Sunday, March 31, 2013

Ronnie Fauss - Tia Maria (lyrics and chords)

Here's another song that I've been wanting to get the lyrics and chords for, for quite a long time, but it is also ungoogleable.  So I've been a little busy today.

This song is by Ronnie Fauss and was on his EP Mulligan.  I got it when it was a free promotional download from his website and have since bought two more of his (full length) albums.  It is no longer available free (not legally, anyway), but it is available on CD from Amazon.

Unfortunately, there's no version of this on YouTube, so I don't have a video link.  Since it's still a fairly new song that is still available commercially, I'm not going to upload it myself.

The chord progressions simply repeat themselves throughout the song, alternating between four-verse and five-verse stanzas.  P.S.  The five-verse stanzas are limericks!

Note that in the line "Tia Maria, she got a great idea..." the word "idea" is sung with three syllables, like "eye-dee-ah" so it fits the meter of the line.

G                        C         G
Tia Maria, she makes the best sopapillas
G                     D
She sings in a Tejano band
G                   C           G
Tio Leo, he's got a job down in Rio
G                 D       G
And he visits whenever he can

C                     G
Maria she lies in bed night after night
C            G                   D
Wishing that Leo was holding her tight
C                     D
And she cries for her mate
    G             Em
But alas she just waits
           C              D             G
'Til she's wakened by the cruel morning light

Tia Maria, she's got a daughter named Leah
Who don't know why her daddy's not home
Tio Leo, he bought Leah a Geo
His love comes in silver and chrome

Leah, she drives that thing all over town
With the music turned up and the windows rolled down
And she screams at the sky
And she goes and gets high
And she drinks 'til her sorrows are drowned

Tia Maria, she likes quesadillas
She eats them a pound at a time
Tio Leo, he's got a girlfriend named Cleo
Who's just about to enter her prime

Leo makes love like he's eighteen years old
While Maria feels as used as the laundry she folds
And she watches her soaps
And she smokes Leo's dope
'Cause she don't got nobody to hold

Tia Maria, she got a great idea
And hopped on that Rio-bound plane
Tio Leo put on a record by Dio
And crawled in the bed where his mistress lay

Maria walked in and she saw them in bed
That teenage Lolita and the man that she wed
So she grabbed Leo's gun
And she told him that he'd won
And she shot herself right through the head

Tia Maria, she made the best sopapillas
And she sang in a Tejano band
A Tejano band

W.C. Jameson - Love Songs in Spanish (lyrics and chords)

This is a song that's included on the Americapolitan Outlaw Sampler which is available free (legally) from Noisetrade.  I liked this song immediately and wanted to add it to my book of songs to practice strumming on the ukulele, but it was ungoogleable (Google has taken legal action to prevent this word from appearing in a dictionary, so I'm going to use it as often as possible).  That is, it doesn't look like anyone has ever posted a simple chord chart--or even lyrics--to any of the numerous websites where you can find such things.

So...the song actually is in C.  I didn't just put it that way to make it simple.

Love Songs in Spanish - W.C. Jameson

C                  F              C
She had a voice as sweet as Texas honey
      Am       F                G
And a touch as soft as a summer breeze
C             F           C           F
Her dark eyes shined like diamonds
              C             G          C
When she sang love songs in Spanish to me

2. (repeat chords as in 1)
I met her in a tiny village by the Rio Grande
Felt the magic of her smile and could not leave
Barefoot in the sand, she played the mandolin
And she sang love songs in Spanish to me

G                                    C
Like the river that flows out to the sea
G                                        C
Like the song birds in winter she had to leave
F                          C     F
I'm left here with my memory
              C             G          C
When she sang love songs in Spanish to me

(instrumental break)

3.  (repeat chords as in 1 and 2)
I recall those nights with her alone
Moonlight bright, soft wind in the trees
We lay together down by the river
And she sang love songs in Spanish to me

(repeat chorus)

...when she sang love songs in Spanish to me

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Never woulda guessed it

Just saw this photo over at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.  Okay, I recognized James Coburn and Bruce Lee.  The guy on the left I haven't ever heard of, named Mike Stone.  But who is that fresh-faced young fellow second from right?

Chuck Norris?!

