Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Reasons for my absence and other things cleared up

Sorry it has been so long since I last posted. I've been on an unplanned blogging hiatus because of a death in my family. My Pawpaw passed away just over a week ago and was in the hospital for a couple weeks before that, so the rest of my life (including the QQ) has been on hold for a while.

I won't go into a lot of detail about the past few weeks or the funeral, except to tell one amusing story about my family.

The family needed to select music for Pawpaw's service and they wanted to use songs that he liked. They picked a certain hymn and then an instrumental piece he enjoyed. The only problem was the instrumental selection was on a homemade CD and it was a live version that included applause at the end. Not really appropriate for a funeral. So I was charged with finding a "clean" version of the song. My family said the song was called "Anchor Built."

I commenced my search on iTunes, to no avail. There was no such song by that name. I progressed to Google, which again turned up no results. I tried different variations of the song "Anchor Built" "Anchorbuilt" "Anchor-Built" "Anchor Build"...nothing.

In my experience, if Google doesn't know the song exists, you are out of luck.

In desperation, I played the song for my roomie, thinking she might be able to suggest a way we could cut off the applause at the end. As she listened to the song, she exclaimed "I know that! It's from the Mr. Holland's Opus soundtrack! It's the clarinet solo!"

We quickly turned to youtube, typing in my search terms "Mr. Holland's Opus clarinet solo" and eureka! It was, in fact the same song. However, I still didn't know the same of the song so I scrolled through the dozens of comments to see if I could discover the solution to the puzzle.

And there it was. The answer to my search. "What is the name of this song?" a commenter asked. "Stranger on the shore," an expert answered. "It's by the musician Acker Bilk."

ACKER BILK!!!!!!!!!

My family is going to make me crazy one day. I can tell already.

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