Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A Song Not for Now

When I was a little girl, Walt Kelly's Pogo was a mainstay comic in our house. Pogo was a lefty environmentalist cartoon, and a healthy trade off from the horrors of Al Capp's righty (whitey, tighty) Lil Abner; both were in the comic section of our local newspaper (back when 'fair and balanced' meant something, I suppose). I think the possom and his pals of the Ofekenokee Swamp were avatars for our Dad, but for whatever reason, I ended up with a lot of Walt Kelly's ideas, words, images and tunes implanted in odd corners of my brain.

For example, here is a 'quote of the week' I put together for Archaeology.about.com:
Looking back, the view always improves. Maybe that's why I became an archaeologist.

Anyway, so today I was spending a snowy day catching up on reading my blogroll (there are far too many good writers in the world and a whole bunch are writing blogs about anthropology or archaeology), and in BoingBoing was a link to a review of Songs of the Pogo, a collection of songs written by Walt Kelly and published in 1956. I can't remember that we had this album, but I do know that we had the sheet music, because I can sing you all the lyrics to several of them, including my favorite, a sad little tune called "A Song Not For Now". Be glad, be very glad, I don't have a microphone close to hand...

Songs of the Pogo
This link on emusic will let you listen to real singers singing each of the 25 songs written by Kelly.

Here's Cary Doctorow's post on the subject.

Here's another link to some of the songs sung by Beverly Mills.

"A song not for now, you need not put stay
A note for the was can be sung for today
The notes for the does not will do for the does
Today you can sing for the will be that was. "

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Web 2.0 Explained

I love this video, I ran across it on Lawrence Lessig's blog (where is where the link goes), and he got it from Boing Boing, and originally it came from an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas:

Web 2.0 Explained

This is what geeks like me dreamed of.