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R/E/P => R/E/P Archives => Whatever Works => Topic started by: el duderino on January 25, 2011, 04:24:23 PM

Title: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: el duderino on January 25, 2011, 04:24:23 PM

because one showed up on a sand bar in Biscayne Bay, FL. Yea.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/01/25/vo.piano.sand bar.wsvn?hpt=C2

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Bill Mueller on January 25, 2011, 04:27:36 PM

el duderino wrote on Tue, 25 January 2011 16:24

because one showed up on a sand bar in Biscayne Bay, FL. Yea.  http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/01/25/vo.piano.sand bar.wsvn?hpt=C2

Terry?

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: el duderino on January 25, 2011, 04:32:23 PM

Bill Mueller wrote on Tue, 25 January 2011 16:27

el duderino wrote on Tue, 25 January 2011 16:24 because one showed up on a sand bar in Biscayne Bay, FL. Yea.   http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/01/25/vo.piano.sand bar.wsvn?hpt=C2 Terry?

that thought DID cross my mind.

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Skullsessions on January 25, 2011, 05:05:17 PM

I immediately thought I'd see Tommy Kiefer or Axl Rose walk into the frame...

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Wireline on January 25, 2011, 05:10:28 PM

If that place is in the Florida keys...well, you get the joke

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: MagnetoSound on January 25, 2011, 05:38:32 PM

Wasn't there a pianist guy who lost his memory found wandering somewhere not too long ago?

Maybe it's his.

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Droplede on January 25, 2011, 08:24:34 PM

Return of the cousin of Terry's mystery piano? Hmmmmmm.

-------------------------------------


By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: January 25, 2011, The New York Times

NORTH MIAMI, Fla. — From the shore, it looks like an oddly shaped buoy. But as residents here have discovered on closer inspection, it is in fact a grand piano perched upright on a narrow sand bar in Biscayne Bay — a sight that has inspired wordsmiths to compete to name South Florida’s newest curiosity (“piano bar” seems to have won).

The more relevant question, of course, is who might have left the 650-pound piano atop the highest point of the sand bar, about 200 yards from shore, and why.

“Maybe it was used for a models’ shoot,” theorized Mark Alan Leszczynski, president of Piano Showcase in Fort Lauderdale. “Or maybe this was something some bitter divorced person would do — take your ex-husband’s prized piano and dump it on a sand bar.”

The piano in the bay has quickly established itself as another confounding South Florida mystery, like the bicycles, all painted the same shade of bright blue, that were turning up, without explanation, all over Fort Lauderdale.

The grand piano, estimated to be worth $4,000 new (and dry), was barely visible from land on Tuesday. The tourists seen sidling up to it were mostly prancing seagulls, and the occasional boater.

And unless the piano proves to be a danger to wildlife or boaters, officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the North Miami Police Department’s marine patrol say they will not haul it away.

Even the authorities have refused to hazard a guess about its provenance, although the early consensus has settled on a prank intended to attract media attention.

“We have a real mystery,” said Jorge Pino, a spokesman for the wildlife commission. “Whoever did this, if it was indeed a prank, they have achieved exactly what they wanted, which is the notoriety and the attention we are giving this story. I’ve been a law enforcement officer for 23 years, and I’ve never seen a piano upright in the water. It’s unusual, extremely unusual.”

Mr. Pino said officials who routinely patrolled that stretch of Biscayne Bay did not notice the piano until after a Miami Herald photographer snapped a picture of it last week. The piano is apparently safe from Biscayne Bay’s high tide, which reaches only its legs.

The Miami New Times offered a list of 10 possible explanations. Among them, “A Calvin Klein perfume commercial ran out of money mid-shoot.”

Another theory is the piano is a well-timed publicity stunt for the New World Symphony, a Miami Beach conservatory that opened its new campus on Tuesday. But a spokesman laughed off that idea.

