The Mandelbear's Musings

Last week was physically quite uncomfortable for me; the problem has (mostly?) resolved this morning, thanks mainly to macrogol and senna. I also learned that constipation can cause back pain. On the other hand, I finally got the email from VGZ saying that I have health insurance. (I'm annoyed that it took so long; the fact that I am living in a house that I own should have given them a clue three months ago.)

There was music this week, starting with Leslie Hudson's Hemlock in the Honey tour playlist listening party (all American stops on the tour having been cancelled), and ending with this Star Wars Medley played on the Finnish Kantele, and, by the same performer -- Ida Elina -- the Evolution of Kantele (Finnish Harp). In between, N and I had a practice session. Which, among other things, finally got me off my arse about starting to bring the Kaleidofolk up to date, since one of the songs we worked on, "Life Cycle of Flowers", didn't have chords on the site. (I found the original, printed using an unknown program, in one of my notebooks.)

More music links below, mostly on Saturday. It's been a good week for rabbit holes.

Monday has quite a few good links about how to De-google-ify Internet. My favorite, though, has to be CHATONS. It's French (but easily switched to English or German), and stands for "Collectif des Hébergeurs Alternatifs, Transparents, Ouverts, Neutres et Solidaires". "Chatons" is French for "kittens". Honorable mention goes to a crowdfunding site called "KissKissBankBank".

( Notes & links, as usual )

So the idea of "spirituality" has been in my mind, and to some extent in my journal, where I wrote "Is looking up at the night sky a spiritual practice?" I was remembering, in particular, the night N, Colleen and I came back to the house on Whidbey Island one night not too long after we'd bought the place -- the sky was spectacularly clear, and for a long while we all just looked up and got lost in the depths of it.

Songs came up in my discussion with EG yesterday, in a somewhat different context, and afterward I thought about what songs inspire the kind of awe and grandeur that those stars did.

The first song I thought of was Don Simpson's Ship of Stone. The second was Dave Carter's When I Go. The third was also by Dave Carter -- Lord of the Buffalo. Which I haven't done as a s4s, so I'll just link to Tracy Grammer's cover of it.

(You can also find considerably rougher versions by Kaleidofolk at Or-E-Con 2, 2022 and Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012. Not necessarily recommended unless you're a completist.)

Radiation therapy can lead one down some pretty weird rabbit-holes. I was rummaging around trying to find out why treatment dosage is measured in cGray. Why 1/100 of a Gray? (I note in passing that a Gray is 0ne joule per kilogram.) Well, it turns out that the outdated CGS unit of radiation dosage was the Rad, equal to 100 ergs per gram, and it's equal to 0.01Gy. So the field of radiation therapy goes back a long way, and everyone was used to using rads, so they just kept the numbers and renamed the unit. Besides, it means nobody has to worry about where to put the decimal point -- my prescription, which is fairly typical, is 7000cGy spread over 28 individual 250cGy zaps.

One thing leads to another, so I followed things like radiation poisoning, radioactive waste, and a Timeline of the far future, which somehow wound up at Ray cats. To quote the article,

A ray cat[a] is a proposed kind of cat that would be genetically engineered to change appearance in the presence of nuclear radiation. Philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri originated the idea of a "living radiation detector"[1] in 1984 as a proposed long-time nuclear waste warning message that could be understood 10,000 years in the future...

But how do you ensure that people ten millennia in the future will know why their cats suddenly changed color, and what to do about it? Well, you could make a nursery rhyme about it, and give it a really catchy tune,... The result is titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)". I'm not sure it's catchy enough to do the job, but it is pretty catchy.

See also, Raycats and earworms: How scientists are using colour-changing cats and nursery rhymes to warn future generations of nuclear danger - CityAM, The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain | Method, and the podcast Ten Thousand Years - Episode 114 of 99% Invisible (which has the song in it).

...

