Virge's blog

I'm currently listening to: The Juliet Letters. This collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet is experimental and invigorating. The range of songs - soulful blues, caustic sarcasm, playful wit - is complemented by the range of string styles - warm tremolos, angry martellatos, sneaky pizzicatos.

Here's another little doodle-ditty collaboration with Sigga.

An interesting thought: Song Fight. Each week a song title is posted. Entrants write and record a song within the week and post it. The winner is determined by popular vote.

Picture, if you will, a musician - unstable at the best of times. I can't say who it was because I don't know. I could ask an eye witness (SonOfVirge) but I'm not sure I want to know.

Now consider that this musician is in his teenage years. This is when various limbs go through spurts of growth and the ones furthest from the brain sometimes have a little trouble keeping up with instructions from mission control. Now picture this teenage musician trying to navigate through a forest of music stands, chairs and expensive instruments. If it was on film you'd expect this scene to come just after the dialog that informs us that the trumpet is uninsured.

Of course in the film we'd delay the climax for as long as possible with some near-miss foreplay. In real life it happens all too quickly: the trip, the staggering step that topples the trumpet from its stand, then the recovery step - when the other foot is brought forward to halt the falling body and plants itself directly onto the prone trumpet. It's done.

I don't think this silver was designed to be a crumple zone. It's not a write-off. SonOfVirge can still play it and the tone is not noticeably marred. It needs fixing. I know car panel beaters are renowned for their ability to charge. I dread to think what their musical counterparts are like.

The gallery is up. I built myself a photo gallery - partly to organise photos and party to play around with php scripting (coughcoughgeekcough). I'm pretty happy with it so far. It needs a few extra navigation options and needs more of the photos that are scattered around my hard discs. See Virge's Photo Gallery (let me know if there are any problems).

The Alien



Fresh



Lonely



Bows



Happy

Fifteen goths on a weekend binge
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Felt they dwelt on the lunatic fringe
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
The palest face, when his eyes were red,
thought the bloodshot look raised his gothic cred
but he looked insipid and he felt half dead.
Miss want-me, sitting in her world apart,
carved skin with icons of her bleeding heart.
She whined all night - pretentious tart,
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

I'm free for 9 days. I have next week off work. To the casual observer it would sound like a splendid opportunity to do some writing. "Yay!" you say, "we shall get more samples of Virgiliterature."

Hoom, hoom. Let's not get too hasty here. It's not easy to write when you have an oversized halfling sitting beside you hammering away on an N64 emulator and chattering about every amazing move as though it were a religious experience. I know. I experienced it tonight. I resorted to plan 'B' - wait till the halfling has departed the room to pursue another adventure. (I had to drop plan A since torturing minors is frowned upon.)

I'm sure there will be some opportunities to write. Let's hope the opportunities don't decide to work in anti-phase to my inspirations.

Avast, me proud beauty! Wanna know why my Roger is so Jolly? It be "Talk Like a Pirate Day". It's a day to learn yerself a new language, a day to extend yer vo-cab-oo-lary.

While oi was munchin' the biscuits with the crew today we hoisted the . It were "Talk Like a Pirate Day" so we had ter celebrate. It stirs me barnacled 'eart to see the black flag flyin' proud. Them scurvy bilge-suckin' code-rats always writes damn good pirate software when the flag's a-flyin' (o'course if'n they don't write good code I tie 'em to the mizzenmast and give 'em a taste o' the rope's end).

Last night we went to "We Will Rock You" - the musical by Queen and Ben Elton.
We went with the full knowledge that this would be a big flashy production with a bantam-weight story. No disappointments there. The script was just right for the cheesy, unrealistic, never mind the fine details, futuristic setting i.e. 300 years into the future when live music and rebellious thoughts are forbidden. The jokes that targeted today's manufactured bands and plastic music production were well aimed. There was good variety in the humour. Elton had a go at politics, sex, education, sex, music industry, rock legends, sex etc.
The selection of Queen songs included quite a number that I didn't recognise. Given the theme of the story, I expected to hear more of the early Queen songs when they were passionate about the no synths, no sequencing, "keepin it real" style. I guess the constraints of matching lyrics to story forced some compromises.
The lighting and effects were superb. It used the full dynamic range of my retinas. Videos on the huge ultra-bright display added to the futuristic feel (except for the use of Space Invaders to back Another One Bites the Dust - just a little too retro to be believable).
The overall volume levels were more than adequate for a stage musical, but not high enough to give the feel of a Queen concert. Consequently the big anthem numbers felt a little tame. It seems a shame that they had to sanitise the noise levels to pander to an all-ages audience, but at the same time try to preach a message about music being free and wild.
The acting was a little wooden at first. It's hard to level this as a criticism, since the surreal radio-gaga plastic world makes it very difficult to give a credible acting performance. After interval the show got better. Maybe it was just me adjusting to the style. It seemed that the actors started to live their parts rather than just playing them.
Overall it was a great night's entertainment but it lacked the kind of magic that leaves you buzzing all the way home and itching to get all your friends to go and see it.

It's a bordinary day. You probably didn't even realise that bordinary is now an official word in the English language. I expect it will be several years before the dictionary compilers note that I have been using it and decide it has to be included. Those boffins always spend ages arguing before they'll add a heterological word to the language.

bordinary: (adjective) soporifically unremarkable. So unremarkable and unspecial that it initiates a lack of confidence motion against the words "uninteresting" and "unimpressive".
(14th century, from Latin ordinarius  “following the usual course”. Possibly a contraction of "bloody ordinary".)

Kitty-ditties

Rufus glanced around the cage
and trilled his song, uncaring.
Sinister blinked her yellow eyes
then went back to her staring.

Indolence gave a muffled grunt.
His paws twitched in a dream
of flirting sunny butterflies
on flowers by the stream.

A collaboration with Sigga. Expect more of these ditty-doodles. (She doodles, I ditty.)

"However, if the condition persists, it can result in starvation, social leprosy and bitter cynicism."
- from an old link that I noticed today - an amusingly written Life as a Wannabe Writer.