Some locals recalled that a few years ago, a concert grand, used for a youth concert, had fallen off a barge into the waters off Key Biscayne. But Mr. Leszczynski said, “The odds of that piano washing up are pretty long.”

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: New Orleans Steve on January 25, 2011, 09:21:17 PM

  Anybody missing a piano?

Ya, now that you mention it....That track I cut last week....I know it was missing something....YES, A Piano, That's what it was missing!

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: J.J. Blair on January 26, 2011, 12:55:37 PM

I guess the sand bar wanted to be a piano bar.

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: eightyeightkeys on January 26, 2011, 03:24:15 PM

J.J. Blair wrote on Wed, 26 January 2011 12:55

I guess the sand bar wanted to be a piano bar.

That's good !

I was going to say that it just goes to show what happens when you mark something FRAGILE at the oversize shipment check-in at the airport.

No seriously, in the days when I was touring, my keyboard rack, plastered all over with FRAGILE stickers and came out on the luggage carousel upside down with the wheels spinning.

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Droplede on January 27, 2011, 02:37:56 PM

An update. They figured it out, of course.

On one hand, I'm shocked -- shocked! -- at the glorification of such blatant piano abuse.

On the other: Way to go, kid. Think big.

-d.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html

------------------------------------

Piano on a Sandbar: Mystery Solved
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.

MIAMI — So the now world-famous “piano bar” was not left in Biscayne Bay by the independent filmmakers Billy and Anais Yaeger, who claimed that the feat would be featured in their film trilogy titled “Jesus of Malibu.”

Nor was the grand piano the same one used by the upstart filmmaker James Marcus Haney, a 22-year-old film student at University of Southern California, who shot a music video of an eerily similar piano on a beach in Del Mar, Calif., in September 2007. “Hey,” Mr. Haney said, “stranger things have happened, right?”

No, this stunt was the brainchild of a 16-year-old high school student from Miami Shores named Nicholas Harrington, who figured a video of the old grand piano, which he had set on fire (twice, it turns out), would make a rather, well, inspired college entrance exam essay.

His idea was to shoot a video on the sandbar, about 200 yards off North Miami’s shoreline, with the piano, bagpipes and a submersible belonging to MAST Academy, where Nicholas is a junior.

“We were thinking of a big production, a music video epic,” Nicholas told The Miami Herald, which finally resolved the mystery of the piano-in-the-bay late Wednesday.

The music video epic apparently never happened, however.

The grand piano had actually been a prop in a film four years ago that no one can remember. At a New Year’s Eve party at the Harringtons’ home, the 100 revelers decided to set the piano on fire. It was dropped by davits into a canal next to the Harringtons’ home, and set alight.

The next day, Nicholas, his father, J. Mark Harrington, the production designer for the USA cable channel’s “Burn Notice,” and several others carefully loaded the charred piano onto a 22-foot fishing boat and ferried it out to the sandbar. They rang in the new year by setting the piano on fire again, in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

After the Yaegers took credit for dumping the piano with The Miami New Times Wednesday afternoon, the Harringtons stepped forward and, unlike the others, had video evidence to confirm their account.

But Nicholas’s mother seemed saddened that her son had come forward to spoil everyone’s guessing game. “I loved it being a mystery,” she told The Herald. “The allure was much more powerful than anything else.”

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Jay Kadis on January 27, 2011, 03:03:02 PM

Droplede wrote on Thu, 27 January 2011 11:37

But Nicholas’s mother seemed saddened that her son had come forward to spoil everyone’s guessing game. “I loved it being a mystery,” she told The Herald. “The allure was much more powerful than anything else.”

I suspect she would rather not have been identified as the party responsible for the clean-up bill.

Title: Re: Anybody missing a piano?
Post by: Daniel Farris on January 27, 2011, 03:53:24 PM

Quote:

The grand piano had actually been a prop in a film four years ago that no one can remember.

That is an abortion of a sentence. I hope the person that wrote that sentence isn't getting paid for their writing.

DF