Although more popular today than in the past, the tempo can change within a score a few times.
The Little Nash Rambler is a song where the tempo keeps speeding up each verse.
And then there is syncopation which although may seem like the same beat on the main score, the secondary part of the score is at different tempo's also. An example of that is Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The main score is the same tempo 4/4, but the secondary score is 8/4 and with 6/4 syncopation. That's what gives most Boogie Woogie tunes that rolling and lurching feeling when you listen to them. You can tap your toe to the 4/4 time, while rocking your body to a different beat that keeps changing.
But you are right, almost all musicians today only play by ear. Most of them can't read music, much less write it.
About ten years ago I joined a taxonomy website for plants. If you could answer the questions, it would lead you to the exact parent plant. But to do so, you had to know the terms used for each thing too, and if you didn't, you wouldn't get off the first page. Question one was always, monocot or dicot. Although if you were not sure, you could jump to the next question, radial or axial. And although it was possible to skip that question, the next window would be more questions that could have been narrowed down if you knew the first two. You couldn't skip that window because it would have to give you the entire database, hi hi. If I recall it was sponsored by some college, but I don't remember which one anymore. Been years since I've messed with raising plants now.
We probably have close to 500 adventure type games we've bought over the years.
But now the frau gets them on-line and they take care of making sure they will play on your Windows computer system.
A few of them you play on-line because what they need to work is no longer in computers anymore. Same game, just runs slower playing it on their servers, and of course, sometimes has glitches, which reminds me of the days of serious net lag.
Short time tracking with a push.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
Way back when I was a kid and listening to the radio was THE form of entertainment, we listened to Polish music broadcasts every Sunday. There was a favorite band that mom and dad liked to Polka to and even went to see this guy a time or two when he was in Chicago. It all sounded pretty good until I started with music lessons in grammar school. I was learning to play the clarinet. At some point that Sunday music just didn't sound right anymore. I couldn't figure out why for the longest time. Then we acquired a mechanical metronome to help me along with my studies. Voila! Those polkas were way off beat, and it changed during the course of the song. It was amazing to learn first hand that these guys were not following the beat properly. LOL
Some of the early day R&R music I listened to had problems too, similar to the polka band. But after a while those music studios became very sophisticated. This was necessary when multi track recording came into vogue because everybody had to be in sync. The only way to do that was for everyone to be playing at the same beat rate. My recent experiences have been with country music. There too it's obvious when it's studio music vs impromptu. I'm familiar with both the songs you mention and love boogy woogy by the way. There are a couple country songs that change tempo for effect, You Picked a Fine Time To Leave Me Lucile is one of them, but not the popular Kenny Rogers version. His version is constant. There is one song I don't recall the name of that plays like a galloping horse. It's an interesting rhythm and that's the one I tried to sync with the metronome. Apparently it has syncopation that I can't figure out. LOL
Some of the games I play also have music. Most of the time it's for effect, but a few incorporate it into the play. There too I thought I was listening to music until I determined there is no beat at all. In many cases it sounds melodic, but there is no traceable rhythm. I would not expect gaming programmers to know anything about music, but I was quite disillusioned when I discovered Little Walley's Polka Band didn't know much either.
Some of the early day R&R music I listened to had problems too, similar to the polka band. But after a while those music studios became very sophisticated. This was necessary when multi track recording came into vogue because everybody had to be in sync. The only way to do that was for everyone to be playing at the same beat rate. My recent experiences have been with country music. There too it's obvious when it's studio music vs impromptu. I'm familiar with both the songs you mention and love boogy woogy by the way. There are a couple country songs that change tempo for effect, You Picked a Fine Time To Leave Me Lucile is one of them, but not the popular Kenny Rogers version. His version is constant. There is one song I don't recall the name of that plays like a galloping horse. It's an interesting rhythm and that's the one I tried to sync with the metronome. Apparently it has syncopation that I can't figure out. LOL
Some of the games I play also have music. Most of the time it's for effect, but a few incorporate it into the play. There too I thought I was listening to music until I determined there is no beat at all. In many cases it sounds melodic, but there is no traceable rhythm. I would not expect gaming programmers to know anything about music, but I was quite disillusioned when I discovered Little Walley's Polka Band didn't know much either.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
Our whole family were musicians as far back as when they first came to America.
My grandfather had a big band, as did my dad an three of his brothers, but slightly smaller than the one grandfather had.
But it depended on where and for whom they were playing also. Grandpa's orchestra boasted over 50 members, but only about 35 played the larger dance halls of the era. Weddings he only had around 20 playing.
Dad and his brothers all usually only had about 10 to 12 playing the various gigs.
Even so, when dad bought a music score, it was normally for 25 positions.
When you look at each individual score, although they are all to the same 4/4 beat, in order for them to all play together. Each instrument may be written with rests to produce notes that were not in time with the other players. This was done on purpose to add harmony, and in some cases produce a wave affect.
When all instruments play on the same beat, it feels like you are getting hit with a sledgehammer.
So the instruments start to play sequentially, but with only 16th/s intervals.
Any more than that and they sound like they started late, which could then make the whole orchestra sound out of tune.
Now sometimes you do want all the instruments to hit at the exact same time to give the forced beat the song calls for. This is true for almost all marching bands!
A Marching Song, could sound like a Romance Ballad if they used the 16th/s rest consecutively.
One thing that is really hilarious is when a Bb instrument tries playing a score in Eb during a song written in F#, hi hi.
You have to remember, each instrument is in a Key all it's own. So in order for different instruments to play together, each of their scores are adjusted for their instrument to the Key the song is written in.
This is why a Band Leader needs so many different scores of the same song, each written for the key of the instruments in the band or orchestra.
After TV became popular, and many of the larger dance halls closed down, the big bands more or less vanished. They were too big for smaller clubs, and most of the gigs were for small parties or weddings.
This is where my dad lucked out in a way. He played the Saxophone, while Uncle Clarence played a Trumpet, and Uncle Bob a Trombone. Both the trumpet and trombone were too loud for small venues. Uncle Bob also played piano, so remained in dads orchestra up until they all finally quit playing gigs at all.
But back in my dads era, when he was in his 20s to 40s, dance halls and bands were everywhere.
Well before that too naturally.
I was around the age of 14 when my dad shut down his orchestra. Uncle Clarence had shut his down about 4 years prior to that. Even so, Dad and Uncle Bob would still play at some places as a guest of other musicians orchestras.
The word Band has been so misused over the years, getting really bad around the 1950's and ever since, it was one of my dad's pet peeves. Pretty hard to hire a Band when all the Orchestra's bill themselves as a Band, and you didn't want an Orchestra for an event, you wanted a Band. To help overcome this confusion created by misusing he word Band, real Bands began using the term Brass Band. Technically, there are NO String Instruments in a Band!
So when you Hire a Band, and three guitar players and a drummer show up, and not a single band instrument among the lot of them, dad would actually give them a bunch of guff about it, hi hi.
Not that it has anything to do with music. He taught a few snow plow folks a lesson or two.
If they advertised Snow Removal, and only came and piled it up in a pile, he wouldn't pay them until they came and removed it. Funny thing, most of them did not have a bucket truck or a dump truck to haul it away.
He would eventually give in and pay them, but at the normal snow plowing rate, not at a snow removal rate.
One fellow with a larger company, something like 8 plow trucks said he would sue.
Dad laughed and said go ahead, or you can take what we pay for plowing services.
He didn't take what dad offered. I suppose the guys attorney told him, if he advertised Snow Removal, and the Snow was still on our property, then he did not comply with his own advertisement.
Our parking lot was not all that huge, and we did have our own tractors with a plow and could scoop the snow into a corner. Or we could scoop it up and haul it in back and dump it using a loader and dump truck too.
But we had so many folks coming in wanting to plow our parking lots for us, dad would sometimes take them up on it.
Even showed them where to push the snow to so it was out of the way.
But if they advertised Snow Removal, he didn't tell them diddly squat, just REINFORCED their claim.
Yes, we will hire you to REMOVE the Snow!
He loved doing this too! hi hi.
My grandfather had a big band, as did my dad an three of his brothers, but slightly smaller than the one grandfather had.
But it depended on where and for whom they were playing also. Grandpa's orchestra boasted over 50 members, but only about 35 played the larger dance halls of the era. Weddings he only had around 20 playing.
Dad and his brothers all usually only had about 10 to 12 playing the various gigs.
Even so, when dad bought a music score, it was normally for 25 positions.
When you look at each individual score, although they are all to the same 4/4 beat, in order for them to all play together. Each instrument may be written with rests to produce notes that were not in time with the other players. This was done on purpose to add harmony, and in some cases produce a wave affect.
