Steven's Journal

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Going to Morris Camp
In a week I leave for Morris Camp. Technically what I am attending is the Morris Dance Intensive Course that is part of Folk Music Week at Pinewoods. The staff for the camp includes some people I think very highly of, include my Morris team's own Bob Walser and the wonderful Dave Weber and Anni Fentiman whose recordings are among my absolute favorites. This Morris Intensive program is new, and was added at something of the last minute, so I'm not really sure what this will be like.

This is the description on the web site:

This is a workshop for experienced morris dancers that looks at a range of Cotswold traditions, ultimately focusing on two to four and some representative teams that illustrate those traditions beautifully. For each tradition we will analyze the various dance moves, figures and dances that define them and how a team style is expressed through them. This is not a general 'learn 3 traditions' class, but reaches for a higher level of interpretation, emphasizing key moves, moments in the dances and interactions with the musician.

First I thought, well, I'm not an experienced morris dancer, but then I came to my senses and realized how absurd that assessment is. I may dance on a single tradition team, but I don't think you can call me inexperienced. As for the rest of it, that's the stuff my team talks about all the time -- whether that's evident in our actual dancing is another isse.

In fact, I was originally wary about the whole thing, not just the Morris part. Much as I love weekends like the Midwest Morris Ale, a weekend is one thing and a week is another. What put me over the edge and decided me was when I told my parents about this event, and that I was considering it, and they said -- sort of baffled -- "What are you deciding about? Isn't this a week that was planned specifically for you?" And I think they're correct.

Best of all, some other members of my team (in addition to Bob and his young son Smack) and some other dancers from Minnesota will be attending as well, so at a bare minimum this will be just a fun time with my friends.

So that's my excuse to post a couple of wonderful pictures I just found on flickr that were taken at this year's Midwest Ale. The theme is: Other members of my team who will be at the Morris Intensive week. First, here's some folks from my team dancing something we put together this year called "Troikles" -- a variant of "Trunkles" in which three dancers instead of two perform the figures:

That's Bob on the right. As always, you can click a couple of times to get larger versions of these pictures. Very large versions in these case.

And here's Andy being Andy. He'll be at the camp as well:

And then here's the most wonderful and stunning picture of Micheal.

rsc and

jwg: This is the friend I will be traveling with, so you can recognize him when we show up at your door next week:

I really love that picture. Would I love that picture so much if it were of a stranger? I believe I would.

Now to start working on the packing list. Yikes.

And then there was last weekend
The workweek is ending soon, and I've gotten about two weeks of work done in four working days. This has not left me any time to write about last weekend, which was Pride weekend among other things. It's starting to fade into dim memory already, but photos keep appearing on Livejournal and Facebook to jar those memories back to clarity. So let me summarize what I did last weekend.

I went to work at 6:30am Friday so I could leave early. I'm not sure this was a good or bad thing, ultimately, because this means I got home in time for the big drug raid on the next-door duplex that is twin to mine. That building has had a somewhat checkered history since I moved in, going through several owners and a foreclosure and periods of vacancy. The latest tenant was very bad news, but he's gone now. The raid itself was only a couple of hours beginning to end, but there was lots of noise and lots of police cars and lots of gunshots, which a neighbor told me at the time were the result of the police shooting the pit bulls but I later found out that the shooting was likely done with tranquilizer darts. Oddly enough, it had only been for the three or four days previous to the raid that anything had happened next door that worried me at all -- the neighbor may have been bad news, but he kept to himself. So it's not as if I've just gone through any sort of worrisome ordeal. By the time I learned just what had really been going on next door everything was very much over. But boy, that was an exciting beginning to the weekend.

Then, off and on throughout the weekend, I went and hung out at the Eagle because it's my local pub and on Pride weekend there are many many guests. The monthly bear bar night happened to be last weekend as well. Basically anybody who hangs out at the Eagle or used to hang out at the Eagle shows up at some point over the weekend, so it was definitely Old Home Week at the local.

Besides all that?

Saturday I checked out all the booths at the two-day Pride Festival, which in Minneapolis is just enormous. The politicians were out in full force this year. And lots of people selling stuff. And many organizations. And churches. And corporations. You all know the drill. I think even the people who used to put a lot of energy into getting outraged over the commercialization of Pride have lost the will to take it as anything other than a big festival. Like the Eagle, it had the air of a big general reunion of lots of people you know.

I couldn't stay long at the festival on Saturday, though, because I wanted to head off to St. Paul for the high school graduation party of my friend Maddie. Both Maddie and her mother are Morris dancers, plus there are about a thousand other direct and close connections because that's how things work around here. There was a lot more dancing than I thought there would be. Here's a great picture of Maddie and her Morris team dancing in the street on a very hot afternoon to celebrate Maddie's graduation:

Note that for all of these pictures you can click a couple of times to get larger displays. I particularly recommend enlarging this one, because it's a great Morris picture even with the dancers out of kit. That's Maddie's mother Tera in the long dress in the front of the picture. Maddie herself is nearly completely hidden. As for some other characters I sometimes mention in this journal, that's Deb in the green shirt to Tera's left, and Denise in the white shirt next to her. The girl in the blue shirt is Jim's daughter Anna Kate, back from her freshman year of college.

Here's another picture from the party, with Maddie in the foreground and me in the background. I include it because at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be wearing bells, but wearing bells when I'm out of kit is probably a somewhat eccentric thing. Although it's not as eccentric as wearing bell pads on only one leg, as Maddie (holding a balloon) is doing here. I think Anna Bean was wearing the other bell pad from the pair, so they could both dance with at least some bells.

Sunday of Pride weekend is always an early morning for me, as I have to get up and ready to march which means a big breakfast and finding my parking by 8am and walking the parade route backwards. This photo comes from

quietdanmn, of me on the march with some of my rainbowed bandmates.

And for the last picture I must thank Karen, the wife of the handsome man I'm standing with. There is a story here, regarding the bared chests, but I think I'll leave the picture to tell its thousand words all on its own. I love this picture, and I actually think it's surprisingly flattering. This one I've left unshrunk. Do you like my new glasses?

With that, I wish happy pride to all.

Facebook Spits Out Your Past
For a variety of reasons, Facebook is not the online world I want to live in. But I've started to check in once a day or so, because there are some people whose entries entertain me and I'm finding that Facebook is the only way I can find out when my landlord is heading out of town these days (which is a useful piece of information).

But there's something else about Facebook, which is that people I haven't seen in twenty or even thirty years will sometimes post old pictures they've scanned, pictures of me I've never seen. Then somebody I currently know who is in more recent or regular contact with the nostalgic picture-poster will tag me and there is my past, popping out at me. I do like this, although there is something borderline creepy about this I can't quite put my finger on.

Within days of my joining Facebook somebody I haven't seen since about 1985 posted some pictures of me in 1985, taken at the Indian Neck Folk Festival. My goodness but my beard was black.

