You know you are living in 2007 when…

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Gandalfe

1. You accidentally enter your PIN on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t even have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

Posted in Humor | 5 Comments

Thank you for calling. Can you please hold?

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Gandalfe

LilyTomlin11 We still get telemarketers calling us late at night. Usually I look at the caller ID and then decide not to answer the phone. Most of my friends and family have their names pop up, but not everyone. So sometimes before five rings and the answering machine picks up I am left trying to parse the phone number. "Do we know anyone from the 507 area code part of the US?

It used to be easier as many of the telemarketers were calling from a 1-800 or 1-888 number. But now some of the services we use call from their too. So our food service or some theater subscriptions don’t get answered and we lose our hard-won seats… again. :o(

Then there is the matter of how to handle the call politely but firmly. I saw this statement on the blogosphere, "Thank you for calling. Can you please hold? <click> I think that might be a clever way to handle these callers. You don’t want to ruin your karma by being overtly rude. But you don’t want to talk to these people either.

How do you handle the telemarketing calls you get?

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

What is beauty?

Posted on April 28, 2007 by Gandalfe

 Many of you know the famous Dove soap campaign. If you’ve not seen it, the film is kinda, well actually, majorly disturbing on a couple of levels. YouTube has excellent parody of the Dove Campaign that is closer to true life.

 I’m not sure of the timing but Dove is now running a Campaign for real beauty with some age observations. It’s called by many the ProAge campaign.

Having been married to a beautiful lady, and one that is aging gracefully, I’ve not really paid attention to the soaps, perfumes, and makeup world that much. Suzy is a minimalist when it comes to makeup and hair treatments. And she is as stunning to me as she was when I met her 35 years ago.

"THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,  
  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,  
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express  
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:  
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape        
  Of deities or mortals, or of both,  
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?  
  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?  
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?  
    What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats. 1795–1821

So bringing this idea to the masses of normal people being beautiful in so many unique and interesting ways seems kinda like a no brainer to me. I don’t really understand what the fuss is but maybe, just maybe there are people out there who still think the most important attribute of a person should be based upon how they would look on the big screen. BTW, I consider myself fortunate that Suzy did not hold me to that ‘movie star’ standard.  ;o)

Posted in Health and wellness | Leave a comment

Wikipedia – Totem of Human Knowledge?

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Gandalfe

As most of you know I love Wikipedia, even sponsor it. But I found Nick Carr‘s observation as interesting as it is eloquent:

Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of "human knowledge." Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for "truth," anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can’t remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it’s accurate. If it doesn’t, it ain’t. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it’s in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That’s bullshit, but people seem to buy it.

http://www.roughtype.com/

This was eye catching too:

In fact, by presenting knowledge as a readymade commodity, a Happy Meal for Thinkers in a Hurry, it may well be doing more to retard creative thought than to spur it….

The quality of an encyclopedia is not determined by the number of experts who sign up to contribute but by the skill of the writers and editors who translate what the experts know into the language of the lay reader. That’s a job that experts and crowds are both profoundly ill-suited for.

Posted in Computers and Internet | Leave a comment

Third rock from the Sun

Posted on April 24, 2007 by Gandalfe

Yahoo – This Dec.1965 photo released by NASA shows waves of clouds along the east flanks of the Andes Mountains casting off an orange glow by the low angle of the sun in the West as photographed during the Gemini 7 mission, which included astronaut James A. Lovell, looking South from Northern Bolivia across the Andes.

Lovell, who was on Apollo 8 with Anders, later commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight. From 240,000 miles away Lovell said he understood ‘how insignificant we are, how fragile we are, and how fortunate we are to have a body that will allow us to enjoy the sky and the trees and the water and the vision and the hearing and all that stuff to see what’s going around out here. Everything out there is so stark.” (AP Photo/Courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center)

Posted in Everyday Science | Leave a comment

Those Crazy South American Sax Manufacturers :o)

Posted on April 23, 2007 by Gandalfe

Leo, a friend of mine from the SOTW site is located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has tried a number of Brazilian and other South American saxophones and mouthpieces. The contra and bass saxes pictured are the compact height models which make them about the height of a baritone sax. 

The height is diminished by wrapping the neck a few, okay a lot of extra times. And the price is a lot less than the same kind of instruments from major band instrument manufacturers because the J’elle instruments are new designs.

These instruments use a baritone mouthpiece. Apparently it works and has been done on vintage bass saxes for some time now. There is a another company making mouthpieces called Barkley. They make all sizes from soprano to bass sax pieces.

The Barkley mouthpieces are make by a Brazilian company. They don’t have a Web site yet but you can contact them with the information gleaned from the SoTW site. 

