Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 94

Ballin’ the Jack – fingerstyle guitar

I always liked this peppy tune from the ragtime era. Watch the video (below) of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly doing the song and dance number if you want to see and hear some classy talent. There are a bunch of videos of bands or others playing it, but they almost all start with the main theme, not the intro. I have a record of John James playing it on guitar but I never found any tablature so I decided to arrange it from the piano music. It has a weird chord progression. The intro is written in G and the main theme in B-flat. I had to transpose those to C and E-flat respectively. E-flat sounds like a bad key for guitar but most of the chords are C, F, G7, and B-flat. The intro is written with a repeat, but I skip the 2nd time through and go right into the main theme because the intro really isn’t very catchy.

 

 

Now for the real pros:

 

 

Bomb squad buried in mud

At least, that what the newscaster said today on channel 5. “After being buried in mud for decades, the Alameda County bomb squad declared the dynamite was no longer dangerous.”

I am reminded of the many examples of syntactic ambiguity taught in my sophomore English class by Mr. Bayse. How hard is it to understand that the modifying dependent clause goes immediately before the thing it modifies? “The Alameda County bomb squad declared that after being buried in mud for decades, the dynamite was no longer dangerous.” Come on, newswriters, you can do better than an 8th grade C student.

Sorry, German-Americans, you aren’t the most populous group

Not long ago the national news organizations reported that that more Americans were descnded from German ancestors than from any other groups. These reports were no doubt based on the following data released by the U.S, Census Bureau. Observe these charts:

At first glance it seems pretty clear. Glance again. There are many problems with the notion that Germans are the most common ethnic group based on this data. Of course, the data is 16 years old now and the influx of Hispanics and Asians may have changed it by now, but I am more concerned with how to interpret this data for now. Of course, most Americans probably have mixed ancestry. I would venture to guess that most Americans with German surnames also have ancestors with English names and lineage. The reverse is also true. My surname is English but I have German ancestors. So the first question is how many Americans have some English ancestry and how many have some German ancestry. The above charts don’t show this. Since the original colonies were predominantly inhabited by English immigrants, with most Germans coming later, I would guess that more Germans ended up intermarrying with English descendants than the other way around. Still, this is speculation on my part. For purposes of analysis, let’s assume the simplest case, which is also the one most in favor of the Germans as the leading group. I’ll assume that those identified as German are of 100% German ancestry and the English are 100% English, etc.

Look at the bar graph. Still mostly German, you say, right? Not so fast. Look at that group called American. Whoa. Who are they? They’re not Native Americans, i.e. American Indians, because that group is identified separately. It becomes necessary to determine the methodology used to identify the ancestry. I researched this and determined that the Census questionnaire simply asks what is your ancestry and provides a short blank line. The respondent must answer with one or two words of their choosing. It’s not multiple choice and there is no one verifying the answer. A 100% ethnic Han Chinese with a Chinese name could answer English and no one at the Census Bureau would change it. They could put Martian. It’s purely self-identification. So that raises the question of who answers “American”? Look at the geographic distribution. Without going into extensive argument and analysis, I believe it is quite clear that the people most likely to answer that way are those with the longest ancestral ties to the original colonists. Most of those people were of English ancestry or possibly from Scotland or Ireland, especially in the Appalachian region where the highest concentration of “American” responders reside. If you combine those who said English with those who said American the total is higher than Germans.

Then there is the issue of African-Americans. Set aside for the moment the fact that Africa is a continent, not a country, and African-Americans are descended from many different tribes, ethnic groups, and regions of Africa. It’s no secret that most have some ancestry from slaveholders of old. Note that the areas that show African-Americans as the predominant ancestry are surrounded by “Americans.” Think about how many African-Americans you know with German surnames and how many with English ones – Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jackson, Johnson,… need I go on? Few German immigrants settled in the south, especially during the days of slavery. It is also part of our ugly history that any person with any noticeable African ancestry has been considered black or African-American. Slaves were even marketed with terms like quadroon or octoroon. Someone who was seven-eights white European was still considered black and treated as such. It is fair to say that even today, many people of mixed race who actually have a majority of European ancestry, and this chart shows that to mean primarily English, consider themselves of African ancestry because American society has treated them that way. President Obama considers himself an African-American even though his mother was 100% white.

While none of this is absolute proof, I contend that this data actually provides overwhelming evidence that in fact for Americans it is the English who have the greatest representation among our ancestors. It also raises some very interesting and sometimes disturbing questions about what “ancestry” really means. Is it cultural? Genetic? Are Germans and Dutch different while African-Americans from west and east Africa are the same ethnicity? Is it our surname, our favorite food, our language? Does any of it matter? I’m having a 23andMe analysis done. It will be fun to see what it says about the genes, but I know one thing about my ancestry that it won’t show: I’m American. I have ancestors from England, Wales, Germany, Holland, and some with French- or Irish-sounding names. There’s even a rumor of a Cherokee ancestor who Anglicized his name. My son had his analysis done and he had a small but non-trivial amount of native American genes. My wife has good reason to think there is some native Mexican in her heritage along with the allegedly “pure” Castilian Spanish ancestor. It will be fun to see which of us contributed those genes.

