music

memories / music / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Thursdays are the full days
14
Sep 23

Thursdays are the full days

We had a man from the electric company scheduled to come out this morning and do electric company things. You know the deal, you spend hours on the phone with people and machines and hold music and finally you get someone scheduled in a two hour window on the busiest day of your week. My lovely bride has been handling all of the phone stuff. We were both scheduled to be here to meet the fellow.

You can tell where this is going already, can’t you? Guy never showed up. She called the company again.

“What’s the deal? When is he coming out?”

The person on the other end of the line was all What did he say?

“He never showed up.”

What does the paperwork he gave you say?

“He wasn’t here. He brought no paper, or himself.”

At least the lights come on when you flip the switch. You wonder how, sometimes.

But, hey, it gave me more time to iron. No wrinkles on me for class today.

And how’s that going? I’m doing so well I have even ironed clothes for Monday night’s class.

Unless you meant class. How are my classes going? Just great. Two of them today. One was better than the other, but only because they both can’t be equally awesome. And because I probably did a better job in one than the other.

After two in a row, though, and almost six hours of prattling on, I am quite talked out by the end of the day. It’s been, probably a few decades since I’ve done continual talk and projection. At least it’s just one day a week.

We talked about pre-production, post-production, sampling rates and quantization. We also discussed frame rates and aspect ratios. In the next class, they’ll be pointing cameras at subjects and shooting video. It’ll get pretty fun from there.

What’s really fun is, after a full day of classes and dinner, you can start handling the inbox, and the grading. This will take a few minutes.

Let’s dive back into the Re-Listening project. You know this feature. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s fun; a few trips down memory lane, some singalongs, and I get to write a little bit about it here. So let’s dive in.

It’s 2003, though this CD was released in 1998. That means I probably bought it in bulk at a used record store. I can’t say which one specifically, but I am guessing this is from a little downtown shop in New Albany, Indiana. We used to go there for the fall festival and that store sat on the corner and, every year, I’d come out with a handful of discs. That’s just a guess, because I have no memory of buying this, but it makes sense considering the discs that surround it in my little collection.

Most assuredly, though, I bought it on the strength of the moderately successful alt radio single, track one, “Pensacola.” It takes a second or two, but it builds nicely.

The contemporary Washington Post review is humorous.

Country-flavored new-wave rock would be the correct guess. As indicated by song titles like “Pensacola” and “Pull the Weight, Virginia (Innocent Lucille),” this North Carolina quintet is heavily into poetic Americana, but its “In the Gloaming” sounds less like the Band or Son Volt than REM. (Indeed, the disc’s guest musicians include ex-d.B. Peter Holsapple, who used to supplement REM’s guitar sound on tour.)

It’s not that Jolene never gets earthy or gloomy. Even when it does, though, the group retains an early-’80s-rock sense of dynamics: Songs like “16c” and “So Sleepless You” contrast brooding verses with bombastic choruses or bridges. More common are such brisk tunes as “Wave to the Worrying” and “Star Town,” which feature jaunty rhythms and rippling guitars. It’s not a style that Jolene can make sound fresh, but the band plays it with skill and assurance.

That’s a lot of styles to throw in one column, into one band, or especially one record.

This is the band’s second record, and there’s some atmosphere in the instrumentation, but for the quality mixing and mastering, there’s just … something … missing overall.

It’s pretty clear, from the liner notes alone what they’re after here. Blurry photos, oddly mismatched fonts showing snippets of whoa deep lyrics, deliberately poor kerning. These guys were trying to ride the alt movement for all they worth. And, in 1998, they were just on the backside of that wave.

By the time I got this in 2003, it was probably just something I listened to for that one single. When I played the whole thing this time through I was looking for a second song to like. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to get past something’s texture to enjoy its taste.

By the time I picked up “In The Gloaming” the band was spent. They’d parted ways in 2001, having produced five records on three small labels and supporting some pretty substantial bands.

This is the song I’ll play while trying to find out what’s become of the five members of the group.

One of the guys, Rodney Lanier, died young. He’d been diagnosed with cancer, and though this band hadn’t played together for years, they all came back together for one more show with their old friend.

