I don’t know about you, but I’m worried about November. My quant friends say there are a couple of groups aimed at moving swing voters and low-information voters in the six swing states that matter. Bang for the buck. Check out Working America and Courier Newsrooms. Give to candidates or the party? OK. Give to get out the vote: great for everyone.
I practice the Radio Swiss Classic lifestyle: it is my sound track at home and while driving. Until recently I turned it off when I picked my grandson up from school.
I left it on recently, and was surprised to hear him identify every solo instrument, then ask me about conductors, orchestras and concertos. They have a music program at his school and it is apparently quite effective.
I asked Spotify for a flute concerto, but the one it picked was heavy on orchestra and light on flutes. I whimsically said, “Get out of the way orchestra, we want the flutes.” He repeated it and has used the same sentence structure to ask the orchestra to clear out and stop covering clarinets and horns.
I played him my only love song arranged for an 80-piece band (If Offered A Choice), and he asked if I had conducted it or written the music. This led to a discussion of lyricists, his learning that singers rarely conduct simultaneously, the role of arrangers, and what an orchestra score does.
To say I was surprised is to put it mildly.
My mom treated my brother and I like adults, which is why when I was 10 and he was 7 and she was in college, she taught us two drinking songs.
O, it’s beer, beer, beer
That makes you want to cheer
On the farm, on the farm!
It’s beer, beer, beer,
That makes you want to cheer
On the Leland Stanford Junior Varsity Farm!
My eyes are dim.
I cannot see.
I have not brought my specs with me.
I have – hey! – not – ho!
Brought my specs with me.
I taught the second half to my grandson, Age 5. Then I tried to sneak in the first part. “Oh it’s Cats, Cats, Cats that make you want to chat.” He has no idea what the Leland Stanford Junior Varsity Farm is, but his dad wouldn’t mind if he goes there. I’m, unsurprisingly, pulling for MIT.
We came up with a half dozen couplets, each as good as whiskey/frisky, vodka/oughta, and of course the cappers, cold roast duck/crumpet and split pea soup/cracker. See what they did there?
I have yet to teach him mom’s other favorite (I only remember this part):
Beer Beer Beer for old Benson High
You bring the whiskey, I'll bring the Rye.
Send the Freshmen out for gin,
Don’t let a sober sophomore in.
We never stagger, we never fall,
We sober up on wood alcohol…
No wonder I drank Dr. Pepper and vodka in college.
Long-time friend and contributor Daniel Dern noted an NPR item about cassette tapes that mentioned sales quadrupled last year. If you’d asked me before I read the item, I’d have told you there were no more cassettes. But if you’d asked me five years ago about a resurgence of vinyl, I’d have laughed in your face. Who would want skips, surface noise and degradation with every play? Answer: apparently, a bunch of young people who have no idea what they’re in store for. Give me a CD.
As an audio guy, of course, I think cassette tapes are an abomination. The quality of audio on a tape is directly proportional to the width, and the speed. Broadcast quality was defined as 7 1/2 ips on quarter inch tape, so 1 7/8 ips on a .15 tape didn’t fill the bill for me; just for everybody else in the non-pro audio universe.
And Betamax should have beaten the vastly inferior VHS, while Laserdisc should have beaten them both, HiDef before its time.
The best piece of advice I never followed came from a fellow editor at CMP, as we rolled onto the Internet. “For God’s sake, never learn HTML. If you do, people will expect you to write it.”
CMP had an excellent continuing education policy, and I was encouraged to take a number of courses over 20 years. I chose to take a four-day residential HTML boot camp in 1994, so I could hand-code the Windows Magazine CD-Rom. It was sufficient for me to hand-code this blog starting in October 1998. Which only means I spent untold hours writing code instead of words. I finally got out of the HTML business (with the exception of some minor tweaks) in 2005 when I switched to Typepad.
In fact, I recently quit Aweber as my mailing list provider because their messages now default to HTML, rather than clear text over HTML. Hello Mailchimp!
And Goodbye HTML, except as an occasional hobby. I admit it came in handy for gaming the on-line reunion book for my 50th at MIT. Turned out you can make the website roll over and speak if you know HTML.
The movie Daddio is an artistic and technical marvel, and to top it off it is only 1:41 long. Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson (Don's little girl) spend all but five minutes of the film talking to each other as Penn drives a taxi from JFK to Manhattan. Spoiler alert: yes, it doesn't take 90 minutes for that drive. They are delayed by an accident on the way in.
Genius is not too strong a word for writer/director Christy Hall. They talk of cabbages and kings and life, and make it all fascinating. Well worth your time and money.
In 1978 I was a business reporter for the Oregon Journal, assigned to cover a series of hearings being held in the four corners of Oregon.
I rode with several Irish staffers. We spent dozens of hours driving in Oregon’s hilly hinterlands. Radio reception was sketchy and there was often no source of sound in the car save the human voice.
Midway through the tour, Dick Feeney, a former reporter who was running an institute at Portland State, turned around from the front seat and said, “Paul, who are your people,” a question I hadn’t been asked since college.
“One-fourth Irish on Mom’s side, pure Swiss on Dad’s,” I answered.
“Well,” he said, “one drop of Irish blood makes you Irish, but you may be more Irish than you think.”
“How’s that?”
“What part of Switzerland?”
“The canton of St. Galen.”
He chuckled as did one of his colleagues.
“That explains it. You’ve held your own in conversation for hours. It is clear you've kissed the Blarney Stone.”
(He meant that figuratively, but a few years later I did it literally.)
“You see Paul, there was a wave of Celtic migration to St. Galen. There is a Celtic Cathedral in the capital. I suspect there’s more than a little Celt mixed into your Swiss as well.”
That may explain something I had noticed for years. I thought of myself as half Swiss, but all my Swiss relatives were taciturn. As Everett Dirksen almost said, Irish here, Irish there, the first thing you know you’re an almost Irishman.
I know rag left, centered, rag right and justified aren’t fonts, but do you ever notice them?
And speaking of noticing, I noticed the name tags at Moraga Safeway are in various typefonts. Like the name tags at Disneyland (silver decoration for 5 years service, gold for 10, diamond for 25), I thought the fonts indicated seniority, and that’s what some employees told me. But the manager said the tags are made at corporate, and she had never noticed that some were Helvetica Bold (that is, sans serif) while others were in an Italic decorative font. Pay attention people!