Tag Archives: Frank Zappa

How to Milk a Beaver

Congratulations! You have found a lucrative way to maintain your luxury lifestyle well into the future! If you wish to augment your capital, the perfume industry will pay excessively for that unique beavery smell of vanilla strawberry with just a hint of fine cordovan leather. So will the tobacco industry: beaver excretion is the taste of Marlboro country! And remember the beaver the next time you enjoy your skinny vanilla latte. Your vanilla anything. Also strawberry and raspberry. As a natural additive, that little critter gets around! You’ll find endless marketing opportunities ahead.

Have your assistant procure a beaver, male. Be sure not to wake the little guy up, the beaver not your helper, though do wake your helper up because beavers are best caught at dawn. Have your assistant be very careful, beaver teeth are sharp and do take note of its claws. It can strip bark off of a tree just like that. … More

Octave

The rune carvers, the people who knew the Rune Poem by heart, probably sang it. There’s a lot of evidence for that, not to mention putting a story to music makes the retelling easier to remember. We can all sing along, others joining in where memory fails. Poetry has beats and rhythm and we sing ours too, but we don’t call it poetry when we do that. We have another word for that. Language takes all the music out of poetry. Language did not take language out of music.

Music has an alphabet of its own: the letters are notes. And these notes we arranged into groups of eight. Octaves. Take a note, think of a sound. It’s got a letter, but from such a short alphabet. Now hum it. Hum it steady, you sound terrible because you are not actually doing it out loud. Do it. There you go. Your note, that … More