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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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We ever find out what a barbershop jolly is?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Interesting thread altogether.
Coincidentally, we had a huge wind storm in Dinwiddie last night and all our power went out. The wind was too strong for my father to go get the generator, so we just lit candles throughout the house and listened to the winds gallop down the chimneys. I talked to a friend on the cell phone, so that was a technological advancement well appreciated. However, even cell phones are dependent upon batteries.
But after the call, after going downstairs to check on my daughter and father, carrying a little red votive in my hand, I accepted the silence in the house and marveled at the winds dying down...
It was a darkness that would not be broken for hours--we could do nothing against that darkness. It held us captive other than the little flickerings of candles here and there. And I had such a sense of peace and relief in the darkness and the quiet--all I could hear were the sounds of diminishing wind and my daughter's and father's muted voices in the kitchen.
When crawling into bed, I happened to look out the window onto the oak grove and hay fields beyond, and what I saw made me smile and nearly laugh in delight:
There were literally hundreds of fireflies blinking like mad! There are fifty acres in the fields beyond the grove to the front of the farm, and every spot of that front fifty was being illuminated with flying fireflies. I was held enthralled by the beauty--and seeing it all in a nearly silent house wrapped in unchanging, comforting darkness.
What I want to make clear is, for some mystical reason, seeing the fireflies in such profusion in the fields was better because the house was silent and dark. It was better without the sound of the television in the family room, and better without the porch lights on. Nature had taken out the force of technology and had replaced our blarings and brightness with such sweet undisturbed darkness other than the flickerings of hundreds of tiny, softly blinking fireflies. The fields looked filled with softly glowing jewels. It was as though Nature tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Now, I've calmed down this domain. Take a deep breath and look, really look, at what I can do--and do every night if anyone would bother to slow down enough to really notice me."
I understand the house murderer in Milo's passage...the ears would benefit most of all from a return to times without technology, and, consequently, the heart. But this was a spring night, and, to be perfectly honest, nothing was more wretched than living in darkness imposed upon us for five wintry days due to an ice storm.
Bottom line? If I really had to hone it down, it would be one acoustic instrument, a dictionary, lots of writing paper...and a cell phone with a good supply of batteries!
Best regards,
WordWaffler
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OP
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> We ever find out what a barbershop jolly is?
C sings with a barbershop girlie choir, and they went to Southport at the weekend for a competitive beanfeast organised by the British chapter of the USn Sweet Adelines organisation. It was their first outing at the competition, judged on mucicality and style etc by four experts from the States, and they won the award as Best Small Choir ~ so all was *very jolly, especially in the bar(s)... ;)
edit: Latest news ~ the choir's subsequent grading apparently places it as amongst the 20 top such small-scale barbershop ensembles in the world, so an invitation to competition next year in the USA sounds on the cards. *Extreme jollity is likely to prevail :)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Will we ever find out what a beanfeast is?  Is it related to a wayzgoose (I love that word!)?
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old hand
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old hand
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what a beanfeast is?It's when y'all come to dinner at my place, duh! 
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Carpal Tunnel
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What's a wayzgoose, Jackie?
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Carpal Tunnel
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digital
hmmm, it’s interesting the way a simple word like that gains an emotive impact, isn’t it Musick? Most of the connotations for me are positive, like for BY, but I recognize exactly what you mean too about the loaded shorthand!
From the world of print I get significant images with words like type, lines, stereotype, press... any others?
