…for comedy gold from the doofus congresscritter who worried about Guam “tipping over” and “capsizing”:
Because “abnormal” is sooo much better than “midget”.
Picky-Picky-Picky
I really like Il Volo. The boys have a great sound for such young voices, and they have good arrangers and producers providing them with well-written material that’s also recorded well.
Good stuff. One niggly lil thing though: they all have a strong tendency to take Italian vowel production into all the languages they sing in. Oh, it’s not offensive, but it is pretty glaring at times. Take “Stille Nacht” (below). Beautifully sung, but… the vowels are often not German. Oh, well. Picky, picky, picky. 😉
Wherein I Make a (Pot)LOAD of Work for Myself…
So yes, it was a foolish goal to set myself. It isn’t as though I have nothing else on my plate, after all… *sigh*
I decided to collect all the digital recordings of Christmas music I have on scattered devices all over the place together this year. Yeh, yeh, I’ve been promising myself for several years now to organize it all, and I even have a media server to put it all on, but now I’ve decided to do so with just one genre, I realize what a Herculean task I’ve set myself… and promptly began making my task bigger.
OK, I have many, many hundreds (and hundreds) of digital recordings of Christmas music–mostly sacred solo, choral, instrumental and orchestral, but also tons and tons of secular selections (pop, contemporary, humorous, traditional, etc.), and simply gathering them into one centralized collection is daunting enough, let alone classifying and organizing them. But hey, I promised myself I’d do it and so what can I do but do it?
And then I have been on a buying spree purchasing MORE Christmas music. OK, so I’ve loved the most of the Celtic Woman Christmas offerings in their past work, and the new one has some good stuff, so…
And then there were a few holes in my Mannheim Steamroller and Trans Siberia Orchestra collections…
And I’ve been meaning to pick up some Libera recordings (a boys’ choir, in case you’d not heard them; I’m a sucker for boys voices performing choral works*)… and Woody mentioned a George Shearing Christmas album on FB, while Kat, also on FB, mentioned a collection of 280 pieces on sale for $0.99 (sucked me in)… and, and…
You get the drift. *sigh* In addition to the hundreds of selections of digital recordings I already had, I’ve managed to add another 500 or so in just the last couple of weeks. *heh*
At least I didn’t commit to digitizing my massive cassette tape and vinyl collection of Christmas music this year, although I’ll have to do it sometimes soon. And also A Good Thing: I have ripped a bunch of Xmas music CDs like this one to mp3 over the years, so that’s a wee tad less to get done, at least (although I’ve not ripped the Yo-Yo Ma Christmas CD that was a gift from my Wonder Woman a couple of years ago… or more than a few others, it seems. The Canadian Brass and the Dallas Brass and quite a few others are awaiting equal time, as well… *sigh*)
Oh, well. At least it gives me something to do when I’m not
-
–on a gig
–getting the house “Xmas-ised”
–working on new entertainment center/MPC hookups, etc.
–giving some finishing touches to home “fixup” projects (many and varied)
–working through my backlog (over 200) of books I want to read (and keeping them from cluttering things up while I do projects, fixups and “Xmas-izing” etc.)
Hmm, looks like anything that sounds like “work” takes up less of my attention energy than puttering tasks. Oh, well again. *heh*
*Yeh, I’ve been that way since I was 17 and invited to sing in the changed voice section (all three of us) for a boys choir that’s since gone on to minor acclaim (minor only in that it’s limited to about 1/4 of the country *heh*). Oh, this was the second year of the group, so it was still in its formative stage, but although my life had been filled with exposure to, performance in/with and other involvement with excellent music groups and amazing musicians, that experience was a revelation to me of the beautiful sound of a cappella boys’ voices. The entire performance repertoire was a cappella and the conductor was probably the second (or perhaps third) best conductor I have ever sat under, both for rehearsal and performance, and that is saying a HUGE bunch, given the batons I’ve been privileged to sit under. Do note that the Libera album linked above isn’t a cappella music, but there are a few isolated examples, and the instrumental accompaniments are all very, very well-written and performed.
Well, It Could Be…
Every now and then, our fairly high dollar Bosch dishwasher (which we really, really like, otherwise) will just lose its mind. Turn on. Seems to cycle and… about 90 seconds later beeps to tell us the wash cycle is finished, when it never really began. None of the troubleshooting instructions from Bosch affect it at all, but if I throw the breaker for the circuit the dishwasher is on, wait about a minute and turn the circuit back on–effectively performing a hard reset of its tiny lil brain–the thing works like a champ.
Must be an embedded Windows OS. *heh*
Stupid Ads
Dialog from a smartphone ad:
“When you build an aircraft, you want it to go up and stay up.”
