Not all of the nearly 60 folk recordings on the Folktunes.org wiki-powered site (hosted on ibiblio) are from NC but a number of them are especially those by Clarance Ashley and Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers.
These are some of the best rerecordings of the old 78s that I’ve ever heard. If you know more about them you can add to the wiki knowledge base or if you know nothing, you can listen and learn.
The weekend in Eden, NC is the 10th Annual Charlie Poole Music Festival. Go only if you can stand to miss the Carrboro International Poetry Festival.
Category: Amusements (Page 23 of 31)
Things that are amusing
The best use of flash, veggies and star wars humor that I’ve ever seen – Grocery Store Wars. Thanks to Michael Czeiszperger.
Darth Tater, Cuke Skywalker, Chewbrocolli and others to funny to mention.
Folks kept asking “When are you reading at the Carrboro Poetry Festival?” Now I know. Between noon and 1:30 on Sunday May 22. But there are many others reading at other times. Poet’s bios [here] are in alphabetical order by first name. Here’s what we have of the still unofficial schedule so far:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday May 21 12 PM – 9 PM
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++11:00 SETUP/FOOD
Session A 12 PM – 1:30 PM
A 12:00 OPENING
12:15 Amy King
12:30 Julian Semilian
12:45 Sue Soltis
1:00 Todd Sandvik
1:15 Mel Nichols1:30 15 MIN BREAK
Session B 1:45 PM – 3:05 PM
B 1:45 INTRO
1:50 Ken Rumble
2:05 Tanya Olson
2:20 Dale Smith
2:35 Mary Margaret Sloan
2:50 Joseph Donahue3:05 30 MIN BREAK
Session C 3:35 PM – 4:40 PM
C 3:35 INTRO
3:40 Standard Schaefer
3:55 Rod Smith
4:10 Evie Shockley
4:25 Linh Dinh4:40 15 MIN BREAK
Session D 4:55 PM – 6:00 PM
D 4:55 INTRO
5:00 Heriberto Yepez
5:15 Allyssa Alexandra Wolf
5:30 Gerald Barrax
5:45 Tony Tost6:00 DINNER BREAK
Session E 7:30 – 9 PM
E 7:30 INTRO
7:45 Carl Martin
8:00 Lee Ann Brown
8:15 Philip Nikolayev
8:30 Harryette Mullen
8:45 Christian Bok+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sunday May 22 12 PM – 6 PM
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++11:00 SETUP/FOOD
Session F 12 PM – 1:30 PM
F 12:00 Introduction
12:15 Mack Ivey
12:30 Joanna Catherine Scott
12:45 Paul Jones
1:00 Chris Vitiello
1:15 TBD1:30 15 MIN BREAK
Session G 1:45 PM – 2:50 PM
G 1:45 INTRO1:50 Gabriel Gudding
2:05 Hoa Nguyen
2:20 Murat Nemet-Nejat
2:35 Patrick Herron2:50 30 MIN BREAK
Session H 3:20 PM – 4:25 PM
H 3:20 INTRO
3:25 Reb Livingston
3:40 Hristo Ivanovski
3:55 Andrea Selch
4:10 Randall Williams4:25 15 MIN BREAK
Session I 4:40 PM – 6 PM
4:45 Heidi Lynn Staples
5:00 Daniel J. Wideman
5:15 Marcus Slease
5:30 Tessa Joseph
5:45 CLOSING
The folks at Gumby World have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of our favorite gob of green clay this weekend. I’ve taken a few minutes to see the clips there. I had forgotten the evil blockheads. And I had no idea that Gumby’s special friends include Sai Baba! In fact, Gumby owes his continuing fame to a Sai Baba blessing. It’s delightful to take a look back into Gumby’s history too.
Next weekend, Saturday May 21 and Sunday May 22, is the Carrboro International Poetry Festival. Carrboro Poet Laureate and alterego to Lester, Patrick Herron sends this alert:
The second annual Carrboro International Poetry Festival, to be held at the Century Center in downtown Carrboro, NC, starts in exactly one week on Saturday May 21. Admission is free.
This year’s festival, like last year’s, will feature 40 poets from the US, Canada, and Mexico. The mix of poets includes renowned poets from outside of North Carolina along with some of North Carolina’s finest poets, including a large contingent from the Triangle. [including moi – pj]
In the coming days the schedule of readers will be posted to the website. (http://carrboropoetryfestival.org/) All of the poets’ biographies are up on the site already. The festival website also contains all the travel information you’ll need, from a comprehensive listing of local accomodations to directions and parking maps. We even have mp3s of readings from last year’s event. [already on the website – pj]
If you are in North Carolina, please keep an eye out for articles about the event in The Chapel Hill News (tomorrow), The Independent (Wednesday), and the Raleigh News & Observer (Friday).
