Rick's b.log - entry 2024/12/01

Advent Calendars 2024

This year, in order to test to see if the Celebrations calendars are the same, through the magic of buying two, I shall be looking at this. I'm also going to be recording positions to see if there are patterns.
Yes, yes, I know I could just open the things up, but where's the fun in that?

Here is the first video:

It was the other man

As I'm sure you can understand, it's quite the media circus over here. The trial is ongoing, prosecutors are demanding twenty years for Dominique (the maximum for rape under French law) and in the most recent twist to this already bizarre tale - in which Dominique even tried to claim that he saved his wife from suffering by drugging her - his defence lawyer has most recently claimed that Dominique has a split personality due to trauma. There are two Dominiques, okay? There's a loving family man and... the other guy... who has a certain perversity.

He had a final word for his wife: I have betrayed you with the obscene ... without you I am nothing. Judge me by the best times of our life.

At the risk of Godswining myself, I would point out that a certain man did good things like start to recover a failing economy, build an extensive motorway network, sort out the trains to be efficient and effective, start a company to provide affordable cars to enable the citizens to be efficient and effective. He also revolutionised unemployment support and got a lot of people trained with useful skills and into work. He also made some rather progressive animal rights laws and was also seemingly quite a good painter.
But, alas, that is not how this certain man will ever be judged, for no matter all the good he did, the bad was so ridiculously off-the-scale awful that he not only changed the course of history of the entire planet, he also made a the use of his name utterly off-limits.

I can't help but feel it's the same thing here. It doesn't matter if Dominique and his wife enjoyed twenty-odd amazing years. To drug her, rape her when she's out of it, and have that many other people join in... no, that's just so ridiculously off-the-scale awful that there cannot be any hope of reconciliation. We can but hope that he spends his final years in a little cell in isolation, fearing for his life, and with plenty of time to ponder "was it really worth it?" as he knows he'll never experience freedom again. Karma, rather than justice, because... f██k my life, what?!

Poor Celebrations...

Celebrations recall.

This recall includes my calendars. I won't be going to get my money back as there is technically nothing wrong with the chocolates. The problem is that the information on the back is not written in French - which includes the allergy information because, you know, Danger! May contain Bounty!
Looking at the back of my pack, it is written in Czech, Italian, Romanian, and Slovakian. I'm just going to guess that somebody somewhere got the East Europe and West Europe batches mixed up. Imagine having to explain that to the boss. Some poor probably minimum wage worker made a cockup and hit the company's bottom line hard (even more if all the French/Spanish/German/etc packs went to the east).

Stew pizza

Stew on rice.

On Sunday, I realised that I had a pack of pizza dough that needed to be eaten, so I folded the dough sheet over itself in a largely-failed attempt to make it deep pan, and added stew. Lots and lots of stew.

Stew on...pizza?

As it wasn't already over-the-top enough, I made some brocolli and garden peas and added that on top, and since it was a pizza I threw some cheese on top of that - a store-bought mixture of three grated cheeses (emmental, comte, and mozzarella, if I remember correctly).

This did me for my Sunday dinner, and a smaller piece for eating at work on Monday.

Advertising fail

Shoes, advertisement.

Now, normally I wouldn't mention this as, well, shoes for women aren't exactly relevant in my life. However, the reason that I noticed this was because my eye was inexplicably drawn to the blurb about the product.

You see, just like every clothing publicity and home shopping catalogue ever, the glossy photos of the products have numbers or letters, and these relate to some blah-blah about the product.

Explaining the shoes.

Now as you can see from the escarpins D (court shoes, not pictured) and the bottines E (ankle boots, not pictured), the text says "Top, lining, and inner sole are synthetic materials, the sole is elastomere, available in sizes 36 to 41, used to cost €29,99 but now costs €19,99."

Now if you look at the other two escarpins F and I, and the two ballerines G and H (ballet flats), you'll see they all say "missing text".

I notice dumb things like that.

Lidl air fryer

Lidl's 9-in-1 air fryer oven.

It is being advertised primarily as a 9-in-1 air fryer. Because air fryers are all the rage these days, despite not being a fryer and, well, just being a redesigned convection oven. The only thing air fryers have in their favour over regular convection ovens is that the heating is much more intense, given the heat source is usually directly over the food, the fan is pretty powerful, and being a smaller enclosed space it gets up to temperature much more rapidly.
But, you know, if you happen to have a convection oven, you're more than halfway there.

What I found interesting about this device, which has a big fan in the top (it has to, otherwise all of that control circuitry over the hot part would suffer unpleasantness), is that the "air fryer" part is handled by fitting a rotating basket where the roasting prongs would go. To my mind, it looks a little on the small side, but maybe the photo is deceptive? It says the basket is 1.9 litres, which... is kind of meaningless to me.
Either way, I like the idea of blasting heat down onto chips or nuggets or whatever and always keeping them in rotation. It's like a traditional style air fryer combined with the mixing abilities of one of those Actifry devices.

It's in Lidl for €79,99 and I would be interested, except that it is a little expensive. My oven and air fryer both do the job. Maybe not as super-sexy as this thing, but the end result is nicely cooked cod and chips so...

According to a video I saw on YouTube, and various third party websites, this thing retails for £99.99 in the UK. Say what? Eighty euros is a little under seventy quid. Is this a Brexit tax or something?

Lidl are also selling an ice cube maker. Which, I guess makes sense if you're the sort of weirdo that wants ice cubes in your champagne, but... really... give it a few weeks and then just put some water into a zip-seal freezer bag and leave it on the windowsill overnight. That'll do the trick, right?