In these pictures I'm leading a shapenote singing. Outside, which I would never do these days. Even stranger, I'm using a pitchpipe. I have no excuse, except that this is how I learned the tradition and being the regular pitchpiper for Norumbega Harmony taught me to give pitches quickly after a song was called and I think this is also what taught me where notes actually are in the free air, a skill that I use when I key songs these days. So what I have to say in my defense against my current supercilious self is that the pitchpipe was my training wheels.

The other day, even more suprisingly, somebody I haven't seen since probably 1975 or so put up a picture from 1974 that I'm pretty sure was taken at the Fox Hollow Folk Festival. I am 17 years old in this picture, between high school and college. That was the only time in my life I let my beard grow untrimmed. I remember at the time being somewhat baffled that people often took me for older than I was -- I was never carded for drinks, for example -- but now I can see why. My brother Matthew must have been the one who tagged me in this picture -- he's the mopheaded fellow in the middle. He commented that this is when I was studying to be a rabbi. That's me with a pony tail on the far right.

These feel like wafts of breeze from long long ago.

That Wacky IRS
A few weeks ago I got I received an unexpected tax refund, out of blue, for no apparent reason and with no explanation. I asked around at work about whether I'd missed a new stimulus check or something and somebody actually had an explanation that not only made sense but was correct: Sometimes the IRS, in their mysterious tax-checking ways, determines that you have figured your taxes wrong and you overpaid. They send you an explanation, and then you get your check.

Except in this case the explanation came a few weeks later. But it did come, just as my colleague predicted.

My taxes are incredibly simple and straightforward but this year there was one slight oddity having to do with moving a 401K account from one company to another. This yielded a bit of extra tax for me (don't ask) and the amount of the refund was in the general neighborhood of what I determined I owed on that money, so I figured I had just been wrong about owing tax. So I cashed the check and felt a little bit richer.

Ah, but then I got the explanation in the mail. The reason for my refund, according to their records, is that the IRS decided that I'm entitled to a higher standard deduction than I claimed because I or my spouse is over 65 and/or blind. Ok, not all of you actually know me personally, but really I am neither over 65 nor legally blind and my filing status is single.

So I called the number on the statement. It was a long wait to reach somebody, but the IRS representative was very pleasant. I was sure to begin my conversation right up front with one simple statement saying what my issue was, making it clear that I felt I had received money in error and wanted (a) to verify this and (b) to pay it back immediately. Yes, she agreed there seemed to have been an error. She checked on my file and made some vague comment about this coming from "The Fresno office". She said that she was putting a note in my file that I'd be contacting the Fresno office, but she wasn't going to correct the file herself or else I would get a bill of some sort for the money from the IRS. She said that when the Fresno office receives my note and check (and she told me where to send it and what it needed to include) they should correct my account then and there and send me a notice that it had been corrected. And so I did. And now I hope that this is the end of it.

Once I saw that this was likely an odd and unlikely error I knew I'd send the money back. It just isn't my money. I said as much to the IRS representative, and she said while she couldn't guarantee that this would be so, it was in fact unlikely that they'd later see their mistake on their own. She said that even if they did I wouldn't have to pay any penalties or interest because it was their mistake. Maybe she only told me this because by that point it was too late for me to change my mind, but I wouldn't have changed my mind anyway.

I've told a few people that I honestly believe that this sort of thing comes back to you in the long run -- keeping money that comes to you in error -- and they seem to think I mean that I will be found out and this will cause trouble. But no, that's not what I mean. It just doesn't work out in the long run in terms of living your life peacefully if you don't return the money.

There's a tiny part of me that feels I'm entitled to a small bit of resentment that because of the IRS's error I had to go through the bother of trying to fix this. But really, this didn't take long and nothing was terribly frustrating or cumbersome. And for a brief few weeks I felt about $300 wealthier than I really am, and that was sweet.

Those Clever, Clever Sysadmins
[This is all work stuff. No Morris dance. Nothing to see here, unless you're

kazmat or

pir or -- well you know who you are and so do I.]

A lot of my work has been stupidly dull lately, but today I had a wonderful moment of the geek giggles that came unexpectedly as I worked on what's really a tiny thing. This is the sort of thing that exasperates our developers ("What a mess!") but me, I just admire clever workarounds, once I understand all the background and I see just how clever the workaround is.

The exasperated developer calls this a workaround to a workaround.

So here's the deal: I'm documenting a clustered file system. Sometimes you need to "bind mount" the clustered file system (using the bind option of the mount command). A bind mount is -- well, let's just say it's a link you can't break and I know that's technically a fudge of a definition. So let's say you want to bind mount file system B onto file system A. That means file system A has to be mounted first. No prob, right? Just make sure the order is correct in the fstab file.

Well, no. The clustered file systems I document are mounted later in the initialization process than the other file systems. So if you want to bind mount a non-clustered file system onto a clustered file system you are out of luck. Ha ha. Call this a bug if you will -- it's what the exasperated developer meant by a mess -- but from my point of view I have to document how this works and what you should do.

And really what you should do is write a customized init script. Which I suppose is another ha-ha (yeah, right -- a customized init script for what should be a straightforward thing that by rights shouldn't trip you up anyway). But my job now is to document how to do that. Ok, that's another problem, but outside the realm of this note.

Because what this note is about is what people have been doing to get around this problem. It turns out there is a newish option to the mount command called _netdev, which indicates that the filesystem resides on a device that requires network access (used to prevent the system from attempting to mount these filesystems until the network has been enabled on the system). That's a direct quote from the man page. But glory be -- that means that these file systems (two words at my company, not one) get mounted even later in the initialization process than the clustered file systems. So if you want to bind mount a local file system onto a clustered file system, just tag that local filesystem with the _netdev flag! It's so elegant and simple.

And a completely absurd misuse of the _netdev flag. As the kindly developer who has asked me to document this wrote in the bug report, "this is not a good solution really and I'm not sure that we should encourage that at all."

Oh, this is so a LISA hottub moment.

The Tale of the Black Shirt
Here's another moment from the Midwest Ale that I just loved, for all the resonance it has. This one may well be impossible to explain, but I'll try to get it down.

On Sunday evening after dinner I was standing in the dining hall talking with Matt when Deb came up and told him with a slight hint of exasperation that Michael had forgotten his black shirt to wear for the Sword Dance team's performance at skit night later that night. "Oh," I said, "I think I have a black shirt with me." I didn't know for sure because my typed-up packing list said only "two long-sleeved cotton shirts" (in case it was cool in the evening) which meant I grabbed two shirts without really thinking much about which ones they were. I was fairly certain that I'd brought a black shirt but I had to run to my cabin and check.

What's interesting here is that the black shirt I brought is Michael's size and not really mine. Lately I buy size XL, but this one was L.

So I ran back to find Andy talking with Matt and Deb. I was waving the shirt like a flag. Andy said, "Of course! I should have thought to go to Deb first, because Deb is the problem solver." I said to Deb, "So now you're going to get credit because I have a black shirt for Michael." Andy said they were thinking of performing with just their ties but without shirts at all, so they'd all be uniform, at which point I said, "I'm taking the shirt back." But I did not.

