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Sunday, November 15th, 2009
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So last night I punched John Wallace, the principal of the RSAMD.
... IN MY MIND.
In my dreams, specifically. He was bullying two friends of mine from NYCOS by singing Verdi's Torture aria at them in an attempt to make them work harder. So I punched him, because they weren't even students at his university (we were at Napier for some reason) and he wouldn't stop.
And this is how it goes...
That was the chorus anyway - the rest of it was, unsurprisingly, a list of painful torture implements, made all the more creepy by being delivered in a major key.
So my brain is an odd place to be sometimes.
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Monday, October 5th, 2009
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Have done a minor cull of friends-list; mostly people who don't post any more, who I haven't seen in person for several years, or who only post Stargate:Atlantis slash fiction. If anyone particularly wants to be added back, say so.
We stayed at my parents' this whole weekend, going over to see my gran in Fife yesterday, as it's the last weekend before they head off on their epic trip to the States (we'll meet them in Colorado; for anyone who doesn't know, we get into Denver/Boulder area on the 22nd of October and leave on 4th November, getting back to the UK on the 5th).
Tonight, conducting! Dick Vet Choir (which is up to about twelve decent voices now) and the orchestra - which now consists of two of each woodwind (except bassoons, of course), two trumpets, and at least one of each strings (except double bass). And also a bass clarinet and a couple of saxophones (one Bb tenor, one Eb alto) - after a fair bit of transposing work, I think it's now possible to have the bass clarinet and Bb sax play the bassoon parts, the Eb sax play one horn part, and we should hopefully have another horn turning up this week. Which might mean that we finally get a full orchestra! Fingers crossed.
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Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
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I have started to realise that this is not just jetlag, it's a whole lot of stress. PhD work, actual work, three groups that I'm directing, two of which I've got to publicise in the next week, organising Ardgour (not that I'm doing much of that at the moment as it's non-urgent), organising Sound Thought, and trying to keep on top of cooking meals are just slaughtering me right now.
Please don't ask me to do things I'm not committed to at the moment for the next few months; I have too much on already and a chronic inability to say no.
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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On Many Unrelated Things...
First, thank you to everyone who came to my party/contributed to getting me Rock Band/thought about contributing but couldn't/sent me a card/etc. You're all wonderful. It's a shame Rock Band drums are antisocial when you have downstairs neighbours (as we found out) - guitar, bass and vocals are still a lot of fund though. Does anyone know of a tiny version of the Rock Band drumkit? I'm thinking something that can be played with thumbs instead of sticks, and big toe instead of foot. (Insert a mental image here of me playing a tiny imaginary drumkit with aforesaid digits - Ash assures me that this was very cute to watch.)
We leave for Florida tomorrow! There was a brief and almost-horrible snafu when we suddenly realised that our flight is not in fact from Edinburgh, but from Glasgow. Fortunately my parents are awesome and happy to spare us the vagaries of public transport by driving us over from Dalkeith. Have registered with ESTA, and I now have a valid visa to visit the US until at least August 2011.
My new job is interesting! And I've sorted out the pay issue from the old job and got paid the two weeks of overlap pay, which is useful. Interesting reading from the DFT's Transport Statistics Great Britain 2008 report (yes, really): did you know that, per billion passenger kilometres, cyclists are at less risk of dying from traffic accidents than pedestrians? (There is a 50% higher risk of serious injury, and about double the risk of slight injury - but when you consider that cyclists go on average about twice as fast as pedestrians, the risk of injury per hour on the road is almost identical.) http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/217792/421224/transportstatisticgreatbrit.pdf if anyone feels like wading through it - lots of interesting bits of information (motorways are much safer than any other type of road, for example - possibly due to not having pedestrians or cyclists on them). And interesting bits like that. In the next few months I hope to take some sites where councils have put in injury prevention systems like speed bumps, use some mapping software, and produce parallel animations showing the accidents in the years before the speed bumps went up, and the accidents in the years following. Which would be a very nifty way of showing their effectiveness. Any experienced ArcView users out there who can help?
And in September we're heading down to Brighton (getting in about 11.30pm on Thursday 10th, leaving afternoon on Sunday 13th) so if anyone there wants to meet up (other than ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) angelislington, trukkle and sunlightdances, who are all very much in the diary already) then let us know.
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As some of you might know, I'm conducting the Dick Vet orchestra next term. No idea yet what instruments we're going to have available! I'm also hoping to find some free scores and parts online.
So far I've found:
http://www.mfiles.co.uk/sheet-music-classical.htm
But what I'd really like is something like http://www.cpdl.org - but for orchestras instead of choirs (with parts etc.) Any suggestions?
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(This would also probably work with chicken if you're a carnivore.)
Makes 2-3 portions.
