If you want to do the British-type crosswords, here’s one clue you might be able to get (taken from yesterday’s paper): “Say, Harry Potter’s friend, in spring.” (Answer printed below.)
Am I the only person who thinks the photo headings over at WTF make everybody look inebriated? What are they serving in the punch at these high school tournaments, anyhow? No wonder people are running nonsense: they’re too drunk to know the difference.
I took the weekend off, so to speak, ignoring emails and the like, to pursue a variety of personal endeavors. At the level of most complicated, combined with most likely to lock my brain into the 60s for all time, is a new project to copy all my old cassettes over to mp3s. Well, not all of them; some deserve to be forgotten, but there was a period when I copied practically everything I owned (mostly records purchased during the 60s) onto cassette (the past’s wave of the future), as well as buying practically everything new on cassette. The Sony Walkman was the invention of the age, and one version or another lasted me about 30 years of running/walking/whatever. Inspired by an article in the Times a couple of weeks ago, I purchased a copy of Toast, an iMic connector and a cheap amplifier, attached my good cassette player (which ordinarily only fires up to play the Muppet/John Denver Christmas album) and began copying away. Magic! First you have the music as a simple waveform copy, if you want to make a CD, then you can port it over to iTunes. I imagine there will be some music worth CDing (and all will be backed up, of course—I have no intentions of ever doing this again), but most is going straight to the MegaPod. In among the Small Faces “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” (pre-Rod, originally released in a round album sleeve) and lost cuts from Cat Stevens’s “Mona Bone Jakon” and like gems, are songs by people whose identity is a total mystery to me. These are items I picked up from library borrowings and the like. So there will be a new iTunes entry thus: Song: Unknown, by Artist: Unknown. In one weekend of porting over exactly 2 mix tapes (this stuff takes muchos time, although I did do a bunch of non-mix albums too) I’ve got about a dozen Unknown/Unknowns. Good stuff, too, whatever it is. If you hear any of it in the tabroom and can identify it, speak up. I need to know!
Other than throwing logs on the fire of my music collection, Saturday we headed into Manhattan with a few million of our nearest and dearest non-English-speaking friends (if you doubt that the dollar is on the skids, go to your nearest tourist destination) and visited the Met, among other things. I strongly recommend the Barcelona exhibit (although I also strongly recommend you listen to “Company” first in order to exorcize the song from your mind in advance, otherwise it will drive you crazy as it jiggers through your brain in room after room). Ramon Casas was, to me, a serious revelation. There’s a sampling of Picassos from the womb on up, if you want to watch the eyes evolve to one side of the head. There’s the Mies German pavilion. There’s baffling Miro paintings. And there’s Gaudi, Gaudi and more Gaudi. What more do you need? If any further spur were needed to get me to visit the peninsula in the very near future, this was it. Iberia [sic] or bust!
Answer: pronounce. Say=pronounce; the word ron (HP’s friend) within the word pounce (in spring). Piece of cake, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment