A banjo story from my past

Back in the early 90s, I was doing a concert in Portland about 25 years ago and that thing we always worry about happening in concerts happened: I broke a string. Damn damn damn! I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out the packet of strings we all carry for just this emergency and start changing the string.

But I've got to fill time while I'm doing it, so I start telling banjo jokes. I run through a lot of the old standards:

What's the difference between a banjo and an onion? (You cry when you cut up an onion.)
...an accordion? (The banjo takes longer to burn.)
...a Harley? (You can tune a Harley.)
...a chainsaw? (The chainsaw has a wider dynamic range.)
...a banjo player and a large pizza? (The large pizza can feed a family of four.)

What do you say to a banjo player in a three-piece suit? ("Will the defendant please rise?")

How do you tell the stage is level? (The banjo player drools out of both sides of his mouth.)

...and a bunch more, including my all-time favorite:

Q: What's the first thing every banjo player knows?
A: That Jed's a millionaire.

Okay, so I'm about done with changing the string and I say "What's the difference between a banjo and an Uzi?" But before I can get out my answer of "The Uzi only repeats 40 times," some guy in the third row called out "The banjo clears the room faster!"

Aaaaargh! Upstaged! I mimed getting stabbed in the heart, tuned up the new string, and played the next song in the concert.

A banjo story from my past

Garfield cartoon

The Babe told me this morning about yesterday's Garfield cartoon. Okay, this is me all the way. ~sigh~

You can get the original here.

Garfield cartoon

Contradancing... to techno???

Apparently, contradancing is getting a new audience. As this video shows, there's contradancing being done to techno music.

I'm not much for techno music, vastly preferring that fiddle-and-banjo crap, but if people learn contradancing, it's all to the good. (Thanks to Anita Anderson for this link.)

Contradancing... to techno???

Music: Queen meets the Soggy Bottom Boys

Steve Lalor sent me this clip. It's a group called Hayseed Dixie, an odd bluegrass band from the UK. Their first album was entitled "A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC," a title that just seems to scream "No good can come of this!" The current album is "Killer Grass," with cuts such as "Alien Abduction Probe," "Eine Kleine Trinkmusik," and "Underneath the Bed." You can find a number of clips on YouTube. The video clip below is for their version of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Music: Queen meets the Soggy Bottom Boys

"Wipeout" on the banjo

I was in the middle of working on receipts for expenses and so on, when I got pinged by a cousin with this little nugget.

I think we've seen it demonstrated that you can play just about anything on a banjo. But it's not the banjo that's really unusual in this; it's the washboard.

Oy.

Redneck Wipeout @ Yahoo! Video

"Wipeout" on the banjo

Thanksgiving weekend in Tacoma

We spent Thanksgiving weekend in Tacoma with The Babe's family, though we were able to break away for a day on Saturday and visit a few friends. I got to see my dear friend Kim and we stopped to see Elisabeth, Lonnie, and Zen. In the evening, we were able to do dinner with the Babe's old friends Bruce and Stacy--for those of you who were at our wedding, Stacy was the woman who sang You Are My Home (from The Scarlet Pimpernel)--in downtown Seattle.

Bruce and Stacy have a charming son, Elliot, who did not accompany them. Elliot's, uh, 3 years old. When Stacy left Elliot with her mother for the evening, her mother said "Who are you going to dinner with?" Stacy explained that they were going to dinner with her old drama partner and her husband. "What's her husband do?" Stacy's mother asked.

After thinking a second, Stacy said "He's a banjo-playing technical writer."

Her mother snorted and said "Where'd she meet him? On the Internet?"

Stacy said "Yes..."

Later that evening, the Babe googled "banjo player technical writer," thinking that there would probably be just me. She was horrified to discover this produced 159,000 hits using those criteria. The Babe explained that she'd always felt that one banjo-playing technical writer was a sufficient quantity.

Thanksgiving weekend in Tacoma

Great banjo joke from Reader's Digest

The Babe read this today in Reader's Digest of all places.

The best noise I ever heard a banjo make was when an accordion landed on top of it in a trash can.

Great banjo joke from Reader's Digest

Banjo jokes

For those of you not familiar with the genré, banjos, banjo players, and banjo music in general are the inspiration for banjo jokes.

My first encounter with banjo jokes was in early December 1991. I was lunching with a few people at a client's and we were swapping jokes. One of the people said, "Oh, I've got some banjo jokes," and proceeded to whip out four of them. As a longtime banjo player, I was initially a little bristly but I thought to myself "Oh, what the hell: I tell jokes about all sorts of people myself and these are funny! And what's more, they're true!!" Since then, I've collected and told a number of banjo jokes myself.

As a matter of fact, I was doing a concert in Portland some years ago and was telling banjo jokes. I'd been whipping them off fairly fast and thick--"What's the difference between a banjo and a chainsaw? ...a motorcycle? ...an accordion?" (Look 'em up for the answers.)--and I got to "What's the difference between a banjo and an Uzi?"

The answer that I was about to rattle off was "An Uzi only repeats 40 times" (not too bad), but someone in the third row upstaged me by shouting out "The banjo clears the room faster!" Right HERE they getcha....

