The Fredösphere

Star Trek is a religion.  I could have told you that.  I did tell you that.

Diva Dianne is a friend who is just like me; she sings, blogs, and occasionally is heard hangin' out at the Starship Sofa podcast.  Her latest post rants on a topic dear to my heart:

I find it shocking how rarely it is to find a classical singer you can actually understand.  Concern these days is often placed solely on a "beautiful" sound at the expense of nearly everything else.  If singers would pay more attention to vowel quality and intensity many of the inconsistencies and "problems" would melt away.  But many are so busy covering up technical deficiencies they have no idea how to actually remedy them.

Finally, via SF Signal, enjoy this creepy trailer for the new BBC offering, Torchwood:  Children of Earth, although those of us with kids of our own will find no new information here.  If I am allowed one critique of this (truly hair-raising) video, its that it gives too much away.  I think its punch would be most forceful if it would end with the little dears barking their first communal words:  We. We Are. WE ARE COMING!  Yow.



And now, pardon me while I rush home and lock my kids in the basement.

Labels: CuteKid, TeeVee, VideoClip, vocal

My friend Jeremy experienced high levels of excitement in his life yesterday involving the recovery of a lost cellphone.  He was quite eager to share his story with readers of the Fredösphere, and I am only too happy to oblige him.  Enjoy.

So my wife "lost" her cell phone, which happens from time to time. This time we hadn't found it in over 2 weeks and I was starting to get annoyed/worried.

On a whim, I called today and it RANG. Now a cell phone doesn't ring unless it's connected to the network. It goes straight to voice mail otherwise. After ringing for a while, it went to voice mail....

At this point, my first thought is that a Good Samaritan picked it up, dusted it off, plugged it in, and was hoping someone would call to claim it. So I called back. A male voice answers and the conversation goes something like this:

"Hey! You have my wife's phone!" I say.
"Huh?" he says
"You have my wife's phone! Awesome! Who are you? Where are you?"
"Who is this?" he asks
"This is Jeremy"
"Who's your wife?"
"She's Jackie and you have her phone"
"Jackie?"...

Er... Huh? What just happened? Immediately I call back, assuming we've been cut off. The call goes to voice mail after one ring.

OKAY, I think... The phone was stolen. But it wasn't stolen by someone smart.... It was stolen by someone who would actually PICK IT UP.

Now I'm on a mission. I'm curious who this guy is, where he is, how he wound up with the phone, etc. Guess what? AT&T has a new feature: FamilyMaps! I add Jackie's phone to the plan (free for 30 days thank you!) and quickly locate the culprit to within 1/2 a mile. HE STILL HAS THE PHONE ON.

Well, now that I have some idea that the phone is still within 15 minutes of home, I figure I might as well try to call the guy back. The second conversation is even more odd:

"You have my wife's phone, I'd like it back" I say
"Who are you?"
"Jeremy"
"Who is your wife?"
"Jackie"
"You want to know how I wound up with this phone?"
"Listen, I really don't care too much how you wound up with the phone, I'd just like it back, no questions asked"
"You don't care?"
"Hey, I'll even throw in a $10 finder's fee"
"$10? I have to come up with $40?"...

Once again... Huh??? Why did he hang up? What $40? I personally figured that paying him $10 to get the phone back was fine since the phone insurance deductible was $50 so anything less than that and I'm saving money.

So some time passes... I'm not entirely sure what to do. He isn't calling back, he keeps hanging up... How to I converse with this guy?

LIGHT BULB: Text message.

So I sent the following:
"You have 2 options:
1) I call the police
2) You give me back the phone, recover some of your losses, and you're free and clear."

He responded with (and I quote):
"Yea can cum get da phone"

Okay! Now we're getting somewhere! I ask for his address or a place to meet. He responds with:
"Meet me n west willow on calder ma dads is a state police just 2let ya knw n he is wit me rite knw n a under cover car so cum on"

In English:
"Meet me at the West Willow Church near Calder St. My father is a State Police Officer just to let you know, and he is with me now in an under cover car. Make haste."

Now I have a place to go! Woo hoo! So, I went. I personally figured that if he had to make up something about a State Police officer father, he was probably more scared than I was.

So I headed over with $10 in my pocket. It turns out that West Willow Church isn't ON Calder, nor is there a street named West Willow, but I called our friend and he directed me once I got to the neighborhood. Remember, I knew where he was because of FamilyMaps :-)

I pulled over to the side of the road near where he was standing, popped out of the car, and said:
"Hi, thanks for meeting me"
"This is your phone?"
"Yes, my wife's"
"You sure?"
"Yes, quite sure"
"You got my money?"
"I do. Here you are" at which point I pull out the $10 and hand it his way. It's about here that I notice the switchblade knife he has in his other hand. Blade out. "$10? You said $20" he says
"No, I said $10" and I leave the money extended.
"You sure this is your phone?"
"Yep. What's the knife for?"
"Just so you don't try anything funny"
"Ah"
"Take off your shirt!!"
"What?"
"Take off your shirt!"
I realize he wants to check me for a WIRE. Now I don't know what TV shows he's watching, but wearing a wire to catch a guy who has a CELL PHONE? Seems a bit much. I lift up my shirt, but don't remove it.
"Nothing there" I say
"This really your phone?"
"Sure is"
"Ah hell, I don't care" and he takes the $10 and hands me the phone.

