Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)
But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.
The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.
A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:
In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup
Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.
3D printing. From Wikipedia:
3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control, with the material being added together (such as plastics, liquids or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer.
Kent State. From Wikipedia:
The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre and the Kent State massacre) were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus. The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft.
Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
… The best-known popular culture response to the deaths was the protest song “[Four dead in] Ohio”, written by Neil Young for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Star Wars Day. The calendrical pun May the 4th be with you, based on on May the Force be with you, groan. Proper noun May vs. the auxiliary verb may (phonologically perfect but syntactically distant); and ordinal numeral fourth vs. common noun force (phonologically imperfect).
The 5/4 time signature. “Take Five”, in 5/4 time, from the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s album Time Out. In my 2/9/17 posting “ReFo and K-Man”, from Wikipedia (at the time):
Quintuple meter or quintuple time … is a musical meter characterized by five beats in a measure. The beats can have the pattern strong-weak-medium-weak-weak [as in alligatorid crocodilian] or strong-weak-weak-medium-weak, although a survey of certain forms of mostly American popular music suggests that strong-weak-weak-medium-weak is the more common of these two in these styles.
… In 1959, the Dave Brubeck Quartet released Time Out, a jazz album with music in unusual meters. It included Paul Desmond’s “Take Five”, in 5/4 time [SWWMW]. Against all expectations, the album went platinum, and “Take Five” became a jazz standard.
Now it’s a 5/4 earworm for me.
May 4, 2024 at 5:44 pm |
Two examples from classical music always come to mind when the subject is 5/4 time. The easy one is the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, where the rhythm seems to be a compound of the two rhythms you describe: every pair of measures goes S-W-W-M-W, S-W-M-W-W, or more simply 3-2, 2-3. My other favorite is “Mars” from Holst’s The Planets. I was trying to count the rhythm in that but it was complicated.
May 4, 2024 at 6:05 pm |
To JBL: The Wikipedia entry for quintuple meter covers a huge range of examples and is well worth looking at.
May 5, 2024 at 5:58 am |
Another not-serious holiday proclaimed by folks on a Facebook group I follow: The first Saturday in May purports to be World Naked Gardening Day (not in my climate, thank you very much).
May 5, 2024 at 6:17 am |
I do a fair amount of my gardening in a t-shirt and underpants (my tiny garden being in a walled patio), so I guess that’s semi-naked gardening. But not yesterday, when we had a cold downpour, really unpleasant.
May 6, 2024 at 6:46 am
I actually have three quite valid reasons for ignoring this “holiday”: (1) The climate issue referred to above; (2) Nowhere on our lot is completely hidden from the view of one or more neighbors or the street; (3) We are infested with roses, blackberries, raspberries, and cat briar, none of which I want getting anywhere near my private parts.
This year, additionally, I was more than 200 miles from the garden on the day in question.