five tweets (May 2020)

Kip Williams sort of

@kiptw

*****

A regular reminder that I wouldn't have to think about deleting apps I use all the time if Android would let me delete the built-ins I have never touched, or even just move some of these space hogs off the internal drive and onto my SD card.

Please?

*****

The beef bibimbap bowls at Trader Joe's that I like so much were gone for a while for retooling. Whenever I'm opening one, it occurs to me the change was undoubtedly the glue that holds the box shut. "To hell with this pansy-ass gorilla glue! I want the stuff barnacles use!"

*****

Bear Lobby: "You keep saying these people were killed by bears, and it's just a lie! This guy fell out a window to his death when a bear chased him. This guy had a fatal heart attack while being mauled by a bear. This woman drove off the road when a bear got in her jeep..."

*****

"Metaphor? Parable?" "Well," she hesitated. "A fictional construct: shepherd, sheep and all those allusions." "Simile?" "I just didn't think it was... literal." An angelic voice said "You two are next." Glancing back at the milling flock, they ascended the chute. #MicroSFFH

*****

A train of thought: Ripping Yarns was a hilarious show that dealt with a dissection and reassembly of classic boy's stories ("Boy's Own," wasn't it?). Why doesn't someone do a version of it for girl's stories? 

But, hell, there are plenty of talented "gals" out there who know a lot more than I do on this subject and could probably find the right aspect of it for a truly ripping deconstruction. Assuming they haven't already. I mean, what do I know? I don't even live in the UK!

But I do think I'd enjoy to see a half dozen or so prime individual tales subverting the standard tropes of fiction designed to pry the hard-won non-decimal pennies from the clutches of the young girls of Britain. Won't someone do this for me? Also, send me money. Thanks.

*****

(The last one is three threaded tweets, last seen in the twelve days of Christmas, which is how one steps around the 280-character limit. Watch this space for more creative reuse of my stale old material!)

.

Time and Tide

Grum waited patiently in his cave. He couldn't see, but he had other senses and other talents, and he was patient. Hungry he was, but he didn't need to eat every day. He could have lived where there was more food, but Grum was smart enough to know that too much food got you too much attention. Better to be patient and wait for food to come his way.

Grum had waited for three days already; he'd waited longer. Different foods came at different seasons. The summer season brought lightly dressed food with long hiking sticks and backpacks. Sometimes it brought food that hunted food. Grum smiled, remembering that time when he got one lugging a fresh deer. Two for the same work as one!

The winter season, on the other hand, brought food that was dressed very warmly, in many layers of cloth and leather and fur. Often, this food came sliding on a pair of smooth boards, or stumping on big flat feet of wood and woven leather. The food called these "skis" and "snowshoes," Grum knew, but he didn't worry about that much. He liked to sit and wait, sniff the air, and think about philosophy.

Oh, yes, philosophy. The minds Grum fed on gave him food for thought. He had an active mind, and he spent his idle time exploring grand ideas. Where did Grum come from? What was Grum's purpose? Where would Grum go after he stopped being Grum? Would he be food for someone else? Would he go to... he paused, thought back to the concept... heaven? Why did the seasons change from warm to cool to...

...Wait! Time for that later. Grum had work to do. Food was coming!

Grum got busy. His cave was off the path, and it took skill to get food to make the right choices to get within his grasp. He suggested the sight of something shining here to make it turn to the left. Next, an eye-blink impression of a small animal that way to move it forward. Closer... closer, where it got easier. Now he made it see a bush right there, bringing his food even closer. Now he could reach a thought into the smell center and make it think it smelled -- hm -- bread baking!

Yes! It worked again.

It was close enough now that Grum could simply make it walk into his home with a little befuddlement and an image of a place irresistible. As it often was, a scene from bygone days; a former home, members of a family now scattered or forever gone. Dinner walked right into Grum's kitchen. Musing on the transitory nature of life, Grum savored the contents of the mind for three or four long seconds -- enough material for more philosophical musings -- before mercifully silencing the thoughts. Grum was not cruel. Now he would feed.

Working methodically, Grum removed layers. Furry hat, earmuffs, mittens, boots, outer coat, inner sweater, another sweater, shirt, socks, thermal underwear -- must be colder than Grum thought, or else this one hated the cold. Grum knew cold from hot, but it wasn't a central concern. He kept working, removed hair, epidermis, fat, muscles, vessels, and tendons with the same care, putting the good parts in a neat pile and discards into two piles: one to be thrown in a pit for scavengers, and one for imperishable items, which Grum either needed to take care of soon, or find another cave with more room.

Preparation over, Grum sat down to feast. For a moment, time waited as he enjoyed anticipation: sweeter even than feasting. Grum pitied the lower animals, who did not anticipate. How dark their lives were. How meaningless! Grum wished he could help them somehow, but food was losing freshness now. Time to eat!

Grum began delicately, as always. He brought his meal back into the cave to where a natural cleft in the rock rose up and brought fresh air in. He sampled the meat, reflecting on the different flavors that chased one another and livened the blood. Salt, always lots of salt, but Grum prided himself on seeing past the obvious. What else? Minerals, sweet tastes, seasoning notes.

Ah! Little flavors that showed up at special times. The herb Rosemary. Evergreen scents lingering -- not from this mountain, but a sort of manufactured evergreen essence. Nutmeg, rum, dairy, all mingled -- Grum suddenly realized it was egg nog. Egg nog!

Realization struck him like a falling tree. He almost dropped the food. It was that time of year again! The special season! Grum knew, knew from many minds that this was a deeply important time of year. A philosophical time. If only he wasn't too late! He had a job to do.

Grum took in a big chewy mouthful and rummaged through the discard pile, found what he was looking for, and hung it on a finger of rock by the flue. He adjusted it, patting it to refine his mental image, and adjusted it again. Then he stepped back and pictured his work: a large, thick sock hung on the wall, waiting for a supernatural being, the embodiment of the season, to come and fill it with something wonderful. Something for Grum!

He just hoped he had been good enough.
.


Originally written in 2006, for the prompt "Tasting the Season."

My Inner Felines

Nine Cats
a quick meditation for when I'm in a hurry

I call upon the spirits of nine cats.

1) First, Poosy Gato, Gordo's cat, for joy, coolness, and wordplay.

2) Second, Mehitabel, for strength and resilience; self-belief in adversity despite the judgments of others.

3) Third, Tom Cat, foe of Jerry Mouse, for dexterity and fighting spirit, even when loss is foreordained, without complaint.

4) Fourth, Eek! the Cat, the kindest cat of all, for whom it never hurts to help, even when it darn well does.

5) Fifth, Sylvester, whose self-concern reminds me not to forget to take myself into consideration.

6) Sixth, Felix, for the will to keep on walking. Left foot, right foot: If not there yet, repeat.

7) Seventh, the Kliban cat, for the vision to see things that we can't.

8) Eighth, Snagglepuss, for discretion, and knowing when to exit, Stage Right.

9) Ninth, the Unknown Cat, heard at night or glimpsed in passing. A mystery, already gone.For qualities not enumerated.

To augment my own inner cat spirit, I summon these, like nine numbered spirits in an animated cartoon, to gather around me and commune, nourishing my soul and adding their strength to mine.

Good kitties.
.

Note: This may be where I first wrote my procedural motto, "Left Foot, Right Foot: If Not There Yet, Repeat." If you take nothing else away from this, I suggest remembering these words. They have been getting me through life for some time now, and work in a number of ways, metaphorical and literal.
.

Oh, You Fortuna Kid!

 

O Fortuna! Like the moon, a
Vast and slowly turning wheel.
Rising, trending, now descending,
Sans regard for what we feel.

Blame the Muses, make excuses,
Pin our guilt on other hands
Yet it finds us, and it grinds us
Mocks vain prayers and rash demands!

That's not an actual translation. It's more like my impression of the import of the beginning of the most famous bit of choral blustering, known to us in its many uses in action movies, action movie trailers, and TV commercials.

The verses come from a book called Codex Buranus, found and named for a Bavarian monastery in the opening years of the 19th century. The choral setting is from the late 1930s by composer Carl Orff, who told his publisher he could destroy all his earlier material, because his composing career started with his 'scenic cantata.' It's still his most famous piece, though his Schulwerk has also found its way into some hearts and TV ads. I've searched for more things by him that I can like as much, and though I haven't succeeded at that, I can't say I looked and listened in vain. It's just that he only had one piece in him that was this brilliant.

Maybe it's because of the words. When I wanted to put translations into my piano-vocal score of the cantata, I had to use the subtitles from a TV performance for some of them. Orff jealously guarded the texts, or at least their translations, with the result that many LPs and CDs were sold without them by groups that didn't mind paying for the right to record it, but balked at the additional price he and his lawyers wanted for including translations. I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL), so the legal intricacies of this escape me.

