly trying to ready their wings for the flight they'd never have. I've never forgotten those poor things, and I'm glad Sarah's caterpillar didn't share their fate. "I wanted it to be a butterfly," she said sadly, little realizing her accomplishment.

Thanks, moth, for making it.

@ 2006-07-04 18:58:00

sarah on relatives

We're driving to the McDonald's in Holyoke.

"Grampaw is your daddy."

"That's right, sweetheart."

"Your daddy is my grampaw."

"Right."

"Grampaw loves you."

"Yes, he does."

"Grampaw loves me."

"That's right."

"He loves me more than you. He told me so."

@ 2006-07-06 18:34:00

bye bye flowers

Sarah picked some fluffy blossoms -- tiny thistles, maybe? -- at the Fourth of July celebrations. The next day at school, she picked a bunch more and brought them home. We let her bring these "flowers" in and left them on the counter.

Tonight she noticed them again. "Oh no, they're dying!" she said. Then I think she wanted to water them. I told her they were dying already, because flowers don't live a whole long time after you pick them. While I continued to get supper ready, she decided she would take them outside, "so they can live."

"Honey, they're already dead. They..." Never mind. I stopped with the explanation. She was already on the move. I helped her open the back door, and she tossed them out onto the back steps. "Bye bye, flowers," I said, respectfully.

She turned back to me, sadly. "I let them go," she said.

I picked her up and hugged her and patted her on the back, remembering as I did those early days in China. Picking up our daughter -- literally, a little stranger -- and holding her and patting her gently, rhythmically on the back. And then I felt something: one of those unbelievably tiny hands was patting me on the back.

"I'll never let you go, honey," I said.

@ 2006-07-23 12:32:00

morning of a child

Last night, for some reason, Sarah just wouldn't go to sleep peacefully. She finally surrendered to Morpheus between 11:30 and midnight. But she seems to have gotten up around her normal time today.

She and I got in the car to go have our biscuit -- actually, to go to Panera's. About four blocks from home, she was singing part of the theme from one of the Disney channel shows.

"Everybody knows it when push comes to shove

Nothing feels better than FEELING THE LOVE.

"Everybody knows it when push comes a shove

Nothing feels better than FEELING THE LOVE.

"Everybody knows at when push a push shove

Nothing feels better than FEELING THE LOVE.

Everybody knows it when (very carefully here) push, comes, to, shove

Nothing feels better than FEELING THE LOVE!"

"Sarah, please don't sing the same thing over and over."

"I have to practice! I'm going to be in a band and I have to practice over and over to learn the song right!"

"Yeah, but..." She was using my words against me. I hate it when she does that. I tried to get her to do it more quietly, and she went on singing. I turned up the music. So did she.

We had a pretty normal time at Panera's. She got a cup of fruit to eat. Then she wanted to go to the bathroom, and when we got there, after elaborate preparations, decided she didn't have to go after all. We washed and went back to finish our breakfast. After that, we decided to go up to Holyoke and see if the merry-go-round was running. The Children's Museum doesn't open on Sunday any more -- apparently, not enough people were coming, so they decided to make it even harder to find the place open. That's sure to increase attendance. The merry-go-round was running, and we took a ride together. After that, I had two tickets left, and Sarah wanted to ride some more. I said she could ride by herself, and she did, both times on the carriage/bench seats. I ran back to the car to take pictures and a movie of the historic occasion. Big girl!

Next we played in the playground there in Heritage State Park. Mostly, she played while I took photos. I tried out the ultra-big picture mode of the camera. I haven't looked at the pictures yet. Sarah noticed some weeds with little clusters of white flowers on them, and bent down to grasp one. "I'm picking..." she started, then let go of it. "I'm leaving it in the ground," she said. I wanted to hug her.

Then she wanted to take some pictures, so I told her she had to put the camera strap on her neck to keep from dropping the camera, and she took pictures of the pretty buildings -- brick factories and mills that line the upper canal.

Holyoke actually has three canals. I never have noticed the third one, though I saw what looked like the start of a third. I learned by browsing some local history books at Barnes & Noble that the reason for the upper and lower canals was to provide energy for water wheels. That means the arch-like openings on the upper side of the lower canal weren't entryways, but places for mill water to exit. This all fascinates me, as do the somewhat timeworn brick buildings and the virtually deserted streets they sit on. I need to go back during the week some time and take several hundred pictures.

We walked along the canal toward Dwight Street, then crossed the street so she could get a picture of the bridge-like construction that carried a water pipe across the canal. Viaduct? Then I wanted to take a couple more pictures, since I hadn't been at that vantage point before. I clicked a few, including Open Square, where I once applied for a job in vain, and where Gary Hallgren, one of my personal favorite underground cartoonists, has a shop/studio, which I keep intending to go see during the week some time. The camera beeped that the card was full, so we went back to the car. I took a different route back to the highway to see more shuttered factories, and then we reached home and told Cathy about Sarah riding the horses by herself.

ps: There's a certain amount of morbidity in the selections. It reflects that particular time in our life when she was figuring that stuff out. And here's a recent pic from last month or so:

2011-03-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

in which we leave our hero

.
He sat at his table, dregs of Victory Hunny unlicked on his cheeks. He sat very still, not even brushing away a fat fly that came to inspect the glistening stickiness on his face. He tried to hum a hum, but all he could think of was “Three fours are fifteen.” And sometimes it came out “Three fours is fifteen,” and he didn’t know which was which. Owl came by with a Very Important Message about the Progress in the War Against Heffalumps and he listened attentively to it.

It didn’t matter. He knew that the Heffalumps would be defeated, just as he knew they would always be fighting them. It did not bother him a bit to hold both these thoughts fervently. He smiled slightly and hummed, “Three fours are fifteen.” He would do anything for Christopher Robin. He would give Eeyore over, just as Piglet had given him over, and for the same reason: love. The love of wonderful Christopher Robin, from whom all goodness flowed.

A tear twinkled from one eye and slowly tickled its way down his cheek. Winston Pooh was happy, happier than he’d ever thought possible. He was a Silly Old Bear.
.

2011-01-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

pane chant

.
Near the town's only graveyard, an old mansion sits
Surrounded by wild-growing grass
And facing the street there are thirty-two windows
But only one still has its glass.
It looks smugly out at its less lucky mates
As it twinkles and shines all alone
And a sensitive soul might fancy it speaks
In a thin and self-satisfied tone:

"I made the right choices
I took the right steps
My present success is my own.
I've no one to thank
But my foresight and brains
For the fruits that my planning has grown.
I rely on no man
For my unbroken face
I earned what I have; I'm self-made.
I've nothing to mourn,
And I've nothing but scorn
For the ones who go whining for aid:

(snidely)
"'Someone should do something
Someone should step in
If only somebody would see
I did as I should
I helped where I could
And now someone else should help me!
I hereby declare
That this world is not fair
And it's wrong that the innocent pay.
Somebody must bail
They can't let me fail
We're in this together, I say!'"

With the winter approaching, a gang of young boys
Came biking by just before dark
And spying the window, they stopped where they were
And picked up some rocks for a lark.
"Watch my aim!" one boy shouted, and straight flew a stone
From a slingshot he kept in his coat
And it shattered the glass that sparkled alone
So no more did the last window gloat.

"No one could predict this
I did all I could
And in justice, I should be okay.
This murderous clod
Was a sheer act of God
And that's nothing for which I should pay.
It's a sad day indeed
When the innocent bleed
For something no one could foresee.
I need help, and soon!
I've not changed my tune
For heaven's sake, listen to me!

(plaintively)
"Someone should do something
Someone should step in
If only somebody would see
I did as I should
I helped where I could
And now someone else should help me!
I hereby declare
That this world is not fair
And it's wrong that the innocent pay.
Somebody must bail
They can't let me fail
We're in this together, I say!"

(It seemed thus to sing, by the light of the moon,
On the night that the fortunate pane changed his tune.)

---
©2011 by Kip Williams
No tune assigned
.

2011-01-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

While the twelve days of Christmas are still going on, here's a long-overdue omission from the site. It's our very own perennial holiday special, saluting the happy days of winter with some verses I wrote for Apatoons, back in the 1990s:

FREDDY THE SNOWMAN

Freddy the Snowman,

With his scarf of red and green

Didn't look too spry, but my oh my,

What a stone-cold death machine!

Freddy the Snowman

Got most everyone but me

With his eyes of coal and his evil soul

On his chilly killing spree!

There must have been a curse upon that rusty kitchen knife;

When Suzy put it in his hand, the snowman took her life.

(Ow!)

Freddy the Snowman

Was a child molester too,

And we heard him say, being dragged away,

"I'll be back, next year, for you!"

(Hackity hack hack, hackity hack hack,

Hacking hard and deep.

Stabbity stab stab, stabbity stab stab,

Kills you in your sleep!)

TTTO: Frosty the Snowman by Rollins and Nelson

2011-01-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

Radio

It's decades ago; I still recall this dream:

I'm standing at a picture window in the night

Across miles of snow, even and white

Bright pinpoints alternately fade and gleam.

Each one — I know this — is a radio station

Sending signals out through chilly air.

Every one a voice that asks "Who's there?"

Piercing darkness in my imagination.

My signal, too, flies on its way

I won't know where or if its journey ends

But hopefully its words will reach my friends

And if I'm lucky bring, to night, some day.

Signals wax and wane through winter night.

I can't see you, but I'm warmed by your light.

2011-01-01T17:09:00.000-08:00

Toon River Anthology
part 6

JULIUS DITHERS
Even though Cora was friends with Blondie,
She used to ask me why I didn't just fire him
And let him stay fired. He didn't get much done,
And he took long lunches and he goofed off
At his desk all day long. Oh, he was honest
But I couldn't trust him with any important work,
So I fobbed off the clients I didn't care about on him,
And let him reorganize the stock room from time to time.
Some of the board members mentioned him in meetings,
With pointed references to 'Dead Wood' and such,
And one even hinted that those little bits of hair that stuck out
Bore some kind of resemblance to my own. He didn't last.
A man can stand for just so much. No, he wasn't my son,
But I made a promise to J.B. when he disinherited the boy
That he'd always have a job at J.C. Dithers and Company
As long as he lived. I kept that promise, hard as it was.
But I never promised I wouldn't kill him, and one day I did.
.

2010-07-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology
part 5

TRIXIE FLAGSTON
It was a static life. I went from bed to bath to floor
And was carried places, sometimes crawling,
Sitting and staring. I watched my family stay the same
For year after year, decade after decade
Stuck in infancy, unable to talk, or walk
My only friend was the dog, and after a while,
He found somewhere else to be.
Mom was the only one who ever changed. Once.
She went from staying home to showing homes,
And didn't even hire a sitter or get my siblings
To pay any attention to me. So I stewed
In my filthy diapers, which led to a rash, which led to infection
And that led to a welcome demise.
My stone is under some trees. I stare at other stones
And never see anybody, and they don't come to see me,
Not even the damn sunbeam!
.

2010-07-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

S1K - 026 to 033 [15 songs] (40 so far)
.
Continuing our methodical walk through The Book of a Thousand Songs [Wier, 1918]

p 26: "Ah! I Have Sighed To Rest Me (Il Trovatore)" [G. Verdi], "All Glory, Laud, And Honor" [M. Teschner]. (note: it's their idea to capitalize every word, not mine)
This is the second part of the "Miserere" from Act III of Verdi's "Il Trovatore," and it appears to be a translation of what actually happens here, making for a nice change from a tendency of the editors to employ instead a nice little song about chirpy birds or a moral lesson about honesty or posture. The orchestra accompaniment is absent, and in its place we have the song expanded to four-part harmony.
I'm not sure what's up with "All Glory." The first part is something I've heard in a Christmas carol, and then the second part goes somewhere else entirely. Where's the Hosannah in Excelsis? I can't think of the title now, and am too lazy to search through all my books of carols.

p 27: "Am I Not Fondly Thine Own?", "At Evening-Time" [E.M. Steadman]
note: "All Glory" spills over into this page. I'm mostly not going to bother mentioning when that happens.
"Am I Not" is a semi-translation of "Du, Du, liegst mir in Herzen," which we used to sing in grade school. My fifth-grade teacher taught us little bits of German. This version loses the part where the object of affection makes the singer unhappy even though singer is so good to object and just makes it a sappy little love ditty.
"At Evening-Time" is a straightforward 6/8 Allegretto with no surprises in its pastoral imagery of dusk.

p 28: "Ah, For Wings To Soar", "Away With Melancholy" [W.A. Mozart], "Annie Lisle" [H.S. Thompson].
"Ah, For Wings" is a straightforward 6/8 Andante with no surprises in its lyrical whining to an unresponsive love.
"Away With Melancholy" is a tune from "The Magic Flute." The lyrics here don't correspond with what's in the opera (surprise!), which had a lot of "la la la" going on. Apparently the tune had quite a busy life both as an adaptation from the opera and as a song, and existed in multiple arrangements for all sorts of instruments. J. Pierpont, original writer of Jingle Bells, set one for his glee club with lyrics that apparently started to vary with the second line. Fernando Sor wrote an utterly charming set of variations for guitar on the theme, which I play on keyboard, because why not? The Great Song Thesaurus says the lyrics are anonymous, and I believe it. I browsed a rather substantial article online to learn more about the piece, and one of the scanned musical examples in it was right out of the Book of a Thousand Songs.
"Annie Lisle" is a pleasant Scots tune from 1860, with rhythms that snap (especially on the unexpected short-long pairs) and some nice variation in the accompaniment. It may sound familiar to Cornell grads, as it was adapted in 1872 to become "High Above Cayuga's Waters." I learned recently that Cayuga is a lake. I suppose everybody else already knew that.

