It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I’m immersing myself in Christmas Music. That’s what happens when you want to do a holiday album show for Folk Music Notebook. I’m listening to RUNA‘s new one, The Tide of Winter as I write this. I will give it a full concentration listen later. Then I have to the scary work of coming up with my top albums of the year. It’s such a weird year for everything including music. I’m not sure what I got in terms of physical CDs. A few people mailed me things. The only way I can work on these things is looking at my digital music and filter it by release year. I say this is scary but it’s also so much fun. It reminds me of the magic of music.
I haven’t left the house in days. I should take a walk. It’s already late so I won’t. By the time I finish this it will be getting dark. It’s only November, how much earlier will sunset get? I can understand how in prescientific times people could get afraid that the days would just keep getting shorter without divine intervention. It is something worth celebrating. We should make the Solstice New Year’s Day. That’s how the Elves measured time. That’s the Eldar, the Lord of the Rings elves, you know the real ones.
Yesterday’s excitement was talking to Carolann. As is typical of my conversations it took forever for us to say goodbye. There is always one more thing. It’s not just me, it’s whoever I’m talking to. That’s why they are my friends. Like Casper Guttman I’m a man that likes to talk to a man that likes to talk.
Everyone get the reference? If not, Google is your friend. If it feels odd that I used that quote about Carolann remember that man was originally a genderfree term. It meant any human being. We need to reestablish that. It will make language so much easier. If we think of it as only male, terms like chairman are problematic. The workarounds, chairperson or chair are awkward. When my friend was made assistant chair of his department my response was to say, “you are the assistant piece of furniture?” People are not the only animal where we use the generic species name for males. A female dog is a bitch, a male dog, is a dog. What’s really odd is that a male wolf, is also a dog. What would really be ideal is if there were no gender discrimination so nobody would care about the language quirks. In Star Trek, Abe Lincoln refers to Uhura as a “lovely Negress.” He then immediately apologizes. She tells him there’s no need as people no longer cared about such things. I know two people that refer to Blacks as Negroes; one is an out-and-out racist, but the other is simply clueless. It’s how he was brought up and can’t change. He just doesn’t understand that it’s problematic.
I’ve found a strange TV show to binge, Forged in Fire. It’s a blacksmithing competition originally on the History Channel and now on Netflix. I hardly do reality TV, I never see the appeal of other strange shows my friends watch, for this one intrigues me. I’ve always been intrigued by the process of forging. When I was young I read an article in Scientific American on making Damascus steel swords. You wouldn’t guess from the name, but the finest ones are the Samurai blades from Japan. I also so a special on making Samurai blades, but this is the first time I’ve seen an ingot of steel turned into knives and swords. It’s an amazing process. They are essentially beaten into submission. When we picture a smith we picture a burly man, as they were in the days of hand forging, they had to wield heavy hammers, but it was not the mighty thews that made the smith, but the brains. One of the protagonists in Raising Steam, the penultimate Discworld novel is a smith. Pratchett describes smiths as magical people, “people that know things that everyone doesn’t know.” Now I know something about smithing.
From the start I chose who to root for. In the first one, there were six contestants, I had a clear favorite, second favorite, and least favorite. By the end, my least favorite had become my favorite and he won. In the second one with only four, I also had a clear hierarchy. My favorite was the metallurgy engineer, and my least the survivalist self-described redneck. They were the finalists, the redneck won. The metallurgist got too cocky and spent too much time on bells and whistles and not enough on basics.
I never thought I’d like a show like this, but I did used to watch This Old House which has a lot in common with it. I like to learn how people do things. I also watched cooking shows with my mother, but they were never something that I’d choose for myself. I loved Bob Ross’s painting show when I was an adult and John Nagy when I was a kid. So perhaps it’s not so strange that I watch a show on forging iron.
I was right, it’s pitch black out there now. It’s funny I get hungry earlier when it gets dark earlier. So much of our circadian rhythms are light based. It’s too early to make dinner. I will wait a little.
Wise Madness 