I’ve Located The Last Page Of The Intertunnel

I named it the Intertunnel, of course. You might call it the Interwebs, or the Hypertubes, or THE AOLs, or whatever. But no matter what you call it, it’s not a place; it’s more like a trip. An Alighierian trip. It starts out innocently, but it doesn’t end up that way — like a double date, or maybe representative democracy.

Maybe you start out a German tenor —August Schramm, let’s say– and there you are, standing up straight and trying to get Mozart up a stump in a concert hall where everyone can get a look at him.

But you can’t leave well enough alone, can you? You get one of those cameras full of pixels and brimstone, and point it at yourself, and upload that badboy to the Intertunnel. Pretty soon you get to poking around on the Interwebs after you watch your own video on YouTube. In no time at all, you’re picking Lady Gaga’s merkin hair out of the Intertunnel’s intellectual shower drain:

There you go, folks. We’re done here. The Intertunnel is finished. Kaput, if August is tuning in. You can turn it off and go outside now. But for God’s sake, don’t press the print button first.

(Thanks, I think, to reader and commenter and correspondent Charles Schneider for sending that one along. I guess. Pretty sure. Maybe. Whatever)

Your Plumbing Doesn’t Work

I played trombone in a local symphony orchestra many long years ago. You’d be hard pressed to believe how little classical music is written for the awful piece of plumbing I was blatting into. Like many “modern” instruments, it got parts written for other instruments transcribed for it, here and there, but in general, you’d open up the sheet music and see the the big bar going across the page to indicate the number of measures you were supposed to count silently without playing before you got to your part, and the number would be something like 242. Then play fourteen notes and get another 242 bars rest. Imagine counting to 4 — 242 times. It was like 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, only duller because you were sober. Well, everybody else was sober. I started drinking.

So I like to see the freaks getting some. Here’s Mozart, played on a Flugelhorn. Man, that’s just wrong. But I don’t want to be right; never have.