I need to come up with stable names for the various types of post I do, so I can just called them “X Number Whatever” and skip having to think up a title each damned time.

And no, I cannot leave the posts without titles. WordPress allows that, but my muse does not.

My creativity can be very demanding sometimes.

Anyhow, here’s the usual video thing. Four videos, mine last, do wop do waaah.

First we have a video I saw once, was really impressed by it, then tried to explain it to Felicity, who teaches music theory for a living, and completed failed to get it across to her, and then found that I lacked the Google-fu to figure out how to find the damned thing online.

Seriously, what would the Google search for this be? Bobby McFerrin plays the crowd?>

Anyhow, here is Professor McFerrin rocking the room.

Are you not entertained? With genius level simplicity, he demonstrates the universality of music as a language of the human mind.

This semi-randomly assembled group of people was transformed into a living keyboard for McFerrin to hop around on. That by itself is a pretty neat trick, especially because he did it without explaining anything. He did it all with his voice and body language,.

But what I find really cool is that the audience followed a pentatonic scale perfectly without, I am assuming, the majority of them even knowing what that was.

I think what it truly demonstrates is that we all have a sense of interval. We might not know a thing about music, but we know how to make each note the same number of half-tones off from the previous one.

Next we have a rather neat little bit of nerdcore music, this one the sort of thing that would happen if Weird Al (hallowed be his name and works) was a hardcore particle physics and/or astrophysics (they are increasingly the same thing) devotee.

See, I learned my lesson with that thing about “complete” quantum data transfer in last week’s science post. If I don’t understand a story well enough to say anything about it, I will just put it out there to my readers, hoping those higher on the nerd food chain will explain it to me.

And I do not get 90 percent of what he is on about in that song. Any knowledge of string theory I have is so old that I still think superstrings are a thing. (But they aren’t any more…. right?).

So my brain doesn’t even understand branes, and I assume we are so past branes now it’s hilarious. I might as well be asking how fast modems are these days.

Still, I rather like the production values of the song and the video (making those animations where all the words fit together must be hard!), and I love Sock Puppet Einstein and his unique singing voice, so I figured I would share the video with you all.

But not on Friday. Fridays are for science I understand.

Next up, we have a rather well done skit about what it’s like to live in Vancouver.

Excellent stuff. Tightly paced, well edited, high density, and tons of good material.

I am kind of jealous, honestly. It’s exactly the kind of slick local comedy I want to do some day. I would love to have a show that was the Almost Live of the GVRD.

And yes, that includes the completely shameless whoring to the audience via local place names…. just like those idiots in SPUZZUM, am I right?

As to the accuracy of the observations of the skit, I dunno. I am so far from being plugged in to the local scene at all that I am almost plugged into a completely different scene.

But it all rings true to me. When the N magnet went on the lime-green sports car, I totally LOLed. And I love the line “And that’s hardly a joke!”.

Oh, and the bit about the bike lines is priceless because just the other day I was telling Joe about my experience with the ongoing war without honor or humanity between the bikers, the drivers, and the pedestrians in the editorial and letters columns of the free newspapers in Portland Oregon when I lived there.

Seriously. You want to see people from a very laid back and hippie-ish town lose their shit and go feral? Bring up the subject of bike lanes.

Bikers : “We are angry at you drivers because you keep almost killing us on the highway!”
Drivers : “Well we are mad at YOU because we keep almost killing you on the highway!”
Pedestrians : “They should close Downtown to all vehicles and make the whole thing a pedestrian mall!”
Bikers and Drivers : “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

And so forth and so on.

Aaaand lastly, we have my lil ol vid right here.

I am not very happy with it, but the basic idea has merit and I may try it again with political news instead of wacky little things next time.

I really rambled on in the middle “anger” act, and I was trying to be all bullet-point pithy comedy, a few high density rounds into a target then move on, and I failed at that.

Next time, I will try to focus better.

Also have another piece of music in the works, of course. This time, I decided to forego the use of loops and only use single instruments to make my tunes.

I mean, it’s still sample-based, but I am using single instruments instead of all the premade loops I have, and it feels good. Loops are great for making music quickly, but in order to get that speed you sacrifice a lot of control and nuance, and I am tired of having the loops dictate the music.

So this time, it is straight composing, no shortcuts. So far, I have a rather cheerful beat going with a funky bassline and a drum beat to match.

It’s all a little twee right now, but that’s just a matter of finding the right instruments.

Wish me luck.