Exponential girls bands

In the idle hours of morning, have been browsing the web. This is what I have discovered about Japanese music...

Morning Musume's recipe for (musical/other...) success:
1. Get loads of young girls to form a band.
2. Keep adding girls.
3. PROFIT!!!

Seriously, as the video (in the full post) below demonstrates, you're definitely taking it too far if you can make a song that lasts over six minutes just by introducing each band member...

Greek Chorus

I was walking home from my Wittgenstein Reading Group, a few hours ago, enjoying Vivaldi's "Der Herbst" as I headed back up Conduit Road (that's one hell of a climb), and I began noticing how well music works as a soundtrack in conditions of low visibility. It seems to dramatise everything, and give a particular edge to people emerging from the darkness, and heading back into it in silence. That got me thinking about how wonderful it was to have the small flat device the size of a business card (aka my iPod nano) that could allow me to carry my favourite music around with me. Actually, it is the very storage of music which is marvelous here - the very idea that any person with the equipment could hear Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the comfort of his living room, alone. We can afford to hear things again and again, and to let it play in the background, almost outside of our consciousness, knowing that should we want to hear it again, it will be there.

How different it must have been just 150 years ago, before the phonograph, when the only way to hear a particular piece was to go to a concert, or if you were rich, to have someone come play it at your house. How different must musical intentionality have been, knowing that that particular hearing of a certain tune could well be, for purely logistical/material reasons, your last. Auditors must have focused intently on the music, savouring each moment (for cases where the song was worth it), trying to remember and record the experience. Never would they have imagined that the masses a near century-and-a-half later would view music in a completely different way...

This raises the question: is music the area where social practices and norms define intentionality? Why would the other methods of human interaction be any different. Language and communication, the notion of self, the self in the world, and what things are and aren't... why would these be conserved and unchanged? We generally assume that people of the past are essentially just like us, with a different basic body of knowledge, and weird clothes. But what's to say that the mental difference isn't drastically different the further you go back...

Side note: I wish I could get credit for idle musings like this, and not have to do this goddamn physics project. Oh well, back to work...

Foggy Weather

I'm not that passionate about weather, really. I'm not too keen for really sunny afternoons, although it is nice to sit in the park with a hat on your head, some corona, and a book. I'm not a huge fan of rain, especially when I'm under it without cover, but I have to admit it'd not unpleasant, being inside on a rainy day, with the light on, my bathrobe donned, and something good to read in the warmth of my room. Not much love for snow either: fresh, it's cold as hell and ends up getting you wet, and after two days of urban existence, it turns into the most vile, dark slush possible. But I must say few things match the experience of drying out in a chalet with cinnamon Glühwein, and seeing a dark cloud pouring snow down, or standing under a lamppost on a dark snowy night, and seeing how the light plays with the flakes as they come down (pro-tip: wear a hat, or the experience suddenly goes downhill). But it must be said: there is one type of of weather I'm an absolute sucker for, and that's fog. Fog is just amazing. Not the heavy kind that drenches you in 5 minutes, or the wimpy light kind that's accompanied by drizzle, but nice, thick fog. The kind that wraps around you so that you can barely see ten paces down the road, and all the streetlights become nothing more than diffused orbs, and people come and go into the thick mass like shadows, as if there were nothing more to the world but what you can see.

I love how the imagination works in the fog. In hiding all that is unsightly, and blurring all that might be, it leaves the formation of the external world to the mind. Walking down a stone-wall-lined back alley near Endcliffe Crescent, you could almost expect a victorian gentleman in a top hat and black cloak to just walk by, or be in Elizabethan England, and be walking along perimeter of some estate, or just pretty much be anywhere you want to be. The fog makes the world like a book, makes the world anything you want to see, and I think that's pretty damn good stuff, for something which is basically just water.

Anyway, enough crazy ranting about fog. Back to some fun reading about Nuclear Physics while listening to Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "The Lost Christmas Eve", as the rain batters my skylight, and rattles on the roof.

They should have flippin' won

Unfortunately, by having a great time at the ball, I missed out on the best comedy night of the year: Eurovision.

So I played catch-up thanks to youtube, and picked out some of the best bits and pieces. The israeli version of R Kelly was pretty bad, as we were the french and british entries (I don't know what annoyed me the most with the latter: the lyrics, the singing, or the choreography). The finnish band weren't too bad, despite ripping some lyrics straight out of a KISS song. But I think the best performance by far was the one the Lithuanians gave:

I normally wouldn't repost a popular video, but given the impact this has had in terms of "good mood-ness", it would be a crime not to share.

Click here to expand movie player.

Priceless...
Those guys are completely insane, but by Jove that band shoulda won.