{"id":18126,"date":"2020-01-08T23:09:53","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T07:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18126"},"modified":"2020-01-08T23:17:47","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T07:17:47","slug":"pdq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2020\/01\/08\/pdq\/","title":{"rendered":"PDQ"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I just finished reading Prof. Peter Schickele\u2019s 1976 book <cite>The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach<\/cite>, which I\u2019ve been glancing over occasionally ever since I encountered it on my father\u2019s bookshelf as a kid, but which I had never read in full before.<\/p>\r\n<p>(Even reading just the titles of some of the PDQ Bach pieces\u2014especially the rounds from \u201cArt of the Ground Round\u201d\u2014immediately led the music to run through my head, even though I haven\u2019t listened to most of it in decades.)<\/p>\r\n<p>The book includes many delightful puns and other jokes (musical and otherwise), and I would highly recommend it were it not for its occasional inclusion of unfortunate-by-modern-standards terms and jokes.<\/p>\r\n<p>Among the many bits that I laughed out loud at:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>The character name <i>Count Pointercount<\/i>.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The piece of sheet music in Appendix E, \u201cTwo-Part Contraption,\u201d featuring both a Principal Theme and an Assistant Principal Theme.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The mention of Lady \u201cLady\u201d Lady and her husband Sir Yodah. (Plate 30, p. 76.) I puzzled over the latter name for a while; it wasn\u2019t until I came across the index entry for him that I understood that he was <i>Yodah Lady<\/i>, who I assume was an eminent yodeler. (And probably no relation to Baby Yoda.)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Speaking of the index, that too is quite entertaining. When I took an indexing class in the 1990s, I was told that every index should contain exactly one joke; fortunately, nobody told Schickele that, or if they did, he ignored them, because the index of this book includes a multitude of jokes. A few of my favorite index entries here:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>ago, two hundred years<\/li>\r\n  <li>C., F.C. [Which is to say, the FCC. Listed alphabetically under <i>C<\/i> in the index, of course.]<\/li>\r\n  <li>etc.<\/li>\r\n  <li>VI, Pope Pius [Listed alphabetically between <i>van Swieten, Gottfried<\/i> and <i>view, another<\/i>.]<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>The index also contains an entry for each of the individual letters <i>a<\/i> through <i>m<\/i>; it turns out those all point to p. 53, where the letters appear as labels for the parts in a diagram of the instrument called the Pandemonium.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,50,99,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indexes","category-jokes","category-music","category-puns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18126"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18131,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126\/revisions\/18131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}