Friday, March 29, 2013

More computer history

Another blast from the past.  This one is about laptops in the late 80s.  I bought my first computer in 1990, and it was a laptop similar to some of these, with a supertwist screen but it also supported a CGA monitor, and I almost never used anything but the CGA monitor (which I had to buy separately).  I think this video was from 1987, and the cheapest computer they list here sold for $1,995.  Three years later, when I bought mine, I got it for only $800 because it was already behind the curve.

I don't remember the brand, but I bought it mail-order from DAK Technologies.  It was a regular 8MHz 8088 with 640K of RAM and had two 3.5" DD (720K) floppy drives.  DAK packaged it with a bunch of software.  The one I used most was Wordstar, which was able to run on a single floppy--the other floppy was used to save your documents.  This was also the computer that I played Ultima V on.  I remember when you switched from above ground to a dungeon setting, it took so long to load the dungeon that I would go to the bathroom or refill my tea while I was waiting for it.

Oh yeah, it also came with a mouse!  But the mouse worked only for specific software, and any program it worked for had its own mouse driver which you had to load before you started the program.  I never really used the mouse because it was just easier and faster for me to type everything.  I've always been a pretty fast typist.  One of the other programs that was packed with it was a typing tutor program, and I timed myself on it several times.  I often broke 90 wpm in speed drills.

The second computer I had, which I bought in 1993 I think, was a Leading Edge 486SX25 (25 MHz) with 4 MB of RAM and a 120 MB hard drive, and was the first computer I had that ran Windows (3.1).  That was the computer that I later installed a 2400 baud modem in, then later bought a combination upgrade package that added a sound card, a CD-ROM drive and a 14400 baud modem.  I also upgraded the RAM to 20 MB.  This was the computer that I had when I first began accessing BBSes and the internet (via NovaLink).

The third computer was in 1995, I think, and was a 60MHz Pentium which came with its own modem and sound card/CD-ROM.  I've forgotten what kind of RAM and hard drive it had, but this was my main Doom computer.  I had tried playing it with the older 486, but it just couldn't handle it very well.

Playing with the runtastic app

Here is me playing with the smartphone app.   Our first map is from Tuesday.  I had never done this one before.  I added the blue line in because it didn't start tracking me right away--I think it took a few minutes for the GPS to lock in.  Anyway, the green and red dots should have been right on top of each other because this route starts and ends in the same place.  This was my longest single route of the week at slightly over 4 miles, and with the partial that I also did, made it the longest day of the week--as far as distance goes.  I tried using a different app to map the partial, but it didn't post to FB like it was supposed to, so I didn't get a map.

Wednesday's full route.  The words "Five Palms" will cause all meter readers to shudder in horror.  This is the worst part of town to work in because of the kind of lids that are used on the meter boxes there.  Five Palms isn't visible on this map but it's in the area.  The lids here are what we call "oval lids" because they are oval instead of round.  There are numerous different kinds of oval lids, ranging from a major pain in the a** to a hellish, nightmare-inducing pain in the a**.  The worst kind were obviously invented by a sadistic psychopath.

Wednesday's partial, in a different part of town where the work is much easier because all the lids are round here.

Thursday's full route.  This is another rough one, mostly just because the terrain is so uneven.  I've been doing it for so long that it doesn't bother me as much anymore, but I still admit it's a hard route.  The green part is to show the part that I drive through instead of walking.  There are only 75 meters in all that big area where the green is, and it takes an hour to walk it.  In the rest of the route I can average around 140-150 meters per hour.  After I started driving that green part, it took 30 minutes off my total time.  P.S.  One of my rules of routes is:  If it incorporates or even touches Broadview, it's gonna be messed up.  The same rule is also true if one replaces "Broadview" with "Vandiver."

Thursday' partial.  Someone at some time in the past sequenced this one so that you're supposed to go down Poplar street, then climb a dangerously rusty and dilapidated 5-foot chain-link fence to get into the church property, walk all the way across it to McMullen, then climb a 6-foot chain link fence to get back out and read that one meter where I put that green dot.    Well, that's not how I do it.  After I finish everything else, I just drive over there and get that last meter.

Alamo Heights full route.  This one's pretty rough, too, and it has some major hills that are just murder in hot weather.  I drive that part that I drew on there in green.  During the worst part of summer, I drive out those little dead-ends on the bottom section, too.  That's where all the worst hills are.

Alamo Heights partial.  On the other side of Broadway.  This one is mostly alleys, which you can see because the red lines aren't going down the streets.  But in this part of Alamo Heights the alleys are all paved, so it's not bad.  I drive the green part.

On that lower left rectangle, you can see a little "blip" where the line isn't quite as straight.  That was where I went into somebody's back yard so I could run some water and check if their meter was still working.  That's some pretty good detail, I think.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Back in the olden days of 1995

I just had to share this video.  It's all about using the internet in 1995, with a focus on CompuServe.  It's a real blast of nostalgia, and made me laugh several times because I remember it all.

I first started using computer networks, of a sort, in late 1993, dialing up "phone BBSes" (bulletin boards).  By 1994 I was trying out various online services, and CompuServe was the first one I tried, but I canceled it as soon as my free trial period ran out.  In 1994, CompuServe did not yet provide internet access--it was strictly an in-house online service.  The first actual internet access I had was a company called NovaLink, and I got 5 hours of access for $10 a month.  By the way, at that time I was using a 2400 baud modem.  So I wasn't able to do a whole lot, but I did go through all the stuff of installing Win32S so I could use NCSA Mosaic.  At that time, Mosaic was the only web browser, and was the precursor to Netscape.  Later on, I used Netscape.  I had to buy it.  It came on 2 or 3 1.5" floppies.  The only thing I specifically remember about NovaLink is that one day I went to a web page where some guy had posted gifs of all the Rush album covers (at that time).  It took a while to load, even though they were only small thumbnails.  Oh yeah, back then Mosaic could display in-line gifs, but not in-line jpgs, so if someone wanted to show a jpg, they just had to link to it, and when you clicked on the link it would open an associated jpg viewer on your computer to view it.  I used a program for jpg viewing that was called LView.

In 1995 I joined Netcom, which was unlimited access for $20 per month.  By that time I had upgraded to a 14400 modem, and pretty soon after joining Netcom I upgraded again to 28800.  The Netcom service came with its own software called Netcruiser, which incorporated all the stuff you'd need into one program (web browser, email, ftp, gopher, archie, usenet, etc.).  Netcruiser also functioned as a Winsock so you could minimize it and run some other browser if you wanted, like Netscape.

I used an html editor called HotDog.  I had to quit using it when I switched my screen resolution up to 800x600, because it wouldn't run under anything but 640x480.  At that time I started using some freeware editor that I don't remember the name of anymore.  Of course, back then all you had to know was basic html to create a website.  When things got so complicated that you also had to learn CSS and all sorts of other stuff, I gave up on creating my own sites and just went for a while with some very simple sites on Tripod until Blogger came along.

I kind of miss the old days when every ISP also provided Usenet access.  I was a big Usenet user back then.  After I quit Netcom and started using other ISPs that didn't provide you with software (mainly just because I was trying to find something cheaper and ever cheaper)*, I used Agent for email and usenet.  I loved Agent.  It was one of my favorite programs ever.

Of course, I also used AOL on at least three different occasions.  This video is from before the big AOL explosion.  I also had Juno email for a while.  Anyone remember Juno?

The thing about screen resolution was kind of funny to me, too.  I remember going to the local Whataburger for the morning gathering of ham radio operators shooting the bull and drinking coffee**, and I announced, "Well, I changed my screen resolution up to 800x600."  Back then this was a Big Thing.  "So, how do you like it?" Everyone asked.  Crazy.

*I actually used some free internet services for about a year.  One was from KMart, and I don't remember the other one.  When you first started the software, it would feed you a brief ad from the store, then dial you in.

**Back then Whataburger had this special deal where if you bought one of their plastic coffee mugs, you could get it refilled for a nickel.  After a year or so they changed it to refills for a quarter.  I wish I still had that mug, just because it was a good mug and it would be another bit of pleasant nostalgia to drink from it.  I don't know what happened to it.


My sister has been using an app called Runtastic so I though I'd give it a try.  It works a lot better than MapMyWalk--mainly because so far it isn't as crash-prone and it actually shares to FB.  The only problem with it today it that I actually started it at the red dot but it didn't start tracking me until there where that green dot is--both dots should be right on top of each other.

So this was a little over 4 miles.  My partial was 2.3 miles.  I tried MapMyWalk on it again today just for kicks, but as before, it won't post to FB so I can't get a map off of it.