p 29: "All Hail The Power Of Jesus' Name!" [Oliver Holden], "Ah, Tell Me Why" [A. Warlamoff].
This is a hymn we used to sing at Northside Baptist. One week our friend Nancy announced it and it sounded a little like she said "All hell," and we kids laughed and laughed. What boring lives we must have led.
"Ah! Tell Me Why" is another misunderstood lover song. Warlamoff would appear to have been a Russian who wrote vocal and choral music. No idea if the lyrics belong to the song. Wieniawski and Kullak both made arrangements of some of his tunes for their respective instruments.

p 30: "Adieu! 'Tis Love's Last Greeting" [Fr. Schubert], "Amici".
The Schubert seems to be well-known as a song and a choral song. No idea where the English lyrics come from. It's a graveside love song, so it could well be a translation from the original (presumably German). No trace of Schubert's piano style can be found in the four-part setting.
"Amici" is another borrowing from "Annie Lisle" (see p 28), so I pencilled Thompson's name in on the score.

p 31: "All Quiet Along The Potomac" [Mrs. Ethel Beers, J. Dayton], "Angels Ever Bright And Fair" [Handel].
Seems like it should be called "All Quiet Along The Potomac Tonight," as this was the form in which it was published in the 1860s. It was first a poem called "The Picket Guard," written by Mrs. Beers (bylined just E.B. at first) based on telegrams by Maj-Gen McClellan following the First Battle of Bull Run. The song was set to music by John Hill Hewitt, but that's not the version in this book. It's similar, but not identical. And some creep named Lamar Fontaine seems to have tried to grab credit for the lyrics. He must not get away with it.
"Angels" is from a Handel opera, "Theodora." The arrangement starts out with one voice, adding more to end up with four at the end.

p 32: "All Souls' Day" [Edward Lassen], "Angry Words".
A light arrangement of an art song from a past master — possibly somewhat neglected now, but I could be wrong. It occupies the middle ground between a love song and a memento mori.
"Angry Words" is another little life lesson, presumably for the kids. The melody doesn't remind me of anything in particular.

p 33: "Angel's Serenade" [G Braga].
This once-popular song can be found in arrangements for many instruments, including a piano version that's in a lot of older collections and was apparently adapted as a theme for some incarnation of "Amos & Andy." The Child hears the sound of angels, The Mother hears nothing, and the angels end up taking The Child. It's somewhat less dramatic and menacing than Schubert's "Erlking," but it's the same plot: Child hears supernatural entity who takes it away. The arrangement follows the narrative, and may be thinner than some versions but still carries it all, putting some of the accompaniment into the right hand along with the melody to do it. There are even a couple of four-note chords in the right hand. One of the more challenging pieces in the book so far.

also posted to my LiveJournal
.

2010-06-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

S1K - 019 to 025 [13 songs] (25 so far)

.

In which I continue my traversal of The Book of a Thousand Songs [Wier, 1918]

p 19: "Angel Gabriel" [J.E. Stewart], "A, B, C, Tumble Down D" [no credits].
The latter is a puddin' and the former is a fake. "Angel G" is a 'gwine' song with a credited writer, so it would seem to have been intended for a minstrel show or perhaps a book of sentimental songs of the south. Dotted rhythms, but very little syncopation.
"ABC" is in 6/8, which isn't the way I heard it on a kiddie LP we had in the house when I was a kiddie. I recall thinking it was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but I guess I hadn't heard a lot of things at that time, because it's been topped repeatedly since then. Is this the first song in the book that has no writer credited at all? It's far from the last. A perfunctory Google offers no hints.

p 20: "Afterwards" [Mary Mark Lemon, J.W. Mullen].
Unless otherwise noted, the lyricist's name precedes the composer's.
A sentimental song with nothing that strikes me as remarkable in the lyrics. The arrangement, which I expect reflects the composer's work, though it adheres to the general rule of the book in having no chord thicker than three notes in either hand, varies the figures used and seems to be competent and craftsmanlike, if not stunning.

p. 21: "Ave Maria" [Bach-Gounod], "Ah, 'Tis a Dream" [E. Lassen].
Bach's most famous prelude, the first from Book 1 of "The Well-Tempered Clavier," was used by Charles Gounod (best known for his opera "Faust" and for "Funeral March of a Marionette," which was used as the theme for Alfred Hitchcock's TV show) as an accompaniment to the melody of an Ave Maria. The view that this was a wonderful achievement is undercut by George Bernard Shaw's claim that all Gounod did was pull out the underlying harmony Bach put in. Still, it's popular to this day in all sorts of arrangements. This one leaves out the Bach prelude completely and gives a choral setting (SATB) of the Gounod part. You could play this and have a friend play the Bach on another keyboard, but you'll have to transpose the prelude up to G to match the key, and be sure and use the version of the prelude with the extra measure Schwenke inserted, which is most of the versions you'd have found before modern scholarship started asserting itself on the matter.
Lassen's song is a nostalgic wish for home, written in 9/8 with some duplets for emphasis. Wier let this one go on for three verses. Maybe he liked it.

p. 22: "Araby's Daughter" [Thomas Moore, E. Kiallmark], "Annie Laurie" [Lady John Scott].
Here's Moore again, going for the exotic this time. He had a lot of songs on the hit parade, and a number of them still ring a bell today. Kiallmark doesn't ring a bell, and unlike Haydn, we don't see his name and wonder which of his many works was used in the creation of this song. The 6/8 rhythm is dotted and snappy, but not unrelievedly so.
"Annie Laurie" was a real person, erstwhile sweetie of William Douglas, who wrote the poem Alicia Scott modified and added a tune to, modified from one she had written for another Scottish setting. Douglas's own authorship is sometimes questioned because of the original poem's similarity (altered by Scott in her setting) to "Jon Anderson, My Jo." However, the first and third verses aren't questioned, and he really did go out with Annie Laurie before marrying someone else.

p. 23: "Angels Meet Me at de Cross-roads" [W.S. Hays], "Alma Mater, O"
I looked up Hays to see if it was the Will Hays who wrote some other songs. His full name was William Shakespeare Hays, and titles I seem to remember include "Who Cares?" "Keep in de Middle ob de Road" and "Sweet Violets." Not that one, I'm sure. I found a book of his Poems and Songs at Google Books (scanned from an autographed copy), and it has this touchingly humble note at the front of the book:

"To My Friends: If I have done wrong in publishing this book, forgive me."

The song itself is nothing much special. He also wrote "Irish" songs.
"Alma Mater, O" is a run-of-the-mill toast to the college one is about to leave, and the tune seems to be nothing more than the first strain of "The Wearin' of the Green" sung twice. Four times, if you sing both verses.

p. 24: "Angelina Baker" [Stephen C. Foster], "A-Roving"
Angelina's another sweet dead chick that the blackfaced narrator misses. For a sad song, it's rather sprightly in a 2/4 Allegretto, and ends with an incongruously catchy rhythm on the line "She left me here to weep a tear, and beat on de old jaw-bone."
"A-Roving" shows the folk process at work, circa 1918. The version of this that I always hear has more snappy rhythms than the comparatively square setting here. Needless to say, this version is also cleaner than I generally hear, too.

p. 25: "Among the Lilies" [H.B. Farnie, Alphons Czibulka], "All Through The Night" [Old Welsh Song]
I suspect Farnie simply showed up uninvited one day and imposed his lyrics on this to make a song, as the melody is Czibulka's gavotte "Stephanie." The composer was a bandmaster who wrote a lot of Viennese trifles. "Love's Dream After the Ball" turns up in old collections, as does "Stephanie." He may be best known for "Hearts and Flowers," a song for which Tobani took full credit, but which seems to be lifted wholesale from "An Old Winter's Tale." The theme can be heard during many pathetic moments in silent movies and old cartoons.
"All Through the Night" is a lullaby everybody should know. My favorite arrangement to play is not this one, but rather the one in Gems of the Universe, a smaller collection that's jam-packed with great songs (I played all the way through it over a few days when I lived in Virginia, so this project is not entirely unprecedented).

Also posted to my Live Journal.
.

2010-06-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

S1K - pp012 to 018 [12 songs]

.
In which I begin my traversal of The Book of a Thousand Songs [Wier, 1918].

The music follows a lengthy (as you might imagine) table of contents which somewhat mirrors the organization of the book. Alphabetical order guides but does not dictate placement -- Wier, or whoever did these things for him, was sensitive to layout and convenience. As a result, there are very few places where I need to turn a page once I'm playing a piece. I noticed one the other day and was almost shocked by it.

So the book is roughly alphabetic, but not fanatically so, with the same relaxed sort of organization as my two comb-bound books of photocopied music (almost entirely stuff I own or which is out of copyright), only they're on a vague chronological scheme. The first page forsakes even rough order in order to be patriotic.

p 12: "America" [Samuel F. Smith], "The Star-Spangled Banner" [John Stafford Smith, Francis Scott Key].
The editor relaxes his usual method of presenting no more than two verses and gives four for "America." The Book of World-Famous Music [Fuld], a valuable reference on such matters, says that nobody's sure whose tune it is. The Great Song Thesaurus credits a Mr. Harris.
I penciled in John Stafford Smith for "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's not that I'm tentative; it's just that a pencil is what I keep by the piano. The melody varies a little from the standard version we hear. There's a little less martial snap to it. The song didn't become our national anthem until 1931, but it was already popular in 1918 so its inclusion isn't surprising.

p 13: "At Pierrot's Door" [French folk song].
I played this way back in the first time I tried (and failed) to take piano lessons from my Dad, as "Au Clair de la Lune."

p 14: "Alice, Where Art Thou?" [J. Ascher], "Abide with Me" [H.F. Lyte, W.H. Monk].
The former would seem to be the source of a snippet Dad used to pop out with at odd moments, "Al-ice, where are you go-ing?" (To which the answer was "Down the drain.") Neither lyric is actually in the song.
"Abide with Me" is one of those hymns I've heard over and over, over the years.

p 15: "Ave Maria" [fr Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni], "Auld Lang Syne" [Traditional, and Robert Burns].
Instrumental opera intermezzo with (religious) words attached. Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, the librettists, had nothing to do with this, so I won't be writing their names in on it.
I added "Trad" to "Auld Lang Syne" because Burns didn't write the first verse. The melody first showed up as a germ of its present self in one of Playford's dance tune collections and was modified in subsequent appearances. The folk process at work.

p 16: "As Down in the Sunless Retreats" [Thomas Moore, Joseph Haydn], "As a Little Child" [C.M. Von Weber].
Thomas Moore gave us songs and lyrics that are still remembered. Some may have been original, many were taken from Irish and other folk sources. We'll run into him later, with "Believe Me, if All those Endearing Young Charms," "The Minstrel Boy," "The Last Rose of Summer" and, well, more. I'm not sure how he got together with Haydn, but it seems he wrote a poem and used something Haydn had left sitting around for a tune.
I don't know enough Weber to say if this is a translation of something he really set or if it's one of those didactic little bromides some educator cobbled together.

p 17: "Away Down Souf" [Stephen C. Foster], "Aura Lee" [W.W. Fosdick, Geo. R. Poulton].
Foster wins the previously unannounced prize for first use of the N-word in this collection. Seemed to me at one time that minstrel songs were an opportunity for uptight whites to express emotions that were too real for other songs, but I may have been wrong. Anyway, this is one of the happy ones, and that's an emotion I don't see as much of in white songs of the time -- they were more into sweethearts dying young and like that.
I had to write in both writers' names for "Aura Lee," courtesy of The Book of World-Famous Music. Elvis Presley covered this in the 50s as "Love Me Tender," with lyrics mainly by Ken Darby.

p 18: "Ah! So Pure" [F. von Flotow; w: W Friedrich].
A memorable air from a somewhat forgotten opera. I added in the writer of the lyrics, though the translation is anonymous. I like to play the version of this that's in Gems of the Universe, and tend to imagine it being sung by Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.

Now I'm worried. I didn't plan to write about every song. Maybe these were just special or something. I'm sure I'll have nothing much to say about "Angel Gabriel" on page 19. But it's late now, so I'm off to prepare for bed. Night, all.

Mirrored at my Live Journal. Edited slightly for format and words out.
.

ps: If somebody out there can tell me how to pad the picture so it doesn't crash into the text, please clue me in. I've tried all sorts of permutations of "padding" "cellpadding" and "border" with values in and out of quote marks, with and without px after, and using equal sign or colon. Guh.
.

2010-06-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

S1K - intro

.

The Book of a Thousand Songs. I first saw it on a shelf at Southern Music in San Antonio, TX, and a quick look convinced me I didn't need it. After returning home to Georgia, I suddenly decided I needed it after all, ordered it over the phone, and found that it's a trove of slightly shopworn treasures. The songs go from being as short as one line to taking a couple of pages, divided between ones that look like choral settings, ones that have a melody in one hand and the accompaniment in the other, and ones where the melody is woven into a rich enough piano part.

When we lived in Virginia, I found a second copy of this book. My first is a large volume, a little over half the thickness of a ream of paper and about the same size otherwise. The second copy was printed during wartime, so it's more petite and the paper is thinner. I rigged a cardboard slipcase for it and carried it in my backpack for years. I'm glad to have the lighter copy, as the somewhat improvised music stand on my electrical piano is not at its best with large, heavy volumes. When I get that messed-up hammer wire fixed on the other piano this won't be a problem.

The book is copyright 1918, edited by the once-ubiquitous Albert E(rnest) Wier, who is also responsible for Masterpieces of Piano Music, a glorious brick of sheet music covering everything from Bach to some formerly fashionable flashes in the pan who wrote painfully figurative little tone poems for the parlor player. It was part of the Music for the Millions series that brought so darn much culture to so many, and which have brought much joy to me personally. The older edition bore a MUMIL imprint, which first looked like a dignified Roman numeral. I eventually figured out its true meaning. (Can you figure it out, Dear Reader? The clue is in this paragraph!)