Really?!? Anyone “flying” it, and any passengers, would at best starve to death (unless they were able to get in flight provisioning).
I Just Wanna Dope Slap Some Folks
On FB I told someone who related a conversation with an Obamanoid she had a good four word response when the Obanaoid’s first paycheck next year reflected the increased grab by the feds, “I told you so.”
One dope responded, “Isn’t ‘I told you so’ three words?”
I swear. Some folks can’t even use the fingers on one hand to count, or…
“I railed against the innumerate who couldn’t even count to four on the fingers of one hand, until I met a man who only had three fingers… “
No, apparently he wasn’t kidding. And I bet he even voted.
*profound sigh*
(Yes, I think these things so you don’t have to.)
The Dhimmicraps’ GOTV Push Sinks to New Lows
This MUST be another Dhimmicrappic GOTV ploy:
It’s a Tough Job, But Someone Has to Do It
Had an email from someone asking for help making a decision about a particular personal service (health-related). Since my knowledge about the topic is about 40 years out of date, I did what anyone who’s not room temperature would do nowadays: I typed search terms in a search bar and pressed “Enter”.
Sent the first two links that looked as though the articles were well-researched. Got an email back: “Wow! This was helpful. Thanks.”
Now, this isn’t a post denigrating the original asker for not doing a simple search. No, I’m just noting a mindset that doesn’t think first of what a marvelous resource the Internet is, or perhaps feels overwhelmed by the amount of information available and hasn’t spent time and effort learning some filtering techniques (or just doesn’t know how to go about developing those techniques).
I admit, my mind’s a bit odd. I grew up reading a LOT of books. No, more than what you think is “a LOT”–much more. And about half of the books I read were non-fiction, often reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, etc.–yes, read for entertainment), so I developed the mindset of checking references and instinctively look for well-referenced, well-organized, well-thought-out non-fiction. (That doesn’t mean that I write that way here all the time, of course. This is a blog, after all, a place for “the voices in my head” to give a shout out to each other. *heh*)
Add to that too many years in academia, working with my Wonder Woman through a couple of her masters degrees in library/reference/media, and I find it pretty easy to filter out B.S. or even just poorly-sourced, poorly-researched articles on the web.
I wonder how many folks are like my respondent, though–either unable to do such quick web searches (for whatever reason) or who feel daunted by the task of filtering the results?
Tightwad Confessions
Sometimes, tightwaddery results in… alternate “expenses”.
Example: the two hours I spent getting a communications issue straightened out this afternoon/early evening.
OK, the tightwad part: since I do not very much like to talk on the phone (missing visual cues, etc.) and I have NO desire to be connected wherever I am 24×7, but I do recognize the benefit of having a phone handy when I’m out and about (especially when deep in the “piney woods” backroads of America’s Third World County), I have a cell phone, but it’s sub-basic, a pre-paid, calls-only “dumb” phone.
Suits me just fine. Ever since I ditched a more expensive phone and plan, I’ve been just hunky-dory setting it to “Off” unless I want to make a call. And at $15/month for many, many (MANY) more minutes than I use, it’s just about right. Yes, there is one cheaper option, but the company that offers it doesn’t cover America’s Third World County worth spit.
And all has gone well with this lil pre-paid “dumb” phone for five years or so until today.
Entered the code to add air time/minutes and… message said to call support to complete the transaction. “WTF?!? Never seen THAT before!” thought I. So, called. Told me the code had already been used. Over the course of almost 2 hours, I finally learned that the code had been credited to the wrong phone, one with a completely different number to mine. *huh?!?* Yup.
Four different people told me they’d corrected the problem and credited my air time and all, and four different people were wrong. Round and round it went, until I finally found a service person (apparently the only one in India) who knew how to deal with the issue.
So, I have my tightwad-qualified phone for another couple of months. It does what I want it to (again) and doesn’t do what I want it to. Simple, inexpensive: just the ticket for a tightwad. But there are times… *sigh* Fortunately, this is the first such time in the years I’ve been using this thing, so “amortized” out, a couple of hours inconvenience divided by about five years isn’t all that bad, I suppose. *heh*
*tink-tink* Where Are All the OT-Style Prophets When You Really Need ’em?
[“OT” in the post title=”Old Testament”]
So, the Left Coast came briefly under a tsunami warning this weekend as a result of a 7.7 magnitude quake off Canada’s west coast. Hurricane Sandy is about to ravage the Leftist Coast (East). We need an OT-style prophet to explain to the folks in these places just what that means… (Stay home on Election Day, urm, unless you’re going to mend your ways and vote Right? *heh*)