Tools: part one

Posted on April 28, 2013 by J L tagged.

To Ergaleio: sign on a shop in Athens says “The Tool” written out in Greek with tools.

Many, many hand axes have been found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Such axes were made by Homo Erectus, the first tool making creature.

These people loved making handaxes. They made them for practical use, yes, but also for the sheer creative joy of it. They made hand axes that were far too large for normal use, just because they liked the form. At least that’s what it looks like from this distance. They made Acheulian hand axes in all sizes and varieties. These were the first tools that are recognizable as such.

This is a hand axe that was found near Gray’s Inn Road, London. It is 350,000 years old.

John Frere (10 August 1740 – 12 July 1807) was an English antiquary and a pioneering discoverer of paleolithic tools in association with large extinct animals such as elephants.

He used the Gray’s Inn hand axe and one he found in Hoxne, Suffolk, to illustrate the antiquity of human culture at a time when many people thought the world was 6,000 years old. Actually, many people still do think that the world is 6,000 years old and they carry around misspelled signs to insist upon their belief.

Hand axes were made from flint or any other stone that would take a sharp edge. Flakes were hammered off using another stone, and the flakes themselves were used to make smaller tools such as scrapers and knives.

This is called flint knapping or pressure flaking and it is a technique that can make a tool of great precision and beauty.

About 25,000 years ago, people learned how to control the shape of the flake from the parent block so that long, narrow blades could be made into knives, chisels and gravers.

Maybe those two feet long Acheulian hand axes were made simply as the source for these flake blades.

Bone and antler tools were shaped by abrasion and cutting.

They could be polished with sandstone, so there is ample evidence of several step manufacture here that required planning ahead.

A soft stone could be hollowed out

and a lamp made using animal fat and a wick of twisted vegetable matter.

This is a wooden sickle (Thebes, 1300 BCE) with a flint blade in the shape of a cattle jawbone. Perhaps jawbones were originally used to harvest cereal crops.

The silica in the strong stems of the crop often wore down the flints, leaving behind a deposit or gloss.

A tool kit from 14,000 years ago could contain a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone for striking flint pieces off the flint core, a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were used to make beads. Leaves and herbs were often carried as medicine.

Remember Ötzi who was found in the ice in Italy near Bolzano?

He is a well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived about 5,000 years ago. The mummy was found in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps (hence Ötzi) near the Similaun mountain and Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

Seventy objects found with Ötzi. They include a cape of woven grass; a bearskin cap; a goat-hide coat; leather leggings and loincloth; shoes with bearskin soles and deerskin uppers, filled with grass; an unfinished longbow, and a deerskin quiver containing 14 arrows (only two of which were finished); a backpack frame of hazel and larchwood; a copper axe with a wooden haft and leather bindings; a dagger with a flint blade and an ashwood shaft in a woven grass sheath; and some containers of sewn birchbark.

The axe’s haft is 60 centimeters (24 in) long and made from carefully worked yew with a right-angled crook at the shoulder, leading to the blade.

The 9.5 centimetres (3.7 in) long axe head (blade) is made of almost pure copper, produced by a combination of casting, cold forging, polishing, and sharpening. It was let into the forked end of the crook and fixed there using birch tar and tight leather lashing. The blade part of the head extends out of the lashing and shows clear signs of having been used to chop and cut. At the time, such an axe would have been a valuable possession, important both as a tool and as a status symbol for the bearer.

Ötzi’s knife measured 5.2 in in total length. The handle was made of ash, the blade was flint and the sheath of woven lime wood bast. A string was attached to the back of the knife.

Ötzi also had a tool designed for flint knapping, also called a retoucher, because one could pressure flake the knife blade or the projectile points with it, and so sharpen them.

It consisted of a piece of lime tree branch, which was pointed on one side. On the pointed side a hole was drilled, into which a bone plug (stag antler) was inserted with which the knapping was done.

A quiver of arrows was also discovered alongside Ötzi. It was made of leather, and held 14 arrows made of viburnum sapwood. Two of the arrows were completed. They had flint tips, held with birch tar and bindings. The other 12 arrows were unfinished. In the quiver several pieces of antler were also discovered.

Ötzi was also carrying an unfinished yew bow. The stave was 72 inches long.

Ötzi also carried two birch bark containers possibly used to carry some other items. They were about 5.9 in to 6.0 inches in diameter and about 7.8 inches in height. They were stitched together using tree fiber. Tests have shown that one of them contained maple leaves as well as spruce needles and charcoal, probably an ember for fire making. The leaves were most likely medicinal.

He had a long belt with a pouch on the side. In the pouch he had several flakes of flint, a 2.8 in long bone awl, and a small drill. The majority of the pouch was filled with tinder fungus. Some traces of iron pyrites were also found, indicating that he was perhaps using a flint and steel method of fire lighting. We will leave Ötzi for now, but I plan to see him when I next pass through Bolzano.

This is a metate, also referred to as a “piedra de moler” (grinding stone), this tool is related in lineage to the molcajete, and was used by the Mayans and Aztecs.

The metate is used to grind corn and for mashing ingredients to make salsas, purees, and chocolate. La mano is the cylindrical part that you hold in your hands.

There is an idiom in Mexican Spanish, “Echar comal y metate” which literally could mean “throw the tortilla oven and the corngrinder,” but it really means what we mean when we say “chew the fat.” It means chismear which is to gossip. It would be natural to do a lot of talking while grinding and baking.

A quern is a hand-mill for grinding corn or other grains. The simplest kind consists of a large stone with a cavity in the upper surface to contain the corn which is then pounded, rather than ground, by a smaller stone.

The more usual form of quern consists of two circular flat stones, the upper one pierced in the centre, and revolving on a wooden pin inserted in the lower. A handle is attached to the outer edge and used to turn the stone while corn is dropped into the central opening.

Millstones come in pairs. The base or bedstone is stationary. Above the bedstone is the turning runner stone which actually does the grinding.

The runner stone spins above the stationary bedstone creating the “scissoring” or grinding action of the stones.

A runner stone is generally slightly concave, while the bedstone is slightly convex. This helps to channel the ground flour to the outer edges of the stones where it can be gathered up.

The runner stone is supported by a cross-shaped metal piece (rind or rynd) fixed to a “mace head” topping the main shaft or spindle leading to the driving mechanism of the mill which can be powered by wind, water, animal, man.

The Greeks invented the two main components of watermills, the waterwheel and toothed gearing, and were the first to operate undershot, overshot and breastshot waterwheel mills.

Undershot water wheel developed for watermilling since the 1st century BCE.

Overshot water wheel used for watermilling also since the 1st century BCE.

Breastshot water wheel used for watermilling since the 3rd century CE.

The first water-driven wheel is probably the Perachora wheel (3rd c. BCE), in Greece.

The earliest written reference is in the technical treatises Pneumatica and Parasceuastica of the Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium(ca. 280?220 BC).

Those portions of Philo of Byzantium’s mechanical treatise which describe water wheels and which have been previously regarded as later Arabic interpolations, actually date back to the Greek 3rd century BCE original.

The sakia gear is, already fully developed, for the first time attested in a 2nd century BCE Hellenistic wall painting in Ptolemaic Egypt.

People needed to clear the land for crops, so you would think that the earliest dwellings would be made of timber.

In Mesopotamia, however, the earliest building material was sun-dried brick bricks which before 5,000 BCE were molded by hand and looked like stones or even loaves of bread.

Brick molds were made very early.

Mud in almost liquid form was packed down into the molds which were then removed so that the new brick could sit in the hot sun to dry.

Brick molds were used at least as far back as 6,000 BCE in Anatolia (Turkey).

And now I must describe how the soil dug out to make the moat was used, and the method of building the wall. While the digging was going on, the earth that was shoveled out was formed into bricks, which were baked in kilns as soon as sufficient number were made; then using hot bitumen for mortar, the workmen began at revetting the brick each side of the moat, and then went on to erect the actual wall. In both cases they laid rush-mats between every thirty courses of bricks. – Herodotus, i. 179 (of Babylon). The method of making bricks used to take days, but thanks to companies that supply cement brick machine, what used to take days now takes just a few hours.

The floor of the dwelling was made of a carefully laid layer of clay and it was soon discovered that clay could be hardened by firing which ushered in the age of pottery.

The earliest cooking vessels were probably made of wood or a hollowed out stone or gourds or shells.

Right up into the 19th century, native Americans like the Miwoks of the San Francisco bay area boiled water in tightly woven baskets for the processing of acorns.

The earliest pottery we know already shows advanced techniques such as the addition of sand or crushed rock to prevent shrinkage during drying and also to prevent breakage.

Potters seldom used just one clay mixture and they paid a great deal of attention, of course, to the properties of the finished product.

People had burnished the walls and floors of their brick and clay houses and they likewise burnished their pottery by rubbing it with a stone.

In the beginning, a base of the pot was molded over a shape of a hemisphere, perhaps the bottom of an old pot, and then rings of clay were added.

The first potter was the sumerian-babylonian Aruru the great, the almighty gentle mother god of the earth and birth, who created humanity from clay. She molded mankind out of clay using a god as pattern and breathed life into him with her divine exhalation. In Sumerian mythology, Aruru (also known as Ninmah, Nintu, Ninhursaga, Belet- ili or Mami) was the almighty mother goddess of the earth and birth.

She created the first man out of clay (adamah = the female soil). She confected seven mother-vessels for women and seven for men. « The shapes of humanity are formed by Aruru » as say the Assyrians.

This is the Sumer tree of life (qaballah). In Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, Adamu was the first man.

The gods tricked Adamu and his descendants out of immortality – not wanting man to be immortal like the gods – by telling him that the magic food of eternal life was poisonous to him, and as such Adamu didn’t eat it and so didn’t become immortal.

The word “ceramics” comes from the Greek keramikos (?????????), meaning “pottery”, which in turn comes from keramos (???????), meaning “potter’s clay.” This is the Ishtar gate which is made of glazed ceramics.

The Ishtar gate is now at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

The potter’s wheel was probably invented in Mesopotamia by the 4th millennium BCE.

The oldest pottery vessels come from East Asia, with finds in China and Japan, then still united by a land bridge, from between 20,000 and 10,000 BCE, although the vessels were simple utilitarian objects. This pottery fragment is from a layer dating approximately 20,000 years old in the Xianrendong cave in south China’s Jiangxi province.

For thousands of years, small ceramic lamps were used to illuminate homes and temples. Hundreds of these lamps have been excavated, most of which are no more than a simple saucer-like vessel. Earlier lamps were wheel-thrown, while later lamps were formed from clay rolled into a sheet and pressed into a mold. Wicks were generally made of flax or hemp and were draped over the edge of the lamp. Olive oil was the preferred fuel, but other vegetable, nut and animal oils were also used.

Corinthian and Attic ware was superior to anything being produced in the west at this time and there are several reasons for this.

The potter’s wheel was no longer low and close to the ground. Now it was a large flywheel raised about a foot and a half and was turned by an assistant seated opposite the potter.

Once the object had been shaped and dried it was put back on the wheel, smoothed and shaved to give it a very fine surface.

The red and black were made by a sophisticated process that involved a very fine clay material and an elaborate sequence of firing.

The clay slip that was used for the black was clay, water and an alkali (probably leach from wood ash). This mixture was allowed to stand so that the crude parts sank to the bottom and only the fine particles were suspended and they were poured off and the water evaporated out. This was then used to paint on the pot or plate.

The object was then put in the kiln and fired to around 1000 degrees centigrade when the openings in the furnace were closed which blackened the entire surface of the pot.

When the kiln had cooled down to 800 degrees or so, the apertures were reopened. The areas that had been painted with the slip stayed black but the unpainted parts slowly lost the black and turned red.

This is all easy to say and very difficult to do. There was a lot of trial and error, and only in recent years have potters been able to duplicate this process.

Pottery was produced in enormous quantities in ancient Rome, mostly for utilitarian purposes. It is found all over the former Roman empire and beyond. Monte Testaccio, a huge waste mound in Rome, was made almost entirely of broken amphorae used for transporting and storing liquids and other products, mostly Spanish olive oil, which was landed nearby and used as the main fuel for lamps, as well as for use in the kitchen and washing in the baths.

The major class of fine Roman pottery is the red-gloss ware often made in Italy and Gaul and widely traded, from the 1st century BCE to the late 2nd century CE, and traditionally known as terra sigillata.

Sigilla is Latin for the little figures that are, for example, in a cameo ring. There was actually a holiday called Sigillaria where people in Rome exchanged these little figures.

Sigilla is the origin of our word “seal,” probably because of the similarity between a cameo ring and a seal ring. The word sigilla is a Latin plural, but the singular sigillum was never used.

This terra sigillata bowl was made in Valladolid, Spain.

The usual way of making relief decoration on the surface of an open terra sigillata vessel was to throw a pottery bowl whose interior profile corresponded with the desired form of the final vessel’s exterior.

The internal surface was then decorated using individual positive stamps (poinçons), usually themselves made of fired clay, or small wheels bearing repeated motifs, such as the ovolo (egg-and-tongue) design that often formed the upper border of the decoration.

Sometimes the maker used a stylus to add details and embellish the work.

When the decoration was complete in intaglio on the interior, the mould was dried and fired in the usual way, and was subsequently used for shaping bowls. As the bowl dried, it shrank sufficiently to remove it from the mould, after which the finishing processes were carried out, such as the shaping or addition of a foot-ring and the finishing of the rim.

The details varied according to the form. The completed bowl could then be slipped, dried again, and fired.

Jugs and jars, were seldom decorated in relief using moulds, though some vessels of this type were made at La Graufesenque by making the upper and lower parts of the vessel separately in moulds and joining them at the point of widest diameter.

Relief-decoration of tall vases or jars was usually achieved by using moulded appliqué motifs (sprigs) and/or barbotine decoration (slip-trailing).

The latter technique was particularly popular at the East Gaulish workshops of Rheinzabern, and was also widely used on other pottery types.

By about 5,000 BCE there were farming villages throughout the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the Levant, Anatolia, mainland Greece and on, perhaps, a few islands in the eastern Mediterranean.

A little after 5,000 BCE in this same area, there came a whole set of technological advances that were to influence the whole life of humankind. People in these early farming communities decorated the walls of their homes. They decorated their tools. They decorated themselves too. There was a sense of liveliness and even of merriment in the culture.

The search was on for colors. Yellow ochre or limonite and red ochre or hematite are ores of iron.

Ores of copper are malachite, the green mineral, and the blue mineral, azurite.

Copper occurs as a metal in ore deposits and it was easy to find the green pigment which was used as eye shadow.

Brightly colored minerals, the red and yellow ochres and the blue and green ores of copper were ground to a fine powder with a mortar and pestle and then using animal fat as a binding medium, people began to make rouge and mascara.

Perhaps the search for these colors is what first led people to find out about copper and iron about seven thousand years ago.

Copper was not like other “stones” that people knew. It couldn’t be chipped or flaked but it could be hammered into shape. Only a little bit of hammering, though, would make the copper brittle and it would break. It was soon found that heating the copper to where it was red hot would allow the metal to be hammered some more and then it could be heated again. This process is called annealing. Annealing is the process by which you heat steel to create different metals and can be one common process when it comes to commercial heat treating of different metals. These different metal-altering processes discovered some time ago, are still commonly used today in various industries. Stainless steal is a by-product of steal which is a great example. There are two methods to heat such a solid metal. But which is better and cost-effective? Is it tempering vs annealing? There are only two documented ways to heat such a material.

Copper the metal is rare in ore deposits and the ore deposits themselves are scarce, and could be found mainly in the mountains of eastern Turkey and Syria, in the Zagros mountains (western Iran), in Sinai, in the mountains of the Arabian desert east of the Nile and on Cyrprus whose very name means “copper.”

Copper occurs as native copper in these places and was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record. It has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old, and estimates of its discovery place it at 9000 BCE.

A copper pendant was found in northern Iraq that dates to 8700 BC. There is evidence that gold and iron from meteors (but not from iron smelting) were the only metals used by humans before copper.

The history of copper metallurgy is thought to have followed the following sequence: 1) hammering and working of naturally occurring copper 2) annealing, 3) smelting, and 4) the lost wax method.

In southeastern Anatolia, all four of these metallurgical techniques appear more or less simultaneously at the beginning of the Neolithic c. 7500 BCE.

Agriculture was independently invented in several parts of the world (including Pakistan, China, and the Americas) and, similarly, copper smelting was invented locally also in several different places.

Smelting was probably discovered independently in China before 2800 BCE, in Central America perhaps around 600 CE, and in West Africa about the 9th or 10th century CE.

Investment casting was invented in 4500–4000 BCE in Southeast Asia. Carbon dating has established copper mining at Alderly Edge in Cheshire UK at 2280 to 1890 BC.

The Bronze Age (bronze is copper with a little bit of tin added) began in southeastern Europe around 3700–3300 BCE, in northwestern Europe about 2500 BCE.

Copper was the metal first used to make tools and weapons. (Remember Ötzi’s axe blade?) Pure copper is, however, soft and not ideally suited to the purpose. It was discovered that, by alloying copper with tin, a much more durable metal could be produced: bronze.

The Bronze Age ended with the beginning of the Iron Age, 2000–1000 BC in the Near East, 600 BC in Northern Europe. The transition between the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age was formerly termed the Chalcolithic period (copper-stone), with copper tools being used with stone tools, but the term has gradually fallen out of favor because in some parts of the world the Calcholithic and Neolithic have the same beginning and end.

Brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, is of much more recent origin. It was known to the Greeks, but became a significant supplement to bronze during the Roman Empire.

Pottery and glass will last through conditions that would soon destroy leather and wood, so we know far more about glass than we do about how leather was used, for example.

Around 2,000 BCE, Egyptian faïence, the oldest glazed soapstone ornaments, was beginning to be replaced by a completely “synthetic” material, glass.

White sand was mixed with natron, a naturally occurring form of sodium carbonate, and shaped and heated so that the whole mass was fused.

