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.)

Continue reading “Did we land, or were we shot down?”

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.

栗コーダーポップスオーケストラ

Yotsuba&!

Here’s the track list from 「よつばと!」イメージアルバム「よつばと♪」, which I’m listening to right now:

よあけ
よつば、めをさます
よつば、とーちゃんをおこす
とーちゃん、にどねする
よつば、とーちゃんをおこす（はげしく）
よつば、おなかがすく
あさごはんのしたく
あさごはんをたべる
あとかたづけをする
よつば、でかける
よつば、こうえんであそぶ
よつばとえな
ふたりでおえかき
とーちゃん、はたらく
よつば、おなかがすく
はらへったおんど
ひるごはんのしたく
ひるごはんをたべる
おひるね
なつのごご
ひとりでおえかき
よつばのちいさなだいぼうけん
よつばととーちゃん
ゆうすずみ
とーちゃんとおでかけ (ー Odekake and fine)
オカイモノのうた
かえりみち
カレーをつくる
カレーをたべる（とてもおいしく）
おふろにはいる
きょうもいちにちたのしかった
おやすみなさい
またあした

If you see Japanese characters, that means that the database is set up correctly.

I finally found out why I couldn’t use non-English characters on my weblog. If you used Fantastico or something similar to install WordPress, as I carelessly did several years ago, it would set “latin1” as the character set in MySQL instead of UTF8, thus changing all the kanji to question marks. It’s possible to fix the database, but it looks like a nightmare for someone who prefers to do as little coding as possible. I figured it would be much simpler simply to start a new weblog and import the old data to the new site.

So, welcome to the new weblog, pretty much the same as the old weblog. I’ll be doing some tidying-up over the next week or so, and soon it should be no uglier than its predecessor.

If you see a box with a question mark where a picture should be, click on the box. That will bring the picture up.

Kilt optional

Today is Tartan Day. Here are a few Scottish tunes: The Barren Rocks o’ Aden / Munro’s Rant (Angus Cumming, 1782) / Stirling Castle / Miss Kitty Gordon of Earlston’s Reel (Robert Riddell, 1787).

Wilhelm Reich does mecha

The accumulators are going to be overloaded

From episode one of Captain Earth, yet another ridiculous adolescents and mecha show that I made the mistake of sampling.

The Al Gore effect intensifies

From episode one of The Irregular at Magic High School, which looks like it will involve class warfare of a sort in one more damned high school story.

I might watch more of the latter show, or I might not. The only shows this spring that interest me are Ping Pong, because of Masaaki Yuasa, and Mushishi, because it’s Mushishi.

Update: Ubu has read the books on which The Irregular at Magic High School is based and found them “really good, fairly deep.” I probably will watch more.

Unbooked

No more fox

So Mozilla is cracking down on thoughtcrime. I need to find an alternative to Firefox that runs on my Mac. ((Safari remains my primary browser, but there are some operations that Firefox does better, and I’ve kept both handy.)) I experimented with several yesterday, and while they mostly worked tolerably well for my purposes, none were astonishing — except for Opera. WTF? Am I missing something? What kind of browser doesn’t allow you to use bookmarks?! ((Yeah, there is a “bookmark bar,” but it’s useless for storing more than half a dozen sites.)) I have a large, organized and frequently edited collection of bookmarks, which I need. Why the hell is this joke is being recommended as a replacement for Firefox?

For what it’s worth, Chrome seems to be the least annoying. However, it’s part of Google, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with that particular borg than absolutely necessary.

Update: Show Mozilla your frowny face.

Ken the Brickmuppet recommends Epic.