Leo has purchased some of these pieces and says that he likes them. If I understand Leo correctly these pieces can be modeled after the more expensive Meyer, Yanagisawa, and Vandoren styles.

Leo is going to try to get me some of these gratis to try out and I’ll report back to y’all if that happens. They are stunningly beautiful mouthpieces that will surely be very popular if Barkley can keep the prices down. I should ask some of my mouthpiece fabricators what they think of these pieces too. If the Barkley pieces are hand-worked, they should be very smooth playing providing a playing experience like that of a custom mouthpiece. 

Posted in Saxophone | 2 Comments

Susannah McCorkle – In a Samba Mood

Posted on April 22, 2007 by Gandalfe

Whenever I think of the Latin torch singer, a samba honey, I think of Susannah McCorkle. A friend of mine, also a musician, recommended the song, The Waters of March to me. If I can get my Spaces site to quit misbehaving, I’ll feature part of that song here. Her music is still available on Amazon.com.

 She has that soothing voice that seems to haunt you and I end up playing the song over and over again. She is to Latin female singers as Stan Getz is the sax players.

leaves us with a mystery: “Susannah McCorkle, the sultry voiced pop-jazz singer who brought a rare literary refinement to popular standards, was found dead outside her apartment at 41 West 86th Street early yesterday morning. She was 55. She had apparently jumped to her death, the police said. She had left a suicide note, but the police would not reveal its contents. Her obit

In her apartment, the singer had left a will, along with detailed instructions about disposition of her estate. With a smoky, often kittenish pop- jazz voice and phrasing that lingered stealthily behind the beat, Ms. McCorkle was a direct stylistic descendant of Billie Holiday, who was her primary influence. A student of lyrics and a prolific writer herself, she liked to find new ways of interpreting familiar standards. Her pensive, slowed-up rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” for instance, found an underlying sadness in Irving Berlin’s razzle-dazzle anthem.

She also had special and continuing love for Brazilian pop, to which she devoted an album, “Sabia” (Concord Jazz), whose lyrics included her own translations from Portuguese. Many of her later albums included at least one standard composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim.”

You can read more about this phenominal singer and female on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susannah_McCorkle.

Posted in Female vocalists, Jazz, Music | Leave a comment

10 Things You Don’t Know About Women – Part 26

Posted on April 22, 2007 by Gandalfe

By Julia Louis-Dreyfus

1. We know what you’re doing when you put your hand in your pocket.

2. We think it’s okay if you get fat and go bald. Please do us the same courtesy.

3. When we say we "almost tried that in college," it means we did. At least twice.

4. When we start getting undressed in front of you with the lights on, it means we’ve lost interest.

And it gets more interesting. Read more here…

Posted in Too Spicy for some | Leave a comment

Off to practice now…

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Gandalfe

After a long day of work I am so ready to go play my sax and clarinet. Suzy and I are bringing in six instruments between the two of us because Arwen needs to borrow a tenor sax while hers is being tweaked. So it’s a tenor sax and bass clarinet for me. Suzy has an alto sax, a Bb  and Eb soprano clarinets. It will be three hours of practice for us, 1.5 hours of jazz and 1.5 hours of concert band. And to me it usually seems like 15 minutes.

But I enjoy the people too. After a number of years with this band, my best freinds are now people who play in the band. Many were music majors in college and but me to shame, but playing with them is sooo fun. Molly is about to get married and I hope she can stay with the band. As the lead alto in both the jazz ensemble and the concert band, she is very important. And to date, no lead alto saxophonists have be appreciated as much as her.

The bass, guitarist, and drummer are stellar too. Sometimes you just get lucky with the right people at the right time. With a great rhythm section and lead/taught by a local high school band teacher, this jazz ensemble is tackling some very challenging music like Basie’s ‘Straight, No Chaser’ and ‘Residual Fire’ by another arranger. We hope to kick some proverbal jazz ass with our concerts in Victoria this year. :o)

Posted in Music | 4 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut 1923 – 2007

Posted on April 12, 2007 by Gandalfe

"NEW YORK — In books such as "Slaughterhouse-Five ," "Cat’s Cradle," and "Hocus Pocus," Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound. Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz." – MSN News

"A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim ("Slaughterhouse-Fiv e") and Eliot Rosewater ("God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater") as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

Like "Catch-22," by Vonnegut’s friend, Joseph Heller, "Slaughterhouse-Five " was a World War II novel embraced by opponents of the Vietnam War, linking a so-called "good war" to the unpopular conflict of the 1960s and ’70s."

Posted in Books | 2 Comments