Sentimental songs! Operatic songs! Sacred songs! Hymns! Children's songs! Southern songs! College songs! Sea songs! Rounds! Patriotic songs! National and Folk songs! This book was put together back in the dim, forgotten days when it was actually possible for a song to come out of copyright (that's right, kids!), so it has snappy pop numbers from a couple of decades before 1918 and on back. It has classical tunes with sappy bromides fitted in place of the original dramatic intent (along with ones bearing apparent translations that are at least intended to be faithful) such as school children probably suffered to while developing a solid loathing for any and all forms of culture and uplift.

The book's most endearing feature is that it lets me make connections. I play this one, and realize where that tune comes from that I used to hear in the background of a cartoon, or where the lyric that Krazy Kat sings to himself is from. I play that one and it dawns on me that it was parodied in a Lewis Carroll book. I find more songs by Septimus Winner, a particular favorite, who wrote "Listen to the Mocking-Bird" and "Whispering Hope" under a pseudonym, as well as "Ten Little Indians" and "Der Deitscher's Dog" -- which we seem to know now as "Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone," and which is as often as not generously credited to the prolific "Anonymous" in these lazy times.

I showed this to my musician father, and he now has a copy of his own. He also likes to do what I do, which is to play through it aimlessly, annotating when a light bulb goes off; writing in a missing composer or lyric source (Claribel! Dekker!) or other trivium ("It's possible that The Old Grey Goose is a parody of this"). I recently mentioned to Dad that I was playing through some pages in the book, and he asked how far I'd gotten. Oh no, I said, I meant I'd just started in the middle and had played a half dozen or so pages… but it got me thinking. Why not, I thought, start from the beginning (like I did once with Gems of the Universe) and play every song at least one time through, repeats optional?

So I did. Updates to follow. I'm up to about page 32 now. I don't intend to write about every song, just to hit the interesting spots. If the book interests you, it's still available, and probably not more than about 100% more than I paid for my first copy, which was ten bucks. There are also scans of it online, or there have been. If I come across it again, I'll post a URL. I have my own set of scans that I made for my own use, so even though I'm not carrying the book in my backpack these days (it's getting fragile, and I gave in and taped a couple of pages that wanted to be free), it still goes a lot of the same places I go.
.

2010-04-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

two wheels bad, four wheels good

Of nearly hypnotic interest is this monthly archive of cycling paths and such kept by the Warrington Cycle Campaign (UK). These are the most amazingly perfunctory and ill-considered so-called accomodations imaginable. Month after month of them, with understated comments pointing out the "benefits" of each facility.

This bull trap can be found Sustrans route number 53 from the North coast of the Wirral to Chester. It is to protect cyclists from being trampled by the herds of migrating wildebeast common in this corner of Cheshire.

See foot-wide paths squished between pedestrians and opening car doors, fourth-dimensional hops, embedded obstacles, and dead ends. Every one of them is, seemingly, designed to fail by bureaucratic hires attempting to fulfill some sort of mandate they don't give a tinker's dam about.

Have you ever noticed how cycle paths accumulate litter, or that there is never anywhere to get rid of your sweetpapers? Well this could be the solution of the future.

The facility has been carefully placed in the middle of the cycle path so that it can be used by cyclists passing in either direction. Note the precision engineered tilt to accomodate cyclists leaning into the curve.

It may be of comfort to U.S. bicyclists to know that officials in other countries care just as much as those in our own.

2010-01-19T06:01:00.000-08:00

visitor

My window here opens out at ground level, and through the slats I could see an animal's legs on the porch. A cat perhaps? I went back to getting Sarah ready for school and the bus. Snow on the ground this morning. Must remember to get my car out of the garage so Cathy can park there when she comes in from Boston this afternoon. As usual, Sarah was outside first. "Dad! Matty's here."

Matty was the dog next door, friendly enough but still puppy-rambunctions. Sarah encountered her a couple of times a day when coming or going to Zach's house. Our back yards join at the property line under the utility wires, and our front doors are 2/3 of a mile apart by car. Sarah said she scratched her one time, probably from trying to jump up -- sometimes she was too friendly.

This morning, she was polite but skittish. She came when I called her, and she was willing to come with me to the back yard, but making eye contact and then looking at where I wanted her to go (a trick that had worked to perfection once in Virginia when a neighbor dog had escaped their wooden fence) didn't get me anywhere.

I went in to get my phone. "Don't let her go in the house!" Sarah cautioned, but Matty didn't seem inclined to follow me in anyway. Frances was on the stairs, as usual, rubbing her sides on the rails and angling for some pets. I came out with the phone and called over. Their number was the most recent on my list. I'd used it a day or two ago when Sarah had kicked off a boot that proceeded to hit Zach in the face.

"Hello?" Zach's mom sounded sleepy. Perhaps she'd worked late at the ER last night.

"This is Kip. Matty's over here. I tried to get her to go back, but she's just hanging around here."

Deb thought about it. "The battery in the invisible fence thing might be low. She probably doesn't want to cross it. You could take her collar off." I wasn't keen on that, because Matty was acting pretty nervous. "I'll come over there and get her in a couple of minutes." I said I'd stay with her until then.

Sarah petted Matty. "She likes getting pets on her tummy," she told me.

"She should lie on the porch instead of on the cold snow," I said.

"She likes to be a snow dog." Sarah explained. "Where's that dumb bus?" I suggested that the snow might be slowing it down, though it was a pretty light snow. A minute later, it showed up. "Don't let her get on the bus!" she said. She petted Matty one last time and then dashed to me for a kiss before going down the driveway to stand ten feet away from the arriving bus. Sonali ran across our yard to get on with her (Sarah's friend from two houses away tended to make the bus just in time, more or less). I tried to get Matty to follow me to the back again, but she opted to stay by the corner of the house and watch as I whistled. This time I saw something I hadn't noticed before -- a small pile of what seemed like they could be deer droppings. I saw that the sleeve over one of Sarah's tiny apple tree seedlings had fallen partway and straightened it back up. Then I could see Deb coming over, and then she started calling to Matty.

"Matty! Silly dog. What are you doing over here?"

"She might have followed a deer. I just saw a pile of droppings -- it's a miracle nobody stepped in it." Everybody had walked within a foot of the footprint-sized pile. If there were any hoof prints in the snow, we'd wiped them out. Deb removed the electronic collar so it wouldn't keep Matty from entering her yard, and escorted her back to her own side.

"Oh yeah, she's a lot more comfortable now," said Deb as Matty went into full happy mode. "Thanks for calling us!"

I thought about poor Matty as I went in. A deer, perhaps, lured her across the invisible fence, but nothing could lure her back across the electronic barrier, so she picked our front porch as a sort of haven. It was lucky for her (maybe she smelled us here) that she'd found friends. A fence works both ways.

2009-10-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

slide show

I've been slaving over a hot keyboard today. I actually put in something on the order of six hours organizing and selecting photos, putting them on my flickr page, finding that half of them were already there, blasting away duplicates, deciding on an order, captioning, and mostly, waiting for flickr to wake up. That was the fun part.

Anyway, the magnum opus is finished. I have made a new photoset of the pictures I took in 2006 and 2007 of the derelict amusement venue, Holyoke's Mountain Park, and the nearby derelict (and somewhat newer) water park. Mountain Park closed in 1987 after 80 years, and the wooden coaster was torn down in 1990.

In the course of looking up older photos to put names on some of my pictures, I learned that Jay Ducharme (whose pictures and sound files I linked to) finished a book on the park's history. He was one of the last carousel operators. The book, fittingly, is being sold at the carousel, which is now in Heritage Park, by the Children's Museum. It came out about four months after we moved out of town.

I also found out that bulldozers have finished obliterating the place, and a new owner hopes to make a concert venue of it.

Having found the access road, we have driven up and parked just off the bridge over I-91. The animated clown sign that invited drivers to visit Holyoke's Mountain Park for years is long gone, but the sign for the water park farther up Mt. Tom (which closed more recently) is still visible and peeling away. Let's go on in!

One of the overpasses that allowed pedestrians to cross paths with the little Zephyr train that ran around the park and also marks the location of the mini golf course, whose carpeted greens are among the more recognizable features of the park.

For a real treat, check out Jay's page. He was a carousel operator before the park closed, and he saved the recorded sound tracks from the Pirate's Den and Zoltan, the robot fortune teller.

www.karenandjay.com/mtpark/mpsounds/mpsounds.html

Sadly, Thurl Ravenscroft doesn't seem to be among the pirate voices. Anyway, this seems to be the roof of the Dolly Pitch, where you pitched dolls at baseballs to win wooden bottles. Or something.

www.karenandjay.com/mtpark/mphotos/2006pan.jpg

A three-dimensional view of a hill of poles. This is freeview 3D, because cross-eyed 3D gives me a headache and won't hold still. I took some other 3D pairs as well and might do something with them some day. More information about freeviewing can be found on the internet.

Seriously, go have a look if you can. I hiked in the hot sun to get these because I thought it was interesting, and I put a couple dozen of them up two and three years ago, respectively, and they've been looked at between zero and three times, ever. Be the first on your side of the Mississippi!.

2009-07-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhh, Yes!

.
Before it vanishes, as it has other times, do yourself a favor and spend some entertaining time immersed in the scholarly pages of The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion by Eric Costello.

I can't mention it without bragging that I -- yes, I! -- once had the privilege of serializing this groundbreaking reference in the pages of a monthly cartoon APA (private magazine that went out to the contributors). Once I learned that Costello was doing this, and having seen it, I got his permission to run a few pages of it each issue, with the intention of turning the text files over to him afterward, so that he wouldn't have to type the thing over another time, and could get it published somewhere reputable. My term of office expired before it was completely finished, but by then (or soon after) he took the show to the net where it could be appreciated by a wider audience.

So. You might ask what this wonderful thing is? (I pause while you ask.) It's a guide to all the puzzling references, in-jokes, catch-phrases and ad jingles that enlivened the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, and which now confuse and confound audiences, even as their kids are shouting "TURN OUT THAT LIGHT!" or asking "Was this trip really necessary?" Radio jokes, ration coupons, opaque slang, Texas trivia, aspects of Hollywood stars, and other detritus of the collective unconscious are aired and explicated herein.

A note of caution: It comes and goes. It seems that no sooner has Mr. Costello found a home for this indispensable repository of knowledge than something happens leading to a 404 NOT FOUND message. A Google search will show you all manner of no-longer-viable WBCC locations. We recommend saving the whole thing to your hard drive, and maybe converting it to some format in which you can carry it with you wherever you go. It's that good. Samples:

SOPHIE TURKEY

The Last of the Red-hot Gobblers. A caricature in The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (Tashlin, 1937) of Sophie Tucker.

“SO ROUND, SO FIRM, SO FULLY PACKED -- SO SMOOTH AND EASY ON THE DRAW”

One of the many advertising slogans for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Daffy-Duck-as-Danny-Kaye mentions the slogan in Book Revue (Clampett, 1946). The Christopher Columbus character in Hare We Go (McKimson, 1951) yells the phrase in exasperation at King Ferdinand while attempting to prove the Earth is round. Henery Hawk also used the expression when confronted with a fine specimen of alleged chicken tail.

SPARKS, NED (1883-1957)

Cigar-smoking character actor with a dour face who was well-known and often imitated. His movie appearances include 42nd Street, Golddiggers of 1933 in which he played the producer, the live-action Alice in Wonderland as the Caterpillar, and Wake Up and Live.

Caricatures of Sparks appear in:

Hollywood Steps Out (Avery, 1941) greeting the table of stonefaces

Malibu Beach Party (Freleng, 1940) being buried in sand by Baby Snooks/Fanny Brice

Slap-Happy Pappy (Clampett, 1940) indicating his joy (?) at the news that Eddie Cackler (caricature of Eddie Cantor) is going to be the father of a boy

Fresh Fish (Avery, 1939) as an old crab

It is quite possible that the Rip Van Winkle character in Have You Got Any Castles? (Tashlin, 1938) is a Sparks caricature as well, given the character’s voice.

These are three successive entries, taken from the page I had it open to when I started this. I can't promise that the internal links work, but it gives you the names and the meanings -- there's enough there to satisfy your curiosity and make you want to watch all the cartoons again.
.

2009-07-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

re: re-re-re-re-reading

.
Every day, I read just a few more pages of Jules Feiffer's America. This is the 25th anniversary collection of his comic strips. Inimitable, though often imitated, they are amazingly concentrated and powerful stuff.

Feiffer was already an experienced professional who had worked for Will Eisner by the time he hit the ground running during the Eisenhower administration. His drawings shimmered from one style to another briefly before settling into a style so direct and unvarnished it sometimes seems like no style at all. Though famous for his talking heads, his action drawings are full of life, especially his dancers (male and female), caught at moments of poise and release, like key drawings by a great animator.

Typically existing for about eight panels, his characters breathe nervous life. He sets up small slices of them speaking to us, panel leading to panel, until they have unwittingly revealed their hearts. Sometimes they are us, and the recognition is not always comfortable. Sometimes they are the evil others, only they look and sound a bit more like us than we would like.

They are history lessons for moderns who think the 50s were a sitcom, the 60s were a love-in, and our current problems are something entirely new and novel. His Eisenhower-era strips are insightful, and I'd read many of them so often before that I can't recall them being a revelation. His Kennedy strips are a jolt of cold water to Camelot fantasists. His JFK was vital, sharp, alive, and also shallow and poll-driven. Feiffer stuck it to him mercilessly, depicting him as a choreographed dancer "doin' the Frontier drag." LBJ was a shining knight until he revealed too much of himself; then he was a particularly disappointing political hack. Nixon -- well, we all know Nixon. So did he. Jerry Ford? "Shut up and ski, Jerry." Carter was Jimmy the Cloud.

