Uncle Connie
01-01-2016, 02:36
Hi. As I type it's the last few hours of 2015 and I strongly suspect I'll be your final new member for that year. That's because you're mostly in the U.K. and I'm on the west coast of the U.S.A. and there are no major land masses left after mine to provide new blood.
I live in San Diego, and have for 58 years. Inasmuch as I'm 71, there's a gap to be explained: That gap is filled by San Francisco (birthplace and first 9 years) and Los Angeles (4 years), both of which were abandoned owing to paternal change of job. The user name I chose is "Uncle Connie" which is actually not the name I was given, believe it or not. (I see a thread elsewhere where we explain our usernames. I shall go there anon.) I'm actually Conrad Friesner von Metzke, and when people occasionally ask, "Oh, are you of the German nobility?" I politely reply that yes, our family has estates and castles all over the bloody Rheinland and all the way over into what used to be Eastern Silesia, and they gape in admiration, but in fact it's all nonsense. My father was from Ohio, his father from Nova Scotia, and it was one further generation before anyone we knew had any touch with Germany. And nobody has the slightest idea what touch that may have been; it's all lost to antiquity now. Sorry, no estates and castles. One ancient letter (1898) in a box in my closet referencing a family death in Sagan, Silesia - now Zagan, Poland. The "von" may well be a fake, and I don't know enough German to fill a single page triple-spaced.
Why I'm here: I was invited. He who invited me is named Jerry Jacobs and he prowls the corridors of one or more of your threads. He has apparently got some faith in my ability to be interesting and contribute, but he may be in for a rude shock - we shall see, shan't we? I do like to write - much too much for some tastes - and I do love music - classical almost exclusively. (Do I hear the sound of myriad readers suddenly clicking off?)
My system - please, do not laugh too uproariously. It's the music that matters to me, not the hardware, and as I ain't made of money, I make do. There are bits and pieces of a 30+-year-old Bang & Olufson system round here, minus the turntable because I no longer have LPs for it. There's a Marantz tuner - oh look, up there in "The Art of Sound" banner at the top of the page, the little photo in the upper right corner; there it is! (But just the one on the bottom, the one with the tuning wheel. And it's even older than the B&O.) And there's one of those silly Bose Wave Radio / CD players, and this very nice iMac computer which plays CDs, and then there's the car. See, I got music all around everywhere, don't I? (But the radio is generally useless because I'm classical, remember?, and San Diego has no classical station. We can pick up one across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, that plays "popular classical" mixed with Mexican folkloric. Or I could subscribe to one of the cable radio feeds that are available - one of which we already get, for free, on the television, but I'll be damned if I'll sit there watching a radio feed on the TV - but, because I have enough CDs to fill a lifetime if I were reborn and started over tomorrow, I don't bother.)
Married, two adult sons (one the front man for three local rock bands - the papers to disown him are already filed), retired manager of the Post Office, voracious reader, voracious and occasionally tolerated writer (a local amateur theatre group recently performed a play I wrote last summer), and I fear prone to prattle on and on until someone has the sense to bellow, "Hold! Enough!"
Good evening.
I live in San Diego, and have for 58 years. Inasmuch as I'm 71, there's a gap to be explained: That gap is filled by San Francisco (birthplace and first 9 years) and Los Angeles (4 years), both of which were abandoned owing to paternal change of job. The user name I chose is "Uncle Connie" which is actually not the name I was given, believe it or not. (I see a thread elsewhere where we explain our usernames. I shall go there anon.) I'm actually Conrad Friesner von Metzke, and when people occasionally ask, "Oh, are you of the German nobility?" I politely reply that yes, our family has estates and castles all over the bloody Rheinland and all the way over into what used to be Eastern Silesia, and they gape in admiration, but in fact it's all nonsense. My father was from Ohio, his father from Nova Scotia, and it was one further generation before anyone we knew had any touch with Germany. And nobody has the slightest idea what touch that may have been; it's all lost to antiquity now. Sorry, no estates and castles. One ancient letter (1898) in a box in my closet referencing a family death in Sagan, Silesia - now Zagan, Poland. The "von" may well be a fake, and I don't know enough German to fill a single page triple-spaced.
Why I'm here: I was invited. He who invited me is named Jerry Jacobs and he prowls the corridors of one or more of your threads. He has apparently got some faith in my ability to be interesting and contribute, but he may be in for a rude shock - we shall see, shan't we? I do like to write - much too much for some tastes - and I do love music - classical almost exclusively. (Do I hear the sound of myriad readers suddenly clicking off?)
My system - please, do not laugh too uproariously. It's the music that matters to me, not the hardware, and as I ain't made of money, I make do. There are bits and pieces of a 30+-year-old Bang & Olufson system round here, minus the turntable because I no longer have LPs for it. There's a Marantz tuner - oh look, up there in "The Art of Sound" banner at the top of the page, the little photo in the upper right corner; there it is! (But just the one on the bottom, the one with the tuning wheel. And it's even older than the B&O.) And there's one of those silly Bose Wave Radio / CD players, and this very nice iMac computer which plays CDs, and then there's the car. See, I got music all around everywhere, don't I? (But the radio is generally useless because I'm classical, remember?, and San Diego has no classical station. We can pick up one across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, that plays "popular classical" mixed with Mexican folkloric. Or I could subscribe to one of the cable radio feeds that are available - one of which we already get, for free, on the television, but I'll be damned if I'll sit there watching a radio feed on the TV - but, because I have enough CDs to fill a lifetime if I were reborn and started over tomorrow, I don't bother.)
Married, two adult sons (one the front man for three local rock bands - the papers to disown him are already filed), retired manager of the Post Office, voracious reader, voracious and occasionally tolerated writer (a local amateur theatre group recently performed a play I wrote last summer), and I fear prone to prattle on and on until someone has the sense to bellow, "Hold! Enough!"
Good evening.