Mike and Dick pop up in Dick's Toolbox unexpectedly

Mike's Pith & Wind - Encore!
I was going to quote from the review of the Chick Corea/ Gary Burton concert in this morning’s Age, but the on-line version is not the one I read in the hard copy, (or paper paper), which was more of a preview really. Anyway, you’ll have to take my word for it that the review was pretty enthusiastic about all aspects of the said show, except for the ending. After ninety minutes of apparently blissful music, the band didn’t return to the Hamer Hall stage for an encore. The reviewer wasn’t happy, and I can’t guess how the audience felt, but they might’ve felt as cheated as the reviewer did - or not.
The (musical) encore is an elusive beast – one minute it’s obligatory, the next it’s indulgent. My niece Louise, in her role as Supergirly, overcomes the problem by telling the audience in advance that she's going to have a ‘spontaneous’ encore, and explaining exactly what their role is in it. It’s not a bad strategy, because the audience is not always certain whether their role is crucial in determining whether the act will come back on stage or not.
My favourite encore was when Elvis Costello was in town promoting the Bacarach/Costello CD, Painted From Memory. It was obvious Elvis was having a very hard time hitting anything like the notes as scored, his microscopic range and his natural adenoidal disposition being further inhibited/enhanced by a cold and/or from simply overdoing it the night before in Sydney.
I still can’t believe he didn’t transpose the songs into a more congenial key – he had only the one pianist accompanying him – but he struggled on with this admittedly challenging material painfully.. read more

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Gazing along the bookshelf I noticed The Lonely Planet German Phrasebook, which I eventually realised had brought back by my daughter from a semester studying law in Dublin, (a time that she combined with glandular fever and flying visits to Paris, Berlin, Spain, Portugal and Morocco). The only German phrasebook I ever owned was pretty bad 25 years ago, probably useless now, and served my wife and me extremely poorly when we were middle-aged back-packers in Bavaria. I suspect that it was in some peculiar Swabian vernacular and specifically designed to prevent you eating or finding out where the toilets where - though without one the other was not necessary.
The Italian phrase book that accompanied us on the same trip was much better, and I am convinced that it was only my pronunciation that led me to ask a large Italian fellow passenger on a slow train to Rome whether I could.. read more