So, What Are You Reading?

Yeah! The memories! "All American Boy," Bobby Bare.

"... I was rockin' and a boppin' and I was gettin' the breaks
The girls all said that I have what it takes
When up stepped a man with big cigar
He said, ''Come here cat, I'm gonna make you a star.
I'll put you on bandstand, buy you a Cadillac, sign here kid.''

I signed my name and became a star, havin' a ball with my guitar
Drivin' a big long Cadillac and fightin' the girls off of my back
They just kept a comin', a screamin', yeah they liked it.

So I picked my guitar with a great big grin
And the money just kept on pourin' in
But then one day my Uncle Sam he said, (bang bang) ''Here I am.
Uncle Sam needs you boy, I'm a gonna cut your hair off.
Ah, take this rifle kid, give me that guitar, yeah...''


J.

 

Don't want to turn this into a music thread, so this'll be the last...

Back then, Bobby Bare was a master of simple, yet telling, lyrics. I remember vividly from "Detroit City:"

"...by day I make the cars and by night I make the bars..."

Back in folk-days I wrote a parody of his "All American Boy" that I called "Talking Folksinger Blues." I got a friend to sing it in a fake Bob Dylan voice. Sample:

"I knew three chords and how to hammer-on
And had "Sing Out" reprints of fourteen songs...

Get you a twelve-string, (don't) put it in tune;
You'll be recorded on Folkways soon..."

Mercifully, it died quickly.

J.

 

WHOOPS. That's inaccurate -bad choice of words. Not a parody. A bit of satire, perhaps, based on the form of "All American Boy." No comparison. Mr. Bare's work is FAR better than mine -and deals with different music. Not ridiculing - his good work inspired me to use roughly the same musical form.

J.

 

Read John F. Marszalek's Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order.

 

Read Ari Hoogenboom's The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

 

Read Richard Taylor's Destruction and Reconstruction.

 

Read Paul Taylor's Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer.

 

I have Sales For Starups. Will start reading it by Wednesday. It should help me gather more sales for my new business.

 

Read Orlandro Willcox's Forgotten Valor.

 

Who's the author?

 

Re-reading "Plague Dogs" by Richard Adams.

 

I've no money in this game, Ted - but I think the author is Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing, A B2B marketing firm. I believe they're in Seattle. I'm not going to plug the firm, the books or their blogs - you can easily Google-find them if you want. A book titled "Sales for Startups" is one of about 20 free e-book downloads the firm offers - in exchange for a valid work email address - you know how it works...

J.

 

Read Joseph J. Ellis' First Family.

 

Read Robert P. Broadwater's Gettysburg as the Generals Remembered It.

 

Finished these:

The Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham: Islam and the Future of Money - Imran N. Hosein
An Introduction to Islamic Finance - Mufti Muhammad Taqui Usmani

I read the second book as background for this one, which I'm reading now:

Islamic Banking and Finance: Principles and Practices - Marifa Academy. It is a very dense and thorough work and will take time and diligence. May I also comment that it is one of the most beautifully-illustrated books I have ever seen!

J.

 

Read Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill's Their Finest Hour.

 

Read J. Matthew Gallman's The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front.

 

Evolution of Islamic Geometric Patterns - Yahya Abdullahi, Mohamed Rashid bin Embi (Universiti Teknologi Malaysia) - a 1300-year history of Islamic geometric art forms. I've had this interest a long time, starting with jali and mashrabiya about 15-20 years ago. I've had some success writing computer programs to produce such designs. It seems to work particularly well in kid-friendly languages, e.g. FMS Logo, Scratch (MIT), Python and TigerJython (Swiss) Turtle modules. Yeah - anything with a Turtle, or in Scratch, a ginger-striped cat. :smile: If they'd told me in school (1950s) that I could do this stuff with geometry, I'd have paid attention.

I'm looking to adapt this knowledge to designs in wood, once I move. Got all the tools I need - just can't bang wood in a small apt. Yep, gonna have me some one-of-a-kind furniture, Insha'Allah! :smile:

J.

 

Read Karen Abbott's Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy.

 

I've found myself attracted to those little 'Very Short Introductions' books from Oxford University Press. (I've got more than twenty of them.) They are inexpensive, generally well written, very readable, and cover material that one might find in a less demanding university introductory class. The format is small enough that you can stick your book in a coat pocket or purse.

Right now I'm reading 'Knowledge - A Very Short Introduction' by Jennifer Nagel (OUP 2014). It's a short introduction to epistemology.