Speaker for the Diodes

"You can be the best in the world and not be recognized.... A lot of it has to do with breaks. If a coach at Tennessee State hadn't given me a break at 14, I never would have been in the Olympic Games." -- Wyomia Tyus (b. 1945-08-29), sprinter (gold medals in 1964 and 1968).

"They know enough who know how to learn." -- Henry Adams [thanks to blueeowyn]

"If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07), My Day (newspaper column) 1958-11-05

Last month, I posted some sheet music, for a tune called "Eff the Big C" (or "F#$% Cancer", but there are already a lot of works with the latter title, so ...). Today I finally got around to putting an MP3 of it on the web (along with a couple other versions of the sheet music -- different clefs, with/without tab -- at http://www.dglenn.org/music/Eff_the_Big_C.html.

It's sloppy, and I know it -- I started out yesterday or the day before, working to a metronome and then playing along with a MIDI file to keep me in time, but the result kept turning out thuddy and plodding and I wasn't happy with any of those takes, so I punted and started over without external timing aids, and the result was a little uneven. And beyond that, a couple of tracks ought to have been redone, but I hit the "not enough disk space to do much more" point about the same time as my ears started going wonky and the dog started wanting to make noise, so the "tired enough to make things worse with stupid/climsy errors" stage was probably right around the corner anyhow. Bottom line: I'm feeling too impatient to set it aside nearly done and wait for the next day I'd get a chance to finish it, so I've stuck it on the web even as rough as it is. Somdeday I'll tackle it again.

My bandmates can attest that I do sometimes need a bit of nudging with regard to timing when we're playing together, and some do-overs in the studio. It's even harder when it's just myself. (Yes, I know the answer to this problem: More Practice. I mostly take the "playing counts as practicing" approach and just play, but every so often there's some specific thing I need to focus on, and it's time to do the kind of practicing that feels like practice/drill work. Also: I haven't been playing/practicing mandolin enough lately.)

I wound up trying different guitars looking for one that had a sound that fit the tune even after being run through my half-baked recording setup. (The solid-body electric would've been the most convenient -- no microphones to mess with -- but I couldn't get the sound I wanted going direct.) When I got to the point where I had too many instruments to fit on or next to my bed, I relocated the computer to Mom's living room. Which I'm going to need to tidy a bit before I crash. (Yes, that's an old Radio Shack PZM (pressure zone microphone) gaff-taped to the wall; and yes, there's a dynamic mic tied to a guitar stand with a bungee cord (all my mic stands are in Baltimore).) Things mostly worked except for my own sloppy playing (OT1H, a day when I wasn't feeling well wasn't the best day to work on this; OTOH, if I'd been feeling better, I would have gotten other things done, which involved driving, instead of this) ... and my not figuring out how to capture the sound of the doumbek adequately (but I know whom to ask about that later).

Anyhow, it might not be "put on a CD to sell" quality, but at least it's recorded and there, so folks who don't read music can hear it. From my comments here you can tell that I don't think it's great work, but I'm happy enough with it to let y'all hear it, and I think I've learned a little more about my reccording tools in the last two days, so I should get better at some parts of this process. And I'm definitely pleased with the composition, this thing I wrote in 2011; I just need to work on the execution.

So there it is: Eff_the_Big_C.mp3 for whoever's interested in hearing it. And a long list of other tunes I should also be trying to record ...

"I was born, lucky me
 In a land that I love
 Though I am poor, I am free
 When I grow I shall fight
 For this land I shall die
 Let her sun never set
 Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, 'toria
 Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, 'toria."
  -- from "Victoria" by The Kinks (1969, Arthur), written by Ray Davies

[Happy Victoria Day to my Canadian friends! Yeah, I know I just quoted an English, not Canadian songwriter, but he did mention Canada in the last verse ...]

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." -- Nelson Mandela

[To Christians celebrating on the Western calendar: a blessed Whitsunday -- Pentecost -- to you!]

[Y'all remember Xena: Warior Princess, starring Lucy Lawless, right?]

"In short, when I can tell you how I break the laws of gravity,
 And why my togs expose my intermammary concavity,
 And why my comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily
 To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of Omphale),
 And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's versicon,
 [She holds up a tomato:]
 And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon,
 And why this Grecian scenery looks more like the Antipodes,
 You'll say I'm twice the heroine of any in Euripides!"
   -- from "I am the very model of a heroine barbarian", by Kevin Wald, 1996 [the melody should be obvious, no?] Note: original has footnotes which some folks may find useful and/or entertaining

(Though I'm a night owl and more likely to be falling asleep than getting up at the relevant time, ever since first reading this all those years ago the line "I wake up every morning, ere the dawn is rhododactylous" flits through my head every so often and makes me giggle. When I first saw this, something about the way that word (a) fit so perfectly, (b) yanked me straight back to middle school and Greek class, and (c) was just not a word I expected to see in an English-language piece, made me laugh so hard I had to stop reading to catch my breath. It took me several readings to make it past that line to the rest of the verse and the rest of the song.)

