Making Flower and Water Gardens With Brass Instrument Bells

I stumbled upon this photo of an old broken saxophone hanging on a wall today, and I thought, Wouldn't that look great with some flowers sticking out of the horn?

Turns out I'm not the only one to have thought of it. Look at some of these neat creations people have come up with using old, broken musical instruments in gardens:

Yes, that's a piano below.

The saxophone waterfall below sells for $5,000! You could easily make one yourself for about $200.

This got me thinking about old phonograph bell horns. A lot of them were made to look like a flower and some had flowers painted on them as well:

I think some of the skinnier horns like those used on the early Edison cylinder phonographs almost look like a vase anyway. Doesn't this look like it's just begging to have a bouquet of flowers placed in there?

The Edison phonographs can be expensive though even if they aren't working. What you can sometimes find that's similar but cheaper is an old music box that's made to resemble a phonograph like this one:

Lastly, I got to thinking about the old RCA Victor phonographs that always had the picture of the dog looking at the phonograph horn as though he was wondering how sound was coming out of it. Wouldn't it be cool to have a phonograph machine like this with flowers coming out of the horn and a stuffed dog up close like he was sniffing the flowers?

File under "Random Thoughts"....

The Legend of 1900

This is a neat movie about a man who was born on a cruise ship in 1900, and he lived his entire life on that ship, never once having stepped onto dry ground. He became a piano prodigy as a young boy who just sat down at the piano one day and knew instinctively how to play. He soon became the focus of the ship's jazz band. He could play things no one had ever thought of and could write incredibly complex harmonies on the spot. People from all over the world took cruises just to hear him play. He was thought to be the best musician in the world. But he wanted no part of going on dry land and making a fortune. He refused to tour or make recordings. He did make a recording once but took the master disc after he heard it and smashed it saying he changed his mind because, "I don't want my music going anywhere without me." I thought that was very unique in storytelling. Most artists want the world to experience their artwork and want to be remembered after they're dead through their art. But if people wanted to hear this guy, they'd have to book passage and see him onboard the ship. And once he would be dead and gone his music would be completely forgotten because there were no recordings or sheet music of it. In fact, he often made up entire tunes on the spot, and they would never be played again. Only the audience that was there on that particular night would ever hear it. He probably spontaneously composed thousands of tunes throughout his life, many of them only heard one time. So his music truly never did go anywhere without him. I thought it was a very unusual kind of story. It's not very often I see such a unique approach. I don't think there are very many unique approaches left.

A Cuter Skooter

I caught this on Jay Leno's Garage yesterday. Randy Grubb styles car bodies to fit existing chassis but in this case he built six bodies to retrofit an existing line of 3-wheeled scooter. They look like the kind of toy race cars kids had back in the 1940s. They cost $25,000, but unfortunately he only made the six and will never make anymore because he likes his designs to be one of a kind and then moves on to something else. Even the six scooters are not exactly alike.

4th Grade Girl Playing Varisty Basketball

This is Jaden Newman. I guess this must be a private school she plays for because a public school wouldn't be allowed to play a 4th grader in high school. I'm impressed she can shoot as far out as she can at that age, let alone do it in a game against defenders (although the defenders aren't very good). Her dribbling is also very impressive. If she gets that first step around you, she gone. She averages 14.8 point, 7.5 assists, and 3 steals per game. Her shooting percentage is a whopping 58%!

The Other Elvis

One of Elvis' biggest songs was Polk Salad Annie, but do you remember who wrote the song and had the first hit recording of it? I didn't think so. It was Tony Joe White, who also could have passed for Elvis brother back in the day.



This made me think of a yet to be fully developed genre of music I like to call Swamp Rock. Other Swamp Rock songs would be Amos Moses by Jerry Reed:



And of course there's a couple of well known Swamp Rockers by Creedence Clearwater Revival (still one of my favorite names for a band) like Green River and Born On The Bayou:



And one of my favorite guitar pickers, Roy Buchanan, had a great Swampy version of Haunted House:



Can you hear the funky Cajun string that ties all these songs together? These songs were born of the Swamp I tell ya.

Using Italics and Bolding In YouTube Comments

I just discovered today that the new YouTube comments design allows users to use some degree of markdown in their comments on videos. For instance, placing underscores around words and phrases makes them italicized:

_italics_

Placing asterisks around words and phrases makes them bold:

*bold*

Kind of nice I guess.

Cheating In Baseball (Hello St. Louis!)

I've written once before here about steroid use, but not cheating in general and what we can and should do about it in Major League Baseball.

Steroids themselves don't really bother me so much. It's the cheating aspect I find vexing. I honestly thought the Cardinals were above hiring a known drug cheat, but apparently General Manger, John Mozeliak, is not the man I thought he was. Peralta is on the team. It's a done deal. Can someone tell me what all this Christian Night at the Ballpark was about last summer? Apparently it was little more than a publicity stunt.

What kind of example does this set for our kids in town? If you cheat in baseball you get a fat contract worth tens of millions of dollars! That's what it teaches them. Mozeliak talks about giving second chances to ballplayers who make "mistakes." But this wasn't a mistake. Peralta took PEDs on purpose. He didn't accidentally shoot-up the wrong drug. It was a premeditated decision on his part.

Cheating in sports is not like breaking other laws. It's not like speeding or tossing a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. People pay a fine for those things and get a second or even third or fourth chance, and it brings a little revenue into the city in the process. Sports are different.

Second chances don't apply to cheaters in sports for a few different reasons. One, we fans enjoy baseball stats. We love talking about who had the best batting average,  the most home runs, the pitcher with the most no-hitters and so on. Cheating makes those statistics useless while lessening the enjoyment of the sport. Two, drugs that enhance a player's performance will also enhance his contract and entitle him to more money than he deserves. Third, players who did only marginally worse while not shooting drugs may lose a slot on the team to a cheater.

Cheaters only win if you let them. If you get caught cheating on a test at Harvard, Stanford, or just about any other Ivy League college you get booted from the school, and you don't graduate. You'll also have a hard time getting into any other Ivy League school, which means going to a lesser college and probably making less money in the real world.

If you really want to stop cheating in Baseball or sports in general, you can't give second chances to someone who has permanently tarnished the game. Boot the cheaters out of the Majors and maybe they can get a job playing for a lesser league like the Independent League or the Mexican Pacific etc. But get them out of the Majors.

Shame on the Cardinals and John Mozeliak in particular. I won't be attending any Cardinal games next year. I'd sooner drive up to Chicago and watch the White Sox lose every game, but lose them honestly.