AWWWWWWWWW blush thanks DogMom MWWAAAHHH!
P.S. I really liked your anagram cartoon. It made me giggle.
And here I thought you were all about the love. Because when I think Rue, I think love. Tho lately when I think Rue, thoughts of poo and puke seem to intrude. But no, with that ittle-cutie-patootie, it’s definitely all about the love. Does Lucy love Brody, too?
Puppy pictures are cool Rue. He is just cutest most precious most delicious puppy EVER!
Today is my Friday after the longest week ever and typically the phones have gone crazy-go-nuts and my boss has buggered off somewhere and my on-call relief is out in the field. I want it to be 5 o’clock already.
and on a more typical MMP topic - food. We had a girls pot-luck lunch today and I am fighting off a card coma right now. Whyowhyowhyowhy did I eat lasagne, cajun potato wedges and sloppy joes and mississipi mud pie?? Hmm hmm someone please tell me?
Sunspace you have not arrived yet? Where are ya?
Oh and what is a player piano?
The dresser in my bedroom generates it’s own gravity field as well - it took 4 strong frac boys (they work for the 'Stimulation dept <snerk>) to move it!
OK that should be ‘carb coma’
That’ll teach me to post be on the phone and have someone in my office.
busy busy
Just for you ems and because I am dedicated to fighting (and sometimes sperading) ignernce. Everything you need to know about a player piano
:: Sunspace exits the box, look saround for a voluptuous Brit with green eyes and brown hair, sees only sheep and a semi-desert landscape ::
Uh-oh.
A player piano is an early recorded-music playback device featured in old Warner Brothers cartoons, usually in saloons.
It’s like a regular piano, but includes a power source and a mechanism for reading a scroll with holes punched in it. The scroll contained notes of a song, and as the scroll, uh, scrolled past the reader, the reader mechanism read the holes and operated the piano’s keys and hammers to strike the strings and play the music. I have an impression that someone would sit at the player piano, operate a treadle to run the thing, and pretend to play the music…
I believe the rise of player pianos in the 1890s led directly to the ride of recorded-music performance-rights organizations and the changes in copyright laws that led to such things as compulsory performance licenses, RIAA, and ASCAP.
The really old ones (like my parents’) have no power source. The scroll (actually called a Player-Piano Roll) is loaded onto the top roller, fed past the “reader” (more on this in a minute) and hooked up to the bottom roll. The operator pumps pedals, sort of like a sitty-downy StairMaster™, which operates the bellows. The reader is a metal bar with a series of 88 holes, one for each piano key. The reader works on a vacuum - the bellows tries to suck in air through the reader holes, which it normally can’t do. As the roll passes over the reader, the holes in the roll allow the air into their reader holes, which somehow (I don’t know how this part works) activates the hammer for the corresponding note.
VERY cool, really. But VERY VERY heavy.
I didn’t say an electrical power source. 
I had no idea they were suction-operated, though. I always thought they were mechanical, based on vague memories of my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine. Suction would seem to be a far-superior method.
So, see ems, you’ve learned two new things today:
-
Player pianos are heavy.
-
Suction is good.
It’s really both. Suction to keep the roll tight up against the reader, and to tell the piano mechanism which keys to play at any given time. The rest of it - the “brain”, so to speak, is all mechanical. The only “power source”, really, is the human power of the pedals.
The modern ones ARE, in fact, powered and can play without a human involved at all, except to plug it in and turn it on.
Heh. It is funny! It’s especially appropriate because DogDad loves chemistry. I liked yours, too. A Swamp Reb, indeed…
Actually, she does. As long as the pup doesn’t want to play with her during one of her nap times. (Dogs sleep around 16 to 18 hours a day. Cat’s are around twenty hours nap time.) Then she can be a touch grumpy. Like when the Crocodile Hunter says one of the crocs is “grumpy” when it just tried to bite his face off. So far no puppy-face-biting-off. That would put a serious crimp in little Brody’s cute factor.
The cat even likes the little guy. She goes sauntering (the way cats do) into the kitchen (which is where Brody gets confined when I can’t watch him closely enough) and sits to look out the back door. She could just as easily look out the back window in the other room, where the puppy can’t get at her. But does she? No. She just sits there and waits for Brody to jump on her. Then they wrestle around until Zoe gets tired of him. He’s all chompy on her and she puts up with it. Until she thinks he’s too chompy, then she puts him in a headlock. They have great fun together.
