Tangential Ramblings

Back in high school

dan — 10:09pm, Thursday 2 October 2008

I had a friend, was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool

Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days.

Back in high school: musical genius or arrogant laziness? I'd like to think the former. Either way, a fabulous track.

Glissando

dan — 10:20pm, Friday 11 July 2008

I find it odd that the musical chromatic scale is made up of twelve notes, the thirteenth repeating the starting note an octave higher. And that the major and minor scales are made up of seven notes each. I'm not suggesting that any other numbers would be any more logical; merely that having any number higher than two play such a pivotal role in something as fundamental as music seems bizarre.

I wonder whether relative pitch resonates (in the mind sense of the word) with us as humans more than it does with other animals. And would we find it musically odd our scale were broken into any number other than twelve intervals? After all, pitch is a continuous scale (ask anyone who listened to me play the violin), so have we artificially manufactured the notes that we know and love? (I'm guessing that there is something inherently significant about two notes an octave apart, given the way they resonate with one another.)

Westwood in da field

dan — 10:41pm, Saturday 28 June 2008

The controversy should not be over Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury. The controversy should be over the fact that Westwood is there to represent him from a reporting perspective.

Musical gerunds

dan — 8:05am, Tuesday 24 June 2008

As far as I'm aware, there are few songs whose titles are a non-finite clause including a gerund. (Surprised no one else has writen about this very subject.) The only two I can think of are Squeeze's Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Shed Seven's Chasing Rainbows. The only such band is Counting Crows, although not sure whether this is acting as a present participle.

That is all.

The World's Greatest?

dan — 10:10pm, Sunday 22 June 2008

Now that R. Kelly has been acquitted, is it OK to listen to his music again? (I completely understand that an embargo of the music of Gary Glitter is a given.)

Pressing times

dan — 9:45pm, Sunday 22 June 2008

I used to estimate that the average shirt took five minutes to iron. Tonight, I added some science and accuracy to this. Below are the results.

Dress-down Fridays meant that tonight's quota of creased-up shirts totalled four. And tonight I decided to iron to music (iPod and earphones), something I rarely do but something which brings with it a mechanism for time-based accuracy.

For the first shirt, an easy-iron, blue-check number, the end of its ironing coincided beautifully with the end of The Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now, a song that's bugged me for a few days now, in none other than good ways. So shirt one: 3m 27s.

Shirt two was a cerise, difficult-to-iron item, the ironing of which took exactly the same length of time as the first: the first 3m 27s of 4Hero/Minnie Riperton's Les Fleur. Third up was a very simple purple-check number, complete in a lightning 2m 44s, accompanied by Dolly Parton's 9 to 5. And the blue shirt that used to have a twin came last, reverting to the three and a half minute standard, this time to The Human League's Together In Electric Dreams.

I think the 2m 44s shirt was a freak, and I'll probably find out in the week that one of its sleeves remains unironed. So the verdict is 3m 30s for a shirt, 30% quicker than the original estimate.

Can't Stand Me Now

dan — 10:47pm, Friday 20 June 2008

For the last hour or so before leaving work yesterday, I was longing to leave the building, plug in my new in-ear earphones (in-earphones?) and blast The Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now into my head while walking along sun-drenched Whitehall. I have no idea why. But I was. And I did. And I loved it.