Month: May 2023

well lookitthat

From VanUkes:

 

  • Mike’s fantastic instrumental version of Toto’s “Africa”, accompanied by Allan on percussion;
  • Lynn and John, past VanUkers, now visiting from the Ukulele Club of Winnipeg, who borrowed a second uke in order to play “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues and then lead us in “Willie and the Hand Jive” by Bo Diddley. They also invited anyone visiting Winnipeg to drop by the club for a visit – you can check out their Facebook page here.
  • Jeff’s rendition of Joel Plaskett’s “Campfire Song”;
  • Tara’s first-time-in-person VanUkes performance, “leading lite” and teaching us Harry Belafonte’s 2-chord classic “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”;
  • Allegra’s VanUkes debut with her snarky blues-and-kazoo song “And Then He Done Her Wrong”;
  • and Boaz’s reprise of the instrumental from the Barenaked Ladies’ “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings”, which he also led earlier in the evening.

a thot

I think one of the single biggest differences between the way cis boys and girls are socialized is that boys are not forced to become competent in activities they do not enjoy and girls are. The removal of agency from girls as they are trained into domestic servitude is quite consistent.

Unusual

So I did my Lumosity and after weeks of very shitty results I got this today: – the trophy cups represent best score ever…. Familiar Faces is a wickedly difficult game and I’ve been stuck on a level for about 8 months now so that was a real relief! Of course it’s the math game I huffed. Sigh.  So there you have it, my brain is working better.

I’m wearing on of John’s tshirts because I miss him so much these days.

Paul has visited another facility and likes it better. We’ll learn soon which is going to get his business. Either way it’s close to where I am currently living.

The second biggest hunting spider I’ve ever seen was in the upstairs bathroom sink this morning. I didn’t turn the light on so I didn’t notice him (claspers) until I went to wash my hands and there’s a SHELOB shape so I had to press pause while I got him safely out on the deck.

Kudo on a story last night. Mebbe 65 words yesterday on TB and a whole bunch of musical practice. Still haven’t put my laundry away but I’m not too worried. I’m too busy being inspired from Tuesday night.

Katie and I and the kids are supposed to go to Victoria this weekend but I don’t have the stomach for four sailing waits and there are no reservations available, coming or going… so I advised against. We’ll know later today.

hey mOm banners

The new summer banners going up on lightpoles in Victoria regarding gardens were done by someone I follow on facebook, Lou-ann Neel. So when you see them all cheerful like with hummingbirds and bumblebees in bright colours in coastal art style you can know that they were designed by an Indigenous artist and scholar.

nice low key day

Suzanne will be coming later.

SPOT PRAWNS IN STEVESTON I REPEAT SPOT PRAWNS IN STEVESTON

Jeff bought us chicken and ribs and salad for dinner and it was NOM.

I have to put my laundry away or my weeks of having a clean floor will be for nothing.

Practiced Uke already this morning. I may even write a song in D. Now that I know what it is. LOLOLOL.

Completely edited section 2 of TB EXCEPT FOR WHERE I BACKED myself into a story corner. I will fix, I have a handle on how. Removed so many adverbs it was like an infestation I tellink you.

Kaossilator settings. 90bpm, High C, G02, 4ths, P91. Start in lower left corner and push your finger around for some bass and drum cool tuneage.

-Later

90 bpm P90 4ths G08 High C – I’m going to call this one the Robots’ Rap Battle and I am having LA FONNE with it

Oppressive sky

brown to the horizon – supposed to lift tomorrow.

We tried to go for a brief walk and it was like holding your breath and trying to swim. For me, chest and head pain, which lightened but did not vanish when I got home.

Practiced and worked the Kaossilator for a while. Setting 75 continues to provide more mindless entertainment than you can imagine. Practiced Smokey, Otto, and Rowena. I have finally decided I’m going to call my most recent gifted uke Mahu (goldingit the diacritics don’t appear properly) (the word’s literally ‘in the middle’ which is the Hawaiian term for gay and gender non-conforming people). Appropriately I will call the first ukulele Kameamua which means ‘the first one’.

