Hey, Your Nose is on Fire!

The Radio Station:      Where I host my program every Sunday afternoon from 4 till 6 is a college radio station. And while some of us haven't actually been college students in decades, we're still welcomed with open arms or the equivalent as long as we adhere to the principles that make KUCI the magical sonic landscape that it is.      I won't bore you with all the intricate details, but one of the things that goes on now and then at the station is the Fund Drive. I've been there long enough to have participated in them all, and now, here I am, participating in this one, too!      From now till next Monday, May the 25th, by going to the website , you'll be prompted to make a series of clicking motions. These motions will take the savvy computer user to the UCI E-Giving site where donations may be made to help keep the electrons flowing at the station. None of us programmers get paid in anything tangib...

The three tunes here :      Didn't form a "set" on the recent Solstice, Christmas, Etc. episode of my weekly radio program. I did play all of them, yes, but it wasn't till afterwards that it occurred to me how well they'd fit together. So here they are.      We start with the British musicians Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden playing guitars and fiddles and singing their way through "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In" backed up by the snappiest little brass band I've heard in a long time. The second tune is from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by way of my favorite trumpeter/composer/arranger of the Big Band era, Charlie Shavers. This isn't Shavers' group performing it here, though, 'cause Don Byron's Sextet puts so much more bounce into it: "The Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairies," Shavers called it. And the set wraps up with Bela Fleck on the banjo with his band the Flecktones and the Tuvan ensemble called Alash merrily mashin...

     Which oughtta do it.      Still, if folks would like to read more about these characters, the badger, the frog, and the mouse first showed up during the composition of my collection Plague Year Poems . Those are the 443 daily poems I wrote from March 22, 2020 till June 7, 2021, while the public library where I work was closed to the public for the coronavirus pandemic. The link in the previous sentence will take an interested reader to the entire collection's table of contents, but for the abovementioned characters, the badger first appears in a sequence that starts with poem #149 from August 17th, 2020 and runs for another 12 or 13 poems.      She then returns when I'm considering quitting the daily poem thing at the one-year mark. That sequence starts with poem #337 from February 21st, 2021 and crashes on through to the actual first anniversary of the the whole thing on March 21st, 2021. Spoi...

     Big finale next!