Blue glaze was applied to this synthetic core. The fusion of the quartz and soda with the admixture of a little lime to make the concoction stable is pretty much how we still make glass today.

The Mesopotamian makers didn’t even know that they needed to add lime to ensure a stable glass, because the lime was already there in the other raw materials.

The synthetic (glass) core (for taking the blue glaze) could be overheated and molten and many examples have survived where the heating ceased just before the core melted and became a shapeless form.

It is probable that the discovery of glass came from seeing the faïence and core (glass) melt into a blob too many times.

A little before 2,000 BCE, true glasses appeared in Mesopotamia, but the glassmakers weren’t sure at first just what they had.

Instead of molding the new material while it was hot, they treated glass at first as if it were a precious decorative stone and mostly cut and polished it while it was cold.

There were many experiments and we soon see a small amount of lead in the glazes on the faïence.

The effect of lead in a glaze or a glass is to give it a greater clarity and brilliance. Who was the first person to add lead to glass? We don’t know, but she may have been a potter since she would have been used to adding lead to her ceramics glazes. From about 1,500 BCE on, lead is not used as a metal (which is too soft for weapons and too, er, “ugly” for jewelry) but as an ingredient in glass, pottery and even bronzes. Lead is a medium. Only now, in the first decades of the 21st century are we finally ridding ourselves of this very useful but very poisonous material.

Lead, aside from adding brilliance, materially altered the cooling behavior of the glass. Glass without lead will shrink and crack as it cools, but the addition of a large quantity of lead will significantly decrease shrinkage, allowing the maker to, say, apply a glaze to an earthenware surface.

The Mesopotamians probably became fully aware of the benefits of lead a bit before 1,000 BCE. The Gate of Ishtar has that shining, glorious beauty because the ceramic tiles were glazed with lead.

In Egypt and Mesopotamia (which, always remember, is not a culture but a geographical place of many cultures) glassmaking became increasingly sophisticated.

Small glass bottles in both areas were made by dipping a friable core of sand and some organic adhesive into a crucible of molten glass and then the friable core was broken out.

Another way to make a small bottle began with that disposable core and then bits of broken glass and finely ground glass material covered the core. The whole was then inserted into the hot oven for fusion

In both methods the core was extracted at the end of the operation leaving a hollow glass bottle.

Copper ores gave a turquoise hue to the final product, and cobalt blue (another copper ore) gave a darker shade.

Iron ores, as we have seen, provided yellows and reds, and the addition of tinstone resulted in a white, opaque glass.

Threads of differently colored glass could be roped in delicate patterns on the surface of the new object and, while still hot and plastic, could be rolled gently over the flat surface, making beautiful , fluid patterns that would last forever.

The glass unguent bottle was a familiar object in the wealthier homes of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The small bottles had other uses. In Cyprus, people have found many small glass containers shaped like the dried head of an opium poppy.

Not just any opium poppy, but one that has been slit and bears the scar where the papaverous juice has flowed out to relieve the pains of our passage through this life.

This was the aspirin bottle of that time. Opium was taken, and still is taken, to relieve hangovers, headaches, menstual cramps and a myriad of other ills.

Opium was even used to keep the baby quiet.

Many, many of these scar faced glass bottles have been found in graves to alleviate the longueurs of a passage to another world.

Talking of other worlds, I’m going to visit one now and do some playing.

Bon voyage till next week.

____________________________________________

Zeroth

Posted on April 20, 2013 by J L tagged.

Origin: 1895–1900; zero + th

Zeroth can be kindergarten. It’s the 0th dimension. The ordinal number before the first. The zeroth.

January 0th is another name for 31 December.

Clara Bellino and Charlie Watts

Being numbered zero in a series; also : Zero 1 the zeroth power of a number.

Two blondes walked into a bar and started arguing about whether an order-of-magnitude estimate is sometimes also called a zeroth order approximation, and the bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”

Rearrange the letters to spell out an important part of the human body which is even more useful when erect. PNESI The people who answer SPINE will be familiar with the zeroth law.

The zeroth law states that if two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.

Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.

You’re supposed to respect your elders, but its getting harder and harder for me to find any now.

A and C are in equilibrium following the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.

^{Irony is the opposite of wrinkly.}

Zero-based numbering is numbering in which the initial element of a sequence is assigned the index 0, rather than the index 1 as is typical in everyday circumstances.

A rabbi was suddenly possessed by a wave of mystical rapture, and threw himself onto the ground before the Ark proclaiming, “Lord, I’m Nothing!”
Seeing this, the cantor felt profoundly moved by similar emotions. He too, threw himself down in front of the Ark, proclaiming, “Lord, I’m Nothing!”
Then, way in the back of the synagogue, the janitor threw himself to the ground, and he too shouted, “Lord, “I’m Nothing.”
The rabbi turns to the cantor and whispers, “Look who thinks he’s Nothing!”

In some cases, an object or value that does not (originally) belong to a given sequence, but which could be naturally placed before its initial element, may be termed the zeroth element.

There is a remote tribe that worships the number zero. Is nothing sacred?

What do you get when you cross a pigeon and a zero? A flying none.

In some mathematical contexts, zero-based numbering can be used without confusion, when ordinal forms have well established meaning with an obvious candidate to come before “first”; for instance a “zeroth derivative” of a function is the function itself, obtained by differentiating zero times.

Nothing is better than this.

Zeroth: The impression that you get from someone before you actually meet them, including impressions made by clothes, style, and rumors.

From what she was wearing and what I heard about her, the zeroth impression I got was that she was a hard case, but when I met her she was intelligent, decent and kind.

Reince Priebus dismissed any controversy over Mitt Romney’s crack about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate as “nothing” and called on the political class to learn to take a joke.

A zeroth law is usually so important that the other laws cannot function without it, yet so obvious that nobody thought it needed stating.

Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics: A robot may not harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

Good luck on that one. That’s a dream, and, I hope, a reality. It’s only a matter of time before computers surpass us in intelligence and ability. We can only hope that they develop an equal abitlity in ethics and morality, although if they are copying our ethics and morality, we should shudder.

Let us hope that the machines are kinder to us than we have been to each other, although, why should we deserve such treament?

Anyone who has read the slightest amount of our history knows that we have no basis for begging for mercy from a stronger power as computers will be, and sooner than we think.

What may we offer up to the sweet goddess of the universe that she should assure us of any kind treatment whatsoever? Can you think of anything?

What did 0 say to 8 ? Nice belt!

How do you insult a mathematician? You say: “Your brain is smaller than any ε > 0″

Life is complex: it has both real and imaginary components.

Why must President Obama prove who he is and where he was born? Be honest and give your answer.

If it’s zero degrees outside today and it’s supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?

There are 10 kinds of mathematicians in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Angles: I’m not trying to be obtuse, but you’re acute.

I am equivalent to the Empty Set when you aren’t with me.

What is the shortest mathematicians joke? Let epsilon be smaller than zero.

What caused the Big Bang? God divided by zero.

A mathematician is a blind person in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.

A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were traveling through Scotland on a train when they saw a black sheep. “Aha,” says the engineer, “I see that Scottish sheep are black.” ”Hmm,” says the physicist, “you mean that some Scottish sheep are black.” ”No,” says the mathematician, “all we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black.”

How are dogs and marine biologists alike? Dog wag their tails and biologists tag their whales.

Why can’t a gorilla play a guitar? She’s too sensitive.

She looked at the score and it said “tacet,” so she took it.

How do guitar players generally greet each other? Hi, I’m better than you. (That’s supposed to be a joke.)

What happened to the elephant who ran away with the circus? The police made her bring it back.

A museum visitor was admiring a tyrannosaurus fossil, and asked a nearby museum employee how old it was. “That skeleton is sixty-five million and three years, two months and eighteen days old,” the employee replied. “How can you know that so specifically?” she asked. “Well, when I started working here, I asked a scientist the exact same question, and he said it was sixty-five million years old—and that was three years, two months and eighteen days ago.”

A solar panel and a windmill walked into a bar full of oil men, and were never seen again.

How do you feel about windmills? Big fan.

What’s worse than raining cats and dogs? Hailing taxis.

Why did the philharmonic disband? Too much sax and violins.

Hey, this is in Seine!

Fowl play: How do you identify a bald eagle? He has a comb over.

What happened to the lab tech when she fell into the lens grinder? She made a spectacle of herself.

He stopped her because she was going too slow. “But, officer, the sign said 21.” ”That’s the highway number, ma’am.” ”Oh, I’m glad you didn’t see me five minutes ago. I was on 205.”

Nobody is perfect until you fall in love with her.

Who was that piccolo I saw you with last night? That was no piccolo, that was my fife.

What’s the difference between an electric guitar and a chain saw? Chainsaws sound better in small ensembles.

These pots were smoked on the kiln floor.

Hey, is that my cheese? That’s nacho cheese!

She worked hard all of her life to be known, and now she wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

For every truth there is an ear somewhere to receive it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it. For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it.

Our Lord was a shoving leopard, I mean, a loving shepherd.

Then there was Pam, too smart to be a ham, too beautiful for Sam, could have kissed her, but I missed her, damn!

Ham and Eggs: A day’s work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig.

English muffins aren’t English, French fries aren’t French. Sweetmeats are sweet, Sweetbreads are meat.

A vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

String quartet: a good violinist, a bad violinist, an ex-violinist, and someone who hates violinists, all getting together to complain about composers.

Guy can’t find the necktie he needs to get into the club. In desperation he throws a set of jumper cables around his neck. Bouncer says, “Well, you can come in but don’t start anything.”

You know you’re a roller coaster enthusiast when some guy screams “You S.O.B!” and You instantly think “huh, Son of Beast, where?

Much unnecessary labor is involved in the number of demisemiquavers. We suggest that many of these could be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver thus saving practice time for the individual player and rehearsal time for the entire ensemble.

Two things necessary to keep a redhead happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

I hate those little Russian dolls. They’re so full of themselves.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.

“Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” – A film company’s verdict on Fred Astaire’s 1928 screen test.

“Brain work will cause women to go bald.” Berlin professor 1914

I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go read a book

If god had intended us to drink champagne, she would have given us stomachs.

A kiss is persecution for the child, ecstasy for the youth and an homage for the old.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in vodka.

I always forget faces, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.

A kiss is the contraction of mouth due to the expansion of the heart.

Harvard Business School announced that, in recognition of his massive tax cuts coupled with rising costs of war, they were awarding President Bush an Honorary Doctorate in Deep Doo-Doo Economics.

A kiss is a process which builds a solid bond between two dynamic objects.

What do you call bears with no ears? B.

A Chinese man walks into a shop with a parrot on his shoulder, and the shopkeeper says, “Hey, where’d you get that?” and the parrot says, “In China. They must have a billion of them there.”

Dick Cheney was riding on a camel and he stopped at a small oasis. He got off the camel, lifted its tail and looked at the camel’s butt. A guy comes over and says, “What are you doing?” Cheney replies, “About two miles back I heard someone say, ‘Look at the two assholes on that camel.’”

Elephant to naked man: How can you pick up peanuts with that thing?

Two goats out behind a movie studio eating old movie film: “Pretty good, huh?” says one to the other. ”Yeah, but I prefer the book.”

A thief held up a man at gunpoint: Give me your money. You cannot do this. I am a congressman. Thief says: In that case, give me my money.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a while. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

I love you once, I love you twice, I love you more than beans and rice.

A kiss is the juxtaposition of two orbicularisoris muscles in the state of contraction.

My husband and I married for better or worse. He couldn’t do better and I couldn’t do worse.

How do you make a hot dog stand? Steal her chair.

She walked up to the bartender and asked for a double entendre, so he gave her one.

So, why was Wolgang Amadeus Mozart a little scratchy about his chickens? They kept saying “Bach, bach, bach, bach, BACH!”

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has charged a man with going deer hunting with a handgun in a Wal-Mart parking lot. He is being charged with reckless endangerment, but may plead guilty to the lesser charge of being a redneck.

How many books have you read in your life? How should I know? I’m not dead yet.

“The Beatles? They’re on the wane.” The Duke of Edinburgh in Canada, 1965. (His Grace was perhaps a few crumbs short of a crouton.)

Ashley Judd announced she will not be running for Senate in Kentucky against Mitch McConnell. And Mitch McConnell announced he will not be co-starring in any romantic comedies.

Remember George Bush’s plan to put a man on Mars? Why not? It’s not like we had an enormous debt or failing economy or anything like that.

Collect stacks of paint brochures and hand them out as religious tracts.

A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

VODKA : It’s not just for breakfast anymore.

Smile. It’s the second best thing you can do with your lips.

I got this ukulele for my husband. Good trade!

A kiss is the shortest distance between two lips.

Why do elephants drink so much? To try to forget.

North Korea is now threatening the United States with all-out war. What did Dennis Rodman say to these people? What did he do?

Who wrote Huckleberry Locomotive? ChooChoo Twain.

They who drink beer will think beer.

Cop: How high are you? No, no, officer, it’s Hi! How are you?

What happened when the bomb detecting dog wrote her autobiography? It shot to the top of the best smeller list.

What’s harder to catch the faster you run? Your breath.

Come on, feet, start walking.

Why is an elephant big, gray and wrinkly? Because, if she were small, triangular and plastic she would be a guitar pick.

I have actually sung onstage with this estimable person. She’s the one who should have played Janis Joplin in the film, but, alas and alack, it didn’t happen.

Convincing my dog that I really threw the ball is the closest I will get to being a real magician.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

People smile in the same language.

A kiss is the reaction of the interaction between two hearts.

How can you tell the difference between an elephant and a grape? The grape is purple.

We’ll see you next week.

___________________________________________

How Latin Became French

Posted on April 10, 2013 by J L tagged.

The Romans left their language behind everywhere they went. They didn’t force anyone to learn it. Everyone wanted to speak Latin, the language of opportunity and success.

In time, Latin, became Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

And also Catalan, Occitan, Provençal, Languedocien, Romanche, Corsican, Wallon, Venetian and Sicilian.

Rome began as a muddy, swampy village surrounded by the brilliant Etruscan civilization on one side and the no less prestigious Greek colonies on the other.

The history of Rome begins like a fairy tale with a prince and a goddess and continues with legendary stories and historical realities.

Aeneas ( Αἰνείας, Aineías, derived from Greek Αἰνή meaning “to praise”), the son of the prince Anchises, and Venus Aphrodite, brings his colony from Troy to Italy, as Virgil tells us in Book One of the Aeneid.

Two newborns, Romulus and Remus, are abandoned along the Tiber and suckled by a she wolf. Romulus kills Remus and becomes the first king of Rome.

There is a rape of young women from the nearby Sabine people. The women are kidnapped to populate Rome.

A great sewer (the Cloaca Maxima) is built to drain the marshes and the Forum is created, which becomes the center of Roman life.

There is a revolution (509 BCE) and the monarchy is abolished to make way for the Republic. The government is headed by two consuls elected by the citizenry and advised by a senate. A constitution based on the separation of powers and checks and balances is developed. Public offices are held for one year, and dates in Roman history are often stated to be when so and so was consul.

The Republic will last for five centuries (from the 6th to the first century BCE) to be succeeded by the Empire which will also last for five centuries until the fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE. The Empire’s beginning is usually dated from the declaration of Julius Caesar as permanent dictator in 44 BCE.

Rome conquered Transalpine Gaul (Provincia Narbonensis now called Provence) in 120 BCE and northern Gaul in 58 – 50 BCE, so the Romans were in Gaul longer than they were anywhere else.

Romans were farmers in the beginning and their language was based in the soil. The verb CERNERE (to see, to discern), for example, originally meant “sift.”

COLERE or INCOLERE which is found in the word “agricola,” farmer, originally meant cultivate, but Caesar uses it in the opening sentence of his book to mean “live” or “inhabit.”

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres: unam quarum Belgae incolunt. All Gaul is divided into three parts: one of which the Belgians inhabit.

The verb PUTARE originally meant prune or trim. Look where it is now: compute, dispute, repute, deputy, putative.

DELIRARE originally meant to leave the LIRA, the furrow. The word became delirium, delirious, délirer. That’s leaving the furrow with a vengeance.

RIVALIS was an adjective for RIVUS, the bank of a river ( rive gauche). Two people who shared the water in that river were rivals.

A PAGINA was a grape arbor, a group of vines arranged in a rectangle. Then it became a page of papyrus, a page containing one column of writing.

LIBER (book) originally was the tissue between the bark and the tree. The first books in Europe were written on “beechen” tablets. (Buch in German originally meant the beech tree as does our “book.”)

LEGERE Cueillir To pick, pluck, gather, harvest. This word LEGERE later took on the meaning of levy, draft, and a LEGIO (legion) is called that because the soldiers were levied upon the general population.

The past participle of LEGERE is LECTUS, so all of the elect, lecture, dialect, select, lectern, collect meanings come from LEGERE also.

LEGERE became the word for “read.” Lire, leer, leggere (Italian). When you read, you are harvesting words and meanings.

The people in France (Gallia, Gaul) finally spoke Latin, of course, but before they did they loaned some of their words to the Romans. CARRUS (a chariot with four wheels) was Gallic, as was BENNA, a kind of wagon with four wheels, which became benne the word in French for “bucket” or “scoop.”

Other Gallic words brought into Latin were ALAUDA, lark, alouette; BECCUS, beak; CAMBIARE, exchange, barter (which became “buy” in Italian and Spanish).

BRACAE, breeches, britches, pants. The Romans didn’t wear them, but the Celts did. They lived in a colder climate. The word became brache in Italian and bragas in Spanish. In modern French it’s braies.

There were two Latins, the Latin of the intellectuals URBANITAS and the Latin of the streets and fields RUSTICITAS.

The Latin of Cicero (3 January 106 BCE – 7 December 43 BCE) was a dead language even when it was alive. There was an agreement not to change it, and, remarkably, no one changed it for centuries. I can read Latin from the time of Cicero, but can only read my own language, English, in Beowulf , written almost a thousand years later, with great difficulty when I can read it at all.

RUSTICITAS, the Latin language of the people, changed constantly all through Roman history.