When all instruments play on the same beat, it feels like you are getting hit with a sledgehammer.
So the instruments start to play sequentially, but with only 16th/s intervals.
Any more than that and they sound like they started late, which could then make the whole orchestra sound out of tune.
Now sometimes you do want all the instruments to hit at the exact same time to give the forced beat the song calls for. This is true for almost all marching bands!
A Marching Song, could sound like a Romance Ballad if they used the 16th/s rest consecutively.
One thing that is really hilarious is when a Bb instrument tries playing a score in Eb during a song written in F#, hi hi.
You have to remember, each instrument is in a Key all it's own. So in order for different instruments to play together, each of their scores are adjusted for their instrument to the Key the song is written in.
This is why a Band Leader needs so many different scores of the same song, each written for the key of the instruments in the band or orchestra.
After TV became popular, and many of the larger dance halls closed down, the big bands more or less vanished. They were too big for smaller clubs, and most of the gigs were for small parties or weddings.
This is where my dad lucked out in a way. He played the Saxophone, while Uncle Clarence played a Trumpet, and Uncle Bob a Trombone. Both the trumpet and trombone were too loud for small venues. Uncle Bob also played piano, so remained in dads orchestra up until they all finally quit playing gigs at all.
But back in my dads era, when he was in his 20s to 40s, dance halls and bands were everywhere.
Well before that too naturally.
I was around the age of 14 when my dad shut down his orchestra. Uncle Clarence had shut his down about 4 years prior to that. Even so, Dad and Uncle Bob would still play at some places as a guest of other musicians orchestras.
The word Band has been so misused over the years, getting really bad around the 1950's and ever since, it was one of my dad's pet peeves. Pretty hard to hire a Band when all the Orchestra's bill themselves as a Band, and you didn't want an Orchestra for an event, you wanted a Band. To help overcome this confusion created by misusing he word Band, real Bands began using the term Brass Band. Technically, there are NO String Instruments in a Band!
So when you Hire a Band, and three guitar players and a drummer show up, and not a single band instrument among the lot of them, dad would actually give them a bunch of guff about it, hi hi.
Not that it has anything to do with music. He taught a few snow plow folks a lesson or two.
If they advertised Snow Removal, and only came and piled it up in a pile, he wouldn't pay them until they came and removed it. Funny thing, most of them did not have a bucket truck or a dump truck to haul it away.
He would eventually give in and pay them, but at the normal snow plowing rate, not at a snow removal rate.
One fellow with a larger company, something like 8 plow trucks said he would sue.
Dad laughed and said go ahead, or you can take what we pay for plowing services.
He didn't take what dad offered. I suppose the guys attorney told him, if he advertised Snow Removal, and the Snow was still on our property, then he did not comply with his own advertisement.
Our parking lot was not all that huge, and we did have our own tractors with a plow and could scoop the snow into a corner. Or we could scoop it up and haul it in back and dump it using a loader and dump truck too.
But we had so many folks coming in wanting to plow our parking lots for us, dad would sometimes take them up on it.
Even showed them where to push the snow to so it was out of the way.
But if they advertised Snow Removal, he didn't tell them diddly squat, just REINFORCED their claim.
Yes, we will hire you to REMOVE the Snow!
He loved doing this too! hi hi.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
Sometimes I think you are too strict with your interpretations of the English language. I now understand from where you acquired that trait. LOL There certainly are definitions for all the words in our language and I agree fully that many of those words are misused. I also know that the language is fluid. Unless you are dealing with something that demands precision, such as science, the definition of a word can change with popular usage. We have talked a few times about "bandwidth" as an example of a word being misused. You are correct, but everybody I know understands the intended meaning better than the defined meaning.
I like the snow removal ploy your dad used to get bargain rates. While living in Chicago proper there was little need for plowing or removing snow from the streets. That was all done by the city. The only time I recall there being a concerted effort to remove the snow was the great snow storm of '67 where in excess of 24 inches fell overnight. In a city like Chicago that is enough to close it down. Everything was at a standstill for a few days. They could not even get the plows out because there was no place to put the snow. The piles of it were in excess of 10 feet in many places and there was no way to put more on top of that. Earth moving trucks were eventually called in from places like Utah and Wyoming so that they could fill up the dump trucks and actually haul the white stuff away. Some of those trucks had wheels taller than the car I was driving back then. They were amazingly huge.
I was born too late for the Big Band Era, but I heard a lot about it. Chicago had the Aragon Ballroom which was known nationally and all the big bands played there at one time or another. I was to that ballroom only once and it wasn't for dancing, but I can't recall exactly why. I have a feeling it was converted to an ice skating rink or something and that is how I got to see the famous ballroom. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when they shut it down, but it didn't mean much to me. I knew about Benny Goodman, but couldn't say what his band was noted for.
When I was in grammar school learning the clarinet the school had an orchestra. There must have been 40 or 50 kids in that group and I was playing 3rd B-flat music. The score for 2nd and 1st was the same except they played higher notes. My part was at the lower octaves. It was kind of neat to hear all the reeds sync together but playing different notes. The conductor, and music teacher, must have been a genius. At the very least he had a great ear for music. We would play a piece and then he would stop the music and walk over to me, or the guy next to me, or somebody, and tune their instrument to harmonize with the rest of the group. It was a matter of elongating one of the sections of the 5 piece clarinet I had. How he picked out a single instrument was beyond me. It all sounded great to me, but the I was in the middle of it. When I got to high school all they had was a marching band. I wasn't interested in that so I quit my studies.
I like the snow removal ploy your dad used to get bargain rates. While living in Chicago proper there was little need for plowing or removing snow from the streets. That was all done by the city. The only time I recall there being a concerted effort to remove the snow was the great snow storm of '67 where in excess of 24 inches fell overnight. In a city like Chicago that is enough to close it down. Everything was at a standstill for a few days. They could not even get the plows out because there was no place to put the snow. The piles of it were in excess of 10 feet in many places and there was no way to put more on top of that. Earth moving trucks were eventually called in from places like Utah and Wyoming so that they could fill up the dump trucks and actually haul the white stuff away. Some of those trucks had wheels taller than the car I was driving back then. They were amazingly huge.
I was born too late for the Big Band Era, but I heard a lot about it. Chicago had the Aragon Ballroom which was known nationally and all the big bands played there at one time or another. I was to that ballroom only once and it wasn't for dancing, but I can't recall exactly why. I have a feeling it was converted to an ice skating rink or something and that is how I got to see the famous ballroom. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when they shut it down, but it didn't mean much to me. I knew about Benny Goodman, but couldn't say what his band was noted for.
When I was in grammar school learning the clarinet the school had an orchestra. There must have been 40 or 50 kids in that group and I was playing 3rd B-flat music. The score for 2nd and 1st was the same except they played higher notes. My part was at the lower octaves. It was kind of neat to hear all the reeds sync together but playing different notes. The conductor, and music teacher, must have been a genius. At the very least he had a great ear for music. We would play a piece and then he would stop the music and walk over to me, or the guy next to me, or somebody, and tune their instrument to harmonize with the rest of the group. It was a matter of elongating one of the sections of the 5 piece clarinet I had. How he picked out a single instrument was beyond me. It all sounded great to me, but the I was in the middle of it. When I got to high school all they had was a marching band. I wasn't interested in that so I quit my studies.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
I received a letter once from a Vietnamese boy who used a word translator to convert his letter to English for me.
He sent me two copies, the one the translator made, and a second one where he looked up each of the words himself.
It was actually hilarious to read too.
Think of all the words that sound the same, but have different meanings and spellings, and/or words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, and then use them in the wrong places, hi hi.
I used to love getting a letter from my great-grandma. Although it was written in English, it used German grammar structure. Which basically means, they start off with a Noun and trip over the Verb at the end, hi hi.
Plus a lot of the letters she used, she would add how they are written in German with the accent marks.
Now I'm no cracker-jack in English myself. I couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it.
But working as a writer, I learned a lot of the things publishers don't allow. All those things they call weasel words.
For the most part we are not allowed to use LY words, except perhaps on the word Badly or Poorly, which is proper.
The one thing I miss most when writing or editing is having access to the editing programs on the publishers computers.
Spell-Check never finds words spelled right but used in the wrong way, such as to when too should have been used.
I have a lifetime subscription to a third party grammar checker that cost dearly, but it is not as neat as the one the publisher had, because it will flag every word and ask if I used it properly. At least their newest version keeps track of what they already asked you about, unless you completely clear the edit and start over with a fresh copy.
