Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
T.I.A.I.L.W.:WiebkeHoogklimmer.
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01:19:32 AM,Tuesday 31 December 2003
The Three CDs I Made For My Brother's Car Ride Back To Seattle (and the bitter realization that I am almost entirely dependent on the blogmass for good music):
A Selection of Silly (And Somewhat Sordid) Songs The Vestibules - I Don't Want To Go To Toronto (Ariadne)
Moxie Fruvous - King of Spain (Katherine)
The eXile - Amerikanski Alfons
Russian Spongebob Squarepants Theme Song
Danny Kaye - Stanislavski
Tom Lehrer - Lobachevsky (Neil)
Ninian Harwick - Scottish Rite Temple Song (Katherine and Remi)
ABBA and Terence Chua - Do You Hear The Pipes, Cthulhu?
P.D.Q. Bach - What Is The Question
Ernie Kovacs - The Wrong Man.mp3
Ska King Crab - There Ain't Nothing Like a Dame (Martin)
Judge Dread - Big Six (Martin)
Squeeze - It's Not Cricket
Rapier Magazine - Bawdy British Limericks
Dan Bern - Sex (Christopher and Anne)
Romanovsky & Phillips - Must've Been Drunk (Neil)
The Klezmatics - Man In A Hat (Katherine)
Oscar Brand - The Captain's Daughter
Pills to Purge Melancholy - My Thing Is My Own
Robyn Hitchcock - Uncorrected Personality Traits (Remi and Moss)
Shonen Knife - Sushi Bar (Moss)
Estradasphere - Super Mario Brothers
Nine Inch Nails and Koji Kondo - SMB-Closer (Martin)
MC Frontalot - Indier Than Thou (Martin)
Sesame Street - Dance Myself To Sleep
Reasonably Light-Hearted Popular Music Driving Mix Fastball - The Way (Kristin)
Kultur Shock - Gigolo Amerikana (Moira)
James - Laid (Martin)
Mary Prankster - Art Fag Bastard (Martin)
Mary Prankster - Blue Skies Over Dundalk (Martin)
Cabaret - Mein Herr
Randy Newman - Take Me Back
Gaelic Storm - Johnny Jump-Up (Neil)
Cake - Commissioning A Symphony In C (Moss)
Jimi Hendrix And The Kronos Quartet - Purple Haze
Hedwig And The Angry Inch - Origin of Love (Neil)
Hildegard Von Bingen - Euchari , Eucharius
Steeleye Span - The Elf Knight (Moss)
VAST - Pretty When You Cry (Tania)
Leonard Cohen - Alle Vet Jo Det
Cafe Tacuba - La Ingrata (Martin)
The Tiger Lillies - Bully Boys (Remi)
Eartha Kitt - brother can you spare a dime
Dean Martin - Ain't That A Kick In The Head (Christopher)
Marlene Dietrich - Makin' Whoopee
Nothing To Do With Nothing -- Classical, Out Of Context Henry VIII - Pastime With Good Company
Die Fledermaus - Mein Herr Marquis
Cosi Fan Tutte - E Voi Ridete
Un Ball In Maschera - È Scherzo Od E Follia
Il Barbiere di Siviglia - Ecco Ridente In Cielo
Il Barbiere di Siviglia - Largo Al Factotum
Semiramide - Alle Più Care Immagini
Ariodante - Entrée Des Songes Funestes
La Vera Costanza - Che Burrasca! Che Tempesta!
Don Giovanni - Mille Torbidi Pensieri
The Magic Flute - Nur Stille! Stille!
Bertola - Sonata Settima
Vivaldi - Misericordia
Bach - Sicut Locutus Est
Black Sabbath - Verres Militares
The Fairy Queene - Let The Fifes And The Clarions
Scarlatti - Si Suoni La Tromba
La Clemenza Di Tito - Marcia
Bach - Double Concerto In D Minor
Corelli - La Follia
La Clemenza Di Tito - Parto, Ma Tu Ben Mio
Blow - 'Tis Women Makes Us Love
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05:41:32 AM,Monday 30 December 2003
Freaking nuts. I've been playing cornetto several times a week since I started in July. Tonight was the first time since then that I picked up my trumpet. The mouthpiece felt like a gaping abyss. I hadn't realized how much my embouchure had altered. I can barely reach G above the staff, and it sounds like an asthmatic porpoise. Floog.
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07:16:29 PM,Sunday 29 December 2002
My room smells like cigarillo smoke. I can't tell whether it's sleazy or sophisticated, but either way, I approve.
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(1)
08:52:04 AM,Sunday 29 December 2002
DUDE!!! T.I.A.S.F.I.L.W.: Judith Blegen. I was only gonna be tepidly I.L.W. her, 'cause though she made an awfully cute little Oscar in the Ballo I watched tonight, she smiled too much, and I felt like being a sourpuss about it. But!!! After Googling her I find out she was born in freaking MISSOULA! How insanely massively mindkaboomingly kickass is that?! God. Damn. Yo.