Michael, in the meantime, was at a board meeting for the Midwest Ale association. He had started to try to find a shirt but then it was time for the meeting so there was nothing more to do just then. Deb snuck into the meeting and placed the shirt into Michael's hands and snuck out. Michael didn't even think much about it (after all, Deb is the problem solver, except for when Andy is), although he says he did vaguely notice that the shirt was folded and pressed and soft cotton with a button down collar. But it made sense to him.

When Michael arrived at the dance hall for skit night a little later, wearing the black shirt (again, the shirt that fit him better than it fits me -- by coincidence this shirt had long arms, which Michael has but I do not), I asked him if he knew where the shirt came from. He looked as if he hadn't even thought about this (as well he may not have) and then he said, "Oh! Of course! It had to have come from you."

The resonance? Well, I'm team Mom (extra hankies in my kit bag) and in some ways my role in my friendship with Michael is to do things like provide him with a black shirt in circumstances like this. I could claim that's why I brought it in the first place, but I won't. Douglas, in Douglas's role, had reminded Michael on Friday to remember his shirt, but Michael was very sick on Friday (he didn't even come out to the Ale site until Saturday morning), and Douglas said that if he'd realized the state Michael was in he himself would have brought an extra shirt. Between Andy and Deb things will usually get taken care of. There was no moment of actual crisis, except among the few people working on the shirt issue, and everything fell into place. We all were exactly who we are.

I was actually giggling with the absurdity of it all.

Not much of a story, you say? Ah, but there's the mythologizing that underlies it all.

Wine of Impulse, Wine of Fate
On Friday afternoons I take a quick work break and walk over to Surdyk's -- the wine part, not the cheese part -- and pick up two or three bottles of wine to take with me to

perkk's SciFi Friday. Sometimes I'm the only guest, and we still manage to get through two bottles. He lives three blocks away from me, and I always walk, so that gives me the freedom to drink perhaps a little more than I would were I to be driving.

I've been buying -- and drinking -- a fair amount of wine lately, pretty much always wines in the $8-$12 range. That makes me the King of Table Wine (the Roi of Vin Ordinaire?), which isn't such a piddly title all told. I know that the real sweet spot for great wine bargains is more the $20 - $25 range, but I don't have the expertise or confidence to spend that amount. For $10 I'll purchase wine on the basis of the label or grape varietal alone with no other background knowledge. Lately any Malbec is fine by me. For a while it was Zinfandel. For a while it was anything from Bonny Doon or Ravenswood that I could afford.

Today, like most Fridays, I walked over to Surdyk's which happened to be having one of their periodic 20% off all wines sales, which is slightly relevant to this anecdote. There I was at the checkout, waiting in line with my inexpensive Malbecs and a Rioja. The man in front of me had two bottles of wine, both the same, but as he was purchasing them he realized that his wife was over in the cheese store with the credit card and he had cash enough for one bottle only. Amidst sincere apologies he bought just the one and decided to leave the other behind. On pure quick impulse, I decided to buy it. I figured this was as good a recommendation as any.

So I bought a bottle of Condado de Haza. I checked on the Internet, and Condado de Haza is the name of the winery as well. Perhaps they produce only this one type of wine. According to the label:

Alejandro Fernandez of Pesquera de Duero initiated the replanting of Spain's Ribera del Duero region in the 1970s, where his red wines made from Tempranillo grapes are internationally famous. Condado de Haza is a Southfacing slope along one kilometer of the Duero River, where planting began in 1989. Superior exposure and soils, artisanal winemaking and fifteen months in oak yield a noble wine of which Alejandro is justifiably proud.

Of course, I didn't have a chance to read that until long after I'd purchased the wine. The wine was 29.99 sale-priced to 23.99, so it wasn't a bank-breaking risk.

On my way out I caught up with the man who had returned the wine and told him that I'd bought the bottle he didn't want, taking his purchase as a recommendation. He said that it is very good wine. The label sure is pretty, with a nice watercolor of a Spanish building and the retro font of the credits of a Brat Pack movie, or perhaps the Pink Panther, or -- come to think of it -- Gidget Goes to Rome.

The real fun, though, is that I will tell

perkk this story tonight and he will get just as much of a kick as I will out of trying this out and rolling it around on our tongues and deciding whether the wine fairy was being generous or mischievous in placing this wine impulse before me.

Or maybe I'm the wine fairy.

Brief eBay Weirdness Post
It's been a while since I've posted pictures of some of the more interesting things I've found on eBay. I guess I haven't been browsing much there in recent months. So just to catch up I present two photos of eBay items -- one of which I purchased and one which I did not.

First the item I did not purchase, although believe me if this weren't the sort of thing that sells for hundreds of dollars I would have snatched it up in a heartbeat and it would have taken a prominent place in my (metaphoric) cabinet of amazing things. It's an early Mickey Mouse piece, and I should say as background that in the beginning Mickey Mouse was not solely meant to entertain children. In fact, early cartoons were shown before movies that were definitely for adults. I'm sure many of us remember the Warner Brothers cartoons we saw on tv when we were children that were just packed with references no child would get, even when the cartoons were new.

You actually could find things in the 1930s like corset covers with Disney's Snow White woven into the fabric. And you could find bracelets like this one, which I doubt was meant for a child:

Just as a piece of deco design I love the enamel on this bracelet. Add to that the iconic Mickey, and you've got an item I would definitely look at twice. But check out the scene depicted here. It's almost cliche to speak of the weirdness of a mouse having a pet dog. What could be stranger than that? But to show a mouse going duck hunting with that dog suddenly transformed from his silly pet status into a hunting dog? Borderline Twilight Zone creepy. And why would you want to wear this scene as a decorative item? Yes, I can think of answers to these questions, and of course Mickey is not really a mouse but an Everyman. Nonetheless, I see levels upon levels of absurdity here.

The opening bid for this was something like $125 and I never even followed the auction. But I snatched up the picture.

As a consolation prize, here's a picture of another one of those items for which I bid the minimum and won the auction. A few days later another one of these came up on eBay, and the temptation to put together a set arose, but only vaguely. First the picture, then the reason I wanted it:

That cute little bunny is picking his nose with a carrot! I'm not sure I can add anything more, except to say that on the actual cup itself it still looks as if the bunny is picking his nose with a carrot.

Who comes up with these ideas? Who approves them?

A Lovely Moment
I seem to organize my life around having the occasional truly lovely moment. Lovely moments, in my experience, take an awful lot of planning and trouble and worry, and even after all that there is never any way to guarantee one. Sometimes it might take years and years of, say, learning to shape anything in the Denson version of the Sacred Harp and developing decades-long friendships and spending vacation time and money to yield one lovely moment of song (a small cost for such a great value). Also, the same specific circumstances that yielded a lovely moment once may or may not yield it again -- definitely not in the same way. So I put in my time making sure I'm laying down the framework for these moments and every now and then lightning strikes. This relates to my belief that deep pleasures are rarely instantly accessible.