When we had some really huge snows in St. Louis County, they actually used earth graders to plow up the snow which went into the grader. I guess that would be earth mover and not earth grader which is just a plow in the center. These are like a scraping dump truck towed behind a motor that is integral with the machine. Right behind them was a normal snow plow and salt truck. I remember on coming down Clayton Road one year and it would turn off into parking lots to empty the load, and bobcats would load it onto dump trucks.
The city of Rock Hill had an interesting snow removal plow, worked almost like a snow blower, except the spiral blade didn't spin fast, nice and slow like an auger, and pushed the snow up a tube and back into a trailer it was pulling. It had a dump truck bed, but that had salt and a spreader in it. So once he passed, the snow was gone and salt put down. I actually thought that was the best method yet, except for the fact they had to go empty the trailer often. However, it didn't actually work that way either. Another truck would back up and hitch to the trailer, then it would get unhitched from the plow truck, and another truck would back up to it and hook up an empty trailer. Then the plow would start on it's way again.
I was over in Nashville, Illinois around 1972 and again in 1974, and both times it was like rolling back the hands of time 30 years. They still had a couple of big band dance halls there which were packed every weekend.
I love Big Band music, always have!
Kirkwood High School and Music Class. It was basically an Orchestra as far as the school part went.
I was also on the Varsity Marching Band. Being in the Band was a REQUIREMENT to get into the Symphonic Orchestra that played several places, even down at the Fox Theater a couple of times. I played a Trumpet in the Band, and more often than not, a French Horn in the Orchestra, a Cornet a couple of times, and a small Tuba once, which was actually a punishment, hi hi. I hated the Marching Band because we had to play in the Winter, Outside, during half-time at the Footsball Games. I never did like Footsball to start with, and hated being outside marching in the freezing cold. Nothing like putting frozen metal up to your lips and getting your tongue stuck inside the mouthpiece, hi hi.
At least I was good at the choreography after being in Little Theater.
I played the Saxophone in grade skewl, Trumpet in high school, lead guitar out of school in a small teen town band, and the Organ when I was doing nightclub work. I had a Lowrey HR98 K Theater Organ in my home. A little big to take to gigs, but I did so anyhow. Just because you can play one Organ, doesn't mean you can play another one very well. Especially one like a Hammond that uses drawbars instead of stops. And air powered organs have a delay which can really mess you up. So did the calliope I played on the USS Admiral, but the delay was not noticeable it was so short, and the music played on it was fairly slow, even when it was a fast tune, but you couldn't play a really fast tune because the instrument was slow to respond, and hitting too many keys at once would cause it to fade out too, hi hi.
I thought it would be cool when I was asked to play on the Admiral. Then I learned what a truly miserable job it really was. Being outside and exposed to the elements and the sun, all the seals dried out fast. This meant the HOT STEAM leaked out to burn your fingers, and hot water would drip down on your lap. So you had to play with hot and heavy rubber apron on your lap and thick rubber gloves on your hands. Trying to play that way is like watching a cat try to walk with a cigarette wrapper on each paw, hi hi. I thought the exposure would do me some good gig wise, but that never happened.
He sent me two copies, the one the translator made, and a second one where he looked up each of the words himself.
It was actually hilarious to read too.
Think of all the words that sound the same, but have different meanings and spellings, and/or words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, and then use them in the wrong places, hi hi.
I used to love getting a letter from my great-grandma. Although it was written in English, it used German grammar structure. Which basically means, they start off with a Noun and trip over the Verb at the end, hi hi.
Plus a lot of the letters she used, she would add how they are written in German with the accent marks.
Now I'm no cracker-jack in English myself. I couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it.
But working as a writer, I learned a lot of the things publishers don't allow. All those things they call weasel words.
For the most part we are not allowed to use LY words, except perhaps on the word Badly or Poorly, which is proper.
The one thing I miss most when writing or editing is having access to the editing programs on the publishers computers.
Spell-Check never finds words spelled right but used in the wrong way, such as to when too should have been used.
I have a lifetime subscription to a third party grammar checker that cost dearly, but it is not as neat as the one the publisher had, because it will flag every word and ask if I used it properly. At least their newest version keeps track of what they already asked you about, unless you completely clear the edit and start over with a fresh copy.
When we had some really huge snows in St. Louis County, they actually used earth graders to plow up the snow which went into the grader. I guess that would be earth mover and not earth grader which is just a plow in the center. These are like a scraping dump truck towed behind a motor that is integral with the machine. Right behind them was a normal snow plow and salt truck. I remember on coming down Clayton Road one year and it would turn off into parking lots to empty the load, and bobcats would load it onto dump trucks.
The city of Rock Hill had an interesting snow removal plow, worked almost like a snow blower, except the spiral blade didn't spin fast, nice and slow like an auger, and pushed the snow up a tube and back into a trailer it was pulling. It had a dump truck bed, but that had salt and a spreader in it. So once he passed, the snow was gone and salt put down. I actually thought that was the best method yet, except for the fact they had to go empty the trailer often. However, it didn't actually work that way either. Another truck would back up and hitch to the trailer, then it would get unhitched from the plow truck, and another truck would back up to it and hook up an empty trailer. Then the plow would start on it's way again.
I was over in Nashville, Illinois around 1972 and again in 1974, and both times it was like rolling back the hands of time 30 years. They still had a couple of big band dance halls there which were packed every weekend.
I love Big Band music, always have!
Kirkwood High School and Music Class. It was basically an Orchestra as far as the school part went.
I was also on the Varsity Marching Band. Being in the Band was a REQUIREMENT to get into the Symphonic Orchestra that played several places, even down at the Fox Theater a couple of times. I played a Trumpet in the Band, and more often than not, a French Horn in the Orchestra, a Cornet a couple of times, and a small Tuba once, which was actually a punishment, hi hi. I hated the Marching Band because we had to play in the Winter, Outside, during half-time at the Footsball Games. I never did like Footsball to start with, and hated being outside marching in the freezing cold. Nothing like putting frozen metal up to your lips and getting your tongue stuck inside the mouthpiece, hi hi.
At least I was good at the choreography after being in Little Theater.
I played the Saxophone in grade skewl, Trumpet in high school, lead guitar out of school in a small teen town band, and the Organ when I was doing nightclub work. I had a Lowrey HR98 K Theater Organ in my home. A little big to take to gigs, but I did so anyhow. Just because you can play one Organ, doesn't mean you can play another one very well. Especially one like a Hammond that uses drawbars instead of stops. And air powered organs have a delay which can really mess you up. So did the calliope I played on the USS Admiral, but the delay was not noticeable it was so short, and the music played on it was fairly slow, even when it was a fast tune, but you couldn't play a really fast tune because the instrument was slow to respond, and hitting too many keys at once would cause it to fade out too, hi hi.
I thought it would be cool when I was asked to play on the Admiral. Then I learned what a truly miserable job it really was. Being outside and exposed to the elements and the sun, all the seals dried out fast. This meant the HOT STEAM leaked out to burn your fingers, and hot water would drip down on your lap. So you had to play with hot and heavy rubber apron on your lap and thick rubber gloves on your hands. Trying to play that way is like watching a cat try to walk with a cigarette wrapper on each paw, hi hi. I thought the exposure would do me some good gig wise, but that never happened.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
The Hammond Pipe Organ is one of my favorite memories from my teen years. I was not a social butterfly because the high school I attended was not coed. Never went to those school sock hops where they imported females from the all girl HS down the street. My main social entertainment was roller skating at The Hub Roller Rink. It took me quite a while to learn how to dance on skates, and even then I was pretty miserable. The problem was that the guys were expected to skate backwards and pull their partner along. Well, eventually I mastered that technique and met a girlfriend of my future wife that way. She invited me to a party where my yet unmet wife-to-be would attend, and the rest is history. That's nice but the big draw to The Hub was the organ and the organist who was popular in his day and even made a few vinyl records of his music. This organ literally shook the skating floor at times. The bank of pipes were mounted above the rink's floor in a kind of balcony arrangement. Around the perimeter of this platform were various carved wooden figures playing various instruments. They would become animated as the organ mimicked their sound. I was totally immersed the that whole skating scene. The gals I danced with were just incidental. LOL
I studied German when I attended the University of Illinois. It was a major reason why I never completed my degree. LOL It took two tries to get a passing grade for German 101. The grammar made sense to me, but when I learned the vocabulary I never learned which article to attach to the noun; der, die, or das. That was a critical oversight on my part because the entire language is based on the masculine, feminine, and neuter gender of the words. That's an unknown concept in English. By the time I caught up with the article memorization I was way behind on the rest of the language. I could speak it very well and understood most of it. I just couldn't pass any of the grammar tests.
