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Open Thread

Album of the Week 5-31-25

Afternoon folks!

Small haul this week, I've been busy with some projects around the house and haven't uploaded much this week. So there's an album with excellent harmonica player Lester Butler backed by a band that isn't the Red Devils. After that and finishing up in the diversity department is an album of jug bandish tunes penned by Norman Greenbaum, the fellow who would later go on to have a really big hit with "Spirit In The Sky." Anyway, it's a fun album worth a listen if you like that sort of thing.

Enjoy the tunes and have a great weekend!

Saturday Open Thread - 5/31/25: Odds and Ends

Good morning, good people!

I have bitched and moaned about AI being encouraged by the Texas State Bar. Well, I read the 2 articles about it in a recent Bar Journal about the ups and downs. Saves time, looks professional, but hire staff to verify every single word, then verify their work, and you are responsible for malpractice if they didn't catch a mistake and you didn't, either.

Open Thread - 05-30-25 - Just in Time

Does it feel like time is moving faster? Things happen so quickly that hardly a second goes by and we're off to a new development, a new revelation, a new outrage. There's hardly time to catch our breath and there's a new squirrel to chase up a tree. We're inundated with problem after problem and very few solutions.

There's an old theory in the science of physics that states the faster one goes the more time slows down. For instance, if one could travel in space at the speed of light time would decelerate. One could leave earth and travel many light years away and upon return will have aged very little while everyone that one knew back on earth would have been long dead.

The revelations are coming so fast they're leaving us behind. Is that it?

Or are we just getting old and running out of time?

Open Thread - 29 May 2025 - Learn Something New Every Day

Learn Something New Every Day

So, here's something that I encountered a little while ago, a bit of knowledge that made me go... wow, I didn't know that! I was reading about logging here in the Pacific Northwest and learned the first meaning of the term 'Skid Row'. It's, now, generally a name for a poor area in a town or city, where those people 'on the skids', who are basically poor, druggies, prostitutes, etc, live. Basically it's a slum; a red-light district.

But the term didn't start like that. It seems to have started in the 17 Century as 'Skid Road'. It referred to a log road - a road made by paving it with greased wood slats, also known as a Corduroy road - then. The term gained wide usage in the Pacific Northwest in the 19th Century and meant the road, path or track upon which logs were skidded down the mountains to the mills and storage areas below. In time the mills and storage areas were also spoken of as being on Skid Road and when loggers were fired, they were sent down Skid Road.


An original Skid Road with the loggers using oxen to pull huge trees. Image from the above link on greased slates called Why Do they Call It Skid Row?.

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