MY DEMENTED DIARY

Oh by the way, folks, oldest entries are deleted to keep the total entry count at 666 because that number is sure to rile up somebody who sorely needs it.

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My Biography

My Beliefs

My more serious diary:
A Walk Through the
Valley of the Shadow

Today we celebrate the birthday of Wyatt Earp, born in 1848.

I got the stuff I needed for the clarinet and played a bit on it, whereupon the neighbors all thought I was strangling a Tasmanian Wombat on a torture rack. No surprise, I guess, because the last time I played a clarinet was 1962, when the college orchestra director tactfully suggested that he'd be happy to accept my resignation from the orchestra.

I suppose there's little chance I'll ever be a worthy rival to Artie Shaw.

Now let me tell you a bit about clarinets.

First of all, the notes are shifted downscale a coupla notches so that C is really B-flat. That means that music arrangers who wanna include a clarinet in their combo have gotta rewrite a whole new music score in a different key signature. That's because clarinet makers have got some sorta sadistic lust affair going for music arrangers.

And there's no discernible pattern for the gadgets that do the sharps and flats. They're just all over the place. Not at all like a piano where the sharps and flats are in between the notes they're the sharps and flats of.

And then the harmonic octave is several notes more than a true octave above the base octave, so if you wanna play your music an octave up or down the fingering is completely different. Nothing like a piano, where you just move your hands over a notch and keep on playing.

Not only that, but the base-to-harmonic interval is more notes than you've got fingers for, so the extra notes are implemented by enormous bundles of gadgets for your little fingers to bounce around amongst. This imposes the biggest workload onto your little fingers, which are your weakest and most inept.

Furthermore, to get to the harmonic octave you've gotta get your left thumb onto both the thumb button and the harmonic octave gadget at the same time. Quite a trick if you haven't got an L-shaped thumb.

No wonder clarinet players are kinda strange.

Oh well, the Wondrous Weather Website is predicting a great gardening day, so I'll be out there making use of it.

Happy Wednesday!

OrneryPest