A friend of my lives in the Czech Republic and we write to each other from time to time. She is an author and has published a few books in Czech which means I never could read any of her works. She claims she can speak about six different languages and English is her second language. Well, as you noted with your German relatives, some of the letters I get are quite humorous. One interesting thing came to light while corresponding with this lady. I have a great sense of humor that is enhanced by sarcasm from time to time. I love using words with double meaning and innuendo is a secret weapon of mine. Well, this lady in the Czech Republic doesn't get any of it. She interprets what I write literally and often has to look things up in her own language. That totally destroys any humor I'm trying to convey. In some instances it caused some misunderstandings. When I write to her now I avoid anything complex but I don't want to appear as if I'm talking down to her. She is an intelligent and creative woman, but just doesn't get my American humor.
I studied German when I attended the University of Illinois. It was a major reason why I never completed my degree. LOL It took two tries to get a passing grade for German 101. The grammar made sense to me, but when I learned the vocabulary I never learned which article to attach to the noun; der, die, or das. That was a critical oversight on my part because the entire language is based on the masculine, feminine, and neuter gender of the words. That's an unknown concept in English. By the time I caught up with the article memorization I was way behind on the rest of the language. I could speak it very well and understood most of it. I just couldn't pass any of the grammar tests.
A friend of my lives in the Czech Republic and we write to each other from time to time. She is an author and has published a few books in Czech which means I never could read any of her works. She claims she can speak about six different languages and English is her second language. Well, as you noted with your German relatives, some of the letters I get are quite humorous. One interesting thing came to light while corresponding with this lady. I have a great sense of humor that is enhanced by sarcasm from time to time. I love using words with double meaning and innuendo is a secret weapon of mine. Well, this lady in the Czech Republic doesn't get any of it. She interprets what I write literally and often has to look things up in her own language. That totally destroys any humor I'm trying to convey. In some instances it caused some misunderstandings. When I write to her now I avoid anything complex but I don't want to appear as if I'm talking down to her. She is an intelligent and creative woman, but just doesn't get my American humor.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
While I had my organ at home, it was connected to a few other devices and sound boxes. One the kids got a kick out of was a monkey holding a pair of cymbal. This bear was originally a telephone ringer, and was named The No-Bell Bear. The circuit inside that converted the 90 volt ringer voltage down to 12 volts for the solenoid burned out and it laid in my junk box for years. Then when I bought a sound box that had a Base Drum and Iron chimes in it, I didn't like the sound of those chimes so removed them and put the monkey in it's place. Over the years I had added things like a slide whistle, siren, and several other noisemaker type toys to it. Although my organ was not a pipe organ, I did have a small bank of 12 pipes and the blower to power them. Took me over a month to get all 12 of those pipes in tune with their corresponding keys on the organ. My organ also had a mechanical tremolo, which was a speaker with a spinning cylinder around it with a hole cut in the side of the cylinder. The motor to drive it would burn out about once every 3 to 5 years, no actually the motor didn't burn out first, the front bearings would get sloppy first and then it would slow down and finally the motor would burn out. The echo was produced by an enclosed set of springs that ran the entire width of the organ inside the back. The bottom of the housing for them was low enough, if I stuck my toe real far into the pedals, I could tap the box which made a horrendous sound. But I found if I did it with one of three bass notes being played, it sounded like a thunder crash, which I made use of a few times, hi hi.
Almost forgot to mention I had a light in each of the side instrument boxes so when I activated one of the instruments, the light would come on for 2 or 3 seconds to draw attention mainly to the monkey which moved and the Bass drum which did not have an animal or figurine associated with until I added a monkey. Wait the No-Bell Bear was a bear not a monkey, hi hi. Old age is stealing my memory, hi hi.
I took French because the school I was going to wouldn't let me take German, said that was my families native tongue.
It too had masculine, feminine and neuter genders for almost every noun.
I went to parochial schools up through my freshman year, then as a sophomore I started in public schools. BIG difference between how they both operated back then. In grade school I had the Sisters of the Most Vicious Blood, hi hi.
My grandfather on my dad's side of the family, had more phrases that were a play on words than Carter's has pills.
Although my parents spoke perfect English, and my dad was a real stickler about it too.
I found English hard to learn because nearly every one of our employees were German, and they spoke some strange language you couldn't call English or German. When they said a sentence, there would be a few English words, a few German words, and whole lot of words they made up as a combination of the two. They all understood each other, but any new employee was often just as lost as I was trying to understand them. But the worst part was, I picked up on many of the words, and the order in which they used them in a sentence, and it really blew it for me in English class. Although I knew and could spell very well, I just never could get a grasp on English grammar. And then being around grandpa who's every sentence has some hidden meaning by using either the wrong word or some slang.
And of course, being a kid, we picked up on those that were intended to be vulgar but weren't, hi hi.
For example: She wouldn't for a Russian, but would for a Fin. Or the way grandpa would say it, She Shant for a Ruskie, but went down for a Fin. One of his favorites. Or if he wanted someone to hand him a wooden peg or dowel he would say, Hey Joe, you got a Bung for a Bung Hole.
Speaking of which. Our oldest barns had no nails in them. Nearly every place where one would drive a nail, they drilled a hole and drove a (dig this) square peg into a round hole. Doing so would shave off the corners of course, but that is what held our barns together. Grandpa always said pegs were better than nails because they don't rust or come loose. Also, pegs were kept hot before use, and of a softer wood. This way they swelled up first from cooling down, and secondly from the humidity in the air. At least I learned that much from him about our oldest barns, hi hi.
Almost forgot to mention I had a light in each of the side instrument boxes so when I activated one of the instruments, the light would come on for 2 or 3 seconds to draw attention mainly to the monkey which moved and the Bass drum which did not have an animal or figurine associated with until I added a monkey. Wait the No-Bell Bear was a bear not a monkey, hi hi. Old age is stealing my memory, hi hi.
I took French because the school I was going to wouldn't let me take German, said that was my families native tongue.
It too had masculine, feminine and neuter genders for almost every noun.
I went to parochial schools up through my freshman year, then as a sophomore I started in public schools. BIG difference between how they both operated back then. In grade school I had the Sisters of the Most Vicious Blood, hi hi.
My grandfather on my dad's side of the family, had more phrases that were a play on words than Carter's has pills.
Although my parents spoke perfect English, and my dad was a real stickler about it too.
I found English hard to learn because nearly every one of our employees were German, and they spoke some strange language you couldn't call English or German. When they said a sentence, there would be a few English words, a few German words, and whole lot of words they made up as a combination of the two. They all understood each other, but any new employee was often just as lost as I was trying to understand them. But the worst part was, I picked up on many of the words, and the order in which they used them in a sentence, and it really blew it for me in English class. Although I knew and could spell very well, I just never could get a grasp on English grammar. And then being around grandpa who's every sentence has some hidden meaning by using either the wrong word or some slang.
And of course, being a kid, we picked up on those that were intended to be vulgar but weren't, hi hi.
For example: She wouldn't for a Russian, but would for a Fin. Or the way grandpa would say it, She Shant for a Ruskie, but went down for a Fin. One of his favorites. Or if he wanted someone to hand him a wooden peg or dowel he would say, Hey Joe, you got a Bung for a Bung Hole.
Speaking of which. Our oldest barns had no nails in them. Nearly every place where one would drive a nail, they drilled a hole and drove a (dig this) square peg into a round hole. Doing so would shave off the corners of course, but that is what held our barns together. Grandpa always said pegs were better than nails because they don't rust or come loose. Also, pegs were kept hot before use, and of a softer wood. This way they swelled up first from cooling down, and secondly from the humidity in the air. At least I learned that much from him about our oldest barns, hi hi.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
One of the favorite language games kids liked to play when I was a youngster was to speak in Pig Latin. If you never heard of it or used it all you need to know is that it's simply normal English words that have been altered. The initial consonant of the word would be moved to the end and then an accent added to that. Dennis would be ... ennisDay; forum would be orumfay. Once you get the knack of it you can speak it at normal speed, which is what most of my buddies could do. Not I, however. LOL I had to think hard about what I heard and do a mental translation which slowed down the whole process and made a conversation impossible. Most of my pals were fluent in Pig Latin.
About the strangest perversion of the English language I encountered was on a business trip I made to Puerto Rico. I was there two weeks and on the intervening weekend I took a trip to the British Virgin Islands. They had duty free shops there and I was looking for bargains to bring home to my sweetheart and the kids. A commuter plane took me from San Juan to the Virgin Island airport in about twenty minutes of flight time. This was the first time I flew in one of those small commercial planes and it was the flight of my lifetime. LOL But, that's not what I want to talk about now. The first surprise I ran into at the airport was the customs officer. I was warned to take a passport with me and I did but he more or less just flagged me through the gate. Still, it was my first experience with customs. The airport proper was small compared to O'Hare International and it wasn't very crowded. The natives, however, made me stop and stare for a moment. The natives of the Virgin Islands are ... black. They are not tan, brown, or chocolate. They are black as that infamous ace of spades. I had to wonder about that because the natives of Puerto Rico are brown skinned or tan. These islanders were a different breed of people altogether even though they lived a short distance from Puerto Rico.
