Buddy Holly had 20/800 vision

A Wall Street Journal story highlighted the history of his iconic glasses:

As one of the few optometrists in this West Texas town, J. Davis Armistead reckons he saw some 10,000 pairs of eyes over a four-decade career. But the doctor, now 96 years old and retired, still remembers one lanky youth with a vexing vision problem.

The kid couldn't see—his vision was 20/800 in both eyes, meaning he couldn't read the top line of the eye chart. But he didn't want to put on glasses for fear they would spoil the rebellious image he was trying to project as a musician. His name: Buddy Holly...

Mr. Holly had tried going without glasses, but the move backfired when he lost a guitar pick on stage, according to an account from the late Holly historian Bill Griggs. Mr. Holly also tried an early version of contact lenses, but they were so large and uncomfortable that he couldn't tolerate wearing them through a long audition, says Mr. Armistead.

So Mr. Holly started wearing glasses with a plastic-and-metal frame that were chosen precisely because of their nondescript design, the doctor recalls. All that changed when Mr. Armistead watched "The Phil Silvers Show" one night on television. The doctor noticed how Mr. Silvers, playing the role of beleaguered U.S. Army Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko, used his heavy black frames to accentuate his everyman persona. "The next morning I got up and said, 'This is what Buddy Holly needs.'"

More at the link.

Photo via Ordinary Finds.  Reposted from 2011 for "the day the music died."

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An ancient rebus involving a Jew's harp

Solving the rebus at the top of this illustration in a 17th-century book requires understanding the meaning of the key-like item after the word "dames."

It actually most closely resembles a jaw harp, a small instrument played with the mouth that produces a distinctive twanging sound. The possibility that this is the intended meaning of the symbol at first seems untenable, as it does not appear to fit the phrase in any logical way. Inserting the common French term for the instrument, guimbarde, gives us nothing, as does the German term maultrommel. However, discovering earlier French names for it, jeu-trompe and trompe de Béarn, suddenly supplies the image with a double entendre. If the word “trompe” is inserted in the phrase, an unexpectedly negative phrase emerges: “Le coeur de dames trompe le monde”, or “The hearts of women deceive the world”. There is little doubt that this is the correct interpretation, as it is a known proverb. The phrase in fact appeared on the Queen of Hearts in a playing card ca. 1500. Yet while this mystery is solved, the question of how it relates to, and informs the image above, is just as cryptic.

More information here:

The Jew's harp, also known as the jaw harp, mouth harp, Ozark harp, trump, or juice harp, is a lamellophone instrument, which is in the category of plucked idiophones: it consists of a flexible metal or bamboo tongue or reed attached to a frame. The tongue/reed is placed in the performer's mouth and plucked with the finger to produce a note. This instrument is considered to be one of the oldest musical instruments in the world; a musician apparently playing it can be seen in a Chinese drawing from the 4th century BC.

Despite its common English name, and the sometimes used Jew's trump, it has no particular connection with Jews or Judaism...

The instrument is known in many different cultures by many different names. The common English name "Jew's harp" is sometimes considered controversial or potentially misleading, and is thus avoided by a few speakers or manufacturers... Other speakers believe the avoidance of the term to be offensive and deliberately use the term so as not to cause offense. Another name used to identify the instrument, especially in scholarly literature, is the older English trump, while guimbarde, the French word for the instrument, can be found in unabridged dictionaries and is featured in recent revival efforts.

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Gene Simmons shows how to apply KISS makeup

YouTube link.

It's a time-consuming and detailed procedure.

The young lady in this tutorial is his daughter, Sophie Tweed Simmons.

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We'll Meet Again (Vera Lynn, 1939)

For New Year's Eve, instead of embedding fireworks I've chosen a classic song. "We'll Meet Again" was a signature tune of World War II:

The song... resonated with soldiers going off to fight and their families and sweethearts. The assertion that "we'll meet again" is optimistic, as many soldiers did not survive to see their loved ones again. Indeed, the meeting place at some unspecified time in the future would have been seen by many who lost loved ones to be heaven.

There have been many versions as modern performers have covered the piece, but Vera Lynn is the obvious choice, since she popularized the song during the war, and it became one of her signature pieces. The video of this song most often seen is the one using the final moments of Dr. Strangelove, but those images of nuclear blasts were a little too dismal for tonight; I thought this one employing stills from WWII was at least a bit more upbeat.

The message of the song is for all TYWKIWDBI readers, especially the old-timers. It has been an interesting year; I've enjoyed having your company for this curious adventure. We'll meet again - tomorrow...

Addendum: The Guardian has a story about Vera Lynn at age 92, and about the upcoming publication of her autobiography.

...at the age of 92, she has done it again, hitting No 1 in the album charts last night with her offering We'll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and usurping Bob Dylan, 68, as the oldest artist to grace the top spot... Her album fought off stiff competition from the Beatles, who occupied the 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, 21st, 24th, 29th, 31st, 33rd, 37th and 38th spots...

It is 70 years to the month since Lynn, then 22, first recorded We'll Meet Again, which became a symbolic song of the second world war... Last night's No 1 made her the only artist to feature in the UK single and album charts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Update 2010:  I needed some music to post on New Year's Eve, so this repost finds life once more.  See you guys next year...

Update 2014:  Familiarity with this song skyrocketed in the U.S. this year when it was chosen by Stephen Colbert for the concuding segment of his farewell program.  I'll leave the original version embedded at the top; the Colbert version is a bit too celebrity-centered for my taste.

Meanwhile, in England Vera Lynn reached her 97th birthday in March.

She is the oldest living person to have a top 20 UK album after Vera Lynn: National Treasure - The Ultimate Collection reached number 13.

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The death of Frederic Chopin

For decades I've assumed that Frederic Chopin died of tuberculosis; that's what I told my students in lectures and handouts.  Now I learn his cause of death is still being debated.

Chopin died in an apartment in Place Vendome, in Paris, on 17 October 1849, at the age of 39. France's greatest authority on tuberculosis had diagnosed him with the disease months earlier, and duly noted it as the cause on the death certificate.

But things then became less clear. The same doctor, Jean Cruveilhier, removed Chopin's heart and carried out an autopsy. Precisely what he recorded is not known - the notes he made were lost. However, reports suggest he referred to something other than TB, a "disease not previously encountered"...

Then in September, the debate appeared to be over. The forensic and genetic scientists who had gathered months earlier at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw for that unprecedented examination revealed their conclusions at a news conference. Chopin's heart was well preserved and bore "TB nodules" they reported. It was also "much enlarged, suggesting respiratory problems, linked to a lung disease"...

... the possibility remains that the heart reinterred in the pillar of the church in October 1945, amid patriotic celebration in the ruins of a devastated city, is not Chopin's.

 Photo cropped for size from the original at Wikipedia.

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So you think you know a lot about music?

For the final exam in this course:  "Define, compare, and contrast five of the following musical genres.  Be specific." 

Canterbury scene
rock gaucho
Lithumania
vegan straight edge
technical death metal
black sludge
filthstep
deep orgcore
fourth world
grave wave
fidget house
shiver pop
contemporary post-bop
Nintendocore
full on
fingerstyle
deathgrind
quiet storm

Selected from a longer list at Harper's, which in turn was selected from "a list of 1,266 musical genres compiled by Glenn McDonald, creator of everynoise.com, which seeks to produce a comprehensive music-classification system."

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