h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm still using an old Windows Vista machine to do my writing. I generally use Firefox. The most important thing is a good keyboard. The next most important thing is a good mouse.

I find laptops a bit restrictive, because for good editing I need a mouse. I find I can't easily cut and paste using the little laptop "mousepad". And although I can type reasonably quickly on a laptop keyboard, it is still only about half the speed I can type on a full PC keyboard.

Some people say, can't you do all that on a mobile phone now? Well, no. The keyboard on the phone is not really capable of supporting typing at 10 characters a second. It also doesn't have all the functions such as "select from here to the end of the line", find a word, keep five windows open and cut and paste between them, and so on.

My Algol entry has now been picked, bringing to 198 the total of solo entries I have which are either published or waiting to be published. I've one more in Peer Review (Black Beethoven) and two more nearly ready to go in (The Aelric Books and Tolkien's Dwarves), so I hope to get my personal total up to 200 before the end of the year.

I also have an entry on Gandalf which won't go in as a solo entry since Tav helped me with some of it.

I thought I might write an entry on the monastery of Durrow, since I thought it had three great claims to fame - the Book of Durrow, the Cross of Durrow, and the record made in Durrow of the 1054 supernova. But on investigation, the last of these is dubious, so I may not bother.

I've heard that there is a very old and special organ in Durrow: from http://www.durrow.ie/visitors-guide/attractions/durrow-heritage-trail/church-of-ireland/


Of great pride in the village is the organ in St Fintan’s Church. It was built by Samuel Green and is the only original instrument by Green in Ireland. The firm of Samuel Green built organs for Buckingham Palace Chapel, St Petersburg, Canterbury Cathedral, Windsor Castle, the University Music School in Oxford, and Westminster Abbey. The Durrow organ was originally presented to Trinity College, Dublin, by King George III in 1797, and Lord Ashbrook employed William Telford to bring the instrument to Durrow in 1842.

That's a singularly uninformative site you linked to there. Not a mention of the High Cross or the Book of Durrow. I've heard of the organ - my daughter sang in Durrow with the Trinity Choir and has told me a lot about Trinity organs.

Yes, my quote includes the whole article!

My Green Stars entry is now on the Front Page. It's got a great illustration by FWR.

I've written lots of astronomical entries (as befits a Guide to the Galaxy), but I'm trying now to write about other things. The three entries I have in Peer Review at the moment are about Fantasy and Historical Adventure Fiction.

I'm off to Greece at the end of next week, and while I'm there I'm going to be getting bouzouki lessons from the local bouzouki player. That might inspire something musical. I've already written an entry on bouzoukis, but the whole issue of tuning in fourths vs fifths, the use of octave strings and the Greek virtuoso double-course fingering technique might be worth a mention. I also have an idea about Greek traditional music being a westernised version of Turkish music which I'll have to investigate.

Interesting! I looked up 'bouzouki' in Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians (the bible) and was surprised to find no entry. So I looked up Greece/Folk Music/Instruments and it was not mentioned there either.

So I looked up Oxford Music Online (the online edition of Grove) and found this entry which I quote in full:

Bouzouki.
Greek long-necked lute, also found in Ireland. The 19th-century bouzouki was indistinguishable from the Turkish bozuk with its carved wood or carvel-built bowl resonator, movable gut frets and wooden tuning-pegs. By the end of the 20th century it was exclusively carvel-built with fixed metal frets and metal machine tuning-heads. The instrument has three or four double courses of metal strings tuned e–b–e′ and d–g–b–e′ respectively and is played with a plectrum. The version with four courses of strings has developed since World War II.

During the first half of the 20th century the bouzouki and its smaller relations the tzouras and baglamas were used principally for virtuoso improvisation and for accompanying the REBETIKA (songs associated with an urban low-life milieu). Their strong associations with the criminal underworld and hashish smoking led to official disapproval and even persecution of the instrumentalists. During the 1930s, however, the bouzouki, aided partly by the release of commercial recordings, began to reach a wider audience.