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[Donald Glen Arthur Sr.: b. 1931-11-04, d. 1999-05-17]

Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, interviewed by Thomas Rogers in Salon (published 2009-07-07):

[I've had this in the queue for ages; I'm using it today because a friend recently linked to this article about a lawsuit related to the topic.]

"What do they call it ... the primordial soup? The glop? That heartbreaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets." -- Edward Albee, Seascape

[To everyone celebrating the giving of the Torah today, I wish you a good Shavuot (or at least a good nap if you were up all night).]

"My father spent his years fighting his size, wishing he was smaller, weaker, less of a giant. He was taught to hate his body, and he was ashamed of the amount of space he took up. But he passed his strength to me, and I won't squander my inheritance. I will not let myself be diminished." -- Tiffany at morecabaret.com, 2013-05-07 [thanks to multiple friends on FB who linked to this]

"We are learning that those amenities we took for granted before 2003, you know- the luxuries -- electricity, clean water from faucets, walkable streets, safe schools -- those are for deserving populations. Those are for people who don't allow occupiers into their country.

[...]

"We're learning that the leaders don't make history. Populations don't make history. Historians don't write history. News networks do. The Foxes, and CNNs, and BBCs, and Jazeeras of the world make history. They twist and turn things to fit their own private agendas."

-- Riverbend, 2013-04-09 [thanks to twistedchick for linking to this]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-05-12:

"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness." -- Honoré de Balzac

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

Upon being awakened by a phone call: "I have a recurring nightmare that I'm never going to get a good night's sleep and then I wake up to find it's a recurring reality." -- from Freefall by Mark Stanley, 2013-05-10

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice." -- Henry Louis Gates

Why this quote today:

"In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of 10 May, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades 'against the un-German spirit.'" -- Wikipedia: Nazi book burnings

Edited to add:  Also see Monica Roberts' post about that today:

"Many of those books that went up in flames that night as Nazi Propaganda Minster Joseph Goebbels spoke to a crowd of 40,000 that evening came from the recently raided sex institute of Magnus Hirschfeld.

"Hirschfeld [...] was doing much of the pioneering transsexual research there at the Berlin based institute and it went up in flames. [...]

"And as a trans person, you are also left to ponder the question had Hirschfeld's institute and those books and papers survived, how much futher along trans related medical care and research would be if it hadn't been burned that night in the Bebelplatz?"

Today is:
Gregorian: 2013 May 10
Julian: 2013 April 27
Hebrew: 5773 Sivan 1
Islamic: 1434 Jumada t-Tania 29
Persian: 1392 Ordibehesht 20
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.0.7.0
Indian Civil Calendar: 1935 Vaisakha 20

"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07), Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

Stayed up late packing, slept a couple hours, then got up again and have been going for 26 hours and counting w/o more sleep. Am home (if it counts as home before I've picked up Perrine and brought her back here). Check-in at BA was going to charge us a whole lot of money for extra baggage -- nearly 2/3 of what their published policy said, so less than we expected -- then there was a long period of waiting and confusion and phone calls between BA staff and then all of a sudden we weren't being charged anything for extra bags and they handed Mom's credit card back. Don't quite grok what happened but didn't want to jinx it (or add still more delay) by asking. Larnaca security confiscated a bottle of Commanderia and jar of watermelon glyco from Mom's carry-on (no, I don't know what made her think these didn't count as too much liquid to carry on. Heathrow security was annoying as %$^# but I don't think I lost anything there this time. Company that does all the weelchair assistance for all airlines at Heathrow screwed up so the four wheelchair passengers (including Mom) were 20-30 minutes late boarding (they'd been very helpful right up until then), but pilot flew very fast and made up most of the time. Near end, pilot announced the flight was being rerouted "east" to avoid weather; I had trouble recognizing what terrain peeked through clouds, thought I recognized the Magothy river but didn't think that made sense, then I saw something that looked rather a lot like the US Naval Academy, which would mean "east" was really "east and south"; at end of flight, pilot beamed a huge smile when I asked whether we had flown over the Academy and confirmed that we had. US Customs took a long time (mostly waiting in line), opened all of Mom's bags and none of mine, and let everything through after asking what stuff was and how to pronounce "dra(c)hana". Guitar and banjo survived trip as checked baggage in inadequate cases (saz went as carry-on) but the backgammon/chess set I bought in Ledra wound up with a busted latch despite being in middle of suitcase with soft stuff inside & around it. Have done most of what I really needed to get done before I could go to bed (including making the bed, finding the charger for the PowerBook, and getting Mom to find her pills). So: good night. Don't forget, The Homespun Ceilidh Band is performing at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, MD this weekend. I think I can wake up by then.

(Stella: like I said, when tired, I babble. Now very very tired but tried to keep this short anyhow.)

"A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood. " -- Chinese Proverb [thanks to blueeowyn]

"When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed." -- Russel D. Moore, "Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience", 2010-06-01

From "My Time of Day", from Guys and Dolls (music & lyrics by Frank Loesser:

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.

When the smell of the rainwashed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the streetlamp light
Fills the gutter with gold

That's my time of day