The Fire Ant Gazette - A Texas Hill Country Blog

Snake Karma

April 22, 2019 9:26 PM | Posted in: Nature, Texas Hill Country, Wildlife - Birds, Wildlife - Snakes

Late last month we were confronted with the sad sight of three nestlings that had apparently fallen from their nest attached to a stone column about ten feet above our back porch. Two of the baby birds were already deceased and the third would soon be.

There was no sign of a disturbance in the nest, and the parents continued to fly to and from the nest. We were at a loss to explain why the nestlings would have fallen from their well-protected home. But, such is life (and death) in the natural world.

A few days later, early on a crisp April morning, we heard a commotion from some upset birds in the vicinity of the back porch. We went out to investigate and were greeted by a small snake, perhaps eighteen inches in length.

The snake was somewhat lethargic until I got close to it, when it became more animated. While it didn't seem particularly aggressive, I noticed one behavior that alarmed me just a bit. Animated gif of Rat snake vibrating its tail

Animated gif of Rat snake vibrating its tail

Pay close attention to the tail in the gif on the right (which I've slowed down by 50% and converted to black and white to save bandwidth). That vibrating tail is an easily recognized characteristic of a rattlesnake -- and this obviously was no rattler -- but it's also a behavior of some other species, including the copperhead, another venomous pit viper, and a species not uncommon in the Texas Hill Country.

I'm not very familiar with copperheads, as they aren't normally found in the parts of West Texas where I spent most of my life, and my frame of reference for them was limited to the aforementioned tail-shaking behavior (they're thought to do this in the dry leaves where they're often found as a warning to would-be predators). Given that, I made the decision to dispatch the serpent, not wanting to take a chance on having a poisonous snake lurking around our back porch.

Later, after spending some time googling images of copperheads and other tail-shaking snakes, I came to the conclusion that I had misidentified the recently departed; it was, in fact, a juvenile rat snake.

I confess that I felt a bit of guilt about killing a non-poisonous snake. Rat snakes are useful for controlling the rodent population (although this one was probably too small to be much of a threat to anything but the tiniest of mice). I've never subscribed to the philosophy that the only good snake is a dead snake.

However...

MLB and I got to thinking about the agitated birds that brought the snake to our attention, and from there it was an easy mental leap to those unfortunate baby birds I mentioned at the top. And, unlike with copperheads, I do know a few things about rat snakes, including the facts that (1) they are skilled climbers, and (b) they've been known to raid bird nests.

Armed with this knowledge, and insight gained from year's of watching CSI, I deduced that those nestlings hadn't just accidentally fallen out of their nest, but were in fact panicked by the presence of something -- well, let's just say it: a snake -- and in their frantic state fell to their demise.

Now, I can't prove that the snake I killed was the same one that raided that nest, but I suspect it had climbed up the rock column to the nest seeking eggs...and further, that it had returned to the scene of the original crime. As I said, I can't prove any of this, but neither can I disprove it, and the facts seem to fit better than OJ's glove did.

Having reached that conclusion, I also conclude that karma was visited upon that snake in the form of a hoe wielded by yours truly. Justice was served.

That's not the end of the story, however. The non-descript birds have nested on that column for a couple of years, returning each spring to raise their young. I don't know their species, but I do know they're not barn swallows. Anyway, after losing that first set of younguns, I thought they might move on to more hospitable environs, but they're persistent little guys. We've noticed that one of them is often on the nest while the other keeps watch from a nearby rooftop or hummingbird feeder hanger. The photo at right was taken through the blinds of our bedroom window, hence the weird composition.

Curiosity got the best of me this evening, and I affixed my phone to a tripod, fired up a video recording, and hoisted it up to where I hoped I would get some images of the contents of the nest. Sure enough, there are five eggs in the nest, and we can thus expect to see another batch of hatchlings in the near future. I hope their existence unfolds in a much happier manner.

Mors Ab Alto*

April 17, 2019 10:32 AM | Posted in: Nature, Wildlife - Birds, Wildlife - Mammals

*With apologies to the 7th Bomb Wing, USAF

We returned home last Sunday afternoon after a whirlwind ** 750-mile weekend trip to our old stamping grounds *** in West Texas, and as we drove over the low water crossing to pick up our mail, we saw that a squirrel had recently been hit by a car and lay dead in the street. Given that we have approximately forty thousand squirrels in our neighborhood, this wouldn't seem like much of a loss, but in this case it was a rock squirrel, and they are relatively rare. Alert Gazette readers may recall that we were involuntary hosts to a gaggle **** of young rock squirrels about this time last year. It was a little sad to think that perhaps a new batch of squirrelings were now missing a parent.

