In the spirit of compromise I offer up a piece of music with no lyrics at all, written by person or persons of unknown cultural heritage or skin tone.
Also, the video makes no sense, and frightens me a little.
Friday, 12 September 2008
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Radio Ljubljana 3
I had considered sticking up something a little more esoteric today, but given S. Spielbergo's disgustingly arrogant attitude towards whiny white boys, I am hitting back with a whiny white boy.
This is perfect chill-out music, which isn't a term I use often. In fact, I'm not even sure it is whiny, so much as whimsical and contented. Whatever, it's awesome. And he has a new album out: bonus.
This is perfect chill-out music, which isn't a term I use often. In fact, I'm not even sure it is whiny, so much as whimsical and contented. Whatever, it's awesome. And he has a new album out: bonus.
Tough On Farmyard Animals
This had me laughing for quite a while yesterday: DRC police arrest and detain goats.
I think my favourite part of the story is the line "The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining."
It is not clear what exact form their re-training will take, but I choose to believe they will be taken into a room with the following pictures on the wall
and asked which of the two they will brutally oppress the human rights of.
In fairness, it's just about possible to believe the police officers thought they were apprehending a herd of Kevin Federline clones:
which is certainly a laudable objective.
h/t to S. Spielbergo.
I think my favourite part of the story is the line "The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining."
It is not clear what exact form their re-training will take, but I choose to believe they will be taken into a room with the following pictures on the wall
and asked which of the two they will brutally oppress the human rights of.
In fairness, it's just about possible to believe the police officers thought they were apprehending a herd of Kevin Federline clones:
which is certainly a laudable objective.h/t to S. Spielbergo.
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Radio Ljubljana 2
I can't embed today's video because the option has been disabled on youtube. Nevertheless it's a great song, and I hope the added inconvenience of a further mouse click doesn't put you off.
Astronautalis - Ocean Walk
If it sounds familiar, it's probably because Clarks used it not too long ago to sell shoes. Because you walk in shoes, you see? It works on a multitude of levels.
It didn't actually persuade me to buy their footwear, but it did inspire me to track the full track down (once again iTunes fails miserably to cater to my needs). Astronautalis describes his music as "rap for people who don't like rap", and that's as good a description as any.
Astronautalis - Ocean Walk
If it sounds familiar, it's probably because Clarks used it not too long ago to sell shoes. Because you walk in shoes, you see? It works on a multitude of levels.
It didn't actually persuade me to buy their footwear, but it did inspire me to track the full track down (once again iTunes fails miserably to cater to my needs). Astronautalis describes his music as "rap for people who don't like rap", and that's as good a description as any.
Thank TCB Almighty
It is done. I've been tentatively saying to people that the research required for my thesis has been complete for the last week or so, but until I got to Slovenia and spoke to my friend/colleague/unofficial replacement supervisor/walking Encyclopedia Mathematica DJ I couldn't be 100% sure. In fact, at the end of a half-hour brainstorming session yesterday morning it became clear that I wasn't quite done [1], but having been shown the one missing link in our chain of logic I simply beat the hell out of maths yesterday afternoon until it capitulated.
Now I have reached my favourite part of the academic process, writing papers. This is fun for two reasons. Firstly, writing=awesome, whether it's a story or a blog post or an academic article. Secondly, though, now that I'm supposed to be typing away at my computer all day no-one suspects anything as I sit here yapping away on the Musings instead. Take that, government funding to take me overseas! In your face, wonderfully kind and hospitable Slovenian hosts!
Anyway, gloat over. I shall now try and actually write some maths.
See you back here in, ooh, ten minutes or so...
[1] Maths is a funny business. The best way to explain the mistake I made is to use an analogy. I tried to prove that if there is only one water trough in a fenced field, then no matter where a horse is when it needs a drink, it will always go to the same trough, and so sooner or later the horse will visit said location. DJ's objection to my reasoning was essentially "why assume horses drink?". Of course, this being maths, I had to prove that mammals require water to function, and that took about four hours.
Now I have reached my favourite part of the academic process, writing papers. This is fun for two reasons. Firstly, writing=awesome, whether it's a story or a blog post or an academic article. Secondly, though, now that I'm supposed to be typing away at my computer all day no-one suspects anything as I sit here yapping away on the Musings instead. Take that, government funding to take me overseas! In your face, wonderfully kind and hospitable Slovenian hosts!
Anyway, gloat over. I shall now try and actually write some maths.
See you back here in, ooh, ten minutes or so...
[1] Maths is a funny business. The best way to explain the mistake I made is to use an analogy. I tried to prove that if there is only one water trough in a fenced field, then no matter where a horse is when it needs a drink, it will always go to the same trough, and so sooner or later the horse will visit said location. DJ's objection to my reasoning was essentially "why assume horses drink?". Of course, this being maths, I had to prove that mammals require water to function, and that took about four hours.
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Radio Ljubljana
With my interesting topics quotient at an all time low, I figured I'd cunningly keep up traffic with some of the awesome music I've been unearthing on Youtube. We begin with a live cover of Woody Guthrie/Jeff Tweedy's "At My Window Sad And Lonely". Tragically neither this breathtaking version nor the original is available from iTunes. There is a Wilco cover I could get, but it's rubbish.
Note to Wilco: adding drums to this is musical heresy.
h/t to whoever was responsible for selecting the soundtrack to The Strangers, which in addition to being a nice little movie of the kind I like (i.e. remorseless, inexplicable horror) had some pretty impressive tunes, this being the best.
(Oh, and this completely off-topic, but already three people have coming looking for my host since he left for the afternoon, and every single one of them slid effortlessly into perfect English the moment they realised I was an uncouth foreigner. I can't think of a nicer place to be spending my exile).
Note to Wilco: adding drums to this is musical heresy.
h/t to whoever was responsible for selecting the soundtrack to The Strangers, which in addition to being a nice little movie of the kind I like (i.e. remorseless, inexplicable horror) had some pretty impressive tunes, this being the best.
(Oh, and this completely off-topic, but already three people have coming looking for my host since he left for the afternoon, and every single one of them slid effortlessly into perfect English the moment they realised I was an uncouth foreigner. I can't think of a nicer place to be spending my exile).
Thoughts From A Tiny Nation
My tremendously friendly yet deeply scary Slovenian supervisor has popped out for a meeting, so I figured I'd take a little time to update y'all on recent trials and tribulations.
I hate airports. Actually, I think I hate any place where the main objective is to get as many people through that location as quickly as is humanly possible. It seems like having that as your guiding principle leads you to stop viewing customers as people and start seeing them as items on a conveyor belt that must endlessly be kept running. Any attempt to speak, to ask for help or clarification, and you will be immediately classed as a defective part who must be dealt with severely, so as to force you back into the system, that you might piss off again as soon as possible. I heard for years that Londoners are objectionably rude, and I've had some experience of this, but looking back it occurs to me that all my negative experiences have been in train stations, tube stations, or bus stations. It may well be then that I simply suffer for having to travel to London, and thus invariably the first people I meet are of the "human beings are cattle to be herded and eventually shot" stripe. Certainly, it turns out that several of the airport staff in Newcastle are egregious dicks, too.
On a more positive note, I am delighted to find that the acrophobia I suffered from as a child has now vanished. Given the seemingly endless capacity possessed by my brain to generate new and crippling phobias apparently at random, finding out they can disappear without reason too is quite a nice thing to learn. The one thing I still can't do, though, is read on an aeroplane if I can see out of the window with my peripheral vision. Something about trying to scan lines of text whilst clouds pass beneath you causes a short-circuit in my brain.
Slovenia itself is beautiful. I spent some time observing Western Europe as I flew over it, and it pretty much just looks like home. The same networks of roads, the same patchwork of arable fields. It's not like I was expecting volcanoes and glaciers, or anything, but the lack of variation was still a little depressing.
This is just like home, I said to myself.
Then we reached the forests, huge forests that stretched to the horizon. They were broken by valleys and towns, but there was no question as to who was boss. The only things that didn't seem to be menaced by the trees were the mountains.
Fair enough, I thought, this is new.
