Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

My chamber choir Convivium hosted a group called The Queen's Six for a workshop and concert last weekend. The Queen's Six is a professional six-member male a capella group that live in and sing at Winchester Castle. It was a really wonderful concert! Here's a video of them doing one of the pieces they sang last week (they commissioned this piece as part of their 10th anniversary celebration).







And here's a video of Convivium singing Melissa Dunphy's O Oriens to open that same concert!

I've been wanting to get these up for a while, but the DVD of this past year's recital only just became available.  So... here's me, singing Adele's Laughing Song (Strauss, Die Fledermaus) in May of 2010:



And here's me, singing Adele's Audition Song in May of 2011:



Enjoy!

I've recently been informed that the Halloween party traditional at the annual department retreat may be replaced by "something that might resemble Oktoberfest and a short-sketch show possibly with group singing."  Being the sort of person I am, this immediately provoked a web search for science-based songs that I could sing. 

I was already familiar with a few, namely Tom Lehrer's Elements, Monty Python's Galaxy Song, and The Amphioxus Song (the latter stumbled upon when I was working at the genome center and doing amphioxus finishing).  And I knew a bunch of programmer/sci-fi filk songs (HAL's Song - it's in the comments, search for "I sent Frank to fix the antenna" and sing it to "My bonnie lies over the ocean", You Can Build a Mainframe From the Things You Find at Home), but those seemed inappropriate for the group.  Surely, surely there were more out there. 

Surprise!  There are!

The journal Nature runs a blog called The Great Beyond that has collected a whole lotta science songs, many with videos.  There's possibilities there.  They also link in one of those posts to rips of Singing Science records, a six-LP set for kids produced in the "late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. (Zaret's main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic "Unchained >Melody" for the 1955 movie "Unchained", later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in 'Ghost'.)"  I listened to much of "What is an Animal?" before I broke under the wave of saccharine cuteness-for-5-year-olds and turned it off.

Happy Friday!

• One of the hymns we sang yesterday is "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." I am less than fond of the words; suffice it to say that they are very Baptist, and I am quite definitely not a Baptist. I was therefore slightly put off to have it running through my head for chunks of yesterday afternoon and large parts of today. (It's a very chirpy, catchy tune. I suppose I could try using "Oh My Darling Clementine" words instead; I realized that these fit the tune equally well.)

• HHMI informed me today that they're really not s'posed to pay for lunches on day trips, and that after this most recent trip to Berkeley, they will cease to do so. Hmph.

• Much of the sequencing data I stared at today was useless: crap data (lots of overlapping squiggly lines for my traces), or inserts going in the wrong bloody way, or annoying errors all over the place.

• Life is made somewhat better by digitalemur 's post of the following animation to Jonathan Coulter's song "Mandelbrot Set," of which I'd never heard before. Enjoy! (NSFW; uses the F-word to describe the coolness of a fractal)

Normally, I can't stand "Teh 12 Days of Christmas". But a college men's a capella singing group has actually put together an arrangment that I rather like, and thought I'd share with you:

I'm taking my birthday holiday tomorrow (Friday)!  I hope to have the dress for my costume completely assembled by the end of the day - wish me luck!

Meanwhile, two bits of amusement:

IGN has an amusing article as part of its Halloween celebration on RPG Cliches That Need To Die.  The hero who starts off as a simple farmer... monsters that have no business carrying any items at all... they're all there, and roasted till very well done.

The theatrical trailer for Tim Burton's film version of Sweeney Todd is available for viewing!  Why they've moved the release date back to just before Christmas, I dunno... it's not exactly a nice, family-friendly happy holiday story.  Maybe they're hoping for an Oscar nod.  And the trailer is trying very hard not to indicate that there's lots of singing in it.  It's clear from the little that's shown that Johnny Depp is no George Hearn, but hopefully he will suit nonetheless.

We went to see Avenue Q this weekend!  We'd been looking forward to it ever since I first got the announcement that it was coming to our neck of the woods, and it did not disappoint.  There's a good summary of the plot here for anyone who's interested.

