Know-It-All

“Man, you know, these young guys, they know all the modes, they know all the chords, they can play high and low and fast, and they can do amazing things, but the one thing they don’t know is how to leave the bone alone.” — attributed to Gerry Mulligan as quoted by Herb Alpert in a New Yorker piece by Nick Paumgarten (April 10, 2006, page 33).

Web Humor: Silly or Scary

The following, emailed to me by a friend who is not usually prone to disseminating such things, is either really silly or very scary. Perhaps both.

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How can we achieve 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

On the other hand,
B-U-L-L-$-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that, while Hardwork and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it’s the BULL$HIT and ASSKISSING that will put you over the top !!!

D-E-V-R-A, alone, only gets you 50%, but D-E-V-R-A-D-O-W-R-I-T-E gives you 144% of your minimum daily requirement. (Of course T-E-R-R-Y-T-E-A-C-H-O-U-T scores even higher — 179% — so what else is new? Cheers TT, here’s to you — may you remain in the stunned but happy state of grace to which I will continue to aspire.)

Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning often means organizing piles of memorabilia — thank you who invented scanners. My latest cleaning/organizing/scanning project was a direct response to John’s desire to share with his family (all the way down to those great grandchild) the events surrounding the honor he received this past January. I scanned all the NEA Jazz Masters and IAJE memorabilia we collected, added in some photos (by Leroy Hamilton), audio and video clips, plus a little narration and a bunch of clippings to create a computer CD. When I decided to create the presentation as if it were a web site (so that anyone with a browser could open the files regardless of what computer system they use) my tech guru, Robert, suggested I use a free WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) open source web authoring program called
NVU. Worked like a charm.

Speaking of a great use of photos, I recently took time to really check out Bill Crow’s new web site. WOW! Bill has posted beaucoup photos, and you really should browse the whole site so as not to miss Bill’s four-up head shot for commercial casting or the one with him riding off to a gig on his Lambretta motor scooter with his bass strapped on to the back. And don’t limit your meanderings to the photo pages, there are wonderful pix accompanying the bio and lots of links to other great sites. (Thanks, Bill, for including me on the links list.)

While I’m on the subject of visuals and spring cleaning, online re-designs are in the air: two of note this week are The New York Times and All About Jazz. In addition to a cleaner-looking more readable appearance, and the inclusion of more multimedia and podcasts, the other latest/hottest must-have “element” seems to be a listing (withy links) of the most popular stories — either the most read, and/or the most emailed. The Times also has a list, updated hourly, of the “most blogged.”

These lists put a new spin on the idea of word-of-mouth or grassroots. It used to be that one person told five (or fifty or even five hundred), and they who were told in turn told others, who told others, and so forth. In that scenario, the telling takes place amongst the audience or consumers. With these lists, supported by the automated aggregation of data, the publisher or originator is now a direct and ongoing participant in the propagation. I’m not sure how that is going to change things, but I suspect it will have some impact down the road. I’ll bet Malcolm Gladwell would have an opinion about this.

As always, time will tell. Meanwhile, what do you think?

Hoisted By My Own Petard

I received the following email from someone who calls himself my friend:

One of the gimmicks I detest most is the “$99 value, yours for only $24.99,”…

vs.

Men, Women, and Girl Singers
Retail Price: $14.95
Online Sale Price: $13.46

That’s all it said, and the subject line was “LOL”

It had me scratching my head for a minute or three. The detested gimmick part came from my post on Friday, but $13.46? Where did that come from? I sell a few copies of my own book from time to time, but I don’t sell at a discount. I called my friend. “Where’d you find that?” I asked. Now he really was laughing out loud. “You posted the link on your site.”

DUH.

After kicking myself three times and wishing for home, I tried to wiggle out of culpability – after all, I didn’t come up with the price; that was my friends at ejazzlines.

“You cash the checks?” he asked.

Hoisted by my own petard.

It’s a clichéd phrase, and we know what it means, but do we really use the expression correctly? And what, exactly, is a petard?

The word: I have always assumed that a petard was a rope. I fantasized that it was a nautical term, imagining a hanging by pirates at sea — I don’t know where I got that idea. I thought that to be hoisted by ones own petard was akin to being given enough rope to hang oneself. But a petard is not a rope, it’s a bomb. My Visual Thesaurus by ThinkMap says that a petard is an explosive device from Medieval days (sometime between 300 and 1500 AD) used to break down as gate or wall. My Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM is more specific, defining it as “A small bomb made of a metal or wooden box filled with powder, used to blow in a door etc. or to make a hole in a wall,” and citing first use as mid sixteenth century (specifically between 1530 and 1569). The derivation? Péter meaning “break wind.”

The expression: “Hoist with one’s own petard” was coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet (sometime between 1600 and 1602) A Wikipedia entry explains

The phrase is usually misquoted as “see the engineer hoist by his own petard” and is taken to mean “the hangman hanged with his own rope,”… Hamlet’s actual meaning is “cause the bomb maker to be blown into the air with his own bomb,” metaphorically turning the tables on Claudius, whose messengers are killed instead of Hamlet.

Wikipedia also asserts that “a petard was a 19th Century animal trap, consisting of a rope and a bent branch that caught the desired beast by one leg as it stepped into a loop in the rope and pulled it up into the air.” However, I can not find any corroboration for this other than some online chatter that seems to have proliferated the aforementioned definition intact. There is no such mention in any of my reference books.

In any case, the gist is being ruined by one’s own devices, whatever that device may be…bomb, rope, or poison pen.

Advice

I came across the following in an old issue (Fall 2005) of the Author’s Guild Bulletin:

The late E.B. White wrote to Linda H. Davis, young author of a biography about White’s wife, Katherine White: “Advice from this elderly practioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in the project. Write about it by day, and dream about it by night.”

Practical advice is a good thing. Proverbial wisdom, on the other hand, is more difficult to apply:

If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep. – Yiddish proverb

If you want your eggs hatched, sit on them yourself. – Haitian proverb