Ralph - another one you may like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI1nPd7hezM

Allen Ginsberg performs William Blake's "Laughing Song" from Songs of Innocence.

So bad, it's almost good.


BTW, there's a difference between tone-deafness (inability to distinguish between the notes you hear) and tone-dumbness (inability to stay on pitch when you're singing).

When my nieces were studying at the Curtis Institute, they said that everyone in the program was required to take a choir class at some point in their studies, but there were three such classes: one for the students with absolute ("perfect") pitch, one for the students with good relative pitch, and one for the students who had trouble reproducing pitches vocally. This segregation was necessary to keep the class enjoyable for all of the groups.

I was astonished that that third group of people could even make it into a conservatory as competitive as Curtis, but my nieces said that there were lots of off-pitch singers at Curtis, and that a lot of them were strings players. This astonished me even more, because a violin isn't like a piano, where you just hit the note and, if it's been tuned correctly, that's the note that's produced. With string instruments you have to be able to make minor corrections to the pitch on the fly, based on your finger's position on the string. But hearing the pitches of sounds that are generated from outside our skulls is different from hearing the pitches of sound that's making the whole front of our skulls vibrate from the inside.

Apparently, producing sound with one's own voice is so different from producing it with an instrument that some world-class musicians can't carry a tune in a proverbial paper bag, without their instruments' help.

I decided not to share this, after all. As you were.
.

You rang?

I’m inspired, not yet expired, by Sam’s take on the blank, and found my fingers listing this, admission that I cannot escape the blankety blank.

A Twist of Emily

Blank has an element of pain;
It cannot forget
When it began, or that there was
A time when it was not.

Its being is to be the Ralph,
Its finite realm a blank
Its future, blinded to perceive
Old periods of blank.

Well, since I didn't see your original post, Annie, I am as I was. But I wouldn't have minded knowing how I might have been.

You didn't miss much, and I quite like you as you are.

Quarterback?
(no, keep the change)

I could never throw a spiral.
I hope this doesn't go viral.