Eine Kleine Nichtmusik

Heavy Breathing

2009-12-05T01:50:00.002Z

The clarinet equivalent to the Ernst in terms of crazy difficulty is Arthur Benjamin's Le Tombeau de Ravel, but I couldn't find a performance on Youtube. Its equivalent in silliness, though, I found: Domenico Liverani's fantasy on the Cujus Animam from Rossini's Stabat Mater. OK, first you take a religious text solemn to the point of morbidity. Then you set it to a rather bouncy tune (marvellously performed by Luciano Pavarottti here). Finally you make a wildly florid fantasy from it.

Admit it, if you'd heard it before the Ernst you'd have thought it was even sillier than you do now.

And now for something completely different...

2009-12-05T01:34:00.004Z

...a piece generally considered to be the greatest technical challenge ever written for the violin. There is a marvellous story of the mighty Maxim Vengerov at some record industry lunch being asked if he'd play something, and simply hauling out the old Strad, giving it a cursory tune up, and launching this on his unsuspecting audience. Watch and weep:

The curious can download the sheet music free here. The crazy bit at 5:05 is the Poco piu vivo on p.31.

How could I forget?

2009-11-28T02:43:00.003Z

Another classic charity music video, this time from two girl bands:

OK, this time the cover isn't as good as the original. It's still a neat idea though.

2009-11-28T01:15:00.003Z

OK, a few actual music videos for the heck of it. Here are Girls Aloud. Well, why not? Damned good cover version with an awesome bass line:

And here's another girl band. On this occasion the sisters are doing it, not for themselves, but for charity.

And while Children In Need's inevitable lets-get-the-newreaders-or-weathergirls-to-do-a-dance spot is sometimes only of curiosity value, Fiona Bruce does a damned good job on All That Jazz:

Colour me gobsmacked

2009-11-28T00:26:00.004Z

A friend of mine just linked to this in Facebook. For all Countdown fans (and sometime competitors such as Clare Sudbery), watch and weep:

I'd just about got to 953 myself.....

.....and Lady Mondegreen

2009-11-28T00:01:00.002Z

Regular readers will know that I'm pretty fussy about my Mondegreens. In particular, I get very annoyed by the supposedly "misheard" lyrics that pepper most of the sites on the web and which are nothing of the kind, and couldn't by any suspension disbelief be anything other than someone's lame attempt at a pun which they are trying to pass off as a Mondegreen. Sometimes deliberate ones work OK, but they do have to be clever.

This video, it seems to me, is a mix of plausible mishearings and clever inventions, with very few lame ducks. I think my favourites (excluding ones I'd heard before like "Me Ears Are Alight") are the ones by Nirvana, Billy Ocean, Kula Shaker, Eiffel 65 and Michael Jackson.

Have fun.

A better way of commemorating the anniversary than hiring Jon Bon Jovi

2009-11-24T01:08:00.002Z

This.

I feel old. My children aren't old enough to remember the wall's coming down: I remember its going up (just).

....and an unpalatable Brit

2009-11-24T00:58:00.002Z

From The Guardian

If only there were some kind of an international spokesperson whose job it was to make representations to the Israelis about this kind of thing. Such a person might be called, I don't know, perhaps a "Peace Envoy". If only we had someone like that. Of course, if such a person existed they would have been heavily involved during Operation Cast Lead (aka Israel's 'second Holocaust' in Gaza).

This man, of course, having been in Israel during all the planning and the genocidal sabre-rattling, took the opportunity to spend some time at home with his money. And where is he now? In London of course, awaiting the glory (and more money of course that he expects as his due for being willing to take time out from his £6,000 per minute public speaking schedule to pretend to be interested in the EU.

There are few things that make me ashamed to be British: Tony Blair is definitely one of them.

An unpalatable truth

2009-11-24T00:54:00.002Z

A very thought-provoking piece from al-Jazeera on the US reaction to the Goldstone Report.

For my family....

2009-11-23T22:56:00.003Z

....all of whom use Facebook. My son uses Bebo, I use LiveJournal (though not for some time just lately). I have a blog (admit it, you'd spotted that) and I have a feeling one of the kids has a Myspace page. My wife and daughter have iPhones and I will be following them as soon as I get round to it (I've been getting used to the interface by using my wife's sometimes).

So yeah, this is for us.

At least none of us tweets......

I'm all for encouraging organ donation

2009-11-23T22:47:00.002Z

No, seriously.