The extensive use of elements from vernacular speech by the earliest authors (Plautus, for example) and inscriptions of the Roman Republic make it clear that the original, unwritten language of the Roman monarchy was an only partially deducible predecessor to vulgar Latin. Very early on, this sermo rusticus (also known as sermo plebeius, sermo vulgaris, sermo cotidianus or just sermo usualis) already had many of the features of French, Spanish, Italian and the rest.

Here are some pairs of words that have the same meaning from upper and lower Latin. Guess which ones came down into French: AEQUOR and MARE (sea); AGER and CAMPUS (field); CRUOR and SANGUIS (blood); EQUUS and CABALLUS (horse); LETUM and MORS (death); SIDUS and STELLA (star); TELLUS and TERRA (terrain, earth, soil); MAGNUS and GRANDIS (big); FERRE and PORTARE (to carry, to transport). This would be easier to tell with Spanish or Italian. With French this is a little harder to see because French has changed more than any other Romance language. In fact, French is the most Germanic of the Romance languages. The very word “France” comes from the Franks, a Germanic tribe.

For the word “house,” the Romans had at least four terms: DOMUS (domicile) was the house and everything in it. AEDES (edifice) just meant the building itself. VILLA denoted a farm or agricultural property, and CASA was a cabin or a (thatched) cottage. Which term came down into the Romance languages? The humblest, of course. CASA is exactly the same in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish and in French when you say “chez nous,” you are using the Gallic form of CASA.

When I lived in New York, there was a restaurant around the corner from me called La Chaumière, which is the exact French translation of the Latin CASA.

There are books, or tablets, really, from Roman times where people are taught what and what not to say.

One of the most well known is the Appendix Probi, which reads like a schoolmaster’s spelling correction book. It would be as if today a teacher published a manual with some of the following strictures: say is not, don’t say ain’t; say You gave it to whom, don’t say You gave it to who; say Where is that? don’t say Where is that at? ; say He and I did it, don’t say Him and me did it; say between her and me, don’t say between her and I. (I hate to write these and I can feel the pain of the person who wrote the Appendix Probi. It’s a losing battle, and it always was.)

These correction books are a vivid snapshot of a language in evolution. Say VIR (man) not VYR. Say SPECULUM (mirror) not SPECLUM. Say VINEA (vine) don’t say VINIA.

Say COLUMNA (column) not COLOMNA. Say NUNQUAM (never) don’t say NUNQUA. Say HOSTIAE don’t say OSTIAE (proof that the H was already beginning to disappear.)

Città della Pieve City of the People

Say RIVUS (bank of a river) not RIUS (“river” in Spanish is “rio.”); Say PLEBES not PLEVIS (b and v were already beginning to be confused. Big Brother played in an Umbrian town called Città della Pieve. Pieve is what PLEBES, people, had become by the time we got there. (The LATIN L became I in Italian. Clara = Chiara.)

Say CIVITAS (city) not CIVITÀT (ciudad is Spanish for city) and certainly not CITTÀ. Say AQUA not ACQUA. Say PAUPER MULIER (poor woman, pauvre femme) not PAUPERA MULIER (changing third declension adjectives and pronouns to the first and second declensions).

Île de la Cité WAS Paris for a very long time. Nôtre Dame was begun in 1163. In 1963, I stood in a large group of people right about here and we heard and saw a son et lumière presentation of the catheral’s 800 year old history. In Latin her name would be Nostra Domina.

The accent circonflexe in French very often tells you that an s was there originally: île, hôte, août, hâte, arrêt, bête, fête, forêt. Put an s into each of these words and you will see very quickly what they mean.

For a linguist these prescriptive “corrections” are a delight, because in almost every case, what the people are taught NOT to say is what they are actually saying (otherwise why bother to correct them?) and these “mistakes” will be passed down into French and the other daughters of Latin.

Some rules from these early prescriptive wordbooks: Say AURIS, don’t say ORICLA. Say FRIGIDA, don’t say FRICDA. Say CALIDA, don’t say CALDA. Say MENSA, don’t say MESA. These rules show you what people were saying (and spelling) then.

Guess which forms came down into the Romance Languages? MESA, you know, if you live in the Southwest of the United States. ORICLA became oreille, oreja. FRICDA became froid. CALDA became chaud.

A thoughtful person might be encouraged here to think of terms and forms that are forbidden in English today, and to consider how our own language is evolving.

Comparatives in Latin: DOCTUS is wise, knowing, learned. DOCTIOR is more wise, more knowing, more learned. DOCTISSIMUS is the most learned.

In French, however, these comparatives were made by using Latin MAGIS (more) and PLUS (plus). More than my own life. Docte. Plus docte. Le plus docte.

Je n’en ai plus. I just don’t have any more. That’s it, I just can’t do any more.

Adverbs: IN SIMUL ensemble, AB ANTE avant, DE EX dès

When my wife Elise is in Germany, she can be heard to say, “Den Schlüssel der Toilette, bitte?” and the person at the gas station will say, “Der Schlüssel ist hier.” When Elise asks for the key to the bathroom, she uses the accusative case, because implied in her request is Ich will (I want the key to the bathroom), because “key” is the object of the sentence. The woman answers, “The key is here (der Schlüssel) which is the nominative case because “key” is the subject of the sentence.

German is an inflected language. The words can change form according to what function they perform. It’s the key to another world.

In English we have cases too, although we don’t call them that, and they are mostly seen in pronouns. He goes to the store. “He” is in the nominative case. He took his book. “His” is in the genitive case. I saw him. “Him” is in the accusative case. He, his, him are all referring to the same person, but the words change according to their function.

So, English is an inflected language too, but not as inflected as German, and neither of them is as inflected as Latin. You have probably noticed that “whom” is disappearing, so that dative/accusative case will be gone forever when the last person says it.

In Latin, for “Flavia picks a rose,” you can say Rosam Flavia leget. Or you can say Flavia rosam leget. Or you can say Leget Flavia rosam, or even Leget rosam Flavia, or Flavia leget rosam. They all mean Flavia picks a rose and the word order is not important because Flavia is in the nominative case and she is the subject of the sentence. Rosam is in the accusative case, and, wherever rosam is in the sentence, it will always be rose as the object of the sentence.

Similarly, to say “Flavia loves the color of the rose,” you can say Flavia colorem rosae amat, or Rosae colorem Flavia amat, or Colorem rosae Flavia amat or Amat Flavia rosae colorem. They all mean Flavia loves the color of the rose. This is Classical Latin, the language of Cicero and Caesar. The word order (syntax) is unimportant because each word has an ending that tells its function. Flavia is the subject of the sentence. Amat is the verb. Colorem is the object. And rosae is the genitive. It means “of the rose” no matter where it is in the sentence.

In the Latin of the street (RUSTICITAS), however, the endings of words, because they were almost always unaccented, began to be lost with people speaking quickly, mumbling, being drunk, being excited, being lazy… the endings dropped away early. So now what happens to the syntax? The order of the words in the sentence becomes more than important; it becomes absolutely necessary to the meaning of the phrase.

Paulus Petrum verberat means Paul hits Peter. It’s the same if you say Petrum Paulus verberat, but not if the endings in Paulus and Petrum both become -u as they did early on in street Latin. If Paulus and Petrum become Paulu and Petru, then Paulu has to go first and Petru has to follow the verb for the sentence to be most clear. Paulu verberat Petru. And the -t in verberat was lost early too, so the sentence looks like Paulu verbera Petru. This is beginning to look a lot like Spanish, French or Italian, isn’t it?

Flavia rosam amat (Flavia loves the rose) now begins to be said Flavia ama rosa, and if you say Flavia loves that rose, the sentence, even in Roman times, can be said Flavia ama(t) (il)la(m) rosa(m). Flavia ama la rosa. Then the sentence looks very much as it would in Spanish or Italian. Flavia aime la rose, as the people in Gallia would say.

In Classical Latin, murus (wall) is the subject of the sentence (nominative). Muri means “of the wall” or wall’s (genitive). Murum is the wall as the object of the sentence (accusative) and muro means “to the wall” (dative). So, there are four cases, murus, muri, murum, muro.

By the third century BCE, people in the street were saying muro(s), muri, muro, muro, and they weren’t pronouncing the s in the first case, so the word sounded the same in all the cases. We know this because of writing on tombstones, graffiti, and other places where uneducated people would write. And now to emphasize the words they would say THAT wall, rather than just wall. That = ille in Latin, and so they said (Il)le mur. Le mur is the wall in French.

Here is a message on a tombstone, date unknown: Hic quescunt duas matres, duas filias numero tres facunt et advenas II parvolas qui suscitabit cuius condicio est. Jul. Herculanus. There is a joke here, “two mothers, two daughters make the number three.” OK, it’s not a big joke, but it’s on a tombstone, where jokes are in short supply. Let’s be grateful.

There is a later inscription on a tomb in Gallia: Hic requiiscunt men bra ad duas frates Gallo et Fidencio qui fo erunt fili Magno… Both of these inscriptions show that the old declension (case) system was disappearing and would soon disappear altogether.

So, now, articles became necessary. In late Latin the definite article (the) was taken from the word for “that” ille, illa. For the indefinite article (a) the word for “one” was used. Unus, una. “The widow” is la vidua and “a widow” is una vidua. La veuve, une veuve.

Now prepositions become important. They are needed to show the relationships of the words to each other. The dative case is gone, so you have to say “to the wall,” as you do in English. Or “on the table,” or “with the drink.” The world had changed. (That’s the world… in the bubbles.)

Frederick the Great of Prussia and Voltaire made a bet who could write the shortest sentence in Latin. Frederick wrote Eo rus. (I’m going to the country.) Voltaire replied I (Go).

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida received a doctorate honoris causa from Oxford University and he wrote his discours de réception in Latin.

There were several words for “blonde” or “white” in Latin. Our friend Flavia above was so named because she was blonde (FLAVUS yellow). Also ALBUS meant white as did CANDIDUS but the French took their word BLANC from the Germanic languages. The Romans, too, borrowed “blond” from the Germans very early and Roman women bought great quantities of blonde hair from the north.

There were four or five ways to say “blue” in the mother language: CAERULEUS denoted the color of a cloudless sky. CYANEUS was a darker blue. CAESIUS, a gray-blue, a greenish blue, especially used for the color of eyes, and then there was GLAUCUS “between green and pale blue,” and VIOLACEUS, blue tending to violet, but in about the seventh century CE, the French borrowed *blao from the Germanic language.

So, when did French become truly French and not a mélange of Latin and Gallic? One boundary date might be the Oaths of Strasbourg (842 CE) taken by two grandsons of Charlemagne, Louis le Germanique and Charles le Chauve to swear assistance and fealty to each other against their brother Lothaire.

These Oaths were written in the langue romane and the langue germanique. The only copy we have is from a century later, but the document is invaluable for linguists.

Pro deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun saluament d’ist di en auant, in quant Deus sauir et podir me dunat, si saluarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra saluar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui meon uol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

In today’s French this would be: Pour l’amour de Dieu et pour le salut commun du peuple chrétien et le nôtre, à partir de ce jour, autant que Dieu m’en donne le savoir et le pouvoir, je soutiendrrai mon frère Charles de mon aide et en toute chose, comme on doit justement soutenir son frère, à condition qu’il m’en fasse autant, et je ne prendrai jamais aucun arrangement avec Lothaire, qui, à ma volonté, soit au détriment de mon frère Charles.

This is the way the Oath reads in la langue germanique: in godes minna ind in thes christânes folches ind unsêr bêdhero gehaltnissî fon thesemo dage frammordes sô fram sô mir got geuuizci indi mahd furgibit sô haldih thesan mînan bruodher sôso man mit rehtu sînan bruodher scal in thiu thaz er mig sô sama duo indi mit ludheren in nohheiniu thing ne gegango the mînan uillon imo ce scadhen uuerdhên

oba karl then eid then er sînemo bruodher ludhuuuîge gesuor geleistit indi ludhuuuîg mîn hêrro then er imo gesuor forbrihchit ob ih inan es iruuenden ne mag noh ih noh thero nohhein then ih es iruuenden mag uuidhar karle imo ce follusti ne uuirdhit.

In la langue romane, notice that the original is much more concise than the modern French. This is because of the survival of some cases and other similarities to Latin.

The copyist seems to have hesitated over the written form of final unaccented vowels. For aiudha (help) and cadhuna (each), he writes a.

Sometimes a, sometimes e: fradra, fradre (brother).

Sometimes e. sometimesd o: Karle, Karlo (Charles).

In Latin, the future of LAVARE was lavabo, lavabis. In French (and similarly in the other daughters of Latin) the verb “to have” (avoir) was used to make the future: laver + ai = I will wash; laver + as = you will wash; laver + a = she, he, it will wash; laver + (av)ons = we will wash; laver + (av)ez = you will wash; laver + ont = they will wash.

Sometimes a Latin word would come into French twice, once very early and then another time very late. The same thing happened with English and, in fact, some of the pairs are the same, such as frail and fragile (frêle et fragile) from FRAGILEM.

SECURITATEM sûreté et sécurité. FABRICAM came into French early as forge and then later as fabrique. FRIGIDUM froid et frigide. GRACILIS grêle et gracile (slender, slim). CADENTIAM chance et cadence. POTIONEM poison et potion. MUSCULUM moule (mussel) et muscle. MONASTERIUM moutier (obsolete) et monastère. MINISTERIUM métier et ministère. TABULAM tôle (sheet metal) et table. CLAVICULAM cheville (ankle) et clavicule. AUGUSTUM août et auguste.

Sometime early in the fifth century CE, Egeria, a Spanish nun, set out to visit as many as possible of the places mentioned in the Bible. This was in effect the first of many, many Christian pilgrimages and she decided to write about what she had seen.

The manuscript was discovered at Arezzo in 1887 by Italian scholar Gamurrini. Egeria’s descriptions of the way she was received by local dignitaries in her travels suggest that her standing in the Church was high.

No other author of her time or for long after wrote in such a lively and conversational style. It is like hearing her talk.`She writes in Latin, but it is a Latin far removed from the villas of Cicero and Caesar. Her language, the syntax, the simplicity, the excessive use of definite and indefinite articles, is well on its way to becoming French, Italian, Spanish. She’s chatty.

Cum ergo descendissimus, ut superius dixi, de ecclesia deorsum, ait nobis ipse sanctus presbyter: ecce ista fundamenta in giro colliculo isto, quae videtis, hae sunt de palatio regis Melchisedech…. Nam ecce ista via, quam videtis transire inter fluvium Iordanem et vicum istum, haec est qua via regressus est sanctus Abraam de caede Codollagomor regis gentium revertens in Sodomis, qua ei occurrit sanctus Melchisedech rex Salem.

When we had gone down from the church, as I said above, the holy priest spoke to us: You see those ruins in the fold of that hill, they are of the palace of king Mechisedech…. That path which you see passing between the river Jordan and the village, that is the way by which holy Abraham came back from the slaughter of Codollogomor, king of the peoples returning to Sodom, where holy Melchisedech king of Salem met him.

She continues: Tunc ego quia retinebam scriptum esse baptizasse sanctum Iohannem in Enon iuxta Salim, requisivi de eo, quam longe esset ipse locus. Tunc ait ille sanctus presbyter: ecce hic est in ducentibus passibus; nam si vis, ecce modo pedibus duco vos ibi. Nam haec aqua tam grandis et tam pura, quam videtis in isto vico, de ipso fonte venit. Tunc ergo gratias ei agere coepi et rogare, ut duceret nos ad locum.

Then because I remembered that it is written that Saint John had been baptizing in Enon near Salem, I asked of him how far away the place was. Then the holy priest said: It is two hundred yards away; if you wish, I will lead you there on foot. The stream which you see in the village, so large and clear, comes from that source. Then I began to thank him and ask that he should take us to the place.

This was a woman who loved to travel and who loved people. Her use of words such as HIC, IPSE, ISTE and ILLE and priest’s use of ECCE are pointing forward to la langue romane. They are attention getting and attention directing devices that are always a feature of ordinary life. Professors and academics are used to being the center of attention, and listened to, but everyday people have to build a few HEY! moments into their speech even to hope to be heard. HIC, IPSE, ISTE, ILLE, ECCE are all look at me words that call for attention.

Egeria would not have been out of place in Chaucer’s collection of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury a thousand years later.

The Gallia of the Romans began to form her own language(s). The names for them were each based on the word “yes.” The languages of the former Gallia Narbonensis (Provence) had a word for “yes” that was originally HOC, “this.” If someone said, “Did you go to the market today,” and you wanted to affirm this, you simply said HOC, this.

In Latin there was no word for “yes.” People simply said “thus,” which was SIC and this evolved into “si.”

In the French of today there is this “si,” but it is only used to contradict a negative statement. If she says, “You weren’t at Monterey, were you?” I can answer, “Si, j’y suis êté.” (Yes, I was there.)

Of course, the Latin SIC (thus) came down into all of the other Romance Languages as the word for “yes.” In Portuguese: Sim. Eu gosto muito. (Yes, I like it a lot.) Spanish: Si, señor. Italian: Ma, si, lo sai che sei più bella della Avril Lavigne, davvero eh! (But, yes, you know it, that you are more beautiful than Avril Lavigne, really, eh?)

In the north of Gallia, which we can almost call France now, the phrase for “yes” was HOC ILLUD, which is something like “this that,” but it meant “yes,” and the language of Gallia Septentrionale, northern France, became known as la langue d’oïl, the language of oui. The language of HOC ILLUD.

In the 9th century romana lingua (the term used in the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842) was the first of the Romance languages to be recognized by its speakers as a distinct language, probably because it was the most different from Latin compared with the other Romance languages.

A good number of the developments that we now consider typical of Walloon, the language spoken in the environs of Belgium, appeared between the 8th and 12th centuries. Walloon “had a clearly defined identity from the beginning of the thirteenth century”. In any case, linguistic texts from the time do not mention the language, even though they mention others in the Oïl family, such as Picard and Lorrain. During the 15th century, scribes in the region called the language “Roman” when they needed to distinguish it. It is not until the beginning of the 16th century that we find the first occurrence of the word “Walloon” in the same linguistic sense that we use it today.

