There’s now an online square dancing chat forum at Romney Tannehill’s website…I think. It was announced on the sd-callers mailing list and I tried to check it out…but nothing shows up using Internet Explorer 5.0 on a Macintosh. Looks like yet another PC-centric site. Along with having a chat room that I can’t access, he also has some annoying java applet where a fairly lengthy text message appears one word at a time…in a word, irritating. He also links to other web sites, but those sites show up in enclosed in Romney’s frames. I hate that. Especially when the one-word-at-a-time message seems to imply that the links don’t come up in a Romney frame.

How about a square dance club named “Guns n’ Garters” including a logo with a gun inserted into a garter. Gotta wonder sometimes… but this site led to another site that compiles info for dances around Southern California and also has a nice URL: squaredancecentral.

The sausage thing seems to be a spreading meme. I used it (along with eggs) at an ECR dance. The next weekend, Anne and Tim workshop it in Vancouver at Weave the Rain. Where will it pop up next?

This has absolutely nothing to do with square dancing, but I think it’s an interesting analysis of what makes a good business website, and could also be relevant to anyone involved in building websites that keep people coming back. This site won an award from inc.com, a small business website. The main factors that interested the judges were the interactivity and sense of community built by the website.

I’m back from over a week with no square dancing and no calling; I think that’s a record for me since I started dancing back in 1990. Instead, I spent the week playing a lot of games of a domino variation called Mexican Train. A quick perusal of the web indicates that this is a fairly fluid game with many different versions:

• The Mexican Train
• Train
• Mexican Train Dominoes
• Mexican Trains

Our family has its own idiosyncratic version, which seems to change every time I go home (and sometimes even changes during the course of a single visit). An interesting thing about searching for Mexican Train on the web was that I ran across some diary pages…the kinds of things that people are probably putting up for friends and family and don’t really expect other people to look at…but then someone searches on terms that happen to occur on the page and there they are: looking at someone’s life. Quite a few people mention playing Mexican Train at some point. My going-on-100-year-old grandmother enjoys it, as did a Japanese exchange student who spoke very little English.

I also spent time trying to teach my mom how to use her new iMac. It’s interesting to see how much I take for granted in computer use and how hard it really is. For example, she might be typing in a form and accidentally hit some key that totally changes the context she’s in…and she didn’t even know she made a mistake. All of a sudden, everything has changed, but it seemed to change “magically” rather than through some action on her part. Compounding the problem is her crumby internet connection, which I think is mostly caused by bad phone lines, but seems to be compounded by some flakey modems at her ISP. So, although I set it all up, she can’t just click the “Send and Receive” button to automatically dial in, get her email, and disconnect…over half the time, the modem doesn’t connect on the first or even second attempt.

Counting down…only three more days until I get a DSL connection. In the meantime, my regular phone line is down for no reason that I can tell. Oh well…repairs will supposedly happen tomorrow.

I’m off at my mom’s ranch this week for the annual Thanksgiving eating ritual, but not before calling a dance in Palo Alto for the El Camino Reelers. It was interesting…a wide mix of abilities ranging from just-completed-Basic-on-Tuesday to been-dancing-in-the-high-C’s-for-years. It was a multi-level dance, with about two Plus tips for every class-level tip and an A2 tip near the end. Programming these kinds of dances is difficult, I think; peaks and valleys are harder to achieve when the level’s changing with almost every tip. I pulled out the “special shapes” thing again…my excuse this time was that it was a Harvest Dance, meaning an autumn dance, and fall in Albuquerque means The Balloon Fiesta, which leads to special shapes.

Because there were so many C-type dancers, I did the O’s, Butterflies, Hourglasses, and Galaxies perfunctorily and then moved right into Sausages and Eggs. It turns out that the square dance guru, Stewart Kramer, who’s an ECR member and who was at the dance, is credited with the “Slice the Sausage” call. He says Bill Davis is actually the perpetr…I mean inventer of the whole egg/sausage thing. But I wish I’d known about Stewart’s connection during the dance!

And of course, there’s a lot of interesting info in the guru’s comments.

Over on the square dancing mailing list, they’re talking about renaming square dancing again. I got a little riled up by a post by the CALLERLAB Foundation’s marketing expert, James Hensley. Here’s what I wrote:

on 11/14/00 5:35 PM, James Hensley at cmarkets@earthlink.net wrote:

> A key problem we have here
> at the Foundation is trying to ‘gather’ all the components of our “Folk
> Dance Group” under one, usable, acceptable and marketable name for purposes
> of presentation. When we go to corporate sponsors (or for ads, public
> relations purposes) we need to not have to say, “Square, Round, Contra,
> Line, Clogging, English Traditional, etc, etc,” as part of our descriptive
> name.

Our hubris in this area is amazing. Modern western square dancing is not
part of most folk dance organizations and festivals. I’ve looked at lots of
websites describing folk dance festivals; these festivals include
international folk dance, contra dancing, traditional squares, English
country dancing and even swing dancing…but not MWSD. I don’t think we’re
legitimate spokespeople for all the myriad of dance forms that make up folk
dancing; in fact, many folk-oriented people do not consider MWSD to be a
folk activity because of its heirarchical, legislated nature.

> there is a caller in Texas that calls
> it “Geomotion” (since all the figures, squares, diamonds, circles, boxes,
> etc are geometric in shape)

Geomotion is used by Paul Galburt (http://bsd.ideaquest.com/geomotion/) as
a name for a computer program featuring a form of two couple square dancing
designed to introduce non-square dancers to the game of square dancing. I
think it’s a neat name…but it’s probably trademarked.

Nobody’s written back, but that happens to me a lot. Besides Geomotion, other suggested names are Team Dance, Sport Dance, Pattern Dance, American Folk Dance (and what about square dancers in other countries), National Folk Dance (sure, and what about the national folk dances of other countries), and Modern Western Dancing. The idea behind all this is to get rid of the dread “square” with all its negative connotations, at least for those of us of a certain generation.

So I stuck a few things into Google to see what would come up. TeamDance is interesting…a few photos of dance competitions (a country dance, Native American dance), a couple of foreign language pages (Japanese, German), and, most intriguingly, a German page on a Yorkie site involving dog dancing.

SportDance: there are “SportDance” competitions which involve aerobic, step, and hip-hop dancing (Triple-A), and a there’s a ‘SportDance’ club in Uppsala, but mostly “sportdance” is used in naming .html pages dealing with DanceSport. DanceSport, of course, is the new name for ballroom dancing, and will, I think, be an Olympic “sport” in Athens (sorry for the quotes…I guess if Ice Dancing can be considered a sport, why not Ballroom Dancing?). At any rate, there is an International DanceSport Federation, with a spiffy website and a nice professionally-designed logo.

Here’s a quote from a press release about DanceSport inclusion in the closing ceremonies of the Sidney Olympics:

DanceSport rivals the ice-skating sports for telegenic appeal. In addition, it has the powerful advantage that it is one of the few sports that has 100% gender parity and offers women exactly the same sport opportunities as men, right down to competing with men in the same events and on the same playing surface.

Hmmm…gender equity and television appeal…so that’s how they decide what activities get included in the Olympics…

Anyway, back to SportDance…I found out more that I really wanted to about Svetlana, a 35-year-old Russian woman whose favorite sport is sportdance (aerobika), and who wants to marry a westerner so much that she’s put herself on bunches of websites like RussianWife.net and LovePlace.com. I’ll bet she’d learn to square dance if the right guy approached her…

Here’s a great name for a Thanksgiving weekend dance: the ButterBall. Also, a great idea: a one-day, 12-hour dance, with different callers (and, since this is a contra dance, bands). (I wonder if the turkey people have problems with this use of a brand name…)

Over on the square dancing mailing list, Clark Baker set up a poll to record the ages of the list participants. So far, there are 57 responses, showing over 50% are between 40 and 60 (I’m pretty close to the middle of that group). While this shows that there are very few young people on the list (8 between 20 and 40), it also shows a skew towards a slightly younger group. If we did a poll at various square dance groups, I’d bet we’d find a majority over 60, whereas in this group, the majority are slightly younger.

A few days ago, I mentioned Erik Hoffman, a caller that Turtle-Bear and I really enjoyed at the Boo Camp dance weekend. I found a few chapters from his book, Contradictions, and he has some interesting things to say about dance, trance, style, and connection. Check it out.

Did you ever get the feeling that square dancers take themselves way too seriously? A few days ago, I cited a couple of articles dealing with rules and obligations of square dancers. Here are some others: Ground Rules of Square Dancing and Duties and Responsibilities. Also, a graduation ceremony that makes me laugh, it takes square dancing so seriously. But maybe it’s a generational thing: the ‘greatest generation‘ vs. the baby boomers. Or maybe it’s just my personality; I’m not particularly fond of ceremonial rituals.

Plugged in “learn to square dance” into Google and got this in the coveted first position: Learn to Square Dance. It’s actually a pretty nice site, although I think the URL is pretty awful (or maybe it’s just because I’m not good at remembering numbers).

Noriko‘s page doesn’t show up on the first couple of pages from Google, although it does show up as a link from Lynette’s Challenge site.

I hate frames. I’d like to cite this page: Information for Non-Dancers, but it’s a page that’s meant to be viewed in a frame context, and all the navigation info is in other frames. So instead, I have to cite Welcome to Mini-Squares and tell you to click on the “To Non-Dancers” item in the menu on the left. Yuck.

But, anyway, the Mini-Squares idea is interesting, although I haven’t heard any follow-up on whether people are successful in introducing their friends. I did come across this site, Learn to Square Dance, in my search on learning to square dance. And a later search on mini-squares revealed these results:

Mini-Squares Results: Only 1 new dancer completed the 4-week Mini-Squares session we hosted in July and another new dancer completed the 4-week session held in August. Not many members took advantage of the fun and challenge of these sessions. Most sessions only had 4 mini-squares so we lost money during both sessions. The club members who supported these recruitment sessions appeared to have fun and found the all-position dancing with only 18 calls challenging.

Listening to new releases on line:

Most record producers don’t seem to have websites. Among those that do, a few provide music samples online.

• Alliance didn’t have anything.
• Blue Square Recordings says it has previews, but doesn’t (clicking on one gives a 404).
• ESP
• Global didn’t have anything.
• Hearties Records doesn’t.
• HiHat has MP3 files that download first and play later.
• Rawhide/Buckskin says they’ll have previews, but they’re not ready yet.
• Rockin M has some RealAudio samples.

While Supreme Audio has a column for a RealAudio preview in their display, very few of the records actually have a RealAudio preview. (On the November tape, only one record has a preview (and that record happens to have an MP3 version, and also was released several months ago).

It looks like Shakedown Records is taking the most advantage of selling MP3s online; they’ve released MP3 versions of records from 1989 and 1992. See Supreme’s online MP3 page.

I think it’s great that Supreme Audio is selling MP3s on line, and I think it’ll be a really good way to get records that have been “out of print” back in the hands of callers. But I don’t get why I should pay the same price for an MP3 as I do for a 45 rpm…the whole point of an MP3 is that the production costs are way down so that the producer (and therefore the user) doesn’t have to pay for pressing vinyl. As Vic Ceder points on on his page about converting vinyl to MP3, MP3 uses a lossy compression algorithm. That means that sound quality is lost when a sound file is converted to an MP3 file. While that loss may not be noticeable if you just play the MP3 file, particularly on our not particularly hifi amplifiers, it will become noticeable if one needs to decompress the file back to some other format in order to change its pitch or tempo and then recompress back to an MP3. It’d be nice if Supreme (or other record distributors) would make an uncompressed version available so those of us who have the bandwidth to grab a 20MB file and the need to alter the original music. Otherwise, if the record is available, I’ll buy the record over the MP3, even though I’ll immediately convert it to a sound file on my computer. If no record is available, I’ll consider the MP3, particularly if I don’t need to alter it.