Still laughing to myself about singing Que Sera sera last night. I don’t know why I think it’s funny but –don’t I deserve to laugh.

a Vancouver moment

Mike got us dinner (Jeff got a chicken donair, I got a lamb donair – Halifax style, never had the sweet sauce before.) Then just before we went to the uke jam he got me a gelato and we ate them watching the street scene at Robson and Hamilton of a warm evening; it included a complete  buggering of traffic by what proved to be a false fire alarm, so I got to watch how fire trucks back up when they’re blocking traffic. Three fire trucks were called, plus a supervisor. <—-a Vancouver moment

Mike was NOT the only person of colour at the ukulele jam last night. <—a Vancouver moment

And he did something he’s never done before.

An open mike. I know, right? He’s been the soundtrack for fifty campfires and other people’s vacations and music nights for decades now, at least for me, but he’d never gotten up and played in a public venue.

He played a uke version of Toto’s ‘Africa’. (Jeff’s heard it.)

I played too, “And then he done her wrong.” So this involves me BLOWING three verses. THROUGH A KAZOO while playing uke as ominously as I can.  At the end of each verse I whip the kazoo out of my mouth and sing, “And then he done her wrong.” The last verse I do double time, so that the musicologists in the audience can realize that the last verse is to be played on the way back from la cimetière, N’Awleens style.  You can check with Mike if you think I’m fibbing, but I got half of a standing ovation at the end of it. I watched people springing out of their seats with my mouth hanging open and bowed back to them.

I wore Tom’s hat, that was mine, and I gave it to him, and Peggy gave it back after he died; that probably did it. Not my protean fucking talent nawssir.

I had a guy tell me that I was an ‘inspired’ kazoo player. This just means that Jeff, who sadly did not know about my kazoo leanings until after he moved in with me, has been gazing dubiously at his bathroom wall (the music room / spare room is on the other side) for more than a decade as I attempt to blow my brains out on the kazoo in ever wilder attempts to control what the damned thing does (I’m especially fond of imitating electric guitar lines.) As far as I can tell I stayed on key. Please spare a thought to Jeff, who has suffered.

All lyrics and chords for the jams were on the screen and THEY HAD A BAND percussion and bass!! to accompany them. A broad range of music from the last century, including Beatles (the song suite from Sgt Pepper) to Dua Lipa (‘Levitating’) was covered. Most professional. I got overwhelmed about 45 minutes in and I could either sing or play, not both, and they were using chords that no Christian would intend, so that’s what I did, put the uke down, and I didn’t try anything on any song I wasn’t familiar with. Even songs with three easy chords were tricksy because of the strumming patterns. It was a brain challenge for me for SURE.

So that all happened. I am so proud of Mike getting up there and blowing everybody away! His anxiety is such that he can conjure up being booed off stage (there was no stage, it was a function room in an absolutely right downtown high school, across from the Fringe NY headquarters LOL the VPL) and I noticed that he shook almost all the way through but he was superlative. (Told him afterwards that he stood with bent knees as if he was expecting to get assaulted, which OF COURSE NO ONE DID) https://vanukes.ca/ is the site name, but be warned they are broke and it might stop happening. <— this too goddamnit is a Vancouver moment

wordle in 2 this morning

Bit of writing yesterday.

 

 

aircon is back

What a difference it made yesterday. I can’t imagine how it must have been for a frail elderly person with no AC – it wasn’t even a heat dome situation, just an ‘unusually warm spell’. Staying warm til Friday, and much particulates so my eyes are gritty and I feel ‘oppressed’.

I have a few errands to run today including calling Paul and seeing if he wants to go for a walk. We did manage a walk yesterday, Jeff and I, but that was the extent of our external travails.

I haven’t been reporting on it, but I’m still doing wordle and lumosity every morning. I just made tea, the iced tea pitcher is full in the fridge (it’s that time of year again!) Buster’s been let out and the cat door is open. I’ve been practicing on my instruments pretty much every day. As soon as the dishwasher’s done I’ll run some laundry. Couple of hundred words on TB.

Stay busy and stay cool!

A quick phone call

Keith called to advise that after consulting with his siblings, and the geriatric social worker, Paul has decided to move into the residence we visited last week.

I cannot express the extent of my gratitude and relief to have been part of the process. I’m so happy for Keith right now I don’t have words. More when a lease is signed or if for whatever reason it falls through, but at the moment there’s no reason to believe it will. Love to the siblings!

very hot in the house

The aircon didn’t get turned on yesterday and it is still very hot upstairs. I’m about to throw the door open and get some air in here – it’s 17ºC outside.