My first mission was to get from the airport to the shopping district. A taxi was readily available for that purpose, and the driver was a native of the Virgin Islands. He too was extremely black and at first I didn't think he spoke English. I caught a familiar word or two in his utterances, but he was doing something like singing. It wasn't like rap music we know of today. This cabbie was speaking Calypso, which is a kind of melodic sounding form of English. There is such a thing as Calypso music, and I like that genre quite a bit. But, there is also a language by the same name. It's actually English but with numerous inflections of the voice that makes it unintelligible to the uninitiated. LOL The cabbie was very understanding and did his best to speak slowly and clearly just for me. We laughed together about it because obviously I was not the first visitor to run into this problem. Oddly enough, Pig Latin was more easily understood. LOL
About the strangest perversion of the English language I encountered was on a business trip I made to Puerto Rico. I was there two weeks and on the intervening weekend I took a trip to the British Virgin Islands. They had duty free shops there and I was looking for bargains to bring home to my sweetheart and the kids. A commuter plane took me from San Juan to the Virgin Island airport in about twenty minutes of flight time. This was the first time I flew in one of those small commercial planes and it was the flight of my lifetime. LOL But, that's not what I want to talk about now. The first surprise I ran into at the airport was the customs officer. I was warned to take a passport with me and I did but he more or less just flagged me through the gate. Still, it was my first experience with customs. The airport proper was small compared to O'Hare International and it wasn't very crowded. The natives, however, made me stop and stare for a moment. The natives of the Virgin Islands are ... black. They are not tan, brown, or chocolate. They are black as that infamous ace of spades. I had to wonder about that because the natives of Puerto Rico are brown skinned or tan. These islanders were a different breed of people altogether even though they lived a short distance from Puerto Rico.
My first mission was to get from the airport to the shopping district. A taxi was readily available for that purpose, and the driver was a native of the Virgin Islands. He too was extremely black and at first I didn't think he spoke English. I caught a familiar word or two in his utterances, but he was doing something like singing. It wasn't like rap music we know of today. This cabbie was speaking Calypso, which is a kind of melodic sounding form of English. There is such a thing as Calypso music, and I like that genre quite a bit. But, there is also a language by the same name. It's actually English but with numerous inflections of the voice that makes it unintelligible to the uninitiated. LOL The cabbie was very understanding and did his best to speak slowly and clearly just for me. We laughed together about it because obviously I was not the first visitor to run into this problem. Oddly enough, Pig Latin was more easily understood. LOL
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
Yeppers, I remember the Pig Latin phase. Some commercials even used it, like Fruit Loops became Ootfray Oopslay, hi hi.
I was on two mission trips to Africa. We crossed the ocean in a normal passenger aircraft. Then took a bus from the main airport out to a small airfield where we took these ancient twin engine planes to a dirt landing strip, where we got on some old stake trucks converted to buses and rode for a couple of hours down jungle paths to reach our first and temporary location. From there we were split up to go to the tribes camps, which was walking the entire way with all of our gear, and some pull along trunks with fairly large wheels. We did luck out and some native with a small motorcycle that looked like an old Indian motorcycle, came by and connected our trunks up behind it and pulled them along slowly so as not to upset any of them on the rutty trail.
The only place we had to go through customs was at the main airport when we first landed, and like you, we just held up our passport as we walked through the gate. It wasn't until our return trip home that they took them from us and put a stamp in them.
I've been to Nassau, the Bahama's, the Virgin Islands, and a few others, but was never to Puerto Rico.
I was to Andros Island for business a couple of times, getting a grower set up to raise plants for us.
Plus we got into a sideline business while there too. This is one place where they mine diatomacious earth.
It is used heavily in the swimming pool industry as a filter material, and we used it for a few other purposes in our fish factory and for roach control in rooftop greenhouses. But our goal was to package and sell most of it as swimming pool filter powder for about half the price of other distributors. The key to being able to get it shipped in cheaper and without the commodities import tax was to claim it was for use in horticultural operations. Then after it was here for a few months, over 90 days actually, we could repurpose the excess we had on hand and resell it. At least that is what it was supposed to take to keep it all legal anyhow. Unfortunately George overlooked a couple of other laws concerning imported raw materials used for something other than why they were imported. So we would still have the pay the commodities import tax in order to sell it as swimming pool filter powers.
I've already mentioned how crooked George and Stuart were previously, they are the ones that destroyed my business.
Well, George decided to still sell it, but as a horticultural insect control powder to avoid the tax. And he carefully had each bag marked with the name Diatomacious Earth, sieve grade 00, sterile, and in really small print, for horticultural use only, hi hi. Elsewhere on the label it showed the DE sieve grades for all uses, including as swimming pool filter powder which was also sieve grade 00 sterile, hi hi. He managed to get about 10 different swimming pool companies to carry it, and then ended up selling all we had in bulk to a public swimming pool maintenance company.
When I worked down in the Landa gas fields in Louisiana, they had a lot of Creole speaking folks. Never understood a single thing they said, even when they did speak English, hi hi. Didn't much matter because the places we did go had menu's we could just point at what we wanted. Technically, we were not supposed to leave the property, but we could go up along the main road to the restaurants up there. Nevertheless, we snuck over to New Orleans a couple of times without getting caught. Most of the time we flew down in the morning, and flew back home at night on the company jet. Long story, but we crashed once too when we had a new young pilot. Gotta say though, he handled the jet like a pro when we had a double flame out. Landed in a popcorn field while the crop was still young else we wouldn't have made it home safely. I thought for sure he was going to kill us all, because after the flame out, he did a nosedive straight toward the ground. He did say to hold on, he needed to build up enough speed so that he could glide into a landing. In my mind I'm thinking, yeah right, go faster you idiot, and we will end up hitting trees, electrical wires, or you name it. I'm looking out the window just knowing whatever we hit was going to kill us both. All I saw coming at us was trees, and nothing else, but he skimmed right over the trees which ran along a waterway and then dropped into the cornfield of which the corn was not as high yet as the belly of the plane. Even so, it was a smooth landing but a rough stop after we touched ground. Damp fields slow the plane down fast, so fast I thought we would tip over frontwards. But the pilot kept the front wheel off the ground as long as possible, but when it came down, we stuck like glue to the field. The farmer saw us and came out their lickety split in a pickup truck, so we didn't have to walk a mile to his farmhouse. The pilot got fired, but technically he should have. He ran that jet harder than any of the other older pilots that shuttled us back and forth.
I was on two mission trips to Africa. We crossed the ocean in a normal passenger aircraft. Then took a bus from the main airport out to a small airfield where we took these ancient twin engine planes to a dirt landing strip, where we got on some old stake trucks converted to buses and rode for a couple of hours down jungle paths to reach our first and temporary location. From there we were split up to go to the tribes camps, which was walking the entire way with all of our gear, and some pull along trunks with fairly large wheels. We did luck out and some native with a small motorcycle that looked like an old Indian motorcycle, came by and connected our trunks up behind it and pulled them along slowly so as not to upset any of them on the rutty trail.
The only place we had to go through customs was at the main airport when we first landed, and like you, we just held up our passport as we walked through the gate. It wasn't until our return trip home that they took them from us and put a stamp in them.
I've been to Nassau, the Bahama's, the Virgin Islands, and a few others, but was never to Puerto Rico.
I was to Andros Island for business a couple of times, getting a grower set up to raise plants for us.
Plus we got into a sideline business while there too. This is one place where they mine diatomacious earth.
It is used heavily in the swimming pool industry as a filter material, and we used it for a few other purposes in our fish factory and for roach control in rooftop greenhouses. But our goal was to package and sell most of it as swimming pool filter powder for about half the price of other distributors. The key to being able to get it shipped in cheaper and without the commodities import tax was to claim it was for use in horticultural operations. Then after it was here for a few months, over 90 days actually, we could repurpose the excess we had on hand and resell it. At least that is what it was supposed to take to keep it all legal anyhow. Unfortunately George overlooked a couple of other laws concerning imported raw materials used for something other than why they were imported. So we would still have the pay the commodities import tax in order to sell it as swimming pool filter powers.
I've already mentioned how crooked George and Stuart were previously, they are the ones that destroyed my business.