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08:17:50 AM,Sunday 29 December 2002
Aw, now I'm wishing I'd done my hundred things in this format. Who knows. Maybe I will.
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04:11:42 AM,Sunday 29 December 2002
Well, prong my nettles.
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(1)
02:07:52 AM,Saturday 28 December 2002
Covet.
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(2)
12:32:29 AM,Saturday 28 December 2002
Damnit. Oh well. Salome's kinkier anyway. Knock-knock. Who's there? Karajan. All right, I will. Y'all missed a buttermunching rulesnout Fidelio tonight. And a shootout in a glass sculpture garden with a gun-toting Chinese guerilla. And now I go scrub the bathroom floor (not a euphemism).
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(2)
04:13:45 AM,Friday 27 December 2002
ACUPUNCTURE COMBAT?!
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02:29:38 AM,Friday 27 December 2002
Bloody frustrating. Now, I realize I'm thoroughly spoiled, and people who had to make do with wax cylinders are shaking their fists at me, but grargh! I need more space. I like having lots and lots of music all together in one place, and the wretched thing is, I'm never sated. It's never enough -- this summer, I ripped around 100 CDs, downloaded lots of silly stuff from audiogalaxy and the web, and built up a handsome 11.1 gigs (not counting spoken word files, which are all burnt to CD) of music. Now, my hard drive is a little over 18 gig (I thought it was 20, but it ain't), and I've got 2.71 gig free, after paring it down to the knucklebones -- just about every superfluous program, including both Winamps (helas), my camera software, all my wav files, and just about everything else besides, has been thrust onto CDs and summarily deleted from my hard drive. WinXP take up a revolting 2 gig, so I've basically only got 4 gig of programs, pictures, and miscellaneous files, which I really don't think is all that terrible, considering. And y'know what? I haven't even ripped any of the hundreds of CDs in my parents house, and I still don't have enough free space to defrag -- I'm 14% empty, and I need 15%. Grargh.
The solutions, as I see it, are these:
* delete all my mp3s and re-rip everything into wma format. Pros: it'll "double my space", they brag, which does sound tempting. Cons: who the hell uses wma format? mp3s are the gold standard. And it'd be pretty tedious to re-rip everything, particularly since I don't have round-the-clock CDDB access anymore.
* cull my mp3 collection brutally, keeping only my very favorite tracks from my very favorite albums, and shucking all the rest onto data CDs. Neil took this tack, as I recall. Pros: get to play merciless executioner, and make my collection all slim, elitist, and pure as the driven sludge; enough free space to breathe. Cons: lots of poorly-organized data CDs lying around which I'll hardly ever listen to 'cause I won't be bothered to drag 'em out and polish 'em off when I could just listen to my old favorites until my head caves in; can't be happily surprised by a track I thought I hated or forgotten I had (e.g., the Kronos Quartet's cover of Purple Haze, which I've had for a year and a half but hadn't ever listened to until it came up randomly tonight) when I'm floating in the turbulent sea of "All Music -- Shuffle"; will still probably fill it up to bursting no matter how snobby I get about what stays and what goes. There's too much good freaking music in the world.
* save up for a bigger hard drive, either laptop or external. Pros: an 80 gig one might just be big enough (but then I remember when 2 gig felt astronomical), and at least they exist -- or I could get one of the ones Moss linked to and be happy forever... Cons: how the hell am I gonna get that kind of money? That's $900 frigging dollars for the big one! And do I really want to be lugging an external hard drive around with a laptop? Kind of silly. Plus I'm supposed to give the computer back to my brother when he finishes his PHd project and can't borrow the lab's laptop anymore, and in that case a hard drive by itself won't do me much good. Besides, it's not like I'm using them for programs or graphics rendering or video files or anything; just music. It seems a bit of a waste, even though god knows I love having acres and acres of space to luxuriate in. The thought of razing public libraries across the country like a little uberlocust, sucking in CDs by the bucketload, makes me all tingly inside.
* buy one of these fancy hard-drive-based portable mp3 players like (droool) a Nomad Jukebox 3 or ({suspicious grimace}) an iPod. Pros: I'd carry it absolutely everywhere. I'd get it surgically implanted into my abdomen. I'd never have to interact with the outside world without the heady haze of music to sustain me. Cons: the biggest one right now is only at 40 gig, and though I realize that's four times what I've got right now, it's not sufficiently enormous to make me feel like I could never fill it up no matter how many bootleg operas I ripped into it. I also don't have a Firewire connection, but that's not the biggest deal in the world. Oh yeah, and they're, like, $500. And I'm, like, broke. I am looking to be gainfully employed fairly soon, and I'm sure their capacity will increase apace, but... hm. And what if I took it to the Peace Corps (which I wouldn't do with the laptop) and it got stepped on by a camel or something? Hm.