Mike Mitschele is a front man in Alternative Champs. You might also hear his music in The Righteous Gemstones. Dave Burris played in a few other bands, and has since turned to film making and been a producer of reality television. John Crooke is doing marketing out west, released a few solo projects and is still playing, from the looks of things. Mike Kenerley was the drummer in Jolene. It looks like he continued on and played with a lot of notable bands over the years.

Up next in the Re-Listening project is Wyclef Jean’s “The Carnival.” People have written scholarly articles, more than a few, about this record. It’s difficult to say something new about such a widely well-received record that’s now 26 years old.

So I’ll just say this. With the exception of the comedy bits, so familiar in the 1990s, this album holds up better than almost anything in the Re-Listening project

It is solid, throughout. Better than “The Score” in several respects, “The Carnival” debuted at number 16 sixteen on the US Billboard 200. Certified as double platinum in the U.S. in just over a year. Funkmaster Flex is on here. Lauryn Hill and John Forté, of course, but also the Neville Brothers and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There was a coming together on this project.

I remember we used to play this song on our campus radio station before anyone had an idea that it’d be a single.

Critics loved the record, while also writing a bit dismissively about the samples. Released in 1997, people were still trying to figure out how they felt about samples, I suppose. (Look who won, right?) It’s funny in retrospect, I suppose, but the answer to that question was always in the lead single.

The Bee Gees didn’t care for the finished product, but Jean’s audience did. It climbed to 45 on the Hot 100, number three on the Hot Rap Songs chart. This song, and the album, often landed on those “Top of the Decade/All Time” lists that people compile.

And The Fugees are still playing. Right now they’re supporting on the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Don’t know how long Pras Michel can be on this tour, though …

OK, back to the grading.

markers / music / photo / Re-Listening / Rowan / video / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off on Ready to just do it already
6
Sep 23

Ready to just do it already

First classes are tomorrow. Last minute dashes to be prepared are today. I got a decent haircut, learned things about cowlicks, and ironed some clothes. When it’s open-the-ironing-board official you know it is getting real.

I’ve also semi-prepared the things I’m going to discuss in class so much that they now seem less interesting to me. And some of these things are interesting! Some of them are about the syllabus. And everyone loves syllabus day. So tomorrow is the first first day for two classes. My last first day is Monday night. I’ll start finishing that class prep on Saturday.

Tomorrow, it is two afternoon classes, and I know most of their pros and cons, schedule-wise. But Monday, it is a night class, that’s new to me. And it’s the last schedule block of the day. Because of Memorial Day, that means the 6 p.m. Monday night class will be the last first day of the semester. I’m sure all of the students in there will be over ice breakers. No pressure whatsoever.

But before that, there’s tomorrow. (It’ll be fine.)

This is the sixth installment of my tracking down the local historical markers. I’m doing this by bike, by the way, which is one good way to go a little slower, sometimes, and learn some roads I wouldn’t otherwise try. Counting today’s installment, I’ll have seen 13 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database. What will we learn a bit about today? Something that doesn’t exist anymore!

Here’s the first marker.

The fire ring isn’t there anymore. And I had this wrong. I thought this footprint would have been where it went. And I figured it was some sort of bell. Ring! Ring! Fire! Fire! Come out and fight the fire! Ring! Ring!

But this is what it looked like, and it was installed right next to that marker. This is a Google Maps image from the summer of 2016.

By the next time the Google car through, in 2019, the fire ring was gone. And you can see that the other spot, where I thought the fire ring would have been, had some other sort of monument or marker. It was also removed before September of 2019.

There’s another marker, elsewhere, for another fire ring. It’s next on the list to visit. Maybe, if it still there, we can figure out more about the mysteries of the fire ring.

But, for right now, if you look just past the marker above, you’ll see another one. And this wordy little document has been sitting here for generations.

And here’s the bridge the old timers were celebrating.

Now, I don’t know if that’s fertilizer runoff or some sort of punk rock algae bloom, but I’m not swimming in that lake, or fishing it, anytime soon. There were some people fishing in the lake the day I took this photo.

The marker says in some places the flood was 20 feet above normal and, in this location, it reached the top of the current bridge. That’s difficult to imagine, given the flatness of the surrounding flat terrain. (That’s how flat it is. Flat flat flat.) That sounds like a lot of water spreading out, and so it was. A tropical storm dumped 24 inches of rain in half a day at a gauge just 13 miles away. Dams failed, and a railway bridge that ran over this lake … well, here’s a thousand words on that from The Times.

