Dance ramblings...

Great music/dance titles is one of the best things about English Country dancing. During the past few weeks at our weekly Monday night English dances at the Gainesville Dance & Music Association (GDMA), we've done Dr. Vincent's Delight, The Astonished Archaeologist, Bonnie Cockoo, Christmas at Zeist, Barbarini's Tambourine, Picking Up Sticks, Jovial Beggars, A Retiring Fellow, Trip to the Manors, Mayfair, Winter Solstice, Wibsey Roundabout, Childgrove, Smithy Hill, Jack's Maggot, and dozens of others. Don't you just love those names?? If you're waltzing, then you can dance to any music that's in 3/4 time. Same for latin dances, or pretty much any ballroom dance--if the beat is right, you can do the dance. But in ECD, each dance has its own tune. So when you hear the band practicing, you know what dance is coming up. Some dances have been written to fit established tunes; for instance, Bonnie Cuckoo is done to an old Scottish classic called Shebeg Shemore. And there's such a wide range of music for ECD!! Hauntingly beautiful waltz-time tunes like Turn of the Tide or Elizabeth, rowdy tunes like Jack's Health or Liliburlero, dramatic tunes like Mary K or Companions, cute mind-worm tunes like Benjamin's Birthday, and dances done to classic tunes like Good Man of Cambridge which is done to Mozart's Rondo Alla Turka.

OK, that's enough rambling on. If any of these songs sound intriguing to you, email me at rthorp@aclib.us and I'll send you the audio. And if you're interested in maybe coming to dance with us, I'll be glad to tell you more. We dance every Monday from 7:00 'til 10:00 at GDMA, 308 W. University Ave. It's right next door to the Seagle Building, upstairs in the old Firestone Building. "But I don't know how to do it!" you say. These are called dances--the caller walks everyone through the dance a couple of times before dance starts, and continues to prompt the first few times through. "I don't know the footwork" ECD has no footwork, just a smooth walking step. Literally, if you can walk you can do ECD. "I don't have a partner" Doesn't matter. ECD has no ballroom hold, and the men's and women's steps are pretty much identical. If there are more men than women, then a man dances the woman's part. It's no big deal at all; it usually means nothing more than standing in a different place. "I'll look silly" No you won't--well, no sillier than you normally look. ;>) Put that ego in check--everyone won't be watching you, they'll be dancing and enjoying themselves. And we were all newcomers at one time, so we're very understanding.

Think about it!!

Thing 7--it just won't die!

The Generator Blog is like alcohol; no nutritional value, but once you start... There's all kinds of fun, totally useless stuff you can do there!

Thing 7 redux

Is it really wasting time, if yer havin' fun? Image Chef has lolcats!!! So now I have a dancin' lolkitteh of my very own! Kewl!

Thing 7!

OK, this is pretty fun! I used BigHugeLabs Motivational Poster generator, and only had a couple of hiccups. Setting the color for the letters and the background was way different than what I expected. I thought it would be like Outlook, where you get a bunch of little colored squares, and you pick one. Nope! BigHugeLabs uses this cool color wheel, so instead of discreet color selections, you have a continuum of all colors. It really is fun (even if you're color-blind like me!) You can pull your photo from pretty much anyplace you want. This one is from my work computer, but you could just as easily get something from Flickr. This is Annette at the John C. Campbell Folk School, in Brasstown, North Carolina. We went to a weekend of English Country Dance there last May, and plan to go again this year. While we were there dancing, there were also people taking classes in photography, beekeeping, blacksmithing, bark-basket-making, ceramics, wood-turning, kaleidoscope-making, quilting, and more stuff that I can't remember right now. It's a WAY cool place, and if you're ever in the very western-most tip of NC, you should check it out. Or go to www.folkschool.org and read about it.

Thing 6!!!

This one was so evil I thought it should be Thing 666! I never would have figured it out without the help of the "My 23 Personalities" blog. She told me exactly how to make it work--thank you so much! I wish it hadn't lined up the letters vertically, but at least they're there. "Dance or Die!" Bwa ha ha ha!!!

OK, I see that Thing 11 is now posted, but since I now have Thing 6 completed, I'm MORE than halfway caught up! For me, this is just amazing! I couldn't have done it without the help of so many people; I'd like to thank the Academy, my hairdresser (she's just fabulous!), and most of all my Key Grip, without whom I'd never have been able to grip all those keys so well. The rest of you know who you are; go have a beer on me. Well, not actually on me...

Video Bar!

