Sunday Music: Anthology, Bread

Album Title: Anthology, Bread

Why I Bought It: I had a couple of Bread LPs which I couldn't play - this was before I bought the converter - and this album had most of what was on both, so....

What I Like (Melancholy): "Everything I Own". This has always been my favorite Bread song. (This particular theme is one I enjoy. Janis Ian's "Thankyous" and Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band" fill the same niche.)

What I Like (Evocative): "If". Just a beautiful love song, with an outstanding last verse. (I also have Dolly Parton's cover; she... doesn't quite get it.)

What I Like (Yeah, Right): "It Don't Matter to Me". I was being earwormed, the other day, by Bobby Vinton's "Roses are Red (My Love)"; it occurs to me that that song occupies another position on the spectrum shared by this song and Diana Ross's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough". Anyway, even if the singer's words aren't quite believable, he's doing the right thing.

What I Don't Like (Harsh): "Fancy Dancer". This one seems out of character, and I find it unappealing musically - so much so that its content has no impact on me whatever.

Overall: Mostly, I think of Bread as comfort music. Even songs like "Diary" and "Aubrey" are more bittersweet than anything else. There are a number of more downbeat songs on this album, though, like "Dismal Day" (which is musically perky-sounding); I'm not sure how I feel about them. A lot of their work ("Make It With You", "Lost Without Your Love") is like upscale Air Supply, although with less energy. Ear candy.

Amazon Raid

As I mentioned a bit ago, I was reading Virginia DeMarce's 1635: The Tangled Web. Having finished it, I was unclear enough on the sequence of events to date in the Ring of Fire universe that I decided to go ahead to a marathon. This was helped by the handy inclusion, in that volume, of a suggested reading order, by Eric Flint himself. Unfortunately, it included several volumes - four issues of the Grantville Gazette, Ring of Fire 2, and 1635: The Dreeson Incident - which I don't have. This prompted my first visit this year to Amazon.

I ordered those books, of course, but also went for a few more items from my to-get list: the fifth Mercy Thompson book (not out yet, but only days away); The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (recommended by the Pinyin website); a Cambridge Language Surveys volume on the Dravidian languages (hi, Tora!); and A Tour Through Mathematical Logic. That last got a good writeup in one of the journals I read, and fills a gap. (I'm comfortable with propositional and predicate logic, but modal logic and model theory are unmapped territory to me, and the book also includes a chapter on constructivism, which I don't know enough about.)

As a side note, I see that, though we lost the local Borders, its site was immediately occupied by Books-a-Million. I don't know much about that chain; I'll have to wander over there sometime. Probably not until spring, though.

John Tyler

John Tyler - tenth President of the United States; the only President whose death was not officially mourned, mainly because when he died he was a member of the Confederate House of Representatives; born 1790, died 1862 - has two living grandchildren.

Yes, that's grandchildren. 150 years after his death, two of his grandsons are still around. (He had a son at age 63, and he had two sons, at ages 71 and 75.)

According to silbey at The Edge of the American West, Tyler's grandson Harrison Tyler thinks that Newt Gingrich is "a big jerk". (He hasn't decided who he'll vote for this fall, but - reading between the lines - seems to be leaning towards Romney.)

Just thought I'd mention that.