Composing music

I sometimes play the piano for relaxation, but it isn't really relaxing as I absolutely suck and it sounds pretty bad. But, you know, I keep hoping that one day something will click in my mind and it'll start to make sense. Don't hold your breath, I think I need a better body than the one I currently inhabit.

So what I do is I have an idea, sort of, of what I want in my head. I play a very slowed down version on the piano to make my idea more concrete - it's one thing humming a tune, but that tune needs to be translated into actual notes, the pitches to play.

Then, of course, there's time. I don't really get on with traditional notation as its a little too abstract time-wise.

Using my SimpleSeq software, I then filled in the pitches in the grid for the desired duration. Since writing a minute's worth of music was going to be a bit of a pain in the arse, some of the music was simply replicated (fancy word for copied) to fill the space, but with a few small variations thrown in so it wasn't quite so obvious.
Though, a good example here was the percussion: tish tap tap tap, repeated. Just create that once, then copy as many times as needed. I wasn't planning on doing any fancy symphonic metal drum patterns.

Composing music.

There was a pretty big complication right from the outset. I wanted each beat to run a sequence of six notes, a _dah dah ^{dah dah} dah _dah sequence. But this isn't really possible as it stands because each sort of note is half the length of the next note. So two semiquavers to a quaver, two quavers to a crotchet, and so on. It can be done, I think we'd be looking at dotted semiquavers or something (the dot adds half the note duration) but it would be a mess to get things lined up, and, well, my software - being simple (clue in the name) - doesn't support stuff like that.

So what I did was to select 6/4 time, which would normally have six beats to a bar, and then speed it up (320bpm) and then treat each bar as a beat, which is what? 6/1 time or something?
Anyway, this gave me the intervals that I was looking for. I then simply wrote to common 4/4 time on top of that treating four actual bars as one bar, with a beat (provided by percussion) that was ticking along at a much more sedate 60bpm.

I could have done better, I was planning on having some acoustic guitar in there, but I wanted to get it done by the end of the morning so I could do other stuff (like editing the ten-year retrospective video).

The last time I did some music, for the theme last Christmas, I simply placed my phone on the keyboard and recorded the music as-played through the piano's speakers.

This time I hooked up the keyboard to my video capture dongle and recorded a video (with some fake video in order that it would record something and time it correctly). While this worked, it didn't have a particularly good frequency response, so the bass chugging along a nice solid D1 (inspired ever so slightly by the type of music that I listen to) wasn't particularly noticable in the final version. Maybe that's for the best if you don't like that sort of music? ☺

I had planned to buy a USB audio device to record with, but they were all really expensive, which seemed weird given that my cheap little video capture device can do it, and at 128kbit 48kHz stereo AAC, which my video editor app transcoded to 128kbit 41.4kHz stereo AAC...
...perhaps it would work to boost the volume of the bass? Well, what I have will do for now.

Recording music.

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A tree-dwelling mammal, 1st December 2024, 23:57

Posted the last comment on the previous entry before I saw this entry...    If you want some really weird time signatures, have a listen to country music. Because it only generally uses 3 major chords, it has to add interest in other ways. For example:    7/4 time signature    7/4 time signature in cut time    7/4 in half-time    Jumping between 7/4 and 4/4, sometimes in half time, sometimes in cut time.    6/4 time signature    9/8 with compound triplet time    Trying to teach those to your session drummer is... interesting. Especially if they're a rock drummer that can only play in 4/4, only knows how to use matched grip (as opposed to traditional grip), and can't keep time without a click track.    I play drums too, although that's a secondary instrument. I do own a guitar, but that's more so that when I'm at a gig I can get a guitarist to use it (it's a vintage Washburn acoustic, Nashville-tuned, ie high-strung, fitted with a piezo pickup) for playing rhythm.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd December 2024, 08:47

Now, air fryers... My mum bought herself one a while back. I'm not impressed. Not sold on them at all. It's basically just a fan oven (not convection) that's been turned on its side, and given an added portion of delusions of grandeur.    Many years ago I did some consultancy work for the local KFC franchise (IT work, nothing to do with asking 'would you like fries with that Sir'!). Whilst migrating their email system, I noticed the interesting way that they were cooking the chicken. After deep-frying, it would go into a fan oven for several minutes - but the notable thing was that instead of being placed straight on a tray, they'd use a baking tray with a wire rack over it, with the chicken portions placed on the wire rack. That way all the excess fat would run out and sit in the tray, keeping the bottom part of the chicken portion crisp and dry.    I discovered that I had some of these wire racks at home which fitted perfectly in the baking trays I had; I'd been passed the whole lot when I moved into my own place a few years earlier. I recall my mum used the wire racks as cooling racks, but it appears they were meant to be used in the way that KFC used them.    Nowadays I almost always oven-cook things in this way. Everything comes out crisp, no more of the traditional fat-soaked base of whatever it is you're cooking. So basically the same thing as an air fryer, without needing to buy an air fryer.    (I have a deep fat fryer as well, if I'm having chips I do them in this. It's just better.)

jgh, 2nd December 2024, 09:04

I'm sure the Blake's Seven theme changes time sig halfway through a bar somewhere. I'll have to listen to it again.

Rick, 2nd December 2024, 11:15

Don't forget Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. Normal 4/4 time except for one place in the chorus where you count six.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd December 2024, 17:10

Or Blondie's "Heart Of Glass", which drops beats in the instrumental. A trap for the unwary drummer.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd December 2024, 17:34

Also Rick - I sort of nicked your calender idea for my blog (the blog posts calendar I mean, not the advent calendar). Hope it's ok to spam your comments:    https://www.ilikejam.co.uk/    (If touting for readers is ok then can you make that into a link? If not, feel free to delete this comment.)

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