But that date, the dedication date of the new bridge? That was 15 months after the flood. That’s not what stands out. Sure, it is 981 months, to the day, from me writing this, but that’s not it either.

December 6th, 1941, a Saturday. Imagine, the next day the members of the Board of Freeholders (a term no longer in use, having rebranded as county commissioners just a few years ago) woke up, all proud of their efforts, saw their neighbors, went to church, or whatever else their normal habits might have been. And, by dinnertime that night war was no longer a looming shadow. What everyone had feared had come at last. That bridge may have been the last thing built around here for a while.

If you’ve missed some of the early markers, look under the blog category We Learn Wednesdays. What will we learn next week? Come back and see.

We also return to the Re-Listening project, which is aptly named. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. I’m writing a bit about them all here, to play some music, to see if I can scour up a memory and, sometimes, like today, pad the place with some extra content. These aren’t reviews — because who cares? — but they’re sometimes fun.

And this time, we’re in the early summer of 2003. Train’s “My Private Nation” was released, their third studio album, and I liked Train. I liked Train three albums worth, and this was the third one I purchased. (They’ve released seven more records since then, the most recent being in May of last year.) This record went platinum, their fifth platinum certification, and ended 2003 at number six on the Billboard 200. A lot of people liked this record. (And five of their subsequent records have ended a year in the top 20. A lot of people like Train. Go give them some grief.)

They released four singles in support of the record. “Calling All Angels,” you’ll remember, was a big hit. “When I Look to the Sky” was moderately successful and, I think, the place where I’d almost had enough. “Get to Me” made it to number six on the Billboard Hot Adult Top 40 Tracks, and is still catchy two decades later. Though I’m not sure if I ever listened to that in the company of another human being.

That could have been a function of 2003. Early morning shifts — my first hit was at 4:30 a.m., which meant I was going into the studio before 4 a.m. most days, which meant my first alarm went off at 2:30 a.m., — shape your social life.

This was not an early morning listen, though. I was singing along in the car to people with a deeper register than Pat Monahan has. Also, right about here on the CD, I think I was starting to discover the Train formula.

Despite that, though, there’s still charming little imagery sprinkled throughout.

For my money, the last track on the album is the best one. And one of the best in their catalog.

Five years later a guy named David Nail covered it and had a moderate success on the country charts. What does that sound like?

It’s a cover.

Anyway. The first time I saw Train was on a small festival stage about 45 seconds before they became a supernova. And then I saw them in the now demolished Five Points Music Hall. I think I caught them once or twice more in bigger places. Then one morning I finished an early morning shift and bumped into them at a breakfast place. They didn’t look prepared for breakfast. This would have been 2001 or 2002. I didn’t see them, I don’t think, when they toured this record. And soon after this members of the band started changing and it would feel like an entirely different show if you went these days I bet. Monahan is the only original member left.

If you want to find out, Train is on tour right now. Let me know if they’re still doing the Zeppelin covers.

errands / I do not know what is happening. / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Some things were accomplished
5
Sep 23

Some things were accomplished

This is how the day went —

You shouldn’t begin a daily post generally grounded in the day-to-day events and notes of interest to the author; it is implied.

You’re right. Should I try again?

I think you should. No one has started a post like that since the days of the burrrrrr-krrrrrr-beeeeep—whiiiiii modems.

You’re probably right.

I think that I am, yes.

This is how the day went. I got a later start than I wanted, but that was fine. I did a little prep work for this week’s classes. Then I took a trip to the convenience center to drop off a good 10 days worth of garbage and recycling. Eventually, the novelty of that little chore will wear off and we’re going to want some actual curbside service, like most people from the later part of the 20th century.

The garbage haul was two bags from the house. I also moved four bags of weeds and one tub full of recycling. This took, I dunno, three minutes to load up, probably less time to unload and 25 minutes of driving, round trip.

Which meant it was lunch time, and so I had a nice bowl of chicken noodle soup on a day when the heat index will hit 100 degrees. After that, I did a a bit more work, and then set out for a haircut. The place I visited offered me a 145 minute wait. Not two hours and 25 minutes, but 145 minutes. There was a small circus worth of children in there, so I shared my thanks and departed. There was another place not too far away, I went there. Equally crowded. Did not go in. I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll make an appointment, which carries the hefty cost of, for some reason, having to share my cell phone number with a company.