Anyway, the buzzards (aka "the biohazard remediation team in the sky") had begun to circle, and would eventually descend to their inevitable feast. We don't give them enough credit for the nasty-but-important work they do, but that's another story and we're all about staying on point here at the Gazette.

Later that evening, as I was firing up the grill to cook cedar plank tuna (the salmon at the grocery store not looking particularly appetizing on that day, none of which is really germane to the story), I heard a *plop* followed immediately by thrashing sounds in the vicinity of the pecan tree in our back yard. I looked up in time to see two buzzards land awkwardly in the tree -- they're quite graceful in flight, but their tree landings are about as smooth as a Trump tweet -- and another one aborting a landing and pulling back up into the sky.

The two big birds stayed in the tree for a few seconds, and then followed the third one into the air. That was rather odd behavior; I had never before seen a buzzard perched in any of our trees. But it was the *plop* that intrigued me.

I wasn't mystified for long as I immediately spotted the source of the sound. I thought about posting a photo, but out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the typical Gazette reader, I've chosen this artist's rendering as an accurate representation of the scene:

Artist's rendering of a run-over squirrel

Using my massive investigatory skills, honed by years of watching CSI Miami (I've also mastered the technique of standing sideways as I address the always-guilty suspect, but that's also off-topic), I determined that the buzzards were quarreling over the now partially-eviscerated carcass (I've spared you that visual detail), and one of them attempted to abscond with the corpse. The others followed and in the dogfight ****** that ensued, the cadaver was dropped onto the lawn next to our porch. I'm sure the buzzards would have continued their dinner dispute had I not been present, but instead they continued to circle overhead for a while until they peeled off, one by one, in search of other roadkill.

And, of course, I was left with the wholesome task of disposing of the now-defunct Otospermophilus variegatus. I accomplished that by scooping it up with a shovel and flinging it into the adjoining vacant lot, where the scavengers eventually finished the task.

As a footnote to this story, as if we don't already have enough footnotes to this story, the next day a hummingbird committed suicide on our back porch by ramming headfirst into one of our windows. I expect Stephen King to show up any day on a research visit for his next novel.

**I'm not sure why a quick trip is often referred to as a "whirlwind," but if you're ever traveling in West Texas during the spring, you'll see (and feel) its relevance. [back]

***So, you're judging me, aren't you, for using the term "stamping" instead of "stomping"? For your penance, read this, then go forth and sin no more. [back]

****A group of squirrels is actually referred to as a "scurry." That explains how Scurry county, in West Texas, got its name, following a mass invasion of squirrels, not unlike the cricket invasion of Mormons in Utah.***** [back]

*****One of the sentences in the preceding paragraph is not 100% accurate.

******Oh, never mind. [back]

Apple Watch Fall Detection: Annoying...but effective

April 15, 2019 12:38 PM | Posted in: Cycling, Health & Fitness, Technology

The golf cart/pedestrian path next to the low water crossing over Slick Rock Creek, just south of Highway 2147, hasn't had water running over it since the October floods. Still, much of it stays wet thanks to the splashes from cars driving through the creek. Over time, if those puddles don't dry out, moss and algae begin to form on the concrete.

I have an Apple Watch Series 4 (apparently we're not supposed to use "Series 4" as an adjective), and it has a couple of health-related features that are potentially useful.

Well, one of them has been immediately useful. Ever since my little heart-related episode, I've occasionally used the ECG and irregular heartbeat notification feature of the watch if I feel anything out of the ordinary in my heartbeat. Fortunately, nothing has been amiss, according to the watch, so I'm obviously a hypochondriac.

We rode our tandem bike across that path a week ago, and felt the front wheel skid slightly -- just for an instant -- as we went through a puddle in which a mass of leaves had accumulated. But we made it across without any further incident, and I made a mental note to avoid that puddle if it was still there the next time.

