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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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Not to be outdone by those damned German chappies who discovered a new Bach autograph, we have ourselves recently discovered a new broadside ballad fragment “The Cuckoo and the Child”.
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Would you credit it? After I've been doing stuff for these buggers over the last twenty-one years they are still too cheap to spring for a five minute phone call down to Plano. There I was all ready at a moments notice to hurl myself onto the telephone, but my self-sacrificial offer went unheeded and the poor sod celebrated his ninetieth year on the Radio effectively alone in his mean little oubliette, possibly sobbing to boot.
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Millennia ago...
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They tell of an ancient legend, and though I can't for the life of me remember who the original 'they' , the legend (or perhaps it's merely a joke) is that whenever you fly and you check your baggage, whatever your destination happens to be your baggage will always end up in Vladivostok . The only exception to this rule being, of course, if you actually happen to be going to Vadivostok yourself.
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I almost, but not quite, had an argument the other day with Lee-the-Lady-Friend (who she insists should never be confused with Conan-the-Barbarian, which is probably why the argument wasn't quite). This almost disagreeable occasion occurred, during a reading of my most recent essay to her over the phone, when she recognised one of the many un-attributed quotations I lard my texts with. She accused me of plagiarism and just couldn't be convinced that it wasn't bad, evil and rather shady (lady friends can be like that).
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For today's dedicated technopoodle the great curse of Life (and the Universe and perhaps even of Everything) is that, almost inevitably, today's "Oh! Wow!" is tomorrow's ho-hum. And that that time-scale is pretty-well not metaphorical!
In its most general extent it's all the fault of that damn Moore and his Loore, I mean Law---though of course it's not really a real law like the Law of Gravity that has underpinnings and maths and stuff, it's more of an observed phenomenon that has sort of held good for the last foorety or moore years.
More's Lore states that computer chip density doubles every eighteen or so months1 . And all the dreadful just-in-time obsolescence we suffer naturally follows from it---Not to mention that even worse just-before-it's-time-and-as-soon-as-you've-given-the-sales-guy-your-bloody-credit-card obsolescence.
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You will see in a moment how much it pains me to admit this, but I have to tell you that the other day I traveled by ... um ... public transport; though, I hasten to reassure you, it was merely on a DART railway train so it isn't as bad as it could have been.
And so it fell out, that other day, on the most decidedly non-U Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and whilst pausing in the relative quiet of one of their stations I heard an American girl talking about going, as she described it, 'horseback riding'---now this immediately piqued my interest because in England, where we very much subscribe to the theory that 'less is more', if you do it, it is always just 'riding' (I mean you pretty-well know what part of which animal is involved!) While our young Americanette was perhaps trying to be pretentious about her activities (she was talking unusually loud, even for an American) our English term way outdoes her efforts because it is a perfect example of a particularly English form of aggressively anti-pretentious pretentiousness: a form which is to other sorts of pretension what passive-agressive behaviour is to kicking the ... well whatever out of whomever.
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"You leave the Pennsylvania station
'Bout a quarter to four,
You read War and Peace
And then you're in Baltimore.
Dinner in the diner,
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your next six meals in Carolina.
When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar
Then you know the goods ahead has derailed a car.
Perhaps if they shoveled coal in
They could get the bloody thing rollin'.
Boo! Hoo! I think we're staying right where we are..." [scratch]
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First of all, to start out right and to tell you the complete truth: I am an avowed atheist.
... Well
... actually that's not a good start and in fact it's a downright lie; I haven't yet taken my vows and so I'm merely a postulant
... and, Oh! Dear, now this has inadvertently given you a possibly wrong impression of all atheists, and in highly divisive addition, has set us up to come over all Epimenides, with one of those interminably boring ancient philosophical Greek paradoxes: 'RHB, who tries to make us believe that all Atheists are liars, claims he is an atheist; therefore ... therefore I could potentially go into a logical loop with this and use up the whole essay without having to waste any more time thinking.
Wow! that would be wonderful---[sigh] ... but only wonderful for me so let's plough on...
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I run most mornings starting at around 3:45 local time (and that doesn't sound quite so crazy if you convert it to my birth time zone. Then it works out to be 9:45 in the morning British Summer Time; so just imagine that I never bothered to change my watch when I came here and you won't have to look askance at me---well at least not for that). As you might imagine, at that totally non-crazy and indeed cool time of the morning my run is just a dull repetitive forty-five minutes of pumping legs and elevated heart rate and sweat---and nothing else much. I don't meet many people who aren't whizzing past in cars (nor, really, that many who are). In fact I still think fondly of the time, three months ago, when I passed an hispanic man who said hello to me, and the time, maybe a couple of months before that, when I saw a pretty girl walking with a cell phone to her ear who didn't.
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