Levitacious

levitacious (adj)– being filled with joy, levity

I think this is how it happened, though neither of us can remember for sure.

I walked by a colleague’s desk, in a reasonably good mood. Maybe I made a light joke.

C: My, you seem levitacious today.

R: Wow, that’s a great word you’ve coined!

More banter commending the word.

C (in e-mail): Which spelling doth thou prefereth? Levitacious or levitatious?

R (in e-mail): Think I like the C, avoiding 2 Ts. How about you?

C (in e-mail): I agree!

R (in e-mail): levitacious (adj)– being filled with joy, levity

C (in e-mail): Excellent!

So, are you feeling levitacious today? Tell me some of the word coinage you’ve done.

X is for Xylophone

I loved my xylophone, and think it’d be a nifty Christmas gift for SOMEONE ELSE’S little child.

Wikipedia says: “The xylophone (from the Greek words ξύλον—xylon, ‘wood’ + φωνή—phonē, ‘sound, voice’, meaning ‘wooden sound’) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets.”

When I was a kid, I had a xylophone, very much like this one pictured, with an octave and a half. It was good for Mary Had a Little Lamb, or for Chopsticks, if you had two mallets.

But I was always disappointed that certain seemingly simple songs often had ONE note (or more) that wasn’t in the standard scale. I figured “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music” [LISTEN] certainly would be able to be played on a keyboard [PLAY!], using only the white keys of a piano, which is all most kids’ xylophones had. After all, the very basis of the song is that DO-RE-MI, etc, were the building blocks of singing. Alas, at LA (A in the key of C), it goes A down to D-E-F#-G-A-B. Then at TI, it goes B down to E-F#-G#-A-B-C.

Likewise, Dominique by The Singing Nun [LISTEN], a big hit in my childhood, just before the return of the chorus, went (in C) E-D-E-F#-G. In other words, again, one needed an equivalent of a black note on a keyboard, missing on this simple instrument.

Still, I loved my xylophone. I think this would be a nifty Christmas gift for SOMEONE ELSE’S little child.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Advent/Christmas stories and songs

A Charlie Brown Christmas almost never aired

Random FB pic

MUSIC:

Jaquandor has been offering Your Daily Dose of Christmas.

About.com’s Top 100 Christmas songs

The Bells of Christmas by Julie Andrews from a Firestone tire LP I still own.

Nat King Cole -The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)

Snow from White Christmas (Bing Crosby, et al).

The Dream Isaiah Saw, plus the backstory of the song, the lyrics and another rendition.

Tamale Christmas by Joe King Carrasco

SamuraiFrog’s contributions include Good King Wenceslas and the original Santa, Baby, as well as my favorite, A Christmas Carol by Tom Lehrer. But you should READ what he has to say about It Feels Like Christmas.

Eddie, the Renaissance Geek’s usual offering.

A Moose in a Maple Tree – The All Canadian 12 Days of Christmas

Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer in Latin, set to plainsong.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen if it were played in a spaghetti western

The Beatles’ Christmas Record 1963

Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas (Full Album)

A very Coverville Christmas 2013; I especially enjoyed the Led Zeppelin.

dj BC writes, “I just dropped Santastic 8, the 8th annual Holiday mashup album in the series … This year we offer 14 new Christmas mashups and one old one which was reissued because it is great and it matches the album cover so well.

A goldmine of mostly very obscure, very bad seasonal music! Examples: a surfing Little Drummer Boy; a Jimi Hendrix version of Auld Lang Syne; and the truly awful Debbie’s Last Christmas.

VISUAL:

NORAD Tracks Santa Command Video 2013

The Bear and the Hare

That WestJet ad

Peanuts, 1966 and Peanuts, 1967 and Peanuts, 1968; in a similar vein, Off the Mark.

1966 CBS promo I remember watching at the time

Varicolored Christmas ChemisTREE

You do not want your school Christmas party to go like this.

Vintage Christmas cards; he’s gotten more, but this was the first one.

NARRATIVE:

Sharp Little Pencil: The Advent of the Adventure and Christmas Traditions.

