Imitation is the puest form of flattery

Very little of my lifetime output has been purely original. Of course, the really creative can get away w ith quoting themselves. Was it not George Bernard Shaw who said, "I often quote myself. I find it adds spice to my conversation" He allegedly is also the guy who responded to his long time lover, who wanted to conceive their baby, saying, " with your brains and my beauty, it would be a wonderful child!" GBS responded, "But what if the child had MY beauty and your brains. What then?

Well, you see, one of my blessings is a long term memory for funny thinking, by anybody who wrote it down. Evidence of this will keep cropping up. Today, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of an earthquake that fortunately killed only a couple of dozen people. It is sometimes called "The World Series quake", also for its epicenter "Loma Prieta" a location near the modest sized town called Santa Cruz. Damage from the quake was widely scattered. There were no cell-phones in those days, so it was a couple of days before my sister was able to hear from her eldest, at the UC branch there, that mostly all was well. She had to do without hot Water for a couple of days, as the water heater had capsized in her rooming house, . There were long distances between damage, for example, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge had a non-cable section which broke loose on one end, closing the bridge for a couple months and necessitating that we outsiders get to the City via the Golden Gate, if we must drive, but to get to a convention in the downtown convention center, I drove to the Concord stawtion and got onto the light rail.

But, you may be asking, where is the imitation here? Ain't any. My excuses were apt to be composers of the classics. After all, Bach kept using the same tunes and changing the orchestration. Besides Ravel, several composers have reasonable takeoffs on Mussorgsky's piano piece, "Pictures at an Exhibition", Ashkenazy did a pretty good one, to my mind. I think Stokowski had a good try to his credit. Charles Ives' "Variations on 'God save the King", which we call "America" in the USA, also, "My country 'tis of Thee", which he wrote for organ, are an almost unalloyed delight. Those interested in such fun trivia are recommended to use the internet to call up "SF Gate", "Columns". Jon Carroll, and then in his archive, an item called "Mondegreens" This is really recommended, until i write something really profound or "Hold-your-belly funny".