Water

I was telling my friend Dave Howell about the decipherment of Hittite Cuneiform. We have interesting conversations as you will see.
My knowledge came from a book from the library that I checked out sometime in the recent past, but I have no idea which book it was. I suppose it was about the decipherment of cuneifom and hieroglyphics in the Middle East and North Africa. ;-) Sometimes I 'graze' the new book shelves in the history and social sciences sections of the library looking for an interesting read.
What makes this subject particularly interesting, and made me remember the tidbit of information that I related to Dave, is that the word 'water' was the key to translating Hittite Cuneiform, because it's the same word phonetically in ancient Hittite and in Modern English. No, really! When I went home I looked this up on the web to verify my memory's claim.

From:

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/hittite.htm

"A Czech linguist, Bedrich Hrozny who specialized in Semitic languages decided to attempt the decipherment of the Hittite cuneiform script. He was able to visit Istanbul and obtain copies of some of the cuneiform text from Boghaz Keui. In one text he found a example of two rhyming lines that looked promising. He knew the phonetic values of the cuneiform symbols so he rendered the two lines into the Latin alphabet as:

nu ninda en e-iz-za-te-ni
wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni

Hrozny recognized the cuneiform ideogram ninda as representing bread. This led him to speculate that some of the other words in the lines might be for something like eating. He at that point was still considering Hittite as a Semitic language so he was looking for words that might be cognate with words for eating and so forth in other Semitic languages. Hrozny was a Semitic scholar but as a Czech he was also familiar with German. In scanning the lines looking for something that would be associated with bread what does he find at the beginning of the second line but wa-a-tar. It fairly leaps out as virtually the English word water although Hrozny probably saw it as a cognate of the German word for water, wasser. This was the clue to Hrozny that Hittite belonged to the Indo-European language family. He found similarities of the words in the lines to other Indo-European languages and was able to translate the pair of lines as:

Now you will eat bread and drink water. "

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In fact, the sound 'ah' as in water, or close to it, is in the word for 'water' in all of the languages that branch out of the Indo-European family, as far as I can find. If you have an example that contradicts this, feel free to post it here.

Latin - aqua
Italian - aqua
Spanish - agua
French - eau
German - wasser
Hindi - pani
Marathi - pan-ni
Arabic - nahla

My mom's recipes - I made a blog just for them

I've made a blog and moved my mom's recipes to it. Hopefully I will add lots more. For now, here it is:

http://sarasrecipes.blogspot.com/

Locust and Mulberry Conversion Chart

*Note - the Mulberry Gauge is being moved to a site upstream.  The correlations to the bridge gauge will all have to be re-done over the coming year(s).*  
Link to spreadsheet of new Mulberry correlations

I've had this in a printout on my wall for years. I don't think it is online anymore so I am going to type it in so I have it handy online. I don't know who originally compiled it. I've altered it to suit my own experiences.

Online gauge for the Mulberry:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/al/nwis/uv/?site_no=02450000&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060

Online gauge for the Locust Fork:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/al/nwis/uv/?site_no=02455000

This information is NOT intended as a gauge for safe water levels. Be sure to check the readings at the put-in bridges. Use your judgment and DO NOT attempt to paddle if your skills do not match the river conditions. Gauges change, and rivers change.

CFS Conversion

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THE CFS Flow	LOCUST Stage or Height	FORK Comments
222-441	2’0” to 2’6”	Minimal flow for paddling
530.5-630	2’8” to 3’0”	Good Paddling begins at this level.
732	3’2”	Ideal technical paddling with a little push.
962.7	3’6”	House Rock rapid gets strong; ender hole is prime for tricks.
1230	4’0”	House Rock rapid needs scouting; Double Trouble rapid gets less technical; ender hole begins to wash out; surfing and wave wheel paradise.
1970	5’0”	Big Water river in trees; Powell Falls becomes grabby – scout river right.
2900	6’0”	A real flusher; Whirlpool above Ender Hole becomes very dangerous.

THE CFS Flow	MULBERRY Stage or Height painted on Bridge. Subtract 3.3 from the online USGS gauge to get the correct feet on the painted bridge gauge.	FORK Comments
250-300	0”	Bump and scrape. Too low!
420	0” – 6”	Class I.
600-750	1’	Class II. At 651, bridge gauge said 1 ft with lots of little surf waves. -at bridge 1ft./700 cfs the surf spot between the islands at Glen Clark was in.
800	1’6”	Hawaii 50 begins to form and bow surfing possible.
1100	2’0”	Enjoyable run; great down river run.
3000	3’0”	Hawaii 5-0 is a surfer’s paradise; Lunchtime becomes retentive.
4000	4’0”	Pushy; rapids and eddies begin to wash out; floating debris may be present; 5.0 questionable but the hole behind is great.

Femme Avec Guitar Electric - Right Hand Assertiveness

I want to talk about right hand strumming technique with a pick this morning. One of the things that I am aware of with my right hand is that the fulcrum of strumming is not my wrist; it is my elbow.

