Saturday 28 February 2015
Songs: Moi Je Joue
Well, it's news to me that Brigitte Bardot could sing, but here it is. A sexy, playful song for your Sunday:
Show Reviews: Rigoletto
As far as I'm concerned, the best way to see opera is outdoors, in the Roman arena in Verona. As well as being guarantied a great show, it's also a really lovely atmosphere. Imagine a warm Italian summer night, a magnificent stage, and you sitting on the ancient fossil-strewn stone steps, still warm from the sun. People are drinking beer, eating sandwiches and relaxing. My friend said he wasn't sure if he was at an opera or a football match. The stage might be far away, but everthing is Big, so there's plenty to look at, a huge cast, magnificent costumes.... We saw Rigoletto, which was one I hadn't seen before. It was very enjoybale, and of course has the very famous La Donna e Mobile, which everyone will recognise when they hear it.
Stage of Rigoletto
This one is actually Aida, but I think it shows what I'm trying to get across
Saturday 21 February 2015
Songs: Here's to Us
I love this! It's fiesty and angsty and well, sometimes I just feel the need to say here's to us too.
TV Reviews: Legend of Korra, Season 1
Being a massive fan of the original Avatar series I was very curious as to what the makers would do with this. You might say Korra had a lot to live up to. Well, it didn't disappoint. It's set after Aang's death and Korra is the new avatar. From the very first episode Korra establishes itself as its own show. It's clearly still part of the Last Airbender world, but it's not just a continuation of a old story. It's a very different show and Korra is a very different avatar to Aang. While Aang is happy-go-lucky and gentle and deeply spiritual, Korra is hot-tempered, fiesty and prone to action. While the majority of The Last Airbender was about Aang trying to master all four elements, and hiding the fact that he's the avatar, Legend of Korra opens with Korra having already mastered three as a child and telling everyone she's the avatar. Korra's world is more modern than Aang's, with pro-bending being a thing and the industrial revolution being well established, and more political. Elected officials matter more, and being the avatar seems to count for less. Korra is manipulated and used. The whole structure of the series is different too. Instead of Korra being on a journey and meeting a host of quirky characters, almost the whole series is set in Republic City where Korra is staying. There's also a tension between benders and ordinary people that just wasn't present in the last series.
Having said that it's a very different show, there are plenty of nods to the Last Airbender, such as meeting the descendents of Aang, Katara and Toph, and flashbacks to Aang's youth. And there are some elements that have stayed the same, such as the avatar having a helpful big furry friend. In this case her name is Naga and she's a polar bear-dog. I NEED a polar bear-dog! Big and fierce like a polar bear, but loyal like a dog. And rideable too! A goofy male comic relief character also appears in the form of Bolin, a sweet, poverty-stricken pro bender who is infatuated with Korra. Anyone who cares about the world will also be happy to see the air-benders are doing ok. After being reduced to one (Aang) in the Last Airbender, they're now starting to recover. Aang and Katara's son Tenzin has four children who are all air benders. So although air benders are still very rare, they're not gone yet!
As with the Last Airbender, it's the characters that make the show so appealing. Korra's calm, dignified air bending teacher, Tenzin, his hilarious children, sweet, funny Bolin, awesome Naga and evil Amon are all unforgettable. And as for this storyline, it's tense and full of intrigue and betrayal, with a healthy dose of teenage angst thrown in as well. Benders are being captured by rebels and having their bending taken away. In the end Korra herself has her bending taken. For a few tense minutes you wonder if the series is going to go for a very bold decision. Having an avatar who can't bend. But she gets it back quickly. Perhaps a little too quickly in fact. It feels like a bit of a deus ex machina. And the final episode where Amon is finally defeated is....emotional. So emotional. I won't ruin it for you. Watch it!
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Having said that it's a very different show, there are plenty of nods to the Last Airbender, such as meeting the descendents of Aang, Katara and Toph, and flashbacks to Aang's youth. And there are some elements that have stayed the same, such as the avatar having a helpful big furry friend. In this case her name is Naga and she's a polar bear-dog. I NEED a polar bear-dog! Big and fierce like a polar bear, but loyal like a dog. And rideable too! A goofy male comic relief character also appears in the form of Bolin, a sweet, poverty-stricken pro bender who is infatuated with Korra. Anyone who cares about the world will also be happy to see the air-benders are doing ok. After being reduced to one (Aang) in the Last Airbender, they're now starting to recover. Aang and Katara's son Tenzin has four children who are all air benders. So although air benders are still very rare, they're not gone yet!
As with the Last Airbender, it's the characters that make the show so appealing. Korra's calm, dignified air bending teacher, Tenzin, his hilarious children, sweet, funny Bolin, awesome Naga and evil Amon are all unforgettable. And as for this storyline, it's tense and full of intrigue and betrayal, with a healthy dose of teenage angst thrown in as well. Benders are being captured by rebels and having their bending taken away. In the end Korra herself has her bending taken. For a few tense minutes you wonder if the series is going to go for a very bold decision. Having an avatar who can't bend. But she gets it back quickly. Perhaps a little too quickly in fact. It feels like a bit of a deus ex machina. And the final episode where Amon is finally defeated is....emotional. So emotional. I won't ruin it for you. Watch it!