The Midwest Morris Ale regularly provides more than a weekend's share of these moments. I want to tell of one in particular, smack dab in the middle of the day in the middle of the Ale, an oasis of calm pleasure.

On Saturday of the Midwest Ale we all divided up into 5 buses for our "tours" around the Twin Cities. Each tour was led by one of the host teams (if you count the team from Prairie Farm Wisconsin as a host team), and each tour included a "pub stop" in the middle of the afternoon. My team decided that our pub stop would be the Land of Liberty, Peace, and Plenty, which is Bob Walser's basement. I think somebody suggested this off the cuff one night, not particularly seriously, and somebody else thought that it could work as a serious idea, and somehow it became a decision that nobody really made but everybody was happy with. About three weeks later we told Bob, who had somehow missed the disembodied discussion, and he was fine with this and set to work making sure he had enough home-brewed beer on hand. A few days before the Ale we realized that even though the pub stop was in addition to a box lunch the campsite provided, we really did need to provide some nice snacks. Even more shortly before the Ale I realized that I'd better provide a variety of non-alcoholic drinks as well (although Michael M. also brought some).

My team does food well. I brought a large amount of a variety of good cheese from Surdyks and a bunch of large spinach pies from Emily's Lebanese deli. Douglas brought the makings of artichoke dip. Michael M. made about a gross of delicious cookies. Andy made a bassinet of fruit salad, which always goes over well. Matt and Deb brought a bathtub of delicious humus from Shish cafe in St. Paul. Look at the extra care the restaurant proprietors took in the presentation:

I was impressed.

It was hot day, and we danced at Lake of the Isles and then walked over to Bob's, where I put our guests (Ann Arbor Morris and Prairie Waves Morris from Omaha) to work helping set up. My team all knew their way around Bob's house, and preparation was smooth and minimal and soon we were all sitting out on Bob's back porch, drinking beer and eating delicious snacks.

And then we sang. Just a little. A few of us led one song each. Everybody was in fine voice and good spirit and just sitting out there on that lovely afternoon having a little rest with a little song and some inspiring choruses was as nice of a time as it is possible to have. To the extent there was a theme it was that all songs had to reference the landlord and his ale, even if that meant writing an extra verse on the spot. Here we are, or some of us anyway. It looks as if Michael S. is leading a song:

I know it looks like little more than a group of ice cream men on a break, but trust me there was a spark and feeling in the air of great delight. I wish you could have been there. I wish everybody from the Ale could have been there. Maybe next time.

It's so Quaint and Charming
When I went to the beer bust at the Eagle after dancing Morris at the Powderhorn Mayday Festival, I told some of my bar acquaintances what I had been doing all afternoon. These are friendly folks, who sincerely wanted to know more about what I meant by Morris dancing, and they asked me what kind of dancing it resembles. That's actually a fair question, but I tried to explain that it would be misleading for me to put it in those terms, because what dance form it might superficially resemble is beside the point and would not explain what Morris dancing is at all -- but that didn't get me very far. The notion that context matters most of all in explaining what something "is" has not made its way into the general consciousness as much as I would like.

("What kind of music do you like?" "For what? Singing with friends at 2am? Listening to in my car on the way to work in the morning? Paying to see performed on a stage?" Just try to give that answer and see how far you get socially with it -- even though it's the only answer I could possibly give. Reason number 378 why I feel I live in a world that is not optimized for me.)

Eventually, with my friends, I had to resort to a description that included the phrase "folk dancing", even though Morris dancers traditionally take great umbrage at being called folk dancers -- this despite the fact that if you go to the Wikipedia entry on "folk dancing" there is a prominent photo of Morris dancing. Why is this so -- that Morris dancers in general do not consider themselves folk dancers?

I wish the answer were simple. To me it's a question of the context in which "folk dancing" is danced in our culture -- which is different than the context in which it is danced in its country and epoch of origin. I think that is very different than the context of Morris dancing -- which at essence is street theater, and which has the goal of integration into a community (dancing out and performing at public events). When I first heard of White Rats Morris in the Bay Area -- a Goth-influenced team that actually sews their bells to their arms for some performances -- I remember hearing praise for the fact that even though in some ways they were not "traditional" (in terms of their kit, for example) they did a better job than most teams of trying to be the team for a particular community (dancing at bondage parties and the Folsom Street Fair and the SF Pride Parade). My larger point here is that it's not the specific dances that White Rats Morris performs that is most significant to the discussion, but where they dance and why. This is what I believe distinguishes Morris from folk dancing -- that is, folk dancing outside of its country or community of origin, which is mostly what I see in the US.

I know that folk dancers would probably claim otherwise -- that this distinction I make here about folk dance privileging the choreography over the context doesn't hold. But I think about all the folk dancing enthusiasts I've known, and what I've seen is that their dances are from a variety of cultures and regions. The pleasure is in the choreography, and the folk dance community itself (and these are great pleasures indeed)-- but is the folk dance community the same as the cultural community in which a particular dance originates? And then there's the distinction between folk dance clubs and folk dance troupes that perform for a paying audience -- are those the same thing? I would say emphatically no, even when they do the same dances. But you could probably have guessed that I would say that.

Besides the conversation at the Eagle, I also had occasion to think about this recently when

d33ann wrote in her journal about seeing Morris dancers on a stage at the Seattle Folklife Festival (and thinking of me). My first response was that if she saw them on a stage she didn't really see Morris dancing, but that sounds more snide than I'd want it to. Mostly I think this touches on my thoughts about the dance having meaning only in context, and the context of a stage is not where it seems like Morris dancing to me. It seems like -- ah ha -- folk dancing.

I get support for my notions here from Tony Barrand in his book about Morris dancing, Six Fools and a Dancer. Now, there's a lot I don't agree with in what Tony says -- or perhaps the way he says it -- but he talks about this distinction from folk dancing in various places in the book. At one point, in discussing Morris as street theater, he writes: "The Morris in not an art form for its own sake. That would be merely folk dancing". (Did you catch that "merely"? Without the "merely" I'm in agreement. With that one word he manages to offend all folk dancers worldwide, and that's what I mean about not agreeing with the way he says things.) He also argues for Morris teams to maintain a single tradition (rather than many) and to keep that tradition over time, in support of which he writes this:

...the choreography is really only a very small part of what the Morris is about. The meaning lies in the occasion, in the performance of the season and of one's links with a time and place. That can be achieved with any one set of individual and group movements....To switch traditions or to perform several different ones is to keep what is expressed through the Morris at a shallow level. It is to be a folk dancer for whom the choreography is the raison d'etre rather than a Morris dancer for whom the choreography is a means to achieve more powerful ends."

Again, at the core I agree with the distinction he makes -- or in any case I find support for a distinction I was already making, in an inchoate form. But he's got to throw in this implication that folk dancing by definition keeps dancing at a "shallow level" -- which is not really what he's saying -- the shallow level part is a separate point from the folk dance distinction -- but you've got to read really carefully to figure that out. Still there's no question about what he means when he refers to Morris dancing as achieving "more powerful ends" (than folk dancing) -- as if there is a competition or ranking. That's where I part ways. But if you can get through that obnoxiousness and focus only on the description of what Morris is (minus any explicit comparative ranking against other forms of dancing that are so different -- contextually -- that ranking is irrelevant) then you've got some things to think about. By which I mean that I myself have some things to think about here, in regards to what I myself do.

