Weirdness
At the stroke of midnight I made my deadline! I hate to take on freelance work and never solicit it, but when I get axed I don’t know how to say no. Particularly as it’s a display for a local charity.
Charities. Making you feel guilty since…forever.
Anyhoo, in the comments to the previous post, the question came up — why does that banjo have four strings, but six tuners? See, this is why I love British banjos. They’re so gosh-darned weird.
That is actually a five-string banjo, and it’s strung typically for a zither banjo. Observe the headstock in the picture above (a banjo of mine, and one that I’m convinced was made out of a piano stool).
Four strings go directly from the headstock, across the nut to the bridge. One goes into a little hole (indicated by the arrow), under the fingerboard in a tube, and pops out at the fifth fret. That’s called a ‘tunneled fifth.’
And the sixth peg? Just for show. Some British banjo makers claimed that three pegs on one side and two on the other just wouldn’t look aesthetically pleasing, so they made the tuners pointlessly symmetrical.
I once suspected that this was boolsheet and they did it because standard three-on-a-side tuners were mass produced and cheaper, but you sometimes see this arrangement on the fanciest and most expensive of zither banjos. So…artard, I guess.
Sorry I gave you short shrift this week. What the hell is shrift, come to think of it? Oh. Google says it’s confession, like to a priest. If you give shrift, you are shriven. Okay. Back here tomorrow, 6pm WBT — DEAD POOL ROUND 86!
June 9, 2016 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 7
Mine! All mine!
Look at this fugly beast. JUST LOOK AT IT! This is probably the ugliest banjo I’ve ever seen, and now it belongs to me.
Well, it will do, if the eBay seller ever puts it in the post. The suspense is killing me.
If I’d known Britain was the Land of Goofy Banjos, I’d have moved here years ago. This will be goofy banjo number ten, if anyone is keeping score (eleven, if I manage to pull off the ukulele conversion I’ve been playing with). Though technically, this one is (probably) Swiss. From the description:
Here is my uncles old banjo he had in his shed I don’t know exactly how old it is but I’m 50 and remember he had when we were kids my auntie said that he bought it backdrop abroad before she knew him when he was in the army and she thinks it was Switzerland and can only remember him say he got it off an old man on a farm who made it for his loved one
That’s right, it’s a lurve banjo.
It’s a proper five string. Four store-bought ones either side, and then see that peg in the middle? The one that looks like it was chewed out of a rutabaga by a frenzied mink? That’s the fifth string peg: the string goes under the fretboard below the nut and pops out again at the fifth fret (that little white dot is the fifth-string nut). Very common feature in goofy British banjos (actually, a tunneled fifth is now an option on custom-made fine American banjos, one of which this emphatically isn’t).
These old things often don’t age well, owing to some of their more eccentric design features. But, then, they don’t cost much, either. And it’s not like they’re musical instruments or anything.
March 1, 2016 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 13
Night in the old town
Steeleye Span was very good. The crowd was very old, but we made a respectable amount of noise. Booze was served. A good time was had by all.
The venue was something else. Believe it or not, that neoclassical thing in the middle of the picture was built as a church. The picture is maybe 1915. The building has recently been renovated into an arts center, St Mary in the Castle.
You’re not aware of it so much; it doesn’t look like that from the outside. You enter through a nondescript modern glass box down at the base there, but then you find yourself in a lovely semicircular hall. With a dome. And pillars. And less than comfortable straight-backed chairs, but we’ll ignore that for the moment. It’s early days and they haven’t got everything worked out yet.
Like the acoustics. The sound was kind of muddy and the instrument separation wasn’t good. Not enough to ruin the gig — not by a long shot — but those pillars play merry hell with the sound system.
But it was very impressive and pretty easy for us to get to. Hope they have some more good stuff there in future. Good night!
December 11, 2015 — 12:19 am
Comments: 6
This is old
This came up in conversation today. Now that I’ve looked it up, I might as well share.
I can’t find a reference, but per my memory: the story goes that a guy made this and sent it to his girlfriend for her birthday (you’ll see a dedication to April). And then it went viral, back in the happy olden times before “go viral” was a thing people said.
If you’ve not seen it before, enjoy.
August 20, 2015 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 9
I bought a sad ukulele
I bought this at the country fair. It is a sad, sad ukulele. The brand and model is a Jetel 5 and it has 1937 written inside in pencil (also Dalington, Sussex and a name I can’t quite make out).
I managed to get it completely apart without breaking any of the metal bits (metal fatigue is a serious problem in these old things) so I stand a chance of getting it all put back together again.
