Put your music player on shuffle. Press forward for each question. Use the song title as the answer to the question. No cheating! (ganked from elfen)
Tag: music Page 8 of 10
So I’ve been procrastinating catching up the state of things, and I’m currently stuck over the at our colocation centre waiting for a RAID rebuild that should have been finished by now, so I may as well drop a note here on some notable events of the last couple of weeks.
Last night, I got to drop an entire entertainment centre off of a third story balcony. But you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the recent musical events I’ve attended.
I’ve been pretty quiet lately, but its not that there hasn’t been a lot going on. Some of it hasn’t been good, but I’m not going to talk about that here. Drop me a line if you really want to know about it.
I’m choosing instead to focus on the good stuff. There’s actually a fair bit of it about. In fact, here’s a baker’s dozen really cool things that are going on in my life right now.
- My creativity has actually been sparking lately. I’ve now finished more songwriting in 2006 than I did in all of 2005, including some stuff I’m rather proud of. Better yet, I’ve been playing more music than I have in months, which is a sure sign that I’m feeling better about the world. I’m adding new songs to my repertoire, which is helping me keep from being bored with what I’m doing musically, which in turn inspires me to write more. I actually got stuff I’d written recently onto online songbook.. I even went and made a second index page that separates the song by year, which will make it easier for people to find the new stuff, even if it does highlight just how little I’ve written in the last few years.
- We had not one but two housefilks in February, and each featured wonderful faraway visitors. The first was the official GaFiA housefilk, and featured such luminary travellers as sdorn, sdelmonte, and batyatoon! The very next weekend, there was a gathering at joyeuse13 and abovenyquist‘s house, in honor of the visiting celticdragonfly! Yay faraway people I don’t see often enough.
- In spite of all the cramping our budget has suffered since the middle of last year, as of this moment our bills are all paid up, and we’ve gotten rid of a number of small debts that were being carried on our books. This puts us in excellent shape, if we’re careful and prudent, to reach our goal of paying off *all* our debt by the middle of 2007!
- kitanzi is almost done with her physical therapy following her shoulder surgery in December, and is feeling much better and stronger than she had in many many months. Crappy health is definitely one of the things I’m looking forward to putting behind us as we move further into 2006.
- Speaking of feeling better, we both have been feeling much better rested in the last week, since we acquired kitanzi’s early birthday present: a mattress pad. The pad is made out of a three-inch thick slab of four pound memory foam, and the difference it has made in the comfort of our sleeping is astounding! Many of our aches and pains have been reduced since we started sleeping on it.
- Thanks to klrmn (who I miss terribly since she moved to California, but that’s a different post), we now know where to go for all-you-can-eat made-to-order sushi. Yummmmmmm.
- One of my best and oldest friends, Jeff, has finally joined LiveJournal. Jeff has been my writing partner, confidant, and brother-in-arms since we were both in Jr. High school, and I’d love to introduce you all to him. So go say hi to hejira2006,and add him to your friends lists, because honestly, if you are the sort of person who likes me, I think you’re going to like him too. (Just be nice to him — I don’t want him to be scared off. *grin*)
- Another of my best and oldest friends, vila_resthal, will be getting married in August. Dan is the editor of Aphelion Webzine, a project he and I have worked together on since its inception ten years ago. (And if you’re inclined to like reading or writing original SF/F fiction, go check it out. It’s a groovy place. We take filk lyrics, too. *grin*) I’m so very happy to see him happy, and I really like his new lady love, and am looking forward to the wedding, which will be held at the same time as ApheliCon 2, the second annual Aphelion writers cookout party.
- I now own a Macintosh computer! tarkrai acquired a 17“ G4 iMac, which he gave to me for my very own. He claims that it’s a bit quirky but isn’t sure why, but so far I haven’t actually had any trouble with it. And it’s pretty. And it’s cool. And it’s a Mac. Shiny! Thanks, Smac!
- Just in general, I have the best friends in the whole wide world. Yes, I do.
- We have tickets to see Great Big Sea in concert in Atlanta in April! I am *very* much looking forward to finally seeing them live, after all the amazing reports we’ve gotten from our friends about their shows.
