A Little Musical Humor

A couple of days ago my Sister-In-Law posted on her blog a youtube link that's lately been making the rounds, of a male vocal ensemble from Indiana University, making a glorious hash of The 12 Days of Christmas (and many other worthy things). She commented that these guys could be distant cousins of the Power Family boys. Her commenters (who know my brothers and me reasonably well) concurred.

Well, as we enter the final stretch of the Marathon and wearily wheeze our way toward the Christmas finish line, we all tend to get a little punchy about the whole season. It's a little difficult to maintain an air of subdued expectation concerning the Birth of Christ, for a full month starting with the day after Thanksgiving, all the way until the twenty-fifth of December. For me, the wonder of the season frequently wears off about the second weekend of December. That is, if it ever gets started in the first place. These last several years I've been the music director for my church's Christmas Musical Annual Extravaganza™; and by the time December rolls around, we've been working on Christmas music for two months, and I want to slap everyone silly, and the singers all want to do the same to me, and can't we just get the season over with finally, for Baby Jesus' sake? So about this time, I tend to enjoy musical parodies of great songs of the Christmas Season much more than the originals:

• Chest Hairs Roasting On An Open Fire....
• Walking 'Round In Women's Underwear....
• Jingle Bells, Batman Smells....
• Joy To The World, The School Burned Down....
• Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer....

Then of course, there are all the songs where the words don't change, and the music doesn't change, but the humor is in the way you sing it. The phrase "Don we now our gay apparel" followed by a blithe flurry of Falalalalalalalalas can actually be quite silly, don'tcha know--especially if you can drape a lavender boa around you when you do it. (Although you better not try to strike my harp, or I'll strike you right back.) And the song "Here We Come A'Wassailing" is a mother-lode of silliness, which is even better because everyone knows the silliness is coming:

God bless the master of this house,
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table goo...

Not to mention that the verse that goes:

Dear master and mistress,
As you sit by the fire,
Please think of us poor children
That wander in the mire....

...works best when followed by squishy-sounding vocal/labial effects demonstrating what wandering in the mire actually sounds like.

(For those of you who know my brother Rick, ask him to make his "Mud-Man" impression sometime. That's precisely what I'm referring to here.)

Anyhoo....

I don't have much in the way of Christmas musical humor to share with you tonight, but my brother and sister-in-law did introduce us recently to the team of Igudesman & Joo. These guys are musical comedians, in the mold of the late Victor Borge or of Dudley Moore. We looked them up on youtube, and....

Well, see for yourself:



Here are some other segments of their routine:

Try to guess the song in this next one before they get to the lyrics.



Now, a few years back, one of my brothers and I came up with the musical monstrosity we called "Peter Gunn and the Wolf," in which one of us would sing the "Peter" theme from Prokofiev's work, and the other would sing the theme music to the old Peter Gunn TV show. We actually got the two themes to work together. (And, of course, in the story of Peter Gunn and the Wolf, Peter usually gets eaten about the time we get bored of singing, which doesn't generally take too long.) Well, it appears that my brothers and I aren't the only ones that possess this kind of humor:



I'm in the process of teaching my eldest daughter to play piano now. She doesn't always appreciate it. Given this fact, I'm not going to show her this:



One last one, just for kicks:



Hope you enjoy.

I looked at their website, and I'm not seeing any plans on their part to tour the US anytime soon, which is a serious bummer. But in the unlikely event I have any readers in Sweden, make sure you take the opportunity to see these guys.

You Know the Christmas Season Has Gone On Too Long...

...when you seriously consider getting your daughter one of these.
(And yes, I know it's a parody. Still....)

A Little Light Reading

So, when the Pillowfight Fairy was just learning how to walk, she developed this truly charming habit of wobbling up to our bookshelf and pulling out a little light material. It was particularly charming since she always seemed to go for the same book, each time she tried this. This book was the 1993 edition of Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, by Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard.

The pages on this tome go up to 518, not counting the preface and introduction, which are numbered with those cute little Roman numerals that take me so long to figure out. And here's a sample of the text, pulled at random:

Writers normally communicate their thoughts through a contextually-coherent statement that uses words according to their natural meaning in such a context consistent with the historical-cultural setting. Each word's impact on the total thought of the sentence arises from its grammatical relationship to the other words. Therefore, to discover what a writer meant, one must concentrate on four things: literary context, historical-cultural background, words, and grammar. Regardless of the literary genre, for any interpretation to be true it must be consistent with:

• the obvious sense of the literary context
• the facts of the historical-cultural background
• the normal meaning of the words in such a context
• the proper grammatical relationship between the words.

A meaning that does not fit all four principles is unlikely to be the meaning the writer intended.

From Chapter 6, page 156 of the 1993 edition.

Well. The thought that our dear daughter was so interested in theology at such a young age was very bracing! Of course we had to protect our books, or our budding reader would have, um... devoured them, but we were careful to try to keep from squashing her natural curiosity and enthusiasm toward the subject.

