The Information Super-Frog

Dolly Parton in New Orleans, 1988 television show. Internet Archive. 1980s VHS quality, but interesting. Some good music and nostalgic scenes. Last part is visit to Cajun country. Sound gets somewhat warbly towards the end.

https://archive.org/details/DollyDownInNewOrleans

I dreamed I was reviewing documents from a British East India Company officer from the start of the 19th century. It detailed an expedition to an obscure location inhabited by descendants of Viking settlers still using traditional iron-age technology and lifestyle a thousand years later. The account was not completely unknown to scholars, but was mostly neglected other than noted for first recounting of geographic features, but I realized that the anthropological and archaeological significance was much greater. It described in detail the tools weapons and other implements they used, along with the native names. Some of them were only known from archaeological contexts and how they were actually used had been only conjectural. "Reading" the account, it played for me as a movie I watched. It included the British ship landing, skirmishing with the locals then learning to communicate and trade.

Great compilation of 1922-1924 recordings by the Abe Lyman orchestra. Of particular interest is the work of New Orleans cornetist Ray Lopez (b 1889), one of the top white hot trumpeters in New Orleans in the early 1910s and a significant figure in the spread of the New Orleans style nationally in the later 1910s.

His style has many similarities to his contemporary Freddie Keppard, and superior in technique and invention to another contemporary Nick LaRocca.

The Lyman group is a dance band not a jazz band per se, but gives many opportunities for Lopez to shine. Like the more famous and dramatic younger Louis Armstrong with the Fletcher Henderson Orch a couple years later, the band orchestrates some of their New Orleans trumpeter's hot variations.

https://youtu.be/8fGC4X9hF-0

Novelty mute work was a key component in the early New Orleans style of Lopez - as it was of Armstrong's mentor, Joe Oliver. (I sometimes wonder if a large factor in this style becoming considered dated by the later 1920s was the fact that Louis Armstrong mostly abandoned it, as perhaps the one technique where he couldn't surpass Oliver.)

Short Ray Lopez bio from former Red Hot Archive: https://syncopatedtimes.com/ray-lopez-1889-1979/

1958 transcript of interview with Lopez:

https://musicrising.tulane.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/07/r.lopez-8-30-1958.pdf

Another episode in 'My subconscious seems not to understand how names work in the waking world'.

I dreamed of the picturesque Alpine resort town of "Bernie Sanders, Switzerland".

Last night I dreamed I was one of 3 people from the US who went to Ukraine to get some honey. That we were in the honey business was actually a cover for that we were journalists investigating irregularities in the international honey trade. And really it was all part of a television show.

I was the youngest of the 3 US honey traders, I think we were supposed to be brothers, the other two did most of the talking I mostly just stood and watched, but secretly I was the one in charge of all the machinery which was secretly recording everything.

We were inside a large tall room in a building somewhere in Ukraine (no evidence of a war going on in my dream). It was a commercial establishment and office, and there were lots of shelves crowded with things, some of which had clearly been sitting there for decades if not more than a century.

The leader of our group went to the owner of the business with a jar of honey, complaining "We paid for top quality honey, but you gave us bottom quality honey! Taste this!" The business head tried to brush us off, until the leader of our group told him, "Look, I have a market for top quality honey in the US, and if you can get it for us, we can both make lots of money. If you can't get top quality honey, I'll look elsewhere." So then we were trying to work things out.

Then a group of Russian spies came in with guns, and took us upstairs and were going to kill us, but somehow we escaped.

Back in the States, my character only had a few minor scenes to film. It turned out our whole adventure was just a subplot and we were minor characters in the tv series. However the tv series turned out to be very successful, the biggest hit series. I hadn't known until we were in a car on the freeway, and when the show came on everyone pulled over and stopped their cars to watch the show on their smart-phones.

The most famous episode was one where Brad Pitt and Elly May Clampett had explicit and vigorous sex on live tv (!) which became the most talked about tv episode ever. I hadn't known any of this while I was busy filming in Ukraine, but now that I was in a hit tv series, even as a minor character I was getting some good residuals as payments for all the reruns.

YouTube video "The Lies We've Been Told About Frank Lloyd Wright"

https://youtu.be/zji7Zc-AYxA

I believe I've discussed Wright online previously, and my opinion got some dramatic pushback, but I couldn't find in in a search - perhaps it was on Usenet or some lost forum of yesteryear.

I acknowledge his brilliance as an artist, creating buildings that are interesting to look at. But if one considers part of the job of an architect is to design structurally sound buildings useful for people, he was not even competent.

My opinions developed from visiting some of his buildings on road trips in the US Midwest in the 1980s.
One in particular was the Neils House in Minneapolis, a private home at the time, and I got not only a tour but a good bit of family backstory. I first noticed the open carport which needed a short walk to the front door - Minneapolis has very cold winters and lots of snow, so almost every other house has garages with garage doors that can close and an interior door into the house. Inside, there were multiple levels requiring regularly going up and down a few steps, and otherwise open space separated by walls that went up 6 feet but left space before reaching the ceiling, and separated living spaces without any evident usefulness and just made going from one part of the house to another more awkward. There was also the maid's quarters, designed for the family maid, a short woman of 4 foot something - the ceilings were 5 feet tall, so the rooms unusable for many people of average height. When the water-heater had to be replaced, it necessitated hiring a crane and dismantling (and later reconstructing) part of the chimney and fireplace to remove the old water heater and lower a new one in - the only other option would have been to demolish multiple interior walls. The Neils family found the house impractical to live in, but maintained ownership because, hey, it was by the famous Frank Lloyd Wright - it was irregularly occupied by various young relatives as their first place out of their parents' house while going to college.