Another cool thing about this app is the map.  The map that it posts is just a basic map, but the one you get to see on your phone has a color-coded route instead of just solid red.  It ranges from red for the fastest parts down through orange and yellow to green for the slowest.  So I can look back and see which parts of the route had the most troublesome meters.

This one has a voice thing too, which is kind of annoying.  A British woman's voice announces every time you hit a new mile mark and says some other things.  I didn't have it turned up loud enough to hear it that clearly today, but the first time she announced the mile I jumped and spun around with a "WTF?!"  I hope no one saw me.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West (1973, "movie")

I don't remember why anymore, but some time ago I added a DVD to my Netflix queue called "Great Wacky Western Comedies." It includes three movies plus some bonus features. So today I watched the first movie.

1973. Gilligan's Island has already become legend. Sherwood Schwartz is at the peak of his Bradiness. He can't go wrong.  So what did he do?  He created a movie that should have more accurately been called Gilligan's Wagon Train.  Their theme song isn't nearly as catchy as the Gilligan's Island song, which I'm sure most of us can still sing from memory, but here are some of the lyrics to get you going.

A stage and a wagon headin' west
Part of a wagon train lost from the rest
Dusty's the reason for their plight
Thanks to Dusty nothin's right
Only the wagonmaster's hands
Keeps 'em a-rollin' to the promised land've got this stagecoach and this single wagon that have somehow become separated and lost from the rest of the wagon train--marooned, as it were.

So we have Gilligan...

The Skipper, too.

The millionaire and his wife.

The prostitute, the professor and Mary Ann.

Stuff happens, most of it in a very disconnected manner.  More stuff happens that didn't have anything to do with the first stuff that happened.  Then more stuff happened but I slept through it and woke up right at the end to see Dusty somehow win a gunfight because he got lucky and did some fancy twirl with a gentleman's cane and the bad guys thought he was Bat Masterson so they surrendered without firing a shot.  I don't know how they got from being lost in the wilderness to fighting bad guys in a town with Gilligan/Dusty posing as Bat Masterson because I was a asleep, but I'm not going back.  If you want to know what happened, look it up on YouTube.  Somebody uploaded the whole movie for some reason.  If you watch it and figure out how it all happened, keep it to yourself, because I don't want to know.

Apparently they made a sitcom out of this, too.  I don't remember it.  Thank God.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Explaining the past

Buzzfeed has "the 14 most irritating questions people born in the 2000s ask."  Well, technically my daughter was born in 99, so she's still pretty close.  I don't know why most of these would be "irritating."  My son especially likes to ask me questions about my past, and it's one of the few things he'll sit still for and listen without interrupting with another question.  And I like answering him.  Isn't that what dad's are supposed to do?


1.  My kids--aged 14 and 12--have used floppy disks.

2.  My kids know the difference between a cell phone and a "land line."

3.  Never came up.  For the record, I never liked that show, either.

4.  Also never came up, but I would be happy to explain it to them, if it did.  Of course, they would easily understand the concept, as anyone should who has used a portable mp3 player.

5.  My kids have used cassette tapes.

6.  My kids have used dial-up.  I hope they never forget it, so they always remember how fortunate they are to have a wireless service now.  They have never used AOL, however, I have told them about it, and how there was a time when you couldn't pick up a magazine without an AOL CD falling out.

7.  Never came up.

8.  See #7.

9.  I used to work at a beeper repair shop.  Although my job there ended when my son was only about a year old, I still had beepers lying around.  They played with them and know exactly what they were and how they worked.  By the way, that beeper pictured was a total piece of c***.  It was modeled after a Panasonic model that was also a total piece of c***.  The best beeper Motorola ever made was the Bravo Plus.

10.  I don't even know who he/she was.

11.  My kids have played Carmen Sandiego games.  Vintage games on a vintage computer.

12.  I never heard of these, either.

13.  My kids have used/watched VHS tapes.

14.  Never came up, but I have a ready answer if it does.

And all this is leading up to the real point of this post.  The other day my son was listening to one of those "country" songs, the one that's called "1980 Something," or something like that, which mentions a space shuttle exploding.  He asked me about it, so I had to somberly tell him about the Challenger.  In the process, I also had to explain to him what an o-ring is and how it works.  "So," he said, "one little part made the whole thing explode?"  "Yep."  It was strange, yet gratifying, to see him sobered by something that happened 15 years before he was born.

