5 fingers (usually), 5 senses (usually),* 5 days (usually) make a work week,

[capri0mni]

And 5 things make a post:

1. From the Lexiphile file: Watching all these old movie musical rom-coms, I got to wondering about the word "candy" (such a nice word for a lyric). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary Candy came into English the late 1200s, via Old French, via its Persian and Sanskrit Great-grandparents: qand and khanda.
   
   At around the same time, the word "Sweet" was used to mean both a piece of candy and a person -- "a beloved."
   
   I find it rather reassuring that these words have remained stable for 800 or so years... The things that are really important to communicate, we don't mess around with.
   
   
2. Coming soon: A post about Danny Kaye's penultimate leading role ("On the Double," 1961), and how the contemporary New York Times movie reviewer and I saw two essentially different films, thanks, more than anything, to the 50 years of cultural change that has flowed on between then and now. Someone has uploaded the whole film to YouTube, in ~10 minutes clips, and there is one part (part 6), and it's the one chunk that has the most emotionally mature scene, and makes me wish with nearly my entire heart that Danny Kaye had been allowed to play dramatic roles before he retired from Big Screen films; he was 48 when he made the film, but the role he'd been given was still the wet-behind-the-ears Innocent Schlep. But for three or four minutes, you see (and hear, in his voice) the grown man.
   
   The company that released the DVD did an utterly "Bare bones" version -- without even closed captioning (which, I don't understand how that's legal, since it was released just last year, and we have this little thing called the ADA). So I want to try to post the clip here with a transcript. But transcribing ten minutes of a Danny Kaye film will need a full load of daily spoons, and be undertaken in bite-sized chunks, so...
   
   
3. Yesterday, sometime in the afternoon, the fan of my air conditioning conked out (and I don't have money in my budget right now, to get it fixed). So I opened the one window I could a) reach, and b) still had the bug screen up... just to get some fresh air in the house. Then, the fan started working again. But now, the window is stuck, and I can't close it again (*Augh!). Also, the weather service said today is Code Orange for Air Quality, which means it's bad for people with asthma (like me). Joy. Today will be one of those short-spoon days, I think.
   
   
4. Last year, on one of my favorite radio programs (The Splendid Table), there was an interview with a neurologist who discovered that the senses of hearing and taste/smell are so closely linked that what we hear actually affects how we smell and taste (and I note that Laurent Clerc --one of the founding teachers of Gallaudet University-- lost both his sense of hearing and smell at the same time (whether from birth, or from an accident in babyhood).
   
   So, lately, I've been playing a little game with myself, associating singers' voices with flavors / aromas. In this clip, for example, of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger singing a duet, Baez's voice reminds me of fresh, plain, strawberries, and Seeger's voice brings up the scent of pine resin / freshly cut wood and wet clay.
   
   What about your favorite singers / sounds? What "flavors," if any, would you say they have?
   
   
5. I swear, there was a fifth thing, when I started out. Q.V. short-spoon day.

*Actually, there are seven senses, if you include the senses of balance, and hunger/thirst (the two internally-generated senses)

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

... I believe that both taste/small senses are unmediated: the receptors for taste are right out there in the tongue while the smell receptors are out there in the nostrils. (Compare with the auditory sensors buried in our braincase, and the retina back in the skull as well.

I must admit I've been avoiding your Danny Kaye posts because enjoying his shows on TV with my mother is one of my happiest memories. I'm afraid if I stir the cobwebs there will be some unwelcome truths.

We've had some orange level weather up here lately, and it's grim stuff. When I can, I get to the pool. Breathing out in the cool clean water really gentles my asthma.

Musically speaking, were you perhaps thinking of "Almost Every Circumstance" when you titled this post? (Steeleye Span, first recorded by Silly Sisters)

Played by civilians here

[capri0mni]

Musically speaking, were you perhaps thinking of "Almost Every Circumstance" when you titled this post?

Um, no, actually (though thanks for the rec). I was thinking: "Five senses -- but I know people who are 'missing' some; Five fingers -- but I know people who are 'missing' some; Five work days to a week... except this week..."

Actually, Danny Kaye's TV show first came on the air before I was born. And it went off the air by the time I was 4. So if I have any personal memory of it, it's buried subliminally (maybe I heard it wafting up from the living room, as I was drifting off to sleep, in my cradle; I recently caught his "Psychologist" bit, and one of the lines was something my father quoted at least once. So maybe my parents watched it, or maybe Kaye was reciting an older vaudeville line from before TV days. My dad grew up in the era of vaudeville records).

[capri0mni]

...I believe that both taste/smell senses are unmediated

Actually taste and smell are actually just one sense, not 2 -- about 90% of what we percieve as taste actually comes to our brains through the nose, via the "back door" at the back of the mouth (the same channel milk squirts through, if we laugh at the wrong moment). The cluster of tastebuds at the front of the tongue tell us if something is "Sweet" but our olfactory nerves tell us whether it's chocolate, honey, or strawberry (that's why food has no taste, when we get a cold).

I tried to do a search of "Splendid Table"'s archives for the interview on the link between smelling and hearing. But, on a radio show, variations of "Hearing," show up in every single story ("Next, we'll hear about the newest trend..."), and on a cooking show, donn't even try to filter by using "aroma" or "taste"...

From what I remember, this scientist being interviewed was studying the mouse's brain activity while smelling something. And he had electrodes wired into the mouse's brain.

Then, something fell off the counter (or something), and made a loud crashing sound. And the mouse's olfactory receptors started firing like mad right at that moment, before he'd even set up his smelling experiment.

and the retina back in the skull as well

Actually, I've seen several places where Neuroscientists say that the eyes are the brain -- the one part of the brain that's not covered by the skull.

But you're right in one sense: sight does allow us to perceive things from a distance, so that sense is the least "embodied."