Please come to the festival. The hundreds that turned out to last year’s free event displayed an enthusiasm about poetry in a way I’ve frankly never seen before. I’ve tried my best to make it entertaining, fresh, and surprising. I expect to see more of that same energy and excitement, as I have worked to make the festival better–not bigger–but better.
I hope to see you next Saturday.
Patrick Herron
What: Carrboro International Poetry Festival
Where: Carrboro Century Center, 100 N. Greensboro St, Carrboro, NC
When: Saturday May 21, 12 Noon – 9 PM and Sunday May 22, 12 Noon – 6 PM
URL: http://carrboropoetryfestival.org/
The long, heated and open debate about the Google Web Accelerator seems to have slowed down. The Register, in their lovely snippy and witty way, covers the story as “Google puts the brake on Web Accelerator.” The lead: “Google has disabled downloads of its Web Accelerator software less than a week after introducing the service. The suspension follows reports that the software was caching sensitive content, such as user control panels to online forums.”
However Google says:
“Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.”
More from the Google side of things at their FAQ. And from the blogosphere via Technorati. Dan Gillmor covered the problems a bit a week or so ago.
I’m in a faculty retreat all day today. Whilst I’m out, here are some selections from the latest news letter from the Yes Men with updates on activities around their DowEthics site, how Dow VP for Acceptable Riskâ„¢, Erastus Hamm, explained the value of human life and acceptable risk to the International Payments 2005 Conference in London (includes video), how the State Department uses DowEthics, the Yes Men visit the Dow Shareholders Conference and more.
In case we are selected as the top winner out of the five Finalists for the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Awards on June 6th, we’re supposed to have sent the Computerworld folks some elements (images and video) that represent what ibiblio does (and did as sunsite and metalab). Then they will make a little video montage out of it.
Last year’s winner, the MIT Open Courseware Project, ended up looking like this.
What would you say represents at least part of what we’ve been doing in the past dozen years? Send me links or post here pleeeeeze! Pointers for screen grabs, pictures of folks who’ve been involved, primo collections, other things?
The owners of our town eyesore, the long abandoned Wicked Burrito, have made the Town and offer: Find a suitable not-for-profit tennant that is willing to vacate on 30 days notice and we’ll let them use the space. This in a letter to Town Manager Cal Horton dated April 26, 2005.
Who/what would you suggest? Art gallery, rehearsal space, poetry readings?

So I take a break from grading to drop by a Kentucky Derby party. Play a little croquet. Draw a horse name to make it interesting. “Closing Argument” Odds? 70 – 1 and up to 71 by the time the nags get put in the gates. But then — I’ll be damned — Closing Argument places!
Note: Paul Jones was the Derby winner in 1920. I’ve been told we resemble each other when seen from the rear.
Most Slashdotters miss the humour (note Canadian spelling) of Bob Young’s offer to give Apple a free license for the use of the term “Tiger.” Bob owns Canadian Football’s Hamilton TigerCats who have been the Tigers continually since 1869.
TigerDirect is suing Apple claiming that Apple’s use of Tiger infringes on TD’s trademark specifically by knocking TD down the results pages when one searched Google for the word “Tiger.”
Bob Young, Red Hat Linux founder and current Lulu CEO, says:
This lawsuit is a load of codswallop. Nobody and no company should have the exclusive use of the word ‘tiger.’
136 years ago we were called The Tigers. If anyone owns the exclusive rights to the word “tiger” with that much history and tradition, it’s gotta be us.
In a recent check (2 seconds ago), the first result for a Google search for “Tiger” was dedicated to the 5 subspecies of Tigers and the second was TigerDirect.
Anyone who can use the word “codswollop” in a complete sentence is someone I admire.
Ever alert South African literata Andie Miller points to the exceeding bad occassional poetry of Ian McMillan, election laureate for Radio 4 in the UK.
Or perhaps as the folks at Spike Magazine notice “No poetry yet then.”
As the stripper said, “Two G strings are better than one.” Guitarist Roger McGuinn believed her and designed a Seven String Guitar with two G’s. One is tuned an octave higher than the other so’s you get the jingle jangle 12 string sound whilst being able to do blues bends, slides and single string runs. The guitar has just been released by Martin as the “HD-7 Roger McGuinn Dreadnought Signature Edition.”