I haven't been quoting (except for Jerry) because if I start, I won't stop. It's all too good.

I can't recommend this 25th-anniversary collection too highly. It's been more than 25 years since it came out, and I wish he'd do a follow-up. I don't know if reading all his strips in order without the filter of the creator choosing what to include would match the impact of this set, but I'd be willing to find out. Fantagraphics has started the ball rolling, and the volume they've done calls to me from the store shelves. Would that I were wealthier.
.

2009-03-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

family day

.
Six years ago, on the other side of the planet, they handed us a baby. I am still awed that such a thing could happen, no matter how many forms we filled out, biographies we wrote, pictures we took, fingerprints we allowed, interviews we underwent, and months we waited. They gave us Sarah. Thanks, China. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, Cathy, for your diligent and committed work on getting it all done right. Thanks, Sarah, for being a great kid. Thanks, Frances, for being such a kid-tolerant cat.

My heart, as they say, is full.
.

2009-03-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

a billion and one blistering barnacles

.
Georges "Herge" Remi passed away with one last Tintin book loosely sketched out. It has been finished by others. Canadian fan Yves Rodier made the art, and it has been scripted, colored, and translated into English.

The first time I found this online, it was still in French, and only the first few pages had been colored. This is a pleasant pastiche, complete with covers and end pages. I've often said that the trouble with some fan fiction is that they can get the characters properly dressed and standing around, but don't know how to plot for them. Luckily, in this case, the plotting has been done for them by the sole and singular creator of the entire milieu (no relation to Snowy). I still haven't purchased the published volume of the very loose version of this left by Herge, so I can't be sure whose idea it was to have various secondary characters pass through. I'm not complaining, though.

I wonder if the other completion of this, the one signed as being by "Ramo Nash" (a character in this tale), has been fully finished now. There were interesting differences between them, owing to the vagueness of the outline both started from.

Anyway, please enjoy this. It's a valedictory curtain call -- and a sort of gift to a Tintin fan who thought they already had everything.
.

2009-02-27T21:51:00.000-08:00

flickr hates you
part 2

.
Let's see if I can finish this tonight...

Well, that's the lot, so far. It takes a significant part of an hour to do each of these. Let's hope I can find some time to do more of these soon -- and maybe some of the panels that were also saved in the same scrapbook of "Our Boarding House," which were pretty good. Just not as good, to my mind, as these.
.

2009-02-26T22:36:00.000-08:00

flickr hates you
part I

.
Flickr takes action often to keep people from viewing my photos there. God knows why. You'd think they would want their service to work. So, here is a portfolio of "Out Our Way" panels from my flickr page. I may not get all 20+ in today. It's late at night. Here goes.

Let's just call this Part I. Bed beckons.
.

2009-01-11T16:43:00.001-08:00

Jukebox for January 11, 2009

Ben Light was another musical master who worked within the field of "Party Records." He has a handful of sides over at archive.org (click on his name), which include two genuine delights -- the other is "The Full-Her Brush Man," which I intend to present on a future occasion. The others please me less. "Give It To Me, Daddy," is a fairly standard number for the genre, and its ending is a little creepy by today's standards. Ditto "It May Not Be Love, But It's Wonderful," which is actually reprehensible to my 21st-century ears. "When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go" is one I seem to have forgotten. I might give it another listen and see if I like it now.

Ben has a breezy delivery, and his piano playing is superb, with scales and arpeggios that tinkle like running water at times. His small backup ensemble includes a guitar and either a clarinet or a saxophone and not much else. Searching on the title didn't get me much of anything. Archive says it's as given below, though it would seem more logical that it would be the same as the first line of the song proper. This suggests to me that the song was written to be sung by a woman, and he's covering it in the third person. If you think that's complex, wait till we get to the brush man!

Anyway, before the introduction overshadows the piece itself (a sound file is linked from the title), here we go:

I'm Gonna Get Me a Robot Man
by Ben Light and His Surf Club Boys

(intro)
People laugh at Science
The reason I can't see
For science has done many things
For girlies like Marie

First it gave us radio
That reached around the world
Now it's found another way
To help the working girl

She has had her troubles
With sweethearts by the score
But hip hooray for science
She won't have them any more!

(choruses)
She's gonna get her a robot man
He'll do things nobody else can
She'll turn him on about a quartet to nine
And keep in action all of the time

Switch him off at a quarter to ten
Rest a while then start him again
She'll have lovin' that's simply grand
When she gets her that robot man
(He'll keep givin'!) When she gets her that robot man.

She must have one with a guarantee
One that loves nobody else but she
She'll have gadgets that are unique
Turn him on on Monday and he'll run for a week

A robot man cannot cheat, you see
She'll control his electricity
He'll never feel tired and never get low
Flip a switch and he's ready to go, no foolin'
Flip a switch and he's ready to go.

(interlude -- Ben plays that tinkling piano)

A robot man cannot rust or spoil
All he needs is a little oil
And talk about your sex appeal
He'll be a Casanova made of steel

A metal papa that can go to town
He's got a battery that won't run down
If you want lovin' that's simply grand
Get a scientific robot man and he'll keep pitchin'
Get a scientific robot man!

2008-12-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

Jukebox for December 22, 2008

EVERYBODY WANTS MY FANNY
by Benny Bell

Everyone is out to get my Fanny
Everybody wants to see my Fanny
Everybody likes to hold my Fanny
But she loves no one but me

Everybody wants to seize my Fanny
Everybody likes to squeeze my Fanny
They do everything to please my Fanny
Still she loves no one but me

Oh, don't touch my Fanny
Please don't ever try
My little Fanny
Is reserved for just one guy

That's why I never let another love light blind me
Everywhere I go you'll always find me
With my little Fanny right behind me
'Cause she's so in love with me

Everyone who ever spied my Fanny
Tried to hang around beside my Fanny
Maybe I should go and hide my Fanny
Or she'll find somebody new

I've seen lots of fannies in my time
And frequently their cheeks were close to mine
But never have I held one so divine
Like the Fanny that belongs to me

We will be married
Some day next June
And when we go away
To spend our honeymoon

I know that everyone is goin'a miss my Fanny
No one ever could resist my Fanny
But they wouldn't dare to kiss my Fanny
'Cause she's so in love with me

(ps: This is a song from, I guess, the 1940s, using American slang, not British slang. Using British slang, it's more filthy and less amusing, because some of the references make no real sense -- "right behind me" "their cheeks were close to mine," in particular.)

[Lyrics courtesy of The Mad Music Archive]
(If you enjoyed this, you might also like Shaving Cream, The Automobile Song, Why Buy a Cow When Milk is Cheap, or some of his other tunes over at archive.org.)

2008-11-24T06:03:00.000-08:00

Joshing with Cal Stewart

About 1975 I was visiting family in Brookings, SD, and my aunt dropped me off at a little museum on the campus. The docents didn't know, when I asked them, if the cylinder player worked, but didn't mind if I tried it, so I put on a Sousa march for a half a minute, then switched over to "Uncle Josh at the Bug House."

James Thurber describes how he and his brother played a record -- I think it was "Cohen at the Telephone" -- nearly to death, and the same seems to have gone for this work of humorous art. Without steady, gentle finger pressure on the needle, it would have stayed in any given spot and repeated the same revolution over and over.

The performance itself was a recitation of one basic joke, over and over. The narrator lodged at a sort of hotel run by a man named Bug. He saw the lightning, Bug did, hee hee. He took a tumble, Bug did, hee hee. The piece had its own canned laughter, you might say, as "Uncle Josh" made sure to laugh at each of his jokes, or more accurately, at each instance of his joke. It was so popular, he re-recorded it a few years later. Here's Uncle Josh, blessedly silent, reacting to events in a Haunted House:

For the curious, the record is available at archive.org, along with a raft of other "Uncle Josh" sides and many other recordings. "Uncle Josh" movies can be found at the Library of Congress's "American Memory" site. Elsewhere online, I've found a reprint of at least one "Uncle Josh" book, and the fictional "Punkin Center" where the tales take place has been enshrined in more than one locale with that name, including one in Colorado, not terribly far from Lamar and Karval. I see that Cal Stewart's creation is also available on YouTube (aka: Your One-Stop Shop for All Things Josh). Which is to say, he was popular. Here he is at the moving picture show:

I'm too lazy to look up whether Stewart took his character's name from the verb "to josh," or whether the word came from Stewart's character. Neither one would surprise me much. (ps: A commenter at LJ says the verb precedes the name by many years.)

Cross-posted to LJ. Based on a Usenet post.

2008-10-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology
part 4

POPEYE THE SAILOR
I played me part, see?
I ate me spinach and saved me girl
And helped the kiddies and told 'em
To listen to their parents, and I fought
For me country when it needed me.
Bluto was me enemy and me pal,
And I loved him, and he loved me.
Now, I never laid a hand on him, except
To give him a paste on the jaw, but he knew
And I knew he knew, and that was enough.
But it was something you couldn't say in them days,
So I kept quiet and kept on paying calls to Olive's house
But I only felt alive when I was scrapping with Bluto.
I was what I was.

DOLLY KEANE
Would anyone have paid attention
If I'd said "encyclopedia" or "electricity"?
If I wasn't adorably wrong about something,
I was invisible, ignored, unnecessary,
A clown even when I wasn't being funny.
So I went along with it. What choice did I have?
Through seven decades, trapped in that house, in that world,
In that body, in that face. I did my best to radiate
Ignorant, unreasoning cheerfulness
My passing was a mistake, a bid for attention that went wrong.
You should have found me in that "frigidater."
Couldn't you follow the dotted line?

FRED BASSET
This is my grave.
(I am dead!)

2008-10-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

the Bad Humor man

First you'll hear somebody snarling,
Then a clash of cacophanous bells.
Frozen dill pickes and vinegarsicles
Are what the Bad Humor Man sells.

He yells, "All you brats quit that shouting!"
And he smacks any kiddie who sings.
Cold curdled custard and horseradish mustard
Are what the Bad Humor man brings.

He carries a silver cop whistle
And he sneers that all children are crooks.
Birds fly away, and the puppies won't play
When they catch his bad-humored looks.

The special today's cubes of topsoil
Bedecked with a relish of dills
Stuck to the foil you'll find cold castor oil
And a garnish of saccharine pills.

He never gives anyone change back
And he takes nothing smaller than dimes.
Take it from me, you're wisest to flee
When you hear the Bad Humor Man's chimes.

(by me, circa 1983: originally printed in the New Pals Club Magazine)

2008-10-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology
part 3

ANNIE WARBUCKS
"Daddy" made me feel loved and welcome.
He even got rid of that wife of his
Who acted like I was some sort of trophy;
A proof of her virtue. She was soon gone.
In her place, the lethal Asp and towering Punjab,
And Sandy. Always loyal, wonderful Sandy.
I would see "Daddy" mostly when he came in,
Guns blazing, fists flying, to save me
From the enemies of our country,
As well as from callous orphanages and cruel caretakers,
Just in time to sever them from success
And to protect this nation, and me, and Sandy,
And his own financial interests as well.
As days accreted into years, I wondered
Why my loving "Daddy" always ended up placing me
Back into those dark places where I had no protector
Save the good-hearted weak ones who folded like leaves
And sometimes a sympathetic gangster or mystic,
And I began to notice how my salvation and their demise
Solved at once some pressing business problem of "Daddy"'s
Until, at last, I resolved to contrive a test for him;
A setting of peril for me without any hope of profit for him.
And lo! here I am, beneath this stone forever
As Sandy, faithful Sandy, watches over me
Crying helplessly at the cold white eye of the moon.

JAMAAL J. JAMAAL
For years, I played the game with the ball and the hoops
And sometimes won, and sometimes lost, then retired
And opened a food place with a good friend of mine.
Life was good. We watched shows and listened to music
And exchanged opinions with others in our circle
Until the day we went to the large green park in town
And as I walked down by the wooden structure that crossed the water
I felt a sharp painful sensation down near the end of my leg.
A kind bystander with an electronic device was able to call
And try to get some help from the medical professionals,
But they asked what bit me, and all I could tell them
Was that it was a skinny, shiny creature; long, with no legs
And of a fairly common color. They pressed me for details,
But I couldn't help them, and they couldn't help me.
When they got to me, I was nearly gone.
As if naming something gives you power over it!

2008-10-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology
part 2

ALAN THE ARTIST
Talent only takes you so far.
Praised in school, successful at first,
I saw my path to fame, to glory,
To all the good things in life.
But ideas were few, and I went
To the pool of creativity, which I found
In a glass pipe Jones gave me
Along with my first taste of the stuff
And I painted, painted, until I thirsted,
Went back to the pool, then painted some more.
But before long, the thirst was more important
And the next trip to the pool, and the next,
And my curtains grew tattered, and I began
To leave my shirt unbuttoned at the top,
And I even forgot to brush my teeth some times.
And then I sought out Ray, who was looking for me,
And things went bad from there, and I perished.
Students of art, always try to find yourselves
A cheaper form of creativity than mine,
And lay in abundant supplies
Before you prime your canvas.

PHILLIP WINSLOW
Dottie and I saw him in the window,
A small puppy, looking helplessly at us
Canting his head as if to hear something
We had just said. We brought him home
To the delight of the children. In my mind,
I had some reservations about his paws,
Which looked too large for such a small dog.
"He'll grow into them," Dottie said,
As if that was a good thing. And grow he did
Until he was bigger than any of us,
And willful, and selfish, and bone stupid,
Although he was clever at driving a car,
Making phone calls and operating a computer.
He was less like a dog than he was a demon,
Sucking the life out of our family,
My marriage, and our finances
Until the day I called him out to the car
And took him far away, into the mountains
And tried to lose him on a lonely road.
I got the beefsteak out of the trunk
And called to him to have a treat
But when I looked up, he was in front
And had undone the parking brake somehow
And he rolled right over me before he went
Clattering down the road, until the car stopped
Gently, the front bumper just touching a pine tree.
My last moments seemed to stretch out for me,
Seeing the quizzical expression again on that face,
With that long-ago puppy's face showing behind it
And I saw the irony as well, and had to admit
That in a way, it really was dog-gone funny.