Photo - Apple Watch screen showing fall detection message

The second feature has been less helpful. The fall detection capability built into the Series 4 is designed to, well, detect when the wearer has suffered a fall. This feature is automatically turned on if the wearer is 65 years or older (the watch owner is asked to input age when the watch is initially activated). This is a commonsense approach, since older folks are more apt to (1) fall and (2) suffer injury from such a mishap. The detection feature can be manually disabled, but I've elected not to do that, for reasons that aren't germane at this point.

However, what I've experienced is that this feature is prone to false positives -- detecting what it thinks is a fall when in fact nothing of the sort has happened. I now take my watch off before using the leaf blower, because it will invariably confuse the vibration with whatever movement its algorithm uses to identify a fall. When that happens, the watch vibrates and displays the screen shown above. Also, on one occasion I got the same message while vacuuming the floors in our house (see, housework is dangerous!).

This behavior is annoying, but it is potentially serious. If you don't tap on one of the options shown above within sixty seconds, Apple automatically calls 9-1-1. Again, this is a commonsense and valuable action...provided that you've actually fallen and need assistance. But it could be very embarrassing if you're using a leaf blower (or vacuum cleaner, or hammer, etc.) and don't feel the vibration that signals activation of the fall detection process.

Last weekend, we got about an inch of badly-needed rainfall. Things had dried up nicely by Tuesday, when we headed out on the bike for a midday ride. We were riding the same route as the previous week, and we discussed what we would do when we got to that low water crossing. The plan was to simply avoid the collection of leaves, assuming it hadn't been washed away by the rain.

It was still in place, so I steered around it and we continued pedaling across the concrete walkway. A couple of seconds later, we were lying on our sides, still astride the now horizontal bicycle. As it turned out, the entire length of the passage was now slick with moss or mud.

I was still clicked into the pedals and it took me a while to get extricated so we could stand up and assess whatever damage we and the bike had taken. But I immediately felt the familiar vibration on my left wrist. We quickly determined that we were not significantly injured, and so -- for the first time -- I was able to click the "I fell, but I'm OK" option.

Fortunately, emergency responders are not prone to judge harshly such lapses in technology, assuming they aren't associated with repeat offenders. This article deals mostly with false positives from the ECG feature of the watch, but the attitude toward the fall detection feature is similar: it's better to show up when you're not needed than to not find out you're needed until it's too late.

We didn't come away completely unscathed. MLB lost a rather large patch of skin on her palm, and I twisted my knee and wrist and had some minor abrasions on the back of my hand. (No, we don't wear gloves when we ride. That would have prevented the hand injuries.) The bike wasn't damaged, but my handlebars were knocked out of alignment a bit. All in all, it could have been much worse.

Well, actually, it was worse, as the whole mishap was witnessed by a elderly Latina walking a tiny dog. She had paused to let us go over the walkway ahead of her so she had a closeup view of the fiasco. I'm sure she was shaking her head about the crazy gringos and their weird bicycle. The dog just looked bored.

Fortitude at Altitude (or, "You think your job is hard?")

April 10, 2019 12:54 PM | Posted in: Technology, Texas Hill Country

A week or so ago, I was returning home in the truck when I spotted a helicopter hovering at what I guessed to be about a half mile from our house. There was a long line suspended from the bottom of the aircraft with something attached to the end. As I turned onto the road that leads into our neighborhood, the helicopter ceased hovering and began to move the same direction I was driving. I briefly lost sight of it behind some trees.

As I came around a bend, it came back into view. It was now hovering over one of the power transmission line towers belonging to the LCRA that march in a row just outside the southern border of our neighborhood. To my amazement, there was a man perched at the top of said tower, and he appeared to be attempting to snag the line hanging down from the aircraft.

You're no doubt surprised that I stopped and began videoing the scene. Here's what I witnessed.

It's hard to tell from the video but the worker appeared to be removing something from the top of the tower and placing it in a pouch. The last three minutes of the video (which I took with a video camera zoomed all the way in, hence the shaky picture), also appears to show that the worker is focused on the point where the "shield wire" is attached to the tower. I didn't know it at the time, but I've since learned that a shield wire is installed on overhead electrical transmission lines to protect them from lightning strikes. For more information, here's a short "how does it work?" article about shield lines.

If this process looks dangerous, well, it certainly can be. In August, 2013, two men were killed in West Texas when the line they were suspended from while servicing power transmission towers snapped because the helicopter pilot failed to see the shield wire. The men fell 200 feet to the ground.

