Who’s fiddling around?
I live between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough NC, near Durham and the RTP. I have two donkeys, ten chickens, and two kids. I play fiddle, concertina, piano, and sometimes viola with two bands you can see and listen to at Wedding Music in North Carolina...
One is Mappamundi, which means "Map of the World" and which plays popular wedding music of Western and Eastern Europe, Jewish traditions (klezmer, yiddish, hebrew, israeli, sephardic, songs in Ladino) and American swing tunes for dancing and a little bit of Hispanic music as well.
The other is the Pratie Heads, a duo specializing in music of the British Isles (Celtic, Irish, Scottish, English) and early America - but recently branching out into many other traditions as well!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Is music now like water?
I just finished my latest cd, of Yiddish songs, made with pianist Aviva Enoch. You can buy “I Can’t Complain – but sometimes I still do” at Skylark Productions. When I look around at people “consuming” music, I see that … Continue reading
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An incredibly handsome tv star: Fernando Colunga
I manage a blog called Caray, Caray! (English translations of Spanish telenovelas) – it started as just me, translating one of these spectacular Mexican soap operas by myself five days a week for several months and now I have 45 … Continue reading
In which I hand-piece and hand-quilt two traditional design quilts
Since I don’t drink, and don’t want to sit around eating oreos all day, I needed a more productive distraction while my son was struggling to finish college and my daughter was getting married. I settled on – quilting! I … Continue reading
Hack your own swivel arm for a larger tv
My son graduated from college AND my daughter got married in June, and I went to my college reunion AND got sued by my crazy neighbor. That was enough to put me off my internet habit, I hardly logged on … Continue reading
Complaints Choir of Durham – Chapel Hill NC now forming!
One of my Facebook friends posted a link to the Complaints Choir of Tokyo. I’d never seen such a thing and was delighted by it (see bottom of this post). Somebody else posted a response: “These choirs are all over … Continue reading
Solo violin or solo viola for weddings… painting a ketubah…
After I cooked up 116 lenses , around mid-December I started working on other stuff, including: Designing and painting a ketubah for my daughter (you can read about it and see the pictures start-to-finish – well, I’m not done yet … Continue reading
A purple star for my lens about being a mentor (Big Brother program etc)
I wrote How to be a mentor because I have a big crush on the young social worker who runs our local Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate program; his name is Graig Meyer and he’s better at his job than almost anybody … Continue reading
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Tagged big brother program, big sister program, kids, mentor, mentoring, volunteer, volunteering
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Squidoo encourages me to make more good stuff like this Christmas songbook…
In the late 1980s and early 1990s I ran a sprawling winter holiday celebration called the “Solstice Extravaganza,” Christmas and Hanukkah songs and early music and mummers and pagans with their newly-minted pagan songs and poets and the Chuck Davis … Continue reading
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Tagged christmas carols, christmas songbook, folkmusic, folksongs, hannukah songs, winter solstice
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Make websites that people don’t hate.
I’ve been infuriated for a long time about fancy, flash-based websites with tiny font-sizes and hard-to-click cascades of menus, so I was grimly satisfied to see an article by Jakob Nielson called Usability for Senior Citizens (meaning people over 65). … Continue reading
Google likes blogs much more than it likes Squidoo
I’m now part of three different blogging communities drawn from Squidoo lensmasters and it’s not only fun, it really helps with SERPS. Two observations: If you search for anything online, Google is only going to offer up three (at most) … Continue reading
