Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
Bloggistry, noun, the artistry of blogging. From O.E. Blaugt, to fall into a well, yelling loudly, from Arch. Lat. Bloggum, to chew with one’s mouth open, in a loud and disgusting manner, showing one’s table-mates more than they wanted to see of the mastication process.
Earliest known quotation: “To bleaugh, to plough whyle burping, ’tis blaggy, blaggy dew. Bloggum, bloggum, all thee day long, ’tis not so naice of yew.” — from the Three Canticles of Clackmeyer mss., circa 1502.
Today Mayor Smokey Barnable of Edgewood cut the ribbon on the new Mobius Factory, declaring August 15th to be ‘Megatar Day.’ The location of the new facility remains undisclosed, and numerous attempts to shadow Mobius workers have met with failure.
“We was trailin’ em,” said Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve III, chief houndsman, “And Ole Bessey was a holdin’ fast. And then a quick zig and a zag around a big tree, and all a-sudden the trail went over rocky ground … and it weren’t no use after that.”
Inquiries should be directed to the Secret Megatar Laboratory, in care of Post Office Box 989, Mount Shasta, CA 96067.
My uncle Eugene, the oldest, and Richard had joined the navy. My uncle Robert, the youngest, had joined the army. Eugene and Richard were assigned different duties and different ships because they were family members. So each was alone, like any sailor or soldier in wartime.
Robert became a medic in the army, and was stationed in the South Pacific, and so when he saw a certain ship in port, he hurried down to mail call, hoping to ask for news of Eugene, for Eugene had been on that ship some months earlier.
The canteen building was crowded, elbow to elbow, sailors and soldiers jostling for their mail, which sometimes held treasures of cookies or cakes! The sargent read out the names, and Robert was again disappointed. No mail today, on Christmas day. No word from folks back home; no word from his brothers far away.
“Sailor,” he said to the fellow next to him, “are you on the ship in the harbor?” The sailor nodded.
“Yes, sir!” the sailor replied.
“Do you know anything of a navy man named Eugene Hurn?” my uncle Robert asked of the sailor. The sailor shook his head.
But from behind where Robert was standing, a man spoke out.
“Why, Bob!” the man said, “What are you doing here?”
[Merry Christmas to you and your family from our family.]
Miraculously, a parking spot opens up just in front of him.
He turns his face up to heaven and says, “Never mind, I just found one.”
The Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, Summer 1987: On my way back from the store I walked along the eucalyptus trees in the Panhandle. This is an arm of Golden Gate park that extends between Lyon and Fell streets, and it’s a great hangout for bums, lovers, basketball players, and me.
Just ahead of me, on a bench sat a young Hispanic couple. She looked miserable, with eyes red from crying, and just as I passed their bench I heard the young man saying, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
It was so hard to keep from laughing.
And then I remembered an evening, just a few nights before … [Read more…]
Asheville, North Carolina, August 22, 2005: Robert Moog, 71, the inventor of the synthesizer, died today at his home, from an inoperable brain tumor. A childhood interest in the theremin
led him to create sound modules, creating the first synthesizers used in early electronic recordings such as ‘The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music.’
Early recording artists such as Walter Carlos — later Wendy Carlos — and two musicians I met in a Los Angeles Warehouse, Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause — brought synthesized sound into the radio landscape, where it has become the background music for our lives today and into the future.
Despite hobnobbing with headliner musicians world-wide, Moog remained quite humble about his place in the world. For example … [Read more…]
Here’s how to do it …
First you get a glass. A fancy wine glass might be better than a jelly jar, but I’m not sure.
Next, you determine the ‘natural frequency of vibration’ of the glass. You do this by tapping on the glass with a little teensy thing, hard enough to make it sound a note, but not hard enough to break it. There is ‘spozed to be some special tool used for tapping bottles, but I’ve never seen such a tool.
Next, you must sing the exact same note that the glass made, and increase your volume to 130 decibels, and hold that note at that volume for a time. When you get this sound just right, the glass will begin to vibrate and then it will shatter, throwing glass all over the floor. This should be very satisfying.
If that doesn’t work, then just pick it up and throw it on the floor.
Mount Shasta, Sunday March 11: Daylight Savings Time changed today, which is earlier than in years past. But not at our house!
That is to say, the last several days have been very confusing, because Adrienne didn’t want to get caught by the weird feeling we always get when we change the clocks. Therefore she decided to get the jump on the whole thing. Kind of an activist approach to Daylight Savings.
So, three days ago, she began changing our clocks, and I’ve spent the last three days in a kind of time warp as I walked from room to room. In the kitchen, the stove and microwave and kitchen clock might claim 4pm, but the coffeepot disagrees. The clock in my room agrees with the majority in the kitchen, but my computer held out (until today of course). In my office I operated in a different time zone until yesterday, and the car is still running on some time zone that’s out in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a wonder we don’t arrive before we set out.
Our voicemail is lying to us about when those messages came in. But I’m not fooled.
Oh, well. My Adrienne is just a woman ahead of her time.