In the south of Gallia, the language was called langue d’oc, the language of HOC, which was how they said “yes” in the South. This speech became known as OCCITAN.

Oc was and still is the southern word for yes, hence the langues d’oc or Occitan languages. The most widely spoken modern Oïl language is French (oïl was pronounced [o.il] or [o.i], which has become [wi], in modern French oui).

Very early on, differences between the languages of the south and north became marked.

These differences still exist today and there have been many movements to make southern dialects (Provençal, languedocien, occitan) into languages in their own right, especially in the 19th century and especially by the writer Frédéric Mistral.

In the South, they said: cantat aqua pratu(m) In the North, it was chante eau près.

By late- or post-Roman times Vulgar Latin had developed two distinctive terms for signifying assent (yes): hoc ille (“this (is) it”) and hoc (“this”), which became oïl and oc, respectively. Subsequent development changed “oïl” into “oui”, as in modern French. The term langue d’oïl itself was first used in the 12th century, referring to the Old French linguistic grouping noted above.

In the 14th century, the Italian poet Dante mentioned the yes distinctions in his De vulgari eloquentia. He wrote in Medieval Latin: “nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil” (“some say ‘oc’, others say ‘si’, others say ‘oïl’”)—thereby distinguishing at least three classes of Romance languages: oc languages. oui languages and si languages.

This is part of the story of the Prodigal Son in various dialects. Modern French: Son fils lui dit alors: Mon père, j’ai péché contre le ciel et contre vous; je ne mérite plus d’être appelé votre fils. Mais le père dit aux serviteurs: Allez vite chercher la plus belle robe et l’en revêtez, mettez-lui au doigt un anneau, des souliers aux pieds. Amenez le veau gras et tuez-le, mangeons et faisons liesse.

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

And now in Picard, one of the langues d’oïl: Sin fieu ly dit: Min pere, j’ai grament péché conte I’ciel et conte vous; et jenne su pu dinne d’éte apelai vous fieu. Alor I’pére dit à ses gins: Allez vite qére s’première robe et fourez ly su sin dos; mettez ly un aniau au douet et dés solés à ses pieds. Amenés aveucque I’viau cras et tuélle, mingeons et faigeons bonne torche.

Walloon: Et I’fils li diha: Pere, j’a pegchi conte lu ci et conte vos: ju n’so nin digne d’ess loumé vos fils. Mais l’pere diha atou ses siervans: appoirto bin vite su pu belle robe et tapo li so l’coir et metto li onne bague et des solés èze pis. Et allézo prinde lu cras vai et sul touo et s’magnans et s’fusans gasse.

Morvandiau (Nièvre): Et son fiot ly dié: Men père, y ait pécé conte le ciel et conte vous aitout, y n’ mairite pu d’eitre aipelé voute fiot. Anchitot, le père dié ai sas valots; aiportez vias sai premère robbe et vitez ly, boutez ly enne baigue au det et das soulés dans sas piés. Aimouniez aitout le viau gras et l’tuez: mezons et fions fricot.

And now we go to the langues d’oc. Here is the tale in the dialect of Auvergne: Et son fiot ly dié: Men père, y ait pécé conte le ciel et conte vous aitout, y n’ mairite pu d’eitre aipelé voute fiot. Anchitot, le père dié ai sas valots; aiportez vias sai premère robbe et vitez ly, boutez ly enne baigue au det et das soulés dans sas piés. Aimouniez aitout le viau gras et l’tuez: mezons et fions fricot.

Gascon, the language of Cyrano de Bergerac: E soun hil qu’eou digouc: Moun pay, qu’ey peccat cost’oou ceo é daouant bous: nou souy pas mes digne deou noum de boste hii. Lou pay que digouc a sous baylets: Biste, biste, pourtat sa pruméro raoubo é boutats l’oc; boutats lou la bago aou dit, e caoussats lou. Amiats lou bedet gras, é tuats lou: minjen é hascan uo gran’ hesto.

Provençal as spoken in Marseille: Et soun fieou li diguet: Moun païré aï peccat contro lou ciel et contro de vous, noun siou pas digné d’estre appelat vouestre fieou. Alors, lou péro diguet à seis domestiquos: Adduses sa premiero raoubo, et vestisses lou; mettes-li une bague oou det et de souliers eis peds. Adusés lou vedeou gras et tuas lou, man- gens e faguem boumbanco.

Franco-Provençal (Swiss, Valais, Saint-Maurice: Son meniot la y a det: Mon pere y ai petchia devant le chel et devant vo; ye ne sey pas digno ora d’être appèlo voutrom fi. Mais le père a det a son valets: Apporta ley to de suite sa première roba e la fey bota; metté ley ona baga u dey é dé solar è pia; amènà le vè grà é toa lo; mindzin é fézin granta tchiéra.

These languages still exist.

SUBIUNGO is Latin for “I subjoin,” I add to, and the subjunctive mood is so named because it is primarily used in subordinate clauses. Il faut que tu vienne. (You have to come.) If faut que j’y aille. (It’s necessary that I go there.)

In Latin all conjugations and irregular verbs have four tenses of the subjunctive: present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect. French normally uses only two of these tenses, although Spanish and Italian and the other linguae romanae rusticae positively revel in all tense subjunctive usage. Quisiera un café, por favor. (I would like a coffee, please.)

When I was young and silly, I used to use the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive just for laughs: J’aimerais que vous me servissiez 100 F de gasoil.

Or: Madame, réfléchîtes-vous à ma proposition car il faudrait que vous prissiez une décision immédiatement pour que je vous livrasse au plus tôt et que vous fussiez en mesure d’apprécier les services de mon appareil.

At the time I was taking a course in 18th century literature and reading people like Marivaux, Voltaire and madame de Sévigné, all of whom were comfortable with the all the subjunctives and used them in an often humorous and even schpritzy style. (Schpritzy = avec esprit.)

J’étudie la carte du Tendre, je participe aux fêtes galantes, je suis l’observateur “statufié” des tableaux de Watteau… et de Boucher.

In Latin, the past tense is called the “perfect,” because it has been thoroughly done, perfected, finished. I was = fui. You were = fuisti. It was = fuit. In spoken French this perfect past (or passé simple as it is known) is not ordinarily used in speaking, but it is in writing, especially in novels.

There is a French writer named Raymond Queneau. He wrote Zazie dans le métro and many other funny books that play with language.

The first book of his that I read was Exercices de Style where he takes a very simple story and tells it in many different styles: Métaphoriquement, Rétrograde, Surprises, Rêve, Pronostications, Hésitations and so on.

One of the versions of the story is Passé Simple where he uses only that tense. The usual tense for description is the imperfect, so it is strange to read all that Passé Simple.

Ce fut midi. Les voyageurs montèrent dans l’autobus. On fut serré. Un jeune monsieur porta sur sa tête un chapeau entouré d’une tresse, non d’un ruban. Il eut un long cou. Il se plaignit auprès de son voisin des heurts que celui-ci lui infligea. Dès qu’il aperçut une place libre, il se précipita vers elle et s’y assit.

Je l’aperçus plus tard devant la gare Saint-Lazare. Il se vêtit d’un pardessus et un camarade qui se trouva là lui fit cette remarque: il fallut mettre un bouton supplémentaire.

This is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it if you read French, or maybe even if you don’t read French, because it does take that simple tale and tell it over and over again in many different modes, so it is quite educational.

And, speaking of end, here are a couple of trous de culs américains. What they don’t know would fill a number of very large volumes.

Au revoir. À la prochaine.

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A Heterogeneous Assemblage

Posted on March 2, 2013 by J L tagged.

In Australia, the number-one topping for pizza is eggs. In the United States, it’s pepperoni. I like the one in Italy called Caprese, goat cheese and tomatoes.

Fanfaronade: fulsomeness, from Spanish fanfarrón, a word that was probably an imitation of the blaring blowhardedness and braggadocio of bigheaded braggarts.

Stop the presses! Dirty Harry’s last name is Callahan.

Reading too many underground comic books? The name of Jabba the Hutt’s pet spider monkey is Salacious Crumb.

The famous Dragnet theme was actually composed by Miklos Rosza for the 1946 film noir classic The Killers.

The total number of bridge hands is 54 octillion.

General Lew Wallace’s best-seller Ben-Hur was the first work of fiction to be blessed by the Pope.

Lassie, the TV collie, first appeared in a 1930s short novel entitled Lassie Come Home, written by Eric Mowbray Knight. The dog in the novel was based on Eric Knight’s real-life collie Toots.

People in Iceland read more books per capita than any other people in the world.

The book of Esther is the only book in the Bible that does not mention the name of god.

Arnold Schönberg was a triskaidekaphobe. He died thirteen minutes from midnight on Friday the thirteenth.

Tabloids, chronicles and gazettes were what they called newspapers in the 19th century.

The word is WAY older than that: In Irish police stations in the nineteenth century, couples were charged with being Found Under Carnal Knowldege, which the police abbreviated calling it a F.U.C.K. charge.

A sultan’s wife is called a sultana.

The real name for lead poisoning is plumbism.

The word byte is a contraction of “by eight.”

Only words we use now that end in -gry are angry and hungry.

There are solid reasons for both of these facts: Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish more easily than English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish more easily than Japanese.

Give him 2.54 centimeters and he’ll take 91.44 centimeters: 10 October is National Metric Day.

A beverage in China called white tea is simply boiled water.

Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s for $2.7 million in 1961 from the McDonald brothers.

And just why would you want to do that? Beer foam will go down if you lick your finger and then stick it in the beer.

Vegetarians make up four percent of the US population.

Bananas don’t grow on trees. They grow on rhizomes.

Coffee is the second largest item of international commerce in the world. Statements like this drive me crazy, because then I always have to wonder what is the FIRST largest item of international commerce in the world. You don’t know, do you?

Less than three percent of Nestle’s sales are for chocolate.

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma in an emergency.

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

Rice is grown on more than ten percent of the earth’s surface and is the main food for half of the people of the world.

Salt is the only rock humans can eat.

Playing cards in India are round.

More people use blue toothbrushes than red ones.

A flush toilet exists today that dates back to 2,000 BCE.

Most people button their shirts upward. Not me, though.

Totally Hair Barbie is the best-selling Barbie of all time.

The yo-yo originated in the Philippines where it is used for hunting.

The side of a hammer is called a cheek.

The average lead pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long or write approximately fifty thousand English words.

People in China sometimes leave firecrackers around the house as fire alarms.

It takes a plastic container fifty thousand years to start decomposing.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are blood donors.

In Cleveland, Ohio, it is illegal to catch mice without a hunting license.

Most burglaries occur in the winter.

Abdul Kassam Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.

A golden razor found in King Tut’s tomb was still sharp enough to be used.

In 290 BCE, Aristarchus suggested that the sun was the center of the solar system.

Candidus is Latin for shining white. All office seekers in Rome were obliged to wear a certain white toga for a period of one year before the election. They were said to be candidati and one hopes that they were candid in their speeches, but, well, probably not.

Two dogs were among the Titanic survivors.

Robert E. Lee wore a size 4 1/2 shoe.

Olive oil was used for washing the body in the ancient Mediterranean world.

New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote, in 1890.

The words of the Japanese national anthem, dating from the ninth century CE are the oldest of any nation’s songs. but the music is from 1880.

Built in 1697, the Frankford Avenue Bridge, which crosses Pennypack Creek in Philadelphia, is the oldest U.S. bridge in continuous use.

Printed on the book that the Statue of Liberty is holding is “July IV, MDCCLXXVI.” The statue’s mouth is three feet wide.

The main library at Indiana University sinks more than an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

The Future’s Museum in Sweden contains a scale model of the solar system. The sun is 105 meters in diameter, and the planets range from five millimeters to six kilometers from the sun. This particular model also contains the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, still to scale, situated in the Museum of Victora, Australia.

The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than Niagra Falls.

All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.

San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile national monuments.

The largest object ever found in the Los Angeles sewer system was a motorcycle.

If you bring a raccoon’s head to the Henniker, New Hampshire, town hall, you are entitled to receive ten dollars.

In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.

I had no idea that I was ever that close to forty-seven czars. Forty-seven czars are buried in the Kremlin which is just across the square from where we stayed when we played in Moscow.

“Czar” is the Russian rendering of “Caesar,” just as Kaiser is the German version. “Kaiser” is very close to the classical Latin pronunciation of “Caesar.”

Says here the Romans originated the practice of giving presents at Christmas, which was known to them as the Saturnalia, but the veneration of the Egyptian god Horus who was born on 25 December and who had twelve days of worship probably included presents too. Horus was born of a virgin and he had twelve apostles.

Sister Boom-Boom was a transvestite nun who ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1982. S/he received more than twenty thousand votes, if you look closely she looks very much like the shemales linked here.

Hmmm. Pope Adrian VI died after a fly got stuck in his throat as he was drinking from a water fountain.

According to the ceremonial customs of Orthodox Judaism, it is officially sundown when you cannot tell the difference between a black thread and a red thread.

Wives and husbands in India who desire children whisper their wish into the ear of a sacred cow.

A third of Taiwanese funeral processions include a stripper.

Not even real foam? NERF, the popular foam children’s toy company, doesn’t actually stand for anything.

Ted Turner owns five percent of New Mexico.

Time to go online. It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.

The most dangerous job in the United States is sanitation worker. Fire fighters and police officers are a close second and third, followed by leather tanners fourth.

The sale of vodka makes up ten percent of Russian government income.

In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

Vanilla is used to make chocolate.

Sixty percent of big-firm executives say the cover letter is as important as, or more important than, the résumé itself when you are applying for a new job.

John Dillinger played professional baseball.

Anise is the scent on the artificial rabbit that is used in greyhound races.

It takes three thousand cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.

Nearly all sumo wrestlers have flat feet and big bottoms.

Meteorologists claim they’re right 85% of the time.

Astronauts in orbit around the earth can see the wakes of ships.

A manned rocket can reach the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.

A neutron star has such a powerful gravitational pull that it can spin on its axis in one-thirtieth of a second without tearing itself apart. A pulsar is a neutron star, and it gets its energy from its rotation.

A full moon always rises at sunset.

The first computer ever made was called the ENIAC. A silicon chip a quarter-inch square has the capability of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

The tail section of an airplane gives the bumpiest ride.

Gold was the first metal to be discovered.

One out of five trees in the world is a Siberian larch.

During the time that the atom bomb was being developed at Alamogordo, New Mexico, applicants for routine jobs like janitors were disqualified if they could read.

All organic compounds contain carbon.

Hydrogen is the most common atom in the universe.

One hundred seven incorrect medical procedures will be performed today.

Moisture, not air, causes superglue to dry.

The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond.

A baby blue whale is twenty-five feet long at birth.

The only two mammals to lay eggs are the echidna and the platypus. The mothers nurse their babies through pores in their skin.

In 1859, twenty-four rabbits were released in Australia. Within six years, the population grew to two million.

Human beings and the two-toed sloth are the only land animals that typically mate face to face.

At least one species of lizard is known to reproduce by parthenogenesis.

A dragonfly has a life span of four to seven weeks.

A square mile of fertile earth has thirty-two million earthworms in it.

No wonder they put up the seagull monument. A large swarm of locusts can eat eighty thousand tons of corn in a day.

There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.

The poison arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200 people.

Marine iguanas, saltwater crocodiles, sea snakes and sea turtles are the only surviving seawater adapted reptiles.

The tuatara lizard of New Zealand only has to breathe once an hour.

A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.

Snakes, like cows, cannot activate their vitamin D without the presence of sunlight.

A group of geese on the ground is called a gaggle, but in the air they are called a skein.

A group of goats is called a trip.

A group of hares is called a husk.

Kangaroos in a group are known as a mob.

A tribe of rhinos is called a crash.

A group of toads is called a knot.

A bale of turtles, a clowder of cats, a gam of whales and a streak of tigers.

A parliament of owls.

We’ll see you next week.

Big Brother and the Holding Company

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Composing Music

Posted on February 24, 2013 by J L tagged.

I started writing melodies and songs when I was about this age, just as all the other babies do.

Some babies don’t stop singing songs and painting pictures. They remain babies in this sense (and perhaps in other senses as well) all their lives, whether they move onto piano stools or hold an instrument in their hands.

Writing about writing music is strange because we all played music long before we evolved rules for making music.

Art cannot be explained, but technique can, so I’ll talk a bit about the technique of composing music.

First comes rhythm. That happens when your heart starts beating. If I had it all to do over again, I would have played drums for a couple of years right at the beginning, say, when I was six or seven. I bought my own drum kit after reading reviews on websites like Instrumentfind.com and it was one of the best things I’ve ever bought.

If you play guitar, try muting the guitar strings with your fingering hand and and playing all kinds of rhythms with you strumming hand. This way you’ll concentrate on the rhythm alone. When you get something good going, start playing a few notes or chords in that rhythm. Maybe look into getting some dj equipment to mix your sounds together, creating something unique through your music.

Melody is mysterious and sacred. There are rules for writing melodies and they are good, but the best melodies come from somewhere inside you. They are almost like a gift.

Sing it first. You should be able to sing any melody that you write. Melodies should sound inevitable. A melody is like a line in drawing. Very simple but it is the foundation to everything.

Every time I take a long walk, there is a song that goes with me. My feet hit the ground and that is the basic rhythm. Then, a melody comes out of me whether I want it to or not. That is the theme of my walk. This melody is so obsessive that sometimes I want to run away from it, so I do. I invent a second melody. It is worth noting here that fugue means “flight.”

As I walk, I improvise a countermelody that is busier than the first melody. One of these melodies comments on the other, sometimes in a spirited and witty fashion, sometimes plodding along. I hear both melodies together even though I am “writing” them (imagining them) sequentially.