* suck it up and stop acting like such a baby. Maybe even, like... start listening to actual CDs again... y'know, those little round things with significantly better sound quality and pretty liner notes and which only take up 3-dimensional space, something you're not running out of in a hurry? Or even, whoah -- LPs! Dude, I totally forgot about those! Hardcore. Pros: Um... it would be pretty easy to do, actually. Uh. Cons: Whiiiiine!
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10:08:33 PM,Wednesday 25 December 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Zarah Leander.
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02:55:11 AM,Wednesday 25 December 2002
God Jul!
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03:32:36 PM,Tuesday 24 December 2002
By my watch, it's 10:34 pm eastern, and I'm logging off. If the game is still on, though, call me at (406) 549 - 0734. G'night, me hearties.
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10:32:27 PM,Monday 23 December 2002
* stereotypic rejection of femininity (check!)
* only wearing things that look like a boy's (check!)
* wanting to play only with boys (what do you mean by play, baby?)
* being emotionally detached from the mother (uhhh... heh. maybe sometimes it would be easier if I was...)
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(10)
03:38:33 AM,Monday 23 December 2002
I thought this was pretty funny -- last Christmas my dad gave me one of those cheapo $4 classical CDs from Naxos, y'know, the ones with paintings on the front, unknown Eastern European soloists and ensembles like the Kosice Teachers' Choir and the Hungarian Radio Chorus. Not that I'm knocking them, don't get me wrong; my favorite recording of the Coronation Mass is on one of those, and sometimes they have awesome performances. But this was one of the cheesier examples of the breed; it's called "Ave Maria", so of course it's got the Schubert and the Bach/Gounod and Ave Verum Corpus and all the other warhorses, but I guess they were a little short after they'd finished filling it up with lovely-but-overplayed sacred oldies, so apparently they just randomly decided to cram in the two most overplayed Handel arias (with, god help us, the Hallelujah chorus in between), Ombra Mai Fu (Ombra Your Own Damn Fu) and Lascia Ch'io Pianga (I Don't Wanna Leave the Cianga)... for absolutely no goddamn reason except maybe that they're slow and purty and everyone and his fruitbat can hum along. But they sure don't got nothing to do with the mother of Christ or anyone else.
Ok, but the funny part comes in with the poor schmuck who's got to write the liner notes. You just know this guy Keith Anderson is some starving musicologist pumping out the notes for these piddly one-offs with a mixture of righteousness and despair; he's got nothing to do with the performances or the selection, he's probably got a treasured old cache of LPs full of the legends of music, and he's forced to fill up nine paragraphs with simple explanatory texts without being either too erudite or too patronizing. But you can see him sweating over this one. He starts the hedging right off with "The prsent collection, however, contains music of wider connotation, with some elements that have a purely secular origin, however uplifting the music may turn out to be." Translation: I'm not the idiot who decided on this whole stupid mish-mosh of motets and choruses ripped from their contexts and jammed up all together, and I KNOW that these Handel arias have NOTHING to do with ANYTHING but I can't say it without making Naxos look like a fool so I'll just sit here tight-lipped and give you lots of pointless dates to make up for it and prove that I'm not the ignorant moron you think I am after looking at the tracklisting." ("his first Italian opera, starting, in 1711, with Rinaldo", "A later opera, Serse, staged in London in 1738") Hee hee... and by the time he actually gets to the sacred part, he's practically biting his fist: "Of overtly religious intention is the great oratorio Messiah, an ambitious study of the essence of Christianity." (italics mine)
Oh, man, I just saw another one I didn't notice before (and he hardly graces it with a sentence... it's like tears of lead): "The eighteenth-century Italian composer Giuseppe Giordani is chiefly remembered for his popular aria Caro mio ben (my beloved), included in a collection of earlier Italian arias that has for long formed a basic part of any singer's training." {snicker} I mean, honestly, they couldn't find 60 whole minutes of actual say, sacred arias that might have something to do with Mary, or Christ, or, like, anything? They had to go digging in the etude books?! Glaaah. Oh well. I ain't complaining or nothing. I just thought it was pretty funny, and my heart went out to the dignified, exalted Mr. Anderson. Hee.
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06:15:53 PM,Sunday 22 December 2002
"Here's to the alabaster limbs of eager and passionate maidens."
-- my dad, before sipping his cognac.
"I hope you'll forgive me if I was a little incoherent last night; I'd had some Kava and Everclear, and I don't think they were quite conducive to clear thinking."
-- my dad, the morning after a rather convoluted philosophical discussion.
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05:48:09 PM,Sunday 22 December 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Dr. Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara.
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06:41:39 PM,Friday 20 December 2002
Maybe getting a job in Food Service wouldn't be so bad after all...
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11:32:52 PM,Thursday 19 December 2002