Square dance promotion on the web: I’m interested in websites that actually try to sell modern western square dancing to the general public. Here’s Jeff Gorbutt’s: Good reasons to join in the craze and come square dancing.

When I first started this weblog, I came across Circle Left, an (at the time) relatively content-free but attractive site on square dancing. It’s been worked on since then, and the databases have been filled in, so it’s no longer content-free. Unfortunately, it’s also no longer as attractive; the owners have decided to put up some advertising on the front page (and other pages too). I guess ya gotta understand people trying to recover their web-hosting costs, but advertising sure junks up a site.

Anyway, the databases (callers, clubs, events) have been populated, although I’m not sure where the data is coming from. The caller directory has 1432 entries as of now…compare that with Vic Ceder‘s 851. That means that it’s unlikely that all the callers listed in Circle Left have requested inclusion. I know I’m in there twice (once as Kris and once as Kristin). The club directory has 2378 entries, but out of the three for New Mexico, two of the clubs no longer exist. Hmmm….the numbers look impressive, but I don’t trust the quality.

Does playing bridge boost the immune system? A new study indicates that playing contract bridge leaves people with higher numbers of immune cells. The researcher said:

“Bridge players plan ahead, they use working memory, they deal with sequencing, initiation and numerous other higher order functions with which the dorsolateral cortex is involved.”

Maybe we need a study that measures T-cells after square dancing.

Here’s a good way to sell square dancing (not!): a page of articles, where two out of three deal with dancer responsibilities and rules. Gee, that’s just what I want in a fun activity: rules and responsibilities. Whoops, the third article, on angels, just happens to be a list of rules for angels. How special.

This stuff on contra dance sound might be of interest, although it’s more relevant to mixing live music. For info more specifically related to using our equipment, see Hilton Audio’s “Sound” Information.

Interested in how contra callers organize their dances? Check out “Methods of organizing dance cards”, a thread on rec.folk-dancing. This has actually segued into a discussion of preparing for a dance (programming in our terms). Different folks prepare differently, ranging from completely written-out programs to extemporaneous programming (just like square dance callers). I find that I call a better dance if I have some plan in mind, even if the plan gets totally revised at the dance. I think it’s sort of like athletes visualizing a performance; it gets me focused on the event. Last week, the dance I called for Duke City Singles went well, and the dancers seemed to have fun with the “special shapes” tip.

As a caller, how would you do a web site to market yourself to non-square dancers for party dances?

Here are some that I’ve found:

• Fred Bouvier. Fred uses square dancing, line (solo) dancing, and other folk dancing for all ages. Fred’s headline: SQUARE/FOLK DANCE CALLER & TEACHER FOR SOUTHERN LOUISIANA AND MISSISSIPPI
• Cliff Brodeur. I’ve mentioned Cliff’s site before; he mentions Square Dancing, Line Dance, Contra, Polkas, Waltzes, and Rock ‘n Roll and talks about birthdays, wedding receptions, anniversaries, picnics and theme parties, fundraising events, and church, school, and youth groups. His start page includes a reference from Pete Seeger. His headline: Have a dance party!
• Dick Crouse. Dick combines both modern square dance calling and party dance calling on one page. He’ll call “easy fun-level western parties” for corporate and private groups, church gatherings, Girl Scout activities, college orientations, and fund raisers.
• Patty Green. Patty’s opening square dance page focuses on the audience: “Are you looking for a different activity for your next pot-luck supper, family reunion, company outing? How about trying a square dance fun night?”

I’m also collecting sites that do a good job of describing square dancing. Here’s Don Crosby’s, with a couple of good quotes:

“An exercise in interpersonal relationships, set in a matrix, rythmic, environment.” –Mike Jacobs

“a physically healthful and mentally stimulating activity involving good fellowship and music”. –Don Crosby