But I wouldn't call myself a folk dancer, either.

Me and My Drum
At the Midwest Morris Ale there is a lot of what you call "mass dancing", which is when all the dancers from all the teams (or "all who will" which is usually most of them) get up to dance the same dances together. At the Midwest Ale this was an enormous number of dancers. My understanding is that this is not a common Morris phenomenon -- I'm told it's hardly done at all (if ever) in England. How could this be common, really, since different teams dance different traditions and different styles, so it's not as if being on a Morris team means that you share a body of dance or even a way of dancing with all other Morris dancers. There are a few dances that are generally known -- Abram's Circle, for one, and the Bonny Green Garters processional is I think a common massed thing -- but beyond that you've really got to develop a regional culture of common dances. Friday night of the Midwest Ale is given over to teaching that year's selection of mass dances, which always includes several taught in previous years.

It's all worth the confusion and bother and preparation, because the sight of a vast field of Morris dancers is something to behold, and the feeling of dancing in such a body and dancing with people from other teams in a lovely set is one of the great joys of the Ale.

But above and beyond the issues of getting dancers from different teams in different cities to learn the same dances in the same traditions, you've got the logistical issue of providing music for the mass dances. Each team develops a deep and interactive relationship between the dancers and musicians. How does that work when you add everything together? This is not like a band or an orchestra with sheet music and a conductor. Equally significant is the issue of volume. Many teams work with musicians whose instruments can't really be heard beyond the range of a single set or two. The farthest dancers need to hear and feel the music. I'm just summarizing some key issues here; in fact there are many others.

In the last couple of years the issue of mass dance music has improved quite a bit specifically because we now have somebody who has been asked to be in charge of the musicians -- that being my team's alpha musician Bob. This means you have somebody organizing things like assigning a single musician playing once to his/her self to lead into the dance, or calling on individual sections to play alone, or keeping the tempo steady, or giving cutoffs at the end of a musical phrase. I suppose you could say you have a conductor, but it's something a little different than that. And while sometimes the musicians might get a little put out at the novel situation of having to work with a conductor for MORRIS dance (harumph!), that is nothing compared to the level of frustration many of the musicians have felt in the past when this has not been the case.

So this year my role, as bass drummer, was the clearest it's ever been. In the past I've been a little hesitant to assert my drumming as I always felt it needed to be asserted to steady the tempos and keep the furthest dancers up to speed, because you don't want to step on the other musicians. But with somebody in charge you are actually freer to give what you think is necessary, knowing there's somebody whose role it is to direct you or to let you know if you are on the wrong track. With Bob's help we set up a regular structure: Each dance begins with one musician playing alone to lead into the dance, I come in strong and powerful and as clear as I can be for just the last measure of this lead-in, and then the dance begins and all the other musicians join in while I pound-pound-pound on the downbeats. To this I add my own stuff: I do try to modify what I'm doing in terms of volume and resonance to push the dancers along for particular steps, and the dancers I watch to work with are always the ones farthest away. And, just as on the march, it is also my job never to falter. At the core, though, my significance in the musician group is that there are frequent periods when the furthest dancers can hear nothing but the bass drum.

This was particularly key for Bonny Green Garters, where the line of Morris dancers extended, oh, an eighth of a mile? Here's a cell-phone picture of the line after it had doubled back on itself; for most of the dance this was one long line. Note that even doubled back you can't even see the end of the procession.

As you can imagine, I was finally free to play the fortississimo I've long dreamed about. I'm told that when the dancers lined up the ones far in the back looked over at the musicians and went into a momentary panic because from their position they couldn't see me. "Oh no! Where's Steven?" rang out the plaintive cry, or so it was claimed. But then they heard the drum, and watched the hankies of the dancers leading the procession, and the entire line stayed together for the duration of the dance.

In fact, I was told by various people over the weekend that when they blocked up for a dance they would look over to be sure I was in the musician's group. The delay was that I have to take my drum off when I'm not playing it for a while, and I had no idea when the mass dances would be called during the group dance time, so I frequently made it to the musician area at the last second. Here's a picture of me standing on the sidelines next to my drum. That's

springiswrath with his arm around me, and hey

rsc and

jwg: that's Carol Ormand to my left. And that's a big smile on my face, such as I wore most of the weekend. Behind me is Mike from Madison in his role as the Betty.

The bass drum is not an inside toy. It it absolutely wrong for a single set of Cotswold Morris dancers. But outside, amongst of field of 10 or 15 sets? I think it makes a big difference. Who would have thought that all my years on the march were merely practice and preparation for my being a legitimate Morris musician?

Isaac Newton Be Damned
This photo was taken at 3am on Sunday night, at the end of the Midwest Morris Ale, during pickup dancing. That's me in the front. The other dancers are members of my Morris team. We are dancing the last figure of "Mopping the Cedar", an original dance (choreographed mostly by Matt and Mike) to an original tune that Bob Walser wrote.

I should leave the picture to speak for itself, without commentary, but I just can't.

The response to the picture I've seen so far has been admiration for how high off the ground we are. It's true that we are very high off the ground, even accounting for the angle of the photograph (we are probably two feet in the air, perhaps three, but certainly not five or six as it appears). But honestly, that's not the big deal here. Pretty much anybody can jump high in the air. No, this is the big deal, and I am going to have to live up to my team name of "Braggart" to explain this:

It is very very difficult, extraordinarily difficult, to get even two dancers to jump up in the air for a mid-air splitter at the same moment. It requires that both dancers are feeling the music and the rhythm in exactly the same way (and our team's quirky style requires that we feel simultaneous syncopation). It requires a good sense of partnering the other dancer. This sense of unified movement is the major skill and major aspect of Morris that other Morris dancers look for. It is the ultimate goal of good Morris dancing -- unified style and movement among the team. The particular difficulty of unison splitters is that our way of doing splitters is physically very demanding, so you've got to keep up all the dance unity while pushing your body to its limit. Just think of it. Two people moving up high in the air in unison, held aloft by the music itself.

In this picture, there are SIX DANCERS ALL IN THE SAME PLACE HIGH IN THE AIR AT THE SAME TIME AT THE SAME PLACE IN THE HANKY MOVEMENT. Ok, my splitter form is a little weird here for some reason (I remember wondering why my leg went the wrong direction as I leapt in the air for that one particular splitter -- all I can do is assure you on my word that this didn't happen the other three times in that figure which requires four high splitters in a row), but think for a second on what it takes to get six men in the air like this, at the very end of an extremely knackering dance. Consider this as well: During the figures for this dance, we cannot see each other except in the vaguest peripheral way. We are in a circle. Our line of sight does not take in even the dancer directly in front of us.

