Today’s Rhapsody is Bela Bartok’s first Rhapsody for the violin with soloist Kyung-Wha Chung. I’m really enjoying becoming more familiar with Bartok’s work. He was a folklorist as well as a composer and incorporated much of the traditional Hungarian and Gypsy music he researched into this works. It gives the violin solo a wonderful haunting quality that I’m really getting into.
Today’s sketch, from the Seattle Art Museum, is of “Tower of Mothers” by Käthe Kollwitz. This was the first piece I had ever seen Kollwitz and regrettably the first time I’d heard of her. Since then I’ve been enjoying the pleasure of discovering her work. I very much like her vivid style and the power of the symbolism behind it. 
I’ve always liked folk music. Growing up my father used to play his guitar and banjo to us and he had an extensive collection of folk records including Pete Seeger, The Weavers, Peter, Paul & Mary as well as the Kingston Trio.
I was reminded of the Kingston Trio today. While they weren’t my favorites, they had a few songs I like such as the Anne Boleyn song (which was nearly traumatic when I first heard it at age eight.) and this one, the MTA song which my Father used to like but couldn’t get some of the final chords right. I always liked it too, mostly due to the absurdity of this musical tall tale.
Of course as I got older a recurring question kind of spoiled it for me… Why didn’t Charlie’s wife give him train fair along with his daily sandwich?
Today’s Rhapsody is a completely new one for me. I hadn’t even heard of Eduard Lalo before today. But now having heard his Norwegian Rhapsody I very much like what I hear. I hope you all do too.
Welcome back everyone! It looks like we’ve finally managed to flush out the remains of that pesky out of the system. I was comfortably sure everything was okay my stats that had been pretty much dead all week started going up big time (on a SUNDAY) and I got a email from Google Adwords saying they had unsuspended my account (not that I was ever using it but the suspension email on Wednesday was the precursor to the malware wall) But on the other hand a friend had told me he was still getting the Google Malware Wall. So I had developed a nearly superstitious pessimism which kept me from even checking up to see if everything was working again. (I swear after a while it’s like looking at your bank account)
So anyway everything is up to snuff and with any luck changing all of my passwords to ones so strong they’re impossible to remember without writing them down will guarantee this doesn’t happen again for a LONG time.
With any luck this will work. Since the last report Google and my webmaster were still finding bits of the virus lingering to the point it was decided to get drastic an wipe by rebooting the system.
So far it looks like everything is working. At first only about ten articles from the archives were showing up but. that turned out to just be a configuration issue. Something I would have remembered if I had just been updating the latest version of Comicpress. Other than that the only thing Is I had to do was reinstall the advertising banners and reconstruct the header. And now it looks like it’s ready for it’s final checkup.
Let’s hope it get’s the seal of approval because I am really sick of that stupid warning malware wall.
