Pat Martino, in Here and Now! wrote:By the late 1960s, I began leaving my “mark” in a kind of surreptitious way in certain jazz clubs.

Let me explain.

This was a time when I was very South Philly oriented with regard to graffiti. That’s part of this particular culture, part of this city, part of the kids who grow up in South Philadelphia, and part of the kids who grow up in all the metropolitan areas who want an identity and want the world to “look at me, look at me.” So they do it on walls, with paint … they paint their name on there … graffiti …

I used to do that.

Not with paint on walls. But I would sneak around on a gig when no one was looking and I would find a name artist’s instrument and I would engrave my initials on the inside of it, or put my full name on the inside.

I have my name on the inside of one of Miles Davis’s trumpets, which I scratched with a switchblade that I used to carry in my back pocket. I also have my initials under the f-hole of one of Charles Mingus’s basses. I was leaving my mark.

God knows the karma that it brought. Maybe it had a great deal to do with the outcome that I later experienced. Maybe that was the voice that said, “You don’t realize what you’re getting into.” We don’t realize what we’re getting into when we’re childish about life. So I did Miles’s trumpet at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. I was playing in the front room with Sonny Stitt; Miles was in the back room with his band. And at the end of the night, I spied Miles’s black trumpet with a golden rim just sitting on the table in the back room.

Miles and all of his band members were in the dressing rooms at this point, and I was on my way to a party when I saw the trumpet there, and I couldn’t help myself. So I just picked it up and I put the tip of my switchblade way in the back on the inside of the bowl, and I just scratched “PM” in there.

Like Zorro.

It's hard to know how much the other monks in the abbey knew about Mendel's experiments, or how much they cared. In the early 1850's, Mendel had tried a more audacious variation of this experiment, starting with white and gray field mice. He had bred mice in his room - mostly undercover - to try to produce mice hybrids. But the abbot, although generally tolerant of Mendel's whims, had intervened; a monk coaxing mice to mate to understand heredity was too risque, even for the Augustinians. Mendel had switched to plants and moved the experiments to the hothouse outside. The abbot had acquiesced. He drew the line at mice, but didn't mind giving peas a chance.

Grotewold wrote:All the Light We Cannot See is amazing. I'm reading it 10 pages at a time to string it out

kruker wrote:Love all the Bill Bryson books. Reading "One Summer" now. Amazing. Was fighting the urge to throw staggering facts/anecdotes at random strangers on the train ride home yesterday.

JUburton wrote:

Grotewold wrote:All the Light We Cannot See is amazing. I'm reading it 10 pages at a time to string it out

Yeah, this is great. Easy to just fly through too.

CalvinBall wrote:JH-- how far in Hamilton are you?

I am really enjoying it. I mean I know the general history of the foundation of this country and then some. But the little stories with Hamilton going to Gates to get more brigades after Saratoga, etc. are super interesting. The way Chernow is able to use pieces from letters to fill in the details about the personal relationships of all this people is really fun.