Hey, I added a video bar! When I first saw the name of the gadget, I thought it might be a place to get a virtual glass of wine -- oh well. Anyway, these are videos of actual English Country Dances! I'm not sure if they change periodically, or if these four will always be the ones presented. **LATE BREAKING NEWS!! IT APPEARS THAT THE SAME 4 VIDEOS ARE STILL HERE (THE NEXT DAY), BUT THEIR ORDER HAS BEEN SCRAMBLED! OMG, WHATEVER SHALL WE DO?!? Just so you aren't forever cornfused, "Jack's Health is the one where the people are on the floor below and have a certain ant-like quality, the BBC Pride & Prejudice clip is the one where everyone is elaborately dressed buts dances like they have a stick up their hoo-hah, and Prince William is the one with just 6 people. The one with the weird little kids is the one with the weird little kids. OK, got it? Good! END OF LATE-BREAKING NEWS; NOW BACK TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING!!** **OK, still later-breaking news!! The videos displayed are totally out of control! "Prince William" has totally vanished, and has been replaced by the Germantown Country Dancers! (Which is actually a much better video, but who knows how long it will last??) Who is in control here? Everybody, check the basement for pods!!!**I didn't get to select them; they're just the ones that came up. But the first one is of "Jack's Health," one of Annette's and my favorite dances. It was filmed at The Ark dance studio, which is on the Duke University campus in Durham, NC. We danced there last year, and are planning to go again in just a few weeks for their annual Sun Assembly Ball. The second clip is the famous dance "Mr. Beveridge's Maggot" from the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice. The actual dance is nothing like this presentation; it was totally re-written to give Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy time for some dialog. Our friend Veronica Lane, of the band Full Circle, deconstructed the dance as it's presented here, and we learned it and danced it at a presentation for the Jane Austen Society in Jacksonville. It was great fun! The third dance is "Prince William," which is danced as a three-couple set. The other two are Longways sets "for as many as will" -- the only limit to the number of people who can dance is the size of the hall. The thing at the bottom, with the little kids, is a puzzlement; I don't know why it's here. But then again, I'm not sure why I'm here either!

Thing 5!

This one might have been the most fun so far, and the most frustrating. Signing up for a Flickr account means signing up for Yahoo, which means jumping through hoops and setting up an email account that I didn't want and won't use. If I had it to do over again, I'd probably use Picassa on Google instead, since I already had to set up an account there to do 23 Things in the first place. But now that it's all done, I'm glad I have the Flickr thing. I haven't explored too much yet, but I want to search on the 23things@neflin tag and see what others have posted. Flickr will be a good place to back up my photos, but I have thousands! By the time they're all uploaded, I'll be so old I'll just be sittin' in a corner drooling on myself. And I already have accounts with passwords that I can't remember all over the place. Oh well; getting old beats the alternative!

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StCroix09 026, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

The official bird of St. Croix, the bananaquit. They have a cool little squeaky song. They're also known as sugar birds, because they'll come feed at a dish of sugar water. They aren't very shy; this one sat still for his picture, right outside the door to our condo.

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StCroix09 044, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

This is the view of the Caribbean from the dance tent.

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StCroix09 042, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

The dance tent at Sugar Beach (the resort where the dance week was held). We danced here every morning from 9:00 - 10:30, and every night from 8:00 - 11:00. The week after I took this, the tent blew away!!

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StCroix09 358, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

Annette and I went to St. Croix for a week of English Country dancing. This is the north coast of the island, taken right beside the road.

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SandhillJan09 058, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

This year there are record numbers of Sandhill Cranes wintering at Payne's Prairie. One of the biggest flocks was feeding beside the La Chua Trail.

SnowBall2007

SnowBall2007, originally uploaded by RandyECD.

Randy & Annette dancing at SnowBall in 2007. It's held each year at the Gulfport Casino Ballroom, which is right on the bay east of St. Pete.

Thing 4 done -- Finally!

Wow, it's been so long since I did anything with this! I took about a week and a half off, and since I got back I've just been trying to catch up on work. No time for fun stuff like 23 Things! But now I feel like playing for a while. (He says, like that isn't always the case!)

OK, I watched the cute little video about RSS, and really liked it. Un-technical and easy to understand. I added some of the other 23 Thingers' blogs to my list, along with a couple of English Country Dance sites. One thing I don't really understand is why it matters whether or not a site has the RSS symbol on it. If it doesn't, you just copy and paste the URL and add it to your subscription list. So why do you care if it's there or not?

The transition from Thing 3 to Thing 4 was good; first you learn how to search for blogs, and then you have a reason to do so. That's pretty cool.

This is going to be a short post; I need to make some progress toward Thing 5, so I'm going to go and start that. And I really want to get to some of the photo Things! I have some pretty good shots of things I'd like to share. Onward!! (Into the Valley of Death rode the 23 Thingers!)