The night has otherwise been uneventful, as is the norm here. I did a bit of adjusting of the contents of the room, with the vague idea of perhaps reducing the mass of those contents. No reduction ensued. I did, however, find a number of CDs I'd long missed, and a couple I'd entirely forgotten I owned. Among them is a boxed set of Motown R&B from 1959-1971. This is not the mostly obscure, early R&B which I find the most engaging work of the genre, but a collection of greatest hits by its most popular artists. Still, it's an enjoyable reminder of the era before the style succumbed to the lure of faux-Operatic excess and the inexplicable Swiss/Country/Emo influences which caused it to degenerate into a mass of off-coloratura yodeling and pretentious, overwrought lyrics. Before the decadence, there was Mary Wells, and she could sing!
Brain does not thrive on music alone- not even archaic music from the vanished world of the 1960s-- so I made the obligatory nightly foray into the wilds of teh Internets. I found there Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued Word Wrester. Behold his explanation of its purpose! Do we really need another dictionary site devoted to obscure English neologisms, jargon, slang, obsolete, and other such niche words? Probably not, but I found this bit of excess interesting, not least because I'm quite certain that much of the contemporary verbiage it sports has been coined within the blague-o-sphere, by blagueurs who are coining words and phrases in a desperate attempt to make themselves sound clever and thus stand out from the ever-growing crowd. And, no, I did not attempt to find there my own stab at self-aggrandizing, quasi-clever coinage, "blague-o-sphere." I doubt that it's yet spread far enough to join the nine-minutes-wonders (there you go again, Mr. smartass) which Mr. Barrett's site has thus far gathered. But, words! How can I resist them, even when they are words that will be gone before we know it, and never missed?
Oooh- Carolyn Crawford! Another singer who is not utter crap! I'm glad I dug this up.