Why NORAD tracks Santa

Yes, Megyn Kelly, Santa Can Be Black (and Jesus, Too), assuming Santa is real. Oh, Megyn was just kidding…

The White House has NOT decreed that its 2013 Christmas trees will be referred to as ‘Holiday trees’. So are you being persecuted?

Arthur’s wonderful Christmastime.

Fred Hembeck’s tote of notable holiday gifts connected to the comics medium

A Charlie Brown Christmas almost never aired.

It’s another solstice Ask Roger Anything

I remember last time, someone asked if a particular query was too personal. Too personal? Bah, humbug!

What are you going to give me for Christmas? Santa is bringing me the new Hess truck, aren’t you, Nick? A few pieces of music, a couple books, and some clothes are on my list. (It pleases The Wife no end that clothes are now on the roster, which was NOT the case a decade ago.)

I know. YOU can Ask Roger Anything. That would fill my stocking with holiday cheer. Then, in an act of reciprocal joy, I will actually ANSWER said questions, more or less honestly.

I remember last time, someone asked if a particular query was too personal. Too personal? Bah, humbug! I mean I’m sure there are questions out there that would qualify, but that one wasn’t even close!

I promise to respond within the next 30 days, as I have always done in the past. Now if y’all inundate me with SO many questions that I can’t respond in a month, 1) I’ll be very happy and 2) I’ll let you know. It’s not happened before, which, of course, is no foreteller of future responses.
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And while you’re at it, why not Ask Arthur anything as well? Maybe why kiwi describes New Zealanders, fruit AND flightless birds.

Accidents will happen

We developed a working theory that the Mercedes driver had previously been in an accident, unreported to the police, and possibly to her family members, and used (or staged) an accident to cover up that fact.

Signed up for this service called New York Alert recently. It sends messages to my e-mail – if I texted, it could have gone to that device – based on a menu of topics of my choosing, such as weather alerts. I’d only gotten one or two messages in the past couple of weeks, but on the morning of December 12, I read: “I-90 E&W Exit 5A Off Ramps CLOSED due to a crash at 9:25 am use other routes-Albany County.”

Wait a minute. Exit 5A, that’s frickin’ Corporate Woods, where I work! Sure enough, I stood up to see, less than 100 meters away, the entrance ramp to the place blocked by one police car, and through the barren trees, the lights of another emergency vehicle. I sent a message to everyone in my building, in case they had visitors coming. I got the cleared notice at 10:47 a.m.

That afternoon, this message: “I-90 EB [eastbound] EX 6-6A has the left two lanes closed in the city of Albany due to a crash at 4pm- Albany Co.” Less than two miles away, on the same road, and there was no bad weather. Cleared at 4:40pm.

What’s this? “I-87 NB [northbound] Ex 5-6 Left two lanes closed due to a crash in the town of Colonie at 4:50 pm- Albany Co.” Cleared an hour later.

That was weird enough. But the day before, we were all going to the holiday luncheon at a place called Risotto’s, less than two miles from our office, and one of our group was late. It turned out that she had backed into some Mercedes SUV in the Risotto’s parking lot, in an attempt to straighten out her vehicle.

The other woman called the police, then told my co-worker, “Oh, you don’t have to stick around.” Seriously? She’s called the cops so my colleague would be leaving the scene of an accident, AND that she would get to tell only her side of the story? The cops could not believe that so much damage could possibly have occurred from the way both parties said the accident took place. The people in the accident did not have the required c2c mississauga first aid training which led to the injuries to exacerbate. While my co-worker’s car bumper had a little scrape, the Mercedes looked like it suffered major damage. Also, though the car was registered in the area, the insurance was from Florida, which I didn’t understand. After our colleague finally finished with the cops, we developed a working theory that the Mercedes driver had previously been in an accident, unreported to the police, and possibly to her family members, and used (or staged) an accident to cover up that fact.

On Friday the 13th, another of my colleagues was at a post office during lunch when some older woman backed into her bumper. The other driver cried so much that my colleague ended up hugging her to make her feel better. But it was so unsettling that my co-worker went home early to make Christmas cookies and write Christmas cards. As she wrote on Facebook regarding the other driver, “I will not be sending you [a Christmas card] though, even though I now have your address.”
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Title inspired by the Elvis Costello song [LISTEN].

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