To change the subject almost completely, but still sort of related, the folks giving radiation treatments at the UW medical center provide background music via Spotify (to keep you from being bored during the prep and treatment, which takes some 20 minutes on a good day.) Naturally I told them to search Spotify for "filk".

The treatment only runs for the last few minutes; the rest is the techs adjusting your position and orientation so that the markers in your prostate line up within a millimeter or so of where they were the last time. So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Well, music-adjacent, anyway. Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia is an audio-visual rendering of the Wikipedia edit stream. Scroll down for more information. (This page has more detail.)

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.

Note: when you follow the link to the page, you won't hear anything -- it's muted. To unmute it, click on the volume-control slider in the upper right of the header (to the left of the "about" link -- it has rather low-contrast). Click close to it's left-hand (quite) end and adjust the volume from there.

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed that Songs for Saturday, in addition to having a highly irregular schedule (only 102 entries since I started the tag in 2011), occasionally strays away from the usual run of music-with-vocals that most people consider "songs". But I don't think I've ever strayed quite this far, though that's only because I haven't tagged whale songs or the chirp and ringdown of colliding black holes. Let me fix that.

So with a tip of the hat to ysabetwordsmith, here is The Sweet Song Of The Pando, The Largest Tree On Earth. (Ysabet actually pointed to this NPR article: Eavesdropping on Pando, one of the largest trees in the world. Pando is an aspen clone, spreading over more than 100 acres (43 hectares), with 47,000 tree-like stems growing from a single root system.

I'll get to black holes and whales eventually.

So, earlier in the week I linked to a song, Children Of Darkness by Richard Fariña (as sung with his wife Mimi) -- you'll find the lyrics under the cut, as well as at the link.

Here's another version, sung by Mimi's sister, Joan Baez. Not sure how I feel about the orchestration, but...

I like both versions, but with a preference for the Fariñas'. It's a weird little song, but it fits my mood and the times. Unfortunately. I'd much rather sing cheerful songs in happy times, but that isn't what's happening right now. Another song that's been in my mind lately is Bob Dylan's Desolation Row. Same kind of thing. When things are bad I want a song that resonates with the mood rather than fighting it. (That's related to the standard advice for talking to someone who's depressed or grieving. And the joke that goes: They told me, cheer up -- things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.)

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Since I got confused and ran this week's "Done Since..." post yesterday, I think I'll overcompensate and post an "s4s" post as "Songs for Sunday". (It wouldn't be the first time for either of those, although it may well be the first time I've done both in the same week.) And besides, this isn't really about songs.

Anyway, this week's rabbit hole started with an article on Aeon.co called either "The pharaoh’s trumpet", or "What King Tut's treasures reveal about daily life in ancient Egypt", depending on whether you look at the page's H1 tag or its title. In any case, last Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Among the lesser treasures there were a pair of trumpets, one made of gilded bronze, and one of silver. The article embeds a video, Tutankhamun's Trumpets played after 3000+ Years. I'll wait while you go and listen.

Which led me to Wikipedia, to find out why they were called "trumpets rather than bugles. There, I learned that "bugle" typically refers to the military signaling device, which is limited to the five notes of the "bugle scale", corresponding to the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth harmonics of the horn's fundamental. In the key of C these would be C, G, C, E, and G. You'll note that the 2nd and 4th harmonics are an octave apart, as are the 3rd and 6th.

That led me to the Natural trumpet, on which by going up to the 16th harmonic a skilled player can play an entire chromatic scale by bending, or "lipping", the 7th, 11th, 13th, and 14th harmonics to bring them into tune. Modern trumpets and other brass instruments use valves, of course, which side-tracked me for a while into looking up the difference between piston and rotary valves.

From there I started getting into the difference between "just intonation", which uses pure whole-number ratios, Pythagorean tuning, and the modern equal temperament system, which divides the octave into 12 equal semitones with a ratio of 2^-12 (the 12^th root of 2) between them. Just temperament is used primarily by a capella groups and string quartets.

