My vacation last week started disastrously (see below), but once I arrived at my friends’ home it improved markedly. One of the highlights was an impromptu jam session with the young fiddler Roger and a couple of his friends. I just happened to have my little portable recorder at hand.

Different instruments require different micing techniques. Fiddles, I’ve read, sound best with the microphone positioned two or three feet above the fiddle. With banjos, the further from the microphone, the better — in the next room, say, or across the street, or in the next county.

Old Mother Logo:

Cluck Old Hen:

Update: Here’s Roger in action at a contra dance:

If you have 400 miles to travel and your options are Greyhound bus or a skateboard, choose the skateboard. You’ll get there faster and in greater comfort.

I left the house at 2 a.m. a week ago Sunday and arrived at the Wichita bus station shortly thereafter. I sat down with a book to wait for the 3 a.m. bus. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Evidentally Greyhound assumes that nobody reads any more, because there was a television up on the wall, tuned to CNN, the volume set to Very Loud. It was hard to read with the nattering voices. Nobody watched the television.

The stairway to the men’s room at the bus station was dark. It was not pleasant walking up them and, with my recent orthopedic problems, it was no fun at all making my way back down. Two of the four stalls were out of order, as were three of the five urinals. At the sink where I rinsed my hands, water flowed down the drain and onto the floor. There was no soap in the dispenser.

At 4 a.m., CNN repeated Larry King’s 2 a.m. interview with Colin Powell. Neither Powell nor King said anything worth hearing once, let alone twice.

At 5 a.m., just as CNN began repeating their 3 a.m. news report, the 3 a.m. bus arrived. It left the station shortly before 5:30, about two-and-a-half hours late.

My 7:15 a.m. connection east was long gone by the time the bus rolled into the Kansas City station, so I had the privilege of spending the rest of the morning there. At least the fixtures in the men’s room worked, and I was able to purchase a small hamburger that merely cost three times what it was worth. However, there were, not just one, but two televisions blaring, and none of the seats were comfortable. There were occasional announcements on the loudspeakers, but they were unintelligible with all the noise. I saw no chart listing which bus was boarded from which door. Fortunately, I correctly guessed which line was for the bus I needed in time to catch it.

The second bus left only about twenty minutes late, and I eventually arrived at my destination, about six hours late.¹

Never again.

This was not my worst experience with Greyhound. Some years back, during a complicated journey, one of the bus drivers didn’t bother to go to work that day. I eventually reached my destination, exhausted and furious, in the middle of the night rather than the scheduled mid-afternoon.

It wasn’t always like this. Years ago, busses ran on time. You could even check in your luggage as you do at an airport rather than lug it from bus to bus, and you didn’t have to pay $10 for a second suitcase. I could buy a two-week pass for a very reasonable price, visit friends and family in several states out east and spend a few days at the Pennsic War on the way home. I used to entrust my hammered dulcimer to a friend with a car and take the bus to Winfield, arriving in time to set up my tent before the fingerpicking championship.

But not any more. Fewer busses run these days, seldom at reasonable times, almost never on time, and they don’t stop at Winfield.

Update: Maybe Greyhound executives should visit Japan.

1. Let me note for the record that all the Greyhound staff I talked to were courteous and apologetic. I’m not angry at them.↩

At midnight, the date changes. On July 5, it is no longer appropriate to play with explosives. It’s nice that you feel like celebrating, but I really need to sleep.

… or, less melodramatically, I finally got the new glasses I needed. I’ve read far less than usual these past few years because reading has been a tedious process: read 20 minutes, holding the book and my head at uncomfortable angles so the print is within the narrow zone of close focus, until my vision blurs; wait 20 minutes, until I can focus on nearby things again; read 15 minutes, until my vision blurs again; throw the book against wall and listen to a CD instead. My health insurance covers eye exams but not the glasses themselves, and even at the cheap mall outlets a new pair of glasses is still beyond my budget, so I tried ordering a pair from 39 Dollar Glasses.com. I need varifocal lenses with hefty corrections for nearsightedness and astigmatism, so my glasses cost about twice $39, but they still were only about a third the price quoted by the salesman at the mall.

Am I satisfied with them? Not entirely. The frames need a bit of adjustment, which I’m hesitant to do myself, and while I do have good distance and close-up vision now, intermediate vision, such as is necessary when working at a computer, is confined to an annoyingly small region. I may need to get a second pair specifically for work.

However, I’ve never been completely satisfied with any of the glasses I’ve purchased in the last 20 years. My new pair, even with its problems, is a better fit than the second-last pair, which was expensively mis-manufactured and ill-fitted by the optician at his shop. And my new pair does pass the crucial test: I can read all evening long.

I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.

Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright‘s trilogy.

