My clan have always fancied ourselves capable singers and musicians — my father used to bemoan our not forming a family choir like the von Trapps — but none of us have been quite willing to quit our day jobs. So, it's good to see that two Onkens have continued the pursuit. My sister Katie has formed the Katie O Combo and created its own MySpace page; and my neice Julia has recently started her own YouTube Channel. Maybe there's hope yet.

Here's something we don't get to do every day:
As part of a massive, ongoing renovation, MoDOT closed (completely) the West half of Interstate-64, the main artery running through the central corridor of St Louis County. Yesterday, before the ribbon cutting ceremony that simultaneously opened the West half and closed the East half, MoDOT opened the new highway to pedestrian traffic only. "Let's go walk on the new highway" was The holiday event this year.

My friend Walter and I have spent the last two weeks swapping e-mails of '80s music videos that have shown up on the YouTube. It has been an often embarrassing, but truly enjoyable, walk down memory lane, including videos of songs we didn't get to see on the old 24 hour Music Television channel. Here is the latest find, "Messages" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark:

And here is Walt's response:

Very nice!

I love the good ol’ early eighties abandoned warehouses.

That would be Paul playing Andy’s bass. Interestingly, I wonder if Paul is also left handed as is the bass – he makes a pretty convincing left paw if he ain’t.

I guess Andy was too be busy being moody and the bass would have covered up that tie – I’m glad he did his side-step-in-one-place-dance towards the end though.

To explain, we both loved OMD back in the early '80s, and stuck with the band after the horror that was "If You Leave". We all went to a concert on their "Crush" Tour and got invited back to the Tour Bus to hang out with the band, so watching the video is much more personal. Andy McCluskey, singing in the video, plays the bass and Paul Humphreys plays keyboards, so we were shocked and amused to see Paul riffing out Andy's bass line. Andy and Paul were huge Kraftwerk fans - as were we - and the band's earlier work fills that same space in electronic music history between the Moog and the Emulator. Other old videos I found are their first, "Electricity" (based loosely on Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity"), the live version of "Enola Gay" from Urgh! A Music War, the Scandinavian epic that is "Maid of Orleans", and the great-tune-turned-silly-video "Telegraph". Love that YouTube!

Is it me...

or should they not look so pleased with her touching that thing?

(I have depended on Qiagen kits for most of my preparations for the past decade or more, and recommend them highly, but their ads are something else.)

Yesterday's Word-of-the-Day was, "Monadnock". It's come up before, and always makes me smile, since we go to New Hampshire every summer (except the last two years — don't even mention it to the kids!) and have scaled Mt. Monadnock. The view from the summit is rivaled by the sense of accomplishment at reaching it, especially on a sunny, midsummer's day. Margaret had woven many tales of clambering up "Mou-na-na-nock" as a child, and recalled the view of the mountain from Keene, NH, and how it had seemed to call to her from its lofty perch. My first ascent, we had a friend from Chicago staying at the lake with us, who fancied himself a photographer and wanted desperately to capture the view from the top of Margaret's fabled peak. At the trailhead, he asked an elderly couple coming down the mountain if there were more than the one trail to the top. "I think the Pocka Trail goes all the way up." Only later, after almost getting lost and consulting the map did we learn that our guides were visiting from Boston. "Clamber" was an accurate description of the first half of the ascent, regardless of the trail chosen. But it was worth standing atop the geological survey marker and looking for the Boston skyline in the haze.

I also enjoy seeing Monadnock as the Word-of-the-day, because its etymology has always bothered me. According to Wordsmith, Mount Monadnock is "a peak in New Hampshire, whose name in Algonquian means isolated mountain." What bothered me was that monad in English meant "a single, isolated unit" and knock in English meant "hill", so somehow the Algonquian and English languages had undergone some sort of crazy convergent evolution culminating in a single word, Monadnock, that meant the same thing in both languages. So today, I did some research and found, "Algonquian Names of Some Mountains and Hills" by William Wallace Tooker in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 17, No. 66 (Jul. - Sep., 1904), pp. 171-179 (available through JSTOR). Tooker says:

man, or mon, is a significant prefix to many word combinations... meaning "wonderful," "wonder," "vision," "revelation," "marvellous," etc. It is from the primary verbal root -an, "surpassing," "going beyond," "is more than the common," with the indefinite impersonal m prefix added, which with its generic -adn, "mountain," and the locative -ock, "place," gives as a synthesis of Man-adn-ock, "land or country of the surpassing mountain."

So, Monadnock is the land of the wondrous mountain, and Mt. Monadnock is the mountain of the land of the wondrous mountain; and the colonists who first heard the locals call the area Man-adn-ock probably felt the same sense of linguistic convergence as I did and assumed Monad-knock was Algonquian for isolated hill.
Next post: as a child I spent a week at the Grand Tetons...