I recognize this is somewhat macabre, but out of curiosity, I wondered about the elapsed time and terminal velocity from a 200' fall. According to this table (PDF), it's 3.5 seconds and 60 mph. Both are awful to contemplate.

The work being done in the video shows a very deliberate, well-planned process, and demonstrates good teamwork between the tower worker and the helicopter pilot. If you watch closely, you can see the hand signals from the worker telling the pilot that (1) he's ready to be picked up, and (2) he's safely attached to the line and ready to be lifted off the tower.

I doubt there are many of us who would be comfortable doing work like this, where a minor equipment failure or a momentary lapse in attention means the difference between life and death. On the other hand, you've got a fantastic view of some of the prettiest scenery in Texas, and that's not nothing.

Flower Flyover

April 6, 2019 11:24 AM | Posted in: Nature, Texas Hill Country

Photo - Bluebonnets framed by a gap in a wooden fence

The bluebonnet crop around our little town of Horseshoe Bay is absolutely phenomenal this year. Most of the long-timers here say it's the best showing in at least a decade. It's probably due to the record-breaking rainfall we experienced last fall, plus a relatively warm winter.

I've now learned that the "warm winter" is actually a non-factor. Bluebonnets contain a sort of natural anti-freeze and thus aren't affected much by cold and frosty weather. Check out this bluebonnet FAQ over at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for more interesting tidbits about the state flower of Texas.

Whatever the cause, we're seeing bluebonnets in places we've never before spotted them, and in quantities large enough to make a description of a "sea of flowers" not much of an exaggeration.

Photos don't really do them justice, but I took a shot at seeing if a video might come close. I launched my little DJI Spark drone a couple of weeks ago near the entrance to our neighborhood and took about fifteen minutes of hi-def movies of the flowers we see every day around here.

I decided to do something a little different, however. Instead of a lot of "bird's eye" perspective, I kept the drone as low to the ground as the obstacle avoidance firmware would allow, thereby capturing more of a "flower's eye" view (Ed: Flowers don't have eyes. Me: Oh, yeah. Then how do you explain black-eyed susans?)

I hope you find the following video relaxing to watch. Note that it was a rather breezy day and the drone experienced a little buffeting, hence some of the occasional jerkiness of the images. The rest of the jerkiness is due to pilot incompetence.

Revisiting the Wayback Machine

April 3, 2019 10:15 AM | Posted in: History, Internet, Navel Gazing

Remember the WABAC machine in the beloved The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends show...the device that enabled Mr. Peabody and his pet boy Sherman to visit various pivotal moments in history? Pretty great stuff, wasn't it?

Well, this post isn't about that. Sorry *not sorry*.

Alert Gazette readers may recall -- even without the aid of WABAC -- that I toiled over a hot keyboard to restore some semblance of semi-coherence by fixing issues that caused historically important squirrel videos to not appear. In the process, I began to wonder just exactly when I posted the first video to this blog*. In order to find the answer to this Very Important Question, I had to turn to a real-life WABAC: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Digression: Semi-sentient Gazette readers may wonder at this point..."why didn't he just click over to the first posts via his own Archives Index?" Well, normally that would be an excellent strategy. But -- little known fact -- there was a brief period of time in the hazy past when *someone* made the ill-advised decision to terminate the Gazette. Said termination lasted only a few months, but when *someone* came to their senses, *someone* had the task of restoring history that had been lost. That history consisted of a couple of thousand posts, all of them QUITE SPECTACULAR (as you can imagine), but logistically there was no way to restore everything. Only a relative few select articles made the cut. The process by which this was accomplished was quite Biblical.

So, off to the Wayback Machine *someone* went.

By the way, the Internet Archive, which came into being in 1996, is a non-profit organization which, in its own words, "is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge." All. Knowledge. Pretty impressive, although that does cause one to wonder why the Gazette would be included. Nevertheless, we press on.

The current archive, as of the date of this post, contains:

330 billion web pages
20 million books and texts
4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts)
4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs)
3 million images
200,000 software programs

Included amongst this vast library of culturally significant digital artifacts are almost 50,000 "captures" of files that comprise the articles within the Gazette, spanning the period from April 1, 2003 to March 3, 2019. The summary statistics border on frightening in their detail: more than 36,000 text files, 12,000 images, 29 audio files, and thousands of linked URLs. In the interest of full disclosure, I have no idea what any of those statistics really mean, but they impress the heck out of me.

