maren

Wonderful news! Congratulations!

Plus a small piece of a BIG cake! With love from couw & maren...

First I wrote the polka ( ), then I got to work on the cake!!! Party on ("in the workers' united front" -- that's a Brecht-Eisler song I think! ) Johnny!

And Don Byron, Brian Blade, Mark Shim... The thing is, while Blue Note has these artists on their "roster" (i.e., back catalog) I'm afraid VERY LITTLE CAPITAL has been allocated to their projects... despite the Norah-generated cash infusion.

Congratulations! All those fruit trees -- that's really beautiful! Best of luck! (and thanks to Jim Sangrey for the mortgage advice -- I'm saving that to my hard drive, with your kind permission)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

That reminds me of the one about the mohel (guy who performs circumcisions)... A mohel was getting on in years, and made the decision to retire. He had saved and preserved all the foreskins he had circumcised in his 50 years on the job. His wife wanted to have them made into something special to memorialize her husband's life's work, so she brought them into the shop of a leather craftsman, who said "Yes, I can make something very nice out of these -- come back in a week to pick it up." The mohel's wife returned to the shop a week later, and the craftsman handed her a little gift box. Inside was a wallet. She said, "That's it? My husband's life's work is a wallet? It's lovely, but it's only a wallet!" The craftsman replied, "It may look like it's only a wallet, but if you rub it for a minute, it turns into a suitcase!"

Another vote for "free" detergents: even the Tide free works okay for me, but I usually use "All Free" liquid. But avoid things with "stain lifters" and especially "enzymatic action." The worst was the original ERA detergent (not to be confused with the Equal Rights Amendment, I guess, though it came on the market at the same time!) which pioneered those "enzymes" -- free samples left on doorknobs all over our small town (around 1970) caused horrible full-body rashes -- we didn't use it because there were already sensitive skins in the household but my father, a doctor, saw LOTS of emergency room cases -- including a father and son who had to interrupt their deer hunting because their long johns, newly washed in ERA, were killing them! For stains and smells, I add plain old (20-mule-team) Borax (my only tip of the hat to Ronald Reagan) to the water before the clothes (the MWGA method -- hey, they didn't change "home ec" to "domestic science" for merely PC reasons!).

Happy birthday!

That'll be the day. More cake, just to make sure!

Love that winking cake! I was away from all electronics over the weekend, but here's the cake I baked for the moment when Deus was 33.33333.... with love from couw & maren:

The thing is, there is a big gray area between, oh, a steak-and-eggs diet and full-blown anabolic steroids (which most people nowadays avoid because of the health risks). Just below the full-blown steroids are the direct precursors, like "andro" (androstene dione) -- Mark McGwire's "supplement" of choice, legal in MLB, illegal in NFL -- and below that is creatine (Sosa) and a bunch of other precursors, protein components, amino acids -- and below that is HEAVY protein-supplement-loading during training and use of non-speed fatburners (chromium). There are a lot of guys obsessively training (and ingesting) to pack on muscle and burn fat, constantly tinkering with their intake regimen so as to just fall within the ever-shifting limit of legality.

Wild -- all my life I've seen this finger gesture, usually with no words, but learned really early that it meant "shame on you" -- sometimes it would come with the word "shame", drawn-out with a rising intonation. Catholic nuns in Wisconsin (a lot German/Dutch immigrants there) used this one a lot. And kids would do it to other kids who got into trouble. I thought it meant something dirty was being put on you, or scraped off them. Here in NYC, when my son was little, kids would say "oooohhh" with that same rising intonation -- starts out low, ends high -- when a kid got in trouble with a teacher. Same inflection as "sha-a-a-ame" but I can't remember if I've seen the "sharpening" gesture here. I never realized it meant sharpening a knife! But now that makes sense, like raising a fist in a very symbolic way, just for a kid to look at, or pretending to cut your throat, to signify that someone's "cruising for a bruising" (as my father used to say).

And HERE'S a page on "Ring Around the Rosie" variations, that cites the Opies and a lot of other children's-rhyme-fixated folks.

This reminds me, There's a book on children's culture--arguing that many things like this get passed down over the generations from child to child withOUT MUCH (edit) intervention by adults. Does anybody know it? I can't rember the title or author. --eric The Opies?! Iona and Peter Opie, a British couple, spent their lives studying folk tales, children's games and rhymes and songs. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is probably their most famous book. There are a ton of others, including The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Classic Fairy Tales, and Children's Game in Street and Playground. Plus collections of the things they've found. I have this one, which is good for reading with kids:

Happy birthday!

I'm more familiar with the five-note version: 5-3-6-5-3 Then there's "baby, baby, stick your head in gravy!": 5-3, 5-3, 5-5-3-6-5-3 Ever since I was little, I wondered if the descending minor third ("5-3") (even before I knew what to call it) was universal -- it seemed to me it always recurred whenever people got a little sing-songy in their speech. "Yoo-hoo" for example -- I've never heard anyone sing out "yoo-hoo" other than "5-3" (well, maybe it's "3-1" in Dorian mode ).

I'll stick to the (good) book, The Life of Brian, and Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Anyone else read the David Hajdu biography of BS, Lush Life? A good one, I thought.

I had ANOTHER 29th b'day cake, but then the board was MIA... and now I'm worrying about bandwidth, so let me go straight to today's entry:

Well, I am clearly a psychopath! Or maybe I've just known too many...

ROTproverbialFLMproverbialAO!

I noticed a lull in December and January, too -- checked "all posts by this member" and saw there were a FEW, but he's really drastically curtailed his time here -- I figured it was family/kid/work/LIFE kinds of obligations -- I know I need to go cold turkey from time to time to actually get some WORK done (like I should be doing right now) -- but anyway, I too miss AB and hope that his reduced presence reflects GOOD things in his real (as opposed to cyber) life.

with love from couw & maren, before: and after: