Tag: ABC Wednesday

A is for Andrews Sisters

Patty left the group in 1954, which also caused a personal schism; her sisters learned about it by reading it in the newspapers.

Prelude: for this round of ABC Wednesday, I decided to do musical groups that featured family members. I actually found 24 groups, for all the letters except Q and U, though I did have to stretch some definitions. No Doobie Brothers, though.

Undoubtedly, I was inspired by writing about the Green Family Singers, and further when I watched The Sound of Music.
***
It may have been Bette Midler who introduced me to the music of the Andrews Sisters with her cover of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B in the early 1970s – LISTEN to a version by the Andrews. But in fact, I already owned some Andrews Sisters through Bing Crosby’s classic Christmas album, which featured Jingle Bells and Mele Kalikimaka [LISTEN], though I didn’t know the singers at the time, and I don’t recall if they were credited.

Fortunately, I have a friend named Fred Hembeck who is a fairly rabid Andrews Sisters fan, so now I actually have two albums of the classic tunes by Patty (the youngest, blonde), Maxene (middle sister, a brunette), and LaVerne (the eldest, the redhead). They were quite popular from the late 1930s on. “In the 1940s the sisters found themselves in high demand, and became the most profitable stage attraction in the entire nation, earning $20,000 a week. Aside from singing, the sisters were established radio personalities and made appearances in 17 Hollywood movies. During the mid 1940s the sisters released eight new singles, six of which became bestsellers. Some of the hits include Rum and Coca Cola [LISTEN] and ‘I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.'”

Patty left the group in 1954, which also caused a personal schism; her sisters learned about it by reading it in the newspapers. They got back together, “professionally and personally,” in 1956 with a newer sound that “did not gain popularity with the public, who preferred hearing old hits.”

Laverne died in 1968 from cancer at the age of 55. Patty and Maxene continued to perform, together, but usually apart, into the 1990s. “In 1995, while on vacation in Cape Cod, Maxene had a heart attack and died. She was 79.” Patty died in January 2013, a few weeks shy of her 95th birthday.

I find that I really enjoy listening to them, more now than in my callow youth.

LISTEN to:
Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, the song for which I probably know them best
I Can Dream, Can’t I, which went #1 in late 1949 or early 1950
Don’t Fence Me In, with Bing Crosby, which went to #1 in 1944

WATCH
A segment of the TV show What’s My Life (1959).
***

ABC Wednesday – Round 14

<

Z is for Zero

Helping to working on my daughter’s homework, I get to rediscover centimeters to meters (100), milliliters to liters (1,000), and grams to kilograms (1,000).

Zero has fascinated me for-practically-ever. I saw this article in BoingBoing, which led to this piece in the Guardian:

“Only [India] introduced a symbol, 0, and treated it as if it was a normal digit just like all the others from 1 to 9. The invention of the number zero was possibly the greatest conceptual leap in the history of mathematics.

“But why did the Indians make this leap and not China or Babylon? …

“India made another contribution to world culture as well as zero: the idea of nirvana, the transcendent state of “nothingness”, when you are liberated from suffering and desires.

“In fact, the word used in philosophical texts to mean nothing or the void, is “shunya”, the same word later used to mean zero.

“For George Gheverghese Joseph, a maths historian at the University of Manchester, the invention of zero happened when an unknown Indian mathematician about two thousand years realized that “this philosophical and cultural concept would also be useful in a mathematical sense.” …

“In the modern world, it is common to see religion and science as always in conflict. Yet in ancient India, one cannot untangle mathematics and mysticism.”

I read Thinking in Numbers, On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math by Daniel Tammet this autumn. He wrote about Shakespeare’s Zero, how the Bard wrote a lot about nothingness and was “one of the first generations of English schoolboys to learn about the figure zero.”

For zero means nothing, but, combined with other numbers, can represent an incredible size, e.g., a one, followed by a zero (10), or two zeroes (100), or many more. Helping to work on my daughter’s homework, I get to rediscover the relationship of centimeters to meters (100), milliliters to liters (1,000), and grams to kilograms (1,000).

Of course, we often make a big deal about a birthday or anniversary when it contains a zero in the one’s place, and more so when it’s in both the ones and tens place. Read the Wikipedia piece about zero.
***
The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’

How many is a billion?


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Y is for Yahtzee

The strategy comes when one gets a roll that could be used in more than one box.

