Maine Outlapped
One of the best things that has happened to our currency is the 50-state quarter program. It started in 1999. Every 1/5 of a year (about 73 days) a new quarter is minted commemorating another state. It started in early 1999 with the Delaware coin, which featured Cesar Rodney on a horse. Since then I have been collecting several sets of the coins as they came out. Some of the coins came fast and furious; for example, Virginia, while others were really slow in coming, such as South Carolina. Earlier in the year, I found the Alabama coin, which features Helen Keller and an inscription in Braille. The next two coins after that were Maine and Missouri. I waited for the Maine coin to come out. It would not. I kept getting quarter after quarter, getting mostly eagles with a few Connecticuts, North Carolina, Mississippis and New Hampshires and so forth, but never any Maine. I have been trying to buy things whose price end in a .05 to .25, so that I would get three quarters in change, but today when I tried that twice I got six eagles.
I therefore declared Quarter War and went out in an all out effort to get the Maines. Mid-August has already passed, so therefore the next coin to come out, Missouri, started getting minted. Up to today, I still have not seen a single Maine quarter. Then my wife came home with two coins she showed me. They were Missouri quarters! The first ones to come out. Maine has been outlapped by Missouri. It is the first coin not to come out before the coin after it. So now I have two Missouri quarters, and still no Maine quarter. I wonder what happened to it.
Next week if I still don't have a Maine quarter, I will go to the bank and ask for some. If that does not work, I will order some rolls of Maine quarters from the US Mint and that will settle it. Oh where oh where is Maine? Remember the Maine!
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2003/09/05
2003/08/31
Updates: Taoism, mondegreens, and true north
Taoism principle: Since yesterday, when I came up with all these versions of one of the principles of Taoism (The tao that can be mentioned is not the Real Tao), I came up with some more that are interesting. For example, after hearing a song by Stephanie Corby called "True North", I came up with this one:
The north that is observed is not True North.
Which of course has this corollary:
The north that is found on a magnetic compass is not True North.
So from an Ultimate Principle of a major religion, I have derived a mundane fact that any Boy Scout knows. So it appears that we stumble through life, limited by our senses, not knowing what Reality is, while we experience magnetic reality.
Mondegreens: I remarked earlier on how mondegreens occur in Amy Carol Webb's songs; for example, I heard "tears" as "tease". I tried something else today. I listened to Stephanie Corby's song "True North" (the song I mentioned above) and found it hard to keep focused on it. It did have some interesting lines, such as "Sense of direction". I figured it was a song about how one needs to keep focused on a goal to achieve it. But I just found it hard to listen to. Could it be that it contains mondegreens? I tried this experiment. I listened to "True North" without looking at the lyrics of the song, and tried to transcribe to paper what I heard. Then I compared it to her intended lyrics that came with the CD. I found no less than 17 mondegreens! I also found an 18th one that I resolved: I heard "graves of" and on a second listening heard "great". I heard "inner" as "Hannah". This is another case where a singer tries to avoid the hard-to-listen-to "eerrrrr" and winds up creating a mondegreen, causing me to hear "inner" as "Hannah". Sometimes you must sing "errrr". Other mondegreens I heard were "there are parades" for "I always", "soame" for "zone" (her "n" was apparently not distinct), and "eh?" for "my".
I feel the main causes of these mondegreens were that her melody was not clear and easily heard above a too-loud accompaniment, and that she drawled her words so long that the endings of them tended to get lost, or the syllables became two or more syllables, and that to improve the song, I would make the singer louder and the accompaniment softer.
In addition, I feel the singer in this song shows dependency on her "true north". It is an oft-used theme that sells, but in this case I would have preferred a searching theme, where the singer realizes, as I have said before that the north she is seeking is good but is not the true North. As I said above, the north that can be sung is not the True North.
Taoism principle: Since yesterday, when I came up with all these versions of one of the principles of Taoism (The tao that can be mentioned is not the Real Tao), I came up with some more that are interesting. For example, after hearing a song by Stephanie Corby called "True North", I came up with this one:
The north that is observed is not True North.
Which of course has this corollary:
The north that is found on a magnetic compass is not True North.
So from an Ultimate Principle of a major religion, I have derived a mundane fact that any Boy Scout knows. So it appears that we stumble through life, limited by our senses, not knowing what Reality is, while we experience magnetic reality.
Mondegreens: I remarked earlier on how mondegreens occur in Amy Carol Webb's songs; for example, I heard "tears" as "tease". I tried something else today. I listened to Stephanie Corby's song "True North" (the song I mentioned above) and found it hard to keep focused on it. It did have some interesting lines, such as "Sense of direction". I figured it was a song about how one needs to keep focused on a goal to achieve it. But I just found it hard to listen to. Could it be that it contains mondegreens? I tried this experiment. I listened to "True North" without looking at the lyrics of the song, and tried to transcribe to paper what I heard. Then I compared it to her intended lyrics that came with the CD. I found no less than 17 mondegreens! I also found an 18th one that I resolved: I heard "graves of" and on a second listening heard "great". I heard "inner" as "Hannah". This is another case where a singer tries to avoid the hard-to-listen-to "eerrrrr" and winds up creating a mondegreen, causing me to hear "inner" as "Hannah". Sometimes you must sing "errrr". Other mondegreens I heard were "there are parades" for "I always", "soame" for "zone" (her "n" was apparently not distinct), and "eh?" for "my".
I feel the main causes of these mondegreens were that her melody was not clear and easily heard above a too-loud accompaniment, and that she drawled her words so long that the endings of them tended to get lost, or the syllables became two or more syllables, and that to improve the song, I would make the singer louder and the accompaniment softer.
In addition, I feel the singer in this song shows dependency on her "true north". It is an oft-used theme that sells, but in this case I would have preferred a searching theme, where the singer realizes, as I have said before that the north she is seeking is good but is not the true North. As I said above, the north that can be sung is not the True North.
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