Mainly music

No. 10    Saturday 23 July 2011

Where has the Summer gone??  I think it must have heard "A Song of the Weather" by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in the middle of which there are two lines:
"In July the sun is hot,
Is it shining? No it's not"
At least the rain has been spaced out so my activities (such as they are) haven't been affected.  Anyway I can always do odd jobs on the computer when I don't want to go out or watch TV.  It never fails to amaze me about the amount of information on any subject which can be found on the Internet.  A recent example is that I've done a couple of quizzes for the club I belong to (they will get one of them next week) and I have been able to check the accuracy of some of the answers on the Internet.  The facilities available in Windows 7 (now I'm getting used to it) plus the speed of my computer both help in that.

Having mentioned Flanders and Swann reminds me that I am planning a talk on "Humour on Record" and it is surprising how many amusing recordings there are even in my collection of CDs.  The oldest compositions come from Gilbert and Sullivan, such as the Judge's song from "Trial by Jury" or the Admiral's song from "HMS Pinafore", but the earliest recording by the original artist goes back to 1912 on a CD about the Music Halls.  From then on right through to (relatively) recent times I can find a lot of examples - all I have to do is to fit a selection into a talk.  Music has always been an interest of mine, but my record collection started properly when I bought a record in a sale.  This was the music of Jimmie Lunceford and his orchestra (from the 1930s) which I found I liked so started my collection with artists who were dead and therefore couldn't make any more new records.  It even got to the stage that the main objects of a holiday in USA were to visit Nashville to hear some Country and Western music (my wife's favourite) and New Orleans to hear some Traditional Jazz (my favourite).  We achieved both of these.

My new washer/dryer has performed as expected but the display was in French and my attempts at changing it, as set out in the manual, were unsuccessful.  A phone call to the makers produced an explanation of how to cure it but I still failed to manage it because it meant pressing three buttons simultaneously - probably my lack of accurate control of my left hand was to blame.  This was shown to be the case when a recent visit by my daughter enabled me to get her to do the button pushing - so now the display in in English and I can understand it !!  Maybe the guys who installed it weren't quite as good as they seemed to be.

Mike