- I’m leaving on a plane tonight to spend the weekend visiting aiela, my girlfriend who lives near Canada. *grin* This will be my first ever trip to Michigan, and I’m hoping to sneak across the border for a day so I can *properly* say I’ve been to Canada, rather than having simply been trapped in a plane on a runway there for 3 hours. 🙂 And I get to meet her fiancé, davehogg, who has become a Friend In His Own Right, much to be delight. I don’t get too see aiela often enough, so I’m very much looking forward to the trip.
- Last, but not least, I am still married to the most amazing, beautiful, intelligent, sexy, and all around wonderful person in the entire world. I am absolutely the luckiest person on Earth. And I never, ever forget it.
So, what’s really cool and good in YOUR life right now?
One of the negative side effects of my recent depression is that I’ve been unmotivated to really play music the way I do normally. I’ve not been writing regularly, not practicing, not learning new songs, and not playing when I’m in an environment where I have the opportunity Some people remarked sadly that they didn’t hear me play anything at OVFF or Gafilk (which I appreciated, by the way), and the main reasons for that were emotional distraction and lack of recent practice required to keep me in any kind of playing shape.
This is something i obviously want to change. Music feeds my soul, and my soul’s gotten a bit thin lately. So I’m determined to begin purposefully practicing again, in order to being participating again in social situations where I can play music, such as filkcons.
To that end, I have a query to those of you reading this who are familiar with my repertoire: what songs should I concentrate on getting back into shape. What, out of the songs you know that I play, either my own or by others, would you most like to hear me do more often? Given what you know of my current talents, what songs should I look into learning that would suit my style and skill?
I play as much for the enjoyment of those around me as I do for myself, so here’s your chance to let me know what you’d most like to hear me do. 🙂
This is positively, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have heard since….well, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today, at least.
Ananova reports that a company is developing an mp3 player which can be included in breast implants:
Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman’s breast implants.
One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person’s whole music collection.
BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.
BT Laboratories’ analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.
According to The Sun he said: “It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implant
Admittedly, there might be some useful application of this technology, as the article mentions offhandedly in its final paragraph:
The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.
But seriously, consider the ramifications of this. What if it starts playing randomly during a moment-of-passion short-circuit. If you think your (ABBA|Rick Dees|Winger|Carpenters|Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony) collection is embarrassing now, just wait until it’s blaring out of your left nipple at a volume of 11.
What an amazing world we live in.
EDIT: Does this mean that in the future when you say a woman has a “nice rack”, you’ll just be talking about her stereo?
Music is a constant in my life. It’s a rare day that I go through without listening to or making music in one form or another.
And it occured to me on the way back from lunch with kitanzi this afternoon, as I cranked up a particular song, that there are some tunes that just never fail to make me happy.
Here are five of those songs, in no particular order:
Love Shack, B-52s
Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel
Every Day I Write The Book, Elvis Costello
Got To Get You Into My Life, The Beatles
Linus and Lucy, Vince Guaraldi Trio
What are some songs that always leave you more cheerful than before? That make you dance in your seat? When you’re down, what music do you turn to to pick yourself up? What songs make you instinctively reach for the volume control to crank it up?
Share in comments. 🙂
Although kitanzi had the day after Thanksgiving off, I had to work, so I did.
Saturday, we went back over to deidrecorwyn‘s for the last phase of moving. I had told her that if she could get a truck reserved for the day, I’d pay for it, so that we could do the move in one shift rather than making a lot of trips in cars. This turned out to be a really good idea, since we pretty well used up the space of a 14’ U-Haul.
This last round was almost entirely boxes, since we’d gotten most of the furniture on the first two days. Left behind was a bit of flotsem and jetsem for deidrecorwyn to deal with on Sunday, but she should be in good shape for getting out of the apartment by her deadline. (I hope.)
We finished getting everything unloaded at the new place; I spent most of that time getting her computer set back up and online. The phone company had screwed up the order to transfer the phone, but managed to correct it within a couple of hours, so I was able to verify that the computer was working and the modem able to get connected before we left.
We left deidrecorwyn, Stuart, and TeriS at about 5:30pm and headed down to Decatur for another Screen Door concert at Eddie’s Attic. I really love those guys, and they were especially tight tonight. They did a number of new songs, including one I *really* liked that Ben wrote for his wife called “We’ve Got A Life Here” that I want to get the lyrics for.