Video fun - Tell Me

2009-11-22T03:45:00.003Z

In Korea there appears to be a girl band, a kind of fivefold Britney Spears, called Wonder Girl. They have a cult following among teen and pre-teen Korean girls, and a moderately catchy hit enitled Tell Me. Here it is:

Well, that may have been fun, but it was the preparation for this next one. After all, if you didn't know Tell Me you wouldn't appreciate the wackiness of this cover version on the traditional Korean Kayagum.

Definitely the oddest cover version I've heard of anything for a while.

Thanks to The Metropolitician for that. (And he has some interesting things to say on Korea's fixation with schoolgirls in advertising and the like.)

It started with a library catalogue

2009-11-16T23:30:00.005Z

Thirty-two years ago this evening I had my first date with Hilary, the woman who was to become my wife. We'd known each other at university, but had both been going out with other people then. Now I was in London, working for the Inland Revenue and not long moved into an unprepossessing one-bedroom flat in Highbury, right across the road from the London Borough of Islngton's Central Library.

Ah, the library. As soon as I moved to the flat I got a ticket and started taking stuff out. (I already had a ticket for Camden where I worked.) One day I decided to see what SF by Roger Zelazny they might have, so I went to look at the catalogue. It's hard to imagine now, but in 1977 Islington's catalogue was on file cards. (Mind you, even high-tech Camden only had microfilm.) The file cards were in little labelled drawers: except when they weren't, apparently. I was totally unable to find the cards, not only for Roger Zelazny but for any author whose name began with Z. Flummoxed, I did the obvious thing and asked the librarian, who told me that the Z index was kept behind the librarian's counter. For the life of me I can't remember why, because I was more interested in the fact that I recognised the attractive young lady who was that librarian.

Whoa, stop, you're getting ahead of me. The librarian was Alison Campbell, though by then she'd got married and was Alison Melville. I'd known Alison at Durham as one of Hilary's college pals (I didn't know very many of her friends, as I'd got to know her via her boyfriend at the time). We got chatting, and as we chatted I remembered that Hilary had said she was going to be working in London for Barclays Bank. I thought it would be nice to get in touch, and asked if Alison had her phone number. She did, and neither Alison nor Roger Zelazny will take any further part in our story.

Skip forward via a string of phone messages left with Hilary's fellow-lodgers (I gather they went along the lines of Rob Saunders rang / Rob Saunders rang again / who is this Rob Saunders guy anyway?) to fair Verona, where we lay our tale. No, just kidding: to Holborn Viaduct railway station, easy to find and roughly halfway between our places of work (Hilary at Newgate Street, me in Holborn). We met, and found each other little changed by the passage of, um, about four and a half months. We went for an early dinner at the Tavola Calda in Kingsway. As I realised later, the Tavola Calda was one of a chain of Italian restaurants. What I knew then was that it was an inexpensive place with great food which you collected on a tray from a serving counter. Obviously this kept staff costs low as they were all either behind the counter, in the kitchen or clearing tables. Rather like a Starbucks but serving meatballs and Chianti and tiramisu. Meatballs and spaghetti consumed (actually I can't remember what we ate, but in honour of Lady and the Tramp - released the year I was born - let's think of it as spaghetti and meat-a-balls) we repaired to my flat (four stops up the Piccadilly Line). I must have seen Yes at Wembley Arena fairly recently, because I'd just bought Going For The One which they were touring at the time. I'd also bought Rick Wakeman's Criminal Record: not one of his greatest achievements overall, but with an earth-shaking (even on my unassuming stereo) church organ solo on Judas Iscariot. I remember playing that to Hilary, who described it as a "splendid noise". So we sat, and we listened, and we drank coffee I suppose, and a modicum of snogging occurred. Then I saw her back to the tube station, and that was that.

I suppose it was the next day that it hit me that I'd actually let my hands wander rather more liberally than I would normally have done on a first date, which embarrassed me quite a lot. Not that Hilary had complained or anything, but I began to worry that I really had not made the kind of impression I'd intended. So I wrote (ah, the days before texts, before email....) an apologetic letter thanking her for a lovely evening and hoping I hadn't spoiled it irredeemably by getting carried away. Hilary, on receiving a letter from me, was convinced that I was writing to say "Thanks, but let's not take this any further". Which I suppose neatly encapsulates our respective insecurities at the time. Of course she did forgive me, we did take it further, and voila! we were an item. Thirty-two years on, we still are.

Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers - Queens Hall, Edinburgh, Friday 6 November

2009-11-10T03:11:00.003Z

To the Queens Hall to see the composer of By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston and Macarthur Park (not to mention Up Up and Away). Support was from Martin Carr, best described as "Mostly Harmless". Webb himself sat at his piano in front of a seven-piece band, four of whom were his sons. For a recovered alcoholic who was a worldwide success when I was barely a teenager, he looks pretty good, and sounds better. In a set just short of two hours long, he did almost all the hits I listed: well OK, not Up Up and Away (though he did The Worst That Could Happen, another of the songs he wrote for the Fifth Dimension) and more surprisingly not Didn't We. (I'd forgotten he wrote that - for Richard Harris - until I was drafting this review.) He also did plenty of (to me though evidently not to much of the audience) less well-known songs: P.F. Sloan, Highwayman, All I Know , Christian No (not a song about religion, but one written for his son Christian), and If These Old Walls Could Speak (one of the best songs of the night). He had a polite but firm way of dealing with attention-seeking barrackers (there's always one.....). His introductions and anecdotes were delightful, and there was a sense of wonder at hearing him sing the classic songs, even if he's no Glen Campbell (though he sings better than Richard Harris). Incidentally, Glen's son Cal is the drummer with Webb's band. Their new album "Cottonwood Farm" was represented by Hollow Victory and Bad Things Happen to Good People (showing incidentally that his sons' songwriting is pretty good too). Then all too soon he was signing off with MacArthur Park, returning to do an encore of Adios (surely the best farewell song since Robert Burns). It was both a thrill and a privilege to see one of the great songwriters of our time, especially when he turned out to be such a good performer.

Unser Kampf

2009-11-09T23:53:00.001Z

Today of course is the proper 9/11 (if you're a non-American). It's still a day worth commemorating though: International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism.

So here's an uplifting and appropriate link to the Anne Frank Trust.

And here's Itzhak Perlman playing John Williams' theme from Schindler's List. (We did this in our concert last Saturday, with the orchestra leader Lawrence Dunn doing a very fine job on the solo part.)

You can tell that Schindler's List is a good film. If you trawl through the Youtube clips you can find extreme anti-Zionists complaining that the film is Likud propaganda and an incitement to the genocide of the indigenous Palestinians. Then again, the equally loathsome and immoderate Benjamin Kerstein (the scientific illiterate with the pudenda fixation) described the film as antisemitic ("in that case Jews were quite comfortably victimized, and so we could spend our time pondering the possible humanity of a mass-murdering Nazi officer"). If the Likudniks think it's antisemitic and the antisemites think it's Likud propaganda, it's likely to be on target for an audience of normal folk.

Actually what this is is a homily against taking part in raffles or lotteries....

2009-11-09T03:32:00.003Z

I was emailed this by a friend:

The current banking crisis explained

Young Paddy bought a donkey from a farmer for £100.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

The next day he drove up and said, 'Sorry son, but I have some bad news.

The donkey's died.'

Paddy replied, 'Well then just give me my money back.'

The farmer said, 'Can't do that. I've already spent it.'

Paddy said, 'OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.'

The farmer asked, 'What are you going to do with him?'

Paddy said, 'I'm going to raffle him off.'

The farmer said, 'You can't raffle a dead donkey!'

Paddy said, 'Sure I can. Watch me.. I just won't tell anybody he's dead.'

A month later, the farmer met up with Paddy and asked, 'What happened with that dead donkey?'

Paddy said, 'I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two pounds a piece and made a profit of £898'

The farmer said, 'Didn't anyone complain?'

Paddy said, 'Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two pounds back.'

I had no idea....

2009-11-09T03:16:00.002Z

...that Gibraltar was such a hotbed of racial discrimination, despite (or perhaps because of) its highly heterogeneous society. My trade union is currently campaigning for the rights of Moroccan workers in Gibraltar, which is how the Guardian article came to my attention. (And yes, I know whoever does Unite's web pages can't spell Gurkhas....)

