Now that my laptop is mostly working and I have free hard drive space, I can do things like digitize more 33 RPMs again! hooray.

So I have digitized some 33 RPMs. :D This post is a birthday present for my sister, who has said I should do some of these, but the rest of you are welcome to share them too.

( Man On The Moon/CBS Enterprises/Narrated by Walter Cronkite + Sounds of the Space Age/National Geographic/Frank Borman/1969 )

( The In Sound from Way Out: Electronic Pop Music of the Future created by Perrey-Kingsley )

...and finally, this isn't a 33 RPM rip, it's a .zip file that contains both of Nichelle Nichols' vocal albums. Because stellar_dust once gave me a giant mp3 torrent/archive that had "all the albums ever put out by Star Trek people", and it didn't include these, which was a crime on several levels. And so I found them, and have been meaning to share them more widely for some time.

The .zip includes Down to Earth, produced in 1967, which is a collection of Ms. Nichols singing '60s lounge/pop/standards, and is unsurprisingly really very good if you like lounge/pop/standards (which I do. Why didn't they have *her* be the TNG holodeck crooner?) It also includes Out of This World, a later album of original songs themed around space and Star Trek, and is (perhaps surprisingly?) really bad. I mean, worse that Shatner's albums. Her voice is still excellent, but the songs they gave her to sing are cringingly bad; the music direction somehow even managed to screw up her vocal cover of the TOS theme.

Uhura.zip

(...also there will be cakes later. Under lock.)

Okay, let's try this again.

The lists of free books have been updated. I am giving away all the books tagged "togoaway" in my LibraryThing Account.

You can see the list at my LibraryThing account here, or if LT is being buggy, it's up my webspace here.

I am also giving away books from my Dad's library, here at Librarything and and here at my webspace.

If you want any, leave me a comment with titles, and I will send them to you for shipping costs or less. Get me your email address (either here or at thisaccountname at yahoo) and I'll get back to you early next week for details once I've actually pulled out your books.

Also! Have another weird LP rip. This one appears to be the soundtrack of a son et lumiere production given at Gizeh of the pyramids in 1961. Full of bombastic classical music and very British historical voiceovers and random, old-fashioned translations of Egyptian texts. Fun! It's one mp3, because there were no natural breakpoints, 50 minutes. Here History Began.mp3


..also, as part of my ongoing effort to be less lurky online, I'm friending some of the people I've been watching through friendsfriends. So if I've just friended you, Hi! I've been watching you! Claim some books.

How is it possible to screw up *rice krispie treats*? (Well, cheerios treats actually, but the principle's the same.) Six year olds can make them!

...I've decided to blame the marshmallows. The marshmallows were too old. I was only making them in the first place in order to use up the elderly marshmallows.

Ah well. I needed an excuse to scrub down the entire kitchen anyway. And I did get a lumpy thing that's a third the size the recipe called for and is closer to the "popcorn ball" end of the scale than the "rice krispie treat" end, but still nummy. And some quite excellent homemade caramel chews.

Moral of the story: next time you need to use up baking sweets, just go right for the caramel and cut out the middle-man. You always end up there *anyway*.

In other news, have been playing with USB turntable and record collection. The first one I ripped was "When Dalliance Was In Flower, Vol. III" by Ed McCurdy, which is a 1959 record of bawdy British folksongs, mostly from the early-18th-century collection "Wit And Mirth or Pills To Purge Melancholy". It's not musically brilliant - standard male singer accompanied by banjo and guitar. And it's both a lot less witty and a lot less bawdy than your typical bawdy folksong of today. But it's very, very early-60s-folk-movement. And some of them are catchy. (Especially "Bees? In my cunny? It's more likely than you think!") Anyway I couldn't find the tracks easily available online anywhere, except at collector's prices on LP, so here, share! (I may attempt to set up a torrent later. But that scares me.)

( Zip, cover, & tracklist under cut )

The case had some pretty severe water damage, so I did the best I could with the cover and the text. The record was in good condition, though. I did mess with noise removal and click reduction on some of these tracks, and then decided it didn't really need it. You can tell me if you can tell the difference.

And yes, there was a Dalliance 1-2 and a Son of Dalliance, but they haven't shown up in any of my local thrift shops yet. Sorry.