The sound of your feet walking along the ground can be subdivided by two, three, five, six, seven, anything. You don’t have to stick to 4/4 or 3/4. If you’re willing to wait long enough, your feet will beat out an 11/8 tempo, if you want them too. I wrote a song called Godzilla of Love in 11/8 while I was out walking.

The first melody that comes to me on a walk can be derivative, childish, or an outright imitation of someone else’s song, but the counterpoint, the second melody that goes with the first, is more often original, even eccentric, odd, uninhibited, fugacious.

Before the walk is over, I try the counter melody in every style I can think of.

Go ahead, make a melody of ten, twenty notes, I’ll wait. Some rules for melody making: stepwise motion is good with occasional leaps. Mainly, though, just be loose and natural. Don’t worry about whether it’s original or not. That part will take care of itself.

Another rule is to keep the melody human. Try to have the entire range of the melody within a tenth, that is, an octave and a third. You don’t want to write to the extremes of a voice, or any other instrument for that matter. Good to have everyone comfortable. Especially the singer. If the singer or the instruments want to get wild, good, but give them a melody, a coherent, structured frame for their elaborations.

I can sing this range, and probably most people have a range of more than a tenth, but a vocal in a nice, easy compass will often sound the best and most natural. If you are writing for someone else, try to work well within her range, so she is comfortable and happy. Keep it to an octave and a third.

Find out the strengths of your singer and accent her best ideas.

When we started Big Brother, I was playing a lot of Bach and the above composition appealed to me. Herr Bach used this motif (the first five notes) in many places in his music. I put it in G minor and used it as the organizing theme for Summertime, along with an idea I got from Nina Simone about weaving classical lines through a popular tune. (She did it on another Gershwin tune, You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To.)

A friend showed me this minor descending line which I put in the root of the chord and transposed it to G minor and that was the rhythm part for Summertime, all of which worked well with Janis Joplin’s amazingly beautiful voice.

There are melodies everywhere. I was once in a post office in Moscow writing postcards home and people would walk through a gate to get to the back of the counter.

When the rusty gate swung slowly to and fro, its creaking played something like this, a blues melody of maybe six notes, rich in texture because of the wood in the gate. When the gate sung back into its original position, it played the melody backwards.

Once you have the original melody in mind, the second melody can be found intuitively, or by the rules, or by a combination of the two.

There are many rules for setting a second melody against the first, and many people have spent a lifetime organizing, clarifying and understanding these principles which came to be called polyphony or counterpoint.

If the second melody is closely parallel to the first, it is usually called a harmony part. It makes a series of chords with the first melody. Here the voices are moving closely together, mostly in thirds and sixths, which are inverted thirds.

Here the soprano, alto, tenor and bass are moving much more freely in relation to each other.

Here they imitate each other as if they were echoes.

Remember singing Row, Row, Row, Your Boat while the other side of the room sang the same tune but starting when you reached the second line? This is called a round or a catch. It’s a very simple form of counterpoint.

Sophisticated examples of the round are called canons, fugues, inventions.

Finding the second melody to go with the first can be done intuitively, with a great deal of study, or, ideally, intuitively and with study.

In the early jazz groups in New Orleans, everyone in the band played “lead,” that is, each person played a melody, and all the solos worked together beautifully, because the band agreed on the chord changes before they began. The chord changes were the organizing principle. Every body knew the tune and the harmony and they played their variations on the tune all at the same time.

Let’s say you agreed to do a piece of music where the chord changes were C E7 F F#dim C/G A7 D7 G7 with, say, two beats per chord change. Each musician could play a solo in this framework, a solo that took account of these harmonies, and if they all played their solos at the same time, this would be a natural counterpoint, as in early jazz around 1910 in New Orleans. This is a glorious sound, happy and free and more than a little giddy.

In the music of J.S. Bach and Palestrina there are many voices singing different melodies and counterpoint was the technique for learning how to do this, a technique that could take years of delightful study to master. In this style, it seemed as if the different voices moving against each other create the harmony (the chords) as an afterthought rather than having the chords dictate the boundaries of the melody as they do in jazz and rock and roll. It’s a kind of reverse freedom from the New Orleans style.

Sixteenth century polyphony took the same approach as early jazz only backwards. Instead of the chords creating the harmony, the individual voices created the chords. Depends which way you look at it. Vertical or horizontal. You’re looking at the same phenomenon, but vertically or horizonatally? Improvising musicians answer this question more or less subconsciously every time they play. Is the melody line more important or is the chord matrix more important? What will guide the music more, the melody or the harmony?

The difference between harmony and counterpoint is whether you perceive the two or more voices as vertical (harmony) or horizontal (counterpoint).

Monophony, then, is one melody, simple. Homophony is a melody supported by chords, which are, in effect, many voices working in parallel. It is probably homophony that we hear most often, especially when we listen to popular music. Polyphony is two more or less independent melodies played together.

Counterpoint is polyphony, two or more different melodies played at the same time. This is a very potent technique, especially in popular music where it is rare.

One of the first records I owned was by Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. They did a lot of contrapuntal playing, two truly independent melodies played against each other. The effect was beautiful, especially with a baritone saxophone and a trumpet with such different ranges and textures.

King Oliver hired a very young Louis Armstrong for his group and they did a lot of playing in thirds, incredibly swift playing. They also played counterpoint when they soloed together.

So, then, the idea is come up with a beautiful easy to sing melody and then set another melody against it.

An often used approach is to make the first main melody a soprano part and then to put the the counter melody in the bass.

Then the idea is to thicken each melody part with “inside” harmonies for the alto and tenor voices.

In a symphony orchestra, this will often mean that the violins have the first melody, the basses, way down below, the second, and other instruments will fill out the space between, but, of course, any combination of instruments can perform any of these functions. This is a matter of arranging and orchestration.

Say you have this chord (C, E, Bb, D# and Gb), a C7b5#9 chord: In the strings, this could be the bass viol playing C, the ‘cello playing E, the viola playing Bb, second violin playing D# and the first violin playing a Gb. Any family of instruments, the strings, the woodwinds, the brass can play this set of tones, or all of them could play it. Who plays what is called orchestration. How they play it and where they pass it off to another family of instruments in the orchestra could be called arranging. All of this together is composing for a large group of musicians, an orchestra.

Explore the rhythms. Try a lot of different times for the melodies, 4/4, 3/4, 2/4, 6/8, 5/4.

Begin the meldoy right on beat one, then try it entering before the first beat, then try beginning it in the middle of the measure. Where the melody enters can make a big difference.

Let’s say you have a decent melody played by a soprano instrument, and, then, for the basses, you have a good counter melody. Now, you have to give the inside voices something decent to play. This can be a challenge.

You want to enrich the lives of second violinists, viola players, and second chairs everywhere, by writing some fun things in the middle, that won’t, however, upstage the soprano melody and the other idea in the bass.

It’s a good idea to know how to play every instrument, at least a little, and that way you will be acquainted with each player’s strengths and weaknesses.

There are families of instruments, often with the same fingerings, but in different sizes, so this puts them in different keys.

The violin is the soprano string instrument, agile, capable of playing quick passages and she often carries the melody.

The violin’s range is four octaves, although it might be good at first not to use the top octave.

Stay in this three octave range at first. The violin player can use natural and artificial harmonics, and these are fun to write and play.

The viola is the alto voice of the strings and, indeed, music for the viola is written in the alto clef. Artificial and natural harmonics are available for all stringed instruments.

That bottom note is sound of the third fret, fifth string of the guitar, an octave below middle C.

The ‘cello is the tenor voice of the strings. The name ‘cello is an abbreviated form of violoncello. This is an expressive and beautiful instrument.

The guitar and the trombone are also tenor instruments and are quite close in range to the ‘cello.

A ‘cellist learns to read three clefs and so does someone who writes music for her.

The double bass (bass viol, string bass, upright bass, bass fiddle, doghouse bass, contrabass, standup bass, bull fiddle) is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2. The double bass is a standard member of the string section of the orchestra and smaller string ensembles.

Notice that the bass strings are the same as the four lowest strings of the guitar (E,A,D,G) but an octave lower. The guitar is a transposing instrument in that its music is written an octave higher than it actually sounds. The bass range sounds an octave lower than it is written.

Thus, the string family has its soprano, alto, tenor and bass instruments.

Most of the other instrument families in the orchestra have their separate ranges also.

Many of these are transposing instruments because of their different sizes. When they play their C, it is not the C that a piano plays. When the Eb alto saxophone plays a C, the sound you hear is Eb. This is because people wanted to keep the same names for the same fingerings on instruments of different sizes.

The guitar is an instrument ‘in C,’ that is, when it plays a C, that C sounds the same as the piano C. It’s a “real” C. In my first band, I had two saxophone players, an alto and a tenor. One of the first questions they asked me was, “What key is the guitar in?” This was a very surprising question to me, so I answered, “I don’t know, it must be in E, because there are a lot of Es on it.” After some going back and forth, we realized that the guitar is a concert instrument and thus in C.

When the guitar plays a C, that is a real C, but the guitar is a transposing instrument in that the music for it is written an octave higher than it sounds.

The best place to see a few members of the guitar family is in a mariachi band. I see a requinto, a guitarrón and of course a tenor guitar, which is the main one we know.

This is a charango from Bolivia.

The charango has several tunings or afinaciones. (Afinado is in tune. Desafinado is out of tune.)

When I was 18, I played a silver Eb clarinet, which has always been used in military bands, but was brought into the concert orchestra at the beginning of the 20th cenntury. Berlioz was probably the first to use it. Schoenberg, Varèse and Berg also wrote for the Eb clarinet, which has a hard, biting quality.

The Eb clarinet is written a minor third lower than it sounds.

I have played in a few clarinet ensembles and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

The clarinet has a large range and sounds beautiful in its lower (chalumeau) register which is woody and rich, and, in fact, sounds quite a bit like that old gate in the post office in Moscow.

I once played the bass clarinet in a wind ensemble as a kind of a stand in for the basset horn on a Mozart piece.

This was actually the music that Salieri was somewhat unethically perusing in Amadeus. when Mozart’s wife Costanze was delightedly eating the tettarelle di Venere that Salieri had offered her as a bribe.

Tettarelle di Venere means tits of Venus and they must have been delicious because Stanzi was completely distracted.

The bass clarinet is written in the treble clef a major 9th higher than it sounds, and it is a strong bass in the woodwind group. The lower octave is full and rich and the bass clarinet is often used as a solo instrument. It can be doubled with the ‘cello or bass to provide strong clarity to a bass line.

The flute in C needs to have a nice quiet background for its lower and middle registers.

However, the high register is strong, clear and brilliant.

The alto flute is the next extension downward of the C flute after the flûte d’amour. It is characterized by its distinct, mellow tone in the lower portion of its range. It is a transposing instrument in G and, like the piccolo and bass flute, uses the same fingerings as the C flute. The tube of the alto flute is considerably thicker and longer than a C flute and requires more breath from the player. This gives it a greater dynamic presence in the bottom octave and a half of its range.

The high register of the alto flute is not really needed, but the low register has a better quality than the regular C flute.

The oboe, a double reed instrument of the woodwind family, is a descendant of the medieval shawm, which sounded remarkably similar. Oboes are the sopranos of the woodwind family and are a double reed instrument made from a wooden tube roughly 60 cm long, with metal keys, a conical bore and flared bell. The oboe sound is produced by blowing into the (double) reed and vibrating a column of air. The sound is piercing and otherworldly. The oboe was called the hautbois (haut [“high, loud”] and bois [“wood, woodwind”]) in the time of Händel, and this is still the best name for it. Before the advent of electrictronic devices, the oboe was the one who gave the A to the orchestra for tuning.

The oboe is a melody instrument and doesn’t sound well playing inner voices of chords, because it has that penetrating, individual voice. The best range for the oboe melody is a D below the staff to a Bb a line above. Don’t give the oboist a lot to do. The player has to breathe more often than those who play other instruments, probably because s/he is blowing into that double reed.

The English horn (cor anglais) is a large oboe used mainly for expressive solo passages.

The lower octave and a half of the English horn sounds the best and it goes well with violas, ‘celli and the lower clarinets.

This is a double reed instrument. The music is written in the bass clef except for very high notes which are written in the tenor.

The bassoon is the bass of the woodwind family but it is a good melody instrument which almost always makes me feel giggly for some reason. I love the sound.

Bassoons and clarinets are a good blend. Two bassoons and two French horns sound good also. All three registers, low, middle and upper, are good.

Contrabassoon is very low like the bass viol and it sounds an octave lower than written.

The main function of the contrabassoon is to strengthen the bass line.

The point here is that the contrabassoon needs a simple part with plenty of rests. The best use is for ensemble playing.

There are many kinds of trumpets in many different keys, but the one most used today is in Bb.

Double and triple tonguing are not difficult for the trumpets, but don’t have them do it for a long time.

Music for trumpet is written one step higher than it actually sounds.

The trombone is also in Bb and it is a tenor instrument.

Music for the trombone is written mostly in the bass clef and sounds as written.

If you’re going to write music for the trombone, it might be a good idea to play the instrument yourself or to have a friend who does because there are places where it is not good to write wide skips into and out of (like the 7th position, for example, especially from there into the 1st position).

Three trombones sound well as a unit.

The bass trombone in G is notated in the bass clef and sounds as written.

As the name indicates, humans originally used to blow on the actual horns of animals before starting to emulate them in metal.

This original usage is still retained in the Shofar, ram’s horn, which has an important role in Jewish religious ritual.

Early metal horns were less complex than modern horns, consisting of brass tubes with a slightly flared opening (the bell) wound around a few times. These early “hunting” horns were originally played on a hunt, often while mounted, and the sound they produced was called a recheat. Change of pitch was effected entirely by the lips (the horn not being equipped with valves until the 19th century). Without valves, only the notes within the harmonic series are available. The horn was used, among other reasons, to call hounds on a hunt and created a sound most like a human voice, but carried much farther.

The horn (also known as the corno and French horn) is a brass instrument made of about 12–13 feet (3.7–4.0 m) of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player (or less frequently, a hornist). In informal use, “horn” refers to nearly any wind instrument with a flared exit for the sound.

Descended from the natural horn, the instrument is often informally known as a Horn in F or French horn. However, this is technically incorrect since the instrument is not French in origin, but German.

Therefore, the International Horn Society has recommended since 1971 that the instrument be simply called the horn. French horn is still the most commonly used name for the instrument in the United States.

Pitch is controlled through the adjustment of lip tension in the mouthpiece and the operation of valves by the left hand, which route the air into extra tubing. Most horns have lever-operated rotary valves, but some, especially older horns, use piston valves (similar to a trumpet’s) and the Vienna horn uses double-piston valves, or pumpenvalves.

A horn without valves is known as a natural horn, changing pitch along the natural harmonics of the instrument or by actually building new sections, called crooks, into the instrument. As you might imagine this is a very slow process and is usually done at the beginning of the piece, or during longish interludes.

Three valves control the flow of air in the single horn, which is tuned to F or less commonly B?. The more common double horn has a fourth valve, usually operated by the thumb, which routes the air to one set of tubing tuned to F or another tuned to B?.

Triple horns with five valves are also made, tuned in F, B?, and a descant E? or F. Also common are descant doubles, which typically provide B? and Alto F branches. This configuration provides a high-range horn while avoiding the additional complexity and weight of a triple.

The bass clef is used for the lower register of the horn and the treble clef for the upper.

These instruments fall into the soprano, alto, tenor and bass ranges. They can be the voices for chords and those chords can change in harmony.

For hundreds of years, in the era of what is known as common practice (1600-1900 CE), chords in music tended to move in fourths and fifths.

That is, if you were dealing with a C chord, the most likely place it was going was to an F chord. In the key of C, here is a very well traveled road of harmony: C F Bdim Em Am Dm G7 C. You see? This is up four notes (or down five notes) every chord change. This is still a very strong pull in music. It’s called the circle of fifths. Much miusic is still being written with these chord changes up four notes or down five. This motion is usually taught in chapter one of the harmony books.

For three hundred years or so, chords tended to move COUNTERclockwise around this circle. They still very often move in this motion.

Then came the twentieth century and chords started to go anywhere they wanted. C could go to C# and then to D#. C could go to F#, an interval that was called diabolus in musica (the devil in music) for centuries. In Big Brother we do a song called It’s Cool that uses C to F# as an organizing principle.

The world grew smaller because of radio and recording and we all heard non Western music that sometimes seemed to have no chords, or chords that didn’t move in a circle of fifths at all.

The piano with its ease of playing, say, a C13#5b9 chord gave way to the guitar which was much more comfortable with a basic C chord or a C7 chord, and because this chord was simple, it had a power that the more complicated harmony did not. Most painters will tell you that a primary color will have an impact that eludes a blended hue. Both primary and blended have their place, of course, but by 1900 in classical (serious) music and by 1960 in popular music a need was felt for simple, basic harmonies. So in simple terms, piano sheet music paved the way for new harmonies and tunes to emerge.

Chords began to be built in fourths and fifths rather than in thirds.

Because we were listening to folk music and folk blues, we began to think modally. In the song Down On Me, the chord changes are D C G A, which has nothing to do with the circle of fifths, and the “dominant” chord in this progression, which would have been A not so long ago, was now C.

We began to hear and play songs like this. Here, as in Down On Me, the “dominant” chord, instead of being an A7, as it was for Mozart, is a C chord.

Harmonies (chord progressions) became extremely simple or nonexistent. This is almost a basso ostinato (obstinate bass) part in that the bass plays the same figure for a long time. We began to play long pieces, such as Hall of the Mountain King that had one chord, E minor, or, really, E modal. Over this E sound, we would play a melody in any scale, really, but very often in something like E F G A B C D E. In classical harmony this would be a Phrygian mode, but we didn’t think of it that way, and would just as often play a G# as a G natural or a Bb instead of a B natural. This was not planned, but instinctively felt.

Bass lines rather than guitar/piano chords began to organize such ideas as G Bb C G Bb Db C G Bb C Bb G G.

