Tuesday 7th March - Automatic Subtitles

Having had yesterday's post sabotaged by predictive text, I had this afternoon's music lesson sabotaged by automatic subtitles.

I'm teaching the ocarina to a class of children, aged about ten and eleven, and I've set my heart on getting them to perform "Themes from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony arranged for ocarina trio". The whole idea is so ridiculous, that it is irresistible, which is why haven't been able to resist it.

In order to provide a little light relief from the sound of 25 inaccurately played ocarinas, and to familiarise them with a Classic piece of Classical music, I have been showing them different versions of  the first movement of Beethoven's fifth on YouTube.

This one is very popular - we've watched it twice so far. The children are mesmerised by the graphic score which gives a surprisingly clear visual image of the music.

This afternoon we watched another version with a commentary created by P D Q Bach, in the style of a sports commentary of a baseball game (hence the ref standing behind the conductor). For the benefit of one of the children, the teacher caused the automatic subtitles to appear on the screen. We got rid of them pretty promptly after a couple of unnerving captions that appeared in the first few minutes.

This was the subtitle

 
that should have read something along the lines of  "Coming up to a cadence here, no, the violins didn't...".

I began to be concerned that the captions would just be a whole series of unintelligible rubbish. Then this appeared;

What the commentator actually said, after a blatant and deliberate wrong note from a french horn player, was "why, did you hear that somebody in that horn section really flubbed (that note)".

At this point the class teacher and I exchanged glances, and we restarted. This time without subtitles.

Sunday 13th July - seen and heard

Seen:

As we were parking in one of the multi-storey carparks in town, a man parked opposite was fiddling around with the bonnet of his car. He reached inside, and fished out a small bedraggled kitten, a sort of grubby cream/grey colour. It looked vaguely oriental, and about three months old. It had traveled 20 miles in the engine - that's a few lives used up very early on in its life. I reckon it was reasonably OK as it was beginning to wriggle quite energetically. The people who had accidentally hi-jacked it took it to a local vet. I'm hoping this story will have a happy ending.


Heard:

We went for lunch in pret, and sat next to a family with two young children. "If this sunny weather keeps up, we might go to the beach tomorrow" said Dad. "Yes please" enthused 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old-son. "Oh you can't come, you have to go to school." said Dad. Sometimes family life is not all child-centred. Still, no tantrums ensued, so school can't be such a bad place.


Heard and Seen:

Swallows were scooting up and down the shopping streets at roof level, twisting and banking to zip round the corners from West Street into the Carfax, doing acrobatic landings among the chimneys and turrets of the shops. We heard them all chittering away first, and then could see them here, there, everywhere. No-one else appeared to be watching them do their "Red Arrows" stuff.

Picture of a swallow
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/s/swallow/index.aspx

picture of a swift
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/s/swift/index.aspx

Actually, now I come to look at some picture, they were probably swifts.

Friday 21st March - If only they smiled more.

Music exam time again.

Eleven young children taking their music exams on various instruments - trumpets, saxophones, violins and flutes this time.

It makes such a difference when the examiner gives the children a smile as they come in, helps them with the music stand, exchanges some innocuous comment.

This one was straight-faced - not exactly unfriendly, but not very welcoming or smiley.

It really made me think about the importance of the way you speak to people, interact, make eye-contact, your facial expression, whether you actually have a pleasant expression on your face or just a pre-occupied air.

We'll get the results in a couple of weeks. Hopefully the severity of their manner wasn't an indication of how they were approaching the marks.

Thursday 7th November - Early to bed...

and early to rise

makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Hrrmph. I'm not healthy or wealthy, so all that leaves is Wise. Which I therefore must be. Very.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl
The Little Owl, 1506, by Albrecht Dürer

I've been falling asleep on the settee since 7pm this evening. But, on the whole, that was a bit too early for an early night. So we toughed it out until 9pm, and then I remembered that I had forgotten to post anything for today.  

So that Durer Owl picture is all you are getting from me today.


Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bugs bite

(how do you stop them? apart from mosquitoes I've never had any experience of bugs that bite in the night? There's a "TOO MUCH INFORMATION" passage in "The L-shaped Room" by Lynne Reid Banks about how to catch bed bugs; you need a bar of soap which is slightly wet; you sweep back the covers and quickly capture the bugs by sticking them to the bar of soap... somehow that graphic description stuck in my mind when I read the book all those decades ago. By the way it is NOT a children's book like "The Indian in the Cupboard". You have been warned)

Time to go. Really. I'm going. Now. This minute. Any time right now. Yes yes yes alright. Gone.

Thursday 8th August - Looking for Inspiration

This has been my "holiday" week. I made a new "To-Do" list, which had things like

"Practising the piano"
"Playing the piano"
"Drawing"

on it.

(There are a few necessary other items - letters to write; shopping to do of both the necessary and the "fun" kind; and the basic household tasks which  don't like doing but like it when they are done).

One of the "holiday" categories was "Writing Prompts". Last year, in an effort to improve my writing skills, I bought a book called "The Writer's Year" by Judith Reeves.

 I saw it in a bookshop somewhere, Foyles, I think, so it must have been on my way home from a hospital trip, and thought I'd give it a go. It is a pleasant, engaging, chatty mix of encouraging articles and also a daily writing prompt. Last year I tackled most of "August", so this year I've started on "May" - another 31-day month, chosen at random.

I've reached day 6 (OK, OK, I'm catching up) "Write about an opening blossom".

Inspiration deserted me.

So I decided to make a cup of tea, but not just any old tea.

This is one of the last remaining sachets of a box of floral teas. I took it out and dropped it into my specially bought thermal cup; It looks unpleasantly like a large rabbit dropping. Or a dropping from a large rabbit.

 

 

I added boiling water. Things started happening almost at once. It floated to the top...

and then sank, twitching and turning and putting out tentacles and revealing a glowing red centre. I watched from a safe distance to see what would happen next.

Yellow particles erupted from the brilliant core, and milled about in a confused manner. It was certainly behaving like some coming back to life from death. I kept my distance, just in case.

The yellow bits sank, which was just as well as I wasn't sure how I was going to drink them without risking choking and spluttering.

It took quite a while to cool down enough to start drinking. By then everything had stopped moving about and it was behaving more like tea and less like some tropical sea-creature. In then end I removed the foliage so that I could drink the liquid more easily. I also needed to add more water as it was so strong I couldn't properly taste it.

I did drink it. What did it taste of? Difficult to say. It tasted of oddness and weirdness. Bitter and dusty, strangely dry, not particularly floral. It made my tongue feel all crinkly.

I think I could sum up the experience as more a visual pleasure that a gastronomic one.

So, beware. If you are offered a "Summer Love" floral tea, my suggestion is choose another one.
I've two left in the packet. It may be a wee whiley before I stray from "English Breakfast" again.  

However I did manage to write a whole page. So maybe it had some inspirational qualities?
 

May 31st - Warning - unsuitable for children. Not to be read at bedtime.

I LOVE twitter - it is full of links to all sorts of serendipitous sites. How else would I have uncovered this one? (from a tweet by the QI Elves @quikipedia)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2012/may/30/terrifying-french-childrens-books-in-pictures#/?picture=390846367&index=0

picture  from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

I am constantly amazed at the kind of things adults thought were suitable for children. It took me many, many years to get over reading Struwwelpeter. My grandmother had a copy - from her childhood? It probably wasn't that old. Perhaps it was her children's copy. "Merry", the stories were not.

The one that frightened me most was "The Story of the Thumb-Sucker", in which a mother warns her son not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors. The story (in German) is here http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Struwwelpeter/Die_Geschichte_vom_Daumenlutscher along with the picture that kept me awake.







I guess it is in the tradition of Hillaire Belloc's "Cautionary Tales for Children", another of my grandmother's books;







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cautionary_Tales_for_Children




"Not now, Bernard" is more of a cautionary tale for parents. As I recall, the monster eats Bernard on about page one, and his parents never notice.