I was in that set. I remember the feeling of being in that set with an intensity and joy that remains with me still. I was still buzzed the next morning (which, granted, was only four hours later). But when I saw this picture my jaw literally fell open, just like in a cartoon.

Denise said to me afterward that this was a "dance of a lifetime", which I thought a strong statement. I mean, I knew we had never done better, but I wasn't sure we'd gone quite to that level. Then I saw this picture. Even Michael Shewmaker (dancing behind me, his belly peeking out) said, on viewing this picture, that once in a great while we actually do something worth bragging about.

So that's what I'm doing.

Midwest Ale Hits the Twin Cities This Weekend
It's at last hitting me that the Midwest Morris Ale is this weekend already, and we the Morris teams of the Twin Cities are hosting this year. This is scary because there are some details here and there that I'm suddenly thinking are ones I should have taken care of (even though I'm not in particular charge of anything). I never did see through some of my major plans, including one to make signposts to the Ale site (a camp west of the city) in the shape and kit of lifesize Morris dancers from each of the local teams. It would have been a lot of work for a quick joke, which is just up my alley, but I have not been as go-getting productive these last few months as I sometimes am.

I may find time to write more musings tomorrow, but for now I want to announce to any local residents of the Twin Cities who will be in town this weekend:

On Saturday afternoon from about 4pm to 5pm all the five tour buses of Morris dancers who will be scattered about the cities all day will meet up together at the Spoon and Cherry at the Sculpture Garden of the Walker Museum for an hour of show dances and mass dances. You will get a kick out of this, I promise you.

General tour information for the rest of the day is here, although tours tend not to be precise in terms of actual times:

http://scynthius.com/tours.html

It will be a fine couple of days with my friends. Dance and song and such. And it won't be bookended this year by a long wearisome drive, on too little sleep for the return journey. What a treat.

Mayday Minneapolis Sunrise Video!
I've just been forwarded a YouTube link, to a video of Mayday sunrise in Minneapolis. This is an amazing capture of the morning. You can see how many Morris teams there are in the Twin Cities, and how many people woke up in time to get to the river before 6 am.

The odd thing here is how much I'm in this, since I had no awareness of being filmed. The video opens with a few seconds (seconds 13 to 15) of my team dancing in the background -- doing rounds just at a point when I'm in camera range. There is a lot of footage of me playing the bass drum for the massed dances. One of the teams did a dance to the singing accompaniment of "Rolling Down to Old Maui", led mostly by Tim Ward but they asked me to add my voice to chorus -- and that's what's on this video, my funny voice in the chorus (funny, but you can hear it above all the other singers). Towards the end of the video, when the crowd sings "Haul and Toe", you can see Bob Walser walking over to me in the background, and then at about the 7 minute mark in the video, when that song is over, he leads a Mayday song written by his friend Dave Webber -- and that's me coming in on the second line of each verse (normally I'd let the leader lead the verses solo, but Bob has asked me to do this on Mayday in the past). But it's still Bob's song and he leads it beautifully. (That thing around my neck is the bass drum harness).

The final image of the video is me walking away, bass drum in hand.

This is Mayday morning in Minneapolis. This is my Mayday morning in Minneapolis. I think you'll get a kick out of this.

Direct link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGF9JrnVTTg

Silver Bells, Silver Bells: It's Mayday Time in the City
Here's a picture-puzzle for the Morris dancers. This is my Morris team, Ramsey's Braggarts Morris Men, on Mayday morning about 6:15am or so. I'm at the top of the picture. Aren't we doing a lovely hey?

Here's the puzzler: What's wrong with this picture?

[Cue Jeopardy theme, fold arms, tap foot...]

That's right, boys and girls, there are NINE dancers. What the heck is a Hey for Nine?

OK, it's not a hey. Nope, it's a half-gyp. That explains it, doesn't it? This is Cuckoo's Nest for nine. We threw it together a week or two before Mayday. Which could lead into another little musing on why it's sometimes a great advantage to dance on a single tradition team.

But instead I just have a little musing on how it was a lovely Mayday. We so so so lucked out with the weather, in the morning in the evening and again on Sunday afternoon for the Mayday Parade and Festival in Powderhorn Park. Most of my team managed to take Friday off work so we danced as a team all morning before meeting up with some of the other traveling troupes of brave and foolhardy Morris dancers of the Twin Cities. We do our bit to make the seasons go round.

By dancing a Hey for Nine.

Reading the Coleman Decision
Every now and then I go and read the actual legal decision issued by a court. I'm always glad when I do this, but it inevitably leads to great frustration because once I've read the legal decision I find myself uncontrollably screaming at the talking heads on the television who, it turns out, usually speak from a position of great ignorance. For example, reading the Terri Schiavo legal findings made it crystal-clear to me how poorly the television newscasters researched things.

On Tuesday I printed out and read the legal decision in the Coleman/Franken case, and this, too has been yielding some degree of frustration. The news reports are not inaccurate, really -- they all note that the court dismissed Coleman's suit (although not all reports include the "with prejudice" part, which is significant) and some of them note that Coleman has to pay Franken's legal fees, which is also significant. But this gets all "he said/she said" in the supposedly "balanced" reporting and nowhere -- literally nowhere -- have I seen any sort of reasonable summary of just how thoroughly the court examined and rejected all of Coleman's individual claims (supported in the opinion itself with reference to testimony, Minnesota law, and previous cases). Nor have I seen any sort of summary of the numerous times in the legal decision where the court seems to have expressed great frustration with how the Coleman legal team pursued their case -- for example, by making several requests after deadlines for those requests had passed, or by changing their position on some aspect of the case, or by agreeing to a procedure and then later claiming in court that the very procedure they had agreed to was not legal. Or by taking the position during the recount that no rejected absentee ballots should be reconsidered, and then taking the opposite position in the challenge.

Reading through the opinion you get the idea that the judges just wanted to slap Coleman's lawyers for wasting their time; I don't think I'm making up that subtext. For example:

Coleman failed to propose any additional absentee ballots for reconsideration by the deadline that he agreed to in the Absentee Ballot Protocol. He did however, after the deadline, propose that 587 additional absentee ballots not on the list identified by local election officials be opened and counted.

Yet you still, to this day, have the Coleman legal team making many public pronouncements -- as they have from the beginning -- with the sole purpose of trying to instill a general sense in the public that something was not right in the election and recount procedures. Every one of their claims was examined and dismissed by the court, and you'd think that an actual reporter would point this out when presenting the story of what the Coleman team is claiming. But no. That would be a "liberal bias" or something.

The big point the Coleman team is now insisting is that there are thousands of absentee ballots that were rejected but that other absentee ballots with the same problems were accepted. The court makes it abundantly clear that all of the rejected absentee ballots have been examined at least twice (the vast majority three times) and that none of them comply with Minnesota law -- the court cannot override Minnesota law and accept those ballots. And as for the claim that other similarly invalid ballots were counted, this little nugget is buried in the decision:

In their Notice of Contest, Contestants alleged that county election officials wrongfully accepted absentee ballots that were opened and counted on Election Day. Contestants failed to identify any such ballots in response to Contestee's interrogatories.

