LJ Idol Exhibit A - SCI - With Only Our Tongues as Our Swords
o/` "Up the airy mountain, through the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together
Green jacket, red cap and white owl's feather.
By the craggy hillside, through the mosses bare
They've planted thorn trees for pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring as to dig them up in spite
He'll find the sharpest thorns in his bed at night.
High up on the hill top the old king sits
He's now so old and grey he's nearly lost his wits
He's rising with the music on the cold starry night
To sup with the queen of the gay north light." o/`
-- "King of the Faeries", traditional Irish ballad as sung by The Irish Rovers
Most of you, at one time or another, have probably had the experience of thinking about a particular song only to have your radio or iPod play that exact tune.
I have a radio station full of tinker gnomes with an odd sense of humor and even worse taste in music.
The location of FoxHeart Acres, while conducive to the privacy and quiet I crave, doesn't receive many over-the-air signals. As the FCC limits the amount of power a radio station can use for broadcasting and we reside in what the locals cheerfully call a 'holler', the Jacksonville stations we can pick up transmit rabid preachers screaming about the End Times. The Gainesville stations, which only come in snatches late at night, might be more promising but we can't get them to tune in steadily enough for us to even identify just what it is they broadcast. While we do have a considerable music library between the four of us, we all get tired of having to change CDs or switch out play lists. We craved a radio station, just one decent radio station to which we could listen while cleaning house or working on projects.
Be careful what you wish for!
One evening, as Mr. Shapeshifter was fiddling with the cranky balance knob on our vintage stereo, a radio station suddenly came in crystal clear. It didn't seem to have many commercials and it played a variety of ballroom and dance hall songs which dated no later than the mid-1960s. We all sat on the bed, listening in fascination, until the top of the hour when the station ID was finally given: Jones College Radio. Even the call sign seemed a good omen: WKTZ, which spells "cats" when spoken aloud. Our newly adopted radio station literally had my name on it.
In the course of looking up the station to find out more about it, we learned that it belongs to a private college and that it is one of the oldest stations in the country still continuously on the air and it's one of the only stations which still plays this particular format. The lack of commercials (except for sponsor ads) and talk between songs and minimal songs containing vocals appealed immensely because I could leave the station playing low on the radio while sleeping. Considering the type of music the station offered, I found it unlikely that a sudden shift to vocals would disturb our sleep.
Of course, since WKTZ was a station run on public donations and maintained by college students, it had a few quirks. One afternoon, a weird liquid echoing --- as though someone had remixed whale song with Rastafarian drums --- blasted through the speakers. It lasted about three minutes and then the station went back to normal. It even played the song which it had just played backwards in the right direction. A quick consult with the engineering minded members of the family determined that they were probably still using reel-to-reel tapes and someone hadn't been watching the machine when it rewound or jammed. Later, we concluded that WKTZ must be automated for large blocks of time as the Rastafarian whale song of ailing reel-to-reel continued for hours.
We decided that WKTZ simply must have some tinker gnomes running the station when there were no humans around to observe their odd work habits (which, if the ones employed by the Department of Transportation were any example, dealt more with breaking things than with fixing them or keeping them running).
The play list became oddly and inappropriately specific after the family decided this. I generally briefly awaken at three in the morning and one night, coming back from the bathroom, I noticed the song being played: Dean Martin's Standing on the Corner. Have you ever really looked at those lyrics? I'm certain they were perfectly harmless when they were written but today I could only picture a stalker standing beneath some poor girl's window while he watches her undress and plots how to rape her. Ewwww....! The radio played a lot of Dean Martin or songs with a similar theme late at night. Dee dubbed it the gnome stalker song. I wasn't real fond of Wives and Lovers by Burt Bacharach either. Sometimes, if the gnomes were feeling especially obnoxious, we'd get a string of these creepy-type songs filled with bygone stereotypes of women.
They got lost a lot. About three times a day, we would hear some variant of Do You Know the Way to San Jose followed by a variety of songs about different places --- anywhere but San Jose.
Sometimes the weird instrumental arrangements reduced us to giggles. One ensemble, Esquivel, played standard ballroom and dance favorites with a trademark farting tuba. Mantovani's group sounded like a well tuned orchestra but played songs which were simply odd. Some sounded like the gnomes were working a site and completely demolishing it and others resembled the music you might hear while picking out furniture in one of The Sims games. My personal favorites included March of the Cue Balls and Puppet on a String. Those never failed to conjure images of little red capped gnomes dancing, singing, and playing with a beer in one hand and a wrench in the other as they 'worked'.
The worst of the lot, which we joked about piping into Callistus' workshop, was appropriately titled Swedish Rhapsody. WKTZ plays the version by Mantovani, but I hunted down the original. It was composed by a Swedish artist named Alfven and until 2009 was recently used as the interval signal for a numbers station.
What the hell, gnomes?
Maybe they're spies or something. I've never come across anything like this before or since.
o/` "Mistletoe killing an oak--
Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths making holes in a cloak--
How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
Watch, and you'll see it some day!" o/`
-- "The Pict Song performed by Emerald Rose
We daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together
Green jacket, red cap and white owl's feather.
