A couple weeks ago a thread was started on the Ukulele Underground forums suggesting that folks trade things amongst themselves. It started out simply enough with someone from Guam suggesting that he'd send a little Guam flag to anyone that wanted to send him a flag from their state or something of that nature. Soon it got out of hand.

But in a good way.

A fella named deach posted that what he really wanted was a Howlin' Hobbit hat. He had seen a post of mine -- in another thread -- where I'd said one of the few ukuleles I really lusted after was a sopranino. And that's what he offered to trade me.

How, pray, could I refuse? 

Well, I've put together a package for him. It contains more than just one of my hats, but I'm not going to say just what since I haven't sent it off yet and I want the rest of the contents to be a surprise to him... just in case he reads this.

Tuesday morning, just before 10am, the postman delivered a package.

I came back this morning from a road trip gig (more on that coming soon to an RSS aggregator near you!) to find a message from YouTube. I had a new subscriber to my channel... my 50th!

I'm planning an appropriate celebration.

A new vid, of course, featuring my new sopranino ukulele (more on that coming soon, etc.).

So, I broke a personal rule today and actually set foot on the grounds of Seattle Center while the NW Folklife Festival was going on.

Mind you, it really is a great musical experience at Folklife, I just had my fill of it after the four years I was there with The Emerald City Jug Band.

And they don't pay.

Sheesh.

But a couple years ago (September of 2006, to be precise) the original duo version of Snake Suspenderz (we like to think of it as "classic" Snakes) had a gig at the Mississippi Pizza Pub in Portland, OR. While looking for the area of Craig's List that I could post the gig in I came across an ad wanting a "shoegazer tubist" and laughed my ass off at the concept. I contacted Squish, the leader of the band looking for such a tuba person and told him we'd be down there and how much I dug his band and the whole concept.

The whole band showed up at our gig. So, when I heard they were going to be at Folklife I gave in and took the mighty Metro down there to show some love.

I'm sure glad I did.

Imagine my delight this morning when I discovered that Rowlf the dog, my all-time favorite muppet, also played ukulele.

This from a Wiki about muppets, the article being about the Jimmy Dean Show:

"...almost all of the sketches with Rowlf and Jimmy ended in a song. Aside from using his voice to bring music to the show, on some occasions Rowlf would play the ukulele."

Yeah!

I've become comfortable doing solo ukulele busking and I've expanded my repertoire sufficiently that I don't have to do all the same songs each set. One problem remains though. While I do a number of tunes with "chord solo" sections (and, so far, one straight-ahead instrumental) I also do a lot of songs that need an instrumental break.

A lot of these are the AABA sort where it's good (and pretty traditional) to go through the AABA, have a "solo" section of either all the way through again or just the AA, and then finish by singing the BA part(s) again. On several of them lately I've been whistling a solo (or two) but when you do this outside, several times an hour for several hours, your lips get chapped. So I've been thinking I should throw in kazoo on a couple of them.

I own a harmonica rack but there's a problem with it. I don't want the kazoo to be dangling in front of my face all the time and, since I almost always wear a hat when performing, taking the rack off and putting it back on is a hell of a process. Got to remove the hat, pull the rack over your head, stash the rack somewhere and then put your hat back on. All this while holding the ukulele. Unless you want to add a "set the ukulele down" and a "pick the ukulele back up" step.

I came up with a solution.

Last time I went out busking (several days ago) I had an interesting day. I went to the Pike Place Market and managed to get an early set in at 10am. It was "meh," not bad.

The hat was exactly twelve dollars and the odd part was I got only two coins, both of them the small gold-colored dollars. One with Sacajawea on it and one with George Washington.

I don't remember that ever happening before. I'll usually get either no coins whatsoever or an assortment.

I waited around and got another set in at about noon. It was less (but close to) the same amount. I was ready to just give it up, especially since I don't like to do more than two sets at the Bridge spot on a given day and it was really the only spot worth a hoot to me. Crowd was too small for the Starbucks spot and the weather was too bleh for the courtyard spot to be any good. At least for me.

This left me with the choice of bussing home or hanging around doing nothing for several hours until my ride was done working. That, combined with several of my friends saying I should do another, convinced me to try again.

So around 3pm I'm back on the bridge, strumming madly away on my ukulele. It's getting to close to the end of my set and I'm looking at the tip bucket. After all these years I can pretty much get a decent idea of what's in there and it looked like it was going to be about what the first two were. Ah well.

Paul was waiting to play. I looked at my watch and saw I had about 3 minutes left. I turned around to tell him he was on but he was away from the bridge a bit and deep into a convo with somebody. So I thought, what the heck, and signalled I was going to do one more tune. When I have that little time left I usually do "If Youse A Viper," an old marijuana tune from the 30's, written by Stuff Smith.

So I jammed it out and somewhere in the middle of it a dad and his two sons walked by. Eldest son was maybe 8 or so. They got about 40 feet away and stopped. Dad hands the kid a bill and he runs back and puts it in my bucket.

I'm thinking dad must be a secret viper because, hot damn, it's a fin! Half again what I had in the hat, all at the last second.

I'm certainly glad, not only that I did that last set, but also that I did that last song. 

Hooray for last minute vipers!

...with the sound of tourism.

The famous Von Trapp villa is becoming a hotel.

