I wasn’t surprised to run across yesterday’s Polish blues video; last year I found an impromptu Hungarian band playing Dixieland. I am not a student of music, much of it I can no longer hear anyway and I definitely ain’t no Mozart. However, I have done a bit of reading on American music and its roots and have come to the conclusion there is only one true genre of music solely belonging to America and that is Dixieland. It is a mixture of African, European, Creole, Cajun, blues, country, hillbilly, jazz, classical, and about everything else one can think of. A few experts say blues is totally an American slave phenomena,, born in the cotton fields of the old south, but it has been traced back to African native peoples. Some folks think bluegrass is an American invention dreamed up by Bill Monroe but it is in reality old-time hilbilly music that has been taught to wear a nice suit of clothes. Even my hillbilly music was brought here from the hills of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and later tempered with German and other European influences.
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Today, I am playing geeky-nerdy; updating my Linux Ubuntu systems to the latest release. A major release will be coming in April, and everything has to be up-to-date before I can install it. I am writing this on Ubuntu as the updates are downloading. If there is a hippie operating system in the world of computers, it is Linux; Mac is for Apple junkies and elitists, Microsoft Windows is for everyday computing, and Linux is for those among us who want to or need to be different. Mac and Windows are expensive to buy and properly maintain, whereas Linux is free, secure, and pretty well carefree. Windows and Mac demand huge resources of memory and hard-drive space and only the latest hardware will operate well or at all with them; Linux can be run from a low-capacity thumbdrive on just about any Intel or AMD type computer, which these days, is nearly all of them. My Droid “smartphone” uses Google’s version of Linux OS.
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I am reading the The Mill
on the River Utrata, the final of four stories in the book Jola sent me; it seems it will be as good as the rest of them. I will report on it as soon as I have absorbed it. I also downloaded the Kindle edition of Enslaved By Ducks which Tammy recommended, and I bought the second of Stieg Larsson’s novels about the doings of his young female hero, Salander, titled The Girl Who Played With Fire.
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Have a stupendous weekend!
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Today, I am playing geeky-nerdy; updating my Linux Ubuntu systems to the latest release. A major release will be coming in April, and everything has to be up-to-date before I can install it. I am writing this on Ubuntu as the updates are downloading. If there is a hippie operating system in the world of computers, it is Linux; Mac is for Apple junkies and elitists, Microsoft Windows is for everyday computing, and Linux is for those among us who want to or need to be different. Mac and Windows are expensive to buy and properly maintain, whereas Linux is free, secure, and pretty well carefree. Windows and Mac demand huge resources of memory and hard-drive space and only the latest hardware will operate well or at all with them; Linux can be run from a low-capacity thumbdrive on just about any Intel or AMD type computer, which these days, is nearly all of them. My Droid “smartphone” uses Google’s version of Linux OS.
—-
I am reading the The Mill
on the River Utrata, the final of four stories in the book Jola sent me; it seems it will be as good as the rest of them. I will report on it as soon as I have absorbed it. I also downloaded the Kindle edition of Enslaved By Ducks which Tammy recommended, and I bought the second of Stieg Larsson’s novels about the doings of his young female hero, Salander, titled The Girl Who Played With Fire.
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Have a stupendous weekend!
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