With my still shaggy and unkempt hair, I went to the grocery store. Potatoes for dinner, check. Soups for lunch, check. Cheez It because we eat it, check. Grapes as an impulse purchase’s sake, no dice.

Back in the home office, another few hours of prep work and it’s possible that I’m over-prepared. The spontaneity, I fear, is going from my best speeches and jokes. Or, I could be kidding myself about my level of preparation. The good news: I have all day tomorrow. So I’ll re-read this stuff for the 15th or 16th time in the last week.

So I called it and went for a swim.

And, this evening, I set a personal best. Longest swim of all time, 3,520 yards. I do not know what is happening. My lovely bride went for a run and caught the last of my swim, or the part near the end, the part where I was tired. I could feel it, of course. From about 2,700 to 3,000 felt different. Not desperate, but not good. Not haunting, but a distracted. My good shoulder was a bit achy, but I figured it would pass and it didn’t seem like something to stop over, so I kept on.

Then it all got better for most of the last 500 yards. And for the last 100 or so I sprinted it out, because that always seems like a good thing to do.

After I got my breath, she gave me a few pointers about what was going on with my form during that struggling portion. It seems my usual poor form deteriorated for a while, and that’s bad and can lead to injury. I’m not injured, but I am sore. I also swam two miles, so that stands to reason.

She said I should break up my swim into smaller segments if I was getting tired. And I was getting tired. This weekend I swam 3,080 yards and so I know about the point where I’d get tired. She said, with the wisdom of a real swimmer, that she’d rather see me swim 35 100s, with some rest breaks in there, so that I don’t get so tired that me and my sloppy form don’t swim myself into an injury.

I said that sounds like a good idea, and really good advice. But I had to find out if I could swim two miles.

You know, for shipwreck purposes.

And then I went to upload my swim into Strava, and found that the highest data point they allow for a swim is …

So I have a new goal. I just have to prove I can swim 100,000 yards. (I’ll take breaks.)

That’s 56.8 miles, almost three trips across the English Channel. (I’m never doing this, of course.)

Let’s wrap this up with a bit of the Re-Listening project. Though it hasn’t appeared here in a few weeks now, you’re accustomed to the concept: I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, and in the order in which I acquired them. These aren’t music reviews, just good music, occasionally a fun memory and, mostly, a bit of whimsy, which is always important in music.

And we’re up to late 2003 here, when Robinella and the CCstringband released the self-titled major label debut with this single.

They’d been a huge regional bluegrass sensation, which eventually brought them to the attention of the Columbia label. They’d released two smaller CDs, but this one, which included a bit of that earlier work, also got them some mainstream airplay.

You could best call the group progressive bluegrass and jazz blues. Which is great, because before I saw someone shoehorn the band into those genres, I thought, while listening to this record again, “This is one of the things bluegrass could have become.” You can hear some of that here, I think.

The musical version of that argument is sprinkled all over the record. It was one of those things that bluegrass could have become, but it wasn’t too be, for whatever reason. The next album had some pop and funk. Maybe that’s why.

I didn’t listen to this much in 2003 when it came out, for whatever reason. I liked the single, which was enough of a reason to pick this up, but it took me a while for the rest to grow on me, which is more about my musical shortcomings than anything to do with this band, which could put 12 good tracks on you and make you listen to all of them — if you’re ready for it.

Robinella and the CCstringband was Robin Ella Bailey and her then-husband, Cruz Contreras. They met in college, and shorted the band name to simply Robinella after this record. Somewhere after that the couple divorced and the band was dissolved.

While that song plays us out, let’s see if we can find out where everyone wound up. Robin Bailey is still playing locally, in Tennessee, as Robinella, having put out records in 2010, 2013 and 2018. She also makes art. Her Instagram suggests she plays a lot of unconventional, interesting places, which looks fun. Contreras is touring as well. I listened to the sample song on his site. I liked it. Cruz’s brother Billy Contreras played the fiddle on that record. When he was 12 years old he won the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and has played with everyone and everywhere since then. Everyone: Lionel Hampton, George Jones, Doc Severinsen, Crystal Gayle, Charlie Louvin, Ray Price, Ricky Skaggs and more. He also taught at Belmont for a time. Steve Kovalcheck has also played with many of the greats, he’s the guitarist on this record and he’s an associate professor of jazz guitar at the University of Northern Colorado. Taylor Coker plays the upright, and he toured with Cruz for what looks like most of the teens. He’s still plucking strings, now with the biggest jazz band in eastern Tennessee.

