This and That

The latest hitch in my catching up with blogs is that Reader decided to go crazy and mark old blogs as unread. That confused me, so I decided to mark all as read and will begin anew. Sorry if I missed a few of yours.

Meanwhile, since I was discussing music yesterday, let me note something else that's odd about music and brains. I frequently notice that when one song is over on the CD that I start humming the next one before it plays. The odd thing is that if you were to ask me what songs were on the CD, I wouldn't have much of a clue. But something somewhere deep inside my cranium does seem to know. Weird.

In another anecdote about music, one of the instructors at the workshop mentioned that someone she knows was turned away from lessons by one teacher when she was nine years old — because she was too old! Can you believe that: too old at nine? It was that teacher's belief that one had to start by the age of four. Anyway, the upshot is that this person (whom I don't know) has gone on to become a fine, well know fiddler.

Thanks also for your various comments about playing an instrument, especially Dora's encouraging comment. I do derive a great deal of satisfaction out of playing my heart out in the basement. As a side note to age and learning to play an instrument, here is a little snippet that was recently told to me.

After yesterday's blog, some of you expressed interest in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series. Robinson is an expat living in Canada who sets his Banks series in Yorkshire. The most recent novel, Friend of the Devil, was quite good, but it's fairly new and still in hard cover. You should be able to find cheaper paperback novels on the shelves.