2008-10-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

Toon River Anthology
part 1

(originally sent to The Comics Curmudgeon)

TOBY CAMERON
After I confessed everything to my Ian,
And he forgave me, and respected me for it,
Everything was transfigured
And I went out into the world, determined
To make a new day, a new start
And be worthy of that wonderful man
But as I walked out into the light
Looking up, up at the sky
My silly foot betrayed me, and stepped
Into the open manhole cover, and I fell
Down, down, and all the way down I thought:
I don't know how this could happen!
I'm not careless with manholes!

PROFESSOR IAN CAMERON
After I lost you, Toby,
I went a little crazy
And began to indulge in
Things I'd only thought about before
And by the time I finally died in harness,
There was quite a bit of talk
And Mary came to see me
And recited her platitudes
And I smiled, and nodded, and looked abashed
And thanked her for it as she left
And kept going on my ways.
You taught me something, Toby.
I thought I needed a young blonde
But I found myself instead
In showers and bathroom stalls
And bus stations and personal ads.
Your sacrifice wasn't in vain--
I just needed to get you and your kind
Out of my system for good.

ALDO KELRAST
I set myself upon Mary Worth
And showed up, unannounced
And crossed her path again, and again
Always with a smile and a leer
But she would have none of me.
I kept my disappointment to myself
But one day my eager heart gave way
And I expired there on the floor.
Now I lie here and I see
That she visits me after all.
Perhaps I touched that icy heart
More than she ever let on.
Why, here she is now.
Mary! I want you to know
I can see right up your dress!

MARY WORTH
Time heals all wounds.
There are other fish in the sea.
I told them. For years, I told them all.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
And when they put me aside,
And pitied me, behind their smiles,
(Let a smile be your umbrella!)
I didn't let on that I saw through it.
You catch more flies with honey!
But I think they realized, most of them.
Happiness isn't a gift, it's earned!
At the end, they knew who to thank.
The end justifies the means.
Toby, plunging into endless night--
It's always darkest just before dawn--
Aldo, dying of natural causes,
(For what is more natural than sleep?)
And all the rest of them, whose stones
Surround mine, as if listening for advice
Which I dispense, as I once sold apples.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away!
A stitch in time saves nine.

PRIVATE BEETLE BAILEY
I trembled between them. There was no escape.
Then I saw the recruiter's door. I stepped inside.
Things blurred for a while, and I came to myself
With my porkpie hat gone and an army cap in its place.
And I found that in giving up freedom and self,
I had gained blamelessness and slack,
And what was at first temporary became instead
The permanent surrender of choice in exchange
For the permanent evasion of responsibility.
And as I stayed at Camp Swampy, year after year,
I was astonished one day to realize with a start
That nothing ever changed there. Nobody left
And nobody new came in, and nothing happened
Until the day I realized I had been dead thirty years
And that all of us were already in our private hell.

PETER PARKER
I never asked to be bitten. I only wanted
To listen to a scholarly talk about science
But there it was, I had great power now
And learned quickly what that entailed.
A lesser soul, gaining what I'd gained
Might have succumbed to vanity or greed,
But I had the lesson of Uncle Ben before me
And set out to make the world a better place
Whether the world wanted it or not.
For my pains, I was scorned, excoriated,
Lied about in the paper, and had my image
Which I provided for a modest fee, paraded
Before the credulous public as a menace.
Is it any wonder that I finally surrendered,
Took the easy way out, married my girlfriend
And stayed at home most days, watching TV?

THE UNKNOWN PLUGGER
Here I lie, in a humble pine box
None of your fancy caskets for me
If I'd died a few years later, it might have been
A cardboard carton for my eternal rest.
I didn't ever ask for much from the world;
Just a small-screen TV and a padded chair
The one to sleep in, the other to sleep
In front of on the nights when I didn't have to go
And work the next day. I kept my personal data
On the icebox in the kitchen. My watch
Only told time, and didn't bother me with
Phone calls, headlines, music, or games.
When I was hungry, I ate a burger with fries,
Drank the cheapest coffee, married a big chicken,
And played board games with my bored kids.
Until the day I felt my heart burst in my chest
And couldn't puzzle out the medicine cap in time.
Now I nap under a piece of granite,
Carved with my parents' names, with a line
Left for my family to fill in with mine
When they can afford it.

2008-10-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Cheer up! Smile!

There were so many cheery, upbeat songs in the Depression. And there were some downbeat ones as well. This is the best one I know that's zippy, sarcastic and bitter. Ask me to play and sing this for you next time we meet. I've always wanted to see Shirley Temple sing, dance, and dimple her way through this one:

VERSE
Say, business is punk
And Wall Street is sunk.
We're all of us broke
And ready to croak.
We've nothing to dunk
Can't even get drunk
And all the while they tell us
To smile...

CHORUS
Cheer up, peaceful citizens
Though you have no shirts;
Happy times are here again --
Cheer up! Smile! Nerts!
All aboard, Prosperity;
Giggle 'til it hurts!
No more breadline charity --
Cheer up! Smile! Nerts!

Cheer up! Cheer up! Cheeeeer up!
Cheer up! Cheer
Up! Cheer up! Cheer up! Cheer
Better times are near!
Sunny smilers we must be,
The optimist asserts --
Let's hang the fathead to a tree!
Cheer up! Smile! NERTS!

VERSE
The world's in the red.
We're better off dead.
Depression, they say
'S in session to stay
Our judges are queer.
Our banks disappear --
And all the while they tell us to smile.

CHORUS

Eddie Cantor with Phil Spitalny and his Music
http://www.archive.org/details/EddieCantor

2008-10-04T17:59:00.000-07:00

tiny aspirations

(Picture snagged from WFMU's "Beware of the Blog")

That's where it started. They sold the little record players at Linder's, where I'd go look at toys and novelties (fake barf! whoopie cushions!). I lusted for that little player, and dreamed of having one. I must have been in second grade at the time, and I wished I could have a record player that I could take everywhere and have little tiny records to hear on it.

Never mind that the records they sold for that player probably sounded about like the plastic disk inside the Susy Moppet doll a friend found for me (that's another story). Never mind that they were recorded by utter nonentities who probably made Susy Moppet sound like Barbra Streisand. I never heard one of them played, and was probably happier that way.

Years passed. In junior high, I got my own tape recorder. A year after lusting for the 1.5" reel machine a friend had, I had saved up and got a 3" reel recorder at Penney's and proceeded to tape everything. I kept using it up to the time I was buying my first Firesign Theater albums, and then I finally gave in and got a cassette recorder, which I lugged around in a briefcase with as many tapes as I could cram in there.

One day, years later, I thought about how much my Walkman-type player resembled the wondrous record player of my far-off dreams. When I replaced that with a CD-based mp3 player, the thought came again. Now I think about it as I pat the shirt pocket with the 120GB iPod.

I also wished I could fly. Still waiting.

ps: A bit of searching today shows that one of these changed hands this month, with 11 records, for just over US$91. There was a photo of some of the records -- I could see guitars, a saxophone, a blonde singer, but couldn't make out names or any details. Almost every online reference to the "Mighty Tiny Record Player" led to a link to this item (unless every one of these happens to come with 11 records, of course). But I did find this, in the Google cache of a collector page (lala a gogo) that was otherwise '404 Not Found.'

Hot stuff.

2008-09-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

morbid makeover

In one of my last photo expeditions to local graveyards around West Springfield, I took pictures of photos of loved ones that were incorporated into the stones themselves. These make me a little sad, and it was even more poignant to see how one photo in particular had deteriorated over the years.

Here's a young male, dates unknown because all the writing is in Hebrew (or perhaps Yiddish; I don't know how I could tell) except for a surname at the bottom. Many times I have looked at my pictures of this photo and thought it might be possible to use the paint bucket tool to fill in the missing areas with a dark shade and see the original photo. It wasn't so simple.

I ended up using the clone tool to pick up areas of shade and apply the tints here and there. Some of what I did was completely arbitrary, so it may be that this is not a real image of the deceased.

Nonetheless, I felt like I had a better idea of how this person had looked. Due to some of my own efforts, it's possible I have distorted the apparent gender of the loved one here, but a photo taken farther back shows what seems to be a young boy. It's kind of rough -- a more finished job might have taken twice as long, and it's getting late.

Anyway, that's what I did after work today.

Originally posted to LJ on 20080728.

ps: Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, in comments, for providing the translation of the tombstone. We now know who this young woman was. May she rest in peace. The impression of maleness was the result of deterioration of the picture and nothing else.

2008-09-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

here's a fine how-do-you-do

I've raved before about the 1970 Bell Telephone Hour recording of "The Mikado" in which Groucho Marx plays Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of Titipu. Thanks to one of my pals here, I even have a copy of it.

For those who don't, I'll just say again that the first time I heard this, I thought it must have been re-written for Mr. Marx, when, in fact, it was not changed one bit. The show was carved down to an hour -- minus time for breaks and such -- by the expedient of trimming away much of what didn't directly concern Mr. Marx. I believe I approve, since it's always possible to find a complete performance, but how often can one get the chance to hear such an inspired bit of casting?

It is now possible for others to get the recording, in 320kbps mp3 files, from ReDiscovery, a music vendor who specializes in rescuing obscure classical performances and selling them at budget prices. This is in their "Paperback Classics" series, and is offered free of charge. Dang!

The company also reissues some of the "Basic Library of the World's Great Classics," which used to sell in grocery stores for a dollar, one album a week. We had a bunch of these in my house growing up, and I used to read the booklets that came bound into the box, and even listen to some of the anonymous performances. I saw the first nine releases of the collection at an estate sale last week, and had to restrain myself from buying them all again (having painfully forced myself to part with all but a tiny sample of them years ago in an effort to reduce the bulk of my records). ReDiscovery has done detective work and found out who the artists were who recorded most of them, and if you buy their records, you too will know. They're nice performances.

The link is above. Look down at the bottom of the page, and there's Groucho's doing the Mikado (with some help from Helen Traubel, Stanley Holloway, and some other people, including two guys named Gilbert and Sullivan). You'll be taken to a download page where you'll need to click on the two parts (side one and side two, I'll wager) to go to yet another page that will finally give you this wonderful recording. The link in this paragraph will tell you more about the cast and so forth. If any of you ever find a video recording of this TV special, please, please, let me know. (Same goes for Peter Schickele's performance of the PDQ Bach Concerto for Piano vs Orchestra on "Evening at Pops" around 1974-5.)

If you've never heard this classic tale of love and decapitation, this is a splendid introduction. And if you like it, do what they always advised at the end of every Classics Illustration adaptation and go out and get the whole thing. The parts they cut out are as good as what they left in. Go.

2008-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

two great tastes

We all love middle English, and we all love legacy comic strips, whose creators have moved on to that great bullpen in the sky. "Angry Kem," rightly divining these sentiments in society, has leaped to combine them into one, easy-to-digest web site, Japes for Owre Tymes.

JfOT is now in its second great day. Don't get run over: leap on the bandwagon now!

Angry Kem is a commentator at The Comics Curmudgeon, as am I ("Muffaroo"). Don't say I never give you any good links.

2008-09-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

from memory

My prepared cutting for theater auditions in recent years has been a composite speech taken from various utterances of a character named Slanthead Elder in H. Allen Smith's novel, Mister Zip (written before the US Postal Service launched its ZIP code campaign with the psychotic-looking little mailman who can still be seen, in plywood form, in post offices around our country). Slanthead is a sidekick and confidante of the earnest young TV cowboy who gives the book its name, and from time to time he dispenses opinions to Zip, who thinks there is such a thing as The Real West:

There ain't no West. I was what you call a real cowboy, thirty years ago, up in Wyomin'. Now, you take back in the 1880s, maybe they was a west that's a little like they got it in books and movies. But come to think, not much like.

You know how we got it now -- about all you got to do with cattle is herd 'em a little, and rustle 'em, and unrustle 'em, and drive 'em through the pass. Hell's fire, boy! You oughtta see what a real cowboy's gotta go through with them critters!

First place, a cow's the dumbest animal in the world. Mean. Ornery. A mule ain't in it fer bein' stubborn. One a the worst jobs a real cowboy has on a ranch is pullin' the bog. The stupid critters get sunk in the bogs and got to be hauled out, so you get some ropes on 'er, and two or three fellas on horses start pullin', and eventually you drag the son-of-a-bitch out. And what does she give you in the way a gratitude? In-verryibly, she tries to kill you! Tries to kill the men what saved her stinkin' life!

And the doctorin' you got to do! A critter has almost always got some kind a disease, and if she does have a short spell of health, why, then the bugs are at 'er and you got to fight them, and if you lay your hat down on the ground, she'll walk right over and crap on it, and all the time you're not playin' nurse-maid to these dumb bastards, you're workin' like a section hand, workin' in the hay-fields, fixin' fence, hoein' crops, and, so help me, hangin' out the warsh for the missus o' the ranch!

Elder has other choice speeches that would have made my selection too long for most directors. He holds forth on how stupid the other cowboys were ("That's all they got to talk about -- what's the shortest way to town.") and, when he gets drunk enough, Ole Hitler ("He's got a cave big as a soundstage back there in the hills, with slave labor turnin' out adam bombs like Gineral Moders makes Shivverlays!"). I left some out, so as not to ruin the entire book in advance. Just another service for you, the discriminating reader!

ps: No matter what I try, the text in this post looks larger than all my other posts. Goodbye, consistency. I hardly knew ye.