Well, George decided to still sell it, but as a horticultural insect control powder to avoid the tax. And he carefully had each bag marked with the name Diatomacious Earth, sieve grade 00, sterile, and in really small print, for horticultural use only, hi hi. Elsewhere on the label it showed the DE sieve grades for all uses, including as swimming pool filter powder which was also sieve grade 00 sterile, hi hi. He managed to get about 10 different swimming pool companies to carry it, and then ended up selling all we had in bulk to a public swimming pool maintenance company.
When I worked down in the Landa gas fields in Louisiana, they had a lot of Creole speaking folks. Never understood a single thing they said, even when they did speak English, hi hi. Didn't much matter because the places we did go had menu's we could just point at what we wanted. Technically, we were not supposed to leave the property, but we could go up along the main road to the restaurants up there. Nevertheless, we snuck over to New Orleans a couple of times without getting caught. Most of the time we flew down in the morning, and flew back home at night on the company jet. Long story, but we crashed once too when we had a new young pilot. Gotta say though, he handled the jet like a pro when we had a double flame out. Landed in a popcorn field while the crop was still young else we wouldn't have made it home safely. I thought for sure he was going to kill us all, because after the flame out, he did a nosedive straight toward the ground. He did say to hold on, he needed to build up enough speed so that he could glide into a landing. In my mind I'm thinking, yeah right, go faster you idiot, and we will end up hitting trees, electrical wires, or you name it. I'm looking out the window just knowing whatever we hit was going to kill us both. All I saw coming at us was trees, and nothing else, but he skimmed right over the trees which ran along a waterway and then dropped into the cornfield of which the corn was not as high yet as the belly of the plane. Even so, it was a smooth landing but a rough stop after we touched ground. Damp fields slow the plane down fast, so fast I thought we would tip over frontwards. But the pilot kept the front wheel off the ground as long as possible, but when it came down, we stuck like glue to the field. The farmer saw us and came out their lickety split in a pickup truck, so we didn't have to walk a mile to his farmhouse. The pilot got fired, but technically he should have. He ran that jet harder than any of the other older pilots that shuttled us back and forth.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
By the time cell phones were being invented the radio telephone manufacturing that was done in a Chicago suburb was being phased out. They were not discontinuing the product, but outsourcing it to other parts of the world. That's how I got to go to Puerto Rico. I worked on the line that made those radio telephones and was one of the few people left who had any technical knowledge that could be useful setting up new production. Puerto Rico offered Motorola one of those sweetheart deals wherein they would not tax on the plant for twenty years if Motorola agreed to have it managed by locals. That was a no-brainer decision. However, Motorola closed that plant in year 21 of its existence. 
The trip to Puerto Rico was paid for by the company but I knew there would be some time for myself to do touristy things, such as visit the Virgin Islands. My best buddy had a Nikon SLR camera that he was willing to let me use to document the trip to the tropics. I was into Kodachrome in those days and bought several rolls of 36 exposure film to take with. I was not allowed to photograph the factory but just about anything else of interest was fair game. It wasn't until I got to the Virgin Islands that it dawned on me that I must have taken more than 36 photos by then, but the camera still claimed there was film to be used. It hand a mechanical advance mechanism and when I pushed on it while I was paying attention, there wasn't any drag from the film it should have been pulling along. So, I opened the box and sure enough. The film leader was wrapped around the take up reel, but was too lose to be advancing. All the pictures prior to that moment were on a single frame. I felt like tossing the camera into the Caribbean, but remembered it wasn't my camera to toss. That's how most of my trip to Puerto Rico never got put on film.
When It came to me eventually buying a camera, I had a lot of respect for the Nikon brand, but I bought a Canon instead. It had a motor to advance the film and never failed to do so in all the years I owned it. I gave and camera to my daughter when I moved up to digital. She used it for about a year and then took it with her to a camera shop where she intended to replace it. The guy behind the counter was ecstatic to see that particular model Canon and offered her a good price for it. They stopped making that camera and parts were hard to come by. He wanted to buy it for it's parts. My daughter had second thoughts when she realized she had a collector's item.
Now that you mention it, many years ago I had a neighbor who moved to Chicago from Louisianan. He was basically French but could speak Creole. There was nobody up here he could converse with, but he retained his speaking skills for many years. Like you I couldn't understand a word he said when he talked to me in Creole. Unlike you my experiences with small commuter aircraft were not so dangerous. I felt as if I was inside a can of paint that was being shook by one of those machines they use to stir up the pigments, however, LOL
The trip to Puerto Rico was paid for by the company but I knew there would be some time for myself to do touristy things, such as visit the Virgin Islands. My best buddy had a Nikon SLR camera that he was willing to let me use to document the trip to the tropics. I was into Kodachrome in those days and bought several rolls of 36 exposure film to take with. I was not allowed to photograph the factory but just about anything else of interest was fair game. It wasn't until I got to the Virgin Islands that it dawned on me that I must have taken more than 36 photos by then, but the camera still claimed there was film to be used. It hand a mechanical advance mechanism and when I pushed on it while I was paying attention, there wasn't any drag from the film it should have been pulling along. So, I opened the box and sure enough. The film leader was wrapped around the take up reel, but was too lose to be advancing. All the pictures prior to that moment were on a single frame. I felt like tossing the camera into the Caribbean, but remembered it wasn't my camera to toss. That's how most of my trip to Puerto Rico never got put on film.
When It came to me eventually buying a camera, I had a lot of respect for the Nikon brand, but I bought a Canon instead. It had a motor to advance the film and never failed to do so in all the years I owned it. I gave and camera to my daughter when I moved up to digital. She used it for about a year and then took it with her to a camera shop where she intended to replace it. The guy behind the counter was ecstatic to see that particular model Canon and offered her a good price for it. They stopped making that camera and parts were hard to come by. He wanted to buy it for it's parts. My daughter had second thoughts when she realized she had a collector's item.
Now that you mention it, many years ago I had a neighbor who moved to Chicago from Louisianan. He was basically French but could speak Creole. There was nobody up here he could converse with, but he retained his speaking skills for many years. Like you I couldn't understand a word he said when he talked to me in Creole. Unlike you my experiences with small commuter aircraft were not so dangerous. I felt as if I was inside a can of paint that was being shook by one of those machines they use to stir up the pigments, however, LOL
Last edited by yogi on 25 May 2020, 17:55, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
After doing freelance photography for a few years, I basically burned out on taking photo's of much of anything.
I had a Yashica TL Electro X, with the add-on 100 foot film spool system.
It had a couple of features I really liked about it too.
Film is numbered, and although you don't see it until the film is developed.
Their number wheel was always dead on.
Even if you had to reroll and offload a good hunk of the photo's.
It was not like a 36 exposure roll where you had to use the whole roll and wind it back into the canister.
It had two canisters, sorta like the cartridge cameras. If you advanced the film about 5 frames, you could pull a lever that would slice the film off. Then you could roll it off into an offload container and take it for developing.
To be safe, I always did this in a pitch black room, although you were not supposed to have to.
That being said, I had the reroller pop of off me a couple of times, so lost about 5 or 6 pictures from a roll of about 75 pictures.
One sad note though. When I first got this camera, Not one of the pictures I took at my mom and dad's 25th wedding anniversary came out.
My mistake actually. The camera had a hot shoe for the flash, but it was timed for a flashbulb, and I forgot to plug in the little cord from the flash which would make it ignore the hot shoe and fire with the shutter instead of ahead of the shutter.
It was a good thing I found this out before I did a wedding I was paid to do the following weekend.
I used to use Kodachrome in the winter and Ectachrome in the summer for outdoor photo's, unless I needed the red hues produced by Kodachrome.
I also took a lot of shots of models for another friend, no they were fully dressed, hi hi.
I normally used Ectachrome-X for these shots, it was a higher grain film, cost a lot more too.
There was a brand of film, forget the name of it now, our local Schiller's photography sold for about 1/3 the price of Kodak branded films. I only used it in one of the automatic camera's I had that would keep snapping pictures as long as you held the button down. Didn't take long to go through a 100 foot roll of film that way, hi hi.
I had a few antique camera's too. The oldest was a 5x7 Speed Graflex. Yeah, the kind that used glass plates. However, it was retrofitted to use sheet film plates in plastic frames which were a lot cheaper and lighter. I didn't use it for very many photo's and ended up selling it with everything I had that went with it, including the flash-bar that used gunpowder, which I never used, not even once, hi hi. The going price at the time I sold it was like 885 bucks and some guy offered me 1100 bucks for it and everything I had that went with it. I couldn't pass that up, I was broke at the time.
