My Favorite Keywords – Feb/Mar 2009 Edition
Here are my favorite google keywords that landed people on this site over the last two months:
- absenteeism at honda
- arse licking
- bad analogy
- does saint saens have an umlaut?
- crotch stomp picture
- convert to thong
- classical?classical? why
- can you get hypnotized by listening to classical music?
- varucca sock
- not all passacaglias should be miserable
- how to convert a stereo wire to a monster
Wait, what?
PS – Yeah, I know, I haven’t been posting… I’m more stressed than a structural column in Dubai at the moment.
Following the Unheard
My mp3 player listens to music alone. Sometimes, starting it up as I enter the outside, it begins playing a piece which was not what I left it with. There is an obvious explanation for this: it so much enjoys the music I listen to that it conducts private performances, hidden safely within the black headphone cord spaghetti. I’m pretty sure that’s it.
Sometimes this misbehavior results in serendipity. For example: this morning. As usual, I skipped down the gleaming, freshly painted steps of my house, brimming with enthusiasm for the day ahead. As I pranced down our path, the family of bunnies in our yard (the Benjamins) paused their game of jump-rope, just long enough to call out a cheerful “top o’ the morning, mister Smith!”. The widely grinning sun tipped his sunglasses and gave me a thumbs up, before removing an embroidered white handkerchief from his back pocket and wiping the perspiration from his forehead. The milkman whistled Frere Jacques as he clinked and clanked merrily up the cobblestones.
Everything seemed so normal and boring, so average.
Then came the shocker. As I pressed the play button on my mp3 player, unfamiliar music wafted violently into the sides of my head. And it was awesome. I swear to god I didn’t leave it paused there before, it was like, providence, or something.
It’s the Nielsen string quartet no. 2. It’s got that funky not-quite-tonal thing going on, which totally floats my boat, and carries my tote, and tethers my goat. If I listen to it more and really get into it I’ll give you more detailed feedback than fanciful caprine (frickin’ word of the day right there, folks) wordplay.
Madécasses
I heard these on NPR last night, and for a few minutes thought they might be late Shostakovich songs that I hadn’t heard before:
It turns out they are by Ravel. They are the chansons madécasses. It’s the sparse orchestration and off-white tonality which reminded me of late Shosty — but these dudes are from the 1920s instead of the 1960s.
This was the the first time I had listened to anything by Ravel since a certain wannabe love interest tried (and failed) to get me pumped up about the rapsodie espagnole.
Timefilling
Things this week which I’ve been doing instead of writing to you:
- Moving everything in our lab about 45 feet to the south.
- Getting the horribly cracked windscreen on my car replaced
- Searching for (and finding, thank god) accommodation for next year
- Starting my very delayed, and three week long, PhD A exam.
- Trying to get American Express to give me an extended warranty , so that I can get my freshly dead laptop battery replaced for less than $80.
TOO MUCH STUFF! Both the blogging and >100bpm exercising have suffered due to all those aboves. It’s not good. It’s so easy to give up on stuff like that when you are stressed out. The most challenging free-time activities are the ones which are first in the line of sacrifice. When you are extra busy all day it is easier to not go to the gym than to not spend an hour watching Netflix.
But it is most important to exercise when you least feel like doing it.
Oh crap, I have to run back to lab (yeah, it’s midnight) and shut everything down nicely before the building power beats me to it.
Re-Group-Ing
Yo dudes. I’m taking a bit of a breather from blogging this week — things are pretty hectic. I’ll be back in form in a few days.