2008-08-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

charlie's apocalypse
.
[The scenario has just described a brief subliminal of Chaplin being chased around a corner by a cop as The Bomb is dropped. We see the worldwide devastation from a great altitude, then the camera pans down to ground level, and...]

C. (1) ENTER THE TRAMP

He is back to the camera, hunched deeply over, in a tinily narrow alley between two buildings. A rigid forefinger is still jammed in each ear. He is still motionless; frozen.

He comes up as slowly, timorously, tremulously out of his crouch (fingers in each ear pulling timidly away), as a grass-blade recovering, which has just been stepped on. Straightens, still back to camera; and starts straightening his legs and arms inside clothes, and the clothes themselves, turning very slowly, face close to camera, staring into it. He continues to straighten his clothes, going over them very carefully ... polishing toes of shoes on calves of pants; sleeving his derby and resetting it with care on his head; testing his cane: then a sudden trembling shrug (involving a full check-over of body as well as clothes), which is a blend of what a suddenly dampened dog does, and of the feather-adjustments of a suddenly rumpled hen. Then very delicately and timidly, camera withdrawing, he advances, and sticks his snout around the corner of a building, and peers.

The rough screenplay continues with the post-nuclear-holocaust adventures of Charlie Chaplin, at first alone, then with others, then with scientists, and finally alone again.

It's presented in Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay, by John Wranovics. I have to confess that I found the biographical material leading up to the screenplay (here arbitrarily titled "The Tramp's New World") to be more interesting than the screenplay, overall, though the typescript has some interesting bits in it. The part following this, of Chaplin's interactions with the fixed shadows of the vanished citizens of the city, is particularly effective. If it had been made -- if Agee hadn't died when he did, and if Chaplin had shown an interest -- they would have had to lose an awful lot of what Agee worked so hard to include. It's like Alan Moore at his most specific, only he's groping for something that hasn't come into focus yet. An early draft, it's replete with multiple apologies for the roughness, and shows a willingness to compromise some of the details if need be. I'll wager he'd have done a better job on it if it had become a real project, based on his screenplay for the original Night of the Hunter.

I'd cut most of the prologue, which seems to kill the movie before the bomb does. Agee probably should have made his contribution a skeleton at that stage, keeping such bits as the introduction of the Tramp (quoted from above), and perhaps others. I confess that I was not only starting to doze in the comfy chair as I plowed to the finish today, I even started to skip through paragraphs, looking at the first sentence and then jumping ahead.

But it's still interesting. It'd be interesting to let Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have at it, for instance.

Anyway, I finished it just in time. It goes back to the library tomorrow. I saw a used copy at Barnes & Noble, and had Cathy get it on Interlibrary Loan to save $7.

This is cross-posted from my Live Journal in an attempt to breathe some life into this moribund conceit. I will try to remember to add the tag "lj" to such posts in future, to indicate the source of these items.
.

2008-06-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that this was written in the summer of 1971, while waiting for my friend Dave to come back to his house. I waited because it was a long way home. While I waited, I put a piece of paper in his typewriter and started banging out a rhyming version of a tale I'd written earlier. I seem to recall I worked on it for an hour or two. It was subsequently published in the first and only issue of BABOON, an eight-page humor mag that Dave put out, with contributions from the two of us, and another Dave. Probably Dave's first published cover. Since then he's done covers for "Heroes in Hell" and Honor Harrington books, among others.

I've revised it along the way for various reasons -- mostly the reason was that I was retyping it and I couldn't leave things alone. There are things I would fix now, including a glaring error of emPHAsis, but I'll leave it for the time being. (See: Life, shortness of)

So here it is, my epic poem:

RUMPLESTILTSTEIN

Once, Miller the miller chanced to be
At the place they called ‘group therapy.’
(A meeting place where opinions, views,
And dreams are met with jeers and boos)
He listened long to the people’s talk
Until oblivious to their squawk,
When suddenly his heart went ‘flutter’:
His name’d been mentioned in the mutter.
Ere he was left by this cardiac pain
Someone said his name again!
So he looked around to see if he
Could see who’d said it, and asked, “Who—me?”
Straightaway, he was seen by the crowd.
“That’s him now,” someone said out loud,
“We’ve talked of our kids long enough—
What of yours, you bag of fluff?”
He tried to stall and seemed to wilt:
“My wife’s almost finished her patchwork quilt.”
“Oh, knock it off about that cow,
She’s been ‘almost finished’ six months now.
We’re not so hot on Phyllis Diller.
What of Milly, miller Miller?”
Now Miller the miller was in a spot:
What could she do that others could not?
All she could do was sit on her fanny,
Eat, sleep, talk and tie a granny.
In less than a second these thoughts had passed
And he got his answer: “LIE—and FAST!”
So he cleared his throat: “She spins straw into POT!
(But just when she wants to—she mostly does _not_).”

Somehow, all the others followed it.
More amazingly, they swallowed it—
They all cheered for Miler the miller:
“Wow,” they chorused, “Whatta killer!”
And so, his glory now equal to Rome,
The miller got up, and smiling, went home.

News traveled fast in Yesteryear,
And soon it reached the Royal Ear.
At this, His Majesty’s very first thought was
“Get her!” Then he wondered what ‘pot’ was.
But the one they brought to the King’s great villa
Was not Millicent, but miller Miller.
There he knelt before the throne,
Shaken and frightened to the bone.
“Make her spin!” the King suggested.
“She doesn’t _want_ to!” m.M. protested.
“Well, make her want to, and make it fleet,
Or else your head shall look up to your FEET!”

The miller faced it like a man:
He sent her in and fled the land.
So Millicent, sans further hassle
Found herself inside the castle.
She looked around the room in awe
To find she was knee-deep in straw.
“Spin that into pot!” came the Royal drone,
Then the cell door slammed, and she was alone.

For several minutes she stared dumbfounded
At all the straw that now surrounded.
She knew what she would have to do
Was roll some up and bluff it through,
But before she’d exercised this ruse,
There came a flash and a smell like booze,
And before she could quite grasp it all,
She saw this midget, three feet tall!
Then came his line (a real killer):
“I’m your salvation, Milly Miller!
I can spin anything, from straw to string,
Into the best—the Real Thing!”
She gazed at him with the eyes of a fawn,
And managed to gasp; “You’re putting me on.”
Said he “It’s true! But it’s no dice
If you can’t somehow Pay... the Price!”
“Well, I’ve got... this ring! It’s one humdinger.”
(It left a green spot on her finger.)
He looked it over (he must have been blind)
And pocketed it. “This will do fine.”
There followed some fancy spinning and then,
The weirdo up and vanished again.
Now, being knee-deep in straw isn’t so hot,
But now she was up to her calves in pot,
And soon the King came into the cell
Saying “This is amazing! ...What’s that smell?”

In even less time than it takes to relate,
The King tried some grass, and found it great.
So he once again shoved Milly into the door
And left with the message to “Spin up some more.”
She looked at the straw, piled high in the cell,
And there was the flash and the same bad smell,
And there, sure enough, was her weird old friend
Saying “Millicent Miller, you’ve done it again!”
She looked at him sadly; he gave her a grin
And said “Now don’t tell me, you want me to spin.
I will, of course, but not for free—
There’s a little matter of paying the fee.
You pay, and I’ll appease the King.
You got another diamond ring?”

A look of pain came swiftly on
Her face: the dime-store ring was gone.
She pondered hard, and then she smiled—
She’d offer him her first-born child!
It was probably better than losing her lid.
(After all, with her dead, there’d be no kid!)
So she told the creep and he agreed.
Then he got to work and spun the weed.

The king thought he’d be set for life,
And graciously made her his wife;
No more spinning did he demand
For she claimed she’d broken her ‘detrecle gland.’
Things went just fine after that.
In time, there came a Royal Brat.
Then one day, in a blinding flurry,
The queen thought back and began to worry.
She tried to think: Who was that guy?
But she didn’t know, so she called her Spy.
“Just get his name, and I’ll be set
For any blackmail I’d need to get.”
So fast did her agent catch the game
That in just a week, he got the name.
And what did he whisper in her ear?
“Rumplestiltstein,” loud and clear.

One stormy night at half past eight
A knock was heard upon the gate
And sure enough, not Mr. Clean,
But the creep had come to see the Queen.
“Now, Milly Miller, remember your bid—
I gave you grass, give me the kid!”
The child walked in and caught his eye.
The midget gave a startled cry
And said “But first, a guessing game!
The kid’s yours if you guess my name.”
“Oh, I couldn’t guess!” the Queen protested,
“I’m bad at games, or had you guessed it?
My li’l ol’ head’s just ever so fat—
SO BE A SPORT AND TAKE THE BRAT!”
“Well, bury me in chicken puckey,
Take thirty guesses—you might get lucky!”
(Since she knew his name, one guess was enough,
But she wanted to lose, and proceeded to bluff.)
“Irving? Lucky? Karen? Barry?
Kathi? Stinky? Bruce? or Harry?
Ugly? Marty? Lyndon? Louie?
Herbie? Don, Doyle, Dick or Dewey?
Tim? Jim? Herkimer or Harry?
(She read from Webster’s dictionary.)
John? George? Karl? Ken? Fred Astaire?
Sam? Tom? Paul? ...Well, I declare!
Of all the things! O, fate so dirty!
I’ve made wrong guesses; all of thirty.
Excuse me if I seem to crumple.
The kid’s all yours now. Take him, Rumple!”
Quickly spake Rumplestiltstein:
“Sorry, kid, that’s twenty-nine!
But with the ‘Rumple,’ thirty guessings—
Kid’s all yours; you have my blessings.”
Then, laughing like he’d made a joke
He vanished in a puff of smoke.

But Queen Millicent was no fool.
She sent the kid to boarding school.
So the midget was not alone in laughter.
(They all lived happily ever after.)

THE END
(c) 2008 by Kip Williams

2007-07-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

While fetching a copy of FitzGerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" for my iPod ,
I happened to distract myself with Project Gutenberg's edition of humorous English poetry.
Buried within that worthy volume is this.
Run, you fools! It's a COOK BOOK!

*****

THE POETICAL COOKERY-BOOK.
from PUNCH
THE STEAK.
Air.--"The Sea."

Of Steak--of Steak--of prime Rump Steak--
A slice of half-inch thickness take,
Without a blemish, soft and sound;
In weight a little more than a pound.
Who'd cook a Stake--who'd cook a Steak--
Must a fire clear proceed to make:
With the red above and the red below,
In one delicious genial glow.
If a coal should come, a blaze to make,
Have patience! You mustn't put on your Steak.

First rub--yes, rub--with suet fat,
The gridiron's bars, then on it flat
Impose the meat; and the fire soon
Will make it sing a delicious tune.
And when 'tis brown'd by the genial glow,
Just turn the upper side below.
Both sides with brown being cover'd o'er,
For a moment you broil your Steak no more,
But on a hot dish let it rest,
And add of butter a slice of the best;
In a minute or two the pepper-box take,
And with it gently dredge your Steak.

When seasoned quite, upon the fire
Some further time it will require;
And over and over be sure to turn
Your Steak till done--nor let it burn;
For nothing drives me half so wild
As a nice Rump Steak in the cooking spiled.
I've lived in pleasure mixed with grief,
On fish and fowl, and mutton and beef,
With plenty of cash, and power to range,
But my Steak I never wished to change:
For a Steak was always a treat to me,
At breakfast, luncheon, dinner, or tea.

ROASTED SUCKING-PIG.
AIR--"Scots wha has."

Cooks who'd roast a Sucking-pig,
Purchase one not over big;
Coarse ones are not worth a fig;
So a young one buy.
See that he is scalded well
(That is done by those who sell),
Therefore on that point to dwell,
Were absurdity.

Sage and bread, mix just enough,
Salt and pepper quantum suff.,
And the Pig's interior stuff,
With the whole combined.
To a fire that's rather high,
Lay it till completely dry;
Then to every part apply
Cloth, with butter lined.

Dredge with flour o'er and o'er,
Till the Pig will hold no more;
Then do nothing else before
'Tis for serving fit.
Then scrape off the flour with care;
Then a butter'd cloth prepare;
Rub it well; then cut--not tear--
Off the head of it.

Then take out and mix the brains
With the gravy it contains;
While it on the spit remains,
Cut the Pig in two.
Chop the sage, and chop the bread
Fine as very finest shred;
O'er it melted butter spread--
Stinginess won't do.

When it in the dish appears,
Garnish with the jaws and ears;
And when dinner-hour nears,
Ready let it be.
Who can offer such a dish
May dispense with fowl and fish;
And if he a guest should wish,
Let him send for me!

BEIGNET DE POMME.
AIR--"Home, Sweet Home."

'Mid fritters and lollipops though we may roam,
On the whole, there is nothing like Beignet de Pomme.
Of flour a pound, with a glass of milk share,
And a half pound of butter the mixture will bear.
Pomme! Pomme! Beignet de Pomme!
Of Beignets there's none like the Beignet de Pomme!

A Beignet de Pomme, you will work at in vain,
If you stir not the mixture again and again;
Some beer, just to thin it, may into it fall;
Stir up that, with three whites of eggs, added to all.
Pomme! Pomme! Beignet de Pomme!
Of Beignets there's none like the Beignet de Pomme!

Six apples, when peeled, you must carefully slice,
And cut out the cores--if you 'll take my advice;
Then dip them in batter, and fry till they foam,
And you'll have in six minutes your Beignet de Pomme.
Pomme! Pomme! Beignet de Pomme!
Of Beignets there's none like the Beignet de Pomme!

CHERRY PIE.
AIR--"Cherry Ripe."

Cherry Pie! Cherry Pie! Pie! I cry,
Kentish cherries you may buy.
If so be you ask me where
To put the fruit, I'll answer "There!"
In the dish your fruit must lie,
When you make your Cherry Pie.
Cherry Pie! Cherry Pie! etc.

