tartan top ten

If you’ve ever heard bagpipes, you’ve probably heard “Scotland the Brave”. One night I left a showing of The Seven Samurai, whistling the song of the peasants planting the rice; started to improvise on it, and soon found that it had mutated into “Scotland the Brave” but on the Japanese scale. Couldn’t do that again if you paid me!

Only once before tonight had I heard words sung to that tune, and somehow I suspected that “bring me my sheep / I’m so lonesome tonight” might not be quite right.

Well, anyway, just now this bloke John McDermott was on telly singing “Scotland the Brave”. But apparently the words are original with him, as Google finds them only at his site and at those of his fans. (I’d never have heard of him if it weren’t pledge season at KTEH, and he has multiple fan sites?)

The quest continues. Heck, if anyone knows the rest of the other version, I’ll take that. Hm, maybe it’s on one of Michael Longcor’s tapes?

Posted in music+verse | 3 Comments

reading the tea leaves

Strangers keep asking me for cigarettes – more often, it seems, than they did even a few months ago. Is this a sign of something?

Posted in California | Leave a comment

not too smooth

Animate a face (Java). See what a difference noise makes.

Posted in cartoons, neep-neep | Leave a comment

QotD

Fabien Mosen

You know you have been raytracing too long when . . . you’ve just seen Monsters.Inc at the movies, and you are wondering when they will release Monsters.Pov.

Posted in neep-neep | Leave a comment

ahead of their time

Warp 9 to Hell comic strip, 2001 May 02

Posted in cartoons, history | Leave a comment

another setback for cryonics

French court rules that frozen couple must be buried (BBC).

According to French law, a corpse must be buried, cremated or donated to science.

A naïf like me might suppose that a longterm scientific experiment, even if performed by amateurs, satisfies the spirit of the law . . .

Prosecutor Jean-Frederic Lamouroux argued last week that the couple’s removal from their refrigerated chambers was an “issue of public order and public health.”

. . . and that a freezer is more sanitary than a graveyard, not to mention in the best interest of the health (if any) of two members of the public.

Posted in luddites | Leave a comment

author, author!

Yesterday a stranger asked me out of the blue – perhaps because she saw a book in my hand – whether I happened to know the name of the author of the book Nigger which was recently mentioned on Oprah. I happened to see it later; in case that stranger is reading this, the author is Randall Kennedy.

Posted in prose | Leave a comment