Poa Pratensis 12/3/04

[reldnahkram]

Alison Krauss - Boy Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn
Richard Thompson - Keep Your Distance
Amy Correia - Gasoline Alley / It's All Over Now
Sam Bush - Harbor Docks
Adrienne Young - Soldier's Joy
Old 97s - Lonely Holiday
Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Tony Rice - Little Sadie
Eddie From Ohio - Eddie's Concubine
Michelle Shocked - Anchorage
Lucinda Williams - Get Right With God
Mark Erelli - Troubabdor Blues
Chris Smither - Crocodile Man
R.L. Burnside - Snakedrive
Chirs Thile - Wolfcreek Pass
Mark Knopfler - What it Is
The Paperboys - I've Just Seen a Face
Tom Lehrer - Lobachevsky
Jess Klein - Cloud Song
Rhonda Vincent - Kentucky Borderline
Johnny Cash - Get Rhythm
Tim Easton - Poor, Poor L.A.
Norman Blake - Bringing in the Georgia Mail

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Something called "Eddie's Concubine" doesn't sound like Innocent Mark Music at all.

"Lobachevsky" came up at Russian table last week, one professor summarizing it to another. It made me so happy.

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's a great song - come down and I'll play it for you.

[jdh92.livejournal.com]

When I interviewed here, "Lobachevsky" (the song, not just the mathematician) came up during the conversation. I was rather amused. Especially since the person with whom I was talking about it eventually turned the conversation into an excuse to get out of hosting a departmental event.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Luckily, I just recently wrote this story in an e-mail, so I can just copy and paste it here, where it's intensely relevant:

So, I got an OED Encyclopedic Dictionary as one of my bat mitzvah
presents. Definitely the best of those. The encyclopedic bits are rather
short but interesting nonetheless, so that I've spent many happy hours
just skimming the dictionary. In the course of such skimming, I
eventually discovered that the people who were putting it together had a
sense of humor. At times, it's rather subtle. The paragraph on P. G. Wodehouse includes the following section: "Wodehouse's stories, told with exuberant vitality, most of them set in an upper-class world of his own invention, exist in a realm that is as oblivious of the external world as the author was when writing them. They are musical comedies without music, their plots ingenious and finely wrought, their construction faultless, cadence and nuance displaying fineness of ear and taste, the work of a consummate stylist, while the reader is treated to gleanings from a remarkable variety of poets, philosophers, and classical writers. Wodehouse has been the subject of overstated praise. . ."

But sometimes it's quite outright. The entirety of the entry on Lobachevsky is as follows: "Nikolai Ivanovich (1792-1856), Russian mathematician who, at about the same time as Gauss in Germany and Janos Bolai in Hungary, discovered non-Euclidean geometry. His work was entirely independent of theirs despite suggestions to the contrary in the song by the American singer Tom Lehrer that has immortalized his name."