The earlier practice of improvisation was derived from the Turkish modal system (makam) and the melodic repertory drew extensively on the traditional music of Asia Minor, but since the 1940s Western musical influence has become more marked: Western major and minor scales have displaced the oriental makam as the framework for composition. The traditional bouzouki with three courses is unsuitable for playing chords (the bass strings are mostly struck open to provide a drone), while the bouzouki with four courses has widened the possibility of introducing Western-style chords. Both types of bouzouki are now played; the traditional performance style is maintained by some veteran musicians and has been taken up by some younger exponents.

The bouzouki has become the Greek urban instrument par excellence and is played throughout the Greek-speaking world. Greek composers trained in Western music, such as Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis, have used the bouzouki in their works, drawing on the old repertory of the instrument for melodic and rhythmic inspiration.

In the late 1960s the bouzouki was adopted by traditional musicians such as Johnny Moynihan and Donal Lunny who were involved in the folk revival in Ireland. Ballad bands such as Sweeney's Men and Planxty were among the first groups to use the instrument in Irish music, initially to accompany traditional and contemporary folksong and later to provide a chordal accompaniment for traditional Irish dance music. The construction of the instrument was modified in this rapid acquisition; the Irish bouzouki has a shorter neck than its Greek counterpart and a flat back rather than a rounded one. A variety of tunings have been used, the most popular being g–d′–a′–d″. The bouzouki has become one of the most important instruments used to accompany Irish traditional music.

[end quote]

I don't agree completely with the Irish section, for which they cite N.N. Fhíonaghaile: The Adoption and Transformation of the Greek Bouzouki in Irish Music Tradition (thesis, London U., 1990)

It is used more melodically than chordally in Irish music, and when strummed it is principally rhythmic, using power chords (root and fifth only) more than full major and minor chords.

The Greek tunings are interesting: e-b-e' harks eastwards (balalaika e'-e'-a') and d–g–b–e′ harks westwards (guitar, ukulele).

I gather that there are two types of traditional music in Greece - the music played to tourists and the music played among Greeks. I presume that my bouzouki teacher, who plays during the summer for the tourists, will be a specialist in the first type.

I also gather there is a process which I will call Riverdancification which affects all successful traditional music. The process by which the music is updated, made "relevant" and popularised is simultaneously sneered at by the purists.

That is a great topic to explore too. I grew up in the age of rock 'n roll (50s & 60s) but now I can see that to older folks that genre must have appeared simply wilful ignorance. A version of Blue Moon, for instance, leaving out the interesting chords.

The "Gandalf" entry has been picked. Between entries already picked and two more in Peer Review, I'll have 200 Solo Edited Entries when all of that lot gets published.

I'm running out of things to write about now. My "Gregorian Calendar and 30th February" is reasonably factual but not very interesting. I think I will just go to Greece, and see what I feel like writing about when I get back.

My "Great Telescope of Birr" entry is on the Front Page today. That's my 10th this year, and my 196th solo entry since I joined the site.

There are also links to three more of my entries on the front page.

What a pity that the development of this site has stalled at a point where new users are discouraged from using it.

It's not stalled, it's all on the test system. Developing on the live server isn't the wisest of things

I'll look forward, then, to a time when a newbie can write an entry using the Pliny editor without it eating the text and them losing their work. This only has to happen once to scare someone away.

There's a lot of things that can scare people away, not just the code.

Perhaps an advisory warning on the Pliny text editor problem with a suggestion that they do their initial composition on notepad or something comparable, then cut and paste to peer review when they're ready would help?

Also a recomendation that do their actual peer review editing in one of the more stable Ripley skins?

There certainly used to be an advisory. Ripley isn't stable though. It only appears so because not many people use it. The more that use it, the more likely it is to crash.

I agree that there are lots of things that can scare away new writers. But the first requirement of a user-written Guide to the Galaxy should be a reliable way of writing entries.

I've just noticed that there are 13 Edited Entries featured on the Front Page at the moment, almost all about space. Two of these are new while the other 11 are old entries being re-promoted.

I wrote 5 of those 13 entries!

It's not only newbies; I was mightily scared trying to edit my Barbershop Entry in Pliny. A warning would have helped.

I also wrote something else and lost it. Not inspired to rethink it now.

The new version we're working on automatically saves entries every few minutes, plus it allows for version control. So you can save and retrieve different versions before you publish it.