Daily Archives: April 18, 2007

Rockin’ Out With Accordions And Ouds

Quick notes on the Loreena McKennitt concert last night:

A huge thank you to ADZO and his lovely wife for gifting us with tickets to this concert as a gift for HRH’s birthday and Jen’s birthday, too. We had a wonderful time with them.

The best line I uttered during the concert: “LUTE SOLO!” And I meant it with great enthusiasm, too.

Ironic that the live version of Bonny Swans rocks hard (nothing like two electric guitar solos!) while the version Random Colour is doing is the quietest folksy-est song of our set. (ADZO — I remembered on the way home that I did try listening to the live recording on the Live From Paris & Toronto recording, and it was useless because it was in a different key. No wonder I’d blocked that particular irritation from my mind.)

I had the good fortune to not be disturbed any any of the audience members around me. That’s rare. Usually there’s at least one person who persists in ruing the experience for me, either by singing off-key or talking through it all or jiggling the seat. Everyone was well-behaved and made the experience that much more pleasant.

It was daring to open with what was essentially a harp solo of She Moved Through The Fair, before launching into the first song from her new album.

FOUR percussionists. I counted. They were all excellent.

Yes, there was a cello, there is always a cello, and she was set up at the front on stage left so I could see everything. But there were also electric guitars and bass and an oud and accordion aside from the piano and harp. It was a crowded stage, in a good way.

An excellent, excellent evening.

Scratch Pad April 17

9:36 AM:

Okay — now I’m finding deliberate misspellings that are defined as “a popular misspelling of [correct spelling].” Hold me back…

11:20:

I’ve been driving through a thousand words this morning at an impressive speed, and have suddenly crashed into level 15. Hereonin things will crawl, mainly because there are three times as many words in a level thanks to the supplementary dictionary I vetted two weeks ago. Now I have to pay attention to all my markings and code them appropriately, as well as addressing the nine hundred-odd words that were in this level of the main file which I haven’t yet seen.

12:38:

It just took me five minutes to figure out where the scroll lock key was on this French keyboard. How I originally hit it, I do not know. Maybe I used a keyboard shortcut combo unknowingly. But my Excel sheet mysteriously wouldn’t move the way I needed it to move for a half hour until “scroll lock?” occured to me.

13:24:

“Caliph: a Muslim ruler” is right after “callipers”. Because I see them at the same time, for a moment I think, “Why do Muslims have their own measuring sticks?”

14:07:

GERMANIUM! Everyone grab your zone purifiers!

14:34:

Cross-eyed. Officially cross-eyed. DL 15 is wearing me down, because I’m doing three different things simultaneously.

14:40:

Overheard: “No! Fun first, learning second! We want them to learn words by accident, because they’re having fun!”

14:42:

This one’s for Liam — “Noddle: the head of a person, or their ability to think.”

14:48:

Uh-oh. Crashing.

16:46:

Almost three thousand words today. Gah. No wonder the brain is leaking out my ears.

New word(s): adumbrate, massif, meretricious, stochastic. (The higher the level of dictionary, the rarer the word, you see. So theoretically I should be learning more the higher I go.)