Twenty years later, everybody is still playing. Doing what you love all that time, it’s a great thing.

The liner notes on this CD had some extra content on it. The instructions:

With this CD and a connection to the internet, you will have access to special “Behind The Scenes” footage and more:

1. Inset this disc into a computer connected to the internet
2. Log onto http://www.robinella.com/
3. Click Sign In

— ConnecteD May Not Work With All Computers —

Two decades ago, things really did seem limitless. You just had to remember to connect your dial up modem.

adventures / books / cycling / I do not know what is happening. / Monday / music / New Jersey / photo / swimming / video — Comments Off on ‘Just like children sleepin’, we could dream this night away’
28
Aug 23

‘Just like children sleepin’, we could dream this night away’

I swam 2,000 yards this evening. It was that or go stumble through a run, and my knees said: swim, why don’t ya? So I dove in, donned the ol’ goggles and started the freestyle stroke, with the occasional kick when I could remember to, counting laps along the way. Somewhere around 360 or 400 yards, my arms stopped complaining and just carried on with the effort. That’s my longest swim since 2015, where one fine September day I put 2,900 yards in the books. It is my 10th swim of the summer, and I did it all uninterrupted. I’m pleased with what seems like an impressive progression, and wondering what I’m doing poorly if I’m not a.) super winded or b.) exhausted or c.) both, after the fact, and if I have enough time to get to two miles this season.

Three, four, more swims, right? Surely that’s outrageous and feasible, all at the same time.

I do not know what is happening.

This has been a nice exercise. Something about the rhythm, even for an inconsistent water splasher as I am, becomes meditative enough. If you’re concentrating on keeping the lap count right or, occasionally, focusing on your technique, all of the other things can go out of your mind.

This lets the other things come back into your mind, because when you splash the water away at the wall, more water moves back through.

I don’t know what that means, either. Not really. I didn’t spend my time in the pool writing this. Clearly, that’s the oversight here.

Anyway, laps, time spent not writing this in my mind, because time was spent thinking about class preparation, instead. Not every day is a day full of deliverables, and this was one of those days. But! Two thousand yards!

Phoebe was not impressed. But, then, she’s a classic sidestroker, swimming on the carpet as she does throughout the day.

On Friday, she was very cuddly.

Some days, kitty needs dictate events. And part of Friday morning was one of those days.

Poseidon continues to maintain a watchful eye over his kingdom. He’s lately improved his approach to climbing up the narrow scratching post. What was once a chaotic effort to get up there for “Now what?” has become a confident, measured attack for “Where else should I be?”

I expect he’ll be leaping directly on top of it before long. When, that is, he’s not on the top of the refrigerator.

“No peektures, please.”

So the cats are doing just fine. So are their talons, as you can see a bit there.

We had an interesting bike ride on Saturday. We started too late. My fault. It was already quite warm. But we started with a tailwind. (Which is counterintuitive.) And so we had some impressive splits in the first half of the ride.

It was all I could do to hang on, so there’s no video, no shadow selfies or other cool camera tricks this time. Even still, we had the wonderful opportunity to see a few cool barns. This one was between here and there.

And this one we rode past just after our turnaround about halfway into the ride. (But more about our halfway destination at a later time.)

Soon after, we got back to a place that was more familiar, which meant my lovely bride could drop me. I was dead, but knew my way back, at least. I went a longer way, just for the spite of extra mileage. And, right at the end of that, I blew another inner tube.

They come in bunches for me, and that’s not frustrating at all, getting to break out a tire lever on your rear wheel twice in two weeks.

I suggested a lovely and romantic night out. There’s a winery nearby and they serve upscale pizzas on the weekend and it’s supposed to be lovely. Reservations were made, and 3.6 miles down the road we went. We timed it such that we caught last bit of the sunset creating a bokeh effect of the cars making the drive down the last dirt road. By the time we parked and got onto the property the sun was gone. A three-piece band was playing, mellow strains floating over the rows of grapes on the still August air being our introduction. This was the view.

