Just some small items today:

• Today is “Rose Monday“, the climax of the annual carnival celebrations. I personally don't care for this, but living in Mainz – together with Cologne and Düsseldorf one of the three main strongholds of the carnival tradition here in Germany, this is impossible to ignore.

• Strathspey list correspondent Doug Macdonald recommends Thistle House Live!, a SCD CD by fiddler Dave Courret-Knight, pianist Dave Wiesler, and piper/flute player Dan Emery. It turns out that this is available digitally on Amazon, so I've downloaded it and must say I rather like the sound of it. I wouldn't go as far as Doug and call it the best live recording of SCD music ever, but it is still very, very well-produced and the music is totally worth the price. Especially the pipes are very tastefully integrated. This will be fun to use in class.

• The Thistle House trio is also involved in another album, Delaware Valley Gold, but this doesn't sem to be available online. I'm ordering it (together with a book of dances that goes with it) from the Leeds branch bookshop; let's see what usurious surcharges DHL will put on it this time. (Boo on Boris for Brexit. I'm going to have to put up a picture of him to throw darts at or shoot with the NERF gun whenever I'm trying to get something from the UK.)

• On University Challenge tonight, Bristol University won comfortably against the Open University. At this stage in teh competition teams must win twico to go through to the semifinals, and this was the first quarter-final round for both of these, so they'll both have to play again soon.