Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 13 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Kids, Language and Tech

I’m up to talk to Sergio Quintana of NBC 17 about a couple of things technical and cultural later today.

One will be about tech savvy kids and their use of tech language. he’s all excited that kids know what a wav file is. Heck, in my day we not only knew the name of every car part and its manufacturer, but that stuff was in our music. “Little GTO” “Little Deuce Coupe” “409 (She’s So Fine)”
Now they don’t make songs like that about computers and cell phones! (and it’s a good thing too ;->).

Talking with Tron Guy

Way back in the day, we hosted some projects being developed by Jay Maynard. Then all hell broke loose. Jay became Tron Guy and a net icon of sorts. Jay still keeps a Public Domain IBM Mainframe software collection on ibiblio, but Tron Guy has taken on a life of his own (appropriately at tronguy.net).
I included Tron Guy as an enrichment link for INLS092 today. A few hours after I added the link to the class blog, I got a note from Jay who is monitoring RSS links to his site. You can’t fool Tron Guy.
After a little conversation, Jay sent me a copy of a top secret Tron Guy video done with the folks down at DAVE in Orlando.
I can’t release the video (Jay says hold on), but I did screen it and I can say that Cindy Morgan is just as lovely as ever and that Tron Guy does a better job than the original Tron actor. In the meantime, Jay aka Tron Guy has some very funny videos on his site.

Goldberg, Wells, Bush and a biorecorder

In class today, we’ll be talking about “As We May Think,” Vanevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. I’ve also assigned H. G. Wells’ earlier (1937) “World Brain” and Michael Buckland’s article on the near forgotten inventor of a pre-Memex Memex, Emanuel Goldberg, who had most all of what Bush dreamed of already working in the 1920s.
To my mind, Wells better grasped the potential social use of shared knowledge than Bush, while Goldberg operationalized the Memex concepts so much earlier (and I would say from most of my background readings better) than Bush.

My journalism collegue Val Lauder sends a story about a too observant feathered biorecorder that somehow seems to relate.

With Dr. Stanley

Imagine being 3 feet from Ralph Stanley as he sings O Death (a capella of course). I was there in the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library about 2 hours ago listening not only to O Death but to Ralph Stanley talking about his early days in music, about learning banjo from his mother, watching him play the old time clawhammer style that she taught him on “Shout Little Lulu.”

Ralph is nearly 80 and has serious hair. He started out singing “Girl From The Green Far Shore” accompanied by his grandson, Nathan, on mandolin and James Shelton on guitar. When Bob Cantwell asked if that was a Carter Family song, he said no it was older. But then owned up that he learned it from T-Bone Burnett.
It was then that we heard a little banjo-playing on “Shout Little Lulu” which turned into a really fast paced romp.
At Bob’s request, Ralph talked a little about his banjo style how he added a finger and played mostly three finger style. These days, he allowed, he didn’t play banjo so much because of arthritis, but he looked pretty damn good to me.
He next sang “Man of Constant Sorrow” which he had first recorded in 1948. In his version, he sings “Farewell to old Kentucky” (I have about 40 versions of this song and each singer says farewell to a different place. Bob Dylan bids farewell to Colorado).
Bob asked about his distinctive vocal style and Ralph said that it was God’s gift and that he hoped he had used that gift wisely. He wouldn’t sang hardly any old Carter Brothers songs because he sings tenor and he needed someone to harmonize with. His son, Ralph 2nd, was in the hospital with flu-like symptoms.
Then he sang “Little Birdie” along with some clawhammer frailling.
Bob asked him about the coming of Elvis which he said “starved out” most of the old time and bluegrass bands. The Stanley Brothers continued because they were (and are) distinctive.
Nathan played lead on “Sandy Ridge” then on another of his own compositions “Papaw’s Mule” named for Ralph’s old white mule.
James Shelton did some crosspicking on “Sunny Side of the Mountain.”
Then the three played “Will You Miss Me” as an instrumental.
After a little discussion, Ralph sang his “scary” song, “O Death” which he later said sold over 10 million copies.
James finally agreed to sing on a song he said he learned from Bob Dylan, “Walking on down the line.”
The group finished up with Ralph on banjo as they played “Old Time Picking”
They’re playing in Memorial Hall with the Red Clay Ramblers right now (I didn’t get tickets in time to go — it’s sold out).

Ralph Stanley this afternoon

Gonna run over and catch Dr Stanley in about 60 minutes.

Musician Ralph Stanley to Speak

A Conversation with Ralph Stanley
Thurs. Jan. 12, 5-6 p.m.
Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, 4th floor

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley will discuss his life and work in a free public forum at UNC-Chapel Hill on Thursday (Jan. 12) from 5 -6 pm. in the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library (4th floor). Dr. Robert Cantwell, an adjunct associate professor in UNC’s Curriculum in American Studies and the author of Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound, will moderate the talk. Space is limited to approximately the first 125 people.

The program is sponsored by Carolina Performing Arts, the Southern Folklife Collection, and the Center for the Study of the American South. For information, contact Steve Weiss, Director of the Southern Folklife Collection, at (919) 962-1345.

Ralph Stanley and The Red Clay Ramblers will perform Jan. 12 in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The 8 p.m. concert, part of the 2005-2006 Carolina Performing Arts Series, is sold out.

Henry Greenside on Einstein and Gravity

The Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library have been sponsoring a series of talks on Einstein. Tucker and I were at the first three, but he had a conflict today and I was there alone. Alone with a completely packed room! Dr. Henry Greenside does a fantastic job of making Einsteinian concepts approachable and understandable to the layman and his listeners obviously appreciate his work.

Greenside a nice set of notes and links to the talks and further readings on his Duke website.

Einstein’s most spectacular achievement as a scientist was his 1915 general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as a geometric bending of spacetime by matter.

Dr. Henry Greenside, Professor of Physics at Duke University, will present a non-technical overview of Einstein’s theory and then explain some of its amazing implications, including the bending of light by gravity, how strong gravitational fields cause time to slow down, the properties of black holes that form when massive stars die, and how space itself can expand and contract. Dr. Greenside will desribe how general relativity is being used by scientists to understand many mysterious astronomical observations — monstrous black holes at the center of each galaxy, an ever-expanding universe, and the mysterious “dark matter” of which the universe consists.

Finally, Dr. Greenside will describe the major crisis with which physics is currently faced: our two greatest physical theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — conflict with one another. The resolution of this crisis is likely to lead to spectacular and unprecedented insights.

Fred’s Facebook Final Report

Okay, it’s not a final report, but it’s an end of Fall semester analysis. Fred has been reviewing the Facebook usage at UNC in aggregate (not in detail) for the past semester and he has some very interesting findings. Check them all out at his blog. Much insight into UNC students’ political self-identity, ideas and practices of privacy, taste in music, books and film.

Podcastercon on the Air (NBC 17)

Podcastercon organizer Brian Russell and I will be doing an interview with folks from NBC 17 on Thursday morning to be aired later that day or Friday. I hope we’ll be as interesting as the Israeli Owner-Dog Look-a-like contest piece that they ran tonight. A pug and his owner won. (Note: Sally and I and our salukis won a local owner-dog look-a-like contest some years back, but who isn’t glad to be indentified with a saluki!).


Don’t forget that Podcastercon is coming on Saturday!

And, Brian writes, the site is completely wheel chair accessible.

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