We were sat right away. And the group played “Harvest Moon” as if on cue.

The only Neil Young song you need, really.

Some time passed and the hostess came by to see where our waiter was. You could tell there was some back-of-the-house drama going on. Someone else came to take our order. She did not know the special pizza of the day. A third person, then, stopped by to tell us about that creation, which was when our actual waiter turned up.

This was the special pizza of the day. They called it a Cubano, something or other. And though I have little need for dill pickles in general and no need for them on my pizza, you had me at Cubano.

Being the special, I reasoned, must mean that it was good. And it was good. Somehow those pickles worked.

They also had a lot of pizzas they put honey on. The Yankee’s had honey, and it was delicious, and maybe honey is one of those things, like bacon, that’s good on everything.

What if you put honey on bacon?

After an hour our pizza showed up, which is great, because I was about to launch into my whole “… and this is why I don’t pick restaurants” bit, which is absolutely why I don’t pick restaurants. We didn’t have a waiter. The place that is serving only pizza was struggling to get pizzas out. But it was tasty. The music was fine. The singer had a terrific Jeff Tweedy vibe, but judged his audience not-yet-ready for the Uncle Tupelo or Wilco catalogs. He mumbled when he talked. Couldn’t make out a single word. Sang wonderfully.

Our waiter, our real one, brought our pizza and … that’s about it. It brought up questions about who gets the tip, which is really just a question about why we use a tipping system, anyway.

After pizza we got a little ice cream, a nice end to a lovely day.

Yesterday afternoon we sat outside, as has been our recent custom, and read. I breezed through the second section of Eudora Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). As I don’t read a lot of fiction, I’ve never read her work, but she’s a marvelous writer, and she delivers it with the most deft touch, when she’s talking about her bygone days. This second section — all of this book adapted from a series of lectures she delivered late in life — is about traveling as a young girl with her parents to see the extended family. Traveling from Jackson, Mississippi to West Virginia and Ohio was a week, one-way, in the car. At times they were ferried over creeks and rivers. Sometimes the ferry was powered by a man pulling on a rope. It was the 19-teens, and the same world, but harder.

The whole section dives into her grandparents, and deeper parts of the family roots as she understood them. And the people here are developed with the depth and care you would expect of a keen observer and a more-than-able writer. The very last part, after they’ve gotten home from the long summer journey …

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

I bet even that paragraph means different things to people at different points in their lives. Looking back and marinating in it all, re-playing and re-rationalizing things, putting a narrative to it all. It would be different to a woman of 74, as she was when she delivered that lecture at Harvard, than it would have been to the students in the audience. And the professors and middle-aged people in the room that nodded along sagely, they’d have another understanding, too.

It’ll probably mean something different to me, next Sunday, when I finish the book.

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15
Aug 23

Yes, the world’s best hobo song is included here

Last night I swam a mile. I didn’t know how much I would do, but it started raining on me at about 800 yards and I didn’t want to get wet, so I just stayed in the pool. Before you know it, that’s 1,650 yards and my shoulders felt like it.

The getting wet joke is a lame family joke. We’d gone on a vacation, a dive trip, and my step-father and his kids had just been certified for open water diving. Now, some of us had been diving for a long time, and some of us took to water naturally, and a lot of us had learned from different companies and through evolving teaching methodologies. So I got to be the stick in the mud who demanded the safety meeting the night before our first dives.

Good thing, too, because we learned that my step-sister thought that giving the Heimlich maneuver was delivering CPR. (To be fair, she was young.) Anyway, she wanted to go to the pool, but I wanted to go over hand signals and hypothetical situations. It seemed a good idea. She hated every moment of it. Finally, after a refresher on rescue breathing, and a run through of the basic Caribbean fish signals, we decided we were all at least in the same chapter of the book. So it was time to hit the pool. But it was raining, you see, and so she wasn’t enthused by that. (She was young.) So the rest of us went to the pool. I stayed underwater so I would not get wet.

But last night, I swam that mile and then I floated in the water listening to the raindrops until I got cold. It was delightful in every way.

I swam a mile and I … liked … it?