As it turned out, the Wayback archives were interesting (to me), but not all that helpful. They did bring back some fond memories, such as the changes in the Gazette's layout over time, as shown below.

Screen capture of the Gazette's initial layout

Here's a snapshot of the Gazette's initial layout on the dismal blogging platform creatively named "Blogger"
Screen capture of a subsequent Gazette layout

Screen capture of a subsequent Gazette layout

A later Gazette layout; this one was universally lauded because it displayed a different photo of Abbye every time the page was reloaded (my own very successful version of clickbait)
Screen capture of a yet another early Gazette layout

Screen capture of a yet another early Gazette layout

Another later early layout, this one from my short-lived "socially conscious" era before I became the completely cynical shell of a human being I am now. I stood with a "free Iran" for a few months until it dawned on me that Iran couldn't care less. So much for the power of citizen journalists employing defiant header graphics.

Now that I've addressed the missing videos, I may start addressing the 349 broken links on past posts to see if they're really worth tracking down and fixing. That's approximately 8% of the total number of links I've included on the blog, not counting those in this post. How do I know this? Well, I dropped into another handy website, Broken Link Check, which told me that in the 2,163 pages of the Gazette that it crawled, it checked about 4,200 links. It also identified the broken ones, but it's up to me to figure out why they're broken and if they can even be fixed.

If my archeological dig through the internet archive taught me anything, it's that just because you can preserve everything, it doesn't mean you should.

*December 6, 2006.

We interrupt this period of non-blogging to blog about blogging.

March 29, 2019 2:43 PM | Posted in: Internet, Navel Gazing

It was a dark and stormy night...

Now that I have your undivided attention, allow me to explain why I've completely blown my [admittedly never before publicized, for obvious reasons] goal of posting something every five days or so during 2019. This was not -- NOT -- a New Year's resolution; it was purely coincidental that my resolve to write more reached its apex on January 1st. Anyhoo...

While I've not put anything new on the Gazette in lo these many days, I have still been hard at work on your behalf, toiling mightily behind the scenes to address some rather embarrassing breaches in this blog's stellar reputation for quality content.

You see, it came to my attention that a very few [*cough* about a hundred *cough*] of my prior posts contained links to videos that no longer work. The upshot of this stunning revelation is that when you looked at an article that referenced, say, a baby squirrel dancing a tango with a roller-skating nun* all you would see is the following:

This is, as they say, a sub-optimal situation. However, it's not my fault. Well, not entirely. OK, it's completely my fault but I have an excuse: I'm clueless, and shouldn't be held to such high standards of competency. Here's what happened.

YouTube first appeared on the interwebz with a zoo-related video uploaded in April, 2005. Those first YouTube videos were in Flash format (*spit*). It took almost twenty months before the first Gazette post featured a YouTube video -- don't bother looking for it; it's been deleted from the site, and the post itself no longer appears here, either -- so no one can accuse me of being an early adopter. I was sure that silly fad of moving pictures would quickly fade away.

Vimeo came along around that same time (I was unsuccessful in finding out when the first video was uploaded...Google is such a disappointment to us serious researchers), and it also employed Flash for its playback technology.

However, in response to a combination of browser evolution and security/performance issues with Flash, both services began offering non-Flash alternatives to its videos, adhering to HTML5 standards. The technical implications are not really important for the purpose of this ~~excuse~~, uh explanation...just that the user experience on both platforms was changed for the better when Flash was dumped. But, the upshot was that the coding on websites where videos were embedded no longer worked.

More recently, most major browsers stopped supporting webpages with "mixed content." This is is a little more complicated to explain. Most of you are familiar with the the concept of a secure webpage, right? So whenever you visit a website, and you see the little lock icon up by the URL (as shown below), you know that your interface with the server on which that site resides is encrypted and thus safer from hacking or "eavesdropping" than a site without it. So, in order for a webpage to get that little lock icon, everything on the page -- all the images, and videos, and audio files, scripts, etc. -- must also originate from secure servers.

Screenshot showing secure 'lock' icon on Google Chrome browser

Your browser may display the lock icon a little differently; this is on Google Chrome

But sometimes, even though the main webserver is secure, some of the content on the page you're viewing may not be. The page is then said to contain mixed content. And the vulnerability of that page to outside malfeasance varies depending on the type of that insecure content, to the point where the major browsers now actually prevent it from appearing, even when the rest of the page does appear. Embedded videos that aren't delivered from an HTTPS site fall into that category. I'm oversimplifying but that's the gist of it. And eventually, browsers will probably block ALL non-secure content, but that's another story.