From photography the violent electric brilliance of a thunderstorm last night made me think about flash (including flash in the pan), and a host from movie’s impact including pan and zoom, and most archytypically for our age perhaps would be cut…
Sound recording has given my lexicon particular resonance in words like bass, reverb (no, not a return to the verb from a noun!), fade, splice, and many others. I think we take for granted how much of our mental landscape has been altered and adapted to see the world through the possibilities opened up by these technologies…
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Carpal Tunnel
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Early 'Hi-Fi' gave us rumble and hiss. I still have an amp with a 'rumble' filter switch. 'Rumble', of course, pertains to the *fight your amplifier would have with the speakers to get the low frequencies out of them!  Being "wet" and "gated' are other words that have their roots forever embedded in recording technology. (For those of you unfamiliar: when you add reverb to a sound the sound gets "wet", and when you limit the length in which a specific acoustic effect is applied you "gate" its length (literally shutting it off before it tapers off). I'm gating this post befo-
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Carpal Tunnel
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For me, nothing transcends that musty, burnished aroma of old books...books of all sizes and shapes and topics, stacked in mottled shelves waiting eagerly for yet another reader to fumble and dogleaf their pages. I spend many hours browsing our local used book store, Hooked on Books, and, truly, those moments do wax eternal for me. Not only am I liable to find one of those out-of-print old friends I relinquished decades ago, but I sense around the spirit of the authors, the muses, the former owners and readers, the transparencies of the the layers of life and travel that have ushered these books to their home on these shelves pleading to be read once more. How can I refuse their offer? Typically I leave overflowing with reading material, rescuing paper gems from their exile, glad to replenish my shelves with their favor, even if it takes years for me to read them. Nothing better than turning a musky, browning page, nostrils swirled with the delicate frangrances of antiquity (or just plain oldness), savoring words first printed perhaps forty years ago, like the seductive prose of the old paperback of William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" which I'm now absorbing, page by page, word by word. There will always be a book in my life, nothing beats the mesmerizing read of an immortal classic, or even good pop fiction...I'll never forget the experience of reading tomes like Jaws and The Exorcist before seeing the movies. Read on!... And, then, I am truly a vinyl dinosaur! My love for music generated such a respect for my album collection that I kept the disks (though not all the covers) impeccably fresh through all the years of inebriate partying...how, I'll never know. How I loved zipping the album out of its cover, handling it on its edge to ensure no fingerprints would ever appear on its fine lustre. Then its gentle planting onto the turntable, the aroma and velvety, almost soundless, sliding of the Parostatik over the spinning black grooves as it preened away every particle of dust, then a dab for the stylus as well. Then the reject switch and the music was off and running into the heart of another countless party. Many were the friends who offered to "put on some music" who were told "don't get your fingerprints on it...and make sure you use the Parostatik". Rituals repeated too many times to count (or remember ). And, to this day, I'll never be convinced the sound of digital recording is superior to the sound of vinyl stereophonics on a good system. Many folks agree with me. It's as if a quality creeps into the digital sound that somehow makes it less real, less present, alerting you to it's technological supremacy to spite the music it spews. A vinyl record just plays it's guts out for you. How many moments remembered rushing home with an armful of albums (bought onsale at Korvette's Dept. Store at $2.25 a clip with lawn-mowing money), so eager to hear the new music it felt like Christmas morning, opening the most-anticipated and flinging it onto the turntable while cradling that wonderful, welcoming album-cover with its artwork and artist info, and, of course, following along the lyric sheet on the first listen word-for-word. Yeah, I've got CDs, etc., etc. But I'll never get over record albums. And they say turntables are coming back! Once I find a record booth or vinyl store I'm lost among the album racks, thumbing through for new and old musical treasure. And replacing those three or four favorite albums that had a habit of disappearing at every party was more of a chore than I thought. I got back the Rolling Stone's Hot Rocks fairly soon. But it took forever to find The Allman Brother's Eat A Peach and Traffic's Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys again! And Jonathan Edward's first album...took fifteen years to find that again! I got him to sign it at a concert (I rememeber he laughed at the picture and said, "Who's this guy on the cover?", holding it up next to his "new" face ) Go vinyl! "We're gonna sit around the shanty mama/and put a good buzz on!..." I also have to admit, that as hard as I've tried to get away from it at times, I am a child of the boob tube. I don't get hooked on many made-for-TV shows anymore (a handful a decade), but I just can't wean myself away from the small screen for sports, news, and old movies (not to mention relatively new offerings like The History Channel, Discovery, and TLC).
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