Someone suggested that we could get real poppies from the Taliban

2009-11-09T02:37:00.003Z

On Saturday night Hilary and I played in a concert given by Edinburgh Light Orchestra. When the dress instructions were being given out, it was suggested that we should all wear poppies as it was during the run-up to Remembrance Day. This led to a certain amount of debate within the orchestra among those (including Hilary and myself) who don't wear poppies on the grounds that they are commemorating only military dead, only British military dead, and only a subset of British military dead at that (the Gurkhas, for example, never see a penny of the money raised). I didn't organise myself properly this year: usually I wear a white poppy from the Quaker Peace Pledge Union, which commemorates all those who have doed in wars, whether combatants or civilians (and obviously includes those from all sides in the conflicts). However, even if I had been sporting a white poppy I wouldn't have worn it to the concert: wearing no poppy makes the point without attracting undue attention.

So you won't be surprised that I liked this article by Marina Hyde from Thursday's Guardian. Though to avoid misunderstanding I should perhaps point out that absolutely no pressure was applied to either Hilary or myself, or any other non-wearers, over Saturday's concert, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

Fired with enthusiasm

2009-11-09T02:08:00.002Z

Hands up if you remember Tony Hancock's "Test Pilot" sketch. (I think its formal title is "The Secret Life of Anthony Aloysius Hancock".) It used to be a radio favourite when I was small: Hancock is testing some new jet when he hears a knocking sound. He slows down and opens the hatch to investigate, whereupon he encounters Kenneth Williams, a member of ground crew who was maintaining the aircraft when "Whoosh!". Williams climbs in, complains about all the knobs and levers sticking in him, and asks "Ooh, what's this one?", followed by "Don't touch it!" and BANG! in short order. "Oooooh, it's the ejector seat! Where are you?" "I'm out here, sitting on the tail!"

Anyway, I was unavoidably reminded of it by this news story. I especially like the final paragraph.

Actually the guy was very lucky that he was only in a low-speed Pilatus, not something more gutsy. I mean, one can buy trips as a passenger in a MiG-25, or so I believe. That can hit Mach 3 (Gillette were offering flights a few years back as competition prizes linked to their Mach 3 razors). The first guy ever to make a just-barely-supersonic ejection in the early 1950s (from a Super Sabre whose stuck elevators had just pushed him down beyond vertical) received injuries officially described as "awesome". And that was just from the ejection process.

Perhaps this old chestnut from the 1960s is still apt, especially if read in an Afrikaans accent:

Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das machinkontrol is nicht for gefengerpoken und mittengrabben. Oderwise is easy schnappen der springenverk, blowenfus, undpoppencorken mit spitzensparken. Der machine is diggen by experten only. Is nicht fur geverken by das dumpkopfen. Das rubber necken sightseenen keepen das cotton-picken hands in das pockets. So relaxen, und vatchen das blinkenlights.

First they employ you; then they ignore you; then they sack you; then you win.

2009-10-31T04:23:00.003Z

Especially if you're the government's senior advisor on drugs.

The truth is a bitter pill, but history is on David Nutt's side.

You have to love the Germans

2009-10-31T04:06:00.003Z

I loved this, not to mention this (Go Angie!). So with luck the most Eurosceptic prime minister we've had since we joined the EU won't become Europe's President.

But the best comment on the story has to be that of the Daily Mash. It's as though they read my mind....

Video Fun - Rodrigo y Gabriela

2009-10-31T03:48:00.003Z

A few days ago I booked to see these guys and I have to say I'm really looking forward to it. Well, look:

And again:

Oh all right, but just one more:

Ys, after the event

2009-10-31T03:41:00.002Z

Today (well, yesterday if you're ruled by the calendar, but to me 0345 is still Friday night) is Women's No Pay Day. That is, the day each year on which we Y-chromosomed types would have to stop being paid for our work in order to eliminate the gender pay gap.

Is that not a disgusting statistic? Probably even worse in my sector (financial services) though maybe better in my other one (IT).

The Liberal Democrats declare themselves unfit to run a menage (as they say in Glesca)

2009-10-23T18:37:00.003Z

I'm nearing the end of a week's holiday up at our flat in Ballater, Aberdeenshire. While having a cappuccino and a black-pudding-and-egg roll at our favourite coffee place here, I read this article in the Press & Journal (the main regional daily paper) and I nearly choked. How, I asked myself, could this clown become the business spokesman for a party which once could claim to be a serious political force? To explain my near-apoplexy I need to run quickly through the recent history of the company I work for.