If you take your hand and wiggle it from the wrist, you get the classic 'limp wrist' motion. Imagine slapping someone with your hand moving it this way. Or - go ahead and slap your own face with the back of your hand this way. Now wiggle your hand with the elbow as the fulcrum. Slap your own face with the back of your hand - ow!
There is a lot more power generated from your hand motion if you use the elbow as a fulcrum and keep your wrist straight.
This is not to say that your hand or wrist should be tense.
My term for this is assertiveness, because I believe that's what it sounds like. Whereas playing with a limp wrist sounds like a child's hand smearing around finger paint.
You might say, "But what if I want to sound like a child's hand smearing around finger paint?" There is nothing wrong with that, if you want to sound that way. But if you are a woman who wants to play rock and roll, you need to play with assertiveness. And that is the one thing I see and hear most lacking when I see women rock guitarists.

Exceptions to this? Well they abound, but I think it's good to get this assertiveness thing nailed first. One exception is playing a lead. I use my wrist to play leads and the palm and side of my hand to mute the strings I do not want to be heard.
Another exception - well, sometimes I do strum with my wrist, but in this instance the up strokes have as much force as the down strokes.

I'll probably amend this later. Remember, this is just my own opinions and worth every cent you paid.

Friends

Well, I am having a bloggin' kind of morning, what can I say? BT is down and there's not too much else interesting online. It's kind of pitiful that the entire World Wide Web can be boring. It's not like cable channels - it's the freakin' world! But for whatever reason, it is.

Maybe, just maybe the woman I was worried about actually did find my blog and read it. If she did, she has declined to contact me. I'll never know. I DO know that I had a weird dream the other night about seeing her in a public library. I walked up and said, "Hey how are you? I was worried about you though I have no idea why. Are you OK?" She said yes, and that she is now a wiccan researching spells. (btw I didn't know they had that kind of stuff in the public library.) So I replied with something like, " O... K... cool, um, whatever" and walked off in a bit of shock that someone who was so staunchly agnostic would practice religion ever again, much less with such an esoteric choice.

I did discuss all of this with another friend who is also a former friend of the woman in question (yes that is how tangled up life becomes) and she thinks, as I do, that it very well could be that my worries were valid, in a Jungian kind of way. Well, for no reason I can ascertain I stopped worrying about her, so she must be doing better. Maybe she cast a spell of happiness, I don't know. ;-)

BTW young lady, you can still contact me. Or not. Just... be well.

Practice

In the kayak pool session last night, I thought about something a great guitarist told me about practicing guitar. He said, "You know those guys who sit in front of a TV and mindlessly play whatever without thinking while they are watching TV... well they are ruining their playing. You should be focused every time you practice and if you can't focus, put the damn thing up, it's not the right time!"
This came to my mind as I practiced rolling and trying to initiate the bow last night. I think it's pertinent. The hard thing is, rolling should become something that happens without thought. But perhaps not in the pool. The pool is a place to consider the steps and the technique of whatever it is you are trying to perfect for whitewater. At least I think so.
In the same light, practicing guitar should not be confused with jamming or having fun, not that it can't be fun, but to me these days practicing guitar should be about goals. Which necessitates having goals. ;-)
Without a goal, what are you doing? Are you practicing? Learning? Learning what?
I have a new book - Guitar Fretboard Workbook - and it is great. I can do the written exercises at work while rendering a composite, and when I get home and practice on guitar the lessons remain relevant. I even posted a little review of it on Amazon, something I never do, because I like the book so much.
I decided to count my rolls last night in the pool, and I counted 52. I did this because I want to make sure I exercise the muscles I use rolling when an opportunity like an indoor pool presents itself. I took breaks between every 15 or so - literally getting out of the boat. And my technique? Not so hot. I did come up every time though.
I guess I can get pretty meticulous.

Guitar Tuning

This is a repost from a blog I put on myspace on Jan 4th 08.

I've been reading Richard Lloyd's website a lot and in it he talks about even temperament and guitar tuning. There is a way to tune a guitar by ear that makes a nice agreeable sound. I am geeking out on it this fine morning. I thought you might like trying it so here 'tis.

"First tune the bottom E. string to a tuning fork or tuning machine. Next, fret the E. string at the tenth fret. This will give you a D. Tune the D. string to this note by ear. Next, fret the D. string at the fifth fret. Tune the G. string to the D. string at the fifth fret. Now fret the G. string at the second fret. This gives you an A. Tune the A. string from this note. Now fret the A. string at the second fret. Tune the B. string from this note. It will be an octave up. Next, fret the D. string at the second fret. This gives you E. Tune your high E from this. Again this will be an octave."

He explains why this sounds nice, and why tuning to a machine sounds off, in the rest of the lesson here:
http://www.richardlloyd.com/lessons/index.htm Click on 'Musical Q&A'. It is the second question and answer. Interesting stuff. But if you don't want to read it all and just want to hear what I mean, tune your guitar the way posted here and strum a few tunes. It's very cool!

For more on temperament go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

and here:
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~oneskull/3.6.04.htm