This is a long, tedious way of saying that a bunch of the videos that I had embedded in blog posts were not delivered by way of a secure server and so they were not showing up. The fix is very simple -- just add an "s" to the "http" in the URL and -- voila! -- baby squirrels doing cute things now appear as before. Sounds simple, but it's not something I could do with a global edit command (or if it is, I don't know how to do it, which is very possible).

So I ended up going through several years of posts, one-by-one, looking for blanks where embedded videos should have been. In some cases, the original videos had actually been deleted from YouTube or Vimeo, or the URLs had changed and I had to track them down via a search, but for the most part the addition of that one letter was all that was needed. At some point both YouTube and Vimeo began using https:// in all of their embedding coding so I didn't have to look at everything, but I still crawled through about five years of Fire Ant drivel, all to maintain the artistic integrity of something that no one will likely ever look at again anyway. But it's now there, in case alien historians investigate possible causes for the human race's extinction due to sheer boredom.

*There's probably no such video. Seriously, do not spend time looking for it.

Here's what I'm doing on Instagram...

March 15, 2019 7:38 AM | Posted in: Design, Photography, Social Media

Art installation - San Antonio Museum of Art
(heavily Photoshopped)

I try to post a new image to Instagram every morning. I'm not 100% successful because I'm lazy, but I don't miss too many days, because I enjoy the discipline of creating and sharing those pictures, when I'm not feeling lazy. I also like Instagram because it's the one social medium that is [mostly] immune to inflammatory rhetoric.

Note: If you already follow me in Instagram, you can skip the rest of this post. Unless you're just here for the mesmerizing mellifluence of my prose...in which case you can also skip this post.

Everything I post is based on my own photography, and mostly nature-related, although a lot of it will be unrecognizable because part of the fun is enhancing/modifying/mangling/ruining a picture via Photoshop. So, don't believe everything you see...but everything you see has at least a smidgen of truth in it. What you won't see is a lot of family or vacation photos, or selfies, or pictures of my food. There's nothing wrong with those things, and I enjoy seeing them on other accounts (for the most part), but I stumble to the bleat of a different bagpiper.

If you have an IG account and want to follow me, click here or on the camera-looking icon on the right side of this page. But if you're not on Instagram, here's what I've posted lately. Click on any thumbnail to see a full-sized version.

Tail feathers of a cedar waxwing, Horseshoe Bay, Texas

Canal flowing from Comanche Springs, Fort Stockton, Texas

Crawfish in Comanche Springs canal, Fort Stockton, Texas

Teen zombie love in the nuclear apocalypse

Drone's eye view of the full moon, Horseshoe Bay, Texas

Gnarled tree, Horseshoe Creek, Horseshoe Bay, Texas

View of Molokini from Wailea, Maui, Hawaii

Trees along Horseshoe Creek, Horseshoe Bay, Texas

Paddleboarding, Lake LBJ, Horseshoe Bay, Texas

Rough Green Snake, Fredericksburg, Texas

Vincent Black Shadow, San Diego, California

Three Books About Music and Stuff

March 10, 2019 5:22 PM | Posted in: Music, Reading & Writing

It's been a long time since I wrote a book review. I don't feel really comfortable doing book reviews, because they require some wisdom and contextual insight that I lack. But sometimes it's enough just to say here's a book I like because... and then let you, the perceptive reader, decide whether what I like might also be something you like.

I've recently read two books that deal with the subject of music, and one that is a series of brief essays that are, like this blog, focused on nothing in particular other than what strikes the writer's fancy.

How Music Works is not a new book, but it was new to me when I picked it up in a bookstore in Santa Fe last fall. It was published in 2012, authored by David Byrne, probably best known as the frontman for the musical group Talking Heads. Byrne is without a doubt a gifted musician, but he's so much more than that. He's also an historian, an artist, a businessman, and a darned good writer.

The title can be viewed as having a double meaning: the author explores the physical and emotional effects music has on listeners, but he also delves into the business of music. Byrne is quite transparent in describing his personal experiences in dealing with record companies and performing venues, down to giving dollar figures for how certain recordings performed financially. It is, so to speak, a peek inside the musical sausage factory.

