Do you try to set a good example for others to follow?Do you teach others good habits by showing them or telling them?
I generally consider myself to be a good person, a law-abiding person (except when I’m behind the wheel of a car, where I am, shall we say heavy-footed), and I generally attempt to be someone others might hold in high regard and look up to.
In my working days I always tried to mentor new, younger employees. Not in the sense of being a role model, though. Just someone who could show them the ropes and help them get acclimated.
These days, though, the only people I try to set a good example for are little people: my four-year-old grandson and my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter. When they are around or we are around them, I watch my Ps and Qs. No cursing, no complaining. Just being on my best behavior, knowing that their little eyes are constantly watching.
Over the next ten days, six are going to be 100°F or more. And it’s just the beginning of July. It’s times like these that I wish we had stayed in San Francisco instead of moving just 35 miles east! These same days in San Francisco are forecast to be 76, 77, 76, 73, and 71, respectively. And even those temperatures are on the warm side for San Francisco.
Oh well, I guess it’s going to be a long, hot summer. Fingers crossed that we won’t have any power outages this coming week.
John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He invites us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his.
Do you remember Peter Frampton, whose 1976 live double album, Framptom Comes Alive, was a smash best seller?
Courtesy picclick.com
On this same date, June 30th, in 2013 my wife and I went to Indian Lake in Webster, Massachusetts to see Peter Frampton live in concert. His hair was a lot shorter than it was in 1976, but seriously, folks, who’s isn’t? His voice, however, sounded just as it did almost fifty years ago.
Here are a few more photos, pretty impressive, I think, given the 2x zoom lens on my iPhone 5.
And here was where he called up former member of the Eagles, Don Felder, to the stage for some jamming. Fantastic!
As usual, all photos used on this blog have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.
I responded to this daily prompt when WordPress first asked it last July 3rd, but this is an important topic in my opinion. I’ll get to my bottom line first, so if you read my response last year you won’t have to read it again.
The best teachers don’t teach children what to think — or what not to think. The best teachers teach children how to think.
From last year’s response:
First let me say that I’ve never been a teacher and the only experience I have with what makes a teacher great is from having been a student of some excellent teachers and a few horrid teachers. That said, I have an opinion about teaching, especially in these divided times with respect to not only how teachers should teach, but what they should teach.
In my opinion, a great teacher exposes his or her students to information and them asks them what they think and why.
A bad teacher limits the information he or she exposes to his or her students based upon religious or ideological factors and tells them what to think.
Again, I’m expressing my personal opinion. If your opinion is different, that’s fine. But if you choose to express your disagreement in a comment, please do so respectfully.
For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, Jim Adams has asked us to find a song that features a keyboard. This is speculation on my part, but aside from guitars and drums, I’d guess that pianos and electronic keyboards are the most prominent instruments in classic and progressive rock music. I decided to focus my keyboard search on electronic keyboards rather than pianos. And that led me to Keith Emerson and the Moog synthesizer (pictured below).
The Moog synthesizer is a modular synthesizer invented by the American engineer Robert Moog in 1964. It was the first commercial synthesizer and established the analog synthesizer concept. Moog’s synthesizer was the first that could be played in real time via a keyboard, making it attractive to musicians.
In the late 1960s, it was adopted by rock and pop acts including the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. At its height of popularity, it was a staple of 1970s progressive rock, used by acts including Yes, Tangerine Dream, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
The Emerson, Lake & Palmer song, “Lucky Man,” is probably the group’s best known song. Released as a single in 1970, the song contains one of rock music’s earliest instances of a Moog synthesizer solo. “Lucky Man” reached the top 20 in the Netherlands. The song also charted in the United States and Canada. The single was re-released in 1973 and charted again in the U.S. and Canada.
“Lucky Man” was written by Greg Lake and was the first song he wrote when he was 12. The song was used on Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s debut album when they needed one more song. Lake played the version he had written from childhood, but the rest of the band did not like it, feeling it would not fit with the other album tracks. Lake then worked on it in the studio with Carl Palmer. Lake added numerous overdubs of bass, triple-tracked acoustic guitars, electric guitar, and harmony vocals until it “sounded like a record.” This version of the song — with a second electric guitar solo in place of where Emerson would later overdub his Moog solo — is featured on the album.
“Lucky Man” is an acoustic ballad. The lyrics tell the story of a man who had everything, went to war, and died. A Moog synthesizer solo, recorded in one take, is performed by Keith Emerson at the end of song. Emerson had just recently gotten the device, and only decided to play on this song after hearing the track Lake and Palmer came up with and realizing it was a legitimate song.
Interesting factoid: we have SiriusXM’s Classic Rock channel 26 streaming on our TV for “background” music most of the day when we’re not actually watching a show or movie on TV. Whenever the song “Lucky Man” comes on, as soon as Keith Emerson’s Moog solo comes on, our dog starts howling like a wolf does at a full moon.
Here are the lyrics to “Lucky Man.”
He had white horses And ladies by the score All dressed in satin And waiting by the door
Ooh, what a lucky man he was Ooh, what a lucky man he was
White lace and feathers They made up his bed A gold covered mattress On which he was laid
Ooh, what a lucky man he was Ooh, what a lucky man he was
He went to fight wars For his country and his king Of his honor and his glory The people would sing
Ooh, what a lucky man he was Ooh, what a lucky man he was
A bullet had found him His blood ran as he cried No money could save him So he laid down and he died
Ooh, what a lucky man he was Ooh, what a lucky man he was
This, That, and the Other 