Fifty Shades of Black Read Online Free PDF Page A

years. Last year, Beck put out an album with a difference. Beck doesn’t sing on this production, or play an instrument.
    Nobody does.
    Song Reader is not a CD or an LP or an iTunes download. Song Reader is a book of sheet music containing twenty original compositions along with a hundred pages of art. Beck’s idea is to take listeners back in time, back to when people sang songs with and to each other.
    â€œYou watch an old film and see how people would dance together in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” Beck told an Associated Press reporter. “It was something that was part of what brought people together. Playing music in the home is another aspect of that that’s been lost.”
    Beck points out that nearly eight decades ago—in 1937—Bing Crosby recorded a song called “Sweet Leilani.” Fifty-four million copies of the sheet music were sold. That means almost half the US population was trying to learn how to play and sing the song for themselves.
    Well . . . yeah. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a car or a TV but we had a piano in the parlour—as did most of the families I knew. And in our piano bench was a pair of castanets, a tambourine and a couple of dusty old harmonicas.
    Mom and my older sister sang harmony, my other sister sang and played tambourine, while the old man chorded on the piano.
    Me? I still play a fairly mean “Freight Train Blues” on the harmonica.
    I know, I know . . . corny as hell.
    On the other hand, I watched a family of four waiting for their dinner in a restaurant last night. They didn’t talk. They didn’t even look at each other. They were all texting, off in their separate corners of cyberspace.
    I’ll take corny.

 
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    A-Mushing We Shall Go—Not
    I ’m a double-edged, multi-tasking (some would call it obsessive-compulsive) kind of guy. I love doing two things at once because I hate wasting time. If I’m going to be stuck in a lineup at the bank, I take along a yo-yo. If I get caught in traffic jam I rat-a-tat the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the steering wheel with my thumbs. Even for short ferry rides I carry more gear than a Sherpa for Martha Stewart—food, magazines, my diary, a harmonica, even an inflatable pillow for naps.
    When I heard about Canicross my first thought was: this is for me.
    Canicross? The latest exercise craze. Apparently it began with some anonymous dogsledder in Lapland looking for a way to exercise his doggy cohorts in the summer, snowless months. What he or she came up with is essentially one-on-one dogsledding minus the sleigh.
    Oh yeah—and instead of holding the reins, the human portion of the equation (formerly the sled driver) is lashed to the dog by a harness.
    You’re familiar with walking the dog? This is running the dog. Fido picks the trail and sets the pace. Your assignment is to keep up and stay vertical.
    Oh, and in order to keep your hands free for balance (and to make it extra interesting) Fido is attached to your crotch.
    Pretty much. The Canicross harness fits around your waist and loops about your upper thighs, terminating in a snap buckle in front of your . . . front. The buckle attaches to about six feet of leash, the other end of which clips to the dog’s collar. All you have to say is “Go!” and you are officially Canicrossing.
    Canicross is pretty green as sports go. Historians have traced it back to its Scandinavian origins in the early 1970s. Within a decade it had spread south to France, where the world’s first Canicross meet was held in Paris in 1982. Since then it has blossomed, eventually hopping the Atlantic to take seed in Eastern Canada and parts of the US.
    I know—you’re asking yourself why would anyone willingly attach themselves to a dog and let it drag them through the bush.
    Because in this hectic, stress-heavy world we’re stuck with, where people fumble with their