After that I started getting into modes, diatonic (and other) scales, and some of the more arcane places music theory has gone in the last hundred years or so. I think things beyond that point are mostly of interest to academic music theorists -- mathematicians and physicists got off this bus around the harmonic series.

Yesterday's concert involved a lot of firsts, and not nearly enough preliminary testing; I was impressed if I get a recording that's as much as halfway decent. I'd hoped to have audio to post today, but that's not going to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

This was the band's first Zoom concert, and the first concert where I used the Allen & Heath ZEDi-10 mixer/USB interface. Results were mixed. And, fortunately, also unmixed. Because I got two sets of recordings. Let me back up a bit.

Note: the rest of this post can safely be skipped if you're not interested in home recording.

The A&H (henceforth "mixer") outputs four channels of audio over USB (Linux spuriously exposes the first channel as stereo -- weird) and has both balanced XLR outputs for the main mix, and unbalanced RCA outputs for the monitors and headphones. Since Zoom only supports two channels, I ran the main mix from the XLR outputs into my old Edirol UA-25 interface. The UA-25 has both balanced and unbalanced outputs -- I ran the outputs to my old pair of studio monitors, which I set up so that we could all hear the other side of the zoom meeting.

On a second laptop (Panther, which normally lives in my studio EDU) I set up Audacity to record the four channels of USB audio from the mixer. The default is for these to be the four microphone inputs, and by a happy non-coincidence we had four microphones set up: for me, Naomi, Magpie, and (guitar) Plink. N and m had various percussion instruments, which were not separately mic'ed. I ran the mixer's monitor outputs (set up to mirror the main mix) into the little hardware!Zoom (no relation to the video conferencing software!Zoom) H2 that I use for recording concerts.

We had determined during our rehearsal on Saturday that when you record a meeting using software!Zoom you get 32kHz mono. Yuck! We also re-arranged the living room so that we were all facing the monitors (both the speakers and the LCD) instead of clustered around the keyboard. This made a horrible tangle out of the cables, but fortunately I'd used velcro strips to color-code them, so untangling them this evening was comparatively easy.

The recording of the mix from the H2 ended up being pretty noisy, with a noticable amount of hum, poor balance on a couple of songs, and a few bad noise spikes that I wasted a lot of time this afternoon trying to fix. A lot of the noise was probably due to the crappy cable I used. I'd considered running Audacity on same machine that was running software!Zoom, but I hadn't tested that configuration and didn't trust it.

The 4-channel direct recording is much cleaner, (there were noise spikes, but all in the intros rather than the songs -- weird) but since I decided to work with the 2-channel version first, you'll have to wait until tomorrow (or later) to hear something decent enough to publish.

Kaleidofolk had a good rehearsal this afternoon -- I finally got most of the tech to cooperate. But it turned out that the recording I got off of Zoom was 32kHz mono. I can see why they'd want to do that, but grump anyway. I will try several other things tomorrow morning. The concert's at 2:30.

Anyway, the real s4s post this week will be "Songs for Sunday", tomorrow.

This, I think, needs no further introduction: The Typewriter - Leroy Anderson And His "Pops" Concert Orchestra - Muppet Version

So this will be a rather quick s4s, because I've been rather lazy today, and also we had a KF practice session. The lazyness mainly manifested itself as watching a lot of YouTube videos. Fortunately for this series, most of those videos -- all the ones that weren't math-related, in fact -- were from Talis Kimberley's - YouTube channel which consists mostly of sessions recorded in Talis's kitchen over the last two years or so.

They are wonderful, Talis is a fantastic (in several senses) songwriter and singer, and you should go watch them (and of course listen to them).

So I recently fell down a rabbit hole: Vidding: A History by Francesca Coppa (with a tip of the hat to jesse_the_k). I am still digging my way out -- the online open access version includes 137 videos, and I'm a little short of half-way through.

