Toilet

On Saturday, the Aikido Club is coming over for a party. Hopefully they won't mind the spare toilet, which is currently sitting next to the Amish hutch in the kitchen. No, I don't want to talk about it.

In preparation for the event, we've started tidying up. This, of course, involves power tools. Why? Well, for a while I've been wondering what to do about the number of stringed instruments I've got. Electric guitar, electric bass, folk guitar, DADGAD-tuned concert guitar. Yikes, where to put them? It's true that the instrument case is the greatest roadblock to playing, but on the other hand, stands take up a lot of room.

Enter the wall-hung guitar! This afternoon I bought two "String Swing" brackets, which let you hang your gitt-ars from the wall like a good little redneck. Each of these is basically a two-pronged hook mounted on a small block of wood. They come with drywall screws and the stupidest plastic mounting toggles ever. These toggles seem to be designed on the assumption that all musicians live in houses with walls made from cardboard, butter, or some other substance that you can screw a toggle with the consistency of a pencil eraser into. Ok, maybe that's not such a crazy assumption, but in our case the walls are solid 60-year old Amyrrhican plaster, strong like Russian bull.

The toggles are in the trash, and the guitars are on the wall (well, half of them anyway). Here's the group shot in the music room (yes, Ben, that's a new friend on the far right):




Don't they look nice together? Now if they would just get some recording done...

Animal gap

Update to yesterday:
Marg wants me to point out that the fellow in the picture is her Sweet Bunny of Youth (tm). Outside of Bravely, it's the only stuffed animal from her younger days that she's not managed to give away.

Whereas I have kept Blue Bear, Pooh, harald Hedgehog, and many others, right on up to Bronto!

Ugh.

Ugh. Nothing quite like waking up at 4:40 for no good reason.

Seems like a good time to import a bunch of CDs into iTunes until I'm tired enough to go back to bed. That will undoubtedly happen 20 minutes before I have to get back up again. Today I have my first followup with my back surgeon, and it seems like those guys never do anything at a civilized hour. Maybe that's what got me awake early--anxiety about missing an early appointment? Or maybe it's the rain. We get a vast quantity of rain every time there's a big hurricane in Florida, and maybe that woke me up.

At any rate, I'm too tired to think of anything to say, so here's an early-morning bunny for ya:

Namsess...

Ok, I thought if I did a little research I could find some interesting information out about names and naming conventions for tunes (as in the Irish music nomenclature of 'tunes' being pieces without vocal or text and 'songs' being with). I supposed there might be an interesting essay in comparing and contrasting the evident need for tunes in popular and folk idioms to have proper names (not Bob or Dave, but I mean proper in the other sense) as opposed to, say, classical music where a piece is perfectly happy to be 'sonata #42 in B-Flat for Foghorn and Wildebeest.' Some classical pieces have more namey names, but the great bulk seem not to (is this a modern invention, I wonder? Did most symphonies all have descriptive names in their day, but lose them over a few hundred years' time?). In contrast, folk and pop tunes almost all have names that suggest something other than a cataloguing scheme. Heck, in Irish session tunes it's not unusual for a tune to have several different names; it's also relatively common to get multiple tunes that share a name!

To quote Herbert Grönemeyer, "Was soll das?!?"

Anyway, I searched a bit and thought a bit, and in the end decided the essay will have to wait for a more interesting topic. Heh. Most tune names seem to be either (a) a tip of the hat to the inspiration for the tune (e.g., presumably Jack Ryan's Polka was written for or by a Jack Ryan, or maybe he just liked the tune best, or maybe he was the first guy to stagger into the pub after whoever wrote it first played it at a session), or (b) purely a mental bookmark. At any rate, less to discuss than I'd hoped. Blah.