TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS.

Summertime is for street parades, and we'll take in a few.

Let's start in Czajków, Poland, where the District Brass Band Festival features, as one might expect, local marching bands, as well as the high-stepping majorettes characteristic of recent Polish street parades.

Our next stop is Neuss-Rosellerheide-Neuenbaum, Germany, with Die große Sonntags-Parade in the June 2026 Schützenfest.

Try not to think about marching on Poland.

We'll wrap in in Peru, Indiana, where the Circus City Festival Parade took place Saturday last.  The parade, in the fashion of small city summertime parades throughout These United States, includes fire apparatus, civic and political organizations, businesses, and the local schools' marching bands.  Taken together, the parade takes ninety minutes to pass.  Saturday was a hot day.  I found a shady spot with a decent view of the street, and recorded the circus-relevant units, particularly those involving horses, cages, or calliopes.  During the Circus City Festival, local young people demonstrate their skill in the circus arts, such as acrobatics, juggling, the trapeze, and the high wire.  Those performers marched, rode, or, as you will see, performed.

Half past July, and the blue norther teased its return last night. Sunsets are coming perceptibly earlier as well.

THE MUSTER, POLISH STYLE.

I'm not sure which local bands are participating in this Polish street parade.  Sometimes they are the bands of the fire companies, or they might be civic organizations.  This parade, in Koniecpol southeast of Częstochowa, also features numerous troupes of majorettes high stepping and twirling.

But for the khrushchobas along the parade route, it puts me in mind of a smaller city Decoration Day or Independence Day parade during the American High.

ALL HANDS TO THE PUMPS!

The Popular Perspective on work songs has long been that they establish unity of effort.

As newcomers dove into a vast backcatalog of songs, many quickly highlighted just how catchy these tunes really are. But while early sea shanty composers didn’t envision ever reaching the top of the charts, they certainly wrote them to be earworms. The sea shanty is only one variant of a work song—rhythmic melodies designed to help laborers keep pace with one another during repetitive, often backbreaking jobs. Other types of work songs developed over generations among Appalachian coal miners, prison chain gangs, and British textile workers, just to name a few examples.

Yes, tightening the side-wall on the Big Top:  "Break it, pull it, shake it, now downstake it!  Move on to the next one."

POLISH ARMY CHEERLEADERS.

Because why not?

Enjoy.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN.

Italy's Olympians used Rossini's "Figaro" (from Il Barbieri di Siviglia) as their walk-up music.  Although the opening performances featured giant circus heads of Rossini as well as Verdi and Puccini (what, no Vivaldi?) there were no references to Bugs Bunny.  Cold Spring Shops hereby correct that oversight.

The competition was under way before the opening ceremonies, with, for example, the United States mixed doubles curling team qualifying for the medal round Sunday, beating Sweden in a match that was much more edifying than any Super Bowl halftime show or the counterprogramming.

WOKE RUINS EVERYTHING.

A Canadian musicologist, James Deaville, linked to by The College Fix, offers an essay (in something called The Conversation, I don't know if that qualifies as a Minimal Publishable Unit) describing It's A Wonderful Life as "A Christmas classic that reflects bigoted ideas about ‘proper’ music in the 1940s."  He could have stuck to the musicology, perhaps coming to grips with director Frank Capra and the soundtrack composer never collaborating again.  Instead, he has to inject contemporary sensibilities that might have not been relevant immediately after the War.

The movie’s soundtrack — including contributions by Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin — plays a central role in It’s a Wonderful Life, underscoring problems and tensions beneath the surface. Some depictions of music and sound beg analysis around how these reflect racist ideas about “proper” musical, social and community norms.

Perhaps those depictions "begged" analysis in the sense that nobody would have perceived any cause to offer any, or perhaps the phrase the professor seeks is "provoke analysis," or "prompt me to inject my sensibilities," because that's what a lot of people who claim to be intellectual do these days.

MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree.

As was the case last year, this video features only the vintage trains in the sun room, running in a moderate tempo.  Feel free to enjoy them with a glass of hot tea, properly provided with a podstakannik, or a glass of mulled wine or perhaps egg-nog enlivened with a splash of bourbon or rum.

Rest assured, there are videos in preparation showing the scale model railroad rolling stock going through their paces, as well as showing tinplate trains chasing their tails at high speed the way children of all ages flock to see.