Put some groundnut or similar light oil in a frying pan (enough to just cover the base when heated - a tablespoonful should be plenty). Heat, and then throw in 2 quorn fillets per portion, and a diced red pepper. Saute for 5 minutes. Add a diced courgette, a diced shallot and some finely chopped garlic and chilli (I use 1 clove of garlic and 1 green chilli, with seeds: adjust according to taste, this is medium-hot). Saute until the Quorn fillets are cooked through. Add a tin of tomatoes, a squodge of tomato puree, 2-3 chopped spring onions, a stem of lemongrass (chopped in half and fanned out a bit to maximise surface area), a handful of chopped fresh coriander, and a tablespoon or so of soy sauce. Stir, simmer for a few minutes, and serve with rice.
(Add more veg if you're serving more people - aubergine would work well.)
One upside of Ash being away this week (sob) is that I can cook spicy food and use fresh chillies without worrying!
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Recommended on IPlayer: How To Be A Composer. Made by a friend who I know from choir - interesting, and opens up a lot of debate. The music he's creating isn't entirely his, perhaps - very strongly influenced by teachers and players - but then whose is?
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(with thanks to whoever took this screenshot)
I'll shut up about AC after this, probably. But this was a really interesting bit at the end of the game, and I couldn't find the answer to my question of "so what are all these locations?" anywhere else on the internet. They probably all have some mystic significance, and may well be related to the Templars.
So as far as I can tell, here are my answers; all I've done is look for the closest major city, except for the first one, which I'm sure of :)
Going anti-clockwise from the top right corner;
Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland (yay!)
London, possibly Westminster, the Palace, etc. (or maybe the Temple Church, which does have some vague historic Templar links)
South of France: funnily enough, I think the map location is close to the JET fusion reactor project... This might even be Andorra.
Casablanca or Tunis
Somewhere off the coast of Africa, with no landmasses there on a modern map. Atlantis?
Dakar
Ouagadougou (no, seriously)
Dar Es Salaam
Cairo (or more likely the Pyramids)
Damascus
Baghdad
Delhi
Budapest
Minsk
St Petersburg (there's probably a tie-in with Rasputin there).
In the game, this rotates all the way round; several cities in America also light up (which makes no sense whatsoever, given that this part of the game supposedly took place around the time of the Crusades, when there were no major cities in America AFAIK). There's definitely also a location in Japan, and probably in Tunguska in Siberia, and there must be at least one in South America.
Strange omissions: Venice (which is the setting for the sequel); Vatican City; anywhere in Germany.
I don't have the dedication to fight the final boss again and look at the rest of the map. But if anyone has a screenshot of the other side of the map, that would be fab.
Any suggestions or clarifications on these would be useful. Making this public so that it will (hopefully) be findable with Google etc.
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My PhD review was last Wednesday. Since then, I have mostly been playing Assassin's Creed (effective gameplay, limited variety, but extremely pretty graphics, and a plot that goes along fairly predictably until the last two scenes and then explodes in twenty-eight different directions - will definitely get the sequel).
The basic message of the PhD review, as summarised by one of my supervisors:
. a large-scale piece (ie structurally substantial) would be very beneficial to your portfolio
. avoid staying in your comfort zone – try to engage with “unexpected” devices and material.
. prioritise as much as possible writing music that will form part of your submission.
So I'll be concentrating on that for the next couple of years. This means no taking on extra projects other than the ones I currently have - can people avoid asking me to do musical things if they have other folk who could do it available?
So as of next term, I'll be conducting the Dick Vet Orchestra and Choir on Monday nights, and Glasgow University Music Club choir (and hopefully a student chamber choir also if I can get enough people interested) on Wednesday nights. But I need to not take on anything else...
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Glasgow has thunder.
And rain. Lots of rain.
And in an hour or so I'm off to a wedding rehearsal - yes, this will involve cycling in rain with inadequate rainwear. Waah.
I haven't updated for two weeks - should do something about that.
Work is dying slowly - we haven't had anything to do for the last four weeks, really. In a couple of weeks I start my new job at Yorkhill Hospital, which will hopefully be rather more challenging than "how shall I kill these three hours?"
PhD is going reasonably well. Yearly review next Wednesday. The first five months of the year pretty much accomplished nothing, but in the last month I've done a paper on Shostakovich for the Moving Forward conference in Aberdeen later this month, written a setting of "Christus Venit" (text by Prudentius) for choir which does interesting things without being unsingable, and uploaded a bunch of arrangements to Choral Public Domain Library for publicity purposes. Hopefully plenty of choirs will pick them up. And I wrote The Windhover in November, so that was good. And I've spent a lot of time organising Sound Thought.
(I am mostly saying all this to convince myself that I'm not going to fail.)
The rain has now become a torrent. Aaaaagh.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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Everyone's complaining about the BNP. And rightly so.
But on the other hand, look at the overall results.