This progression, which seemed to be in every other song in the 1950s, and now too, fell out of use in the 1960s. When I was eighteen, I called these chords The Fabulous Four although I thought of them as C A minor F and G. Doo Wop chords.

In the 60s, we were just as likely, more likely, to play these which we would have called C Ab Bb F .

These harmonies aren’t based on the major scale as C A minor F and G are. They are modal or based on minor (Aeolian, Phrygian, Mixolydian) modes.

Recognize this? Definitely mixolydian mode. Dumbed down a little bit for the beginner. For a long time, every guitar player knew this riff.

This song by Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer (Jack Hammer?) used the minor and major modes together.

Often there was no third at all in the rhythm parts which often sounded like a jack hammer.

The bridge (what the Beatles called the “middle”) of the tunes often went into a different time signature.

We could look into this further, but it might be time to make up some music of your own.

Try something different.

Thank you for being here and I’ll see you next week.

__________________________________________

Tumble

Posted on February 3, 2013 by J L tagged.

Anthea Sidiropoulos was walking into a church when she saw a sign that the janitor had put up in front of an area where he was mopping: Please Don’t Walk On The Water.

Elephant to naked man: How do you breathe through that thing?

A good listener is usually thinking about something else… or not thinking at all.

The thing about being on time is that there’s never anyone else around to appreciate it.

When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason.

We’re happily married. We wake up in the middle of the night and laugh at each other.

The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts… the less you know the hotter you get.

You’ve been married for fifty years, how do you do it? I close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening.

I was walking down the hill the other day and saw some men roofing a house and one of the guys hammering a nail called me a big ugly ham… in Morse code.

My friend Sam, one of the best people ever. It’s confusing when we get mail, though.

We would have broken up except for the children. We were the children.

Democrats are better lovers than Republicans. You never heard of a good piece of elephant, did you?

My wife’s an air sign. I’m a fire sign. There’s a lot of hot air, that’s for sure.

New summer camp in the Adirondacks for Native American kids: Camp Shapiro.

The only thing my wife and I have in common is that we were married on the same day.

Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve admired in the shop window. When you get it home it might not go with anything that is in the house.

In Hollywood, all marriages are happy. Trying to live together afterwards is what causes problems.

Justin Bieber was kind enough to do a benefit at a senior citizens’ home and, approaching one of the elderly ladies, said, “Do you know who I am?” And she says, “No, but go to the front desk, they’ll tell you who you are.”

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished. Zsa Zsa Gabor

The guy who said two can live as cheaply as one has a lot of explaining to do.

American, Russian, Iraqi and an Israeli walking down the street. Roving Reporter says, “Excuse me, we’re conducting a public opinion poll about the meat shortage.” Russian says, “What’s meat?” American says, “What’s a shortage?” Iraqi says, “What’s public opinion?” Israeli says, ”What’s ‘excuse me?’ ”

I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me. Henny Youngman

A person is never drunk as long as she can lie on the floor without holding on.

I said to my wife, do you feel that the sex and excitement have gone out of our marriage, and she said, let’s talk about it during the next commercial.

If god dwells within us, I hope she likes enchiladas, because that’s what she’s getting.

Married men don’t live longer than single men. It just seems that way.

A New Age church in California has three commandments and seven suggestions.

If you were my husband, said Lady Astor, I’d put poison in your coffee. And if I were your husband, answered Winston Churchill, I’d drink it.

Mrs. Pop to Mr. Pop: No way we’re naming this kid Iggy.

Marry me, and I promise I’ll never bother you again.

Besides “I love you,” what three words does a woman want to hear the most. “Ill fix it.”

Marriage means commitment. So does insanity.

It was a really big shoe. That guy who was half Jewish and half Japanese was circumcised at Beni Hana’s.

I was engaged once to a contortionist. She broke it off.

Doctors: they give you an appointment in a month and then ask why you took so long to see them.

She’s a lovely person. She deserves a good husband. Marry her before she finds one. Oscar Levant to Harpo Marx.

A WASP’s idea of affirmative action. Hiring South American jockeys.

I love these people. Silvia and Franco.

Carrie Clores, right, is married to my old friend Rob who played keyboards in Love, Janis, NYC.

Man rules the roost. Woman rules the rooster.

Dad: Son, if you masturbate, you’ll go blind. Son: I’m over here, Dad.

Patient: Doctor, I have no memory. Doctor: Now, keep calm, how long have you had this problem? Patient: What problem?

Men are not dogs. Dogs are loyal and faithful.

A smart husband thinks twice before not saying anything.

Where do you find a man who is truly committed? In a mental hospital.

What is the difference between men and pigs? Pigs don’t turn into men when they get drunk.

How does a man plan for the future? He buys two bottles of vodka instead of just one.

I may be seventy-one but every morning when I get up I feel like a twenty year old. Unfortunately there’s never one around.

Why don’t lobsters share? Because they’re shellfish. (I knew you would like that one.)

Did you hear about the psychic amnesiac? She knew in advance what she was going to forget.

A WASP is a guy who gets out of the shower to take a leak.

As long as the world keeps turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes. Mel Brooks

If I had my life to live over, I’d make all the mistakes much sooner.

When you’re dead, your fingernails, toenails and hair continue to grow for three days. After that your e mails taper off.

Fabulous new diet: you can only eat bagels and lox… and you have to live in Syria.

The new heroin diet is interesting… most of your food falls on the floor.

I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I lost two weeks.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Behind every successful man stands a proud wife and an astonished mother-in-law.

How many musicians does it take to change a lightbulb? One, with ten on the guest list.

Adam to Eve: Hey, I wear the plants in this family.

How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hey, fuck you, forget about it.

I’m now at the age where I’ve got to prove that I’m just as good as I never was.

The secret to staying young is to exercise regularly, eat sparingly and lie about your age.

My wife calls our waterbed The Dead Sea.

The optimist created the airplane. The pessimist created the seat belts.

I’m so old, my blood type was discontinued.

Confidence: what you start off with before you completely understand the situation.

My wife always lets me have her way. And that’s OK.

If you don’t drink, when you wake up in the morning, that’s the best you’re going to feel all day.

I heard two guys talking in Arabic in a bar the other day. I said, “Hey, you’re in America now, speak Spanish.”

Jewish foreplay is three hours of begging. Italian foreplay is, “Honey, I’m home!”

How many Amish does it take to screw in a lightbulb? The Amish don’t have lightbulbs. They bake pies.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but that’s what it is… an institution.

Joe: You’re always wishing for something you haven’t got. Flo: What else is there to wish for?

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. Henny Youngman

I wanted to sign up for Paranoids Anonymous but they wouldn’t tell me where they were.

A marriage license costs twenty dollars now, and everything you’ve got for the rest of your life.

The drinking age and the voting age should be the same. Some of the people we vote for, you need a drink.

If someone says, “My kid is a conservative, how did that happen?” remind them that when we took all those drugs in the 60s, we were told that our children would be brain damaged.

Let me get this straight. I can’t sleep with anyone else for the rest of my life, and, if things don’t work out, you get to keep half my stuff? What a great idea.

My doctor keeps sending me to other physicians. I don’t know if he’s a doctor or a booking agent.

Texan: How big is your farm? Kibbutzer: Two hundred by three hundred feet. How big is your ranch? Texan: I get in my car, drive from sunrise to sunset and never reach the end of my land. Kibbutzer: Yeah, I had a car like that too.

What is the difference between a dog and a fox? About five drinks.

Frank goes to a meeting once a week to make him stop drinking, and it works. Every Wednesday between five and six he doesn’t drink.

Patient: How much to have this tooth pulled? Dentist: Ninety dollars. Patient: Ninety dollars for just a few minutes work? Dentist: I can extract if very slowly if you like.

I used to take two hits of acid so I could have a round trip.

Four out of three people have trouble with fractions.

Docotr: You’ll be able to resume your love life when you can climb two flights of stairs without becoming winded. Patient: Why don’t I look for a woman who lives on the ground floor?

When her enemies stopped booing, she knew she was slipping.

I’m so old that when I order a three-minute egg, they ask for the money up front.

She never hated a man enough to give him his jewelry back.

I was recently born again. It was a glorious experience, but I can’t say that my mother enjoyed it a whole lot.

Chinese guy having a drink when Roy Goldberg knocks him off the stool. “Hey, what’s that for?” ”That’s for Pearl Harbor.” ”Yeah, but I’m Chinese,” the guy says. “All the same to me,” says Goldberg. A little later, the Asian man walks over and slugs Goldberg. “That’s for the Titanic.” “The Titanic,” answers Roy, “was hit by an icberg.” “Iceberg, Goldberg, they’re all the same to me.”

Tell me. darling, where have you been all my life? Well, for the first fifty years of it I wasn’t even around.

Are you living a life of quiet desperation, or are you married?

That new synagogue in Harlem is called Beth You Is My Woman Now.

Robert Altman took this of Chet Helms.

I’ll never make the mistake of being seventy again.

I just had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

Bumper sticker in Canada: I’d rather be driving.

Dad, he said, I play this guy who’s been married for twenty-five years. That’s great, son, enthused his father, one of these days maybe you’ll work up to a speaking part.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. Mark Twain

I finally got it all together. Now I’m too old to pick it up.

Or, to put it another way, experience is a comb that life gives you after you’ve lost your hair.

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

Politics is the art of looking for problems, finding them everywhere, diagnosing them incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

What’s the difference between baseball and politics? In baseball, you’re out if you’re caught stealing.

Rick Santorum says that gay people getting married would violate the sanctity of marriage. Are you married? Do you feel sanctified?

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.

Marriage is grand. Divorce is a hundred grand.

Why don’t Baptists make love standing up? They’re afraid it might lead to dancing.

A WASP proposes marriage: How would you like to be buried with my people?

Don’t marry for money. It’s cheaper to borrow it.

If god has anything better than sex to offer, she’s keeping it to herself.

Why is psychoanalysis quicker for men than for women? When it’s time to regress to their childhood, most men are already there.

He doesn’t have an enemy in the world, but all of his friends hate him.

How many psychoanalysts does it take to screw in a lightbulb? How many do you think it takes?

I had to give up masochism. I was enjoying it too much.

The thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most trouble is sex.

Honey, am I your first? Why does everyone ask me that?

No problem is too big to run away from.

The thing about being unemployed is that when you wake up, you’re on the job.

The amount of sleep required by the average person is about five minutes more.

I’ve noticed that nothing I’ve never said ever did me any harm,

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

We’ll see you next week.

Sam Andrew

Big Bother and the Folding Company

_______________________________________

Geology of the San Francisco Bay Area

Posted on January 27, 2013 by J L tagged.

The geology of the San Francisco Bay Area is a nightmare of jumbled, mixed, chaotic rocks. It looks in many places as if a giant had stuck a stick in the Bay and stirred wildly.

One of the most interesting such mélanges in the world.

The San Francisco Bay itself is the drowned mouth of the Sacramento River.

The sea level rose three hundred feet when the continental ice sheets melted about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and it submerged the river entrance into the Bay Area.

Since then the river has been slowly, slowly filling the Bay with mud.

In a few thousand years, the Bay will be a flatland, grassy and beautiful.

The Sacramento is the only river that cuts through the Coast Range to the ocean, so it must have been flowing before the range emerged so that it could erode the rocks as quickly as they rose.

The San Francisco Bay is 300 feet deep in places so the Golden Gate is like a drain in a bathtub constantly scoured by a huge volume of water that flows in and out of a tiny opening as the tides change.

Without the deep sea valley known as the Golden Gate and without the Sacramento River, San Francisco would be just another stretch of the California Coast Ranges. This opening in the Coast Range is so small that Spanish explorers in the fog missed it for two hundred years, as did Sir Francis Drake. In the nineteenth century, before the Bridge, this opening was known as Chrysopylae, Greek for “golden gate.”

Gray sandstone, red chert and blue-green serpentinite at Baker Beach.

Diatomaceous chert consists of beds of diatomites which were converted into dense, hard chert, and strata several hundred meters thick have been found in sedimentary sequences such as the Miocene Monterey Formation occuring in rocks as old as the Cretaceous.

An ekphrasis on an oil painting I did called Death Shall Have No Dominion: this is a depiction of the silica skeletons of diatoms and radiolarians, microscopic animals that live in the sea. Billions of these animals live and die and form chert several hundred meters thick.

The term “flint” is reserved for varieties of chert which occur in chalk and marly limestone formations.

Serpentinite is prone to landsliding because it is slick and soft. Baker Beach is at the north end of a band of Franciscan mélange that runs to Hunters Point.

My wife Elise and I recently took a long walk to look at a Franciscan outcrop near 15th Avenue and Noriega in San Francisco.

This is in the Sunset District which was once covered with giant sand dunes, some of which remain.

Under its homes and streets, San Francisco is about one-third sand dunes, but these were tamed in the 1870s and only a few remain along Ocean Beach.

The south end of Ocean Beach has a thick section of the Merced Formation, Pleistocene river and beach sediment uplifted by more recent tectonic movement.

Volcanic ash beds like this allow dating of the rocks and help show that the Golden Gate first opened about 600,000 years ago, changing the sediment mix here.

We climbed these stairs at about 31st and Moraga. This entire hill is a sand dune overlying Franciscan rock.

A very high sand dune. When people came to San Francisco they built over the dunes, leveled them out, civilized them.

Elise, an amateur geologist, in the field taking notes and samples.

We climb higher…

… and higher.

And then trudge up the Grandview steps all the way to the top.

This ribbon chert at Grandview Park is part of the same terrane, or wide belt of bedrock, making up the Marin Headlands to the north and many hills in the city.

It’s exciting to find wild sections of the City peeking out here and there.

Telegraph Hill is a knob of graywacke of the Alcatraz terrane. Recognize the couple in this shot? William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Telegraph Hill has been extensively and clumsily quarried to help fill in the old shoreline. The old quarries are now occupied by homes and shops. Occasionally one of the rock faces deteriorates and collapses in a rockslide.

Montgomery Street was once the waterfront, and North Beach was a beach. Sailors fetched their vessels up here during the Gold Rush and simply abandoned them. The ships sank and became landfill for the area east of Montgomery Street, so, now, when crews are excavating foundations for new buildings (such as a concrete foundation for a garage, to name one example), they will sometimes find these old pioneer ships.

Alcatraz is an island consisting of graywacke that has been heavily modified during Alcatraz’ years as a lighthouse, fort and prison.

Russian Hill consists of coarse sandstone, or graywacke, of the Alcatraz terrane.

Long slices of the Coast Range have slid into the Bay Area along the San Andreas Fault and so have several fault branches such as the San Pablo and Hayward faults. This sliding of plates, their rubbing past each other, is a continuing process and is, of course, the source of earthquakes.

The rocks on the sea side of the San Andreas Fault are granite.

Montara Mountain, south of San Francisco, is a knob of bare granite.

The Coast Range granites have migrated here from the southern Sierra Nevada, sliding along the faults on their way northward.

Outcrops between the San Andreas and Hayward fault zones expose Franciscan rocks from the northern Coast Range. These Franciscan rocks underlie the hills of San Francisco and Marin County.

The Franciscan is a crazy catchall mix that consists largely of dismembered sequences of graywacke, shale, and lesser amounts of mafic (volcanic) rocks, thin-bedded chert, and rare limestone, dark colored muddy sediments, , red, green and brown cherts, and lava flows of black basalt. It’s a mishmash.

All of this Franciscan rock was once on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and then it was scraped into a trench at the edge of the ocean about a hundred million years ago.

Long strips of green serpentinite from deep in the earth’s mantle make smaller faults in this section of the Coast Range.

East of the Hayward fault, there are also Franciscan rocks, but they are submerged under thick deposits of muddy sediments, and are weak, younger rocks, which can erode to form soft, rounded hills subject to constant landsliding.

Many of these areas are becoming developed which will cause a problem later unless building code regulations are adopted and scrupulously enforced.

Cuts make hills unstable because they pull out the “foundation” of hills, and fills make hills unstable because they add weight on to the slope above. All it takes is a big rain or leakage from pipes somewhere and the ground will give way and slide.

Ground subsidence is the sinking of the land over man-made or natural underground voids, often caused by undercutting a hill, or building over what was once a body of water.

A lot of buildings in the City look like this. Those windows and that garage were once at street level. They have subsided, probably because the building is sitting on an ancient marsh, or for any of the other reasons listed above.

The San Francisco peninsula was once dotted with streams and lakes. Elk Glen Lake, in Golden Gate Park, is one of several that remain. Lake Merced is another. Building atop dried up or drained streams and lakes makes for shaky ground.

During the construction of ring-shaped Stow Lake in the 1890s, great boulders of the local chert were turned into this rustic bridge.

Strawberry Hill, inside Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, has some beautiful chert specimens.

This is ribbon chert in the Japanese Tea Garden.

Also in the Tea Garden are local basalt and greenstone (serpentinite) of the Franciscan Complex.

Chocolate-colored ribbon chert (the same terrane as the Marin Headlands) on Bernal Hill, south of the Mission District in eastern San Francisco. Chet Helms and I once shared an apartment building in this area (Bernal Heights). The Bay Area is home to many attractive properties that frequently draw Americans to the region (like those on this site: https://reali.com/san-francisco-bay-real-estate/). One of the most popular is Oakland, and it’s easy to see why. With its historic neighborhoods, vibrant social life, and friendly and creative locals, luxury apartments in the city, like those of Atlas Oakland, are getting snapped up fast.

Many small San Francisco parks preserve rock outcrops. This one in Golden Gate Heights shows the typical sandstone of the San Bruno Mountain terrane.

There are many slopes in the Bay Area which are becoming landslides and can be touched off by a heavy spring rain, an earthquake or even an excavation by a construction company.

1870 oil painting of the Mission District, including the lagoon, which was a tidal inlet, but probably not a year-round lake as it appears here. In the foreground is today’s Dolores Park, then a Jewish cemetery.

Corona Heights west of the Castro district has been heavily modified by quarrying, but now its outcrops of Franciscan chert are preserved in a park.

The chert of Corona Heights displays a great deal of texture due to fracturing during deep burial and tectonic movement.

