On 12/17/13 4:06 AM, Andrew K. Bressen wrote: Probably time to ping Rich Alderson about this again, although he is VERY busy right now.

On 12/17/2013 3:39 PM, Liam Proven wrote: "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant" would be a lyric that comes to mind. Jim

And constitutes about half the lyrics to the song. (The other half being "Walk right in, it's around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track" - okay, maybe one-third and two-thirds.) Well, very loosely, perhaps. The White Knight sings Alice a song. It develops that the song's name is called _Haddock's Eyes_, but the song's name is _The Aged Aged Man_, whereas the song is called _Ways and Means_, but the song actually is _A-Sitting on a Gate_. Use/mention distinction with a vengeance. Arlo Guthrie's version - to the extent that it's fair to call it that - is much milder. Here'a transcription of that snippet of that track This song is called Alice's Restaurant, 'n' it's about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, that's why I call the song Alice's Restaurant. It doesn't really have much of the use/mention distinction that Carroll's White Knight's piece does - indeed, I almost wrote that it has none of it, but he does say that Alice's Restaurant is both the name of the song and what he calls the song. In context, I see this as two ways of phrasing the same thing, not drawing a distinction that few people save recreational mathematicians, semanticists, and occasionally philosophers draw. It hadn't occurred to me until writing this mail that each involves someone named Alice. I am inclined to call that coincidence, though I have no particular grounds for that, except the negative grounds of knowing no reason to think otherwise; it _is_ relatively common name. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Dec 17, 2013, at 7:10 PM, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote: I agree. My wife worked for a while as a classical music announcer at a local radio station (PBS in New Hampshire). She played Alice?s Restaurant on Thanksgiving Day (since it?s about that day). The manager gave her a lot of grief for that (not classical music after all, and besides PBS managers usually are seriously uptight people). But there was such an outpouring of appreciation from listeners that she changed around, and the next year my wife was in fact encouraged to ?continue the tradition?. Which she did. paul

On 18 December 2013 00:10, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote: OK, I made an exception and gave it a listen, and I'm glad I did. That was excellent. :?) Of course, now I have to read Alice's PDP-10 again... -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

Oh, for those that haven't noticed, and who may find some of the DEC-20 terms in Alice's PDP-10 confusing, Rob did a glossary and some background info: http://www.hactrn.net/sra/alice/ John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> writes: 2-3 years ago, some friends of mine got married in the former church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts that figures in the song. Guthrie bought the place in the early 90s and turned it into a music and events venue and community center. It turns out that while there's some comic exaggeration, the song is basically true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant I find it astonishingly surreal and somewhat poignant that the most well-known thing that officer Obie did with his entire life is spend two hours going through a pile of garbage to find evidence of who was littering in his tiny town in Massachusetts. That and posing for a Norman Rockwell sketch will be the only things he is ever remembered for. Even now, over forty years after its release, the whole 18-minute song gets played on a few US radio stations around Thanksgiving.