There’s a game that involves five dice and a score sheet called Yahtzee, which I’m teaching to my daughter. I like it because, while it involves an element of luck, it also requires some strategy.

“In the upper section, each box is scored by summing the total number of dice faces matching that box. For example, if a player were to roll three ‘twos,’ the score would be recorded as 6 in the twos box. If a player scores a total of at least 63 points, [which corresponds to three-of-a-kind for each of the six rows], a bonus of 35 points is added to the upper section score.

“The lower section contains a number of poker-themed combinations with specific point values
Three-Of-A-Kind (At least three dice showing the same face) – Sum of all dice
Four-Of-A-Kind (At least four dice showing the same face -Sum of all dice
Full House (A three-of-a-kind and a pair) – 25 points
Small Straight (Four sequential dice: 1-2-3-4, 2-3-4-5, or 3-4-5-6) – 30 points
Large Straight (Five sequential dice: 1-2-3-4-5 or 2-3-4-5-6) – 40 points
Yahtzee (All five dice showing the same face) 50 points
Chance (Any combination) often acts as a discarded box for a turn that will not fit in another category”

The strategy comes when one gets a roll that could be used in more than one box. For instance, if one has rolled 2-2-6-6-6, should it be taken as three sixes in the upper box, as three of a kind in the lower box, or as a full house in the lower box? One has to guesstimate how likely it is to get another roll in the categories not chosen. In other words, math probabilities are involved, though one does not have to be a human calculator to enjoy the game.

Given the number of years the game has been sold, it’s possible that you have a copy of the game in your attic right now.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Welcome to ABC Wednesday, Round 14

Bloggers, consider giving ABC Wednesday a try

 

Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before six months ago, but consider this my now semiannual plug for something called ABC Wednesday, in which people, literally from around the world, post an item – pictures, poems, essays that in someway describe each letter of the alphabet, in turn. I’ve been participating since the letter K in Round 5.The meme was started about six and a half years ago by Denise Nesbitt from England.

At some point, she recruited a team of her followers to do some of the intro writing and visiting, which eventually included me.

Then three rounds ago, she was getting a little burned out. So I became the administrator, assigning who reads which posts, making sure somebody is writing the introductions (and writing them myself, when necessary) and inserting the link that allows everyone to participate. The team is pretty good at noting when someone grossly violates the simple rules.

Read about the significance of this round’ logo by Troy here. He’s designed the logos for eight or nine rounds now.

The Netiquette for the site is this:

1. Post something on your non-commercial blog/webpage having something to do with the letter of the week. Use your imagination. Put a link to ABC Wednesday in your post and/or put up the logo.

2. Come to the ABC Wednesday site and link the SPECIFIC link to the Linky thing. It’ll be available around 4 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time each Tuesday, which is 11 a.m. or noon in the Eastern part of the United States.

3. Try and visit at least 5 other participants…and comment on their posts. The more sites you do visit, the more comments you will probably get.

Bloggers, consider giving it a try if this sounds interesting. We’ll be starting with A again in a couple of weeks. And I actually will have a theme for the posts this time through, which will become quite evident soon.

X is for Xylophone

I loved my xylophone, and think it’d be a nifty Christmas gift for SOMEONE ELSE’S little child.

Wikipedia says: “The xylophone (from the Greek words ξύλον—xylon, ‘wood’ + φωνή—phonē, ‘sound, voice’, meaning ‘wooden sound’) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets.”

When I was a kid, I had a xylophone, very much like this one pictured, with an octave and a half. It was good for Mary Had a Little Lamb, or for Chopsticks, if you had two mallets.

But I was always disappointed that certain seemingly simple songs often had ONE note (or more) that wasn’t in the standard scale. I figured “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music” [LISTEN] certainly would be able to be played on a keyboard [PLAY!], using only the white keys of a piano, which is all most kids’ xylophones had. After all, the very basis of the song is that DO-RE-MI, etc, were the building blocks of singing. Alas, at LA (A in the key of C), it goes A down to D-E-F#-G-A-B. Then at TI, it goes B down to E-F#-G#-A-B-C.

Likewise, Dominique by The Singing Nun [LISTEN], a big hit in my childhood, just before the return of the chorus, went (in C) E-D-E-F#-G. In other words, again, one needed an equivalent of a black note on a keyboard, missing on this simple instrument.

Still, I loved my xylophone. I think this would be a nifty Christmas gift for SOMEONE ELSE’S little child.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial