Brian Ibbott over at Coverville ( The all-covers podcast.  Including a cappella covers.) received a meme that he sent my way, about posting the sixth photo on the sixth page of your Flickr photo stream.  I’m using Picasa instead, but in the spirit, I dug up a music related picture to share with you.

The music geeks in the audience will recognize it as an Alto (or C) clef.  For those of you only passingly familiar with sheet music, most sheet music is written in Treble and Bass (or G and F if you prefer) clefs.  The Alto clef was a lot more popular in early printed music (here I show my Nerd Credentials), and unlike the other clefs, isn’t as fixed in place.  It can be slid up and down the staff, and whatever line it centers on is middle C.  You can see why that’d be really popular in the days of woodblock printing: a simple way to fit everything on the staff without actually transposing anything!

To give some context to the picture, I was on Santorini (Thera) recently as part of my honeymoon cruise around the Mediterranean, and passed a house with this as part of the fence out front.  The other parts were the Treble and Bass clefs, of course!  Each was a single bar of music.  Neat fence, no?

Unlike Brian, I won’t be passing this on to five specific people (Why five Brian, shouldn’t it be six?), but I invite all of you to link to music related pictures in the comments below, and to post this meme on your own blogs if you like.