As of 11am this morning, the BNP may have increased their vote share substantially, but the highest increase in percentage terms - at 2.5% more of the electorate than last year - has actually gone to the Green Party. Minor yay.
Still waiting for Scotland to declare. *twiddles thumbs*
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It's been a while since I updated... well, anything really.
But I was amused by this chunk of tortured grammar from the BBC's report on F1 racing:
"Under the rules at the start of this season, Kers - which provides drivers with an extra boost of power for 6.7 seconds per lap - would also be in place at the start of 2010.
The power - 80bhp - was also due to be increased next year, meaning all teams would have had to have had it in order to remain competitive."
You can see how they got there, but it still looks painful to me.
In other news, have finished with Glasgow Chamber Choir concerts for the year (except for a recording session Thursday after next), work is winding down as we've stopped seeing new patients, and I'm still knackered from the after-effects of the 'flu I had a few weeks ago. (Getting from Hyndland to Queen Street usually takes me 20 minutes; last night I was so tired it took me 30, and I only got home before 11pm because the Aberdeen train was diverted via Falkirk due to engineering works and I could catch it instead.) Need a few days off. Fortunately, this Wednesday and Thursday should fit the bill.
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While searching for a GP's address in Glasgow, I do a Google search for "Dr Allison" Glasgow. Allison is the surname in this case.
Tenth result is ashfae's aunt Allison, in Colorado.
*sigh*
(To be fair, one of the other doctors there is apparently called Russ Glasgow, so it wasn't entirely daft - still have no idea where this Dr Allison is though.)
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Much as I hate spam, I admit that the subject line "Gay Zombie Hunter's Dilemma" gave me a few moments' unexpected amusement.
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Now this is interesting. I've never actually met someone with the same name. However, there are a confusing number of them:
Chris Hutchings, who's aged about 18, lives in Wales, and plays in a band called Hard Pursuit, and who I have friended on Facebook.
Chris Hutchings, who's about my age, is an award-winning jazz drummer, and who I once got sent a cheque for.
Chris Hutchings, who manages a football club somewhere (I think in the First Division). Used to manage Wigan and Bradford.
Another one who makes curtains, and owns chrishutchings.co.uk .
A choreographer who owns chrishutchings.com.
I think there was also a celebrity lawyer, but haven't noticed him around recently.
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We are back from a week away! (Some people may not have noticed that I was gone, because I don't post to LJ often these days.)
I've been using the last couple of days to get through all the procrastination I didn't manage over the last week. And emails and that sort of thing. Impressively, there was nothing urgent at all.
I'm typing this from a new computer, kindly gifted by mirabehn and mostlyacat, which is working very nicely indeed. All I had to do was switch the cables over and it all worked! (after a few minutes of "why is the monitor not working? ... oh, because I've managed to plug it into a printer port, what idiot made those the same shape?") Now I just have to get all my documents over. The change from "switch on computer, wait 2 minutes, log in, click on internet, wait 2 minutes, finally get internet" to "takes about 30 seconds to get online" is lovely.
The holiday itself was fabulous. Time spent with many lovely people, several old friends and a couple of new ones. Beautiful scenery, good weather for five out of the seven days, beach about 100 yards from house (albeit with freezing cold water), and excursions to a few other lovely places including Tobermory. And a lot of general relaxing, chilling out, playing games and re-energising. Yay.
I also found a fascinating story about simulating human brains with a computer, molecule by molecule. Which makes me wonder exactly how far away the future is. Thoughts, anyone? (and indeed thoughts on the thoughts of this thing).
I also pondered briefly about Dreamwidth. But then I saw that LJ's response to homophobic ads, and complaints about them, was actually quite good, which decided it for me. Staying here for foreseeable future.
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
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Yesterday, on coming out of the music department on my way to a rehearsal, I noticed a box in the entrance hall. It said "unsorted music - free, take it if you can find a use for it".
This was a box of RANDOM shit.
I mean, seriously random. Biographies of Schumann, music-hall songs that I'd never heard of, Beethoven's Choral Fantasia... but among it were some absolute gems:
an arrangement of Flanders&Swann's "The Hippopotamus" for TTBB, which I can easily adapt to SATB if required;
an SSAATTBB arrangement of "When I'm 64" (quite unlike my one, thank goodness);
a tricky-looking but fun SAATB arrangement of "I Know Him So Well";
SATB&piano arrangement of "The Way You Look Tonight", familiar from a tenth-generation photocopy which I've seen at many concerts;
a Peter Warlock song called "Piggesnie";
and, possibly best of all, a printed copy of "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" by The Wurzels.
So that made my day.
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Saturday, April 4th, 2009
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The first of these actually came up in a dream last night. It would take too long to explain:
What kind of bean is good at climbing trees?
( Read more... )
And another one that I thought up during a boring day at work yesterday:
What kind of dinosaur turns up quickly?
( Read more... )
Thank you. I'm here all week.
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