I also had a couple of Kodak camera's with bellows. One was a portable one that belonged to my mom, and I still have the Brownie Hawkeye sitting here on the shelves in my office. I used to have the flash for it, but somehow it got lost in the move or possible damaged and tossed. I keep hoping to find it in a box I have not yet unpacked, but I doubt it will be in any of them, since I've already went through the boxes that had those types of things in it.
I had a VHS movie camera that used the full-size VHS cartridges. Loved that thing!
Had the camera store replace the pick-up sensor with an expensive low light one.
Indoor pictures came out looking like I used a light bar, while others who tried taking indoor pictures with the same model video camera, theirs came out nearly black, hi hi.
It also looked cool with the huge lens shade, shoulder rest, about like what news camera's looked like.
Now you see why when I did burn out, I burned out completely.
I used to take flying lessons. Most of them were in a Piper Colt or Piper TriPacer, fairly easy to fly, but they both dropped like a rock. I did get to fly a tail-dragger Piper Cub twice. They are supposed to be easier to fly, maybe, but not when you are used to a tricycle plane with a steep dihedral.
I've always been leery of the jets though, simply because the wings are so small.
I guess I was lucky having the young pilot since he knew how to land one after a flame out.
Although I have the time frames slightly off after 30 or more years. Here is an example:
The older pilots took a tad over an hour to fly from St.Louis to the Landa fields.
And about an hour and a half to fly back.
They would make a gradual climb up to flying altitude, and then start the decline.
The young pilot I had would climb to flying altitude fast, and run those engines right up to close to the red line.
We would get from St. Louis to the Landa fields in about 30 minutes.
He did the same thing coming home, but usually went higher than the older guys.
So we basically shot almost straight up, then cruised for only a few minutes before he started his decline.
Instead of an hour and a half to get back, we were back home in under an hour.
Except for the time we crashed, hi hi. But we were very close to home where we landed in an Illinois popcorn field.
I soloed twice and Lobmaster field, and once at Fenton airport. But was always too afraid to fly over to Lambert Field to take my test. I wanted to get in several more hours to get comfortable before I attempted flying in such a busy airspace.
Fenton cost about double of what Lobmaster charged, and due to other things going on in my life, I just basically ran out of money for renting planes. If I had my license, I could have then had a rider. But then too the landing fees at some other small airports was fairly high. I flew out to Viche airport near Rolla to visit some of my first wife's relatives before we were married, and those scobies charged me a landing fee, parking fee by the hour, and you had to refuel with them also before takeoff. So they really soaked you, unless you became a member of their small airport. I would have if I knew I would be going there often, but as I said, I was already low on funds, hi hi.
I also took hot air balloon rides and lessons. On the day of testing I was 25 bucks short to pay for the test. So never got that either. Probably a good thing too, it was a hobby I could never afford, hi hi.
I had a Yashica TL Electro X, with the add-on 100 foot film spool system.
It had a couple of features I really liked about it too.
Film is numbered, and although you don't see it until the film is developed.
Their number wheel was always dead on.
Even if you had to reroll and offload a good hunk of the photo's.
It was not like a 36 exposure roll where you had to use the whole roll and wind it back into the canister.
It had two canisters, sorta like the cartridge cameras. If you advanced the film about 5 frames, you could pull a lever that would slice the film off. Then you could roll it off into an offload container and take it for developing.
To be safe, I always did this in a pitch black room, although you were not supposed to have to.
That being said, I had the reroller pop of off me a couple of times, so lost about 5 or 6 pictures from a roll of about 75 pictures.
One sad note though. When I first got this camera, Not one of the pictures I took at my mom and dad's 25th wedding anniversary came out.
My mistake actually. The camera had a hot shoe for the flash, but it was timed for a flashbulb, and I forgot to plug in the little cord from the flash which would make it ignore the hot shoe and fire with the shutter instead of ahead of the shutter.
It was a good thing I found this out before I did a wedding I was paid to do the following weekend.
I used to use Kodachrome in the winter and Ectachrome in the summer for outdoor photo's, unless I needed the red hues produced by Kodachrome.
I also took a lot of shots of models for another friend, no they were fully dressed, hi hi.
I normally used Ectachrome-X for these shots, it was a higher grain film, cost a lot more too.
There was a brand of film, forget the name of it now, our local Schiller's photography sold for about 1/3 the price of Kodak branded films. I only used it in one of the automatic camera's I had that would keep snapping pictures as long as you held the button down. Didn't take long to go through a 100 foot roll of film that way, hi hi.
I had a few antique camera's too. The oldest was a 5x7 Speed Graflex. Yeah, the kind that used glass plates. However, it was retrofitted to use sheet film plates in plastic frames which were a lot cheaper and lighter. I didn't use it for very many photo's and ended up selling it with everything I had that went with it, including the flash-bar that used gunpowder, which I never used, not even once, hi hi. The going price at the time I sold it was like 885 bucks and some guy offered me 1100 bucks for it and everything I had that went with it. I couldn't pass that up, I was broke at the time.
I also had a couple of Kodak camera's with bellows. One was a portable one that belonged to my mom, and I still have the Brownie Hawkeye sitting here on the shelves in my office. I used to have the flash for it, but somehow it got lost in the move or possible damaged and tossed. I keep hoping to find it in a box I have not yet unpacked, but I doubt it will be in any of them, since I've already went through the boxes that had those types of things in it.
I had a VHS movie camera that used the full-size VHS cartridges. Loved that thing!
Had the camera store replace the pick-up sensor with an expensive low light one.
Indoor pictures came out looking like I used a light bar, while others who tried taking indoor pictures with the same model video camera, theirs came out nearly black, hi hi.
It also looked cool with the huge lens shade, shoulder rest, about like what news camera's looked like.
Now you see why when I did burn out, I burned out completely.
I used to take flying lessons. Most of them were in a Piper Colt or Piper TriPacer, fairly easy to fly, but they both dropped like a rock. I did get to fly a tail-dragger Piper Cub twice. They are supposed to be easier to fly, maybe, but not when you are used to a tricycle plane with a steep dihedral.
I've always been leery of the jets though, simply because the wings are so small.
I guess I was lucky having the young pilot since he knew how to land one after a flame out.
Although I have the time frames slightly off after 30 or more years. Here is an example:
The older pilots took a tad over an hour to fly from St.Louis to the Landa fields.
And about an hour and a half to fly back.
They would make a gradual climb up to flying altitude, and then start the decline.
The young pilot I had would climb to flying altitude fast, and run those engines right up to close to the red line.
We would get from St. Louis to the Landa fields in about 30 minutes.
He did the same thing coming home, but usually went higher than the older guys.
So we basically shot almost straight up, then cruised for only a few minutes before he started his decline.
Instead of an hour and a half to get back, we were back home in under an hour.
Except for the time we crashed, hi hi. But we were very close to home where we landed in an Illinois popcorn field.
I soloed twice and Lobmaster field, and once at Fenton airport. But was always too afraid to fly over to Lambert Field to take my test. I wanted to get in several more hours to get comfortable before I attempted flying in such a busy airspace.
Fenton cost about double of what Lobmaster charged, and due to other things going on in my life, I just basically ran out of money for renting planes. If I had my license, I could have then had a rider. But then too the landing fees at some other small airports was fairly high. I flew out to Viche airport near Rolla to visit some of my first wife's relatives before we were married, and those scobies charged me a landing fee, parking fee by the hour, and you had to refuel with them also before takeoff. So they really soaked you, unless you became a member of their small airport. I would have if I knew I would be going there often, but as I said, I was already low on funds, hi hi.
I also took hot air balloon rides and lessons. On the day of testing I was 25 bucks short to pay for the test. So never got that either. Probably a good thing too, it was a hobby I could never afford, hi hi.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
You got way more involved with photography than I ever did or could afford. My dream has been to own a Hasselblad ever since the day I hear of them. During my brief tour of college at the U of I, I joined the photo team for the school newsletter. The main dude used the Hasselblad that was apparently donated to the school. I don't recall much about it but I think it was 3x3 or maybe 4x4 film plates. The quality of the pictures was unbelievable, which was the attraction I had to it. When it came time for me to replace the Canon, I looked into Hasselblad. Back then they didn't have digital cameras per se, but a frame could be purchased with the lens and a separate backpack with a digital processing module could be attached. It was a kludge just so that they could say they sold digital cameras too. LOL The real thing would have set me back several thousands, so I had to pass on that. I got a Nikon instead and have been very happy with it all these years. It's the equivalent of a Windows 3.11 computer, but I don't use it much. All the pictures I take now are on the clever phone anyway. The only reason I'd go back to the Nikon is because the file size on the clever phone is enormous and most places won't accept them for uploading. I could adjust the resolution, but dammit, it's a clever phone. I don't need to make no stinking adjustments.