On the north side of Corona Heights is a very good example of a slickenside, or polished fault surface.

The Corona Heights look over San Francisco and the East Bay as well as the Sutro Tower and the flanks of Mount Davidson to the southwest.

We are overdue now for the Big One, which many geologists believe will happen on the Hayward Fault. The earth’s crust is not a solid shell; it is broken up into huge, thick plates that drift atop the soft, underlying mantle and the plates rub against each other.

The plates grind against each other, hitching along in sharp jerks as the edges of the slabs catch and stick together until they stretch enough to snap free.

Predicting or retrodicting earthquakes is a matter of spotting the places along a fault where the opposite sides have caught, and seeing how far and how fast the rocks are bending.

If a way could be found to free the rocks on the opposite sides of the fault, or to prevent them from sticking in the first place, then earthquakes could be prevented, or at least managed.

What we need is a brobdingnagian crowbar, say, about fifty miles long, to pry the plates apart and then pour a lubricant in between them to let them slide freely past each other.

This would be difficult for Lilliputians like us to manage, so preparing for a sudden plate sliding emergency might be the wiser course.

As long as the plates are moving relatively freely, the opposite sides glide smoothly past each other and release small earthquakes. This is the best situation to hope for, and it has been happening fairly well for a long time now. Creeping is much better than locked.

The plates are slowly moving past one another at a couple of inches a year – about the same rate that your fingernails grow. But this is not a steady motion, it is the average motion. For years the plates will be locked with no movement at all as they push against one another. Suddenly the built-up strain breaks the rocks along the fault and then the plates slip a few feet all at once. In 1906 the plates slipped twenty feet.

No one has ever been killed by an earthquake. The damage that does happen is caused by falling objects, landslides triggered by the quake, fires, and epidemics caused by contaminated water.

Driving the Coast Road (Highway 1) is a slow, meandering affair best suited to frequent stops for views and looking at pretty rocks such as chert which can be composed of diatoms and radiolarians, which, though very tiny, have skeletons of silica, and build up over millions of years.

Even the sand is beautiful if you look closely enough. This is not the golden sand of Southern Calfornia or Florida, but there is gold in this sand, real gold.

You can see ribbon chert along the Freeway on your right as you drive onto the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County.

If you motor up Highway 1 to Bodega Bay, you will find this mighty green stone.

And some hornblende schist too.

Many of the serpentinites contain chunks of blueschist,

green eclogite, in which you can see tiny garnets,

and even jade.

The trip on Highway 1 between San Francisco and Point Arena is geologically fascinating because you observe beautiful rocks and minerals in the road cuts, and you can track the wind and wave action shaping the shoreline.

North of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Coast Road leads you to Stinson Beach which sits directly on the San Andreas Fault.

The houses in Stinson Beach are built on a sandspit, a very unstable foundation material, right on the Fault, so it would be difficult to imagine a more dangerous place to be when the ground starts moving as it definitely will one of these days.

In Bodega Bay there is a similar situation. The town is built on loose sediment deposited directly on top of the San Andreas fault zone, and thus Bodega Bay is destined to be destroyed every time the Fault releases a major earthquake.

Some of the buildings in town have lasted a while, though. This is the schoolhouse where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. An old friend of mine, Randal Myler, was in this film, and in this building, when he was nine years old.

The Point Reyes peninsula is a well defined area, geologically separated from the rest of Marin County and almost all of the continental United States by a rift zone of the San Andreas Fault, about half of which is sunk below sea level and forms Tomales Bay.

The fact that the peninsula is on a different tectonic plate than the east shore of Tomales Bay produces a difference in soils and therefore to some extent a noticeable difference in vegetation.

Point Reyes is a stray scrap of Sierra Nevada granite which has been transported some 350 miles north by displacement along the Fault.

A little farther to the north, Jenner has serpentinites which embed large chunks of unusually beautiful blueschist.

Coast Range serpentinites often have angular fragments of this rare and beautiful rock. The blueschists are heavy, bluish-black rocks that are flecked with intensely blue crystals.

Serpentinite has all sorts of interesting properties. It is green and seamed by webs of closely spaced fractures that are often white.

Senate Bill 624 in the California legislature calls for serpentine to be removed as the state rock of California. The bill is in the Assembly, and if passed there, will move on to the Senate, where it will be voted on by August 31. Supporters of the move condemn serpentinite as somehow evil because it contains at times a form of chrysotile asbestos. This is more of a symbolic protest, with which it is easy to sympathize, than any real concern about asbestos poisoning from the rocks themselves.

Some serpentinites have a soapy feel and are indeed called “soapstone.” You can carve soapstone with a knife, and it is usually lighter in color than other serpentinites. The rock is inherently so fractured that it is difficult to find a solid piece of it as large as your fist.

I once discovered someone swimming up the creek behind our house, writhing like a salmon over the rocks. I asked him what he was doing and it turned out that he was on the prowl for soapstone (serpentinite) which he carved into interesting shapes. He gave me a piece of it from “our” creek. I was grateful.

Serpentinite has a chemical composition that suggests an origin deep in the earth’s mantle beneath the continental crust. Bodies of serpentinite intrude themselves into enclosing rocks as if they had been forced there while molten magmas, but nothing else about serpentinite suggests a molten origin.

Jade is another rock often found in serpentinites. Like blueschist, it forms under extremely high pressures and chunks of it are found in serpentinite outcrops. Jade is hard and tough, and so will outlast serpentinite in a creek, enduring as a smooth, rounded rock.

Jade can look like pebbles of green chert, but jade is heavier and not so friable. A tap with a hammer can smash chert, but jade can take a hit heavy enough to drive a nail.

North of Bodega Bay and up to Fort Ross, the San Andreas Fault is offshore.

Between Fort Ross and Point Arena, the Fault is onshore and it looks like a gentle valley.

The rocks west of the Fault at this point began life as sediments in Santa Barbara.

To the east of San Francisco, Highway 50 crosses the Sacramento Valley and enters the foothills of the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and Placerville.

The eastern half of the route between Sacramento and where the road enters the Sierra foothills crosses old placer mine tailings.

I have often said that “placer” comes from Spanish placer, meaning “to please,” (pleasure) and, indeed it does, but the true origin of the word here is actually from placer meaning shoal or alluvial sand deposit (Catalan placer, sandbank, shoal), from plassa, (place) which comes in turn from medieval Latin placea (place) the origin word for place and plaza in English. The word in Spanish/Catalan is thus ultimately derived from placea and refers directly to an alluvial or glacial deposit of sand or gravel.

Placer mining refers to mining gold and gemstones found in alluvial areas-sand and gravel in modern or ancient stream beds, or occasionally glacial leavings. Since gems and heavy metals like gold are considerably more dense than sand, they tend to accumulate at the base of placer deposits. Mining of course, was very important back in the day, in fact it still is now. We can obtain energy sources from reactions within metal ores. For example, Uranium Production, which is a type of emission free energy.

Placers supplied most of the gold for a large part of the ancient world. Hydraulic mining methods such as hushing were used widely by the Romans across their empire, but especially in the gold fields of northern Spain after its conquest by Augustus, 25 BCE.

One of the largest sites was at Las Médulas, where seven 30 mile long aqueducts were used to work the alluvial gold deposits through the first century CE.

Placer mining was one of the earliest methods used by the ’49ers. This type of mining used manual techniques and tools such as sluice boxes, pans, and rockers located near rivers and streams.

In the early mining history of California, after the rapid working out of’the shallow placers of the high bars, attention was turned to the river channels as the next most certain source for a large gold yield, and in 1852, 1853, and 1854, a very large amount of this river mining was done, and most of the gold yield of the State at that time came from this placer mining in streams.

Placerville is but one more of the many settlements that had its beginning when James Marshall discovered gold in nearby Coloma in January, 1848. Jack Perry lived for a while in Placerville, and he’s still looking for gold.

She could be called ????? ???? (Athena Earth), but Anthea Sidiropoulos, is her real name, and we are going to play some musical events with her in Australia so we are all excited about that.

Goodbye till next week.

Keep on rocking.

________________________________________________

Hotchpotch

Posted on January 20, 2013 by J L tagged.

Hotchpotch

Cher’s real name is Cherilyn la Pierre.

Sophia Loren’s sister was once married to the jazz piano playing son of Benito Mussolini.

Life in the Ivy League: Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore were roommates at Harvard, and George W. Bush and Oliver Stone were in the same class at Yale.

Spuere is Latin for “spit.” Spew and sputum come from this word. Conspuere is to spit with a lot of other people and this is the origin of the word “cuspidor.”

Jack Nicholson appeared on The Andy Griffith Show… twice.

Two of the Beatles were left-handed, Paul and Ringo. Easier to tell with Paul.

Carnegie-Mellon University offers a major in bagpiping. Bagpipes were once made from the skin of a sheep, presumably after the haggis had been taken out.

When Mozart was born, they wrote Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart in the church record. Theophilus means “love god” and so does Amadeus. One is Greek, the other Latin. Gottlieb is the German way of saying Theophilus.

At age fifty-three, Rolling Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman married Mandy Smith, nineteen, but the marriage only lasted a year. A little later Bill’s thirty year old son Stephen married Mandy’s mother, age forty-six. That made Stephen a step father to his former step mother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father’s father-in-law and his own grandfather. Mick Jagger should have written a song about THAT. They could have done the tune on the Grand Ole Opry.

Real band name: A Life-Threatening Buttocks Condition

One in every four Americans has appeared on television. I first appeared on television in Japan when I was sixteen with my band The Cool Notes.

Kermit the Frog has eleven points on the collar around his neck, and he is left-handed.

Yasser Arafat was addicted to watching television cartoons.

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, put his intials into his drawing of Homer. M is Homer’s hair, and G is Homer’s ear.

Tweety used to be a baby bird without feathers until the censors decided he looked naked. Can’t have Tweety corrupting the morals of America, now can we?

Walt Disney named Mickey Mouse for Mickey Rooney, whose mother he had dated for some time. Mickey Mouse’s original voice was Walt’s.

Mickey Mouse won an Oscar. In Italia Mickey si chiama “Topolino.” In Italy Mickey is called “Topolino.”

Can’t have Donald corrupting the morals of Finland, now can we? Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn’t wear pants.

One day Margaret Herrick, librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, remarked that the statue looked like her uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.

Alfred Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for directing.

King Kong was Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie.

Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.

In Italy, James Bond is known as Mr. Kiss-Kiss-Bang-Bang.

There was not a single Civil War battle scene in Gone With The Wind.

There is not a single mention of the mafia in the Godfather.

When The Wizard of Oz came out, critics said it was stupid and uncreative.

Real title of a how-to book: Keeping Warm With an Axe

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein.

Virginia Woolf wrote all of her books standing up. Smart woman.

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the fifty-thousand word novel Gatsby without any word containing ‘e.’ This is vEry difficult for mE to bEliEvE.

Chicken or Egg? In Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg.

Papaphobia is the fear of popes.

The sixth sick Sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick. Easy for you to say.

Tonsurphobia is the fear of haircuts.

Mattresses used to be set upon ropes woven through the bed frame. To keep the ropes taut, one would use a bed key to take up the slack. This is the origin of the phrase “sleep tight.”

Before 1776, Americans used all kinds of coins and demoninations. The British pound, the German Thaler, and the Spanish real were a few. The real could actually be cut into eight pieces and they were called pieces of eight, as in the old pirate chantey. Two of these pieces equaled one quarter dollar and this is the origin of the phrase “two bits.”

In the 1940s, the Bich pen, originating in France, was changed to Bic for fear that Americans would pronounce it “bitch.” Biche means a creature or a deer in French, and “bitch” does indeed come from this same word root.

When the first regular phone service was established in 1878, people picked up the phone and said “Ahoy.” In Italian, they say “pronto,” ready.

“Hocus pocus,” the magician’s phrase, is a corruption of “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” a sentence in the Roman mass, This is my body. Once, when I was learning to serve mass in the third grade, I said this phrase in imitation of the priest, and was reproved by a nun for getting above myself.

The Boogey people live in an area of Indonesia and they are pirates, Watch out, “the boogeyman will get you” refers to these reprobates.

It can get very cold in the Australian outback, and when it is so chilly that three dogs are needed to keep an aborigine warm, then it’s called a “three dog night.”

Assassination and bump were invented by Shakespeare. He coined many, many other words as well

The U in U-boat stands for unterwasser, underwater.

The word constipation comes from a Latin word that means “to crowd together.” Diarrhea is Greek for “flowing through.”

Accordion comes from the German word Akkord, which can mean agreement, harmony, but if you say Akkord to a German musician, it will always mean “chord.” My grandfather, Albert Mann, who came from Alsatian people, played the accordion so well. He did all those tunes from the old country and it was an extreme pleasure to hear him.

These guys know about Mexican, German, Czech and Polish musicians in Texas. I see Sir Doug, Martin Fierro, and, is that Dr. John?

Disease was the evil influence of the stars, believed many people, and perhaps many people even believe it now. Influence in Italian is “influenza.”

Truth and Falsehood went swimming. Falsehood came out of the water first and dressed herself in Truth’s garments. Truth, unwilling to assume those of Falsehood, went naked. The women here above, Betz and Linda, are truthful to a fault. It is an honor to know both of them, and that’s the Truth.

A deltiologist collects postcards. I would have thought records by Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf, Kid Bailey, Muddy Waters, Junior Parker.

She so fine. She so fine. Linda LaFlamme.

I’m a klazomaniac. Hey, that sounds like a line from I’m A Caterpillar by Peter Albin. Klazomania is an urge to shout. Yes, hallelujah!

And talking of Peter, he made this Christmas tree ornament, which looks more like a Horus tree ornament.

A libricubicularist is someone who reads in bed.

Anthropophagist, cannibal, they are pretty much the same thing.

German is called a sister language of English. Other sisters are Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian.

A fox’s tail is called a brush.

The ball on top of a flagpole is called a truck. If you devoted yourself to the study of vexillology, this would be one of the first things you would learn.

Diastima is a gap between your teeth.

Oh, god, do I love this woman. Lisa Mills, folks, from Birmingham, Alabama. She paints, she sings, she raises a family and hell at the same time.

Lethologica is the state of not remembering the word you want to say. Retrieval becomes so much harder as we get older. I used to say all the answers (or questions, rather) on Jeopardy before Alex had even finished formulating them. Not any more.

Nictitating is winking. Cats have a nictitating membrane that we don’t. A woman who winks at men is called a nictitating woman. Interesting that there is no mention of the male in this, because I wink at women all the time. It’s a deplorable nervous tic.

A poem composed for a wedding is called an epithalamium. I have written some epithalamia and maybe you have too?

Says here, alma mater means “bountiful mother.” I always thought alma mater meant “soul mother.” I’m sure both meanings are good. (The meaning is closer to “nourishing” mother.)

Dégringoler is French for “rouler précipitamment du haut en bas.” The figurative meaning is “déchoir rapidement,” to fall, fail rapidly.” Degringolade in English means to fall and disintegrate.

Dibble means to “drink like a duck.” When I was fourteen I sang a song with the line “if the ocean were whisky, and I was a diving duck, I would dive to the bottom, and never come up.” An old blues tune. I think I learned it from Joe Turner.

Groaking is watching people eat in the hope that they will offer you some.

Hara kiri is the vulgar term. It means “belly cut.” Americans often say “harry carry.” Seppuku is the correct and more elegant term.

Karaoke means empty orchestra, just as karate means empty hand. I seem to remember on my Scholastic Apptitude Test such questions as if karaoke means empty orchestra, and karate means empty hand, which part of the word means “empty.” Even then I thought these were really stupid questions.

Marcia Ball, oh, my god of music, what a wonderful woman she is

Kemosabe means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.

Koala is Aboriginal for “no drink.” I have to remember this the next time I sidle up to the bar.

Scatologists are scientists who study feces, and presumably coproliths, or maybe not.

The “You Are Here” indicator on a map is called the IDEO locator.

Uh, oh, the third year of marriage is called the Leather Anniversary.

Japanese for switch is suitchi and for sex is sekkusu. Japanese are like Italians in that they want a vowel in between every consonant.

The Sanskrit word for war means “desire for more cows.”

A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows. A ward of the cows.

This symbol # is called the pound key, yes, but the two dollar word for it is anoctothorpe.

The word set has more definitions in the dictionary than any other English word.

Rhythm and syzygy are the longest English words without vowels. They are both good words too.

Skepticisms is the longest typed word that alternates hands.

The letter J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements, probably because J did not exist in Latin or Greek. Julius Caesar was Iulius Caesar in his langauge.

A left-handed guy kissing his wife.

I loved this band, the Sons of Champlin. Still do.

Lynn Asher and her very beautiful feet.

The letter W in our alphabet is the only one that doesn’t have one syllable; it has three. (It’s really just a “double U.”)

The longest one syllable word in English is screeched. In Middle English, Chaucer would have pronounced this word screech ed (screetch Ed), because they pronounced the past participle ending in those days.

Is there Hope for Lynn? Oh, yes, definitely.

Most used letter in English, E. Least, Q.

Oldest word in English, town. Youngest, Samified. Means you have undergone the Sam experience.

Lachanophobia is the fear of vegetables.

Hey, how did Kurt Huget get in here? Good looks? Charm? Positive attitude? Plays well with others? Being with Terry Haggerty?

Fifteen letter word that can be written without repeating a letter: uncopyrightable.

Racecar and kayak are palindromes.

Muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir, and residuum. That’s it. The six words in English that use uu.

Eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, rib, hip. Three letter words.

There was no punctuation until the fifteenth century. Reading Latin in inscriptions is a nightmare because it’s all caps and it’s all run together. It’s like reading Russian.

A portmanteau word is one combined of two formerly separate words, such as, motel or brunch.

Just exactly what are you boys planning here? Well, madam, we are preparing to, er, ambulate across this ‘ere Abbey Road, that’s if it’s awl right with you, of course.

Bookkeeper is the only English word with three consecutive double letters.