I do not know what is happening.

Maybe I’ll go for another swim on Thursday.

My laps have been pretty decent, by my standards. My riding has been OK, but light. My running, lousy as ever. Now I just need to put them all in a consistent routine. That’s the part that always gets me.

Today, just more peaches. We tried the new blender. (It blends!) We had peach smoothies. And then we blanched peaches to freeze. Our freezer has a lot of peaches in it now. A new colleague came over and took some off our hands. I brought in three more baskets from the tree. I made myself another smoothie.

We goofed off in the pool until dinner time. It was a fine day. Just peachy.

So let us turn our attention to the Tuesday Tabs feature. This is for all of those extra browser windows I have open. Some of these are worth keeping, somewhere, but perhaps not worth a bookmark at this time. So I’m simply memorializing them here, so I can finally close a few more tabs. (There are so many tabs.)

This is a relatively new one, and I must say, not really, but I have to start somewhere. 10 Alternatives to bi-fold closet doors (you’ll absolutely love):

The most common alternatives to bi-fold closet doors include barn doors, sliding doors, pocket doors, French doors, and curtains. If you want a more unique option, consider swinging doors, a room divider, mirrors, bookcase doors, and industrial doors …

If you’re tired of the same old bi-fold doors, choosing an alternative comes down to the overall look you want. Ready to try something new? Give these different looks a chance when you’re ready to close the door to your closet.

My home office has a bifolding door set. Not a fan.

Here are some nice places to explore here. Maybe I’ll get to one or two this fall. 8 Adorable small towns in Delaware

“The First State” is an amazing state along the Atlantic Ocean, Delaware Bay and Delaware River. This peninsula location means it is full of beautiful sandy beaches, riverfront views and gorgeous parks. The state also has a rich history dating back to it being the first of the original 13 states to ratify the constitution in 1787 (hence its ‘first’ nickname). Among the big cities and prominent attractions are a number of adorable small towns full of charm, history, and opportunity. From the Dutch colony of Lewes to maritime villages or the scenic beaches of Bethany Beach, Delaware is a beautiful and friendly state worth exploring.

I wonder how long we’ll see stories like this, before they all feel inevitable, I mean. AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry:

This March, when U.S.-based AI researcher Anand Ahuja launched CTRHero, “an AI to replace Thumbnail Artists,” he called it “his life’s work.” Trained on millions of successful thumbnails from various social media platforms, CTRHero could create thumbnails within minutes, reproducing faces with 99% accuracy, according to Ahuja. The tool outraged designers who felt their livelihoods were suddenly at stake: some threatened Ahuja with physical violence. Soon after its launch, Ahuja sold off the core technology for CTRHero.

…

For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a videos’ reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.

Stop me when it feels like everything is Ready Player One. How AI will turbocharge misinformation — and what we can do about it:

By some estimates, AI-generated content could soon account for 99% or more of all information on the internet, further straining already overwhelmed content moderation systems.

Dozens of “news sites” filled with machine generated content of dubious quality have already cropped up, with far more likely to follow — and some media sites are helping blur the lines.

Without sufficient care, generative AI systems can also recycle conspiracy theories and other misinformation found on the open web.

University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, an expert in the field, told Axios that generative AI will deepen the misinformation problem in three key ways.

Starbird is a brilliant scholar and one of the leading researchers in this field. Check out her work.

As you read this, I am eight CDs behind in the Re-Listening project. That’s the one where I’m listening to all of my CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. I am writing about them here because, it’s a good excuse to post videos of good music. Also, sometimes there are memories attached to these things, but mostly it’s padded content. And all of it’s fun. Except when you run across that bad CD, sorta like the bad grape you weren’t expecting. There’s one in every bunch, and it all comes down to taste.

Someone else bought Sister Hazel’s third studio album so I didn’t have to. I’m not sure who gave it to me, because I did not write it on the CD and it has been at least 23 years and two months since it happened. My memory is good, but there’s a lot of stuff in my memory, ya dig?

“Fortress” featured three singles, “Change Your Mind” peaked at number five on the US Adult 40. “Champagne High,” one of the album’s better songs, reached number 22. “Beautiful Thing” did not chart, which, in retrospect, was probably a signal that the moment of success brought on by Sister Hazel formula had somehow passed them by. It’s a mystery to me, really, because it’s the same as what we were all used to from the boys from Florida.