Two years later, the Adrenaline Junkie was just learning to walk. She, like her older sister, was interested in checking out the books. But we were in a new house, with a new set of bookshelves; and Introduction to Biblical Interpretation was on a much higher shelf, and therefore--alas--out of her reach.

I can't remember for certain which book she went for, but I seem to remember trying to keep her from eating my copy of Halliday and Resnick's Fundamentals of Physics (3rd edition, from 1988). Actually, strike that. That would have been way too much to eat. We were trying to prevent her from accidentally pulling it out onto her foot, thus crippling her for life. But again, hey--if she wants to learn about physics, well... what more could any geek father like me ask for?

(um... for what more could any geek father like me ask? No... how about, ...what could any geek father like me ask for more? Hm. Still doesn't work. Whoever came up with that grammatical rule was on weed.)

So, we had one young tyke who wanted to learn some hard-core theology, and one that wanted to learn some hard-core physics. This seems very promising, does it not?

Well, the Happy Boy (currently 10 months old) is right on the verge of learning to walk. He even took a few unsupported steps today. And he pulls himself to a stand easily and readily, whenever anything halfway sturdy is within reach (and often when it isn't even halfway sturdy. We have to watch him with a falcon eye to make sure he doesn't suddenly pull folding chairs down upon himself).

And those books! What wonderful colors! I think I shall go over there, pull one out and gawk at the pretty colors, and see what they taste like. Hmmm....

So, which book did Mommy have to rescue three times from his gooey little clutches? What caught our little boy's eye, jarred the wheels of his mighty brain into motion, awakened the latent desires of his heart? What budding proclivities have appear'd in his rapidly developing demeanor?

He picked out the 1973 edition of this volume. This edition is bright, bright yellow, of course.

:-)

I know all daddies are supposed to like their kids, but I really, really like this one, 'kay?

How to Cook When You Lack The Key Ingredient

So my eldest daughter comes to me this morning and says, "Would you like to do some Fairy cooking?"

Ummmm....

"So, dearest, how do you do Fairy cooking?"

"Well, first you get a Fairy...."

Given our daughter, I was prepared for this to be really gruesome, but thankfully (and surprisingly) it didn't turn out that way.

"...then the Fairy puts its wand on all the things and it makes them really yummy."

Oh, OK. That makes sense. But, this brings up an obvious question:

"What happens if you can't find a Fairy?"

Hmmm, hadn't thought of that. So, I attempted to be helpful:

"Can you substitute a Pixie for the Fairy? Would it still work?"

"Yes. A Pixie would work too."

"Can you substitute an Ogre?"

"No."


...


This little exchange got me thinking, though. In a really odd way, it made me think of the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness.

No, really--stay with me here.

For forty years, they primarily ate manna. Baked, boiled, mashed, fried, pureed, steamed. It's what's for dinner--and lunch, and breakfast, and tea. They were pretty sick of it there for a while. But that's what they ate, until an entire generation--the ones who had known how to cook normal food--had died in the desert. That means that the entire generation of those that entered Canaan had grown up on the stuff, and little else.

Did this mean that the generation that took Jericho and Ai, um... didn't know how to cook? Or rather, they knew how to cook... manna, and not much else. So they had entire recipe books filled with recipes for which God wasn't sending them the main ingredient anymore. I'm imagining the people looking in their cookbooks, and saying, "Hm, this looks good. Have we got all the ingredients? Let's see, goat... dates... pomegranate... coriander... manna. Darn it, we can't make that one either."

I'm just sayin'.

(Well, I had to. Seeing as I'm sitting home from church on a Sunday morning with a sick girl, and using this as an excuse to do blogging, of all things, I figured I need to put something vaguely theological in there....)

How to Child-Proof Your Christmas Tree

This is Why I'll Never Be President

...and it has nothing to do with inhalation.

A few months back, a loyal reader of mine, and fellow blogger was kind enough to nominate me for the 2007 Homeschool Blog Awards, in the Best Dad Blog category! I was touched by the honor.

Well, I didn't think much of it at the time, but a few days ago I thought to myself, "Isn't the voting happening about now? I wonder how my humble blog is doing?" So I went over to the host site, and looked up the votes to date....

It's pretty pathetic.

Ok, it's a field of 7. I'm not first. I'm not second...

I'm sixth. And the one guy I'm actually leading, has configured his site to block any browser that doesn't allow pop-up ads--meaning in practice that no one using Firefox or Mozilla can read his site--just MS Internet Explorer.

Let me reiterate: I'm losing to every guy except the one who's configured his site to lock out any browser that doesn't permit his pop-up ads.

As of this writing, there have been 432 votes cast with one day left in the voting, and I have all of 6% of the total. (They don't display the exact number at the site, but that works out to about 26 votes. I'm in Dennis Kucinich territory here, fercryingoutloud.)