You have been warned.

The following definition is taken from Chapter 1:

A vid (sometimes called a fan vid, song vid, or song tape) is a fan-made music video in which preexisting footage (usually from television or movies) is edited to music (usually, but not always, a pop song). The result is a new multimedia object that tells a story, creates an interpretation, stages an argument, and/or produces a feeling. Fans who make such vids are first and foremost fans of the visual source. As such, a vid is properly labeled a Star Wars vid or a Game of Thrones vid (or sometimes a multimedia vid or a metavid), rather than a vid by such-and-such a recording artist. The music serves as the vid’s blueprint, its road map, its code and key. The vidder uses all the information in a song—lyrics, melody, beat, tempo, instrumentation—as scaffolding upon which to build a montage that reveals (which is to say, creates) aesthetic and narrative patterns in the footage. In a vid, the ear tells the eye what to see.

On January 28th, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster happened. I wrote Keep the Dream Alive shortly afterward (less than a week, IIRC), and performed it in the Challenger Memorial concert at Bayfilk III.

I added a verse in 2003 for Columbia.

The recording on the song page, is not particularly good -- much too fast, among other things. If I put together an album of space songs I'll re-record it. There are some concert performances, most of which are better: ConChord 2008, Conflikt 2009, and Westercon 2011. If you only listen to one, make it that last one. I should promote that one to the song page, but I'm being lazy.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

So I actually made some music on Saturday, for once, with a 25-minute concert in the Festival of the Living Rooms (you can find FotLR via FB or any filk-related discord server -- send me an email if you can't find it and want to).

N wanted to be part of it, so she came up to Whidbey with me for the weekend. We continued a family and band tradition by working out the set list this morning during our first rehearsal. We did a second run-through for timing -- 24.5 minutes. As usual, I think I did a lot better in the rehearsal -- I was way too nervous during the actual concert. And I think I left out a chorus in Lock Keeper. Glarg. Anyway, somebody -- R, I think, recorded it for us.

As you might expect, the whole thing was about Colleen, and with N singing on "Lock Keeper", "The Rambling Silver Rose", and "Where the Heart Is", half of it was really a Lookingglass Folk concert.

Setlist:

• Eyes Like the Morning
• Wheelin'
• Lock-Keeper
• The Rambling Silver Rose
• Where the Heart Is
• The River

Next time we give a concert it's not going to be anywhere near as ose. But we had to do this one first.

It's been a week. I bought a Molift Smart 150 Patient Lift (via craigslist), and a portable air conditioner (off Amazon, selected purely on the basis of delivery date). N and her kids were here Sunday evening through Thursday evening, and we spent much of Wednesday going through artwork, and got in a little band practice Thursday afternoon.

We have accumulated a lot of artwork. Mostly at science fiction conventions, but not entirely: there are things that Colleen and I have inherited from our parents and grandparents -- my parents were serious collectors of Inuit art (most of which I let go to my brother because I'm out of wall space). A lot of nostalgia there.

We are, of course, in the middle of a heat wave. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Tomorrow is predicted to hit 97, which is still about 10 degrees less than what's predicted for Seattle. I'm glad we're not living in San Jose anymore. (Did I mention that on Thursday? No, apparently not.)

Hot-weather tip: soak a dish towel in water, wring it out to where it isn't dripping, and hang it in the freezer. Take it out an hour later and wear it like a scarf.

( Notes & links, as usual [CW: medical TMI] )

It will come as no surprise to anyone who's been following this blog for a while that I have a weakness for rabbit holes. These often involve either a series of YouTube videos or a Wikipedia dive, and the deepest usually include both. So when the the 1998 movie version of "Cats" was streamed last Sunday to mark the musical's 40th anniversary, well...

It's provided me with an entire week's worth of rabbit holes and earworms.