When the concert was over, we dropped by The Book Nook, Atlanta’s largest used bookstore (at least ever since the wonderful Oxford Too went under over 10 years ago *sigh*). It was quite a good haul — I found about 40 Doctor Who paperbacks (I’ve been trying to rebuild my Target novelization collection) that I didn’t have, plus 5 of the first 6 Simon Hawke Timewars books and a handful of Heinleins that we didn’t have. All in all, a good time, if a bit expensive. Oh well, after all the work we did this week, we deserved it!
Sunday was a quiet day spent doing very little, ending on a very fun note: kitanzi had never seen the Mel Brooks classic “The Producers”>, which I recently acquired on DVD. So we watched it and had a grand time with Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom and their sure-to-be-doomed play, “Springtime For Hitler”. 🙂
All in all, a weekend of accomplishments! Go us!
I gave blood today. Says so on the sticker.
It seems like I’ve been meaning to get around to donating blood for….ever, really. It’s not something I ever woke up and decided to do (“I think I’ll go give blood today.”) Whenever I saw a blood drive in progress, it was always a bad time to stop. So, here at the ripe old age of 33, I had never actually gone and done the good thing.
Well, we were on our way home from a concert from our favourite local band, Screen Door, and noticed that the Methodist church on the corner at the end of our street was having a big community fair-on-the-grounds, including a bloodmobile. kitanzi mentioned that it had been far too long since she had last given blood, and I said “I’ve never done it.” So, we resolved to get up in the morning and donate, and then check out the rest of the fair.
We arrived at about 11 and did the pre-screening. All was well except that my blood pressure reading was….abnormal. As in “That reading indicates I should be seeing a doctor immedately”. I’ve always had borederline high-blood pressure, but at 180/120 reading would be cause for *serious* alarm, especially since it had never been that high. The nurse at the registration sent me in to be rechecked, and after another couple of high readings, it finally occured to all of us that they should be using the extra-large cuff. (*I* should know this by now, but I wasn’t thinking about it — this is one of the reason why the little supermarket check-your-own-blood-pressure kiosks are useless for me. My arm is just too big). After a much more normal reading with a larger cuff, we proceeded to go through the litany of questions. I think the nurse found me somewhat amusing.
“Have you had sexual contact with any person who was born or lives outside the United States?”
“No. But not for lack of desire.”
Having been satisfied that I wasn’t a risky donor, we went and did the whole jab and drain routine, which was uneventful. I didn’t really find it any more uncomfortable than when I had an IV in while I was in the hospital.
Of course, due to a series of events that Kit has already detailed, she hadn’t started her donation by the time I finished mine. So I sat down at the far side of the bus, ate Nutter Butter cookies and drank juice, and chatted with the nice church folk who were volunteering to help out the Red Cross folks. Once Kit got started, she had a hard time finishing, since she apparently ran out of blood midway through, but we finally got square and went on our way.
The church fair was a sort of combination yard sale, craft show and dinner on the grounds. We found several books for cheap and Kit found three pairs of shoes that fit her, but we were starting to get hungry at this point and decided to head off for a quiet cool place to eat. We ended up at local restaurant Hops, which is a steakhouse/brewpub, and had a marvelous lunch, brought to us by a seriously cute waitress.
We then stopped off at the only used bookstore in Alphretta, treated ourselves to a small stash of books (most notable: Harcourt has come out with a new hardcover reissue of Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s “Sorery and Celia”, which in it’s previous paperback incarnation was nigh unobtanium. Nice to see it back in print). And came home for an evening of relaxation. A full day, indeed.
laurel points to a story that follows up with three guys who got makeovers from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy‘s Fab Five. Where are they now?
—
When I saw THIS cartoon, I instantly thought of Three Weird Sisters, and their “Dumb, Dumb Dorothy” song:
(Committed by Michael Fry)
—
Speaking of the Sisters, they got a writeup in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution!
—
Following up on last week’s Latin translation of Sir Mix-a-lot’s “Baby Got Back”, stronae gives us a paean to geek girls! (Thanks to aiglet for the pointer!)
—
aiglet also passes along a great job opportunity!
—
The Missouri Review offers a critique of Shrub’s attempt at poetry.
—
almeda muses on bad SF cover art.
—