Richard Smith plays Pineapple Rag on acoustic guitar

KidNAP, Inc. by J.T. Lewis

kidNAP Inc. by J.T. Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nick is a crazy detective, suffering from a brain injury incurred on the job. He returns from a stint of recovery in the desert to his Indiana sheriff’s department accompanied by two hallucinatory friends: Trucker, a good ol’ boy who wants to kick ass, and Alix, a horny purple-haired punk rocker girl who has other things in mind for people’s asses. I can’t really say I liked this book, but it had its moments. I only wish it didn’t have so many really irritating aspects, too.

Let’s start with the sex and cursing. Okay, this is a mystery and we expect some of that, but the sheer quantity of both sticks in the craw after a while. The sex was voluminous and gratuitous but at least it wasn’t crude like I’ve seen in all too many mysteries. The same could be said for the swearing. There was too much of it, but it wasn’t particularly offensive. Then there’s the constant giggling. Why is everyone giggling all the time? As for plausibility, well, you really think a hallucinating detective would be put back on the force? And his ex-wife jumps his bones every time she sees him. Really? A really smoking hot, horny ex-wife who can’t get laid for six months while Nick is in the desert? Where’d she hang out – a nunnery? And how many ex-wives do you know who are constantly begging for more sex from their ex? I don’t have any ex-wives, but I know some and their attitudes toward the ex-husbands are less than affectionate, shall we say.

The plot is actually pretty decent, what little time is spent on it. Some would-be models get kidnapped and some of them turn up dead. I won’t spoil the rest. The crimes, although not plausible, are at least original. The author evens sticks mostly to reasonable police procedure despite the sheriff being a farcical stereotype. As a retired FBI agent that’s often a bugaboo for me when authors don’t.

When he’s not filling the page with cursing or sex the author writes quite well, with wit and good flow, even good grammar. I was disappointed when about halfway through it became obvious he’d gotten tired of proofreading and errors began to creep in, especially wrong-word errors: “on his heals” [heels]; “wanted her for desert” [dessert]; “the grow of the truck engine” [growl]; “quite your whining” [quit]; “candidness” [candor]. I won’t list the grammar errors that started showing up. Sure, some of these are typos, but they still should have been caught. Even so, overall there are fewer such errors than in the typical self-published novel. Most readers don’t mind these anyway, I’ve found.

Near the end the FBI gets pretty harsh treatment and some of my regular readers may think my criticism is motivated by that, but I had already decided on my star ratings (2 on Goodreads, 3 on Amazon and my blog) and pretty much written the review in my head before I came to that. Most police-centered mysteries do the same and I’m used to it. I’ve even done it myself in my own books.

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Anagrams on the News

Entire Batcave recreated from scratch using LEGOs = Venturer crafts garish, elegant, comic, secret abode

Original article – MSN

Cliff Knowles Mysteries fan base growth

My book sales and blog readership have continued to grow. Thank you to my loyal readers.

This chart represents page views on my Cliff Knowles Mysteries web page and on this blog.

How the FBI Really Did It

iPhone broken

Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship by Robert Kurson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This swashbuckling pirate story has the advantage of being factual. Two deep sea divers found The Golden Fleece, the ship of pirate captain Joseph Bannister, in 2009. This book tells the tale of these modern day treasure hunters in a fast-paced, edge-of-the-chair thrill ride. Stylistically it’s not perfect. The author piles on the hyperbole. Everything and everyone is the most ___ in the world (fill in the blank: dangerous, incredible, respected, difficult, successful, etc.) Still, the divers and their story are amazing and worthy of most of it. They grew up in different worlds, one middle class, the other working class, a butcher’s son in Staten Island where he became a loan shark in high school and was mentored by a Mafia underboss, then became a policeman. The other was a medic in Vietnam then an industrial diver. Both loved history and the sea. The world these guys live in is not for pansies. It’s populated by tough guys who fight, scream, threaten, swear a blue streak, and compete mercilessly with each other. They go through marriages the way most people go through running shoes. When you read of all the frustrations and near misses, the tons of money poured into such searches, your jaw will hit the floor. And then if they actually find anything, the legal battles. [Expletive deleted]! How anyone continues on these quests is beyond comprehension.

Then there’s the little-known story of Joseph Bannister himself, perhaps the most successful pirate in the world (oops, I did it, too) during the golden age of piracy. It is told with an undisguised admiration and enthusiasm.

I listened to this book as an audiobook. The narrator did an excellent job of building excitement although he, too, may have gone overboard a tad. I couldn’t wait to pop the next CD in.

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I hate lens flare

This is a really obnoxious trend that has made watching movies and TV almost painful. It’s like looking into the sun or into a bright light. Stop it!