Well, after doing a little investigating, it appears that most of the other Dads have been actively campaigning for this thing. Imagine! They're actively grubbing for votes! Can they do that?

I, of course, am too proud to pander to the unwashed masses. This is why I'll never be elected to anything. ;-)

We dads do tend to be a competitive lot, though. And if you aren't winning, one time-honored strategy is to change the rules.

So, notice the pitiful state of the guy who's in seventh place in the poll. Don't you feel sorry for him? I think, that to cheer him up, some nice people should go over to the site and give him some love. It should only take about 25 or so of you.

There's more than one way to end up at the extreme end of a ranking. ;-)

Back Home, Safe and Sound

Well, my family and I are all back home after a week on the road. I get to sleep in my own bed tonight! With my own wife!

Um.... that came out wrong. What I meant to say was that we were in sleeping bags all week, and I was on the floor, and my wife was on the sofa, and, um... nevermind.

The training class was helpful. I stopped in at work for a few hours after driving back from the Bay Area, fired up the computer, and tried to see how much I could remember from the training class. I successfully made a portlet! From memory! That accepted credit card data! Not that it has anything to do with our project, mind you, but it's cool nonetheless. And if any of you out there need a portlet that takes your credit card data and gives it to me, just let me know.

Well, I had been blogging between sessions at the training class, so my wife hadn't seen anything I'd blogged about all week. She was rather bemused to read that I was having a relaxing week. Alas, she was not. She was fighting off a cold (with a nasty cough) all week, as was the Adrenaline Junkie; neither of them were particularly spunky by the end of our stay. She felt like she was on duty all the time.

Anyway, it's good to be home. We tend to get spoiled to the fact that we have a really, really comfy mattress. After a week away from home, we slip into our own bed, and say AAAAaaaaahhhh..... I'm really looking forward to that tonight.

Update on an Unusal Week

This is Day Four of my training class.

It's one of the most relaxing weeks I've had in a long time. And no, that's not because of the training. There are a bunch of other factors at work here.

For one thing, we're mostly away from the stresses and tensions of everyday life. While my co-workers are wonderful people, my regular place of employment seems to be infused with a spirit of "we must produce, in order to stave off doom!" Being away from this seems to help. I have a bit more breathing space, so to speak. As we are learning this Web Portal software, I can think about how we are going to use it on our specific project, or I can just marinade myself in the mysteries of the technology; but my "mind-space" feels like it's my own again, to do with as I wish.

For another thing, I'm getting more sleep. The class doesn't begin until 9:00, so there's not much point in getting up until 7:30 or so. I'm feeling much more sharp when I arrive in the mornings.

For a third thing, we have a pair of grandparents to help with the kids and with the household management. Tonya and I don't have to be "on" all the time.

So for all of this, this week is turning out to be an island of tranquility within what is normally a very hectic season. And I know that the moment we drive home tomorrow, the stresses of everything we've been missing will come crashing in upon us again. For one thing, this Sunday is our church's Christmas program, for which I'm the music director; and we have a whole lot of rehearsing to do Saturday. But at least I'll be rested and ready for it.

...

But I'm remembering all the reasons my wife and I moved away from the Bay Area four years ago, too. I hate traffic. Hate, hate, hate. And red lights. And I really don't like having to spend forty minutes to go ten miles.

Ironically, I'm starting to figure out new routes to get me to my training class every morning that are much faster than the way I've been using up to this point. I've discovered, the fewer left turns you have to make, the faster the commute. I've just about put together a route that uses two--count 'em, two--left turns--and one of those is at a T-intersection where there's no oncoming traffic. (Of course, this means that the commute home at night has all but two left turns, but I consider the route home a completely different problem in optimization.)

The ironic part is that now that I'm figuring out these routes, the class is almost over, and this knowledge will become mostly useless. Ah, well. Maybe the company will send me out for more training at some point in the future. We're using a fair amount of software from this company, not just the Portal stuff; and if I have to learn more of it at some point, it may come in very handy knowing how to get to this lab without having to make more than two left turns.

Follow-Up on the Venezuelan Election

In my previous post on the Venezuelan election, I mentioned feeling surprised that Chavez didn't rig the thing. Well, according to Jorge Castañeda, a former Foreign Minister of Mexico, it turns out that Chavez did in fact try to rig the vote, and failed.

Of course, I have no independent way of verifying what Castañeda alleges; so take from his article what you will. I happen to think what he's saying is highly likely, though.

Details are in this Newsweek article, with a hat tip to Captain Ed.

102nd Carnival of Homeschooling up!

The 102nd Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Seeking Rest in the Ancient Paths. I haven't had the opportunity to check it out yet, being in the road; but lots of other people have, and has apparently spread fear of my eldest daughter all over the internet. :-)