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Here is a Sup—I mean repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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Thanksgiving Day having passed such a short time ago this seems an appropriate moment to look at the other side of the coin: at You'rewelcomegiving Day.
You'rewelcomegiving is that nonchalant, not-quite-smug, and rather indeterminately located holiday wherein we take the time to celebrate one of the only three things that America has ever given to the culture of the world that are totally unalloyed, pure, joyous improvements (the other two being of course the Marshall Plan and Carrot Cake). Everything else---McDonalds, Hollywood, saying (but obviously not meaning) "Have a nice day", pointlessly expensive and choice-ridden coffee---have all been unmitigated disasters and have been to the culture of the world the equivalent of bovine spongeform encephalopathy or at least of a nasty bout of foot fungus.
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As you probably know, when I came to America there were two things I absolutely refused to change. The first was my way of speaking (I’ve never had an accent and I was damned if I was going to get one at that late date); and the other was, of course, my time zone. So when I leave for work of a morning, and it seems to all those Texans about me that it’s a horrendously early 5:30, to me it’s merely a leisurely, eat-your-heart-out-bankers’-hours late start to the working day at half past eleven.
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The other day Diana-at-work was just starting to learn a new computer language---and in passing I should mention that learning new computer languages is something that hovers between being the bane of the programmer’s life and the whole point of that life, we live by learning them and we die a little every time we do it---why in my time I've learned to program in Basic, Pascal, Forth, Modula2, PostScript, C (and most of its children), AppleScript, Perl and loads more that I won’t, for once, bore you with---anyway just as I walked into her cube (myself trying desperately to avoid having to solve, for a few precious moments more, some sliminess in a cURL command) just as I walked in she had generated her first output from her new language: she had a window on her Mac with the following text in it.
It read “HELLO WORLD”.
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[fade in: London traffic, then English children’s voices “Penny for the old guy gov’?” et sim. and then over this, as firework and bonfire noises are added,]
Remember, remember
The fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
[Fade out effects]
Should ever be forgot
Though actually, now-a-days, there are clearly at least two good reasons to forget, or rather two extremely bad reasons: and both of them are just as clearly your fault!
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In a few shortish, rather dumpy days comes Halloween, that vile and engorging celebration of greed and consume-mass-quantities-ism, and I suppose in spite of everything I really should mark it, however reluctantly, or at the very least lament its approach.
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It has come to my attention that no one currently alive in the United States of America, and precious few even in England, can correctly pronounce the word “forehead” any more.
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  This essay is entitled Kiss Rocks, and it might be of interest to see why I chose that particular title. You see the sentence ‘Kiss rocks’ is open to two wildly different interpretations, depending on whether the hearer was around and conscious in the early 70’s and was more at home with the pet rock or with the glam rock crazes. If I say “Kiss rocks”, with perhaps no particular emphasis on either word, it means one thing; and if I say “Kiss ROCKS!!”, with a lot more on the last one, it means quite another: the former no doubt encouraging a perhaps inappropriate intimate interaction with your lithic pet, and the latter an equally misapplied enthusiasm and a total misunderstanding of pop musicology. The beauty of these conflicting construals being that the noun in one becomes the verb in the other and vice versa and doesn’t that just make one absolutely ...glad that English is not a more synthetic language!
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Of course it goes without saying that anything that limits freedom of speech is suspect. Why, even that old chestnut about the prohibition of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded (and presumably non-conflagrational) theatre isn't completely absolute: I mean how else could you have a play about how those nasty German soldiers in WWI Belgium treated poor Nurse Edith Cavell when they finally noticed that she was helping soldiers go home; or about the events in London in 1666?
I mean you can’t have your squad go “Bang! You’re dead!” nor can you leave the way clear for Sir Christopher to rebuild all those London churches without first shouting “Fire!” and in the latter example probably shouting it a lot more than once.
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It has been said, by presumably humorous persons, that the camel is a horse which has been designed by a committee, but this is surely complete nonsense for the camel is clearly an elegant and well rounded beast, showing consistent adaptations to its arid environment from the closeability of its nose right through to the consistency of its dung. Why, one might as well reverse the claim and say that the horse is a camel designed by a committee of Midwestern irrigation and lawn-care specialists ...or maybe of avid rose growers.
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If you remember, before all that nonsense of Simon's Centennial Celebration, I flew the paranoid skies to Florida; well I'm back from my trip and for once I wasn't accurate in the prediction that with airline security getting tighter and tighter we'd all end up having to fly in the nude, indeed I wasn't forced to take my clothes off, not once---not even in the shower! But to forget my homage to Carey Grant's excellent performance in 'Charade' for a moment; while I was gone the universe co-incidentally concatenated (as it so often does) something I heard on the wireless with something I read whilst catching up on my backlog of messages on the ANSAX list .
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