Don’t ask me why. My shriveled stump of a maternal instinct is triggered by grubby stray animals and really messed up gear (the guys at my shooting range offered to help me buy smarter after I came in with a succession of crappy handguns. Crappy handguns that I loved, thank you anyway fellas).
I already have an excellent uke. I’m thinking of making this one into a piccolo banjo, if I can figure out a clever way to hang a fifth string off’n the fifth fret.
August 11, 2015 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 15
Joni Mitchell reminds me of someone. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Ramses II!
Okay, that was mean. She’s always been a slightly strange looking person, age has just added a subtle layer of WTF.
There’s a long article on Joni Mitchell in NY Mag this month, if’n you’re interested. I was a huge fan in my teens. Back when she wrote great love songs, not incomprehensible jazz boolshit.
The other day, I was trying to tell Uncle B about the freaky disease she’s got, and I couldn’t remember the name. It was in the article: Morgellons disease.
Have you heard of this thing? The Wikipedia article states flatly that it’s a delusion. Which surprises me, since Wikipedia is usually willing to equivocate on controversial topics — so perhaps it’s not so controversial any more.
I read about it years ago, when it first appeared (2002, per the article). Sufferers believe itchy little colored wires or fibers come poking out of their skin. They claim the fibers, when analyzed, are not vegetable nor animal nor mineral.
Doctors say Morgellons patients are round-the-bend bugshit animalcrackers.
If you ever want to spend an afternoon down the rabbit hole, have a Google at Morgellons. You can start with the Morgellons Research Foundation.
How come the clever ones are always crazy?
February 10, 2015 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 16
Rockin’ that walker, granny
We went to see 10cc in Canterbury Saturday night. Canterbury is a long old haul for us, but it’s a great place and we don’t go often enough.
Remember 10cc? I’m Not in Love…Rubber Bullets…The Things We Do For Love. They were big in the Seventies.
They still had one member from the very first configuration, two who had been with them since the early Seventies, and two who have played with the band for a decade. It was a tight, impressive performance in a good sized auditorium that was very nearly sold out. Mucho recommendo, if you’re in the UK during the rest of their tour.
I don’t know why I was shocked — possibly because I’m stupid and innumerate — but I was pretty much the youngest person in the room. Blue hair and walking sticks as far as the eye could see.
Funny thing about that. By the end of the performance, every old crock in the auditorium was upstanding, clapping, stamping and rocking out. I think that had a leeetle something to do with the beer and wine they were selling in the lobby. I saw convoys of oldsters slipping off for reinforcements.
Still, it warmed my heart to see them newfangled mechanical hips working out so well.
February 9, 2015 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 11
For your delectation, a whole lotta suck
Anorak has a feature on the 13 worst recordings of the 1960s, and they illustrate it with this album cover of Mrs Miller (that one. Up there. At the top of this post).
Any mention of Mrs Miller lights up a whole row of braincells, a bright line of musical suckery from Florence Foster Jenkins to Wing.
Thanks to a link Oceania provided (I know, I know), I can inform you that for under twenty bucks, Wing will phone you up at your appointed time and place and sing to you. I realize people of good musical taste shrink from this sort of thing, but fuck it — I’m a banjo player. I listened to samples of Wing’s catalog the other night until I laughed like Muttley.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to William Hung, he’s now a crime scene investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. So, living the CSI: dream, bitchez.
February 27, 2014 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 15
birds and artards
So, ten white Gibson Les Paul electric guitars, four white Thunderbird basses, 70 zebra finches. It’s art. Or, if you’re called something gay like Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, it’s music.
If you’re anywhere near Salem, MA, you can go see it at the Peabody Essex Museum. NPR is all over it, of course. The installation requires a highly controlled environment, an on-call veterinarian and a staff of full-time behind-the-scene poop-wipers. The result sounds like somebody absent-mindedly tuning up before a gig (the guitars are clearly open-tuned to a chord). It has all the soothing, pleasant mindlessness of several wind chimes in a light breeze.
Reddit has a subforum called /r/mildlyinteresting where an awful lot of official state-sanctioned art seems to belong these days.
January 22, 2014 — 11:29 pm
Comments: 15
Dagnabbit, we missed Bloodstock again :(
Bloodstock is an annual four day festival of heavy metal music set in the picturesque village of Walton on Trent, Derbyshire. Because England.
About a hundred bands and fifteen thousand fans turn up for it. But we didn’t. Because it was last weekend. And we are not really fans. (Well, Uncle B had his moments. He’s more into early liturgical music now).
BBC took a few snaps here.
That guy on the right? His cleavage tattoo says “1921__2009.” I’m pretty sure dude got ink for his gran. Awwww.
August 13, 2013 — 10:56 pm
Comments: 24