Friday, March 22, 2013

New toy

Big news, which you already know if you're one of my FB "friends": I got a smart phone. It is a refurbished model, which means it's already obsolete by tech junkie standards, but as someone who has always explored the cutting edge with older equipment, I am having lots of fun with it.

I've been exploring lots of apps to see what I can find useful or just plain fun. I just recently discovered Google Sky Maps and almost thought it was technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

But many of the apps that I am keeping on the phone are quite simple but, to me, brilliant.  One is a pitch pipe app.  It just shows you a picture of a standard C to C pitch pipe and you touch the note you want to hear.  I've already used it for a chorus practice at our church when I had forgotten my real pitch pipe.  Another music-related app is a digital tuner that shows you the note being played/sung as well as the frequencly in Hertz with a small bar graph at the bottom to give you a better visual image of how far sharp or flat the note is.  I've used it to tune my daughter's guitar and my ukulele, although the uke is pretty good at staying in tune now that the strings are broken in.  It tends to go about 1/4 step flat after a couple of days--equally across all strings, which is pretty weird.  This app is called DaTuner Lite.

I also finally managed to find a play-against-the-computer "Scrabble" game, by which I mean the rules are exactly the same, the board is exactly the same, the points are exactly the same, but it's called Classic Words Free.

Of course it already had a Facebook app as a standard feature.  I also found an RSS reader app called FeedMe which is working pretty well for quick updates.  Just for kicks, I put the Netflix app on it but I haven't really used it yet except to try it out for a minute and make sure it works.

I also put a Bible app on it called MySword for Android.  It's donationware, which means the free version is still pretty cool and is probably all I'll ever want, but for a small donation they'll send you a registration code to unlock all the features, and I think I'm going to do it because it's a great app.

I put the Winamp app on it because it makes it super easy to shoot mp3s into the phone from my computer over WiFi--no more USB cable!  At a friend/co-worker's recommendation I installed an app called RainAlarm OSM that reads your location and then sends you an alert if rain is detected within a certain area (radius selectable in the preferences).  I guess you can understand that, as someone who works outside all the time, rain is something I try to keep track of fairly closely.

Oh yeah, I also thought putting the app on it would be a good idea, because my wife is one of those people who, when she sees someone familiar in a TV show or movie, sits there and agonizes over where she's seen them before, and she won't be quiet about it until she's remembered.  I thought this app would be a good way to keep that kind of stuff to a minimum.

Today, for the first time, I tried out an app called MapMyWalk.  When you finish your walking workout, you can save it and you have the option of sharing it via FB or Twitter.  Since this was the first time, and I wanted to see how it all worked, I didn't send it to FB but only saved it for myself locally.  Unfortunately, once you do that, you can't go back and decide to share it after all, so I couldn't get a good picture of the map (my phone is so old it doesn't have the capability of taking screen shots).  In the future, I think I will send it to FB just so I can get a pretty picture of the map.  But I made a quick & dirty graphic here by taking photos of the screen and stitching them together so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

This is how my route today looked.  I had what's called my "birthday route" today, which means they let me pick an nice, easy route and not get assigned an additional 1/4 to 1/2 route extra like we usually do.  So I finished this morning by about 10:00, which was a nice birthday present.  The app said this route was 5.56 miles long.  I like it that the detail is good enough that I can see where I was and was not criss-crossing streets.  It started there at the green square, then it goes straight up the west side of General McMullen.  Then when I started back south you can see that the line gets all squiggly; that's where I began reading both sides of the street, which is what we refer to as criss-crossing.  All the way back to Castroville Road, then up one side of that short stretch of Cortez, then criss-crossing again until I got to Jewett, then "looping" part of S. San Bernardo (that is, up one side and back down the other), then criss-crossing another section of S. San Bernardo with a small loop at the end where it dead ends, then back over to Cortez where I went down the other side of it from where I'd been before.  Then that tail at the bottom is where I have to read several meters along Castroville Road.  Then I walked back to my truck and turned it off about where that red square is, almost exactly where I was when I had first turned it on.

I've done this before with my GPS unit, but unfortunately I can't do anything with it once I'm finished except look at it myself because it doesn't have any kind of networking capability like the phone does, and it doesn't use Google Maps so the map it shows is very, very bare-bones.