The business aspect of the book won't be riveting to many readers, but anyone who is interested in the pop and rock music scene (and I don't know why you'd buy this book if you're not) will enjoy Byrne's anecdotes and insights about his career and those of his fellow musicians. Byrne's prose is easy to digest, conversational almost, and unlike the stereotypical rock deity, he's self-deprecating in a winsome manner in describing both the ways he's succeeded as well as his [few] failures. I was also impressed by the sheer width of his musical interests, including country, gospel, so-called world or indigenous, classical, and, of course, rock and roll music. He doesn't simply dabble; he gets immersed.

Bottom line: I liked this book a lot. (And, as an erstwhile graphic designer of little talent, I love the cover.)

Continuing with the music theme, I recently downloaded The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port after reading a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. Port is a music critic and a guitarist, and his passion for music shines in this history of the electric guitar. He has interwoven the stories of Leo Fender and Les Paul to make a framework for a fascinating account of the evolution of what is arguably the most important development in the history of modern music.

Why Leo and Les? Well, each has a firm claim on the invention of the electric guitar, and they leapfrogged each other throughout the instrument's early history in terms of enhancing it. Leo was an inventor but not a musician; Les was both, but didn't have Leo's engineering expertise. He teamed up with the Gibson Guitar Corporation to compete with Fender's company for the hearts and money of the world's guitarists.

Their rivalry (and personal quirks) makes for interesting reading, but where Port really shines is in the retelling of the anecdotes around which the myths of some of the most iconic rock musicians are built. Case in point: a riveting account of the evening that a not-yet-legendary Jimi Hendrix caused the already-a-guitar-god Eric Clapton to question whether he (Clapton) should ever bother picking up a guitar again. You'll also learn that the earliest adopters of the electric guitar were folks like Buck Owens and other pioneers in the Bakersfield country music scene who sought to move beyond the pedal steel that everyone else was using.

Whether you're a guitarist or not, if you grew up with and loved rock and roll, you should read this impressively researched book. Prepare to be disappointed, however, at how quickly it ends, even if your e-reader tells you there are many pages left to go...that's how extensive Port's supporting footnotes are.

And now, to quote Monty Python, for something completely different. The Book of Delights (hereafter referred to as TBOD) is a collection of short essays -- very short; the author calls them essayettes, and most are a page in length, and a small page at that -- by Ross Gay, an award-winning writer and poet and college educator. He set out to write one story per day for a year, from one birthday to the next, about things... people... events... whatever... that, well, delighted him. He didn't quite make his daily goal, but the book contains 102 of these essayettes.

A long time ago, in the early days of the Fire Ant Gazette, I coined the phrase "Content-Free Blogging" as a self-deprecating warning not to take most of what I wrote too seriously. TBOD is content-free essaying. I continually tried to put myself into the author's shoes, or head, or heart as I read his observations about what in his environment or memories caused him delight, and I wasn't always successful. But sometimes I was, and sometimes what delighted him did the same for me, even if it wasn't what he was describing but the way he was describing it. I wish I could say this was the case in all 102 essays, or even in the majority of them. Your mileage may vary. As they say.

As a primer for an aspiring writer who wants to learn more about how to observe people, places, and things, TBOD is not a bad one. Details are important, even if those details don't accrue to subjects you're personally invested in. Gay's ability to focus on the mundane (he finds delight in the vulnerability of a ... carport) and then describe it was a helpful reminder to me, even as his focus on things I didn't care about provided a cautionary note to be mindful of my blogging audience.

Coupla things of note. If the world ever runs short of commas, we can blame Ross Gay. In one paragraph of one essay, I counted 23 of them. The man does take delight in commas. And, of localish interest, three of the essays arose from observations made in Marfa, Texas. You have to get close to the end of the book to find them and they're not focused on anything unique to Marfa, but they're there. And, finally, he tends to get embarrassingly specific about his own bodily functions and anatomy at times, thereby employing the official/unofficial #nofilter hashtag that I apply to modern poets. If you shy away from reading between the lines, let's leave it at this: don't pick this as a book for group study by your Sunday School class, unless it delights in kegs, smokes, and ribald limericks at its get-togethers.

TBOD is not written in a style that appeals to me, and the writer often gets a little too twee for my taste, but I stop short of saying the book was a waste of my time. I can't give it an unqualified recommendation. But, then, I don't appreciate poetry either, so that's on me.

