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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

John plays barrelhouse boogie



Here's young John Last, my 19=year old grandson, beating out barrelhouse boogie on David's (actually, Dorothyanne's) out-of-tune piano, on Christmas Day. He could make a living playing piano, improvising, in a bar, nightclub, or brothel (where these are legal). No doubt he's got game. It's not called barrelhouse nowadays I hear, but that's what we called it when I was John's age. What's more, he played some of the hit tunes from those days, including In The Mood.His playing made my day. Overall, the days around Christmas passed off pretty well - there were moments when I almost forgot that Wendy isn't here now. But the nights are terribly lonely without her. I've tried several antidotes: the Kobo reader with its downloaded library of classics (in which I noticed occasional subtle differences between Google's Gutenberg Project version and each of my two versions of Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics and Collins Classics); both the latter are edited, and the Gutenberg project version has some notes in the back matter that imply editing; but I was too tired to read these carefully by the time I reached them. (These notes are hard to read too, in rather faint 10-point courier; I'll enlarge and change the font before I try again). No doubt the back matter of the translated classics will tell me who's responsible for the translation. I like this ebook reader more each time I use it; but I still prefer the sensuous pleasure of holding and reading a real book, while acknowledging gratefully the usefulness of a device the size and weight of a slim paperback that currently holds over 100 of the world's great books (plus another fifty or so I'd classify as schlock or kitsch). I've added one more that I bought from the e-book store - but loaded and read in comfort on the desktop PC with its large screen, rather than the playing-card size screen on the Kobo. My only real negative comment on the Kobo is the time it takes to "turn the page" - switch to the next screen.If I use a comfortably large font so I can read without glasses, I take in a page at once in much less time than it takes to get to the next screen. Maybe that's a price I must pay for being a fast reader.

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