If my memory serves me (it often doesn't, so...) "Cats" was the first, and perhaps only, Broadway show that Colleen and I actually saw live on Broadway. The details surrounding it don't appear to have been memorable, but the show certainly was, and when the DVD finally came out in 1998, I bought it.

I have mixed feelings about the movie version. On the one hand, it wasn't recorded at a live performance -- there were scenes and parts of scenes missing (Growltiger's Last Stand was the one I noticed), and there were close-up shots where you couldn't see what was happening on the rest of the stage. There were special effects, notably the appearance of Firefrorfiddle and the magical tricks in "Mr. Mistoffelees". On the other hand, the close-ups showed details that I couldn't possibly have seen from the nosebleed seats on the balcony, and the special effects were on the whole a nice addition. And of course being a DVD I can watch it any time I want, for free.

I still want a video of a live performance. There ought to be one. It's not likely that I'll see a live performance any time soon. Or maybe ever.

Anyway, rabbit hole. Mostly chasing links from the Wikipedia articles on the musical and the movie. That also led me to the 'Cats' Musical Wiki on fandom.com, and Cats the Musical Behind the Scenes on YouTube. The characters' detailed descriptions and back-stories are endlessly fascinating.

It also led me to T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, of course, and to the... unfortunate... 2019 film version, which is on the list of the worst films ever made for a variety of reasons. That's one DVD I don't intend to waste money on.

I won't waste too many words on it either; I'll just point you at Cats (musical) 1998 vs. 2019 Comparison and Why the Music in Cats (2019) is Worse than you Thought both on YouTube. And the Wikipedia article on the uncanny valley, which its CGI-over-motion-capture characters place it squarely in the middle of.

And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to watch the (1998) DVD again, because I'm all out of brain bleach.

Happy Valentine's Day to those who celebrate it -- I hope it was a good one. (If you don't, I hope it was just a good day for you, and you have my sympathy if it wasn't.) Since I neglected to do a proper s4s post yesterday, and because I've already written about some of my love songs, I'm just going to cheat and make links.

The earlier one is "Eyes Like the Morning", which I wrote the day before Valentine's day in 1990.

The next one is "The River", which I wrote two days before Valentine's day in 2008. That one also works for friendships, platonic relationships, and so on.

And because our 45th anniversary was last month, here's "Forty Five Years" by Stan Rogers.

You'll find lyrics and audio at the links.

At first I had no idea what today's s4s would be about. Then Steve Macdonald released The WorlDream Project : worldream.filk.de. Problem solved.

Back in 2001, Steve decided to attend every filk convention (plus Worldcon), gather together as many filkers as possible at each one, and record them singing one song: "Many Hearts, One Voice".

This awesome video and BandCamp album were the result.

My suggestion for the optimum listening experience is to pull up the BandCamp page for the song, which has the lyrics annotated with where each section was sung. Listen to it there. Then, bring up another window so you can watch the video on YouTube. Then go to The WorlDream Project website : worldream.filk.de to get the whole story, including the list of participants (and which cons they were recorded at).

Each convention also recommended two or three songs to go with the project; "The World Inside the Crystal" [s4s page here] was one of the three chosen by Consonance.

In case you're curious, I was in the chorus at Conflikt, Consonance, and OVFF. It was my first time at OVFF; I had decided to take advantage of the cheap flights following 9/11.

Not only is today Boxing Day, it's also the birthday of Charles Babbage: December 26, 1791. He invented the stored-program digital computer, which he called the Analytical Engine. That also makes the Analytical Engine the first unfinished computer project (unless you count Babbage's Difference Engine, but that wasn't a general-purpose computer). Contrary to popular belief, the mechanical precision of the time was quite capable of producing it (proved by the full implementation of the Difference Engine, using 1820s-level technology, in the 1990s), but the machining proved much more expensive than expected, and the project eventually ran out of funding. It's an old story.

