I read a book!

I read a historical novel, "A Conspiracy of Paper", by David Liss.  Nice entertainment for a holiday weekend, sort of like an extended episode of "Law and Order, Eighteenth-Century Financial Crimes Unit".  Lots of Georgian squalor and corruption. 

More stressed than I care to be, woke up humming this song from the Squirrel Nut Zippers, which is a dead ringer for my mental state right now.

Exiled

Short stay away from home on family business, providing unrequested but much needed downtime.  Just retreated to coffee shop (our lodgings are at casa de sketchy internet).  But how about a picture from last month's trip, from New Jersey:

That was the very end of April in northern New Jersey.  B1 (now GrownUpOne) took it in woods that his father, grandfather, and a couple generations of great grandfathers had stomped around in before him.

Finals coming up....

This is for my younger kid (blatant homage to  plagiarism of an anonymous Irish author, and Robin Flower, via Helen Waddell) :

"I and Smokes, the neighbor's cat
'Tis a like task we are at,
Hunting 'x' is my delight,
Scratching fleas he sits all night.

'Gainst the flea he sets his eye

 Full and fierce and sharp and sly; '

Gainst the wall of pre-Calc I

 All my little wisdom try."

Thus Pacioli: "For, if he does not put each thing in its own place, he will find himself in great trouble and confusion as to all his affairs, according to the familiar saying, Ubi non est ordo, ibi est confusion." Ah, Pacioli, you know me too well.

Christmas Truce, band geek style

So the High School boys' basketball team has been on a roll and the principal (the one who looks like Dean Martin) decided the pep band should go on the road with the fans to the playoff game c. 4 hrs south of here.  B2 returned around midnight brimming with enthusiasm.  To hear him tell it, the high point of the evening was when he and his pep band cohort emerged from their entrenched positions and crossed no-man's land to greet members of the home team band....  As I imagine it, they exchanged cigarettes and chocolate, and discovered that, lo and behold, they knew the same songs.  They enjoyed a brief moment of band-geek solidarity, before both sides retreated to their foxholes to resume the exchange of fire.  (Our team lost, but I am sure that was despite the best efforts of the band).

...and now he's walking

 Jean Shepherd singing Bear Missed the Train


You know you hear a poem or song for the first time, and then it turns up everywhere?  This week that song for me has been "Bei mir bist Du schoen" / "The Bear Missed his Train".  B2s Dixieland group played the second version at their jam session last Saturday, and I thought it was a cute, catchy number...my son had to explain to me that it was a parody of a 'real' song.  (Parody apparently written in the early 60s by the Smith Street Society Jazz Band.)  Then this week Patty Andrews died, and NPR picked "Bei mir bist Du schoen" as the song to remember her by.  NPR calls the Andrews Sisters success with the song an "only in America tale",  because the song was a hit in Yiddish theatre, and was sung at the Apollo by two black recording artists (identified in the NPR story as "Johnny and George"), before it made it to mainstream fame with the Andrews Sisters.

And now played and sung with gusto by five teenage boys in the foyer of the High School Winter Formal venue Saturday night.

The Bear version calls to mind the edifying (if slightly twee) children's book by D. B. Johnson much loved by Unitarian Universalist Families: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg". 

And while we're on the subject of entertainment, it is eerie how much the local high school principal, Tom Butler resembles Dean Martin ?