Yesterday was the Feast of St. Francis. It was also the annual blessing of the animals at Grace Episcopal Church where I work. It is about the seventh annual celebration of this rite. But yesterday was the first time I didn’t play any Bach. Usually I take my electric piano and play a bunch of Bach while the animals are blessed. I also accompany the two hymns. For some reason yesterday I thought it would be more fun to improv. I think part of this was that our closing hymn at Eucharist was “He’s got the whole world” and I thought it would have been cool to have a jazz piano trio postlude on it. However it was just me at the piano and I jumped up after the closing hymn and went quickly to the organ to perform the schedule postlude.

So at the Animal Blessing, I played some souped up versions of hymns instead of Bach. I was particularly happy with playing “On the wings of a snow white dove.” Get it? I’m not sure if anyone else did, but I thought it was clever.

I was going to post some pics here of the blessing but couldn’t find any on Facebooger. People were taking pictures with their phones and cameras but I didn’t find any thing I was tagged in or any thing else for that matter.

This morning I thought it might be interesting to search pod casts for something on Finnegans Wake. Lo and behold I found one.

Reading Finnegans Wake | A Reading for Everyone

This guy sounds pretty normal. Maybe not what you’re looking for if you’re looking for an expert. But I listened to his introduction and learned something from it (a third way to see the title of the work reading the word “wake” as in the wake of boat… this is very signifcant as bodies of water play a huge role in this book).

Also he promises to do a podcast where he talks about all the books he uses to help him read Finnegans Wake. Cool.

His comments sent me to another website.

Finnegans Wake Audio Blog

This seems to be a dead project (last dated piece is March 2011). Who knows what happened? Maybe the guy died. But at any rate I thought I would poke around on this site sometime as well.

Wilton Felder, Saxophonist for the Crusaders, Dies at 75 – The New York Times

I learn interesting things from obits. Such as Mr. Felder also played bass on many recordings. This makes me want to go back and listen to the Crusaders again.

The Reign of Recycling – The New York Times

Eileen finally asked me to stop reading sections of this article to her and just send her the link. Lots of info on the effectiveness and history of recycling. I am going to put this link up on Facebooger as well.

What Should an Ethicist Tell His Readers? – The New York Times

Hot Damn! The New York Times has abandoned the panel approach for this column. It makes me so happy I left what was probably my first online comment for the NYT.

I also noticed that the stupid app I use to read the paper finally (finally) fixed the glitch for the poem in the Sunday magazine. When the magazine format recently updated, the poem was never there. One had to click a link and it never worked for me. I finally gave up. Yesterday I noticed that the poem was now right there on the app. Wow.