Fan mail.
Well, maybe not fan mail per se but at least someone agreeing with my LETTER TO THE EDITOR in today’s Chronicle.
The letter was a rehash of a recent post wherein I gave my oh-so-lucid opinion re where Don Fisher should put his Contemporary Art Museum.
Fan mail’s nice …
Spectacular sunrise yesterday, presaging the rain that started last night as a drizzle and moved into, yes, real rain (not wicked rain, just maybe a quarter inch or so) overnight.
The rain’s stopped and …
his nibs is up on the roof, bailing out a puddle of water from a plugged up drain.
The leaks are back, in a different place this time, due to a different cause, most likely an installation flaw for the new roof for which we just paid a zillion dollars (what with other work to be done and the cost of uninstalling and reinstalling the solar panels that rest on the roof).
Dang.
But … good thing I heard the drip drips behind me and we got the buckets and towels in place, good thing the rain wasn’t any harder than it was, good thing everyone will be out here in a few days (as soon as the roofer boss is back from vacation and available) to check out what the problem is and fix it before real rain (and Autumn) blows in.
Read/watch this lecture, billed as Randy Pausch’s “last lecture.”
As an intro, the article in the WSJ that talks about the lecture.
The video of the speech is an hour and three-quarters if you watch to the very end. There’s also an edited five-minute video, but it doesn’t capture what the full video does.
Randy Pausch’s speech (and Randy Pausch), inspirational.
Another excellent bit from Patti Digh and 37days: Burn Those Jeans [PDF].
The video this post links to is dashing around the Web this week even though it was taken four years ago.
Made me cry. I’m sure the young woman singing the National Anthem still remembers that night and the kindness of Mo.
Check out this article, written not long after the video was taken in 2003.
*sniffles*
Also check out Patti Digh’s blog, 37days, which is where this all came from.
But for the most extraordinary example of shifting names we must go to the aubergine, once known also as the brinjal in India. The story starts with Sanskrit vatin-gana “the plant that cures the wind”, which became the Arabic al-badinjan. This moved into Europe, again via Moorish Spain: one offshoot — keeping the Arabic article prefixed — became alberengena in Spanish and on to aubergine in French; another transformation became the botanical Latin melongena through losing the article and changing the “b” to an “m”; this then turned into the Italian melanzana and then to mela insana (the “mad apple”). Another branch, again without the “al”, became bringella in Portugal, whose traders took the plant, and their version of the name, full circle back to India, where it became brinjal in Anglo-Indian circles (the usual term among English speakers in India today is the Hindi baingan, or aubergine). In another branch of its history, the Portuguese word turned up in the West Indies, where it was again, but differently, corrupted to brown-jolly. All names for the same plant.
[ref: Michael Quinion at World Wide Words]
Question, though. Why is the same beast called an eggplant in the USofA?
Ah, okay. [ref: Wikipedia] “The name eggplant developed in the United States, Australia, and Canada because the fruits of some 18th century European cultivars were yellow or white and resembled goose or hen’s eggs.”
That makes a ton of sense.
And so ends the etymology detour for the morning.
Wandering from song to song in YouTube, I came across a couple anthems for a cowboy grandma and my second cousins who wear big buckles:
The Highwaymen: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys
and
The Highwaymen: The Last Cowboy Song
‘night.
I was reading someone’s blog tonight and they mentioned Brian Hyland and Gypsy Woman.
Gypsy Woman? What? I knew Gypsy Woman, of course, but had never associated it with Hyland. Why would I? I knew Hyland because of his big hit in the summer of 1962, Sealed With A Kiss. I know it was 1962 because that was the summer after fifth grade, the school year when I’d swooned over Phil Johnston, whose sister Sheila was in my older sister’s class. When school ended in June, Phil’d up and moved away. Sealed With A Kiss, was my anthem that summer as I mooned about. Sealed with a kiss, if only.
Same Brian Hyland? How many Brian Hyland’s singing in that time frame could there be?
So, I popped /”brian hyland” “gypsy woman” “sealed with a kiss”/ into Google and found out Hyland wasn’t a one hit wonder. He was indeed the same dude and, furthermore, his first and biggest hit (recorded in 1960 when he was a sophomore in high school) was Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, written by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss.
Who knew?
Last, but not least, my Web searching scored me a vid of Hyland lip-synching Sealed With A Kiss on some bandstand show, probably Dick Clark’s.
Check out the dancers! There’s a classic nerd with black rimmed glasses and plaid jacket and a girl doing what looks like the Frug. (No, not those on the stage behind him. Later in the video. Watch! The guy she’s dancing with is dressed in a buttoned cardigan sweater. No lie!)
Nostalgia hits hard tonight.
Love Kristofferson’s voice.
Video of a song from last year’s album: In the News
http://www.myrecycledbags.com/
Crafty, mostly crocheted, bags with directions.
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