Did you catch that? The Coleman team (and the Rupublican party) continue to make public announcements about these ballots -- claiming that because these ballots were wrongfully accepted that not accepting other invalid ballots disenfranchises votes. This is the absolute core of their argument. And yet in a court of law they offered no evidence or testimony -- none, zilch, nada -- that would support the existence of these ballots. Basically they made this up. The legal decision goes to great length to describe the procedures surrounding the absentee ballots, basically saying: Here's a few dozen pages supporting the contention that nothing was amiss. What do you got, Team Coleman, to show us otherwise? Nothing? How about that.

There's another key thing here, regarding disenfranchisement: In order for there to be disenfranchisement, you've got to show that the votes of the disenfranchised would have changed the outcome of the election. The Court wrote:

Moreover, even if absentee ballots were wrongfully accepted by election officials and counted, this Court has received no evidence that these votes would have changed the outcome of the election and that Coleman would have received the highest number of votes.

So what do the news reports say? Oh, Coleman has an uphill battle because the "burden of proof" was on him. Implying that maybe he had a case, but that the legal system was stacked against him, what with requiring him to prove there was something wrong in the election process rather than requiring the Franken team to prove that nothing was wrong. If only the legal system required us to prove a negative. Even given that bizarre perspective, the court provides as thorough and clear of a case as possible to prove that there was nothing improper about the election. This, however, does not make the news reports.

This is what the court concludes: "There was no evidence of fraud in the conduct of this election and no showing of bad faith on the part of any election official at any point during the election or recount." Why aren't the news reporters armed with that simple and easy to quote conclusion when they interview the Coleman legal team?

The whole thing is a good read.

Wallace Nutting's Revenge
With all the various retro revivals of home decor I've seen over the last few decades, I don't think I've seen anything in the way of what you might now call "Colonial Revival Revival" -- you know, a recreation of what the home magazines and decorating books of the 40s and 50s called "Early American". I'm not talking about an historic appreciation and scholarly interest in the furniture and crafts of the American Colonial period, or for that matter even the Colonial Revival architectural style (which seems to be mostly a matter of hodgepodge influence), but about the mass-market (even downmarket) suburban home decorating trend that encouraged you to pretend that your very own den was an exhibit at Colonial Williamsburg, if the exhibits at Colonial Williamsburg included television sets and folding metal snack trays with pictures of rooster weathervanes. Yes, when I was a child it was not surprising to find living rooms and family rooms in suburban New Jersey homes decorated with braided rugs, Windsor chairs, and -- G-d help me -- decorative spinning wheels. The fashion had actually faded considerably by the 60s, but it's not as if everybody completely redecorates their home every three years. In fact, the St. Louis Park childhood home of a local friend of mine was still decorated in this fashion when I saw it about 15 years ago (before his parents passed away), exactly as it had been furnished in the early 1950s, and beautifully maintained.

This style must have been enormously popular. I have many magazines and decorating guides for the homemaker from the 40s and 50s, and "Early American" is usually given the most prominent placement. If you have a chance to see an old Sears or Montgomery Wards catalog from that era, you'll see exactly what I mean. The influence is not inevitably without charm or taste, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to note that it's probably something of a collective decorating embarrassment, to realize how many homes were adorned in this fashion.

Surely this style, and its associated paraphernalia, is ripe for a camp revival? Isn't faux-Colonial the very definition of kitsch? I have even seen 50s-modern dishware shapes decorated with decals of charming colonial rooms, which is dizzying in a way. Hurricane lamps powered by electricity rather than whale oil, fireplace andirons repurposed as magazine racks -- why aren't these items going for astronomical prices at Sotheby's?

I started to think about this a while back when I found, at a flea market, my first piece of GeorgeandMarthabilia: A pair of vases (easily convertible to lamp bases), one with a reproduction of Gilbert Stuart's portait of George Washington and one with the matching portrait of Martha. The vases, just perfect for your Colonial decor, were 19th century in shape and mid-20th century in manufacture; again I use the word "dizzying". I bought them because they tickled my fancy, but in doing so it was as if the curtain lifted from my eyes and I saw GeorgeandMarthabilia everywhere. Within a few months I had purchased two mugs in this style (made in 1932 for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth), and then two espresso cups with matching sugar and creamer (made in the early 50s), and then a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and then I had to stop.

Rare is not the word to apply to these items, although my gosh if I'd continued along that path I could have become -- with an absolute minimum of effort -- one of those people with eccentric collections who get profiled on the evening news. Because pretty much any day on eBay you can find this stuff. Do you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in historically inaccurate homage? Just use this as your turkey platter:

Do you need to season the turkey breast at table? Try using these:

Do you want to recall that happy family trip to our nation's capitol? Put this on your mantle:

What would it take to have the premier collection of this stuff? Not much, I'm afraid. But there's something about all of this that tells a story -- a story of history, a story of faddishness, a story of the search for false nostalgia and an imagined past, a story of crass commercialism, a story of cheap stuff. And that, my friends, is the Story of America itself.

That story can be found right here, in this salt shaker shaped like a candle holder with hot wax dripping on the face of the father of our country. If the matching Martha had been included I would definitely have placed a bid.

Stick that feather in your hat and call it macaroni!

My Famous Brother
On the front page of Sunday's NYTimes -- the Front Page! -- there was an article about a school program my brother David teaches. On the inside page on which the article continues there was a nice big picture of him. If you go to the website version of the article, the photo is in color and leads off the story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/education/05empathy.html

It's a good picture, but not a flattering one particularly. Still -- hoo hah!

Later in the article they talk about the work he's doing in some schools in the South Bronx, and his name is a link to his professional bio, which looks impressive.

I think it's pretty cool. I mean, let me say it again: The front page of the New York Times Sunday edition.

Surprising Moments of Braggarty Bizarreness
This is why I have trouble explaining what it means to Morris dance. Or to be a Morris dancer. Or to be on a Morris team. Ok, mostly that last one.

Ramsey's Braggarts Morris Men, or some subset thereof without small or medium children or 6am worktimes, goes out to the pub after practice on Tuesday evening. If you consider Pizza Luce a pub, which we do. It features serving maids (some male, most tattooed) and beer on tap and the menu includes high-carbohydrate foodstuffs. What more do you need, definitionally?

This year Ramsey's Braggarts Morris Men are blessed with a fine-dancing new member, Bob's young son Smack. Smack is picking things up exceptionally quickly, in particular our syncopated double-step. In this he puts older folks to shame, but that's to be expected. Smack is turning out to be a fine Braggart, but he does need to return homeward at 9pm or so, which means we lose both him and Bob. Alas. Alas for us, but alas for Bob as well who misses greatly joining us at the Pub after practice.

But as it happens Bob has his very own pub in the basement of his house, the Land of Liberty Peace and Plenty, stocked with homemade brew and good cheer. So now and then we repair to Bob's basement after practice, and all is well. Except that we sometimes forget when we've planned to do this, because we may dance like the wind but we have the focus and attention span of the tumbleweed.

