posted by miko 22 February 23:40:
In my Roaring 20s I took off to Michigan for a summer with a couple of friends. We were gonna play music in bars and for money and live large and have adventures. We moved into a house rented by the friends of one of my buds. A typical suburban college-town house, a nice one, roomy. The fact that this house was already full of people when we arrived didn't bother anybody. The three of us fellow-travelers lived in one room. In fact, we slept on one extremely large pallet made out of a few futons put together. Other people were similarly crashed all over the house: the guy whose name the lease was in, a painter and musician, the people in his band, girlfriends, friends of girlfriends, people who drank too much & crashed, people who were in between their semester abroad & their summer session at the college, people's sisters, etc.
It was hard to get a bead on* the house population. Many mornings you'd be introducing yourself to new people in the kitchen while you made toast and coffee. It was possible to buy enough cigarettes and food to live on, simply by cashing in the cases of returnable beer bottles for the 10c MI deposit.
Anyway, one day the landlord happened by to put in a new faucet or something. Most people were out; I was there, and so was the guy whose name was on the lease. The landlord went into the house and peered around a bit, becoming progressively angrier each time he looked into a bedroom and noticed more and more twin and double futons, foam pads, mattresses, and duffel bags. It was not the kind of flophouse he wished to run. He went ripshit, red faced, veins bursting, etc. "How many people do you have here?" he screamed at Lease Boy. "Your lease is for. three. people. What do you, think I'm an idiot? Doesn't matter what I say? What are you doing -- telling your buddies 'Hey everybody! Come live on Dorothy Street! Don't tell the landlord! Is that the deal?" Eventually he left.
We named our band "Don't Tell the Landlord" and played several good gigs at this bar under that name.It has a happy ending, too. He came back and apologized and recognized that we were all nice people who were broke, young, & stupid. At the end of the summer, we decided to have a Thanksgiving dinner because we'd really had such good luck during our adventure. We invited him, and he donated the turkey & stuffing. We sat down and broke bread at the backyard picnic table.


*Language Log: And the bead goes on:
[..an expression that,] while mistaken, is arguably common because it's poetically as well as phonetically and syntactically apt.
A common poetic mistake is the substitution of 'beat' for 'bead' in the expression "get a bead on" or "draw a bead on". The original version of this idiom involves the word 'bead', for which the OED gives this sense:
d. The small metal knob which forms the front sight of a gun; esp. in the phrase (of U.S. origin) to draw a bead upon: to take aim at.
But Americans don't spend as much time looking at things over a bead sight as they used to -- even those who regularly use a rifle for hunting probably have a telescopic sight -- so this metaphor is getting old and stale. The sportswriters seem to have stepped in with a fresh idea, making a new idiom out of an old one. In sports, the idea of getting a (musical) beat ahead of someone else makes sense -- marching to a different and faster drummer, so to speak.
"Getting a beat on someone" has another poetic resonance that may be inspiring some of these writers: you could interpret 'beat' as "an edge" or a "a competitive advantage," a nominalization of the verbal sense "to defeat [someone]." ah nice: to beat, get the beat on.
The "faster rhythm" interpretation and the "competitive advantage" interpretation..