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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2003
Glad to see Charles Murtaugh is back in the land of the posting.
posted morning of December 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, December 20th, 2003
My short time in the shop this evening included a number of "firsts". I used my new panel jig (completed after way too long a time, and a poor excuse for what I had originally planned to build) for the first time, gluing up the base for a sharpening station I am building -- it seems to do basically what I was hoping it would, which is to hold boards aligned while I get the clamps on and keep them flat. I cut into the wood I bought for Ellen's bookcase, which marks the first time I have ever worked with rough-sawn lumber. I like it! (Actually this "first" is a bit of an exaggeration but I am going to let it stand.) It is also the first time I have worked with maple since I built Sylvia's high chair (back in the early days of my woodworking career, before I had a proper bench); it is as nice to work with as I remembered it. My scrub plane eats it up. Now I just need to get some better bench dogs, so I can clamp wood that I am scrubbing properly in place -- this would be a major step up for me. I think I will order some new dogs in a few weeks, when I put in my order to Lee Valley for a couple of things I have been meaning to get. Update: I managed significantly to improve the performance of my bench dogs. All I did was, I relieved the lower half of the dog's face; so that instead of coming up from the bench at a 90° angle, it comes up slightly acute. So the contact with the workpiece is all at the top of the dog and the force from the vise is pushing the workpiece down into the bench. It works a lot better now.
posted evening of December 20th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, December 19th, 2003
Ordering home fries in New York City at a restaurant you do not know is always a gamble; and the odds are heavily weighted against you. Most likely you will get mushy, vaguely pink cubes of potato with no flavor at all; but on rare occasion you get lucky: randomly shaped pieces with skin on, browned with bits charred to black, lots of flavor and texture. Today I had such an experience; but that was not the big news. The big news was the corned-beef hash: I have never ordered corned-beef hash at a coffee shop in NYC and been served anything other than the standard canned product. But today, at Sarge's (3rd Ave. and 36th St.), I was served homemade hash. What is particularly special about this (I mean besides the obvious, the flavor, which was excellent) is, the menu did not make a point of it at all: the menu just says "2 eggs with corned-beef hash" or words to that effect. It is almost par for the course now that if a restaurant serves some particularly good or unusual dish, it is a gimmick -- pointed up on the menu and on signs and advertisements, bold face, stars and bullets. It really did my heart good (perhaps good enough to counteract the effect of all that cholesterol and fat) to eat well without all the hoopla. Update: Oog, just looked at the first paragraph of this post and noticed I need to vary my sentence construction a bit more...
posted morning of December 19th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2003
I played the open mike at the Dancing Goat tonight, the first time I have performed in a few years (not counting the time I played in West Orange, which I am trying to forget) -- and the first time in several years I have performed on stage, with mikes. It went all right; I felt a little like I could not get into my groove and my timing was a little rough; but people in the audience said it sounded fine, Janis said it sounded just like when I am playing at her house, which is about what I was aiming for. I played "Stagger Lee" and "C. C. Rider" in a medley, and "Prodigal Son". The band 13 Scotland Road played before the open mike, and were terrific.
posted evening of December 17th, 2003: Respond
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Been a while since I did one of these... Last night Nathaniel and I had tickets to hear Dolly Parton at a small venue in the city. When we arrived, Nathaniel crawled in through the most immediately available entrance, a hole in the wall above the back door (which was locked). I was too bulky for this means of ingress so I walked around to the front door. When we gave our tickets to the man at the front counter, we had to spend what seemed like an inordinately long time proving our identities by means of photo ID's; the first one I showed him was too blurry, the second was poorly posed; then I showed him a photo of myself and Sylvia but with no ID attached to it -- this he deemed sufficient. Nathaniel went right in to the concert but I lingered in the anteroom, where there was a bar, a florist and a restaurant of some kind, sushi IIRC. I bought a bouquet of roses -- I was not sure what for but eventually decided they were to give to Dolly. Some guys from my office were sitting at the bar, talking about the show, which you could see through an open doorway. (NB this does not jive with a detail from the second part of the dream; I take no responsibility for such dissonances.) I noticed that in addition to songs, they were performing anti-drug commercials which had recently been on TV starring Dolly's sister. The guys from my office were discussing these commercials, making lists of which ones they had seen already. At the intermission Nathaniel came out to talk to me, quite disheveled and enthusiastic. We went inside together and I told him I had bought flowers for Ms. Parton, and asked whether it would be appropriate to give them to her. I noticed she was sitting talking to some people in the audience, which seemed unusual. Nathaniel thought it might be proper to give her the flowers after the show. Then the second set started; I saw that what I had thought was a stage, was actually a bar -- Dolly and the band were sitting behind it as if they were customers and the audience were a collective bartender. There was a rilly cool visual effect when Dolly sneezed and all the lights went down instantaneously; in the pitch darkness, the point where your eye was drawn by the sneeze was illuminated with the logo of the company sponsoring the concert. (No, I don't remember what the company was.) The lights went back up and they started singing a song which sounded kind of like a number from "The Pajama Game"... Around this time I woke up.
