Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
Before my blueray player decided it didn’t like Netflix any longer I was enjoying Miss Fisher’s Mysteries. More than once, the credits started to roll and the accompanying song was delightful and fresh in a way that 1920s radio mixes are new and fresh. Being a popular show, of course the soundtrack is available commercially, however, I suspected that a lot of the songs would be freely available courtesy of the Internet Archive. I was right, and I made you a little mix of all the songs I could find for Season One with a script I have been dying to try.
Apartment and tenement dwellers in the Southeastern region of the United States have been harangued by a mysterious creature that haunts the outdoor stairwells of their buildings. “My boy was coming home from school and saw this thing crouching under the stairs and looking at him through the steps; it was making some kind of whispering noise and scared my boy half to death. He ran and got the security guard but by the time they got back to the stairwell, the thing had vanished,” attests Joann Collins of Indianola. The Collins’s aren’t the only residents of Greenacres that have seen the creature. Apartment manager, Rod Dylan, has a stack of resident complaints on his desk and has ordered extra security services to help the residents feel safe.
Dr. Everret Blakingson suspects that these stairwell sightings are directly related to other, equally mysterious, ‘fly-by’ incidents. “These two sets of sightings happen near each other and in the same spaces of time at every location where sightings of either sort are reported,” he says. The ‘fly-by’ sightings happen most often after rain when the sky is still partially shaded by dispersing clouds. Multiple people have seen a large winged figure pass quickly above. Many more people have been surprised when the shadow of a large winged creature flew over them. 
Oddly enough, the ‘fly-by’ sightings are often associated with rainbows.
Al Johnson, one of a group of people in Live Oak who experienced a ‘fly-by’ sighting described the creature as terrifying with large bared teeth and flashing eyes. “It looked like there was lightnin’ comin’ out of it’s eyes and it’s mouth was open in a crazy manic grimmace you know, like a crazy person, but it weren’t no person!” –Johnson.
The police of cities where the sightings have been most prevalent have either declined to comment or said that they are investigating civilian reports of danger. Joel Hanson of the Hoover police suggests residents, “report strange persons if they see them and lock house and car doors if they feel unsafe, just as they should with any perceived threat.”
I had a song stuck in my head. It was playing on a loop through most of the afternoon. I input the lyrics into a search box and found out that the primary refrain of my song was a movie: Yidl mitn Fidl or Yiddle with his Fiddle. According to the National Center for Jewish Cinema, Yidl mitn Fidl was “the most commercially successful musical in the history of the Yiddish cinema.” The story about a penniless father and daughter who become traveling musicians has songs, but not the song stuck in my head. There is a clip of “Yidl mitn Fidl” from the movie on the Jewish Women’s Archive and also a version by the Klezmer Quartett Heidelberg:
A cursory search of the internets found “Yiddle on your Fiddle play some Ragtime” by Irving Berlin.
This was also not the song stuck in my head. When I went home last night, I searched through our newly organized record collection for the song. I knew I had heard it in the house, on our little multi-function record machine. I was unsuccessful. Then, while watching Sense and Sensibility I had a brainstorm and went to our CD cabinet. I found Music From the Yiddish Radio Project and on it was Yidl mitn Fidl by the Barry sisters, and Eureka! That was it, so I share it with you. Enjoy!
As a special close to the week’s activities, Kyle Courtney released “The origin of U.S. fair use,” an artistic rendering of the codification of fair use into the Copyright Act of 1976… , which readers may explore here.
Source: Fair Use Week 2015 | Harvard OSC
I do because I am listening to Noisli.
Long ago, I used to listen to language learning lessons while doing my daily work. Then, the daily work started demanding a little more of my cognitive abilities and I switched to listening to music. Now, I can only manage chamber music in the background because excess input, along with all the other stuff I’m staring at-reading-writing-adding, breaks my head.
My initial method for bringing a little serenity to my desk environment was to make sure my desktop backgrounds were all simple and expansive nature, like a field of flowers or the interlacing branches of a tree. I can’t remember where I read about it first, but this article: “How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies” explains how looking on nature alleviates stress and focuses attention. I also don’t know if the photographic projections of nature on my computer screen are any real type of stand in; time will tell.
In addition to the visuals, I have added some ambient nature noises to my day. Noisli is my number one right now, but I have also scoped out the nature sounds at ambient-mixer and the simplicity of iSerenity.
I saw Alan Cumming at our local playhouse and had a fabulous time. Don’t forget the condoms Valentine’s revelers!
I was there and yes, it was awesome. I am also super excited that one of my favorite songs got recorded on this video. yay!
Source: 