Uncyclopedia: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright

The intro seems basically the same as the snark I put there in my brief time on uncyclopedia some 20 years ago:

"Frank "Lloyd" Wright (b. horse & buggy era – d. hula hoop era) was the world's most famous incompetent architect.

Known for creating improbable buildings out of untested materials, he inflicted hundreds of unlivable houses, unusable office buildings, and frighteningly ugly landmarks on the gullible public. The hallmarks of Wright's architectural style are the leaking roof, the broken window, and the crumbling foundation. Along with Le Corbusier, he was key in changing the discipline of architecture from providing basic shelter for people into a series of passive-aggressive pranks."

Top radio shows IMO that I've been familiar enough with to have an opinion, no order except for the first one which is my #1, one of the most amazing things ever done with the medium.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Happy Station Show
In Our Time
The Jack Benny Program
Le Show
The Hep Cat's Ball
Von Turk's Oriental Foxtrot Museum
Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me
The Goon Show
Stoopnagle and Budd
Schickele Mix

Mother's mother's father died before I was born. I was told his ancestors were Dutch. In the USA in the 19th century "Dutch" was often used not just for the Netherlands, but for countries speaking Germanic languages in general, but the family was specifically from the Netherlands.

Sometime in my tweens I looked over a copy of a family history which my grandmother was loaned by one of her aunts. It was a rather extensive and sometimes chatty 400 year amateur family tree with stories short and long about various persons on it. Some details I recall were that the family came to America as early settlers in New Netherlands, what later became New York State.

One doesn't get to pick one's ancestors. I'm rather glad however that I've never found any involved in the slave trade. There was no mention of such in the account, though I've sometimes wondered if I knew full stories, early New Amsterdam colonists might have been more likely to have some involvement in the wrong side.

Some settled to farm "upstate" (where would "upstate" have been in 16--? Albany? The Bronx?). An "Indian raid" kidnapped the women from the settlement. They were successfully ransomed 6 months later for some barrels of whiskey. With a little simple arithmetic concerning birth date and gestation, this was the only bit of Native American ancestry I found any documented confirmation of in my family tree, though there are stories of some on 3 different ancestral branches.

The American Revolution split the family, with some on the Loyalist and some on the Patriot side. A fair number of detailed incidents were recounted. One Patriot great-g uncle was hung by the British as a spy. One Loyalist ancestor left an extensive account of running from and hiding from gangs of Patriots, including hiding under hay in a barn - I wondered why that account was considered worthy of preserving. The Loyalists moved to Canada.

Some of the family were named "Defoe". My grandmother liked to claim that side of the family were related to writer Daniel Defoe, but I saw no trace of it in the tree, and I rather doubt it as Daniel Defoe's actual birth name was "Foe".

We've had an uninvited visitor for the past month here at Villa Ranocchio, New Orleans. Some scratching and thumping in the wall space leading from under the house to the attic by Ms. H's office. From the noises, something larger than the the mouse problem we had a few years ago (and we've had mouse traps and poison around the property since). At first I thought it likely a possum, as I've seen 2 dead ones nearby over the past decade. But it started to make skittering sounds, which Ms H recorded on her phone; we compared it, and it was clearly raccoon. A few days later I saw it climbing up an oak tree, then a couple days after that running across the street, confirming the identification (though it went too fast for me to get a photo). Both were daytime sightings, somewhat unusual as they're mostly nocturnal.

As my previous entry noted, at first my subconscious conflated the raccoon with Shia LaBeouf, obnoxious unwelcome celebrity in New Orleans. In Cajun country, raccoons are often called "chaoui", from the Choctaw word. In the city the slang term "trash panda" is fairly common. Ms H's other language is French, and she noted that in conventional French the term for raccoon is "raton laveur" which can roughly be translated to English as "wash-rat". We both found that amusing, and we've found ourselves referring to it as "the wash-rat".

Raccoons and opossums are still found in parts of the city urbanized for more than 150 years, what with the old trees, bits of area along the riverfront batture where there aren't wharves often left wild, and the creatures adaptability to scavenging human garbage. I have nothing against them, but when they decide to set up camp in a house frame it can be harmful to the house and potentially dangerous to the animal (don't claw or bite the wiring!). I sprayed "Critter Ridder" and sprinkled cayenne pepper, but wash-rat didn't seem to get the message they were unwelcome.

So I put out a message on community chat. Someone in the neighborhood loaned me a live catch trap. My plan was to catch wash-rat and relocate it to the forest at the back of City Park. (I watched some raccoon trapping videos on YouTube to get the procedure, and it seemed doable.)

I set up the trap a couple of days ago. I ate most of an apple, poked a hole in the core and ran a string through it, and hung it in the back of the set trap. Night before last we had a rainstorm pass through, so I wasn't surprised the wash-rat hadn't ventured out. When I checked this morning, however, the apple core was gone but the trap unsprung. Victory to wash-rat! However this is just round one. I plan to rebait the trap and see if I can reset it to spring at a more sensitive setting.