As was the case a year ago, I'm taking time away for a few football games, for a long winter's nap, for some tidying up around the house, and for some serious work down cellar.

Thank you for looking in.  Enjoy the Festive Season.  Posting will resume next year, some time after Three Kings.

WHY HIGHER ED GETS MORE TURNING POINT CHAPTERS.

Defending a student who gets zero points for writing a bad answer might not be the hill to die on.

On the other hand, the woke parody of the Consciousness Revolution never fails to provoke Normals.

An a cappella group at Kent State University in Ohio allegedly banned white students from auditioning for certain solos and disciplined a longtime member for questioning the race-based policy.

Emails obtained by Campus Reform display how Vocal Intensity A Cappella limited certain solos to “people of color,” claiming white students would be engaging in “cultural appropriation” if they were to perform them.

The article is from two days ago and as we publish there have been no responses from Kent State's deanlets.  In the Oppression Olympics, there are no medalists.  Everybody loses.

THE FEAST OF ST. MARTIN'S.

It might be the opening act of Karneval, and it starts with a German version of Beggars Night.

Children make paper lanterns, fasten them to sticks, and walk the neighborhoods singing songs.  Often, they are led by someone dressed in a St. Martin outfit, which looks very much like a Roman Soldier carrying a sword.  The procession ends at a bonfire with more singing and delicious food.  Some children will then go door to door collecting treats like candy or money as a reward for their singing and beautiful lanterns.

Just before Aschermittwoch there will be a different sort of bonfire and it might involve singing and beer.

Apparently, this St. Martin was a Roman soldier, baptised as a Christian, and later made Bishop of Tours.  He is the patron saint of Modesty and Altruism (which might be as good reason as any to open Karneval with a Teutonic Beggars Night) and has gone afield with Neville Marriner.  There are other traditions one might consider.

This has been a trying year, and we might work a few Karneval references into posts through the Festive Season.  We've already got to Model Railroad Season.  "The eleventh of November is Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth countries, Veterans Day in the States, and the beginning of Karneval in the Rhineland."

The Music Choice Christmas rotation has begun and within the past hour we heard from Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift covering "Santa Baby."  This year she got the ring, and she didn't mean on the phone!

CONSERVING ANCIENT CLOCKS.

A few years ago, Cold Spring Shops added a toy clock to the study.  We've subsequently learned more about the song it plays.  Tradition has composer Henry Clay Work being inspired by the story of a broken floor clock in a North Country inn.  There might be a second element to the song, though, in the Work family house in Massachusetts.

That very clock sat in Dan Parker’s grandfather’s home in Massachusetts when Parker, now retired and living at the Holly Creek retirement community in Centennial, was growing up.

“The first time I was aware of it I was about 5 years old or so,” Parker said. “We lived on the second floor of the farmhouse and my grandparents were on — the clock lived on the first floor. I'd hear it strike and that didn't bother me any. But then the first time I saw it I was about, oh, I don't know, but maybe 36, 40 inches tall … I had to just about bend back over to see the top.”

The song was written in 1876 by a well-known composer named Henry Clay Work, who was married to Parker’s second-great aunt. Counting back from then and noting the song’s lyric “it stood 90 years on the floor,” Parker figures the clock was built sometime in the early 1790s.

That Mr Work might have borrowed details from the history of his clock is how art proceeds, but, clearly, if Dan Parker is hearing it chiming during this century, that clock could not have stopped. short. never to go again.

THE FRUSTRATING FASCINATION THAT IS BASEBALL.

As March gave way to April, we noted, "It's a long season, you don't give up on it after a week."  Nor do you count coup until the final out is recorded.  Consider, two weeks ago, the Mets hosting the Padres in New York.

I should say that what happened before the game between the Mets and Padres was too sweet to ignore.

A performance of the national anthem is the norm before most professional sporting events, but the person who performed last night's rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner" wasn't just any old musician. She is the wife of Mets' shortstop Francisco Lindor.

Katia Reguero Lindor played a beautiful version of the song on her violin, but what made it even more special was the way her husband and their three young children — Kalina, Amapola, and Koa — reacted. Francisco, who was holding baby Koa and standing next to their two daughters, couldn't hide his pride for his wife. He smiled, got emotional, and jumped up and down while she performed. It was just such a pure and wholesome moment — a nice change of pace from the news in recent weeks.

Here is the performance.