Once upon a time there was the Bank of Scotland, a perfectly normal Scottish bank founded in 1695 and proud of its history. In 2001 BoS merged with the Halifax Building Society, based in Yorkshire, England, to form HBOS. The Halifax dominated the UK mortgage market and the merger was felt to be a good commercial fit. For all that it was a merger and not a takeover, the centre of gravity of the merged organisation moved southwards, mostly because of the greater size of the Halifax par, though I dare say the usual post-merger pissing contests took place. Fast-forward to 2007, when HBOS had overstretched itself financially and was on the verge of collapse. (Not because of a huge amount of toxic debt, but because a large part of HBOS's lending was funded by borrowing on the inter-bank money market. As other banks' toxic assets eroded confidence in the whole system, the cost of such borrowing went through the roof and the cost of keeping trading was sucking us under.) Up stepped Lloyds TSB, also in trouble but with a big deposit base with which to fund lending. After much horse-trading the government (a) agreed to allow LTSB to take over HBOS despite the large market share of the combined entity (b) agreed to take a 43.5% stake in the new group to ensure liquidity. Much relief all round, as the only other likely options were that HBOS would fold completely or that we would have been nationalised. While a takeover generally has an impact on jobs in the combined firm, the effect of nationalisation or winding-up would have been far worse.

OK. Two more facts and we're ready. The European Competition Commissioner has stated on several occasions that she wants to see the Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) divesting itself of some parts of the organisation so as to reduce its market share, as with its public funding it is distorting competition. Also, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, recently suggested that it would be a good idea if banking organisations were forced to separate their retail and investment arms (the former being the day-to-day prudent guys and the latter the Gordon Gekko types taking huge risks and making vast profits, or not).

Oh, and may I say that I quite agree with Lord Thurso that (a) LBG needs to be split up (it WILL happen, the EU are adamant) and (b) Bank of Scotland was a great bank and a wonderful Scottish institution (and I speak both as employee and customer).

Back to Lord Thurso. “I would start – I encourage the Treasury to think about this – by taking Bank of Scotland out of the Lloyds group and putting competition into Scotland by making it independent. I suspect that Europe may well ask the Treasury to do that anyway.”

Hmmm. Taking Bank of Scotland out of the Lloyds Group? Taking HBOS out of the Lloyds group might be possible, but may I draw His Lordship's attention to the fact that Bank of Scotland has had almost eight years of absorption into HBOS, to the extent that while the name is still on the letterhead there is almost nothing left separate to pull out. All the computer systems merged years ago. The branch counter systems (after much pain) were merged, the Bank of Scotland accounts were transferred onto the Halifax system (I wrote the program that did it!) until it would require considerable detective skill to tell what part of the organisation began life where. As to separation giving consumers more choice: if they bank online they won;t care less. If they use branches, the last thing they will want is to be told that their branch is no longer available because it used to be a Halifax one not an HBOS one, or that they will have to be patient but there is a new counter system being introduced. And who will write all the new systems to replace the decommissioned old Bank of Scotland ones? We don't even have any computers in Scotland any more! And how long will it take? And who will foot the bill?

To cap it all, the demerger he proposes simply pulls apart two retail+investment combos without addressing in any way at all the point that Mervyn King was making. It seems that Lord Thurso understands neither the difference between retail and investment banks, nor what kind of bank BoS and LTSB are. .

Thurso has as much chance of demerging Bank of Scotland from LBG (or HBOS) as he has of demerging the British Linen Bank from Bank of Scotland. Or to put it another way, my first bank as a teenager was the District Bank. Taken over by National Westminster, it now forms part of the Royal Bank of Scotland. I think it would be great for competition and for Manchester's regional pride if it got its bank back. So come on Thurso: let's demerge the District Bank from RBS. What do you mean you can't find it? No excuses, man!

Thank heavens nobody votes for the Lib Dems any more.

Aaa-vogadro! Aaa-vogadro! Avogadro! Avogadro! Avo-o-gadro!

2009-10-23T18:04:00.004Z

Or to put it another way, Happy Mole Day 2009. Mole Day, 23 October or 10/23 if you're American and do dates in a funny way, is respectfully dedicated by the chemistry community to Avogadro's number 6.02 x 10^23. Strictly I should have posted between 6.02 am and 6.02 pm, but it will still be in that time frame over the whole american continent so my conscience is pretty clear.

Apparently this year's theme is Molar Express. Well, I supppose these molecules are doing their molecular thing pretty damned fast:

OK, so show the Mole some respect! Also love:

Awwww....