Blue and black

Blue Diamond 1

I spent the evening photographing a tech rehearsal for a dance program. Here are three of the pictures. There are about 1600 more to go through. The dress rehearsal is Thursday, and I’ll probably take at least as many more then.

Blue Diamond 2

Elastic bands

Mind your head

Potential ouchie

Some aspects of GATE are not well thought-out, e.g., the girls’ armor. What purpose do the pointed projections on the pauldrons serve? If one of the warrior maidens tilts her head to the side, she’s liable to pierce her ear or worse. Also, I don’t recall ever seeing any of the girls with helmets, even in the middle of battles. It may be that on the far side of the gate women’s skulls are so thick and dense that head protection is superfluous, but I am skeptical.

Forgot your helmet?

Fuzzy details

Miscanthus

I did some preliminary spring cleaning in the tiny garden out front, and kept one of the plumes from the clump of ornamental grass (Miscanthus sinensis?) to give Helicon Focus a workout. The picture above was composed from 48 slices and has a depth of field of about three inches.

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

The calendar says it’s February, but it’s May outside. I took the day off, and in a little while I’m going to go out and enjoy the weather. While I’m out, here’s some miscellaneous nonsense for you. As usual, I forget where I found most of these.

The more Pope Frankie flaps his mouth, the more I miss Bennie and J.P.

Transporter before

Transporter after

Continue reading “What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?”

Here we go again

Shakin' Shakin' Shakes

While I might have felt earthquakes at a greater frequency during the year I lived in San Francisco, during the past few years I have experienced a larger number here in Kansas than in all the years I lived in the allegedly more seismically-active west, most recently earlier this hour.

Footnote on Sulphur Island

An unexpected volcanic hazard:

One of the few videos of a phreatic blowout on Iwo Jima turned out to not be phreatic at all. Instead it was heat affecting an old 16 inch shell from Iowa that had fallen into the ocean. As the spot inflated up and became the new beach it dried out and heated and “boom”. Volcanic artillery is something of a novelty. Cryptoshelling with magmatic release…

Evil and odious

Years ago, when I was a youngster in Bigamy City, Utah1, I played games stepping on the cracks between sidewalk blocks while walking home from the park. My favorite was as follows:

Step on a crack with the right foot.

Step on a crack with the left foot.

Reverse that: left, then right.

Take the entire sequence so far and reverse it: left, right, right, left.

Now take the entire eight-step sequence, and reverse that: left, right, right, left, right, left, left, right.

And so on.

I could usually keep the sequence straight for 64 cracks or so, but eventually I would either be distracted by something or run out of sidewalk. Later I found that if you arranged black and white boxes in a square grid using the sequence, the sides of which square were a power of two, you’d get a pattern with a high degree of symmetry. You could also use “0” and “1” to represent the elements of the sequence, which led to other sorts of games.

Morse-Thue_sequence

Last night, while browsing around online, I discovered that my game does in fact have a name: the Thue-Morse sequence. I was amused to see that one of the ways of generating it involves the notion of “evil” and “odious” numbers.

Miscellaneous nonsense, John Cleese edition

Thought for the day, from Francis W. Porretto:

Silo Syndrome is one of the natural consequences of the sense that things are sliding down the slippery slope to Shitville, and there’s nothing one can do about it. The sense might be illusory, of course, but the consequences of it are nevertheless compelling.
The countermeasure is laughter, however administered or evoked. Jokes. Puns. Harmless pranks. General horseplay. Frivolity. Cat videos. The zany impulse indulged in an unguarded moment. Laughter might not be able to cure cancer, but it can make the chemotherapy a bit easier to endure.

Some vile ethnic humor, attributed to John Cleese:

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”

The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

Rationality

Years ago I attended a performance of a John Cage piece. The musicians sat on the stage in black turtlenecks while making gurgling noises with conch shells and water to the accompaniment of a recording of pine cones burning. After 20 minutes, one of the performers stood up and blew on his conch for five minutes, at the end of which his face was purple. I’ve also sampled recordings of Cage’s prepared piano music; the sonorities are novel, but the music itself is hard to pay attention to for more than a minute or two. Cage himself was probably aware that his music would not be universally appreciated, which is perhaps why he insisted that auditoriums where his music was performed have easily accessible exits.

Cage’s political philosophy is more interesting than his music, which makes him unique in history of music:

Cage—most famous for his 1952 composition 4’33”, in which musicians sit in perfect silence for four minutes and 33 seconds—was a gut anarchist. Asked about the word ecology, the composer replied that whenever he heard that seductive word he knew he’d soon hear the word planning, and “when I hear that word, I run in the other direction.” He boasted that he never voted.

Continue reading “Miscellaneous nonsense, John Cleese edition”

1,000 times more likely?

Does the Eagle have any proofreaders left?

I came across some startling numbers in an article on politics and dating while skimming though this morning’s Wichita Eagle.

Those in the Clinton camp are more likely to be female (176 percent) and gay (606 percent), and Trump supporters are more likely to be unemployed (82 percent) or retired (96 percent).

I suppose I ought to track down the original Washington Post story to see if the surprising statistics originated there, but I have better things to do with my lunch hour.

Music boxes, skeletons and ragtime

In addition to occasionally posting music at MuseScore, I also listen to pieces uploaded by other MuseScorians. The quality varies tremendously, but the best are very good indeed.

One composer whom I particularly enjoy is Tuukka Jokilehto, a.k.a. “Rivergrove.” Among other things, he writes many short, colorful pieces for beginning pianists, such as his collection of “skeleton” music. I recently ran his composition “Old Music Box” through Logic, using sounds sampled from an old music box.

Most of Hans Jacobi‘s piano pieces, while not of Lisztian difficulty, are nevertheless not for beginners, and I’m content to let the MIDI player perform them. He writes numerous modernist short pieces that embody his understanding of “wabi-sabi.” He has a subtle sense of humor that occasionally surfaces, such as when he imagines how Wagner would play the blues.

Finally, there’s Cj Brandt, who composes piano rags. He’s from Wichita, and has even written a “Wichita Rag.”