Tag: ditty

See You In (my) Church

When I went to Sunday school many, many years ago, they taught us the little ditty “Here Is The Church” (… here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people). You’d make a church with your hands pressed together as you sang, raising the steeple by extending and touching the tips of your pointer fingers. Today, sixty-odd years later, those same hands will build a cathedral – Notre-Dame de Paris. Granted my church is made from LEGO blocks and the entire model will be smaller than a cornerstone of the real Notre-Dame, but at least the steeple is made from more than fingers.

So then, “Here Is The Cathedral”… in its purchased form. The cardboard box you see is not what I would call huge, but it’s an ample residence for 4,383 plastic pieces. These pieces dwell in thirty-four separate plastic bag communities, just begging to be liberated.  Buried underneath all these subdivisions (in the crypt, if you will) is the brick of an instruction manual, a veritable phone book of almost 300 pages. C’mon, you didn’t think we’d raise this cathedral in a single blog post, did you?

Mr. Instruction Manual could be called the mayor of this manufactured mess. He guides me on who gets together with who, when they get together, how they get together, and what it’s all supposed to look like as I go.  Mr. Manual has pages and pages of impressive illustrations (like this one), but also some LOL ones (like the one below). I mean, check out the upper left corner.  Am I really supposed to vigorously shake the bag out like that? The tiny residents will go running in all directions! We’re trying to create order from chaos here, people, not the other way around.

I expect all of the same challenges I encountered when I built the LEGO Grand Piano. I’ll think pieces are missing until somehow they appear right in front of me. I’ll connect pieces incorrectly and have to backtrack several steps to get them right. I’ll be left with extra pieces every now and then, and forever wonder if they were really “extra” or perhaps “overlooked”.  And I’ll police plastic piles around the meager real estate of my home office desk.  Maybe I require a shepherd’s crook or a bullhorn?  I mean, it’s me versus 4,383 others so you can see how one or two of them are bound to escape.

Here’s a thoughtful aspect of LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris, and oh-so appealing to the architect in me. The model will be built in the same chronological order as the original was (instead of, say, from the ground up). The first twenty years of Notre-Dame’s construction produced only the rounded east end you see here, which served by itself as a functioning church. The next twenty years generated the full footprint but without the roof, towers, and other noteworthy exterior elements.  The final sixty years brought everything across the finish line.  So I’ll be building the LEGO model in the same order, only in a hundred days (or less) instead of a hundred years.

10,000 piece tower

Before I snap Piece 1 onto Piece 2, let me dress down my many thousands of new plastic friends.  Together they comprise nowhere near the largest of the LEGO sets.  A model of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle is over 6,000 pieces.  The LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon is over 7,500 pieces.  LEGO Titanic (er, before it sank): 9,000 pieces.  And standing regally at the top of the LEGO podium (and just a twenty-minute bus ride from Notre-Dame de Paris): the Eiffel Tower, the only LEGO model to exceed 10,000 pieces.  To each of these top-tens I say non.  Notre-Dame will be challenge enough for this builder/blogger.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #1

Now that we’ve had the prelude (so to speak) it’s time for the church service to begin!  Bag #1 – of 34 bags of pieces – houses the first 100 or so of the little guys.  LEGO thoughtfully opted for a sub-community in Bag #1 for the tiniest of residents (some of which are just begging for tweezers).

chaos

Mr. Instruction Manual (who is multilingual by the way; he speaks English, French, and Spanish), warns me to “… avoid danger of suffocation by keeping this bag away from babies and children!”  Mr. Manual also wants me to know my thousand of pieces were manufactured in five different countries: Denmark (of course), Mexico, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic.

danger

It’s fair to say I haven’t stood in the LEGO “pulpit” for awhile.  I snapped pieces together incorrectly at least three times today.  I also thought I was missing pieces twice, and I fretted over the fact I ended up with two leftovers.  Let’s hope our church service is smoother next week!  In the meantime, here is the build of Bag #1.  Not much to look at but at least it’s the foundation of the east end of the Cathedral.  In 1163 Pope Alexander III oversaw the first stone being set in place.  In 2025 nobody saw me do the same.

order

Bag #: 1

Running build time: 25:38. 

