Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow:
Hashing out the classic question with Strouhal numbers and simplified flight waveforms.

After spending some time last month trying to develop alternate graphic presentations for kinematic ratios in winged flight, I decided to try to answer one of the timeless questions of science....

siderea

gardenfey

For a gentle introduction, start with this mini-documentary of a performance of Carmina Burana, in which they work with a conventional orchestra.

Next, for sheer exhilaration, watch Shou Shou Cheng. That was gardenfey's first link, which when it started rather reminded me of my father's approach to teaching me to swim: Throw me in and see if I sink.

Go ahead and watch it. I'll still be here when you're done.

Heart racing? Breathing a little heavy? Now imagine jumping up and down and all over the stage for seven minutes while all of your breath is being spent blowing into a fucking bagpipe. There's much to love about this band, but all that aside, it's the most amazing display of sheer musical athleticism I've ever seen — including the tapdancing bass saxaphonist I saw in Harvard Square one night.

How about a little dance number, familiar to generations of SCA-folk — saltarello ductia, perhaps?

Oh. My. God.

For something a more soothing, with production values that will definitely appeal to my SCA friends, I suggest Hymnua Cantica. (Yeah, knitted "chainmail". But if that lance shattering was CGI, George Lucas should hire their effects people. And a stadium full of people in Medieval drag doing the wave — how much more anachronistic can you get?)

Corvus Corax turns out to be part of a cluster of bands with shared personnel and similar æsthetics. How about a little bagpipe metal with Tanzwut? Or Ardor vom Venushügels cover of White Wedding — to which I had much the same reaction as the first time I saw Rocky Horror many years ago. (Let's say "erotic in unexpected ways", rather than the more colorful words of the Rocky Horror veteran who took the wide-eyed and innocent eighteen-year-old me to see it — largely, I suspect, to see if I'd break.)

At the risk of repeating myself, whatever expectations are invoked in you by the words Pachelbel's Canon in D are about to be violated. (Like the earlier violation, this one comes to us from Korea.)

This time I got the link not from an LJ friend, but from NPR: it was the subject of a story on "All Things Considered" tonight. (Which at the moment appears to have brought youtube to its knees. So you might want to hold off trying to actually watch it.)

Being NPR, they of course found their own unique way to present the story, including telling us about this even more virtuoso yet completely different guitar video.

I was shopping in the iTunes Music Store, buying some Stevie Wonder because I don't have any on digital and heard something on the radio the other day that reminded me how good he can be, when the title of one of his songs reminded me of a song I used to just adore in the mid-1980s when it was being played fairly regularly on my favorite Seattle radio station, KEZX FM. I don't even know what KEZX's format at the time was called, it was just the station everybody I knew listened to. I suppose "Contemporary Folk" would be as good a label as any. They sponsored summer concerts at the zoo featuring local and national artists. They gave airplay to a lot of WIndham Hill artists, but also to a lot of local bands. I suspect Uncle Bonsai got their first airplay there. They were, of course, a locally owned independent station --- this was before telecommunications "reform" sucked all the life out of radio.

Anyway, I remembered the title of this (I thought) obscure little song that used to break my heart by reminding me of a beautiful girl I cared as much for as I had in me at the time to care, who sent more than a year sending me mixed signals, and then sent me a wedding announcement. Sigh. But, as I was saying before I wandered down that side alley off memory lane:

Anyway. I didn't remember the artist. So I typed the title into the search box: eight performances of a song by that title, some by artists whose names I recognized. Wow, who'd have thought that many people would have covered it.

So I listened to the samples. None of them were quite what I remembered, though a one was pretty close --- male voice in the right register, roughly the same arrangement. But not what I remembered.

So on to google, where I entered the names of two or three of the artists who covered it, and the title, and got a page at the Covers Project for the artist, whose name I immediately recognized, Chris de Burgh. And a list of 112 covers of Lady in Red. Covers by Panpipes of the Andes and Tony Curtis and a hundred other bands from the London Symphony Orchestra.to the Logyrithms.

I guess my fondly remembered obscure little song's been doing a nice job helping Chris de Burgh pay his rent.

kareila

shoebox_bird

I had a really good time. The opening act were ok. (Actually, they were probably pretty good, if you like rap: I don't like rap, but enjoyed them anyway.) But Jim's Big Ego was a blast. The band's energetic, the lyrics clever, and they give a great show. I also liked the venue --- the Lizard Lounge is small and reasonably well ventilated as bars go --- I noticed cigarette smoke, but it was a minor bother, not a major annoyance. (When's Cambridge going to get around to banning smoking in clubs, anyway?)

Anyway, I had a good time and got a useful reminder that I need to get out more.