Francisco Lindor's wife Katia played the national anthem on the violin ahead of tonight's Mets game! pic.twitter.com/rIKuEGiIhn

— MLB (@MLB) September 16, 2025

The Mets and Padres were jockeying for wild card seedings behind the Phillies and Dodgers.  The Mets won that game.  You can't give up on the season with a week or two to go, either.

On June 12th👇

Mets had the best record in baseball at 45-24.

Brewers were 37-33 and 8.5 games behind the Mets.

Since then👇

Mets went 38-55 and missed the playoffs.

Brewers went 60-32 and earned the best record in baseball.

Incredible. pic.twitter.com/F7Ij4Rvrys

— Hunter Baumgardt (@hunterbonair) September 29, 2025

Sometime in May, one of the sports pundits who create power rankings, not because he knows anything, but because sports fans expect such things, suggested that the Cubs had finally shaken off the Brewers, who were playing somewhere near .500 baseball at the time and five or six games behind the Cubs.  Then came those three winning streaks, eight, eleven, fourteen games.  Yes, the Brewers did win a club-best 97 games this year, clinching the playoffs, the division, a bye, and the top seed without invoking any of the tie-breakers that they held.  The division clinch came on a day both they and the Cubs lost, and the top seed clinch came on a day both they and the Phillies lost.

On the final day of the season, the Brewers won that 97th game, which meant the Reds had to get some help from the Miami Marlins, who took the Saturday and Sunday games from the Mets.

It is the custom in Major League Baseball to offer visiting teams a suitable background for a photo shoot in the event of one of those clinches taking place.  Milwaukee's stadium staff were up to the occasion.

Now come the playoffs, and identifying a favorite is a fool's errand.  The Brewers await the winner of the wild card Cubs and Padres, who will play in Chicago, while the Phillies will play the winner of the Dodgers, who had the fewest wins among the division champions and who will host the Reds.  In the former junior circuit (with realignments and interleague play, is there such a thing as the National or American League any more?) the Blue Jays are the top seed, awaiting the winner of the wild card Red Sox at the Yankees, the Yankees losing a tie-breaker to the Blue Jays, and the Mariners will play the winner of Cleveland, a division winner with one fewer win than the Red Sox, hosting the Tigers, with one fewer win than the Indians Guardians.  First pitch will be at noon (Central) Tuesday, in Cleveland.

LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS.

Today in celebrity gossip:  "Cardi B announces she’s expecting her fourth child, first with NFL star Stefon Diggs."

Strong the authenticity is in this one.

The Grammy-winning “I like It” artist is already a mother to three young children — Kulture, eight, Wave, three, and Blossom, one — that she shares with ex-husband, fellow rapper Offset. The former couple began dating in early 2017 before tying the knot in a secret wedding that September. After years of an on-and-off relationship, Cardi filed for divorce a second time in July 2024.

In October 2024, she sparked dating rumors with the 31-year-old New England Patriots wide receiver. They made their first public appearance together as a couple in May at a New York Knicks game.

She has figured out how to keep her spawn in Pampers.

“Now y’all can buy my album, so I can buy Pampers and diapers and all that type of stuff,” Cardi quipped. “I told ya, now go support my album because I’m a mother of four now.”

Her audience?  Maybe not so much.

American Mind's Dan McCarthy summarizes.  "The natural and traditional ties between people are subjected to a constant acid bath." In his view, what the self-styled thought leaders are doing is neither stressing the organism, in the sense of "whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger," nor assisting in the emergence of a fitter organism through mutation, adaptation, and selection. It's maladaptiveness for its own sake. "Outside the family, our culture of celebrity individualism is indistinguishable from underclass irresponsibility."  That's a point going back at least as far as Emmett Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up, wherein what trickled down from Hollywood to the poorer quarters was the bastardy and drug dependence, but in the poorer quarters there are neither expensive fixer lawyers nor cheap illegal immigrant nannies.

Thus, while Cardi is selling albums and the celebrity journalists and influencers will have plenty of baby bump photos to peddle for clicks and subscriptions, her fans in the paradises of the likes of Chicago might be hoping that the food pantry is stocked, that the EBT server doesn't crash at the grocer, that the violent baby-daddy soon to be released from prison will stay away.  And some things never change.  There are still pundits suggesting, in the wake of the disaster that was the Biden-Harris-Walz campaign, that their party isn't McGovernist enough.  That was a foolish argument in 2004, it is no better now.

