LeMoyne Star

On September 8 1966, the first episode of the television show Star Trek aired on NBC. Gene Roddenberry’s influences in creating this series included the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, C.S. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower novels and the television serial Wagon Train. Star Trek was cancelled after only two seasons, but an intense fan letter campaign brought the program back for one more year. The Sci-Fi show that wouldn’t die, it gave birth to five more TV series, eleven films (so far), and countless parodies and novels. I was just a little kid, but I can still remember how much it thrilled me the first time I heard, “These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

September

September is National Classical Music Month, and it’s also National Piano Month. Here are a dozen of my favorite classic keyboard compositions:

Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - 12 Variations on Ah, vous dirais-je, Maman K.265
Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata Opus 27 No. 2 “Moonlight”
Johannes Brahms - Waltz in A-Flat Major, Opus 39 No. 15
Frederic Chopin - Nocturne Opus 55 No. 1
Claude Debussy - La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin
Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No. 1
Dmitry Kabalevsky - Opus 27 No. 70 “Having Fun”
Dmitri Shostakovich - Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major
Camille Saint-Saens - Le carnaval des animaux: "Pianistes"
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
Scott Joplin - Solace

Notice I didn’t call them “classical” piano composers. Most aren’t. Bach is Baroque. Brahms and Chopin (and sometimes Beethoven) are romantic. Debussy and Satie are impressionists. Kabalevsky, Saint-Saens and Shostakovich are 20th century, and Gershwin and Joplin are sort of in a class by themselves.

Ravenchase

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied, “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

Today is Read a Book Day, so I’m sharing a snippet of one of my favorites. Folks have scratched their heads over this riddle for nearly 150 years. I’ve seen many clever answers, but Lewis Carroll probably didn’t mean it to have one. While I’m at it, can you rearrange the letters in NOR DO WE to make one word?

Labor Day Madness

Labor Day was first observed in the late 1800's. Grover Cleveland made it a national holiday in 1894 as a way to celebrate (and probably to appease) labor unions. These days, though, it’s more of a milestone than a holiday. For most of us it’s the last three day weekend before the end of the summer; a day for picnics in the park or backyard barbecues. It’s the last chance to squeeze in a trip with the kids before they all head back to school. Labor Day used to be the last day you could wear white until next Memorial Day. Does anyone really wear white any more? Labor Day also marks the beginning of the American football season, for both the NFL and college football teams. Technically, autumn won’t here for another eighteen days, but as of today you can say you’ve survived another summer.

Windblown Puzzle

My laptop has a British keyboard, which means I probably have a few more keys than you do. And the keys that are the same are not all in exactly the same places. If you were to borrow my laptop you might take a moment or two to find the quotation marks or the @ sign. But most of the letters are where you’d expect them to be. It’s still a QWERTY keyboard. This arrangement of keys was invented in 1873 by a Milwaukee newspaper editor named Christopher Sholes. He invented it for the express purpose of slowing typists down so they wouldn’t jam the keys of their ribbon-and-hammer typewriters. QWERTY deliberately puts the letters we hit most frequently under weaker, slower fingers. The typewriter has been out of date so long most of my readers have never used one. And it’s impossible to type too fast for a computer. So why do we still use the QWERTY keyboard?

Fire and Ice

The Great Fire of London started on Sunday, September 2 and continued to burn through Wednesday, September 5 in 1666. It started in a bakery on Pudding Lane and wasn’t extinguished until it reached Pye Corner. There were people at the time who said this was proof that the fire was God’s wrath against the City of London for the deadly sin of gluttony. True or not, London is still a terrific place to grab a pork pie. Or a pasty filled with beef, onions and mushrooms. Or real Italian gelato, or crispy aromatic duck, or peri-peri chicken or dim sum. But I digress. After the fire there were several radically different plans for the rebuilding of the city. But in the end they were all rejected, and London was reconstructed with pretty much the same street plan that it had before. They really do hate to change things around here.

Lamb

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Mary Sawyer. Like the rest of the boys and girls in Sterling, Massachusetts in the early 1800's, Mary went to school in a little red schoolhouse. One day, just for fun, Mary’s brother suggested that she take her pet lamb to school to show him to the rest of the children. Mary really should have known better. The lamb had no idea how to behave in a classroom. His antics thrilled the other children, but the teacher was less than amused. The minister’s nephew, a young man preparing to enter college, was visiting the schoolhouse that day. The following morning he presented Mary with the three original stanzas of a poem that began, “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow.” The poem was set to music and published as a song in 1830.