When we were last in London, I got to walk from our hotel to Boosey & Hawkes, music publishers, and run rampant through their showroom, bringing a pile of books with me as I went from one bin to another, now increasing, now diminished as I weighed my desires against my allotted funds. Here was a hardcover edition of the dizzying piano transcriptions of Gyorgy Cziffra, where many times a single measure took the entire width of the page to fit all the notes in. Too pricey for something I'd never even be able to slowly pick through, I decided. And there, just around a corner from Cziffra, was a handsome, substantial hardcover printed in multiple colors: a complete facsimile of the 11th and 12th century profane verses (some 13th century, too, I'm told) that make up the corpus of the Codex burana. Man, oh man! What a feast! I couldn't understand a word of it, even if I'd been able to pierce the veil of the antique hand it was in, but it was gorgeous. Incomprehensibly gorgeous. I picked it up and put it down repeatedly, "like a dog that was too full to eat any more, but didn't want to leave his bowl," as Raymond Chandler once said. Finally, I sighed loudly enough for Cathy to hear me back at the hotel, and put it down for good. It would have taken about half the money I had, if not more. I picked it up again and looked at it once more before I left.

Today, I happened to think of the book again, as I do now and then, and it occurred to me that everything's online somewhere. After finding some copies being offered for sale (yeah, like I have  more money now than I did then), I looked harder and found that my friends at the IMSLP--source of so many pieces of Public Domain music that I'd never have found otherwise--have the whole thing, and apart from the annual pittance I pay to help support IMSLP, it would only cost me a little temporary bandwidth and 66MB of storage.

 

Here's the most famous bit. Most people you will run into who know what "Carmina Burana" is are probably talking about the part that opens and closes the set--24 poems in all--whose thundering "O FORTUNA!" is part of a verse something like my loose paraphrase up there. We see Dame Fortune at its center, and an ambitious man crawling up the right. He becomes King at the top, then falls, and is broken beneath the wheel he once ascended to glory. That ought to sell a few running shoes!

Most of the book is text, though from time to time the exuberance or boredom of the scribe breaks through into a marginal illustration or richly ornamented capital. The book's pages have been broken up over the centuries, and rearranged, and lost, and sometimes found again (seven of the pages turned up somewhere else and were deemed part of the text).

What are the contents? These poems are drinking songs, songs of debauchery, declarations of love for pagan gods and goddesses, songs of feasting, the excitement of the discovery of Amor, a lament from a goose being cooked, and more. Knowing the content of the songs has added to my enjoyment greatly (as with Schumann's incredible setting of Heine's aching verses in Dichterliebe), and I'm glad I spent the time awkwardly inking the translations, however good or stilted they were, into my score. Without spending time in comparison, I'll note that there are multiple versions online now. This one seems fairly recent, and includes some poems that didn't make Orff's cut.

And (I have to break the paragraph here, or the previous link sticks to my foot like toilet paper to a shoe) here's another recent version, made apparently to be effective when sung. I considered myself lucky to have a handful of the lyrics included in a collection of medieval song verses that I found at a college bookstore sale in the early 80s. Just that much more I didn't have to transcribe from a paused VCR. There was one line I had to translate myself, because it wasn't in any of the versions. Yeah, that one was the talk of the Academy, all right.

Incidentally, one of my lasting regrets, apart from not spending sixty quid or whatever it was for the facsimiles, was that I didn't have a quarter to hand when I stood in the Salvation Army store in Loveland one day in the 70s looking at an LP that said it was Carmina Burana sung in English! I've mentioned this several times in classical newsgroups and such, and nobody else on earth has ever seen or heard of such a thing, except for me and whoever bought it before I got back to that store with cash in hand to return to the place in the bin where I'd carefully tried to hide my prize from other eyes. Okay, and whoever sold it to them. And the record company, and the singers, and yeah yeah, we get it.

Anyway, here's the haul: Codex buranus (Carmina Burana) pages at IMSLP. I'd say more, but everybody probably just left. And I was going to sing, too.
.

"Awright, ya goldbricks!"

Salute to the Silver Age. It's SGT ROCK!

My buddy Randy helped inspire that. Blame him, not me.
.

The New Normal

Haiku by the Front Porch, 6 May 2020

Pink buds cluster tight
Waiting to explode in white:
Slow-motion popcorn.
.

ps: 7 May 2020. Same song, second verse:

And May 10 (Happy Mother's Day):

Photoshop tips from Kip

Gestural size. That's what I call the fact that most of us have a particular size at which we can best do certain tasks, like draw a circle or a straight line. Therefore, size your workspace to suit what you have to do next. Enlarge or reduce, whatever. Maybe even rotate it if you have to.