Cherry Pie! Cherry Pie! Pie! I cry,
Full and fair ones mind you buy
Whereabouts the crust should go,
Any fool, of course will know;
In the midst a cup may lie,
When you make your Cherry Pie.
Cherry Pie! Cherry Pie! etc.

DEVILED BISCUIT.
AIR--"A Temple of Friendship."

"A nice Devil'd Biscuit," said JENKINS enchanted,
"I'll have after dinner--the thought is divine!"
The biscuit was bought, and he now only wanted--
To fully enjoy it--a glass of good wine.
He flew to the pepper, and sat down before it,
And at peppering the well-butter'd biscuit he went;
Then, some cheese in a paste mix'd with mustard spread o'er it
And down to be grill'd to the kitchen 'twas sent.

"Oh! how," said the Cook, "can I this think of grilling,
When common the pepper? the whole will be flat.
But here's the Cayenne; if my master is willing,
I'll make, if he pleases, a devil with that."
So the Footman ran up with the Cook's observation
To JENKINS, who gave him a terrible look:
"Oh, go to the devil!" forgetting his station,
Was the answer that JENKINS sent down to the Cook.

RED HERRINGS.
AIR--"Meet Me By Moonlight."

Meet me at breakfast alone,
And then I will give you a dish
Which really deserves to be known,
Though it's not the genteelest of fish.
You must promise to come, for I said
A splendid Red Herring I'd buy--
Nay, turn not away your proud head;
You'll like it, I know, when you try.

If moisture the Herring betray,
Drain, till from moisture 'tis free;
Warm it through in the usual way,
Then serve it for you and for me.
A piece of cold butter prepare,
To rub it when ready it lies;
Egg-sauce and potatoes don't spare,
And the flavor will cause you surprise

IRISH STEW.
AIR--"Happy Land."

Irish stew, Irish stew!
Whatever else my dinner be,
Once again, once again,
I'd have a dish of thee.

Mutton chops, and onion slice,
Let the water cover,
With potatoes, fresh and nice;
Boil, but not quite over,
Irish stew, Irish stew!
Ne'er from thee, my taste will stray.
I could eat
Such a treat
Nearly every day.
La, la, la, la!

BARLEY BROTH.
Air--"The King, God bless him!"

A basin of Barley Broth make, make for me;
Give those who prefer it, the plain:
No matter the broth, so of barley it be,
If we ne'er taste a basin again.
For, oh I when three pounds of good mutton you buy,
And of most of its fat dispossess it,
In a stewpan uncover'd, at first, let it lie;
Then in water proceed to dress it.
Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
In a stewpan uncover'd, at first, let it lie;
Then in water proceed to dress it.

What a teacup will hold--you should first have been told--
Of barley you gently should boil;
The pearl-barley choose--'tis the nicest that's sold--
All others the mixture might spoil.
Of carrots and turnips, small onions, green peas
(If the price of the last don't distress one),
Mix plenty; and boil altogether with these
Your basin of Broth when you dress one.
Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
Two hours together the articles boil;
There's your basin of Broth, if you'd dress one.

CALF'S HEART.
Air--"Maid of Athens, ere we part."

Maid of all work, as a part
Of my dinner, cook a heart;
Or, since such a dish is best,
Give me that, and leave the rest.
Take my orders, ere I go;
Heart of calf we'll cook thee so.

Buy--to price you're not confined--
Such a heart as suits your mind:
Buy some suet--and enough
Of the herbs required to stuff;
Buy some le non-peel--and, oh!
Heart of calf, we'll fill thee so.

Buy some onions--just a taste--
Buy enough, but not to waste;
Buy two eggs of slender shell
Mix, and stir the mixture well;
Crumbs of bread among it throw;
Heart of calf we'll roast thee so.
Maid of all work, when 'tis done,
Serve it up to me alone:
Rich brown gravy round it roll,
Marred by no intruding coal;
Currant jelly add--and lo!
Heart of calf, I'll eat thee so.

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING.
AIR--"Jeannette and Jeannott."

If you wish to make a pudding in which every one delights,
Of a dozen new-laid eggs you must take the yolks and whites;
Beat them well up in a basin till they thoroughly combine,
And shred and chop some suet particularly fine;

Take a pound of well-stoned raisins, and a pound of currants dried,
A pound of pounded sugar, and a pound of peel beside;
Stir them all well up together with a pound of wheaten flour,
And let them stand and settle for a quarter of an hour;

Then tie the pudding in a cloth, and put it in the pot,--
Some people like the water cold, and some prefer it hot;
But though I don't know which of these two methods I should praise,
I know it ought to boil an hour for every pound it weighs.

Oh! if I were Queen of France, or, still better, Pope of Rome,
I'd have a Christmas pudding every day I dined at home;
And as for other puddings whatever they might be,
Why those who like the nasty things should eat them all for me.

APPLE PIE.
AIR-"All that's bright must fade."

All new dishes fade--
The newest oft the fleetest;
Of all the pies now made,
The Apple's still the sweetest;
Cut and come again,
The syrup upward springing!
While my life and taste remain,
To thee my heart is clinging.
Other dainties fade--
The newest oft the fleetest;
But of all the pies now made,
The Apple's still the sweetest.

Who absurdly buys
Fruit not worth the baking?
Who wastes crust on pies
That do not pay for making?
Better far to be
An Apple Tartlet buying,
Than to make one at home, and see
On it there's no relying:
That all must be weigh'd,
When thyself thou treatest--
Still a pie home-made
Is, after all, the sweetest.

Who a pie would make,
First his apple slices;
Then he ought to take
Some cloves--the best of spices:
Grate some lemon rind,
Butter add discreetly;
Then some sugar mix--but mind
The pie's not made too sweetly.
Every pie that's made
With sugar, is completest;
But moderation should pervade--
Too sweet is not the sweetest.

Who would tone impart,
Must--if my word is trusted--
Add to his pie or tart
A glass of port--old crusted
If a man of taste,
He, complete to make it,
In the very finest paste
Will inclose and bake it.
Pies have each their grade;
But, when this thou eatest,
Of all that e'er were made,
You'll say 'tis best and sweetest.

LOBSTER SALAD.
AIR-"Blue Bonnets Over The Border."

Take, take, lobsters and lettuces;
Mind that they send you the fish that you order:
Take, take, a decent-sized salad bowl,
One that's sufficiently deep in the border.
Cut into many a slice
All of the fish that's nice,
Place in the bowl with due neatness and order:
Then hard-boil'd eggs you may
Add in a neat array
All round the bowl, just by way of a border.

Take from the cellar of salt a proportion:
Take from the castors both pepper and oil,
With vinegar, too--but a moderate portion--
Too much of acid your salad will spoil.
Mix them together,
You need not mind whether
You blend them exactly in apple-pie order;
But when you've stirr'd away,
Mix up the whole you may--
All but the eggs, which are used as a border.

Take, take, plenty of seasoning;
A teaspoon of parsley that's chopp'd in small pieces:
Though, though, the point will bear reasoning,
A small taste of onion the flavor increases.
As the sauce curdle may,
Should it: the process stay,
Patiently do it again in due order;
For, if you chance to spoil
Vinegar, eggs, and oil,
Still to proceed would on lunacy border.

STEWED STEAK
AIR--"Had I a Heart for Falsehood Framed."

Had I pound of tender Steak,
I'd use it for a stew;
And if the dish you would partake,
I'll tell you what to do.
Into a stew-pan, clean and neat,
Some butter should be flung:
And with it stew your pound of meat,
A tender piece--but young.

And when you find the juice express'd
By culinary art,
To draw the gravy off, were best,
And let it stand apart.
Then, lady, if you'd have a treat,
Be sure you can't be wrong
To put more butter to your meat,
Nor let it stew too long.

And when the steak is nicely done,
To take it off were best;
And gently let it fry alone,
Without the sauce or zest;
Then add the gravy--with of wine
A spoonful in it flung;
And a shalot cut very fine--
Let the shalot be young.

And when the whole has been combined,
More stewing 't will require;
Ten minutes will suffice--but mind
Don't have too quick a fire.
Then serve it up--'t will form a treat!
Nor fear you've cook'd it wrong;
GOURMETS in all the old 't will meet,
And GOURMANDS in the young.

GREEN PEA SOUP.
AIR--"The Ivy Green."
Oh! a splendid Soup is the true Pea Green
I for it often call;
And up it comes in a smart tureen,
When I dine in my banquet hall.
When a leg of mutton at home is boil'd,
The liquor I always keep,
And in that liquor (before 'tis spoil'd)
A peck of peas I steep.
When boil'd till tender they have been,
I rub through a sieve the peas so green.

Though the trouble the indolent may shock,
I rub with all my power;
And having return'd them to the stock,
I stew them for more than an hour;
Then of younger peas I take some more,
The mixture to improve,
Thrown in a little time before
The soup from the fire I move.
Then seldom a better soup is seen,
Than the old familiar soup Pea Green.

Since first I began my household career, How many my dishes have been!
But the one that digestion never need fear,
Is the simple old soup Pea Green.
The giblet may tire, the gravy pall,
And the turtle lose its charm;
But the Green Pea triumphs over them all,
And does not the slightest harm.
Smoking hot in a smart tureen,
A rare soup is the true Pea Green!

TRIFLE.
AIR--"The Meeting of the Waters."

There's not in the wide world so tempting a sweet
As that Trifle where custard and macaroons meet;
Oh! the latest sweet tooth from my head must depart
Ere the taste of that Trifle shall not win my heart.

Yet it is not the sugar that's thrown in between,
Nor the peel of the lemon so candied and green;
'Tis not the rich cream that's whipp'd up by a mill:
Oh, no! it is something more exquisite still.

'Tis that nice macaroons in the dish I have laid,
Of which a delicious foundation is made;
And you'll find how the last will in flavor improve,
When soak'd with the wine that you pour in above.

Sweet PLATEAU of Trifle! how great is my zest
For thee, when spread o'er with the jam I love best,
When the cream white of eggs--to be over thee thrown,
With a whisk kept on purpose--is mingled in one!

MUTTON CHOPS.
AIR--"Come dwell with me."

Come dine with me, come dine with me,
And our dish shall be, our dish shall be,
A Mutton Chop from the butcher's shop--
And how I cook it you shall see.
The Chop I choose is not too lean;
For to cut off the fat I mean.
Then to the fire I put it down,
And let it fry until 'tis brown.
Come dine with me; yes, dine with me, etc.

I'll fry some bread cut rather fine,
To place betwixt each chop of mine;
Some spinach, or some cauliflowers,
May ornament this dish of ours.
I will not let thee once repine
At having come with me to dine:
'T will be my pride to hear thee say,
"I have enjoy'd my Chop, to-day."
Come, dine with me; yes, dine with me;
Dine, dine, dine, with me, etc.

BARLEY WATER.
AIR--"On the Banks of Allan Water."

For a jug of Barley Water
Take a saucepan not too small;
Give it to your wife or daughter,
If within your call.
If her duty you have taught her,
Very willing each will be
To prepare some Barley Water
Cheerfully for thee.

For a jug of Barley Water,
Half a gallon, less or more,
From the filter that you bought her,
Ask your wife to pour.
When a saucepan you have brought her
Polish'd bright as bright can be,
In it empty all the water,
Either you or she.

For your jug of Barley Water
('Tis a drink by no means bad),
Some two ounces and a quarter
Of pearl barley add.
When 'tis boiling, let your daughter
Skim from blacks to keep it free;
Added to your Barley Water
Lemon rind should be.

For your jug of Barley Water
(I have made it very oft),
It must boil, so tell your daughter,
Till the barley's soft.
Juice of a small lemon's quarter
Add; then sweeten all like tea;
Strain through sieve your Barley Water--
'Twill delicious be.

BOILED CHICKEN.
AIR--"Norah Creina."

Lesbia hath a fowl to cook;
But, being anxious not to spoil it,
Searches anxiously our book,
For how to roast, and how to boil it.
Sweet it is to dine upon--
Quite alone, when small its size is;--
And, when cleverly 'tis done,
Its delicacy quite surprises.
Oh! my tender pullet dear!
My boiled--not roasted--tender Chicken;
I can wish
No other dish,
With thee supplied, my tender Chicken!

Lesbia, take some water cold,
And having on the fire placed it,
And some butter, and be bold--
When 'tis hot enough--taste it.
Oh! the Chicken meant for me
Boil before the fire grows dimmer,
Twenty minutes let it be
In the saucepan left to simmer.
Oh, my tender Chicken dear!
My boil'd, delicious, tender Chicken!
Rub the breast
(To give a zest)
With lemon-juice, my tender Chicken.

Lesbia hath with sauce combined
Broccoli white, without a tarnish;
'Tis hard to tell if 'tis design'd
For vegetable or for garnish.
Pillow'd on a butter'd dish,
My Chicken temptingly reposes,
Making gourmands for it wish,
Should the savor reach their noses.
Oh, my tender pullet dear!
My boiled--not roasted--tender Chicken
Day or night,
Thy meal is light,
For supper, e'en, my tender Chicken.

STEWED DUCK AND PEAS.
AIR--"My Heart and Lute."

I give thee all, I can no more,
Though poor the dinner be;
Stew'd Duck and Peas are all the store
That I can offer thee.
A Duck, whose tender breast reveals
Its early youth full well;
And better still, a Pea that peels
From fresh transparent shell.

Though Duck and Peas may fail, alas!
One's hunger to allay;
At least for luncheon they may pass,
The appetite to stay,
If seasoned Duck an odor bring
From which one would abstain,
The Peas, like fragrant breath of Spring,
Set all to rights again.