Friday 20 February 2015
Thursday 19 February 2015
TV Reviews: The Addams Family
I watched the original Addams family TV series from the 60s. I was very familiar with the 90s film, and the cartoon series, but I'd never seen the original before. It's well-worth a watch! You probably don't need to watch the entire series, because to be honest, the gags are the same in every episode.
The characters all have a certain warmth that they don't have in later encarnations. Morticia and Gomez definitely steal the show! John Astin makes a very funny and incredibly enthusiastic Gomez, and his gymnastics are very impressive! He also did the voice of Gomez in the cartoon series. Just a little bit of trivia that makes me happy. Carolyn Jones's Morticia is warm and refined. Jackie Coogan plays a very goofy Uncle Fester, and Ted Cassidy makes a perfect Lurch. They all lack a lot of the creepiness the family has in more modern versions.
I would say that for special effects, the show definitely suffers compared to the later encarnations. Thing is very obviously just somebody's arm in a box, and the meat eating plant is very obviously fake. The sets are also comparatively much less elaborate and varied. But if you can forgive that, the show does have a lot of old-time charm. A very interesting look at what tv used to be like.
The characters all have a certain warmth that they don't have in later encarnations. Morticia and Gomez definitely steal the show! John Astin makes a very funny and incredibly enthusiastic Gomez, and his gymnastics are very impressive! He also did the voice of Gomez in the cartoon series. Just a little bit of trivia that makes me happy. Carolyn Jones's Morticia is warm and refined. Jackie Coogan plays a very goofy Uncle Fester, and Ted Cassidy makes a perfect Lurch. They all lack a lot of the creepiness the family has in more modern versions.
I would say that for special effects, the show definitely suffers compared to the later encarnations. Thing is very obviously just somebody's arm in a box, and the meat eating plant is very obviously fake. The sets are also comparatively much less elaborate and varied. But if you can forgive that, the show does have a lot of old-time charm. A very interesting look at what tv used to be like.
Saturday 14 February 2015
A Short History of Nearly Everything: Cosmic Background Radiation
"Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s when Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s, when two young radioastronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertant discovery.
Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise - a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material", or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.
Unknown to them, just 50 kilometres away at Princeton University a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were persuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow: that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by time it had crossed the the vastness of the cosmos the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.
The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons - the most ancient light in the universe - though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundreth floor representing now and the street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about the sixtieth floor and the most distant things - quasars - were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's findings pushed our aquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the lobby floor.
Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realised at once what the two young men had found. "Well, boys, we've just been scooped," he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone.
Soon afterwards the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience with the hiss, the other by Dicke's team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.
Incidently, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise - a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material", or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.
Unknown to them, just 50 kilometres away at Princeton University a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were persuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow: that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by time it had crossed the the vastness of the cosmos the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.
The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons - the most ancient light in the universe - though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundreth floor representing now and the street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about the sixtieth floor and the most distant things - quasars - were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's findings pushed our aquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the lobby floor.
Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realised at once what the two young men had found. "Well, boys, we've just been scooped," he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone.
Soon afterwards the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience with the hiss, the other by Dicke's team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.
Incidently, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
Friday 13 February 2015
Photography: Berwick-upon-Tweed Beach
Are you going somewhere that's good for photos but the weather is just not on your side? Never fear! Just HDR the crap out of it and pretend the light was interesting! We went to Berwick-upon-Tweed beach because my auntie wanted to go to a honey farm. Us being us, we left too late to go and settled for a trip to the beach instead. These are the best shots:
Sunday 8 February 2015
Songs: They Might Be Giants
You'd like some weird songs, you say? Ok, here are a few from They Might be Giants. An odd little alternative band that's been around since the 80s. They're probably most famous for singing the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle. They're either stark raving bonkers, or high as kites when writing their songs. Some of their lyrics include:
They call me Dr. Worm.
Good morning. how are you? I'm Dr. Worm.
I'm interested in things.
I'm not a real doctor,
But I am a real worm;
I am an actual worm.
I live like a worm.
I like to play the drums.
I think I'm getting good,
But I can handle criticism.
I'll show you what I know,
And you can tell me if you think I'm getting better on the drums.
I'll leave the front un-locked 'cause I can't
Hear the doorbell
Yeah. and then there's:
I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am
Glad that's cleared that up then. Here are three fine TMBG examples. One might be more normal than the others:
They call me Dr. Worm.
Good morning. how are you? I'm Dr. Worm.
I'm interested in things.
I'm not a real doctor,
But I am a real worm;
I am an actual worm.
I live like a worm.
I like to play the drums.
I think I'm getting good,
But I can handle criticism.
I'll show you what I know,
And you can tell me if you think I'm getting better on the drums.
I'll leave the front un-locked 'cause I can't
Hear the doorbell
Yeah. and then there's:
I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am
Glad that's cleared that up then. Here are three fine TMBG examples. One might be more normal than the others:
Saturday 7 February 2015
Nerdism: Rocket Cup
My work sold cups shaped like rockets! Of course I bought one. My very own rocket cup! I love it!
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