Laid back day, nothing of particular interest to report.

The grind around Bakhmut continues. The Russians are demoralized, panicky, poorly-led and -provisioned and the Ukrainians have more and better armaments almost every day. And men are still dying in droves, mostly on the Russian side.

Apparently every day that’s nice men go down to Wreck Beach and take photos of the beachgoers. I’m not saying men are scum, but I wish the old timers’ ways of dealing with rubberneckers still obtained.

a minor change GRADATIM

So… I repointed this one; I changed the instrument from a piano to a harp and asked Finale to use the Human Expression – Funk setting for playback.

Rev 1.4 of Words Fail. The tune is repeated twice. Think of it as being a theme song for a tv show (they are usually one minute long or less) …. obviously with the full orchestral work up!

Happy mother’s day to those who celebrate. The homily for today is in the PDF of all my homilies jammed together in a book.

 

 

Shifting emphasis

I’m thinking keep the blog but make it just the release point for a podcast (with a complete and accurate transcript so visually impaired and deaf people can consume it) on a regular schedule. I have some ideas. LOL. I am, after all, an idea factory. I’m making a list of episode subjects and am considering various formats.

I don’t know why, but I’m thinking of a film made in Africa (I was 18, forgive me if I didn’t keep my class notes about which country it was filmed in and I can’t find anything in Wikipedia.) In it, the present day in a bustling city is depicted in colour; but his fantasies about becoming rich and immigrating are in black and white. I remember at the time being much struck by the emotional resonance of this; that your fantasies are so shopworn as to no longer be vibrant, and as a visual metaphor for the protagonist’s internal life I’ve rarely seen the equal.

We finished “One Day as a Lion”. mOm, picture Totally Boned if it was a het couple and set in the hottest ass end of Oklahoma (and people get shot…). I personally loved it (there were so many little beaut touches), Jeff was so so and said the script needed a punch up and the ending was too abrupt (both valid comments.) It is TOTALLY an ‘instant family Harlequin Romance with dead bodies.”

I forgive Scott Caan (son of James) his ‘career’ as a rapper (I believe I have made CLEAR my opinion of white rappers who did not come up in the business credibly integrated with Black ones) if he can produce little bloodstained film confections like this.

I have to do my Lumosity and get dressed, Jeff wants to do a schlep this morning. We don’t normally go on the weekend. Just checked to make sure they’re open at 7, since we hardly ever go on Sunday (the organic homo is usually all gone.)

As predicted air quality (the Alberta fires) is moderately bad (60 and variable) and today’s going to be the hottest day of this heat wave so don’t do a goddamned thing outside today. Just sayin.

Efforts to teach Buster to count to three are going badly. All he does is start salivating when I count to three, since that means I’m about to drop some treats on his little tuffet. Considering that other people’s pets do things like speculate as to whether a new human baby brother will cry when being stuck in the car seat I feel sad until he commands me to pet him, at which point I calm down.

 

Nothing but electronic horn stabs

Don’t waste your ears on this, I’m just posting it so I can find it later. It is entitled, Brought Before My Oppressors, and it’s BAD VIBES and TOO MUCH VOLUME BLASTS CAN’T YOU EQUALIZE THIS JFC and the bitter grinding sameness of fascism. So, like, I frikkin’ warndja. And of course (pfffft, blowing through lips) PROCESSING? I dan do processing, man. It’s an outrage, but there you have it.

I really don’t want to post the Kaossilator settings for this one since it’s just evil in a bag like Satan’s cat horking up a woolly one and one should have a conscience, but I know for a fucking fact that if I don’t record it, it will be as gone as the (deep breath and avoidance of anecdon’t let’s just say the day before yesterday is a gift that keeps on holy shit what now?ing at me).

BPM 20 – ze lowest setting, which is one of the reasons the sound is so vertiginously choppy.

L02

G08 (Gate arpeggiator set for the first half of the first beat in every four beat bar.)

Minor Third scale

Low C

HONESTLY I WARNED YOU two minutes of audio torture but of course if you use it to drive cockroaches from your home, and use snippets of it in funny animal videos you’re editing, that’s on you.