My very first remote controlled model air plane was a Piper Cub. It was easy to build and supposedly easy to fly for a beginner such as I was. I don't think I ever was able to fly it long enough to use a full tank of fuel before it would crash and need repairs. LOL My next encounter with Piper Cubs was with the flight simulator software on my computer. Amazing as it might seem, I had the same kind of luck there as I did with the RC plane. I tried to do it all with a joy stick and keyboard bindings, but probably should have gotten the controller designed for it.
My very first remote controlled model air plane was a Piper Cub. It was easy to build and supposedly easy to fly for a beginner such as I was. I don't think I ever was able to fly it long enough to use a full tank of fuel before it would crash and need repairs. LOL My next encounter with Piper Cubs was with the flight simulator software on my computer. Amazing as it might seem, I had the same kind of luck there as I did with the RC plane. I tried to do it all with a joy stick and keyboard bindings, but probably should have gotten the controller designed for it.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
I had looked at Canon and Nikon cameras at the time I bought the Yashica.
The store had the lenses, and filters of the right thread size and type in stock for the Yashica, but would have had to order the sizes of the filters I wanted for either the Canon or Nikon. Plus they had the 100 foot double reel attachment in stock as well. And the biggie was the price was less than either of the other two, and I could have it all NOW and not wait.
I never had one iota of problems with that camera. Still have it, but gave it to the wife to use. And of course that usage died when we went with digital cameras, and now she has a Schmartz-Fone with a better camera than our early digitals.
Speaking of digital, I had bought a Nikormat camera used that had a digital backpack for fairly cheap.
It was originally a 35mm camera, but the back cover was removed to install this add-on box.
It used a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk to hold the pictures, and if I recall, set to hi-res, it only held like a dozen or so pictures.
This was one reason I bought my first laptop. Instead of using the floppy disks, I could take like 8 or 10 pictures and then download them to the laptop, or move them to the onboard 3-1/2 floppy.
You may recall from previous conversations, I had horrible luck with 3-1/2 floppies, so didn't trust them one iota.
I was not taking photo's professionally at the time I bought this camera, but used it mostly to take pictures of houses I was working at doing renovations. The battery in the backpack would drain fast, so I just quit using it, and bought a little cheap Polaroid Digital, and also a Panasonic Digital that used 4 AA Batteries. The Panasonic didn't last too long, but I still have that Polaroid Digital after all these years. It's over 20 years old now and still works great, but not hi-res like today's cameras.
I used to be an RC airplane buff. The hardest one I ever built and flew as called an RC Nobler, it was a straight wing plane which made it really difficult to fly, compared to my Cessna looking plane.
Long before RC airplanes, I had won several local awards from flying string tethered planes.
Had awards for both showmanship, and for winning the combat races.
Got into RC boats for a while, then into model rocketry.
After the first kid came along, that ended all of my phun activities, hi hi.
The store had the lenses, and filters of the right thread size and type in stock for the Yashica, but would have had to order the sizes of the filters I wanted for either the Canon or Nikon. Plus they had the 100 foot double reel attachment in stock as well. And the biggie was the price was less than either of the other two, and I could have it all NOW and not wait.
I never had one iota of problems with that camera. Still have it, but gave it to the wife to use. And of course that usage died when we went with digital cameras, and now she has a Schmartz-Fone with a better camera than our early digitals.
Speaking of digital, I had bought a Nikormat camera used that had a digital backpack for fairly cheap.
It was originally a 35mm camera, but the back cover was removed to install this add-on box.
It used a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk to hold the pictures, and if I recall, set to hi-res, it only held like a dozen or so pictures.
This was one reason I bought my first laptop. Instead of using the floppy disks, I could take like 8 or 10 pictures and then download them to the laptop, or move them to the onboard 3-1/2 floppy.
You may recall from previous conversations, I had horrible luck with 3-1/2 floppies, so didn't trust them one iota.
I was not taking photo's professionally at the time I bought this camera, but used it mostly to take pictures of houses I was working at doing renovations. The battery in the backpack would drain fast, so I just quit using it, and bought a little cheap Polaroid Digital, and also a Panasonic Digital that used 4 AA Batteries. The Panasonic didn't last too long, but I still have that Polaroid Digital after all these years. It's over 20 years old now and still works great, but not hi-res like today's cameras.
I used to be an RC airplane buff. The hardest one I ever built and flew as called an RC Nobler, it was a straight wing plane which made it really difficult to fly, compared to my Cessna looking plane.
Long before RC airplanes, I had won several local awards from flying string tethered planes.
Had awards for both showmanship, and for winning the combat races.
Got into RC boats for a while, then into model rocketry.
After the first kid came along, that ended all of my phun activities, hi hi.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
There you go again, resurrecting memories that I forgot that I had in the first place. LOL I know about the Top Flite Nobler, but didn't realize it was documented on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sge2C3h3_n4
I never owned or built a Nobler but a buddy of mine did. I met him in high school and his family happened to own and operate a hobby shop just a couple blocks from where I lived. I never went into the shop until I met this guy at school and then I became one of their best customers. LOL My interests at the time were in building plastic scale model airplanes which these people paid me to do if I bought everything from their store. When I did an exceptional job of building, Jim's dad would offer me a few dollars for it so that he could hang it up in the store to entice other potential buyers. I did that a few times but took a big interest in flying models. Jim, of course, encouraged me and taught me a lot. He was the Ace, however, and I crashed and burned more often than completed a course. He is the reason I looked into RC models, and believe it or not we got into rocketry too. There was a big (several hundred acre) open field across from the hobby shop and that's where we did all our flying and experimenting. Those were the days, my friend.
After we graduated from HS I lost track of Jim and turned my interests toward Sarah, Carol, Mary Anne, and their likes. The shop closed down after I stopped going there, but probably not because I stopped going there. I found out that Jim was drafted and ended up in Viet Nam. He did not make it home alive. I was stunned when I learned of it. Jim flew that Nobler I have memories of. He too won many competitions and had more than a few trophies to show for it.
Digital cameras with floppy disks ... wow. LOL I have a feeling I heard about them when they were high tech but must admit I never owned one. The memory cards for my Nikon are pretty darned slow which means I can't take pictures in rapid succession. I can't imagine what it would take to store a frame on a floppy disk. Probably close to a minute.
I never owned or built a Nobler but a buddy of mine did. I met him in high school and his family happened to own and operate a hobby shop just a couple blocks from where I lived. I never went into the shop until I met this guy at school and then I became one of their best customers. LOL My interests at the time were in building plastic scale model airplanes which these people paid me to do if I bought everything from their store. When I did an exceptional job of building, Jim's dad would offer me a few dollars for it so that he could hang it up in the store to entice other potential buyers. I did that a few times but took a big interest in flying models. Jim, of course, encouraged me and taught me a lot. He was the Ace, however, and I crashed and burned more often than completed a course. He is the reason I looked into RC models, and believe it or not we got into rocketry too. There was a big (several hundred acre) open field across from the hobby shop and that's where we did all our flying and experimenting. Those were the days, my friend.
After we graduated from HS I lost track of Jim and turned my interests toward Sarah, Carol, Mary Anne, and their likes. The shop closed down after I stopped going there, but probably not because I stopped going there. I found out that Jim was drafted and ended up in Viet Nam. He did not make it home alive. I was stunned when I learned of it. Jim flew that Nobler I have memories of. He too won many competitions and had more than a few trophies to show for it.
Digital cameras with floppy disks ... wow. LOL I have a feeling I heard about them when they were high tech but must admit I never owned one. The memory cards for my Nikon are pretty darned slow which means I can't take pictures in rapid succession. I can't imagine what it would take to store a frame on a floppy disk. Probably close to a minute.
Re: Short time tracking with a push.
Mine was an RC Nobler and I had to assemble it Rib by Rib, it was a kit but nothing about it was assembled.
The little Cessna I built only the wings were partially assembled out of molded foam with leading wood edge I had to glue on and the cover with Monokote. The RC Nobler was silk and dope, then later covered with Monokote.
Yeppers, the old early digitals were slow as molasses in the dead of winter, hi hi.
We lost 32 men in my unit and that was before we got to Nam. Sad.
The little Cessna I built only the wings were partially assembled out of molded foam with leading wood edge I had to glue on and the cover with Monokote. The RC Nobler was silk and dope, then later covered with Monokote.
Yeppers, the old early digitals were slow as molasses in the dead of winter, hi hi.
We lost 32 men in my unit and that was before we got to Nam. Sad.