Here is this past February at the office, condensed to about two minutes:

Here’s what life has been like here at the office this week:

Here’s what my office currently looks like:

The crowds were smaller than usual at Winfield, and the camping and campground picking were off-site this year, but the music as as good as ever. I’ve got a bunch of pictures and some field recordings to survey and edit. Until then, here are some videos of this year’s discoveries, The Wiyos¹ and Doug Smith.

1. This actually was their second year at Winfield, but I missed them last time.↩

Cutlass dancing.

My friends and I stopped at the relocated Carp Camp on the way home from Winfield last night. Here’s a bit of the music we heard:

The sound isn’t wonderful (crank it up), but it might give you an idea of the energy flowing there.

There will be many more pictures of Winfield and Carp Camp when I have time to sort and edit everything in the camera.

(I just got an email from a friend checking to see how I am, and I thought I ought to make an announcement here in case anyone else is wondering.)

The remains of Tropical Storm Lowell (an east Pacific storm that nobody paid much attention to) dropped ten inches of rain in the Wichita area yesterday. Several of the rivers in the region are well above flood stage. Fortunately for me, none of the flooding is near my neighborhood, even though the Little Arkansas River loops around it.

My principal, selfish concern with the flooding is to what extent it will interfere with the Walnut Valley Festival next weekend. The spot where I normally camp is currently under at least ten feet of water. (If I do go this year, I’ll be day-tripping. Even if the Walnut River is back within its banks in time, the mud will be deep and gooey in the campgrounds.)

Carp Camp, September, 2008. Here’s what it looked like a year ago. (Photo from The Winfield Courier.)

Tribulus terrestris, a.k.a. puncture weed. One of the pleasures of bicycling in summer.

Close-up, showing the developing seed heads.

Public enemy #2 is the idiot who chatters on a cell phone while driving. #1 is the jerk who doesn’t look, doesn’t think and doesn’t care. All three are common in Wichita, particularly the last.

Odds and ends in lieu of a substantative post.

My ankle has healed to the point that it’s a minor nuisance, not a major problem. It doesn’t feel right, and I expect that it never really will, but I can get around plenty well now, up and down stairs and out on my bicycle. I’m done with formal physical therapy. Next month I plan to take a beginning ballet class as a form of advanced PT. I don’t expect to be back on the dance stage again — my ankle is getting better, but my knees aren’t — but taking class will be worthwhile just to demonstrate to myself that I can still do it, despite everything.

*****

I’ve installed a new photo gallery that I hope will be easier to upgrade in the future when it becomes necessary. I’m in the process of uploading the pictures from the old site. There are a bunch of them, and it’s going to take a while to post them all. Currently, there are some pictures from last year’s Walnut Valley Festival, some from the local botanical garden, and a selection of pictures from my days in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The last are mostly black and white and date back to when I worked in an old-fashioned chemical darkroom.

*****

Robert the LLama Butcher, one of my favorite bloggers, has his own place now, The Port Stands at Your Elbow. He promises to keep posting at the old site as well.

*****

Watchmen is one of the very few comic books graphic novels that I have read. The inevitable movie is due out next year, and it looks like it might not be a botch — though it almost was:

… they originally wanted Keanu Reeves for Dr. Manhattan, Ron Perlman for The Comedian, and either Jude Law and Tom Cruise for Ozymandias. Gack!

Toren makes an essential point in the comments there:

Alan has put his money where his mouth is and transferred all his share of the profits from the movie to Dave Gibbons, the artist. I’ve met Dave a few times here and in England and I must say he’s not only a great guy but his work in adapting Alan’s brutally difficult script has been vastly underrated. To take Alan’s insanely complex and dense scripts and adapt them to read fluently and yet contain the unbelievable amount of required detail and foreshadowing is one of comic’s great accomplishments. Dave’s work was hugely appreciated within the industry but alas, never got much credit outside of it. It was all “Alan Moore is God.”

It’s a damn shame.

Alan Moore isn’t God, but is he Shakespeare? Eve Tushnet has some interesting things to say about Watchmen (spoilers), finding parallels with Measure for Measure and much else. (You may need to scroll down to the entries for January 23, 2004.) Scroll up for additional comments and links.

Update: More on Moore from Tushnet.

Right now I’m playing loud music to drown out today’s treat: a bunch of no-longer-young drag queens lipsyncing to mediocre music down at the corner. No pictures; I want to forget the images, not share them with unwary visitors. There’s also an ice cream vendor playing tinny banjo recordings of teevee themes in the parking lot across the alley.

Because they are idiots.

Three things to keep in mind when you ride a bicycle on Wichita streets:

1. If there is any possibility that a driver won’t see you, he won’t.

2. If there is no way on earth that a driver can possibly miss seeing you, he still won’t see you.

3. Right-of-way? What’s that?

One year ago today I began Scuffulans hirsutus.

Five years ago today, I launched Mixolydian Mode, my first weblog, now retired.