Cleveland spelled backward is DNA level C.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.” So, does Arsenio Hall mean a corridor with white powder in it?

There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, and, as in Japanese and Italian, every consonant must have a vowel before and after it, so Kahlúa is not a Hawaiian word, but Kahului is.

In England in the 1880s, pants was a dirty word. Of course in the 1880s, everything was dirty. Pianos didn’t have legs. They had limbs.

Four is the only English number that has the same amount of letters as its value.

Stewardesses is the longest English word that is typed with one hand.

Words that are very difficult to use in a rhyming song: month, orange, silver, purple. You can rhyme them, but only if you are a sloppy rhymer.

Quisling is the only English word that starts with quis. It’s not really an English word, that’s why. It’s a Scandinavian person’s name. Quis means who in Latin.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

1961 is the same right side up and upside down. The next number that will be that talented is 6009.

There are five thousand (and probably more) languages spoken on this planet. I can read about ten of them, but some days I wake up and can’t speak even one. The Mexicans in the kitchen at Aroma Café all routinely speak three or four languages. Spanish is not their first tongue. Mayan is. There are something like twenty-six completely different languages in the area of Oaxaca alone. The tragedy is that these languages are disappearing rapidly. Knowing this can make a linguist slightly crazy. It’s like watching a beautiful painting slowly disappear before your eyes.

Maybe the plot comes at the end… in the cemetery.

Sam Andrew Vinnie Martel Tom Doyle (I’m telling you, this Manny’s Car Wash green room is like a coffin. Maybe that’s the plot.)

Big Brother and the Holding Company

_________________________

Shuffle

Posted on January 6, 2013 by J L tagged.

Two people who always made me feel glad to be alive.

You give people what they want, they’ll turn out. (A rival producer observing the crowd at Louis B. Mayer’s funeral.)

I willed my body to science and now science is contesting the will.

If there was no action around, he would play solitaire… and bet against himself.

How are you planning for your retirement? Powerball.

Gambling is a sure way of getting nothing for something.

“Unbelievable,” exclaimed Jimmy, “I’ve played plenty of poker in my day, but I never imagined I would see a dog win at poker.” “Ah, we usually wipe him out,” said an old geezer at the table, “Every time he gets a good hand, he wags his tail.”

Las Vegas is the only town in the country where you can have a good time without enjoying yourself.

Hypochondria is the only disease I haven’t got.

There are people who deprive themselves of every eatable, drinkable and smokable that has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health, and health is all they get for it. Mark Twain

They just tested the tap water in my town and found traces of estrogen and anti-depressants, so I’m going to be more feminine and happier about it.

if exercise is so good for you, why do athletes have to retire by age thirty-five?

What’s the definition of minor surgery? An operation performed on someone else.

Dentist: Jesus, what happened to your teeth? They’re all gone and your gums are in terrible shape. Patient: If that’s such a big problem, then get your face out of my lap.

What’s the good part about Alzheimer’s? You keep meeting new friends.

Tell me, doctor, how much longer am I going to live? That’s always difficult to say, she replied brightly, but let’s just say that if I were you, I wouldn’t start watching a new miniseries on TV.

I used up all my sick days, so I’m calling in dead.

Thanksgiving is an emotional time. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often.

The Supreme Court ruled against having a Nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.

Santa’s very jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live.

We’re buying a home. When you buy a home, you deal with Realtors. Realtors are people who didn’t make it as lawyers or politicians.

I have a special Italian lamp with a three way switch… dim, flicker and out.

Some men think that they can convert gay women, make them straight. I can’t do that. I can make a straight woman gay, though.

Take boxing. Two topless men? In silk shorts? Fighting over a belt and a purse?

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

I had general anesthesia. That’s so weird. You go to sleep in one room and you wake up four hours later in a totally different room. Just like college.

I had a hotel room so small that if I would have died in it they could have put handles on the room and used it for a coffin.

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam… and I’ll show you a house full of chips and dirt.

I haven’t cleaned up my house in a while. There’s a milk carton in there with a photo of Jimmy Hoffa on it.

I got rid of those stinking odors in my kitchen. I stopped cooking.

Why don’t you keep watch and see how long the meek keep the earth after they’ve inherited it?

Beaver talking to a rabbit while they’re looking at Hoover Dam: No, I didn’t actually build it, but it’s based on an idea of mine.

I used to worry about what people would think of me, until I realized they rarely do.

It’s easy to turn the other cheek when your tongue is in it.

I don’t make jokes. I just look at congress and describe what I see.

Witty replies are something we think of on the stairway after the party. The French call this “l’esprit de l’escalier.”

Laughter is god’s gift to mankind and mankind is proof that god has a sense of humor.

Whatever you read that I said isn’t true, unless it was funny. Then I definitely said it.

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else, or a long time ago.

My wife thinks that I am too nosy. At least that’s what she keeps writing in her diary.

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. Napoleon Bonaparte

One good thing about getting old. No more calls from insurance people.

She was interested in her husband’s activities, so she hired a detective.

Two old ladies were having coffee at Grossinger’s when a flasher darted over to their table and threw open his coat. “Hmmmph,” snorted Sadie, you call that a lining?”

A Jewish mother’s dilemma: Having a gay son who’s dating a doctor.

Dyslexic Rabbi after a rough day: ”Yo!”

His idea of oral sex is talking about himself.

A blind guy goes to a seder and the hostess hands him a piece of matzoh. “Hey,” he says, “who wrote this shit?”

She belongs to a reform congregation. It’s called Jews R Us.

Would you want to put your life in the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty?

All US presidents have worn glasses.

A client calls his lawyer and asks, “How much would you charge me to answer three questions?” Lawyer: “Four hundred dollars.” Client: ”That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?” Lawyer: “I suppose so, what’s your third question?”

Ulysses S. Grant had a boyhood nickname “Useless.”

John Quincy Adams owned a pet alligator, which he kept in the East Room of the White House.

“You seem to have more than the average share of intelligence for a woman of your background,” sneered the lawyer at a witness on the stand. ”If I weren’t under oath,” answered the witness, “I’d return the compliment.”

Abraham Lincoln died in the same bed that had been occupied by his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Tom: It was so cold this morning. Dick: How cold was it? Tom: I don’t know the exact temperature, but I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.

President James A. Garfield could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other… simultaneously.

Two lawyers are walking down the street and they see a beautiful woman walking toward them. “Boy, would I like to screw her,” says the first lawyer. “I know,” says the second, “but out of what?”

The best male voice in rock and roll… ever.

Guy receives a bill from his lawyer: ”For crossing the street to speak to you and discovering it was not you: $ 50.”

We have thirty five million laws to enforce ten commandments.

In 1912, after being shot in the chest, Theodore Roosevelt finished a speech he was delivering before he accepted any medical help.

“How much is two plus two?” the client asked his lawyer. She drew all the shades in the room, looked outside to see if anyone was there, checked the phone for listening devices, and finally whispered, “How much do you want it to be?”

Life is not for everyone.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked in the safe.

Harry Truman’s middle name was just S and not short for anything. His parents couldn’t decide between two different names beginning with S.

If you can’t find a lawyer who knows the law, find a lawyer who knows the judge.

Laboratories have switched from rats to lawyers for their experiments because, a. there is no shortage of lawyers, b. you don’t get so attached to them, and c. after all, there are some things you can’t get rats to do.

A lonely stranger went into a deserted restaurant and ordered the breakfast special. When his order arrived, he looked up at the waitress and said, “How about a kind word?” She leaned over and whispered, “Don’t eat the meat.”

Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president to wear contact lenses.

I once hit it big In Las Vegas. I drove there in an $8,000 car, and returned home on a $40,000 bus.

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question? Lily Tomlin

Love is like an hourglass: the heart fills up and the brain empties.

Love is an ocean of emotion surrounded by a fence of expense.

Ronald Reagan was the only divorced president and the only president to be head of a labor union.

Love is staying awake all night with a sick child… or a very healthy adult.

Love is like the measles… the later in life it comes, the worse it is.

Millard Fillmore’s mother feared he may have been mentally retarded,

Make love, not war. Hey, you can do both… get married.

Lovely, shapely legs. Beautiful, luminous eyes. Deep, sexy voice. Large hands and a protruding Adam’s apple… hey! Wait a minute.

Bill Clinton was the first left-handed president to serve two terms.

A better understanding of the universe has enabled us to retrodict such phenomena as the passing of Halley’s Comet.

Love is what happens to a man and a woman who don’t know each other. Somerset Maugham

David Rice Atchinson was president of the United States for exactly one day.

It’s bad luck to believe in superstition.

Andrew Jackson was the only president to believe that the world is flat.

Every horseshoe that someone uses for good luck? That horseshoe was once on a horse that didn’t have such good luck.

Ronald Reagan married his first wife Jane Wyman at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer. His brother was a town sheriff. His other brother was a priest. (No, I just made that last part up.)

Why are builders afraid to have a thirteenth floor, but book publishers aren’t afraid to have a Chapter Eleven.

You don’t lose your interest in sex as you grow older. You’re attracted as strongly as you ever were to eighteen year olds. It’s just that everyone your own age seems repulsive.

Hitler planned to change the name of Berlin to Germania.

Louis XIV of France had a stomach the size of two stomachs.

The shortest British monarch was Charles I. He was four feet, nine inches. He would become even shorter later.

No president has been an only child.

Hitler was a claustrophobe. The elevator leading to his eagles’ nest in the Austrian Alps was mirrored so it would appear larger and more open.

Peter the Great executed his wife’s lover and forced her to keep the lover’s head in a jar of alcohol in her bedroom.

Queen Berengaria (1191 CE) of England never lived in nor even visited England.

Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time, so take that President Garner.

Why do men have more brains than dogs do? So they won’t hump women’s legs at cocktail parties.

Vincent Van Gogh sold one painting, Red Vineyard at Arles.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Monroe all died on July 4. Jefferson and Adams, bitter enemies, died on almost the same minute of the same day.

Of all his talents, Leonardo was most proud that he could bend iron with his bare hands.

Isaac Newton invented the cat door.

The most popular guy at my nudist camp could carry two cups of coffee and a dozen doughnuts at the same time.

Narada Michael Walden, Clarence Clemmons, Todd Rundgren, Bobby Weir and Huey Lewis

Every time a woman leaves something off, she looks better and every time a man leaves something off, he looks worse. Will Rogers

Nobody knows where Voltaire’s body is. It was stolen in the nineteenth century and has never been recovered. The theft was discovered in 1864, when the tomb was opened and found empty. It would not surprise me at all to learn that Voltaire paid someone in advance to steal his body. Seems like something he would do.

Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns. Paging Doctor… oh, never mind.

Einstein’s last words were in German. The attending nurse knew no German, so his last words will never be known. (Hey, maybe he was speaking Yiddish?)

Hitler and Napoleon each had only one testicle.

Napoleon liked mathematicians and physicists but he banned humanists from his circle because he thought they were troublemakers, which they are.

Christopher Columbus was a blonde.

I went to the doctor and told her, “My penis is burning,” and she said, “That means somebody is talking about it”

Well, hasta la pasta, happy trails to you.

Chet Helms Sam Andrew

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Big Brother and the Holding Company, part sixteen. 2004

Posted on July 22, 2012 by J L tagged.

2004

2 January 2004 The Docksider Erie Pennsylvania

See how Pennsylvania made that little portal out to Lake Erie ? Croatia has outlets to the Adriatic Sea much narrower than this, maybe a mile in length.

The Erie Canal, dug in the early 1800s, and connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie, is what made New York New York. Many other ports, Savannah, Boston, were more important at the time, but with a way to get goods over the Appalachians (Alleghenies) and to Ohio and points farther west, New York City became the dominant Eastern doorway to and from the rest of the country.

Even today transport by barge on the Erie Canal uses a tenth of the fuel of a truck.

I used to sing this song in my folk music days. This printed music, however, is very odd, with B# going into C. Both are the same notes. I’ve never seen anything like this. Anyway, I loved this haunting melody and the history embodied in the song. This song is rather like what The Volga Boatman must have been to the Russians. Minor key, strongly pentatonic, a chant, really, primitive, strong, good for keeping time while rowing.

This version makes a lot more sense. This one’s in E minor. I think I used to sing it in D minor. There is a lot of history in songs, all songs.

Caro Viaggiatore. The title means “Dear Traveler.” It’s a kind of a pun on Caravaggio because this is a copy of his painting. I put Elise and me in there. I learned how to paint by copying painters before me.

Rodney Albin Ellen Cavanaugh Peter Albin

3 January 2004 Sellersville Theatre Sellersville Pennsylvania

Self portraits are invariably serious because the artist is looking so intensely into the mirror.

I bet Ant Knee took this photograph.

Liverpool lad pours a Bud in the Sausalito harbor.

Sharrie Gomez and I in San Francisco.

21 April 2004 Kellogg Foundation Lake Tahoe California At this event, I met Don Graham the neurosurgeon who since has gone from this…

… to this. He and Sarah made Adyson Graham who is impossibly beautiful.

24 April 2004 Wild Hog Festival Helena Arkansas It rained so hard at this event that she could have almost gone swimming in the audience.

We really thought we might be electrocuted. Everything was soaking wet.

Peggy Pettigrew Stewart created this image.

25 April 2004 Rosy’s Jazz Hall New Orleans

Cool New Orleans dudes backstage.

Meanwhile, farther upstream, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are flowing together at Cairo, Illinois. “We pronounce it Karo, like the syrup.”

And I am swearing that I will learn how to draw a hand in any position, any lighting.

When I think of Florida, I think of the coasts. Sarasota where Elise used to live and Melbourne, home of my brother Stephen and his family.

Orlando, where the Carol guitar was stored in a vault for a while, is an inland place.

13 May 2004 The Vault Orlando Florida The Carol guitar travels around the country and is in San Francisco now, I believe.

When we played there in Orlando, I took the guitar out of The Vault and put it on stage.

The Musical Instrument Museum near Phoenix.

Mujeres floridas. Flowered women.

The Vault in Orlando.

Elise and I moved into this house where we live now in 2004. It’s a small house on two and one half acres, a hectare.

All of Us (oil on canvas)

I drew these profiles in Pahala, Hawaii.

The Hawaiian archipelago is actually much longer than this, extending some 1,200 miles over the Pacific.

Midway Island, that small two mile long dot there on the globe, is at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. It is one third of the way to Tokyo from Honolulu. My family traveled once in a propeller plane that actually refueled at Midway en route to Okinawa. We refueled again at Wake Island too, if I’m not mistaken.

Chad Quist, guitar Kacee Clanton, singer Todd Zimberg, drums

Sam Andrew Elise Piliwale

11 June 2004 Kona Brew Pub Kona Hawaii

Kona Brew Pub

Colin and Wayne and Wayne’s lovely wife. Erstwhile equipment managers for Big Brother, now far richer than we are, PLUS, they get to live in Hawaii. Así es la vida.

James Gurley and I lived on the beach at Makena off and on for a couple of years. I wrote the song Maui there.

Every autumn, humpback whales swim 3,500 miles from Alaska to Maui for their winter vacation in the Au’au Channel between the islands of Maui County. Summer in Alaska, Winter in Maui, not a bad life.

Double Happiness.

Regina and Kacee were with us.

Regina is Austrian. Her name means Queen. Vivat Regina !

Alexandria Virginia

19 June 2004 Red Cross Waterfront Festival Alexandria Virginia Judy and Todd Bolton, so good to see them again.

Tristan Avakian played guitar with us and Todd Zimberg was on drums. Tristan is now with Jennifer Espinoza in some incredible Queen scene.

Jefferson Starship: Slick Aguilar Diana Mangano Paul Kantner Marty Balin Tim Gorman Prairie Prince Jack Casady Photo: Tim Sylvan

30 June 2004 Stop 345 Memphis Tennessee

Right on the mighty Mississippi.

31 July 2004 Magic Springs Theme Park Hot Springs Arkansas

Sam Andrew Elise Piliwale

6 August 2004 Sellersville Theatre Sellersville Pennsylvania

Sellersville is a borough in Bucks County in the Philadelphia-Camden metro area.

7 August 2004 South Park Concert Site South Park Pennsylvania

Eve and Adam (oil on canvas)

13 August 2004 Gray’s Harbor Fair Elma Washington

I always wanted to open for a parrot.

A beautiful place. Actually, when you think about it, the whole world is a beautiful place.

Kate Russo and I passed this one with ease.

14 August 2004 Berbatti’s Pan Portland Oregon

You can see why I decided to learn how to draw hands.

18 September 2004 Tree Frog Music Festival Fairibault Minnesota

Primavera Elisiana.

24-25 September 2004 El Dorado Hotel & Casino Reno

Na’alehu Theatre

Kainani Kahaunaele

2 October 2004

Jessica’s crown.

Chad Quist goes Hawaiian.

Peter Albin Karen Lyberger

2 October 2004 Hamakua Music Festival Honoka’a Hawaii

Chloe Lowery and Elise

The banyan tree downtown Lahaina, Maui. This tree just keeps on going and growing. It’s all one tree and it covers this entire very large block.

4 October 2004 The Landmark Hotel Los Angeles Photo: Howard Sounes

16 October 2004 Largo Cultural Center Largo Florida Wendy Rich

This was a local gig for Wendy. She lives nearby in St. Petersburg.

Peter Albin Photo: Jan Jenson

19 October 2004 The year I set out to learn how to draw hands. I filled notebooks with them.

21 october 2003 The main thing is to draw each joint, each bone in the hand. You can’t slur over it or it’s not going to look right.

24 October 2004

November 2004 Four More Years (oil on canvas)

20 November 2004

31 December 2004 Coco’s in Ko Samui, Thailand. set list This was a happy period of musical adventure for the band.

Señor Blues (oil on canvas)

Sam (I’m so excited I can barely breathe) Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

_____________________________________________________

Tools: part one

Zeroth

How Latin Became French

A Heterogeneous Assemblage

Composing Music

Tumble

Geology of the San Francisco Bay Area

Hotchpotch

Shuffle

Big Brother and the Holding Company, part sixteen. 2004

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