Daffy Day

SUNNY STROLL: We dedicated all of today to getting caught up on our music and genetics classes, but we did take about an hour out to take a nice long stroll down to Fishermen's Terminal.

There must not be much of anything in season in the Bering Sea right now, because most of the slips for the working boats were full.

We always take a moment to visit the memorial at the terminal. And every time there's something there that gets me. Today, it was a baseball. Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training yesterday, and someone clearly brought an old baseball down to their baseball loving loved one to mark the occasion.

On our way back home, I couldn't believe my eyes when I spied a few clusters of daffodils blooming along a public parking strip on 24th Avenue. They are by far our first daffodil sighting of the year!  We admired them for a couple minutes and didn't pick a single one, so others could enjoy them as well.

THE BEAT BROS.: We got back to our Beatles course, of course. Part of what we learned about today was about The Beatles clubbing it big time in Hamburg in their formative years, 1960 and 1961. George was only 17! They would play six sets a night sometimes (which led to popping 'diet pills' for energy, our professor tells us). While they were there, they recorded an album (and single of the same name) with Tony Sheridan on lead. For the project, they opted not to use the name The Beatles, as it sounds like a slang word for male genitalia in German. And so, the four were "The Beat Brothers" supporting Sheridan on "My Bonnie."

The single sharing the album's name starts the song off traditionally, but after the first verse it turns into a rockin' version that sounds very much like, well, early Beatles music.
http://youtu.be/gr35lAvW8PY


Today's lecture covered music and musicians who were popular in Hamburg while The Beatles were there. We learned 'schlager' (loosely translated as 'a hit') was a style of music hot in Hamburg. And today we were introduced to a guy named Ted Herold, supposedly Germany's Elvis. (After watching a video of him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c58lJK9L51c, I'll stick with the U.S. version, thank you, thankyouverymuch.) Ironically of dozens and dozens of Herold videos to choose from, I randomly picked one called "Die Besten Sterben Jung." Guess those three years of German in high school didn't pay off, I had no idea what that meant. At one point Ted stopped singing and started rattling off names like Jim, Janis, and Elvis. That got me to Googling the song's title, turns out it means "the best die young."

We also listened to an instrumental track, "Wonderland by Night," from Bert Kaempfert, "Germany's Herb Alpert." The horns-heavy song hit number one in the U.S. for a few weeks in 1960. Kaempfert was the one who hired The Beatles to back Sheridan on "My Bonnie," by the way. And in another random factoid, now I know whom the Barenaked Ladies were talking about in their hit "One Week" when they said "Bert Kaempfert's got the mad hits!"

So far, it has really been enjoyable being enticed to listen to music we'd otherwise never hear, and get a better sense of the formative years of the Fab Four.

HOW BIG?: A friend's Facebook post tipped me off to a BBC Web site where you can get a good idea how large mammoth objects are, relatively speaking.

For instance, I was able to type in our address and see what it would look like if the International Space Station landed our our house. :0

I put a purple arrow (center frame) pointing to our copper colored roof.

Clearly, the ISS is a big ol' spacecraft.

CJ was rather horrified about our odds of surviving if it landed on our block, but I reminded him, the ISS was not constructed to Earth gravity specs - it would crumple if it were here on the ground. So maybe, just maybe, we'd escape being totally obliterated.

The "How Big Really?" site has a whole list of fun comparisons, divided by categories, like "Space" and "Environmental Disasters"

CRAMMING: We spent a couple of hours studying for our genetics midterm today. I was mostly happy with our review, but we all pretty much failed miserably when it came to remembering how to infer the phase of alleles in a heterozygous parent, infer the gene order and then determine the recombination factors. Tonight, after reviewing a couple of lectures, I'm feeling more confident. We'll give it another go tomorrow. I'd love to be able to take at least half of the test tomorrow (it's broken up into two 90-minute segments).

WELL PLAYED: Bad weather has been attacking a wide swath of the US this winter, closing businesses and canceling classes. Kudos to administrators who are getting creative with their school closure notices.

Check out this 'cool' one from Durham Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhtqjdUi0nw


And Principal Reves of Cedar Creek Elementary gets his whole family in on the act
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLiZ7Q3htqo