I give thee all my kitchen lore,
Though poor the offering be;
I'll tell thee how 'tis cook'd, before
You come to dine with me:
The Duck is truss'd from head to heels,
Then stew'd with butter well;
And streaky bacon, which reveals
A most delicious smell

When Duck and Bacon in a mass
You in the stew-pan lay,
A spoon around the vessel pass,
And gently stir away:
A table-spoon of flour bring, A quart of water bring,
Then in it twenty onions fling,
And gently stir again.

A bunch of parsley, and a leaf
Of ever-verdant bay,
Two cloves--I make my language brief--
Then add your Peas you may!
And let it simmer till it sings
In a delicious strain,
Then take your Duck, nor let the strings
For trussing it remain.

The parsley fail not to remove,
Also the leaf of bay;
Dish up your Duck--the sauce improve
In the accustom'd way,
With pepper, salt, and other things,
I need not here explain:
And, if the dish contentment brings,
You'll dine with me again.

CURRY.

Three pounds of veal my darling girl prepares,
And chops it nicely into little squares;
Five onions next prepares the little minx
(The biggest are the best her Samiwel thinks).
And Epping butter, nearly half a pound,
And stews them in a pan until they're brown'd.

What's next my dexterous little girl will do?
She pops the meat into the savory stew,
With curry powder, table-spoonfulls three,
And milk a pint (the richest that may be);

And, when the dish has stewed for half-an-hour,
A lemon's ready juice she'll o'er it pour:
Then, bless her! then she gives the luscious pot
A very gentle boil--and serves quite hot.

P.S. Beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish;
Lobsters, or prawns, or any kind of fish
Are fit to make A CURRY. 'Tis, when done,
A dish for emperors to feed upon.

2007-07-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

glory

Leonardo DaVinci writes:
OF THE WAY OF REPRESENTING A BATTLE.

First you must represent the smoke of artillery mingling in the air with the dust and tossed up by the movement of horses and the combatants... The more the combatants are in this turmoil the less will they be seen, and the less contrast will there be in their lights and shadows. Their faces and figures and their appearance, and the musketeers as well as those near them you must make of a glowing red...

The air must be full of arrows in every direction, some shooting upwards, some falling, some flying level. The balls from the guns must have a train of smoke following their flight. The figures in the foreground you must make with dust on the hair and eyebrows and on other flat places likely to retain it...

And if you make any one fallen, you must show the place where he has slipped and been dragged along the dust into blood stained mire; and in the half-liquid earth arround show the print of the tramping of men and horses who have passed that way. Make also a horse dragging the dead body of his master, and leaving behind him, in the dust and mud, the track where the body was dragged along.

You must make the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and make the nostrils drawn up -- which is the cause of the lines of which I speak -- and the lips arched upwards and discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentation.

And make some one shielding his terrified eyes with one hand, the palm towards the enemy, while the other rests on the ground to support his half raised body. Others represent shouting with their mouths open, and running away. You must scatter arms of all sorts among the feet of the combatants, as broken shields, lances, broken swords and other such objects.

And you must make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust, which is changed into crimson mire where it has mingled with the flowing blood whose colour shows it issuing in a sinuous stream from the corpse. Others must be represented in the agonies of death grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies and their legs contorted. Some might be shown disarmed and beaten down by the enemy, turning upon the foe, with teeth and nails, to take an inhuman and bitter revenge.

You might see some riderless horse rushing among the enemy, with his mane flying in the wind, and doing no little mischief with his heels. Some maimed warrior may be seen fallen to the earth, covering himself with his shield, while the enemy, bending over him, tries to deal him a deathstroke. There again might be seen a number of men fallen in a heap over a dead horse.

You would see some of the victors leaving the fight and issuing from the crowd, rubbing their eyes and cheeks with both hands to clean them of the dirt made by their watering eyes smarting from the dust and smoke... And there may be a river into which horses are galloping, churning up the water all round them into turbulent waves of foam and water, tossed into the air and among the legs and bodies of the horses. And there must not be a level spot that is not trampled with gore.

from The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci (reprinted from my LJ, July 2006)

2007-06-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

My Object All Sublime

In 2000, I decided that the theatre program at Christopher Newport University was a class act, and determined that, over the hill as I was, I would use my position as a faculty spouse to justify trying out for shows. I auditioned (using "The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish" as my song) , and was offered a part in the Chorus, which I accepted, knowing full well it would be harder than any part I'd ever done. And it was, but it was so worth it. I got to work with director George Hillow, who not only brought out humorous scenes and situations I never suspected were in the original script, but who also created fantastic sets.

(In the photo, I'm the really pale one. My character was called "Honorable Third-From-Left".)

Early in rehearsals, George put out a call for new lyrics in two of the show's numbers, "I've Got A Little List," and "A More Humane Mikado." Though most of the show's lyrics have aged well, the social offenders on whom the characters were wishing death and humiliation have been replaced by much newer annoyances to revile. It turned out quite soon that he was happy enough with a set of lyrics for the little list that had been used in another production, and I turned my attention to the Mikado's number.

One or two verses I initially wrote were axed and replaced by better ones (also by me). In the course of rehearsal, bits of business were added in.

It was just wonderful, hearing my lyrics sung by a soloist with chorus and orchestra for a live audience that gave the impression they were enjoying it. (The highest compliment the show received, in my opinion, was a student sitting behind my wife, who remarked to his chum, "This is more fun than getting wrecked!")

Allow me to set the stage. The Mikado of Japan, feared by all comes to the town of Titipu, where he is greeted by all the other principals and the chorus. By way of introduction, he sings the words of W.S. Gilbert (which I will put asterisks in front of, just in case anyone thinks I'm trying to pass off his lyrics as more of my work):

Mikado:
*A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist!
*To nobody second, I'm certainly reckoned a true philanthopist.
*It is my very humane endeavor to make, to some extent,
*Each evil liver a running river of harmless merriment.

*My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time--
*To let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime--
*And make each prisoner pent
*Unwillingly represent
*A source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment!

The boring breadwinner who rings you at dinner
To change long-distance plans;
We'll let this annoyer try calling his lawyer
With string and two tin cans.

The dowager old, who makes so bold
As to 'lift' her form and face --
When she has healed, 'twill be revealed
Her nose they did misplace.

The chip-eating chap in his easy chair's lap
Who's wild for spectator sport
Will play them all from inside the ball
Being bounced around the court!

The lout who enjoys his musical noise
And shares it with you on the street;
We shall make a drum of his bum-bum-bum
And kick it on every beat...

*My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time
*To let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime,
*And make each prisoner pent
*Unwillingly represent
*A source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment.

Chorus:
*His object all sublime, he shall achieve in time (etc)

Mikado:
The calliginous creep with his cell-phone's beep
In crowded concert halls;
His number we'll lend to the Psychic Friends
And let them receive his calls!

The lawyers who...

At this point, a cell phone is heard. Jon stops singing. The orchestra stops playing. The chorus and everyone else on stage starts digging frantically through their costumes, looking for the phone. A Gentleman of Japan, who is somehow third from right at this point, triumphantly comes up with the chirping instrument, opens it up and says, "Moshi-moshi? ... hai... hai... " Sudden realization that the call is for the Big Guy himself, who stands looking at me with royal impatience. Holding the phone out, I take a couple of steps, then remembering my place, I go the rest of the way on my knees and give him the phone. "Yes, this is the Mikado," says Jon. "No, I can't right now... well, I'm in the middle of a number. Yes... Yes, I'll call you later, Mumsy." He hangs up the phone. I have my hand out for it, diffidently, but he decides he likes it and puts it in his pocket. I grovel back to my place.

Mikado:
...The lawyers who race and ambulance chase
As a business strategem
Will see how they like to pedal a bike
While the ambulance chases them.

The mentalities small, who write on a wall
That "So and So is a Jerk" --
We'll see to it these'll be everyone's easel
Of calli-o-graphic work!

The playgoer loud, so exceedingly proud
To announce how the show comes out
Will be condemned to announce the end
Of himself; quite soon, no doubt.

*My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time (etc)

Chorus:
*His object all sublime, he shall achieve in time (etc)

(We moved from Virginia in 2005, but for as long as we were there, George was telling people that the biggest laugh ever was when I said "Moshi-moshi." I blush to confess I can't remember offhand the name of the fellow chorus member who provided me with this standard telephone greeting. If it comes to me, I'll edit it in here and pretend I never forgot.)

2007-06-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

For Geckoman
It might have been me that warned you about pocket change and batteries. When I was at McDonald, I was standing back in the production area and my thigh felt warm. A second later, it was hot, and I jumped. The culprit was a couple of AAs and some jingly money, burning a hole in my pocket, or trying to. Since then, I've been very careful about it. I even thought about it as recently as this week.

{This comment is here because LiveJournal is rejecting almost all my attempts to reply to the journals of my friends, or even post anything on my own journal longer than a line.}

2007-06-04T06:09:00.001-07:00

Our Hero Treads Some Boards

After almost two solid years, it finally happens. I got my audition at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield. If I can get into the upcoming season of shows, in any part whatever, I'll get to hang out with theatre people and (I fully expect) will show them that I'm capable of good things.

I think it went well. I rehearsed my prepared cutting for weeks, and practiced my chosen musical number, "The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish." I practiced vocals and accompaniment, and a few nights before time to put it on a CD, I had a wondrous thought: I could edit a good performance in SoundForge! So, instead of settling for a relatively decent single take, I worked on getting each part just right and stitched them together. The result was seamless. I had to laugh like a mad scientist. It worked so well! MWAHAHA! (Wait, that's Blinky the Clown's laugh. Let's move along.)

Still there was a touch of uncertainty about the CD. As I took the disk out, JukeBox told me that was my last free sample of CD burning -- I didn't know these were samples! -- and after that they'd be slower. Wasn't that already the slow kind? Oh well. I tried the disk in the old boom box I used to use at work, and it wouldn't play. I tried it in the DVD player and it worked.

So yesterday I finally quit goofing around and went in to make my 2:45 appointment, printing out new copies of my theatre resume and head shot. It takes less than ten minutes to get from here to there. I love convenient venues! I filled out a form (neatly) and pulled out the head shot. Interesting -- the details of my appearance had been replaced by solid black areas. Good thing I printed more than one. I was given three cuttings to look at and some time to prepare.

Cutting number one was from "Guys On Ice -- The Ice-Fishing Musical." Number two was from "The Taming of the Shrew," and the third was from "The Full Monty." The director's assistant talked to me some, and was happy to hear that I have relatives in Escanaba (and thus might have some insight into da You Pee accent for "Guys On Ice"). I asked how to pronounce "satiety." Nobody was really sure, but we decided on a pronunciation anyway. After a while, it was my turn to go in.

On the way, she asked what I'd be singing. She knew "The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish," which is apparently a big number in For The Boys. Maybe I'll see that some time. They said, why not sing first and get it over with, so I watched with some feeling of suspense as the disk was loaded into their boom box and the button was pressed. Nothing happened. She pressed it again and it started playing, so there was one obstacle out of the way. I read the three scenes, after which they gave me a couple of others to read, which I hope was a good sign. I had time to prepare a bit, as before.

Then they thanked me, and I went out to the car. I was just a little unhappy that I never got to deliver my speech (a compilation of Slanthead Elder's words from Mister Zip by H. Allen Smith), and almost went back in to do it. Prudence won out. Thanks, Pru!

Now I'm wondering what happens if I get in. To I have to shake my thang if I get into "The Full Monty"? If I get into the cast of "Guys On Ice," will I have to sweat under hot lights for a month of performances wearing a heavy coat and a cap with flaps?

2007-06-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Hello, LJ Friends. Here's the post LJ won't let me put up.

Last week, we took Sarah to see the Wiggles at Six Flags New England. When we got home, the camera was gone, and their Lost & Found doesn't have it. So somebody somewhere is looking at my camera, trying to use it, deciding it's a piece of junk and throwing it away, and I'm without a camera.

Yesterday, Cathy was going to go with me to drop my car off at the Saturn place to get the AC fixed, and then we were going to go places. Maybe look at cameras. Instead, Sarah swallowed a coin, so Cathy went to the hospital with her while I waited a couple of hours to find out that my car will cost another thousand to fix (in addition to what it cost to find that out). When I got to the hospital, they couldn't find them and said they must not be there, but as I was leaving the parking garage, I saw Cathy's car, so I went back in and located them in the X-ray department. Then we ate at Friendly's, and I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite of clam chowder (which was otherwise tasty).

This morning, Sarah was up bright and early for no good reason. I asked her if she wanted to take a walk to the park with me, and she did, riding on her scooter, which I carried halfway there and all the way home. She played on the swings. We had the place to ourselves until we were about to leave, when suddenly two or three other families showed up. It was thundering, though, so we decided to head on home. After that, we went to Friendly's for breakfast (not the same one as yesterday -- that was a cafe-style mini-Friendly's at the hospital) and walked home in the rain, carrying our umbrellas. I carried mine right-side-up, over my head. Sarah swung hers and then asked me to carry it for her.

Later today, Cathy & Sarah might be at a picnic (depending on the weather) while I go audition for the Majestic's upcoming season. I have prepared a CD with the accompaniment to "The Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish," which I recorded, using Sound Forge to edit together a more-or-less adequate version. (It plays on our DVD player, not on the boom box. I wonder what they'll have. I can't try burning it again because the program says it won't do any more for free.)

Tomorrow I'll get back to the book I'm working on for my sister's layout business. When completed, it will pay almost enough to fix the car's air conditioning, if everything goes as it's supposed to go. I also have the option of calling salvage yards to see if they have a used compressor, but caveat emptor if I do.

After six attempts to post this at LJ, including breaking it up, I've given up and am posting it here.

2007-03-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yes, we all think we have a blog in us. The question is, how many? If Live Journal counts, then at least one. Go on over there to see what I've posted (kip-w), and if you need to mail me, my address is in the user info there. And one day, I'll start filling this up with my old LJ posts, and keep using that for the new stuff.