Draw and erase. I can sail right along (in black and white linework, particularly) by choosing the brush tool and keeping my other hand on the X key, which lets me switch the foreground and background colors (usually Black and White), thereby using the brush as an eraser part of the time. Draw, erase, draw, erase, draw too much, erase it down, and so on. Sailin'.

You can get rid of the blasted circle that appears when you start doing anything with your tablet (assuming that you, like I, use a Wacom tablet for Photoshopping) and messes you up, by going to the Wacom control panel doodad, and finding and unchecking the tickybox that says "use Windows ink." Found that today. I may need it again some time.

Quick color adjustment with Control (or Command) L. Learn this one! Open that menu and move the triangles on the left and right so that they just touch where the black leaves off at each end. You can also mess with the middle. If your colors are off, open your separate color channels one by one (there's a pulldown menu, and you'll notice it also tells you the keyboard shortcuts for next time) and give them a go. When you finish, you can also try goosing the middle of the curve up or down and see what looks best to you. For this you need judgement. Good luck.

Right after that, you might want to fade back. Before you do another operation, bring up the Fade window (Control Shift F, I believe), and you can hold the shift down to go in 10% increments to rein in your enthusiasm in the previous step.

Back to Control (or Command... I'm not going to say this every time) L, if you've scanned an old page of music or comic art or just anything, you can get rid of the years by taking out that big hunk of black at the right-hand edge of the histogram or whatever that thing is. Try it all at once, or color by color. When you're all done, you might want to fade back just a tad, for comics, or not at all, for sheet music.

Tip for scanning sheet music: The straighter you get it on the scanner, the less work you'll have to do straightening it out later. I don't know if that matters to you, but I'm really dippy about that.

Tip for scanning two-sided originals: Put a black sheet behind it on the scanner. The scanner lid (well, mine, anyway) is white, and that really helps it to include the stuff on the other side of the page. I have no idea why it wants to do that, though, because to me that stuff is a bother and a distraction. I made my black sheet by copying both sides of a piece of paper with the copier's lid wide open. Then I laminated it. That was fifteen or twenty years ago, and the sheet is still giving me good service. I also have one or two book of just the right size with solid black bindings that are quite useful as well.

Photos that are a little blurry or smeary can be partly rehabilitated by proper adjustment of the curves. Besides the Control-L (remember, I'm not bothering to say Command every time now) adjustment, there's also the Control-M adjustment. You can actually steal contrast from one part of a photo and give it to another sometimes. Let's say you want a face to show up better. When you're in Control-M, slide your cursor around in that face and notice where the little dot is sliding up and down the line (which is 45 degrees by default). Then add a point or two and slide them in just a tiny bit to make that part of the line slightly steeper. Do this for each color plate (same pulldown menu as with Ctrl-L). Look at the before and after when you're done by using Undo, and be amazed. Before you do anything else after that, use the Fade thing to cut back on your brilliance just a tiny bit, if (like many of us) you fear you have gone Too Far.

5/7/2020: I just drew the ventriloquist cartoon and colored it in greys. The second thing I did was the dummy's hat with the gradated grey band. I did that by making a 50% grey (zeroed out the C, Y, and M values and just put 50 in the K) and using the Burn tool to darken one side, and the Dodge tool to lighten the other. After I did that, whenever I needed a grey tone, I didn't have to make it fresh: I just reached for the Option key (still using my Mac keyboard--it's something else on the laptop's keyboard, which is far enough away that I don't reach for it) to get the eyedropper tool and selected what I wanted.

To color the areas, I made a new layer to color in. Then I selected the places I wanted to fill with a color, using the Magic Wand (one of the W tools), and expanded it by a pixel (Select > Modify > Expand), and chose the bucket tool (G), moved to the new layer, and filled the marquees there.

You probably know, but holding Shift as you press the letter for your tool, like W for the wand, or O for the Dodge/Burn, lets you cycle through the tools that the letter brings up. Dodge, for instance, cycles through Dodge, some sort of sponge, and Burn. I should probably learn how to use that sponge, and will smite myself on the head when I realize what I've been missing. Then I'll run over here to post it as a hot tip.

More if I think of it. It's not always easy to remember three decades of tippage all at once.