I have successfully accomplished nothing today, and now it’s time to go off to work, and do nothing there. Whee!
Sunspace, isn’t it delightfully cold and rainy? I’m so happy.
I had to come back one more time before leaving work to look at the
puppy picture
That is one cute puppy. Do you think the ferrets will know I’ve cheated on them by looking at a puppy?
Fifth disease?
Ha!
Even worse is the Sith disease, as you will note in about 2,486 recent threads on the subject of Siths.
I’m tired. Or as we say down south, “Ahm tard!” I just finished mowing, edging, weedwhackin’ and blowin’ off the driveway. Ok, I used my blower to blow off the driveway, I didn’t do it myself, but still! Then I went into the back yard, took off all my attire, rinsed myself off with the hose to get all the grass off me, and jumped in the pool to cool off. Just thought I’d share that. Also, it illustrates to taxi yet another reason to have a privacy fenced back yard. Then, I came in and took a shower. I’m hopin’ ACBG will call. Poor thing had to go do a home IV thingy at 7 PM. All because of that ol’ meany who up and quit.
Did I tell y’all my neighbors are renewing their wedding vows this Saturday afternoon? It’s their 30th anniversary. I have to get all dressed up and go stand in their back yard under a tent for this cause they want everybody all purtied up. Then, we’re gonna have a bbq and pool party. I told ‘em they could do that at the pool. So, we get to get all undressed up (that does not mean nekkid ya pervs!) for that. They got folks doin’ all the cookin’ and they are furnishing all the beverages (booze, beer and nonalcholic stuff) so all I gotta do is have fun. I hope ACBG can be around for it. He’s probably gotta work cause of the ol’ meanie who up and quit and left him short staffed. 
Hee hee! You said ACBG has a short staff. <snerk>
I believe the correct term is little person. What?
I have but one comment on Brody: Puppy War.
Brody wins every time!
Ashes, good thing I wasn’t sipping anything when I read your post. I snorted (or was that <snerked>?) in a most unladylike manner. 
Back later.
GT
I just glad the heat broke, and I can finally sleep.
Well, I most definitely snerked when I read that post and **Mr. Taters ** did too.
I’ve told Mr. Taters about all your warm invitations to become one of the Cool Kids here, but said to tell you all that he’ll just stick to quietly lurking. He won’t join because his grammar and sentence composition skills are, shall we say, lacking? He’s a smart guy, he just becomes all rushed when he’s typing and forgets about punctuation and capitilization.
So, I guess if he has something to say, he’ll say it through me.
He also said that if we ever have another Dopefest he’s up for it because he had such a great time at Swampfest. He’s still commenting on what a bunch of nice people we met up with.
Well, we need to get cleaned up now for the daughter’s award ceremony tonight.
You know how most people are thinking about the 4th of July (well, people in the US, otherwise they’re probably not thinking about it unless their bills are due or something) and thinking “Yay! Long weekend!”? Not me, Rue. No, I’m thinking, “Oh God, not again.” Long weekends are not usually a time of dread, however…
I’ve had two long weekends this year. The first one, in February for Presidents’ day, was spent mostly in bed, going through a box of tissues. Yes, a whole box. My nose ran and ran, you think it was prepping for the Boston Marathon. I was sick all three days. It sucked.
So last month, my mom needed to go to the ER. Being the dutiful daughter I am, I brought her there and spent five hours waiting for her to be able to come home. (we now know she has really high blood pressure. She’s okay.) One of the other victims who came in was a baby boy, probably a year and a half old. Very cute, but very sick. Cough, cough etc, they sent him for chest X-Rays and everything. Eventually we went home. This was monday, running into the wee hours of Tuesday.
By Friday I wasn’t feeling well. Woke up Saturday. Cough, cough. Oh shit, I think I remember this from somewhere recently. Cough, cough, run nose run. cough. Three days of this. Which days? Why, my long weekend days, of course! The nose continued to run and run for days, poor red nose, all raw and peeling. Apply neosporin, wipe, cough, wipe, wipe, wipe, cough.
It took almost a week to really feel better, and I’m still coughing occasionally. The funny part is that I made my dad laugh my claiming that my immune system must be the part of me that’s French - it senses a long weekend then it’s total surender. But the rest wasn’t very entertaining. Interesting though: Mom, who gets every cold on earth, did not get sick, despite being exposed to me and patient zero both.
So now another long weekend is approaching… I think I’m going to buy tissues and cough medicine on the Friday before, just in case.