Somehow I never had anything by David Bowie in my collection (other than a German version of “Heroes” on some sampler album, and “Under Pressure” on the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack) until recently when I picked up Best of Bowie (2002), which makes me wonder what the fuss is about. Perhaps he is celebrated for something other than music?

Okay, “Modern Love” is catchy.

Rhino Records made a series of CDs of Billboard Top Ten songs for various years. I wonder, if you summed every sequence of 52 consecutive weeks, how many songs would show in those Rolling Top Tens that never made a calendar year Top Ten?

Being nerdy, I might suggest this to Rhino: package the Top Ten of the chart’s first 52 weeks, and thereafter make a new package each time ten songs not in a previous package have reached the Rolling Top Ten.

The refrain of P. F. Sloan’s song “Let Me Be” (recorded by the Turtles) concludes,

I am what I am and that’s all I ever can be.

Defiance or fatalism?

Some simplified meantone guitars (here showing only the first octave):

pentatonic (GDAEB); seven naturals; three flats and two sharps; six flats and six sharps.

Here is the neck of a guitar that I’d like to have made someday, if I should ever develop the dexterity to make it worthwhile. The blue stripes show where standard frets would be, for comparison.

The tuning is my tweaked version of meantone: compared to just intonation, each factor of 2 is sharp by 1/16 comma, each factor of 3 is flat by 1/8 comma, and each factor of 5 is sharp by 1/4 comma. (A comma is the difference between 64:81, the Pythagorean major third derived from compounding fifths, and the more harmonious 4:5.) This makes the thirds and sixths much truer than in equal temperament, and the fifths slightly truer than in traditional meantone, which puts all the error in the 3s.

This design has 31 frets in the first octave: 12 flats, 7 naturals, 12 sharps. The bent frets span the difference (~151:152) between 18 of my sharp octaves and 31 of my flat fifths.

To reduce crowding, the second octave has only three flats and three sharps. The bent frets span the difference (~50:51) between G♯ and A♭.

The charts below should look familiar to players, if you squint a little.

The dots are placed according to a slightly different scale, which divides a factor of 12 into 111 equal steps; this is a local optimum among cyclic scales by the same criterion I used to choose the non-cyclic intervals for the frets.

“Radar Love” (1973) is the biggest hit of the Dutch band Golden Earring. Some folks strongly prefer a cover (1989) by White Lion. I don’t; is there a reason for that, other than my notorious conservatism?

White Lion’s version fills the ears more fully, and I can understand that some fans prefer that. But when it’s all high energy all the time, there’s no room for crescendo. Also, I find the implied silences of the original more appropriate to the story of the lonely night road. The entry of an organ at 2:38 and lead guitar at 2:48 suggests headlights appearing in the distance; they need the darkness for full effect.

Simon & Garfunkel came up in conversation, and I mentally listed their alba: Wednesday Morning 3AM, Sounds of Silence, Bookends, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Wait, aren’t there five? I was sure there are five . . . . .

The other one came to me as I was assembling ingredients for supper: salmon, eggs, bread crumbs, parsley, black pepper.