Category Archive 'Uncategorized'
01 Jul 2025

America Has the Best, the Most Beautiful Alligators

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30 Jun 2025

An Important Difference

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29 Jun 2025

Gassenhauer [Popular Dance] nach [by] Hans Neusiedler (1536)

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Commenter pfdr pointed out the similarity of a piece of music from Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for “True Romance” (1993). I mentioned this to my wife, the family musicologist, who responded with this Wikipedia entry:

Gassenhauer nach Hans Neusiedler (1536), commonly known as Gassenhauer (pronounced [ˈɡasn̩ˌhaʊ̯ɐ]), is a short piece from Orff Schulwerk, developed during the 1920s by Carl Orff with long-time collaborator Gunild Keetman. As the full title indicates, it is an arrangement of a much older work for lute by the lutenist Hans Neusidler from 1536. It (along with several other Orff Schulwerk pieces) is credited to Keetman on a 1995 release of the Schulwerk. As with many other pieces from the Schulwerk, it has been used multiple times on television, radio, music and in films, including the films Badlands (1973), True Romance (1993) (arrangement by Hans Zimmer), Ratcatcher (1999), Finding Forrester (2000), Monster (2003), Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Priscilla (2023),The Simpsons’ 22nd-season episode “The Scorpion’s Tale” (2011), Friend of the World (2020), The Simpsons’ 33rd-season episode “Mothers and Other Strangers” (2021) and Mad God (2021). The piece was used as the theme music for an afternoon radio program also titled Gassenhauer on the classical music station WCLV in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1970s.

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28 Jun 2025

A Bit of Orff

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28 Jun 2025

Gen Z

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Suzy Weiss complains on behalf of an entire hapless generation.

In a week or so I will have left my twenties behind for, I’m told, my thirties. I’m not much of a birthday celebrater, but I have been reflecting on the past decade, and marveling at how little I seemed to have learned during it. Sure, I managed to pay my taxes, and apply for a couple of apartments. I can hold a job. Well, I can hold a job where the boss is my sister.

But I can’t do a lot of things. I don’t really drive. I’m too scared to cook most meats. I’ve never ironed anything—I do a poor man’s steam, which is when you hang your garment in the bathroom while you shower and hope the heat gets the wrinkles out. The other day I called my dad to ask how many thousands are in a million. (It’s a thousand!) …

In an airy, wood-accented event space in Brooklyn, a few dozen adults gathered to talk about their next phases of life. …

“Remember,” Alex Simon, the facilitator of this workshop, called out to the room, “Listen deeply. No fixing, no problem solving.” The class, Life Transitions: Crisis and Change, is part of a series she started. It’s called Lifeshop. Simon, 29, started teaching it to undergraduates at Yale two years ago, then adapted it into a three-month course open to the public in New York. It began in March, and since then, she estimates that 900 to 1,000 people have come through the doors.

“It’s all the things that I wish I learned in college but never did,” said Simon.

Those things include: how to listen, how to fight with someone you love, how to apologize, and how to deal with a friendship breakup, as well as navigating big life transitions. You know, those things that every single person has to do but which make most of us feel completely unprepared.

“At every single workshop, people say, ‘I had no idea it wasn’t just me,’ whether it’s navigating an inner critic or feeling like their life is up in flames,” Simon told me. “We have this habit of taking things that are kind of universal and making them a proof of our own brokenness, or inadequacy. The beauty of doing it in a group is that we realize it’s not just us.”

It’s easy to make fun of young people who find it hard to be adults. They’re eons behind where their parents were at their age. Young people today have fewer kids, no houses, and finance everything from clothes to concerts with layaway plans. A new Gallup poll of Gen Z found that fewer than 44 percent of them report feeling prepared for the future.

RTWT

Gen Z has to be this f***** up because so many Baby Boomers were left-wing douchebags.

28 Jun 2025

Ladies Talk Salmon Fishing on the Spey

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Lady Caroline, Spey Fly.

24 Jun 2025

Canada Often Beats California

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24 Jun 2025

Johannistag

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Piero della Francesca, Baptism of Christ, 1450s, National Gallery, London.

From Chambers’ Book of Days, 1869:

MIDSUMMER DAY – THE NATIVITY OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

Considering the part borne by the Baptist in the transactions on which Christianity is founded, it is not wonderful that the day set apart for the observance of his nativity should be, in all ages and most parts of Europe, one of the most popular of religious festivals. It enjoys the greater distinction that it is considered as Midsummer Day, and therefore has inherited a number of observances from heathen times. These are now curiously mixed with those springing from Christian feelings, insomuch that it is not easy to distinguish them from the other. It is only clear, from their superstitious character, that they have been originally pagan. To use the quaint phrase of an old translator of Scaliger, they ‘form the footesteps of auncient gentility;’ that is, gentilism or heathenism.

The observances connected with the Nativity of St. John commenced on the previous evening, called, as usual, the eve or vigil of the festival, or Midsummer eve. On that evening the people were accustomed to go into the woods and break down branches of trees, which they brought to their homes, and planted over their doors, amidst great demonstrations of joy, to make good the Scripture prophecy respecting the Baptist, that many should rejoice in his birth. This custom was universal in England till the recent change in manners. In Oxford there was a specialty in the observance, of a curious nature. Within the first court of Magdalen College, from a stone pulpit at one corner, a sermon was always preached on St. John’s Day; at the same time the court was embowered with green boughs, ‘that the preaching might resemble that of the Baptist in the wilderness.’

Towards night, materials for a fire were collected in a public place and kindled. To this the name of bonfire was given, a term of which the most rational explanation seems to be, that it was composed of contributions collected as boons, or gifts of social and charitable feeling. Around this fire the people danced with almost frantic mirth, the men and boys occasionally jumping through it, not to show their agility, but as a compliance with ancient custom. There can be no doubt that this leaping through the fire is one of the most ancient of all known superstitions, and is identical with that followed by Manasseh. We learn that, till a late period, the practice was followed in Ireland on St. John’s Eve. Read the rest of this entry »

24 Jun 2025

Cats Haven’t Changed

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A medieval manuscript was peed on by a cat.

The scribe was forced to leave the rest of the page empty, and drew a picture of a cat and cursed the creature with the following words:

“Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.”

[There is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on it during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.]

Cologne, Historisches Archiv, G.B. quarto, 249, fol. 68r

23 Jun 2025

O, Canada!

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Actual story.

23 Jun 2025

Meme of the Day

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23 Jun 2025

How Low Can NYC Go?

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