Tag: ABC Wednesday

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

W is for Wal-Mart, or Walmart

I find it odd that it has banned music with explicit lyrics, yet carries a full complement of assault weaponry that has recently included the Bushmaster AR-15.

One of my sisters is one of the greatest Walmart shoppers in the country. She and my late mother have gone to dozens of store in the southeastern United States. I remember a visit they made to Albany a few years back – probably just after the Daughter was born – and they wanted to go to the local Walmart EVERY SINGLE DAY they were in town. And this was the previous Walmart, NOT the one expanded in 2008 to be the largest Walmart Supercenter in the United States.

Whereas I’m not quite as enthusiastic. I rather like the success story of Sam Walton, going from a single store to become the largest private employer in the world with over two million employees. But some of the company policies have made me wary.

I recall reading in the 1990s about Walmart entering towns in the Midwest, driving out the local hardware store and other merchants. When it found a Walmart store was not profitable enough, it would pull out of the market, leaving the towns much worse off than they were when it arrived. Now that Walmart is having declining sales, this seems like a scenario that could be replicated. Its aggressive price challenge is aggravating its competitors, who claim Walmart has misrepresented the facts.

I find it odd that it has banned music with explicit lyrics, yet carries a full complement of assault weaponry that has recently included the Bushmaster AR-15, which was used in the Sandy Hook (Connecticut) Elementary School shooting and several other high-profile mass killings.

Walmart, many claim, is the epitome of economic inequity, when they could easily afford to pay their employees better, which led to the largest employee strike ever last autumn, and more actions in the spring, and again around this Thanksgiving. It’s clear that Wal-Mart’s low wages cost taxpayers money. By comparison, Mark Evanier and the Daily Kos tout Costco as a much better corporate entity.

Those Walton billionaires, sons and daughters of Sam, are bankrolling a number of controversial actions such as school “reform” efforts in Los Angeles.

Still, my personal antipathy has less to do with any of that than the one and only time I went to Walmart willingly. It was the autumn of 1994. I had just had a painful romantic breakup, and I needed a bunch of household items. Someone said that I should go to Walmart, which had opened only the year before in our area.

I took the bus out to the locale and started filling the shopping cart. I went home with several bags of stuff. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I was missing a bag. I called Walmart, and they found my missing merchandise at the register. It was too late to take the bus back to Walmart, but I said I would return the following day.

The next afternoon, I arrived at Walmart and waited for someone to get my bag from the manager’s office, where I was told my stuff would be. After at least a half-hour, I was told they couldn’t find my bag. But I could go back through the store and get the stuff again.

Now I hated going through the store the first time. Going through a second time, trying to find the SPECIFIC items I had purchased the day before was really difficult. The first time, I was just going up and down the aisles; this time, I had to try to match my previous purchases in terms of size and brand, and price; what a pain! I’ve never shopped there, or any Walmart, willingly since, as I find it too big for my taste.

And to answer the question of a hyphen or no hyphen in the name: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) [is] branded as Walmart.
***
A unified theory of shoving.


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

V is for Vulcan

I blame New York Erratic, and those ears, for this post about Vulcan.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I learned the word vulcanization. It had to do with a heat process involving the manufacturing of rubber tires, usually involving adding sulfur to the mix. The word was derived from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, from which the word volcano also evolved.

Thus, I was somewhat confused when I started watching the original Star Trek television series. I was not a big enthusiast initially, but my father was. The first officer was a character named Spock, not to be confused with the then-famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock.

This Spock was part Vulcan and part earthling, AND he was FROM the planet Vulcan, which didn’t make a bit of linguistic sense to me at all. Someone from Venus is a Venusian, or a Martian is from Mars, and the fact that “Vulcan” was used as both the noun and the adjective bothered me somewhat.

I was not enough of a fan to know this: “Its inhabitants were originally called Vulcanians; a name used by Spock in the Original Series episode ‘A Taste of Armageddon’, by Federation colonists in ‘This Side of Paradise’ and by Harry Mudd in ‘Mudd’s Women’.” Now THAT makes much more sense.

Of course, that TV show lasted only three years (1966-1969), and that was that for Star Trek. Well, except for the animated series (1973-1974); four spinoff television series that ran from 1987 to 2005, sometimes concurrently; and a dozen films, starting in 1979, which has kept the Star Trek universe alive, if not most of the Vulcans. Or Vulcanians. (Is that a spoiler?)

(I blame New York Erratic, and those ears, for this post.)


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

U is for University at Albany

Since I graduated, the university has become even larger.