Mid-day yesterday Bob recalled that he and Smack would be unable to attend practice that night because of a school commitment, but he sent the team email noting that the Land of Liberty Peace and Plenty was open for gathering if we still planned to do so. We had, of course, forgotten that we'd planned to do so, so this was a handy reminder. I took a five-minute break from work and walked over to Surdyk's to pick up some cheese because the Braggarts, as a team, are hugely appreciative of fine cheese. And good beer. The Brie was excellent and perfectly ripe, I hadn't picked up any Parrano in a while, and for a third choice I went, randomly, for some French Raclette. There was also Swiss Raclette and Minnesota Artisan Raclette, but the cheesemonger recommended the French, which was the least expensive.

It was a group of only 7 who were free after practice last night, so we deemed my cheese sufficient repast. Usually Deb and Matt would have added significantly to the larder.

When I unpacked my serving platters and utensils and laid out the cheeses, Bob said, "Ah, Raclette" and explained to all and sundry the tradition of a Raclette oven -- Raclette is the name of the cheese and the appliance both. A Raclette oven is an appliance that is a sort of roof-heated mini-hearth, into which you stick small pans of Raclette cheese until they melt, at which point you pull out the small pans and scrape the melted cheese with a special wooden paddle onto bread or a cracker. It's a sort of deconstructed fondue, that cooks small individual servings at a time, and makes for a social time as well as a tasty meal.

Then the lightbulb over Bob's head went on and he went upstairs and brought down an actual Raclette oven, which had been a gift from a Swiss houseguest. Bob's oven requires a converter, being Swiss. Then Bob demonstrated and we made Raclette. Bob brought down his household jar of herbes de provence (doesn't every household have a large jar?) which you sprinkle on the melted cheese after spreading it on the cracker. It was so so so delicious. Yum. Yum again.

Because, you know, it's just the right thing to have a light snack of Raclette after Morris practice. When I tried to articulate how rare and wonderful of a moment this seemed, my teammates responded as if this were a perfectly unnotable occurence. As indeed, but for this journal entry, it was.

The Clueless? The Rich? The Difference?
I went to my doctor this morning for my annual physical. In the waiting room I found an odd magazine called "Veranda", which seems to be a parody of Home and Design magazines for the rich elite and pretentious, an attempt to out-Martha Martha. But as I've noted before, the line between the real thing and the parody becomes more indistinguishable by the day. I mean, check their website. Could this be for real? Can you determine a zeitgeist in this collection of most-viewed articles?

# Edamame Bruschetta
# The Great House at Greystone Estate
# Big Cocktail Rings
# The Art of the Aztecs
# A Flashback to the Great House

I will entertain no smirks about "Big Cocktail Rings", thank you very much. And no, I did not make that one up and throw it in to see if you were paying attention. I'm not that clever. Really. I am relieved, however, to find that I have to go to only one source to read about edamame bruchetta, big cocktails rings, and the great house at the Greystone estate. The convenience is indescribable.

What drew me to the magazine -- and ultimately caused me to take out my pen and notebook, to be sure I got the quotations correct -- was an article by one Carolyne Roehm on how to make your guest rooms nice for your guests. The article began with a charming little anecdote about the wonderful overnight visit Ms. Roehm once had with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and how comfortable they had made their guests feel. How did they do this? By having the butler discreetly ask after dinner what the guest wanted for breakfast. By having a fire going in the fireplace, and a big four-poster comfy bed. By having a chambermaid sneak in quietly in the morning with breakfast on a tray to restart the fire and pull back the drapes. As Ms. Roehm noted, "As a working woman I never indulged in breakfast in bed, so that was a fabulous treat." As a working woman indeed. I suspect that Ms. Roehm was simply playing Mad Libs with that sentence, and she could just as easily have written something like, "As a post-operative transsexual I never indulged in breakfast in bed..." or "As the second engineer on the Sioux Line Railroad...".

Regardless of her quirky prose, isn't that practical advice? Just have your butler inquire about breakfast desires and have your other servants sneak in to start up the fire in the morning. It had never occurred to me to provide such amenities, but I'll be sure to do so in the future.

Perhaps I'm being harsh, and this was meant to be a charming opening anecdote about how the very wealthy make their guests comfortable. In fact, I was waiting for the logical next point, which I expected would go something like this: "We may not all have servants and castles, but we can all take a tip from the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and do what we can to make our guest feel pampered and comfortable." Alas, that was not where the article went. Instead, it segued into a second charming reminiscence, about the night Ms. Roehm spent at the home of Oscar de la Renta and his wife Francoise: "As a French woman of infinite style, Francoise filled her guest rooms with special things that provided a sense of refinement and ease."

There's that "As a [blank]" rhetorical construct again, clearly a hallmark of Ms. Roehm's distinctive prose style. But the pointlessness of that construct pales before what seems to be the absolutely random use of words. "Infinite" style? Things that provide a sense of "refinement" and "ease"? What on earth do those words mean in this sentence? As an American man of finite style, I ponder what things I might fill my guest room with that would provide a sense of refinement. A scale model of a petroleum purification plant, perhaps?

So I await the next sentence, the explanation, the specific. I could wait forever. Ms. Roehm elaborates only as follows: "None of the items was extravagant -- each was practical and stylish." Clearly my petroleum refinery idea is out, but what, I ask, what could these practical and stylish items be? Hand-knit scarves? Blue-enameled cast iron pans? Gold-plated chapstick holders? What? I have to know!

There is only the merest of hints. After noting that even Americans have started to provide things for their guests, she berates them for what they choose to provide: "The things that Francoise used in those guest rooms -- such as scented candles --are now enjoyed everywhere. But what is often missing in our newly discovered civility is a lack of finesse."

Ignoring the grammatically shaky double negative (a "lack of finesse" is missing? say what?) what we have again is the seemingly random use of a word: finesse. What does that mean? At least we have a specific here: one of the things that Francoise de la Renta fillled her guest rooms with that provided a sense of refinement and ease that was practical and stylish but not eccentric is ... a scented candle! When Francoise de la Renta fills her guest rooms with scented candles, she is rich in finesse. But why then, oh Ms. Roehm, why are we parvenus deficient in that selfsame finesse when we fill our guest rooms with those selfsame scented candles? Carolyne, I am growing impatient and annoyed. You have not given me a sense of ease and refinement. Am I not your guest? If you cut me to the quick, do I not bleed? What do you want from me!

The depth of your ingratitude comes clear in your next sentence: "For me it is unnecessary to find chocolates or presents on my pillow when I retire to a guest room. I don't expect to feel as though I am in a hotel. What I want is a restful night in a comfortable setting." The nerve! After all that time I spent wrapping presents (serving trays, punch bowls, novelty glassware, ice skates) and placing them on your pillow -- just as they do in the finest hotels, I venture to add -- this is the thanks I get?

As an Okie from Muskogee, I am hurt.