It will be interesting to me to map out all my routes like this so I can get a bird's-eye view of them.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

This was certainly strange

It's not unusual for me to see vacant houses with numerous newspaper lying in the yard--the resident apparently having neglected to cancel his subscription when he moved out.  Or died, maybe?  Anyway, I came across this one this morning.

Unfortunately, since as usual I don't want to be looking like I'm up to something in case someone is watching me (people tend to call in complaints if they see one of us pausing for a breath or taking a break), I didn't dig into it to see what the issue date was.

But it was quite strange to find this seemingly fresh copy of the San Antonio Light lying in someone's yard, looking like it had just been delivered that morning, when the Light was shut down 20 years ago.

Photo taken this morning on the east side, in the general area of where Houston and Commerce intersect.


Saturday, March 16, 2013

An interesting night

Earlier tonight I heard a presentation by an Iraqi, formerly a Muslim, about how he came to know and convert to Christianity.  It was very interesting.  Afterward, he had a question & answer session, and many of the questions put to him had to do with the reality of being in Iraq versus what we were told here in the U.S.

He told us how, like all other Iraqi men, he had had to serve a mandatory term in the army (this was under Saddam Hussein).  He was addressing the topic of Hussein's Iraq actually being a threat to the U.S. or not.  He said, "When I was in the army, I fired only 7 bullets.  Only one of them hit the target, and it wasn't even my target."  Then he added, "By the way, I was in the Republican Guard."

Yeah.  That was the supposedly "elite" troops that we constantly heard about in the news.

But like I said, his story was fascinating.  It began when, as a teenager, he had a 4-year-old sister who died suddenly of an unknown illness.  His mother, grief stricken, asked their local religious leaders for something from the Koran to comfort her, and no one could give her anything.  It angered him so much that he temporarily became an atheist, because he refused to believe in a God that couldn't offer a few words of comfort to his grieving mother.  Later, he read some popular books that contained some Biblical quotes and it began his interest in investigating the Bible.  One of the books he pointed out was Peter Benchley's The Island.  He managed to find a copy of the Gospel of John and mistakenly thought that it was the whole Bible.  Since none of the quotes he had read were from John, he thought that they were all false.  But then later he happened across a copy of the New Testament and saw that John was only a part of it.  Then he realized that because several people from the New Testament often said, "As it is written..." there must be even more to it, and eventually he got hold of a full Bible with both Old and New Testaments.  He had to borrow money from a cousin who had a steady job as a barber to buy it.

He had many valuable insights into living in the Muslim world, and I wish many more Americans could hear what he has to say.  He admitted that he will probably never see any of his family again, and that it will likely not be safe for someone like him to return to the Middle East during his lifetime.

The history of music in 9 minutes

Very cool.

Saturday, March 09, 2013

Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwoʻole - Facing Future

I just downloaded this one today. I feel I must say something about it.

Israel "Iz" Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole (click for the Wikipedia link if you want to see how to pronounce his last name) was a Hawaiian musician:  singer and ukulele player.  Follow the link again to read all the details of his life.

Although he was already well-known in Hawaii, this album got him worldwide exposure and his medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" has been used in numerous movies and commercials.  I remember coming across a link to the "Rainbow" part of that medley on YouTube several months ago and was stunned by how hauntingly beautiful it was.  It was also haunting because I realized I had heard it somewhere before, although I couldn't remember where, and at the time I was thinking, "how could I have forgotten I ever heard this?"  And honestly, I don't even want to hear "traditional" versions of that song anymore.

This whole album is just awesome, and the whole thing will be going on my big favorites list.  He sings mostly in Hawaiian, but there are a couple of songs in English, namely the medley I've already mentioned and his own special version of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" that he re-wrote specifically for Hawaii.

His has a mellow tenor voice that sounds like streams of liquid gold floating across blue, sun-dappled waters.  And although my clumsy strumming will never match his playing ability, and my own reedy tenor will never compare with his golden voice, I've already begun practicing the "Rainbow" part of the medley.

He died in 1997 at the young age of 38 from various complications brought on by his severe obesity.  This was the second of four albums he made before his death.  Four more have been released since then.  In my opinion, anyone who even half-assedly wants to play the ukulele should have this album, and listen to it often.

Sunday, March 03, 2013

This just in: redshirts were safer

Someone crunched the numbers to discover that wearing red on ST:TOS was actually safer than wearing gold (per capita).