posted morning of December 17th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, December 15th, 2003
A song was running through my head all day; tonight I figured out (roughly) how to play it. The song is "Tell old Bill", which I know in a performance by the Chad Mitchell Trio. Here are the chords: G
Tell old Bill, when he gets home, this morning,
D
Tell old Bill, when he gets home, this evening,
G
Tell old Bill, when he gets home,
C G D
To leave them downtown women alone
G D G
This morning, this evening, so soon. The fingerpicking is kind of difficult to describe but basically you just play the melody. A lot of time is spent on open B, G string second fret, and open G; and in the alternate melody, a lot of time on E string third fret, open E, and B string third fret. A nice song. Update: I'm playing it in D now, which is a lot easier on my voice, but I have yet to come up with as nice a picking pattern with the different shaped chords.
posted evening of December 15th, 2003: 2 responses
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It occurs to me that it might be nice to have links (to outside web sites) that knew when a reader clicked on them, in order to update statistics -- my idea is to sort my blogroll by how frequently each of the links is used. Here is an idea for how to do it: Currently the link is <a href="http://someurl">Link Text</a> -- but if the link were <a href="http://www.readin.com/blog/blog.asp?redirect='someurl'">Link Text</a>, then I could update my statistics and redirect. This might confuse some browsers' site history, causing the back button not to work properly; I'm pretty sure Explorer and Mozilla know what to do when confronted with such a situation but am not sure about earlier versions of Netscape. And I would want to have some Java code for mouseover, so that the browser's status bar would just display someurl when you hovered over the link. Update: Weird, now (Tuesday) I see someone has browsed to my blog following a link of the type I am describing: my referrals log shows a visit from http://www.popdex.com/redir/?u=http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/000634.html. (The "u" redirect URL is the address of the Koufax Awards thread on Wampum.) Apparently someone followed a self-conscious link to the Koufax Awards, then followed the link on that page to my blog. And for some reason their browser remembered the self-conscious link as the referrer instead of the redirect.
posted afternoon of December 15th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, December 12th, 2003
I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last night -- by the time I got about halfway through I was utterly enthralled. I am sending it along to my dad (a comix collector) to read.
posted morning of December 12th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, December 7th, 2003
The Crooked Timber thread on annoying Christmas songs inspired me to think of "Father Christmas" by the Kinks, one of very few non-annoying popular Christmas songs. (Thanks to Apostropher for telling me which song I was thinking about. Google supplied me with lyrics and I came up with some chords that seem about right. The rhythm is still giving me a little trouble. Here is Tim Harris' transcription, which seems a little better than mine, he plays it in G while I prefer C.
posted morning of December 7th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, December 6th, 2003
The snow is coming down fairly thick -- I spent some time this morning cleaning the kitchen and putting steel wool in a few gaps we have under the cabinets, and fixing up Sylvia's project area upstairs, and am looking for other stuff to do inside the house. This afternoon and evening are parties on the block; Jim is having people over to play guitar and mellow out in preparation for Connie's big party this evening. (It is Jim's 51st birthday.) Connie hired a cellist to come provide music for her party but it is not clear whether he will be able to make it in the weather; if not we will bring guitars over from Jim's.
posted afternoon of December 6th, 2003: Respond
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