Lukewarm Thursday Linkage
Holy crap, It’s thursday already?
These get the lukewarm moniker because a) it’s really friggin icy outside today, and b) I’m breaking the rule of three.
- Remember that huge-ass piano from Big? Well it is moving from some rich guys music room into the Philadelphia Please Touch Museum, which I assume means that you get to stomp Chopsticks out all over it.
- Cellists, your crotches are safe. For now. A very famous UK doctor (who I’ve never heard of) admitted to making up the condition of “Cellist’s Crotch” and submitting a letter about it to the BMJ, in which it was published. She said she did it in response to a previous letter describing “Guitarist’s Nipple”.
Oh, hang about, there was another link. Yay three!
- The most expensive concerts of 2008 – non-classical concerts, that is. Anybody fancy comparing the genres? “Orchestra Premium” seats for the Ring Cycle at the metropolitan opera: $2200. (yeah yeah, four concerts, I know)
A Chinese New Year non-Resolution
“1650×1050″ and two nostrils worth of snickering laughter is the answer you get from a geek when you ask what his (or her, or its) new years resolution is. I cannot abide the making of new years resolutions — both the real kind, and the version which is a stale joke about aspect ratios. If something is worth resolving to do, you should probably start doing it RIGHT NOW, not save it up for an arbitrary orientation of the earth with respect to the sun.
However, if I were the resolution makin’ type of man, this is what I would choose:
Yeah I know, blah blah, it’s a Western kid copying the Mongolians (or Inuits, Sardinians, etc..). Well I actually prefer it without the throatiness, so suck it, hippies.
Plinky plonky
The piano/physics/block-slinging little internet game of the day (and believe me there was a LOT of competition for the title) is this entry from Germany. I’d give you some pointers as to how to wrangle the little beastie into submission, but half the fun is working out for yourself what all the knobs and little colored squares do.
I love the tidy little color palettes in the akkord section, that’s a beautiful way of visualizing the harmonies in a chord. A chord. Akkord. Is that where the word chord comes from? Wiktionary says… no. It actually comes from the Greek word khorde which means “string of gut”. Interestingly the same word is also the root of “cord”, as in rope. Huh. That’s one of those things which seem incredibly obvious in hindsight.
No wait a second. That’s not obvious at all. It’s actually completely surprising that chord and cord come from the same source. I think that means it’s bedtime. After all, you know how the old saying goes: “words start overlapping/lie down and start napping”.
It does start a bit quiet…
There oughta be a term for when you can’t find a video on Youtube due to the original being drowned in spoofs, remixes and other examples of poor production values. I was trying to find a video of Lux Aeterna, aka the arpeggioey theme from Requiem for a Dream, because I was gonna say that:
- “I just watched the film for the first time … blah blah blah … depressing depressing … but not quite as much as with David Lynch.” (That is, “his movies have more of an emotional impact on me.” Not: “Requiem would be more depressing if I watched it with David Lynch”. Though that’s probably true too.)
- “Those crazy kids in the Kronos Quartet played a lot of the soundtrack … blah blah blah … why gosh golly, they sure do get around a lot don’t they?”
HOWEVER. Instead of that happening — which is good, because in retrospect that sounds like an pretty boring blog post — I discovered that:
- The piece has been used in fifty-thousand different trailers, TV shows and adverts. Most famously in the trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- Every fanboy (or fangirl/fanperson; we are equal-opportunity makers of derogatory remarks) on the internet has used that piece to put together their own horribly “deep” trailer for their favorite movie, which is usually Lord of the Rings.
- The version they use is inevitably the re-orchestrated score for orchestra and choir, because it sounds more — cough — “epic”.
Which all adds up to it being vaguely impossible to dig out a video of the string quartet orchestration. Or at least one that isn’t filled Hobbits, or have “It does start a bit quiet LOL” (seriously) whacked on the front of it.
Oh well, it turns out after all that I kind of don’t want to hear it again anyway. We can call that the Pachelbel effect.
Thems Flyting Words
Dubious newsflash: Rap Invented by 16th Century Scotsmen. I want to believe.
Summary: Medieval Scotsmen competitively dissed each other in verse, in a manner similar to the freestyle battles of today. This was called flyting. One of the earliest examples of this is The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie (full text here), which is over 600 lines of foul Scottish pentameter. Examples: “Ignorant fule! in to thy mowis and mokis/It may be verifyit that thy wit is thin”, “Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kynd”, etc.
This professor is claiming that flyting was imported to America by Scottish slave owners, and then was picked up and extended by the slaves. Hmmm. It’s plausible, but the concept of “insulting each other in rhyme” seems like the kind of thing which could easily be independently invented every other fortnight. It seems like the inevitable lovechild of “being drunk and singing” and “being drunk and insulting people”.
Anyway, I don’t actually care that much if it’s true or not. What I do care about is seeing some modern day Scottish flyting throwdowns, in a thick highland accent. With subtitles. C’mon Scotland, do it for me.