Is everybody HAPPY!

They had their share of dancing, drinking, and shagging up on the Mesa during the designing of that bomb. I wrote a thing on it, focussing on the square dancing at Los Alamos.

It also sheds a little light on Tennis For Two, sometimes cited as the world's first video game.

For over two years, I've been researching one of the recordings on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music -- the cut recorded in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1927.

(That's the very freaky and little-researched "Moonshiners Dance Part One" by Frank Cloutier and The Victoria Cafe Orchestra.)

And, sure enough, more than a few of the musicians closely associated with the recording were Freemasons. For one thing, you can often tell by the symbols on their headstones.

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

Hey, #5, this is Boing Boing. There are no problems that can't be solved with a little steampunk! Heh.

No, seriously, I agree it would be better to work up something retro and interesting with "safe" technology. One reason they use the wind-up players is to be mobile -- they don't need to be plugged in. So some alternative energy ideas could be incorporated. A dance-powered record player?

It doesn't really sound like the Shellac Sisters' records are all that rare. By ruining them, they only make the remaining copies more valuable. And anybody evangelizing about old music can't be all bad.

What bothers me much more is that there really (really) are many aspiring record collectors who go out and buy a Victrola first, before they even own any 78s. They then want rare records to spin on their players. It's a holocaust. A shellacicide? Scratch n' snuff?

I hate to think of someone encountering The Shellac Sisters and thinking "Hey ... good idea!" No, bad idea.

PLEASE, I beg of you, DO NOT play vintage 78 rpm records on vintage wind-up "gramophone" players.

These are not floppy disks -- you don't need obsolete play-back technology to listen to this obsolete info-storage technology.

A turntable made in 2008 (with a well-chosen needle) will produce vastly better sound and, most important, will do vastly less damage to the record.

If you care about these records, do not ruin them by gouging them with 1920's players. A foolish mistake that I see over and over and over and over and over. It isn't cute or or sexy or clever. Please stop.

What, no spork?

Hate to stump for anybody, but Ancestry.com is indeed where I got them. Greatest time-waster EVER, it is, besides being a useful tool. Note that Disney's passport application shows his signature beneath a pledge to defend the United States Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Remember -- this is the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport ... maybe their music is ... toe-tapping?