Get Your Bag On

No surprise that I’m about to say I believe it’s a special (different, out-of-the-ordinary, etc) kind of person who’s attracted to playing the Great Highland Bagpipe. Loud, brash, hard to keep quiet and sometimes offensive – and I’m talking the instrument and not (necessarily) the player here – it seems to me shy folk are not generally attracted to playing bagpipes. Yes, exceptions to every rule but I say the bagpipe world is full the eff up with “type A” personalities (drummers included, here, too, but they’re another story).
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Thank You / Gracias / Merci / Tapadh leibh / Grazie

A rare and wonderful thing happened yesterday. At Georgetown highland games we saw a most deserving public thank-you [understatement].
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A Healthy Band: It’s About Feeling Good

We’re entering the time of year (in the northern hemisphere, at least) where pipe bands experience a drop in consistently good attendance. For as long as I have played in bands this has been a truth. From January through to March a good whack of the band, a sizable group of people (usually the same), fail to attend, or attend sporadically, due to “busy-ness” – or whatever. Excuses are legion and, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker [she of “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”], they run the gamut from A to B. The reasons may be unique to those “busy” but to core membership – and every band has a hardcore group of members that keep the ship afloat – they bore.
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What Makes a Good Pipe Band Score Sheet?

Having been around the game a while it sort of stands to reason that I will have seen a whackload of pipe band “score sheets”; you know, those near-impossible to read pages (sometimes due to penmanship) passed to bands following the announcement of results. And yay, reason prevails: I have.

It’s on these pages that bands usually learn what adjudicators thought of their competitive performance – and, by the way, it’s from these pages that pipebandspeople generally judge adjudicators. I’m a sentimental sort, believe it or not, and have, truth be told, quite a few pages dating back to my earliest times with bands laying around the old archives – and some recent artefacts, too.
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Gimme Shelter

This is Worlds week and as usual the city of Glasgow is thronging with pipers and drummers and all kinds of related Piping Live! events. It’s looking like a damp week (to put it mildly) is in store for pipers and drummers. Between “heavy rain showers”, “light rain showers” and “light rain” the cape carriers of the pipe band world will be sure to be under-employed. A good thing a lot of the Piping Live! events are either indoors or under cover.
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Google Me a Picture

I sometimes find Google’s search prompt annoying. It can be a distraction when I’m impatiently on the hunt for some bit of info. It’s way too easy to get drawn in to other lines of thinking, other searches and subject matter. Looking for a new Indian restaurant? Well before you know it you’ve got “indian names”, “indian consulate” and “indian railways”. Too many interesting prompts and challenges for my modest attention span. The prospect of a tasty new palak paneer dish just has to wait while I’m whisked away to some helpful, yet unplanned, visit to completely unconnected websites. Who knew that the Indian railway system carries 18 million passengers a day? Not me – until today.
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A Good Use of Time (Maybe)

I was watching the local news last week and a segment popped up that talked about the release of new internet stats. I can’t find the link to the piece otherwise I’d happily provide it here. Anyway, the story centred on the internet: now preferred over TV for entertainment and info-gathering.
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It’s a Small Worlds After All

BBC’s live streaming of today’s World Pipe Band Championships worked beautifully. In one marvelous effort the BBC has transformed, in one big-servered swoop, the perception of the the grand event as a need-to-be-there happening, at least for observers. A good set of speakers and high speed internet access provided any listener, anywhere, with at least as sound a listening post as those on the Green tenth row back from the ropes. To those who have never attended the event the broadcast has allowed a look-in to how things work and gives a fair representation to the scale of the event. To those pipe band zealots who have been (many times before, like me) and couldn’t attend, BBC’s magnanimity provided a fix that helped ease the angst of not being there.
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The Worlds: Draw Me a Picture

Another RSPBA head scratcher: how is it that the event at the World Pipe Band Championships that has the fewest entries (outside of the grade 4s) has a “qualifier”?
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Irony

Like a lot of you who happen to drop in I get most of my piping world news from pipesdrums.com. The Piping Live festival launch story really got me thinking – or annoyed, maybe that’s a better word (whinge alert).
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