By the craggy hillside, through the mosses bare
They've planted thorn trees for pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring as to dig them up in spite
He'll find the sharpest thorns in his bed at night.
High up on the hill top the old king sits
He's now so old and grey he's nearly lost his wits
He's rising with the music on the cold starry night
To sup with the queen of the gay north light." o/`
-- "King of the Faeries", traditional Irish ballad as sung by The Irish Rovers
Most of you, at one time or another, have probably had the experience of thinking about a particular song only to have your radio or iPod play that exact tune.
I have a radio station full of tinker gnomes with an odd sense of humor and even worse taste in music.
The location of FoxHeart Acres, while conducive to the privacy and quiet I crave, doesn't receive many over-the-air signals. As the FCC limits the amount of power a radio station can use for broadcasting and we reside in what the locals cheerfully call a 'holler', the Jacksonville stations we can pick up transmit rabid preachers screaming about the End Times. The Gainesville stations, which only come in snatches late at night, might be more promising but we can't get them to tune in steadily enough for us to even identify just what it is they broadcast. While we do have a considerable music library between the four of us, we all get tired of having to change CDs or switch out play lists. We craved a radio station, just one decent radio station to which we could listen while cleaning house or working on projects.
Be careful what you wish for!
One evening, as Mr. Shapeshifter was fiddling with the cranky balance knob on our vintage stereo, a radio station suddenly came in crystal clear. It didn't seem to have many commercials and it played a variety of ballroom and dance hall songs which dated no later than the mid-1960s. We all sat on the bed, listening in fascination, until the top of the hour when the station ID was finally given: Jones College Radio. Even the call sign seemed a good omen: WKTZ, which spells "cats" when spoken aloud. Our newly adopted radio station literally had my name on it.
In the course of looking up the station to find out more about it, we learned that it belongs to a private college and that it is one of the oldest stations in the country still continuously on the air and it's one of the only stations which still plays this particular format. The lack of commercials (except for sponsor ads) and talk between songs and minimal songs containing vocals appealed immensely because I could leave the station playing low on the radio while sleeping. Considering the type of music the station offered, I found it unlikely that a sudden shift to vocals would disturb our sleep.
Of course, since WKTZ was a station run on public donations and maintained by college students, it had a few quirks. One afternoon, a weird liquid echoing --- as though someone had remixed whale song with Rastafarian drums --- blasted through the speakers. It lasted about three minutes and then the station went back to normal. It even played the song which it had just played backwards in the right direction. A quick consult with the engineering minded members of the family determined that they were probably still using reel-to-reel tapes and someone hadn't been watching the machine when it rewound or jammed. Later, we concluded that WKTZ must be automated for large blocks of time as the Rastafarian whale song of ailing reel-to-reel continued for hours.
We decided that WKTZ simply must have some tinker gnomes running the station when there were no humans around to observe their odd work habits (which, if the ones employed by the Department of Transportation were any example, dealt more with breaking things than with fixing them or keeping them running).
The play list became oddly and inappropriately specific after the family decided this. I generally briefly awaken at three in the morning and one night, coming back from the bathroom, I noticed the song being played: Dean Martin's Standing on the Corner. Have you ever really looked at those lyrics? I'm certain they were perfectly harmless when they were written but today I could only picture a stalker standing beneath some poor girl's window while he watches her undress and plots how to rape her. Ewwww....! The radio played a lot of Dean Martin or songs with a similar theme late at night. Dee dubbed it the gnome stalker song. I wasn't real fond of Wives and Lovers by Burt Bacharach either. Sometimes, if the gnomes were feeling especially obnoxious, we'd get a string of these creepy-type songs filled with bygone stereotypes of women.
They got lost a lot. About three times a day, we would hear some variant of Do You Know the Way to San Jose followed by a variety of songs about different places --- anywhere but San Jose.
Sometimes the weird instrumental arrangements reduced us to giggles. One ensemble, Esquivel, played standard ballroom and dance favorites with a trademark farting tuba. Mantovani's group sounded like a well tuned orchestra but played songs which were simply odd. Some sounded like the gnomes were working a site and completely demolishing it and others resembled the music you might hear while picking out furniture in one of The Sims games. My personal favorites included March of the Cue Balls and Puppet on a String. Those never failed to conjure images of little red capped gnomes dancing, singing, and playing with a beer in one hand and a wrench in the other as they 'worked'.
The worst of the lot, which we joked about piping into Callistus' workshop, was appropriately titled Swedish Rhapsody. WKTZ plays the version by Mantovani, but I hunted down the original. It was composed by a Swedish artist named Alfven and until 2009 was recently used as the interval signal for a numbers station.
What the hell, gnomes?
Maybe they're spies or something. I've never come across anything like this before or since.
o/` "Mistletoe killing an oak--
Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths making holes in a cloak--
How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
Watch, and you'll see it some day!" o/`
-- "The Pict Song performed by Emerald Rose