The problem, dear Poor Man, is that the national Democratic Party has taken the morality out of poverty issues. As in avoiding being "judgemental" about bastardy, drug use, or being foolishly "authentic" is more important than noting the value of a few simple things, such as learning one's sums or being careful about who one gets naked with, or simply showing up, in avoiding to be poor.

It's on Normals to figure out the success sequence, despite the efforts of the sports and entertainment types to pretend it doesn't matter.

LET OKTOBERFEST SEASON BEGIN.

In Milwaukee, the Oktoberfest season begins with German Fest, the final weekend of July, and continues into early October.  Here are highlights of the opening ceremonies there and the rituals elsewhere.

In Wisconsin, and at selected locations in the State Line area south of the Cheddar Curtain, there are several Oktoberfesten to choose among.

Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

CONCLUDING SCHÜTZENFEST SEASON.

We've noted the continuation of Prussian military traditions in the local Schützenfest street parades, and so too with the closing ceremonies, the Großer Zapfenstreich.  The title literally refers to the drawing of a string to finish the tapping of the beer, although it is the military equivalent of securing the colors with Retreat.

Usually the Zapfenstreich occurs after dark, hence the torchbearers, and traditionally after the national anthem comes Beethoven's Yorkscher March.

With the Germans again establishing a presence in Livonia, and recently resuming conscription, it's possible we'll be seeing those Prussian military traditions more frequently.

BACK TO SCHOOL.

Yes, there are lots of Eventful Things going on.  Those can wait for next month.  We'll close out August, and the summer season, with the University of Wisconsin Marching Band playing their way off a heritage trolley.

Enjoy the long weekend.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

ECHOES OF THE KAISER'S NAVY.

Schützenfest season continues, and here's video of Sunday's Königsparade (there are several excuses to break out the flags and the bands) from Dormagen-Delhoven, which is upriver a few kilometers from Düsseldorf.  I'm learning a few more things about the participants.  You'll see pioneers in seventeenth-century headgear carrying polished axes and saws; they would be clearing the way for the troops.  I've also seen more than one parade group in naval uniform carrying the Kaiser's version of the Navy Jack.

Those units all marched in the opening of the parade.

JÄGERMEISTER, JÄGERMEISTER, I'LL. HAVE. SOME.

"Gebirgsmusikkorps der Bundeswehr Garmisch-Partenkirchen - Mussinan Marsch - Olper Schützenfest 2025" suggests that Bundeswehr musicians participate in Schützenfest parades and concerts.

That's all to the good. Watch the Hunt Club member at the left of your screen!

THE LIMITS OF RILING UP THE AUDIENCE.

New York's Times reports the passing of mathematician and parody song singer Tom Lehrer.  Among his reasons for leaving the show circuit was this reflection.

When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Riling the audience up for applause might have been how Stephen Colbert ultimately went wrong.  But them, Mr Lehrer faced the same quandary.  "'I used to laugh more. Now I get angry,' he told NPR in 1997. 'And it's very hard to be satiric and — or to be funny, let's say — and angry at the same time.'"

Well, yes.  I credit Mr Lehrer with the ability to mock the sort of Excessively Earnest People who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.  And yet he also had the ability to make such people comfortable with their prejudices.  "Once upon a time, the likes of Tom Lehrer and the coastal cosmopolitans could get away with that sort of mockery, as their advocacy of the end of Jim Crow was a cause almost everyone accepted, although whether its end justified the massive expansion of federal powers or the extension of notions of social justice to abortion or the sexual underground remains subject to debate."

Mr Lehrer understood at some level the limits to mocking Normals.  "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good."  Public life is the worse for those who have followed him losing sight of that wisdom.  R.I.P.

BEWARE OF TRAINS.

Schützenfest season continues, with "Die Parade der Hubertus-, Scheibenschützen, Artillerie, und Reiter" in Holzheim.

Note some train movements leading to pauses in the parade.  Note also that breaking ranks to avoid the horse-apples (what, nobody with a wheelbarrow and scoop shovel in the circus fashion?) is permissible.

MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS.

In Monday's Meme Madness Twitchy's Fuzzy Chimp included this.

Best orchestra prank ever, the funniest trombone section, WAIT FOR IT!!😅 pic.twitter.com/9nDAAT1ynE

— 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 (@Hoang_HQ) July 11, 2025

Who knew Prokofiev offered an ad-libbing opportunity.