It's pretty obvious he's scared out of his mind... So I figured I might as well see if there's anything more interesting to the story of how he came about having the phone. I presume most of it is made up, but the story he told is that "some guy" was going to prison and asked him to hold on to his phone while he was there. Our pal, being the nice guy he is, said "sure thing" and proceeded to make about 500 minutes of phone calls on it :-) He also answered quite a few calls for "Jackie" and was kind enough to inform them that she no longer had the phone.

He asked me if the guy who went to prison was my son. Since Cameron is 9 years old and at school, I was pretty confident with my answer of "no".

We parted ways. I never got his name, I never even asked.

So there you have it. My cell phone adventure.

The phone itself was in great shape. It had been completely wiped of anything related to Jackie and had a new address book for people like "Tay" and "Dads". I promptly reset the phone and now Jackie is going to have to answer calls for our friend for the next several weeks.

Oh, and I never did see his dad, though maybe he was VERY undercover.

Sorry for the length. I think I remembered all the good stuff :)

Jeremy

Labels: fun, local

I found out about Futurity, a musical by The Lisps, via a review at tor.com.  (Tor.com is a corporate sibling, but not exactly the online presence for, Tor Books, the SF publisher.)  The Lisps are some kind of indy rock group and Futurity is an SF musical about an aspiring SF writer whose day job is fighting for the Union side in the American Civil War.  Yes, your guess that the steampunk aesthetic is strong in this one would be resoundingly correct, and you can bet your bottom difference engine that Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer, is a major character.

The show has a limited run so I won't have the problem of being even tempted to beg the wifeösphere and offspringöspheres to see a showing when we do Manhattan next month.  But you natives still have time to catch it this Friday or Sunday.

Labels: sci-fi, Steampunk, Thespianism

A week ago I asked what makes a strong bass line.  My friends Alan and Ian answered in the comments with definitions of good bass lines.  Ah, now that I have answers, I understand better what question I was asking.  I was interested in the quality of strength, which can be a component of goodness but is not exactly equal to it.

In other words, imagine a bass line optimized for this quality I've not yet defined called strength.  It may quite possibly (and would probably, I think) lack some of the virtues mentioned by Alan and Ian.  Specifically, it would likely not work as an interesting melody when sounded independently.

Again, I have my ideas, but I'd love to hear from others.  Also worthy of discussion is a comment made by a long-time chorister during a rehearsal of Jesu meine Freude, a comment which started this slowly gestating line of thought, to the effect that Bach was a master of strong bass lines.  Is that true?  Is that good?

Labels: MusicTheory

I'm researching hotels for my family's holiday to New York next month.  Google Street View is, once again, proving to be a godsend for choosing travel accommodations.  Now you can decide for yourself if a neighborhood described by a reviewer as "a little creepy" is safe enough for your precious seven year old Maharincess.

Street View has a disadvantage common to all technologies delivering massive new amounts of information:  it vacuums time like a red matter singularity on a Romulan starship.  I've spent hours and hours evaluating hotels on Manhattan and in Long Island City.  Looks like we're going to choose this new tower right off the subway in LIC, supposedly just a five minute ride from Grand Central Station.  Yee. And also, ha.

Labels: Holiday

We had a blast singing that Menotti choral ballet I told you about and the performance went well.  Oh, yes, there was one botched bass entrance, but the audience clearly enjoyed themselves and laughed at all the jokes, proof that they were, one, paying attention, and two, understanding our diction.

I admire this work hugely.  The story telling and dancing ought to make it accessible to almost anyone (yet tragically it is rarely performed).  I do have a few quibbles with it; I think a few places are gratuitously difficult to sing because of changing meters; I find the story a bit too melodramatic, with its misunderstood artist on his deathbed surrounded by bourgeois blockheads.  and musically, I think it suffers in places from weak baselines.

But what is a strong bass line, really?  What characteristics make a bass line stronger or weaker?  I have ideas, but I want to hear what others think.  Please, please, leave a comment.

Labels: Choral, MusicTheory, Performance

The last time (which was years ago, sadly) I spoke to my friend Greg the amateur singer and professor at the University of Michigan's Engineering School, he told me he was one of a group of researchers pursuing an elusive dream:  a search engine for audio.  Today I noticed SFF Audio is hyping HuffDuffer.com, a system of applying tags to sound files.  Is this the first baby step toward Audio Google?  And may I suggest the next step?—try tagging locations within audio files, which would be analogous to tagging faces within photos rather than the whole photo itself.

Labels: Technology

Seed Magazine talks about the latest research on creativity.  Brain scans of improvising musicians show two interesting things going on:  ideas flow because the improvisers are "inhibiting their inhibitions," and because the part of the brain that composes sentences can also compose musical phrases.  Lenny Bernstein's less than totally convincing Harvard lectures sought to discover a musical syntax and semantics analogous to speech; it would seem he was aiming at the right target even if he couldn't quite hit the bull's eye.

Oh, and one more question:  what's up with that anecdote that begins the article, the one about the Hammond organ part in "Like a Rolling Stone"?  I don't think that illustrates the creative process being described.  It sounds more like the million typing monkeys solution at work.

Labels: Creativity