And you can also get a copy of the gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sang "16 Going On 17" as an assemble it yourself kit.

I gotta admit. I like gazebos and, if I had the property where I could put one up this would go on my short list.

The Sound of Music was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. In fact, I don't remember having a TV when I was that young so it was probably the first movie I ever saw. I still like it a lot and, despite my snarky tourism comment, I'm happy for Salsburg.

Yeah. If I ever get to Europe, I'll try to spend a night there.

I recorded a video of What A Wonderful World, the 1967 tune written by George David Weiss and Bob Thiele and made most famous by Louis Armstrong. Brudda Iz also included his take on it in his most famous medley.

You can watch it here...

...or click the link above to see it on YouTube if the embedded one doesn't work for you.

And if you're a fellow uke phreak, you can download a pdf of my arrangement. It's in the key of C and is made for C tuned ukuleles.

On a similar subject, A while back I made a video of Ain't Misbehavin'. You can get a pdf of that arrangement too. Same key and tuning.

A couple weeks ago someone on the Ukulele Underground forums asked about the tune, Fly Me To The Moon. By coincidence, that song was on my list for "next video I do." After putzing around about it for a bit, I recorded my usual solo ukulele and vocals version and put it on YouTube back on the 6th.

Forgive my extra puffing and panting in this one. The almost spring weather we're having seems to have loosed some hardcore pollens and my nose is a bit stuffy.

Just an ol' mouth breather, me. 

Woodshed, bless his heart, put it in his most recent Saturday UkeTube, lots of folks from UU have watched it and it's shot up in views faster than just about any of the others I've posted. Plus I'm starting to get subcribers to my video channel a lot faster. Yay!

Here's an odd bit. I have a "vanity Google Alert" set up on my name. Sure enough, I get one about the video. But when I checked it out a bit closer, it wasn't to the YouTube page, it was to an AOL video page. Jeez, it's almost like "going viral."

Would almost viral be bacteriological?

Naaaah. Probably not. 

In any event, welcome to any AOL users who stumble across me.

But I guess I'm going to have to go back to my experiment of ending the videos by holding up a sign with my URL on it. At least until I can finally get something together that will allow me to add titles to the vids I do. The AOL page is sadly lacking on such details as who I am and where to find me.

If you happen to have an AOL screen name, please visit that page and leave a comment with www.howlinhobbit.com in it somewhere! I didn't want to remember yet another login so didn't go for one myself.

Last year a band from Manchester, England called The Get Out Clause decided they wanted to do a music video for their upcoming single. Like many bands, budget was a big issue. They wanted a lot of footage to edit together but couldn't afford to pay for it. So, living in England, with an estimated 13 million CCTV surveillance cameras to choose from, they took themselves and some of their equipment around to 80 locations in Manchester and "played to the cameras." They then wrote to all the camera owners and asked for the footage under England's Freedom of Information Act. You can get the whole story here.

And here's the video...

If the embedded vid doesn't work for you, check it out on YouTube.

They also have a MySpace page.

And a good thing too as their main web site is one of those flash-only horrors. Despite that, the video is an A-1 use of guerrilla marketing if I ever saw one. Brilliant idea.

Today's blog double-feature was Will at Clicked and Seth at Seth Godin's Blog both talking about a YouTube mashup called Time Tube.

Time Tube searches YouTube and presents the results as a nice, graphical time line. 

Will said it was the "wicked cool toy of the day" and Seth posited that  "Architecture matters." and thought it was a demonstration of The power of the interface. I read these guys regularly and respect both of them a lot but this time I just have to disagree with the excitement.

I gave it a quick test drive, searching for names and/or keywords to videos I've posted. And none of them showed up.

I know that had I run the same searches at YouTube my video(s) would have appeared in the list. Maybe way down low, but there nonetheless. Even searches on my name, which I make sure appears in the titles of the videos and in the tags, returned no results.

I don't see it as an improvement to present data in a spif new way but with chunks of it missing.

I'm seeing this problem with a great deal of the "Web 2.0" stuff -- or any new gee whiz! tech, for that matter -- where everyone is so excited about how pretty it is they sometimes overlook how the nuts and bolts aspect of it, the "stuff under the hood" so to speak, is sadly lacking.

To me it's like getting a Ferrari and finding out that it's got a Model T engine in it. Beautiful lines, no guts.

Mind you, there are some terrific new web interfaces happening via the infamous Web 2.0 tech. The blog software I'm using right now is a prime example. A pretty complex WYSIWYG editor, with all the basic bells and whistles, all running in my browser and taking up no space whatsoever on my machine.

But let's try to calm down a bit and not herald every little remix as being the grooviest thing since sliced bread. 

Otherwise you end up with all sizzle, no steak.

Thanks to Will at Clicked I discovered this great article from Esquire magazine online, The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master. I don't necessarily agree with every single one -- for instance, if I never master the 12 foot jump shot it won't be any skin off my ass -- but many of them are really essential.

I think my favorite is #44:

    Ask for help.

    Guys who refuse to ask for help are the most cursed men of all. The stubborn, the self-possessed, and the distant. The hell with them.

Yeah... that's what I'm talkin' about!

I'd like to thank Todd Baio of folkster's findings for naming me Artist for the Week of May 5th, 2008.

No matter how jaded we like to appear sometimes, musician's crave that recognition. It might even be worse for ukulele players.