Banjo jokes

Me on a postage stamp

Apparently, you can get just about any picture on a postage stamp. Zazzle.com offers a service wherein you can buy sheets of stamps custom printed with the photo you specify.  They're legal for postage and will pass muster with the USPO.  The catch is that they're really expensive! Buying a single sheet of 20 - 39-cent stamps costs $16.99 (the stamps alone are $7.80 of postage).  Prices start dropping rapidly depending on the number of sheets you order, but figure you're still going to cough up $4 extra/ even if you're ordering 100 sheets of 20 stamps.  That's a bit much for this, no matter how cool I could make postage look:

Me immortalized on a postage stamp

Me on a postage stamp

These are a few of my favorite things

Well, two anyway: here are a couple pictures of BC curled up next to one of the banjos.

BC and a banjo

BC and a banjo

And yes, I found the widget for the digicam's memory card. I've uploaded a bunch of new pictures from Halloween, Orycon, and the kitties to my Flickr photo account and I'll be posting them with appropriate text shortly.

These are a few of my favorite things

It's amazing how the week flies by

I keep meaning to post things here and there on the blog, preferably on a daily basis, and the week has just zoomed by... again. Sheesh!

Tbe STC's Board of Directors has had a busy week this week. The Executive Director resigned and we've had a lot of extra work to do already and there'll be a lot more, I'm sure. Meanwhile, of course, there's everything else that I need to take care of: tracking construction on the new house, working on a bunch of Framemaker files for someone, a few other miscellaneous and sundry items that are designed to keep me from sleeping. Oh, well, we got out and danced twice this week, which is lovely, although we did not make it to the Oregon Country Fair, alas.

I have a couple of web sites for you to look at. The first is Turn Your Head, a web site that lets you order a sculpture of your profile. It's the old optical illusion of "Is it a vase or a silhouette?" only someone's actually done it. Not too shabby--I might get one made myself just because it's so fun.

The second web site is The Canonical List of Banjo Jokes. For all those who know banjos for what they are (fun but reeeeeally low class), this is a lovely page. There's a fair amount of dross in the list, but there are some real gems. They don't have one of my favorites, though: about 13 years ago, I was doing a concert in Portland. Previous concerts, I'd done sung along with guitar or banjo but for this one, I decided I'd do nothing but instrumental stuff and then just talk in between the pieces. I was telling a bunch of banjo jokes about halfway through the show--banjo jokes were still a relatively new phenomenon at that point--and getting some good laughs with them.

Well, I'd gotten through eight or nine banjo jokes, just kinda rattling them off one after another, and I got to "What's the difference between a banjo and an Uzi?" The answer I was going to give (which is the one appearing on the jokes page) is "The Uzi only repeats 40 times," but just as I was about to say the answer, a guy in the 3rd row jumped in with "The banjo clears the room faster."

FACED! Absolutely faced right there! The audience (and I) exploded laughing and I mimed tipping a hat to him.

I've been drinking a lot of tea lately (and enjoying it, of course). I'm going to be ordering some more tea from the Seattle Teacup soon. I couldn't remember what the name for that unusual green tea with the bits of roasted rice in it is; Elisabeth told me that it's called genmaicha ("Duh!" [he smacks his forehead in disgust for forgetting this]) and the question "What's that tea with the rice in it called?" is actually one of their top 10 questions at the store.

Enough of this. It's getting late and I've hit my work benchmarks for the day. I have the last bit of a mystery to read (Lawrence Block's "The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart") and there are a few hours of sleep in my future. I hope.

It's amazing how the week flies by

I bought a new banjo... and it's my first

Kay banjo and resonator

I've just gotten a very special banjo: it's an old Kay banjo, a five-string with a mahogany neck and a rosewood fingerboard.

Kay head--back

The head is probably some kind of plastic although it looks like skin--not likely a skin head would be this tight and would last this long. It's got a resonator on it, but I've taken it off--I want the open back sound to it.

Back of Kay banjo

Here's a picture from the back. You can see the nice flame pattern in the neck.

Kay peghead



Kay peghead--back

The pegs are metal and solid. They're rather unusual, as most of the straight-through pegs you find have some kind of plastic knob on 'em. Finding a Kay banjo with this particular feature has been something of a challenge, as most of them have the ivory-colored plastic.

Okay, it looks nice, it's in really good condition, and it's sturdy (although I do have to make some adjustments to the neck to get it just perfect), but what makes this banjo really special? Easy: this is the make and model of banjo that I started playing on, lo! these many moons ago, in 1971. I bought it from a very nice man through eBay and it just came today. Just pulling it out of the box and looking at it brought back a million memories of being in high school in Tucson and learning to play banjo and guitar.

There's nothing really special about this banjo of itself. It's like any of thousands of other low-end basic banjos. But save for a missing decal at the top of the peghead, it's the spitting image of the one I had. Even better, when I got it strung up with new strings, the tone was the same as the one I used to have Way Back When! It's a slightly different tone from any of my other banjos (this one's number #5 in the house) and I recall walking around Tucson, playing the banjo and singing songs. Gawd, I just well up with happiness at recovering a part of my youth. {deep and happy sigh}

I bought a new banjo... and it's my first