Category Archives: Obsessions

Tearing down the melody

Posted on May 9, 2013 | Comments Off on Tearing down the melody

“You don’t have to play every note,” mandolin player Earl Hunt told me when I said I was still learning to play hoedowns (reels) and jigs as fast as the melody fiddlers do in our pickup contra dance band.

How do you decide which ones to leave out, I wondered aloud, and he smiled and replied, “Keep practicing.”

It’s really rather simple, my fiddle teacher told me. It’s called “tearing down the melody,” eliminating the notes that are there just for show, “the fiddle fireworks,” he called them. The notes which don’t contribute to the melody. So long as they’re not crucial to the rhythm, which is foremost.

Meanwhile, I’m also struggling to learn to play (scales now, tunes later) with the Georgia and Nashville shuffle bowing patterns. There’s always something new to learn.

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Posted in Music, Obsessions, Texana

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Benghazi probe hotting up?

Posted on April 19, 2013 | Comments Off on Benghazi probe hotting up?

Could the Stupid Party be actually, truly, you know, “investigating” the Benghazi murders?

There’s a new warning from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to the legal offices of CIA, Defense and State to start helping their tattling employees lawyer up for anticipated Democrat revenge in public hearings to come. Remains to be seen whether it’s more than hot air.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Obsessions, The War, Troops

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The mass murderer who’s not on Page 1

Posted on April 13, 2013 | Comments Off on The mass murderer who’s not on Page 1

It’s almost as if Philadelphia ghetto-abortionist Kermit Gosnell is being tried in abstentia for his crimes, the way the snooze media is ignoring his trial. Says The Atlantic:

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered [mostly black] women…he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.”

About a hundred of them. Not only that but the state and local government ignored his work and their own laws. Thus a perfect story with, as editors used to say, “all the elements.”

The problem for the snooze media, of course, is that the subject is abortion, one of those social issues (like gay marriage and gun control) which they support without equivocation. Gosnell is their worst nightmare.

Via Instapundit. Also here.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions

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Blocking Pamela Geller

Posted on April 9, 2013 | Comments Off on Blocking Pamela Geller

Funny how the “progressives” are always trying to stop their opponents from speaking. Seldom see it the other way around. So progressive, eh?

Pamela Geller is an excellent example of a speaker who gets the “progressive” treatment everytime she’s scheduled to speak somewhere—including by their pals in the snooze media who always try to plan ahead.

For instance….

UPDATE:  Of course, their favorite target is Karl Rove.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions, Scribbles, The War

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Holocaust Remembrance Day

Posted on April 8, 2013 | Comments Off on Holocaust Remembrance Day

This morning, some eight hours ahead of us in Central Texas, the sirens will sound in Israel and cars will stop, even on the freeways.

People will get out and stand silently for a time, remembering stories such as this one. Wherein we discover that the first two people killed by the British in World War II were not German Nazis, but Jewish refugees escaping from the German Nazis.

Via Simply Jews.

UPDATE: The Warsaw Ghetto uprising wasn’t the only way they fought back. For instance…

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel, Obsessions

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Hammered dulcimer

Posted on April 5, 2013 | Comments Off on Hammered dulcimer

Something new at LOCO’s weekly performance the other night: a hammered dulcimer. That sucker has 48 strings. Imagine the time consumed in tuning it. Comparable to tuning a piano.

The guy who brought it discovered it was out of tune (probably the heightened humidity from the rain that day) and didn’t seem to want to waste time tuning it, so played his fiddle instead. I think he played it once, though. It was hard to be sure, as I was sitting between an amplified fiddle and an amplified mandolin, and could hardly hear my own efforts at fiddle harmony.

I’m getting better at recognizing keys and playing chord voicings contributed by my teacher. Instead of trying to keep up on the sheet music, by counting the beats, I finally figured out what the chords look like on the guitar and now I watch those players, instead. Still a challenge to keep up, though, and I sometimes revert to long, slow bowings of the pentatonic scale in whatever the key is because it fits with every chord.

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Posted in Music, Obsessions, Texana

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Beating the white supremacist drum

Posted on April 2, 2013 | Comments Off on Beating the white supremacist drum

[Updated below]

The snooze media, when it’s not sucking up to our imperial president, his cronies and political party (for you newly arrived illegal immigrants, that would be the Democrats), likes to emphasize our political hyphenation of the past several decades. You know, the multiculturalism nonsense (all cultures are equal; none are superior to any other) that’s supposed to (somehow) make minorities feel better about themselves if they happen to come from a (clearly) backward culture.

Thus the recent killing of the district attorney and his wife in their home in North Texas is, the ever-mendacious NYTimes and cBS assure us, the probable work of the “white supremacist” group the Aryan Brotherhood.  (When it comes to brotherhoods the only one the snooze media likes is the radical Muslim version.)

As Wretchard points out in one of his usual understated blog postings, white supremacism is the snooze media’s favorite hobby horse because it excites their multiculturalist chums. After the Tea Party, perhaps. And gun owners are somewhere on the list. But snoozers have been flogging the gun owners recently and before that the Tea Party. So now, apparently, it’s time (to continue mixing metaphors) to beat the white supremacist drum again. All of which are much easier than thinking or actually working, two things the snooze media tries really hard to avoid and almost always succeeds.

Especially when the probable reason for the DA’s murder is (as usual) staring them in the face. It’s one of the big three. The big three any cop will tell you is the usual reason for murder: sex, drugs or money. Wait and see. The odds are it’ll be one of them, not white supremacism at all. And the snooze media will act like they never doubted it from the beginning and go back to picking on the gun owners.

UPDATE:  Indeed, by April 19, a former justice of the peace and his wife have been charged with the crime, neither of them Tea Party or Aryan Brotherhood members. Nor organizers of a dramatic “hit.” Just plain vanilla murderers, apparently over money. Big surprise.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Obsessions, Scribbles, Texana, The Drug War

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