But this post isn't about Babbage, or the Difference Engine -- this post is about a song I wrote back in 1985 called Uncle Ernie's [ogg][mp3], and that in turn was directly inspired by Mike Quinn Electronics, a surplus joint located in a run-down old building at the Oakland airport, run by a guy named Mike Quinn. I had to search for the name of the store; everyone just called it "Quinn's". There's a good description of the place in "Mighty Quinn and the IMSAI connection" on The Official IMSAI Home Page. As far as I know there is no connection to "Quinn the Eskimo" by Bob Dylan besides the title.

At one point Quinn's had a Bendix G-15 for sale, with a price tag just short of $1000. Unlike the one I first learned programming on, it had magtape drives as well as paper tape. Somebody eventually bought it; I hope they gave it a good home. That's almost certainly the origin of the line about magtape drives in the second verse. A 7090 would have occupied the entire building.

Almost all of the other computers mentioned -- Altair, Imsai, Apple 3, PC Junior, Heathkit Hero (yes, Heath sold robot kits back in the 1980s) -- were also quite real, and some of the smaller ones almost certainly did show up at Quinn's from time to time, especially the Imsai and Altair, which were sold in kit form. The only thing I made up completely was the temperature controller in verse three. The only one I actually used was the 7090 (or rather its successor, the 7094, but that wouldn't have scanned).

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

I have a long history with G&S, and especially with The Yeomen of the Guard. If I remember correctly it was the first, or one of the first, of their operettas I ever saw live, with my parents. It's grown on me over the years. I've had nearly as long a history with the Lamplighters in San Francisco. (I mentioned other performances of Yeomen here in 2005 and 2011.)

Colleen and I had season tickets for somewhere around thirty years, before we moved up to Seattle in 2012. I stayed on their mailing list, mostly out of inertia; it was often rather frustrating. So when they cancelled the 2020 season and started streaming past performances to their patreon supporters every month, I found out about it. Their first was free -- a performance of Pirates of Penzance. Their second was one of their recent Galas, and I might have skipped it, but they also announced that the one after that would be a 2017 performance of Yeomen. Hooked.

I'm not sure why Yeomen is my favorite. Perhaps because it's more serious than the others -- I have a rather ambiguous relationship to comedy. (This post might be something like a succinct explanation, though I really still don't understand it very well, so take it with a couple of bags of salt.) Perhaps it's because of "I have a song to sing, O!", a song I love fiercely, though I rarely get to perform it.

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to see The Yeomen of the Guard, do it. You won't be sorry.

OK, here's the setlist for my concert this afternoon:

1. Ship of Stone
2. The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
3. A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear
4. A Tribute to the Middle-Aged Bear
5. Windward
6. We'll Go No More A-Roving
7. The River
8. Riverheart
9. The October Country
10. The Toolmakers
11. Millennium's Dawn
12. Bells of Norwich
13. The Mary Ellen Carter

As usual, I was fiddling with the set-list up to the performance and beyond -- I swapped "Bells of Norwich" and "The Mary Ellen Carter" at the last minute, which was definitely the right thing to do. It came out to 55 minutes, which was 5 minutes over, but the moderator let me get away with it.

My guitar playing was very sloppy in parts, and I kept forgetting chords on the songs that weren't fully chorded-out. And fumbling a chord tends to throw off my vocals, though I've gotten better at just singing over the fumbles. People seemed to like it.

I made a recording off the zoom; we'll see how that goes after I've learned enough about video editing to split it into separate songs.

Coming down to the wire, here's a music video by fellow activist Julie Matthaei (we lived in the same co-op, Columbae, at Stanford 40-odd years ago). Just in case the embedding doesn't work, here's the link -- Dump Trump AND!!! - YouTube.