Total leftover pieces: 2

American Tune-Up

Each of the fifty United States is represented by more than just a flag. America’s state symbols include animals, birds, trees, flowers, and songs. As a kid growing up in California I memorized these items, and years later I’ve still got them.  The “Golden State” has the Grizzly Bear, the Valley Quail, the Redwood, the Poppy, and “I Love You, California”.  Imagine my interest then, when Brooklyn Magazine took an updated stab at the state songs, publishing “The Musical Map of the United States”.

Image courtesy of Brooklyn Magazine, October 2016

Brooklyn Mag’s map is more than meets the eye (see here).  It’s not a collection of easy ditties you and I might come up with: Beach Boys for CA, John Denver for CO, Frank Sinatra for NY.  Instead, it’s a broad spectrum of lesser-known tunes, attached to the states by writers who chose them.  Read their stories and listen to their song choices.  It’s like 50+ blogs in one, plus a playlist if you want to shift the whole shebang to your smartphone.

Here’s a sampling of the Map’s creativity.  The writers chose Kenny Knight’s “America” for Colorado, a “dusty, country rock gem” with lyrics befitting its patriotic title (even if the song itself twangs along modestly).  For California, the writers needed two songs – Joni Mitchell’s “California”, and Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode”.  The former artist is Canadian; the latter raised in the gangland streets of Compton near Los Angeles.  You’ll find Mitchell’s folk music as appropriate as Dre’s rap for such a diverse state.

As I studied the Map, I realized each of us possesses our own musical geography, accumulating map dots as we move through life.  My own map began on the 8-track player of my father’s Cadillac in the 1960’s, crooning along with Perry Como as he claimed, “the bluest skies you’ve ever seen (are) in Seattle”.  By the 1970’s, I’d moved on to a hard-earned collection of 45-rpm records (“singles”), focusing on Top 40 bubble-gum one-hit wonders like Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” and Terry Jack’s “Seasons in the Sun”.  Also in the 70’s – courtesy of my brother’s extensive LP collection (and a stereo capable of a sonic boom) – I mapped to all kinds of rock, including Emerson Lake, & Palmer, The Eagles, Elton John, and Linda Ronstadt.

By the 1980’s, I’d graduated to cassette tapes and the easy-listening music of John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, and Barry Manilow (to which some would say, two steps forward three steps back).  Later in the ’80’s, I embraced compact discs with a budding affection for country music (Alabama), continuing to this day (Thomas Rhett).

Throw in a handful of downloads from my kids (Katy Perry, Meghan Trainor), sprinkle the whole mess with classical symphonies and concertos – a carryover from childhood piano lessons – and you have my musical map.  I’ll bet yours is wildly different.

Even the world of sports has a musical map, as Steve Rushin wrote in an excellent piece in this week’s Sports Illustrated (“Cheer and Trebling”).  You can’t hear the whistling of “Sweet Georgia Brown” without thinking Harlem Globetrotters, just as you can’t make it through baseball’s seventh inning without singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.  You won’t leave Yankee Stadium without Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, just as you won’t hear John Williams’ spectacular “Fanfare” without thinking Olympic Games.  Moments of silence at sporting events are literally reserved for the dearly departed.  Otherwise it’s all marching bands, pipe organs, and loudspeaker instrumentals.

My now-home state Colorado has a set of symbols like California.  The “Centennial State” has the Bighorn Sheep, the Lark Bunting, the Blue Spruce, the Columbine, and John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High”.  But the song could just as easily be Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful”, inspired by the Rocky Mountain peak I can see as I type.  The song could also be Kenny Knight’s “America”.

You listen.  You choose.  There are no right or wrong answers here.  Remember, even Google Maps gives you several options as you navigate your way.