harp music, and random bits

[cellio]

(For those who've asked, "random bits" are longer than "short takes".)

Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)

After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months). I have been unable to correlate it with anything else going on in the house. His last physical was in January and he was fine, and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the kitty psychologists in my reading audience have any theories?

Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.

I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.

Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.

Comments

Ladies Night

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Actually, my favorite trick was to walk up to a table of women, flash them a couple of bucks and say, "Hey, I'm a student on a budget, can you 'buy' me a beer?" They'd take the cash, buy me the beer and I'd strike up a conversation. :D Great icebreaker and they feel in control.

[schulman.livejournal.com]

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months).

Sunrise is around 6am these days. (Sadly, I know this from the wrong side of the clock.) Perhaps the early birds are taunting him?

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Now I'm curious about the piece... the best kind of harp arrangements avoid too much flipping but it can be a real challenge getting things to fit (I'm assuming your harpist has a full size harp? Even more fun getting stuff to fit into limited strings). I assume you're familiar with the workaround that has you play the sharped note an octave higher, so you can have that note ready to fit in without the need to change the note in the main area of playing.

[lyev.livejournal.com]

Oooo, can I get ahold of the harp piece sometime?

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme

I've found the same restaurant varies slightly too. But I hadn't considered what it means if a dish is meant to be spicy in the first place. Maybe they should go to a scale of -5 to +5 instead? (with zero being the typical level of spice)

I had this image of an elderly Asian gentleman in the kitchen at places like that, carefully weighing out the spices on a balance for each dish, consulting a worn book that was written hundered of years ago and passed down the family for special recipies.

Then at the Schezuan House on Murray Ave this past Sunday, I saw the cook come out of the kitchen to ask a customer about a big take-out order. He was a Caucasian in his early 20's, might have been a college student. Blew my image completely. But hey, it's Pittsbugh (not Chinatown New York), and Beef Orange can't be that hard to make, should have known better.