Digitizing My Life: 45s (and a musical quiz to win some!)

March 5, 2019 7:33 AM | Posted in: Music

I think I've finally come to the end of my vinyl ripping project, as I digitized the final 7" 45 rpm record in my collection. I added about eighty songs to iTunes (in addition to the 850 or so that were on LPs). Most of the 7-inchers were from the 1960s and 1980s; I have no recollection about the fate of the apparently-lost decade of the Seventies.

About half of these records had custom jackets, instead of the generic blank paper or record studio jackets. I scanned the custom jackets and added them as album art to the songs in iTunes and made a sort of collage, shown below. You can click on any specific cover to see a larger version, and navigate through each cover via the pop-up controls..

Aretha Franklin - Freeway of Love (1985)

Bobby Sherman - Julie, Do Ya Love Me (1970)

Mick Jagger & David Bowie - Dancing In The Street (1985)

Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart - I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight (1968)

Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart - Out & About (1967)

The Buckinghams - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1967)

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass - Casino Royale (1967)

The Dave Clark Five - You Got What It Takes (1967)

Electric Light Orchestra - Calling America (1984)

The Rolling Stones - Harlem Shuffle (1986)

The Art of Noise with Max Headroom 7 - Paranomia (1986)

Herb Alpert - This Guy's In Love With You (1968)

Children's Choir - It's A Small World (Unknown)

Loverboy - Lovin' Every Minute Of It (1985)

John Cougar Mellencamp - ROCK In The USA (1985)

Mike + The Mechanics - All I Need Is A Miracle (1985)

Tommy James and the Shondells - Mirage (1967)

The Rolling Stones - Jumpin' Jack Flash (1968)

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap - Lady Willpower (1968)

USA for Africa - We Are The World (1985)

I'll readily admit to some questionable musical choices (I'm looking at you, Samatha Fox, you saucy minx), and I'll also confess that I think some of these records never got played more than once or twice (Max Headroom just didn't stand up to repeated listenings). But some of these records are semi-classics (such as the Disneyland-issued of It's A Small World sung in four languages by an unnamed children's choir and selling for 29¢, the Canadian version of Rock Me Amadeus by the non-Canadian Falco who died in a car wreck at age 40, and the all-star USA for Africa group's We Are The World relief fundraiser recording, said group featuring the likes of Dan Akroyd, Waylon Jennings, and Paul Simon).

I have no particular sentimental attachment to these 45s, now that I've digitized them, so I'm more than happy to give them to a new home that might appreciate them either as music or history or cultural artifact or substitute clay pigeons for trap shooting. So, here's the deal. I've made a musical collage of 3-second snippets from ten of these records (some are NOT included in the record sleeve collage above), and uploaded that collage in mp3 format. You can listen to it below. The first person* to correctly identify all ten songs via the comments section on this post (or in the comments to the Facebook post leading to this article) will win all ten records. What a deal, huh?

I intentionally didn't make the collage too difficult (e.g. I omitted songs by John Wesley Ryles and Don & The Goodtimers [who aren't who you and Wikipedia might think], as well as all of the B-sides), but it will require some musical knowledge spanning a few decades. I think all of the songs landed in the top 20 and many of them hit #1. Good luck!

Update (3/6/19): We have a winner! Fellow blogger Jay Solo correctly identified all ten songs over on Facebook. I've listed them at the bottom of this post in case you still want to give it a try.

[Note: MLB thinks that I need to add a disclaimer that the winner gets the records...whether they want them or not. I suggested that the winner gets 10 records; second place gets 20. Sheesh. My music gets no respect.]

*The date and time stamps on the comments will absolutely rule. Ab-so-lutely. In the event of a tie, the person who sends me the most money wins. Oh, wait...that's probably illegal. Never mind. The person who flatters me the most wins the records, but loses their soul. Probably.

Here are the songs in the order of appearance:

Thank The Lord For The Night Time [1969] - Neil Diamond
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You [1967] - The Monkees
Polk Salad Annie [1969] - Tony Joe White
Secret Agent Man [1966] - Johnny Rivers
Addicted To Love [1985] - Robert Palmer
Don't Sleep In The Subway [1967] - Petula Clark
Money For Nothing [1985] - Dire Straits
Born To Be Wild [1968] - Steppenwolf
Mirage [1967] - Tommy James & The Shondells
Hello, I Love You [1968] - The Doors

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