Avenue Q is perhaps best termed as 'Sesame Street for grownups.'  If it were a movie, it would be rated R for profanity and simulated sex.  Between puppets, mind you, but simulated sex nonetheless.  The show includes some of the funniest, raunchiest songs I've ever heard. 'The Internet is for Porn' and 'My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada' are in no way, shape, or form worksafe, but boy are they a scream. 

There are also moments of comedic bliss that don't involve explicit acts or lyrics.  'Schadenfreude', a song that teaches one of the characters (and probably most of the audience) a new vocabulary word a la Sesame Street or The Electric Company is quite possibly my favorite funny song in the show.  The wedding nightmare (featuring a super-giant puppet of the main character's girlfriend in a bridal veil rising Godzilla-like over the apartment complex) is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen. 

There were a few things that surprised me about the show.  First, it's sweet: it's got an on-off-on love story between the two main characters at its core, and I hadn't expected any terribly deep emotional stuff.  Second, it defines a racial divide at the beginning of the show - not between puppet and human characters as one might expect, but between humans (including some puppet humans) and monsters.  Not terribly deep, admittedly, but an interesting touch.  Finally, it ends up being a quietly wise show.  In 'I wish I could go back to college,' a bunch of characters talk about how they'd like to go back to what they know, in a place where their needs are taken care of... then acknowledge that it simply wouldn't work, because they wouldn't fit there anymore.  And in 'For Now,' they state that nothing, good or bad, lasts forever.

So: Great show, better and more interesting than I expected.  There are certainly good reasons why it won all those Tony awards back in 2003, and I'm delighted that it's finally gone on tour.  Do catch it if it comes to your area - it's well worth the price of admission!

What didn't get done:

- vaccuuming
- yard work, including:
     - hedge trimming
     - (new to list!) rosebush pruning

What did get done:

- singing concert Friday night
- singing memorial mass Saturday afternoon
- seeing my brother at the local airport (long layover for business travel)
- going shopping!

A big thank you to everyone who's given us Barnes & Noble and Borders gift cards over about the last three years (hoshikage and haamel especially); we finally used them! 
Looking forward to many evenings of media entertainment now.  :)

It's looking a little unlikely that I'll be able to do an 'attempt at good writing' post this week, due primarily to a lack of time.  Work is being busy: I'm doing the usual round of wet-lab work, and now that I've figured out how to call SNPs without developing a migraine, I'm trying to do more of that too. 

This week is also concert week for the community/university chorus that the huz and I are in.  The schedule for the week runs like this: regular rehearsal Monday night, dress rehearsals Tuesday and Thursday nights, concert on Friday and Saturday nights.  We're performing Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time, which I made a very brief reference to awhile back.  At some point - hopefully sooner rather than later - I intend to write a 'good writing' post about it.  But for now, suffice it to say that it's relatively modern, that Tippett really liked writing angular, non-melodic stuff (about Kristallnacht, in this particular instance), and that the piece was pretty difficult to learn.  In last night's dress rehearsal, it was clear that parts of the chorus still don't know chunks of it terribly well.  Sigh.

On the Wii front:
Rayman: I cheated the other day and got the huz to win my warthog race for me.  I'd spent more than sufficient time working on the Day 3 trials and wanted to save my game already.  (The one serious issue we have with Rayman is that the game WILL NOT SAVE until you have completed the last trial of the day.  We both feel that it ought to save after every successful sub-trial.  The huz, happily, passed the trial on his first go.)  But this morning, I was myself finally successful in breaking the time barrier!  Yay!  So now I don't feel like a cheat anymore.  I also finished the maze game in Day 3 in just barely the allotted time this morning.  So, double yay!

Sports: I now hold medals in all 3 tennis exercises and in all 3 golf trials, as well as one each in the baseball and bowling ones.  Neither of us has gotten a gold medal yet, but it's only a matter of time.  :)

Zelda: I've determined that if I spend too much time either playing Zelda: TP myself, or watching the huz play Ocarina of Time, I get dizzy, then motion-sick.  So at the moment I'm trying to figure out what my maximum 'safe' time is for watching or playing.  15 minutes of continuous watching from the couch (figuring that if the screen takes up a smaller portion of my visual field, it won't get me so sick so fast) is perfectly fine.  I'm looking forward to trying 20 minutes of play from the couch later today.  :)