Camilla McGuinn writes to make sure we know that we could win one! Acoustic Guitar magazine and Martin Guitars are running a giveaway contest. You only need to register to get a chance of winning. Acoustic Guitar would love it if you also subscribed, but that’s not required.
Note: ibiblio has been host to Roger McGuinn’s Folkden for most of the decade of its existence. This month’s song is “So Early in the Spring.”
O’Reilly digitalmedia has a nice interview with Roger about the 7 string and more in an article by Randy Alberts from March of this year.
A while back I was standing geekily against the wall at a writers’ party listening. Two writers were talking. There was an intense discussion about the fate of a character who had had some fantastic experiences that made the Spiderman biography seem uncontrived. Then one asked the other, the other being mystery writer Michael Malone, “but did that happen in the Spirit World?”
Yes, these were/are writers of soap operas. And yes part of what they were discussing took place in the Spirit World. A place about which I am woefully uninformed.
Michael Malone has a rich Spirit World life as well as lives in other Worlds. One of his soap opera characters, Marcie Walsh of “One Life to Live,” has written a murder mystery (with Malone) called “The Killing Club.”
First, “One Life to Live” isn’t exactly true as the New York Times Magazine explains, “she had picked up a rare disease after being thrown into a Dumpster (long story) and given it to her boyfriend, who died.” But then we learn about “her new boyfriend (who is actually her old boyfriend’s soul in a different man — long story).”
No matter, her book has become a plot device as well as a product and I hope a book worthy of joining Michael Malone‘s other wonderful and fun work on my shelf.
Today’s NY Times Magazine, quoted in part above, has a good article on the artifice behind the creation of the book/event/plot device.
Bonus connection: Michael Malone’s home is on property ajoining Saint Matthews Church in Hillsborough.
Spring is in the air and with it music.
First off, the 1883 Hook and Hastings pipe organ at our church, Saint Matthews in Hillsborough, is back fully restored. There was a great long feature in today’s Chapel Hill News, but they don’t include pictures in their online version. The Church will hold a special service/dedication/concert on Thursday May 5 at 7 to welcome the organ back.
Second, Tucker and I went up to Southern Village to see/hear the 6th Annual Baby Home Benefit Festival. The music was fine but our favorite part of the festival, which raises funds for the Kamensk Uralski Baby Home in Russia, was the wandering magic of Josh Lozoff.
Then we sped over to Carrboro Day which is held appropriately on May First. The whole town was celebrating with music, kids activities, etc. And the new Low-Powered FM station WCOM was broadcasting the music stage live. WCOM is getting really good at this and is the only station in the area directly covering live music events. I popped in the WCOM studio which are right on Main Street looking over to the grounds of Weaver Street Market inspired by Melva’s playing the Django Reinhardt influenced sounds of John Jorgenson. Once there I ran into not only Melva, but Chris Frank (eFolkMusic, Red Clay Ramblers, wears a Fez and plays a Tuba), Solomon Gibson III and Jane the engineer. In the background, the live feed from the Carrboro Day stage was on so we and all the listeners could hear the playing of Too Much Fun, Berkeley Grimball‘s band. It was definitely a Carrboro Day — I even missed the Sunday Jazz on Weaver Street lawn (altho Sally and Tucker were there for that).
Nassib Nassar sends this links to a parody piece from the Guardian teasing us about Arianna Huffington’s upcoming Huffington Post project (which begins May 9). The advance press says that the project will be a group blog by 300 celebrity bloggers [are there 300 celebrities that want to blog?] including:
Warren Beatty, Jon Corzine, Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Nora Ephron, James Fallows, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Hart, Vernon Jordan, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mort Zuckerman.
This list from Editor and Publisher article.
MacExpert Andy Ihnatko sends a link for downloading the audiobook that he created according to the rules for 24 Hour Comics Day. “Jeeves and the Object Class” is slightly less than 1 hour and 30 minute story conceived, written, and performed in bad British accent by Andy in just over 24 hours. The noise in the background is P. G. Wodehouse spinning in his grave. That said the story is pretty good and has as a major character a librarian from North Carolina. Not like too many that I immediately recognize, but very believable — except for the accent.
Josh Myer has been laughing out loud at this geekish post to an XML discussion by Michael Champion which will be very familiar in a skewed way to those who love Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”
Got that?
If not, Warren explains a bit:
If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.
Just as we were talking about pigeons as TCP carriers, I end up sitting beside one here at the Grind as I read Dan Gillmor’s article refering to an Israeli study of pigeons, “PEI (Pigeon Enabled Internet) is FASTER then ADSL” and of snails, “Snails are faster than ADSL (and Pigeons).
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