( embedded YT player under cut )

Here's the "writing of..." article Julie wrote about it: Dump Trump AND!!! Singing Across the Generation Gap for a 21st-Century Revolution | Common Dreams Views. Includes full lyrics.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   1315 words in 3 posts this month (average 438/post)
     71 words in 1 post today

Thursday N and her kids came up for an afternoon of music and conversation. Since N and her oldest kid, m, are the other two-thirds of Kaleidofolk, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that much of the afternoon was spent working on arrangements. I suspect the audience (Colleen, S, and j) may not have had quite as much fun, but...

We did it all outside on the deck, of course, with masks and 6' distances, N having picked out the one day this week with a forecast of clear weather. It was comfortably warm most of the afternoon, but eventually it got to the point where my fingers were uncomfortably cold. (I suppose I could have put on nitrile gloves -- after years of playing in hospital rooms I've gotten fairly good at it.) I made a batch of mulled cider, but drinking through a straw while trying to keep a mask on turns out to be more annoying than I'd expected. We had mulled cider apple pancakes for brunch Friday morning.

We started the afternoon's music with "Bells of Norwich", followed by "The October Country". Those were the two we workshopped, both for harmony (mostly m's department) and lead-lead-who's-got-the-lead scripting (mostly by N). The October Country has never been the subject of an s4s post -- I'll have to do something about that.

We then proceeded to sing "Lock Keeper" by Stan Rogers and "Gentle Arms of Eden" by Dave Carter. N and I hacked Lock Keeper for two voices, with her as the sailor and me as the lock keeper -- it works perfectly as a duet. I'm almost certain that we sang one more song in between The October Country and Lock Keeper, but I didn't take notes and can't remember what it was. Might have been Lord of the Buffalo. Blerg. I worry about myself sometimes.

By the time we finished "Gentle Arms of Eden" it was too cold for me to play, so we had to cut it short. Otherwise we would probably have finished with "The Mary Ellen Carter", "Ship of Stone", or both.

Right now I'm at nOVFF 2020, with something like five different tracks in separate zoom meetings and a Discord server. It is basically impossible for me to listen to music and write simultaneously, so I'll stop here and go back to the con.

Not a good week. Not horrible, either, by contemporary standards, but Colleen spent Monday through Thursday in the hospital with another UTI, and the air quality has gotten progressively worse. Up until today Whidbey Island -- or at least the Oak Harbor measuring station -- has had a slightly lower AQI than most of the surrounding measurements, but today it's solidly up into "Unhealthy" (around 185, though it depends somewhat on which map you're looking at and how you interpolate; the Washington department of Ecology's map has it in the mid-to-high 200s, which is Very Unhealthy). Parts of Seattle are up into the Hazardous range. "Don't breathe anything you can see" -- good advice if you can manage it. I can't.

I've been making progress on upgrading (laptop)Sable to a 1TB SSD and three distributions (Mint/MATE, LMDE/Cinnamon, and UbuntuStudio/Xfce4). The main obstacles are the fact that Mint and UStudio both identify themselves as "ubuntu", so their boot/efi information clobber one another, and the fact that a lot of my setup for (window manager)Xmonad was based on Gnome, which doesn't play well with MATE or Xfce. And some of it was based on the (previously-valid) assumption that I would need only one set of config files per machine. Working on it, and (setup manager)Honu will be the better for it when I'm done. Hopefully this week. I also expect to get a few curmudgeon posts out of it.

I have not been singing nearly as much as (I feel that) I should be. A lot less than is good for me. This is, sadly, typical.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I meant to post this yesterday, but I got distracted by another project. So here it is, a little late. I couldn't let the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass without invoking Fred Small's "Cranes Over Hiroshima". This version is mostly a montage of pictures of Sadako Sasaki.

You can find the lyrics several different places on the web; this one is what the Wikipedia article links to.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Under the following cut you'll find most of the links I collected last week. I remember reading Hiroshima by John Hersey years ago; the link is to the original version published in the New Yorker. Do I need to add a content warning? Consider yourself warned. It's well worth reading if you can handle it, though.

( links: )