The University at Albany, my library school alma mater, has undergone tremendous changes in its nearly 170 years. It started as a Normal School. It became a charter member of the State University of New York (SUNY) when the system began in 1948, and the school expanded its mission beyond teacher education to a broader liberal arts university in the 1960s.

The campus on the border of the city of Albany proper has an ever-expanding uptown facility, built, I’ve discovered, on the former site of the Albany Country Club. When I went to graduate school in the School of Public Administration back in 1979, my classes were all in the uptown campus, a large and sprawling locale with bad signage. That campus was a location for the 1981 movie Rollover, a truly terrible film with Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda, because of its “resemblance to modern Middle Eastern architecture.”

When I went to library school in 1990, however, I attended the older, and the more civilized, downtown campus, which was right-sized for me with only a half dozen academic buildings. I did have to trek occasionally uptown, but buses shuttle between the two campuses regularly.

Since I graduated, the university has become even larger, with more buildings on the uptown campus. An east campus, in neighboring Rensselaer County, was developed by purchasing a former pharmaceutical company complex, which focuses on biotechnology. Possibly most notably, there is the ironically massive College of Nanotechnology, which has literally altered the landscape of Washington Avenue Extension. Recently, the nanotech has been spun off into its own school, despite the opposition of former UAlbany president Karen Hitchcock, whose opinion on this issue I share.

Some of the many famous alumni of the university have included Harvey Milk (1951), the openly gay former San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated in 1978; authors Joseph E. Persico (1952), biographer of Edward R. Murrow, Nelson Rockefeller, William Casey; and Gregory Maguire (1976), author of Wicked; and actors Edward Burns, Harold Gould (1947), Steve Guttenberg, and D. B. Woodside (1991).


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

T is for Title songs for pop albums that have no title songs

You Can Dance is the opening phrase of the Madonna song Get Into the Groove and the title of a dance compilation album of her songs.

So I had this bright idea of writing this trial balloon of a post elsewhere and post the completed item here. Ah, but I got no responses to the core question, though I DID think of another, VERY obvious example.

There is this song called Magnet and Steel by a guy named Walter Egan that was a Top 10 song in 1978. I liked it, as it had a certain stroll feeling. Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, the newish and commercially successful additions to Fleetwood Mac, sing on the chorus, BTW. I bought the album Not Shy, on vinyl – still have it, in fact – and realized that Magnet & Steel served as a quasi-title song for the album. The line in the chorus, “With you, I’m not shy,” is sung several times.

This got me wondering: what other songs functionally serve as the title song, but are not the actual title of the album? That is, the title of the album appears in the lyric of the song? Note: only the first batch has links to the songs.

Brain Damage by Pink Floyd from Dark Side of the Moon, possibly the most famous.
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana from Nevermind, the obvious choice I didn’t think of until much later.
Sunny Came Home by Shawn Colvin from A Few Small Repairs.
Washington Bullets by the Clash from Sandinista!
I’m Lucky by Joan Armatrading from Walk Under Ladders.
Alison by Elvis Costello from My Aim Is True.
You Learn by Alanis Morissette from Jagged Little Pill.
Down on the Corner by Creedence Clearwater Revival from Willy and the Poor Boys.
Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme.
One I just discovered: Great Spirit by Robert Plant from the Fate of Nations album. Here are some of the lyrics:
I love my brother, I must share the seed
That falls through fortune at my feet
The Fate of Nations and of all their need
Lies trapped inside of these hearts of greed
That Day Is Done by Paul McCartney from Flowers in the Dirt:
“She Sprinkles Flowers In The Dirt
That’s When A Thrill Becomes A Hurt,
I Know I’ll Never See Her Face.
She Walks Away From My Resting Place.”
Close enough: Fine Line by Paul McCartney contains a line about “chaos and creation”, though the album is Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

The naming of live albums falls into this category:
Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer from Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends.
I Don’t Want to Go Home by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes from Reach Up and Touch the Sky.

At least two Paul Simon greatest hits so titled (or subtitled):
Graceland on Shining Like A National Guitar
Train in the Distance from Negotiations and Love Songs

Similarly, You Can Dance is the opening phrase of the Madonna song Get Into the Groove and the title of a dance compilation album of her songs.

This is what I’d like to know: can you think of any others? The live album Steal Your Face by Grateful Dead is named after the song He’s Gone, but that song does not appear on the album, so that wouldn’t count.
***
Ken Jennings is wondering “what the greatest trio of back-to-back-to-back album tracks in pop history might be. Some other candidates that leaped to mind…”

“Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You” from U2′s The Joshua Tree
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper
“Ziggy Stardust,” “Suffragette City,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
“Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “My Hometown” from Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

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