From: David el Gnomo - PM
Date: 25 Oct 08 - 05:53 PM

"Piers, I presume you did realise thet notorieties was the word and that you will forgive my sticky keyboard and poor typing skills. I can laugh at myself and my mistakes but really do consider it poor form to mock those less than proficient. In social skills as well as technical:-)"

I finished what I wrote below and I've been sitting here wondering how to apologize for my "poor form" and for mocking at what you wrote, and perhaps it's not nice of me, but I don't feel very apologetic. The truth is, I think you have some rather harsh words for poor performers   , or ones you consider poor and I think someone who's ready to dish it out should be prepared to take it. On the other hand, you didn't name any names and some people are sensitive about mistakes in spelling, grammar, etc., so I can see that you might have found my comment below the belt. So, I do apologize, though I still have some objections to what you've written, as I say below. I'm sorry that this isn't more gracious, but it's honest.

******

No, I didn't. I thought it might be a cross between "notables" and "luminaries" with perhaps an element of "notorious" or "notoriousness" thrown in. I'm sorry if this hurts your feelings, but I don't think "notorieties" is a word, either, nor do I believe that "notoriety" is a word that can refer to a person and "notoriety" isn't really something positive.

On the subject of hurting peoples' feelings, your postings rather left me with the impression that you might be a bit thicker-skinned, considering a couple of things you wrote, such as these quotes, which I have just cut and pasted, not edited:

"Poor performance is of course as discourteous as anything the audience does and, at the risk of getting shot down in flames as I have been before, I find some peoples performances can be downright embarasing."

"I really cannot understand why anyone but the most insensitive and dense people would feel that their poor performance warrant priority over paid artists. Particularly when people have parted with their hard earned cash to see someone good. There has never been anyone at our club, as far as I know, who has not understood that there may be people better suited to the circumstance than them and has not had the good grace to stand down when the need arises."

I do understand that a person running a club has to make sure he or she makes money and I can see the sense in some of what you write. However, to call it "discourteous" to get up on stage and try to perform or to use terms like "insensitive" and "dense" doesn't encourage me to seek out a folk club to perform. Nor does the idea of "being jumped on from a great height", for which, of course, you're not responsible.

"And no, it doesn't mean that someone who has been told they can perform is then asked not to. It means that our club residents and regulars all have enough common sense to understand that they cannot all get on on a guest night so they don't ask. Anyone who is ever invited to perform always gets to do so."

People who are invited. Perhaps I wasn't following the discussion, but I got the impression that it could be open-mike or a singaround (something I wasn't familiar with before), so that I wasn't referring to people who had been _invited_ to perform, but rather people who had shown up in the expectation that they could and perhaps had put their names down on the list. I imagined some "big-name" folk musician walking in the door and people being put to the end of the list. Sorry if I got the wrong end of the stick.

"I heard a good phrase yesterday. It's a shame that common sense isn't..."

I think most people show plenty of "common sense" when it comes to their own interest. I wish that kindness and tolerance were more common. I don't think anyone goes into the business of running a club with the idea of making a fortune and I do understand your point of view --- up to a point.

For various reasons, I haven't gotten out much in recent years and don't have friends to play music with. I love to play and have practiced a lot and would quite like to perform at an open-mike night or something similar. I do suffer from stage-fright and have some other problems so that this goal is not my top priority. Some of the postings in this thread have made me feel a lot less like doing it.