Ljubljana looks just as nice when on the ground. Forests, hills, nice buildings, clean streets. Plus an almost unbelievable number of outrageously attractive women. The only eyesores are the ubiquitous posters for various parliamentary candidates that are spread throughout the city. I am reliably informed that the predicting the extent of the upcoming political reshuffle is very difficult, since a recent scandal has erupted over the Slovenian government buying Finnish weapons and one or other government receiving bribes for making the deal, bribes currently being held in Austrian bank accounts. It's all very confusing, apparently.
I am assured, however, that there are no upcoming wars to worry about. This may be for the best, as I am unsure as to how much faith should be invested in Finnish weaponry.
The place where I am staying is ludicrously roomy, easily the size of my flat back home, which is pretty cool considering it's only little old me living there. On the other hand, unless I can get the internet in my living room to work, I am liable to go mad with boredom. One can only read for so long on any given day without losing a grip on one's sanity, especially when so much of the work day is taken up with perusing academic papers and deciding what can be safely stolen.
That will do for now, I think. This is taking loner to type than normal since Slovenian keyboards swap around the "Z" and "Y" keys (do Czech computers do that too? I've forgotten), so my already limited skills of touch-typing have surrendered entirely.
More to come later, but I'm getting back to the maths...
I hate airports. Actually, I think I hate any place where the main objective is to get as many people through that location as quickly as is humanly possible. It seems like having that as your guiding principle leads you to stop viewing customers as people and start seeing them as items on a conveyor belt that must endlessly be kept running. Any attempt to speak, to ask for help or clarification, and you will be immediately classed as a defective part who must be dealt with severely, so as to force you back into the system, that you might piss off again as soon as possible. I heard for years that Londoners are objectionably rude, and I've had some experience of this, but looking back it occurs to me that all my negative experiences have been in train stations, tube stations, or bus stations. It may well be then that I simply suffer for having to travel to London, and thus invariably the first people I meet are of the "human beings are cattle to be herded and eventually shot" stripe. Certainly, it turns out that several of the airport staff in Newcastle are egregious dicks, too.
On a more positive note, I am delighted to find that the acrophobia I suffered from as a child has now vanished. Given the seemingly endless capacity possessed by my brain to generate new and crippling phobias apparently at random, finding out they can disappear without reason too is quite a nice thing to learn. The one thing I still can't do, though, is read on an aeroplane if I can see out of the window with my peripheral vision. Something about trying to scan lines of text whilst clouds pass beneath you causes a short-circuit in my brain.
Slovenia itself is beautiful. I spent some time observing Western Europe as I flew over it, and it pretty much just looks like home. The same networks of roads, the same patchwork of arable fields. It's not like I was expecting volcanoes and glaciers, or anything, but the lack of variation was still a little depressing.
This is just like home, I said to myself.
Then we reached the forests, huge forests that stretched to the horizon. They were broken by valleys and towns, but there was no question as to who was boss. The only things that didn't seem to be menaced by the trees were the mountains.
Fair enough, I thought, this is new.
Ljubljana looks just as nice when on the ground. Forests, hills, nice buildings, clean streets. Plus an almost unbelievable number of outrageously attractive women. The only eyesores are the ubiquitous posters for various parliamentary candidates that are spread throughout the city. I am reliably informed that the predicting the extent of the upcoming political reshuffle is very difficult, since a recent scandal has erupted over the Slovenian government buying Finnish weapons and one or other government receiving bribes for making the deal, bribes currently being held in Austrian bank accounts. It's all very confusing, apparently.
I am assured, however, that there are no upcoming wars to worry about. This may be for the best, as I am unsure as to how much faith should be invested in Finnish weaponry.
The place where I am staying is ludicrously roomy, easily the size of my flat back home, which is pretty cool considering it's only little old me living there. On the other hand, unless I can get the internet in my living room to work, I am liable to go mad with boredom. One can only read for so long on any given day without losing a grip on one's sanity, especially when so much of the work day is taken up with perusing academic papers and deciding what can be safely stolen.
That will do for now, I think. This is taking loner to type than normal since Slovenian keyboards swap around the "Z" and "Y" keys (do Czech computers do that too? I've forgotten), so my already limited skills of touch-typing have surrendered entirely.
More to come later, but I'm getting back to the maths...
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