Author: Don

More people in funny clothes

Shiny

The first batch of pictures from the weekend are up at my Flickr site. The event was “Figments & Filaments,” a costuming convention debuting this year at a hotel in Independence, Missouri. It was a small, friendly event, about equal parts SCA and steampunk. Although I brought a cotehardie with me, I stayed in civvies and just took a lot of pictures.

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Extracurricular reading

I have another new toy, and I’m going to continue to be scarce here for a while longer while I figure it out. While I’m gone, you might want to drop in on Josh, who’s blogging his way through the alphabet. I particularly like his entries for G, J, R and S. There’s also this:

And don’t get me started about clown masses. If you want proof that Satan is real…

Update: Read also Eve Tushnet on Last Call.

You can also watch some fine unlicensed anime on YouTube, such as Kenji Nakamura‘s first and best series, Mononoke

(I wonder if Tushnet has see any anime beyond Tokyo Godfathers. I’d really like to see what she can find in such works as Mononoke and Serial Experiments Lain.)

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Twenty-five keys

When I first saw this video, I immediately wanted the little green keyboard that Masaki Kurihara plays. It looked like I could carry it in a backpack on my bicycle or at the campgrounds at Winfield, and I would not need to find an electrical outlet or a USB port. After some searching, I determined that it was a Suzuki Andes 25F, a sort of panpipe with a keyboard. Unfortunately, the ones available for sale then were too expensive to consider. I recently checked again and found much better prices. The best was at a Japanese shop affiliated with Rakuten Global Market, which is where I ordered it. Placing the order was a bit complicated but not too tedious, and it arrived fairly quickly once it was shipped.

Suzuki Andes

It has a two-octave range, from F to F. I frequently play in D, A and E, and a few more notes at the low end would have been extremely helpful. Still, there are plenty of tunes that fit well on it. The keys are smaller than regular piano keys. People with small fingers have an advantage; those with larger hands, like me, will find that it takes practice to avoid playing two notes simultaneously with one finger. The lower octave has a pleasant sound, but the upper octave gets shrill, and I avoid playing the highest notes. Unlike most flute-sounding instruments, you can play chords on it. Thirds sound good; fifths, triads and octaves can be unpleasant. Also, the more notes you play at once, the more breath it requires. Glissandos are easy.

The biggest problem is that there is no good way to hold it. There’s no handle on the instrument itself, no strap to slip your hand into. There is an indentation on the angled side that I think is intended for a hand hold, but it feels awkward and your arm soon gets tired. There’s a neck strap, but it isn’t secure. I’ll have to think about this and see what I can devise.

More silly sounds

Here’s an obnoxious setting of an old fiddle tune, “June Apple.” It’s mainly an excuse to make funny noises with Razor. Beware: this is very bass-heavy.

Update: Uploaded a ever-so-slightly less cacophonous version. All the voices except the percussion now are Razor.

Did we land, or were we shot down?

Miscellaneous links and nonsense:

David Bentley Hart, from the May 2014 First Things:

Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into execrable prose.

A look at brilliant, psychotic Joe Meek, who changed the sound of music.

Stereogram

Stereo pictures from WWI. A couple of notes: stereograms made for hand-held viewers use the parallel method of viewing, not the crossed-eye. I.e., the right eye focuses on the right image, the left eye on the left. It is possible to free-fuse the images, though it is easier done than explained. Let your eyes relax and drift apart until the images of a well-defined region in the pictures, such a the bright sky through the roof in the above image pair, start to overlap. Focus on that region until the images snap together, and you should then be able to see the entire scene in perspective. (You’ll need to sit back at least two feet from the monitor if you want to see the full-size images at the link in stereo.)

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I don’t get it

I dismissed Opera as a replacement for Firefox because it doesn’t do bookmarks. Now I’ve discovered to my intense irritation that WordPress doesn’t do blogrolls anymore. Fortunately, there is a plugin that restores the capability, but for a while this morning the atmosphere near my computer was sulphurous. I have lots of links on the previous site that I want to include here, but there is no obvious way to export them. It looks like I’m going to have to manually reconstruct the blogroll, grr. This will take a while. I am not happy.

But I really don’t understand. Why deprecate bookmarks? What’s wrong with blogrolls? And while I’m kvetching, why the obsession with magazine-style layouts these days? Sure, they look nice, but they’re a pain to navigate, particularly on a dinky laptop screen.