Epistemic Ingemination

I think that I’ll just let my partner-in-the-dance Eddie Wilson take the helm today… he says it better than I can hope to.

It took all day Thursday for Wednesday night sink in. Earl Poole Ball’s musical talent, combined with his years of experience at the helm of modern American music is turning the rekindling of “Sittin’, Singin’ and Supper” into pure magic.

Old friends and new joined in the round robin of picking and harmonizing and they played like Threadgill’s Old Number One was Carnegie Hall.

Chojo Jacques is back in Austin after three decades and came by to visit Randy. Thirty-five years haven’t done Chojo any visible damage. I recognized him before we could shake hands. His fiddle playing is about as good as it gets. He recently released a CD with Billy Bright and has been touring with Slaid Cleaves.

Stonehoney and Josh Zee of the Mother Truckers made newcomers to the Hump Day Supper Session wonder if they’d waked up in Heaven. When they sang perfect four-part harmony on a version of “She,” Gram Parson’s love note to Emmylou, it was especially poignant given that Earl was the piano player on the original recording with Gram.

Barbara K and Rich Bowden performed a couple of beauties including the gorgeous Blaze Foley classic, “If I Could Only Fly” with Threadgill’s own beautiful veteran manager, Melanie Bounds.

The audience was filled with the kind of people that keep me from ever staying away for more than a heartbeat; Stan Alexander, who hooked me on music at Threadgill’s in 1961, promised to bring his guitar this Wednesday; Ann Seaman, working on a film follow up to her huge biography of Madelyn Murray O’Hare; Dorothy Martin, sister of pal Don Hyde, one of the most important and overlooked figures in the development of Austin’s counterculture; too many more to mention now because I have puppy duty in the park and it is a glorious day. Hallelujah and I hope to see you on Wednesday evening and any time between now and then that you happen upon a hunger.

P.S. Stonehoney said they are putting together a Gospel Brunch set and I let them promise to the heavens that they intend to show up and play. I didn’t break it to them that Brunch is before noon on the morning that immediately follows Saturday night. We’ll see.

Chojo will be there on Sunday morning (11-1) as well; it’s going to be extraordinary. We’ll be doing the Wednesdays for a long, long time, 7-9 PM. Add ‘em to your weekly sanity maintenance routine. It’s pure, real Austin music wonderfulness.

Go to youtube.com and type in the search term “bloopers”.

Ignore the first twenty or so. The coolness is further in. Have fun.

From Popcorn.

I’ve updated my MySpace calendar with my musical goings-on for the immediate future.

Stop by and say hello at a show sometime.

I am getting ready to head to Memphis, to do a bunch of audio stuff for the Folk Alliance Conference. I’ll probably post some stuff before I leave on Sunday; I’ll also try to pseudo-live-blog while I am there.

In the meantime: Dance, Chirrens, Dance.

Do you think that you have winter weather issues?

Check out what “Condition 1″ means in Antarctica…

This is really neat; via Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice blog. From The Chronicle Of Higher Education:

Who needs college credit when you have a makeshift diploma from a superstar professor?

David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate, even if they weren’t enrolled. In the end, five people the registrar had never heard of joined discussions with the 15 or so regular students and got papers graded by Mr. Wiley, who considered the extra work a public service.

The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley, who at the time directed the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and is well known in the area of online learning.

That was plenty of recognition for Antonio Fini, a doctoral student at the University of Florence, in Italy. “I include it in my CV,” he says.

Open Teaching is the name Mr. Wiley and others use for their experimental knowledge giveaway. And it suggests how the Web could soon force colleges to re-examine their offerings in the age of digital delivery.

M.I.T. started this movement several years ago with their Open Courseware. Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins and several others subsequently followed suit to varying degree.

Donating time to actually grade papers for online students of this type is a whole new thing, and it seems to me to be pubic service of the highest caliber. Kudos to the Dave Wileys of this world.

National Geographic likes to make puzzles out of its amazing photographs. You’ve been warned…

Enjoy.

Here you go. The 50 best cult books.

Sorry for the quietness. I’ve been busy with a, um, project.

I’ll have a pretty neat announcement about it right here, before the end of the month. Stay tuned.

I’m not a big sports fan as a rule, but that having been said, sports are a huge part of our common culture. So kudos to Sports Illustrated; they’ve just put everything that’s ever appeared in the magazine online — 54 years worth — free.

That’s a neat enough thing to do that I think it falls in the category of “Public Service.”

Good for them.

Lyrics, sorted by the word, alphabetically. See if you can guess ‘em. I got about 75%.

Really kind of fascinating in an off-beat way; you can definitely get the feel of the song in question. Kind of makes the geek in me want to do a historiographical map of the frequency of words in popular song lyrics. Or sumpin’.

(Some are gimmes; not many songs that have the word “colitas” in ‘em out there, after all…)

Anyway. Enjoy.

“And Great Lyrics Quiz Rock Roll The” by Matthew Baldwin – The Morning News

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Chicken Little post, but there seems to be a fine amalgamation of doomsday reports appearing this week. Just thought I’d pass along a couple that I’ve noted over the last few days. These things seem to come in bunches. Let’s see here…

From the London Telegraph: The Federal Reserve’s rescue has failed. The Port Authority of New York is having to pay 20% on short-term loans. Home values are dropping all over the civilized world and some folks are beginning to worry about the unity of the Euro. Looks like a global depression awaits unless something drastically goes in the opposite direction soon.

From the Guardian: The guy who discovered Global Warming in the 70’s says that we’re past the tipping point. James Lovelock figures that we have about 20 years until everything goes haywire for everybody everywhere. The money quote: “But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and
expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100.”

Just food for thought. I expect that the truth is a little less drastic on both – but not much.

1. Go to Wikipedia.

2. Click on the random article button.

3. Read for a while.

4. Goto #2.

I have this set up as my browser home page. Celebrate your Inner Nerd!

This comes via Gary the sound guy. Something to do with your old album covers.

Perfect.

(This is lifted directly from Brain-fun.com.)

Einstein’s Logic PuzzleSo you want a hard brain teaser! Well, here it is. It’s purported that Einstein said 98% of the world’s population could not figure out this logic problem. Try your hand at it.

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There are 5 houses each with a different color. Their owners, each with a unique heritage, drinks a certain type of beverage, smokes a certain brand of cigarette, and keep a certain variety of pet. None of the owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigarette or drink the same beverage.Clues:

• The Brit lives in the red house.
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
• The Dane drinks tea.
• The green house is just to the left of the white house.
• The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
• The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
• The man living in the center house drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
• The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
• The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
• The German smokes Prince.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
• The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish?

Solution is here.