They are rhyming the word “thing” with the word “thing,” though. Maybe people noticed.

But, look, the formula works. If you want a fun sweaty party band, Sister Hazel can take the stage and keep you happy.

As an album, “Fortress” was a minor hit, settling at 63 on the Billboard 200. The record you remember, “Somewhere More Familiar” made it to 47 in 1997. Nine years and four albums later they cracked the top 50 again. Maybe tastes change around them, but the syrupy, twangy Southern rock guitar and the upbeat harmonies stayed with the band. And you can hear it still, Sister Hazel is touring all over the eastern US for the rest of the year.

Next up is one of those albums you regret. It was released in 1997 and I got it in 2000 and I can only blame myself. The world wide web was out there, and I had three solid years to find out “Deconstructed,” a remix album, is just a bad project. Even if you like electronic music, you didn’t want this. There are no new tracks, and no real reason to listen to this. I have probably played it four or five times, total, and two of those were for the Re-Listening project. Anyway, Bush worked with DJs from the electronic genre of music to remix some of the band’s previously released songs. The first one is probably the best track … but … still … electronic, British or of any other nationality, just wasn’t for me.

Hey, it was a fusion idea that went gold, and settled at number 36 on the Billboard 200 in 1997. I didn’t like it in 2000. I don’t like it today. I never understood it on my few tries in between. Maybe it’s just me. (It can’t be just me.)

Let’s wrap up this post with a better one. Up next in the Re-Listening project was a 2002 purchase, something I no doubt got at a discount bin. Something Sony licensed for a few suckers just like me. But that’s not a problem, because “The Sound Of Country was a 2 CD sampler set full of important tracks. It grabs you right away, with some classic Roy Acuff.

That’s the more famous Acuff version, of course, but his 1946 original is something to behold. It’s not o this CD, but I have included it for you here.

One of the greatest songs ever recorded in the English language is also included here.

It’s a fundamentally perfect song. Chet Atkins is in there. The background vocals are none other than the Jordanaires. That song topped the country chart for eight weeks in 1958 and climbed to number seven on the predecessor of the Billboard Hot 100. At least three covers of that song have charted over the years.

I am pretty sure I bought this double CD, which was, no doubt, very cheap, for this one song. It was the correct choice.

I was going through a Roger Miller phase. I’d find reasons to play that song. I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with that. It won five Grammys in 1966. It should have become a Broadway show and a network miniseries. If it had come out a few decades later it would have been embossed on mudflaps. The legendary Buddy Killen played guitar on that song. His people knew my people. Maybe that’s it.

You get into some important later hits, too. This topped the charts in 1984, presaging what would become of country music a generation later.

Also atop the charts in 1984, was The Kendalls last number one.

The father-daughter act released 16 albums, seeing 22 singles making the top 40, and 11 climbing into the top 10, including three at the top of the chart. Royce died in 1998 (this CD was published in 2002), but Jeannie Kendall, who started performing at 15, is still strong more than a half-century radio.

The whole double CD:

Blue Eyes Crying in The Rain – Roy Acuff
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Oh, Lonesome Me – Don Gibson
Mama Tried – Merle Haggard
King Of The Road – Roger Miller
Big Midnight Special – Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper
When I Stop Dreaming – Leona Williams
No Help Wanted – Bill Carlisle
Sweet Memories – Frank Ifield
It’s Only Make Believe – Conway Twitty
I Love You Because – Bob Luman
All My Ex’s Live In Texas – Whitey Shafer
Louisiana Man – Rusty & Doug Kershaw
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind – Whitey Shafer
Okie From Muskogee – Merle Haggard
I Got Mexico – Eddy Raven
The First Few Days Of Love – Lorrie Morgan
Sweet Dreams – Don Gibson
Tennessee Waltz – Redd Stewart
Honky Tonk Merry Go Round – Patsy Cline
Night Train To Memphis – Roy Acuff
Tortrue – Kris Jensen
Thank God For The Radio – The Kendalls
God Bless The U.S.A. – Lee Greenwood

And with that, we’re only four CDs behind. The next installment of the Re-Listening project will feature an act that shows us what turn-of-the-century country and bluegrass music should have done.

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