Daily Archive: January 13, 2012

PMQs

I follow the UKMinisters Twitter feed that follows all of the ministers who tweet. There is a pattern that happens every Wednesday.

Prime Minister’s Questions occurs and all those on the PM’s side will state how magnificent he is and how he destroyed poor Red Ed. Whereas on the opposition it seems that Ed annihilates and embarrasses the PM on a regular basis.

Both of these cannot be right.

I have even watched this and tried to compare what I am seeing with what they are tweeting, and although sometimes I can kind of get what they mean, mostly they don’t match what is happening that I can see.

I could just be unable to follow the subtle interplay, but I consider myself fairly well educated and savvy enough about language, if I struggle I would gamble that many do also. Maybe this is why the tweeters cannot agree or even vaguely represent what has occurred.

There is only one solution.

We need a cage fight, that will give us a real winner. If this is too extreme they could always lean across the boxes for a game of ‘slaps’ or maybe a quick round or two of wink murder.

Rude?

  • Rants
  • Friday, 13 January 2012
  • 0

So while flying to the US I encountered what I thought was a rude bloke, it could be me who is just too sensitive, or maybe with my attitude I am rude, here are my thoughts as I travelled.

–START RANT–

A bloke sat to the right of me on the flight has a loud cough, obviously it is irritating him, I just wish he’d cover his mouth more with his hand or with a handkerchief when he is hacking up a lung, or maybe just get it over with and die already.

So that was written three hours ago, since then he has munched on M&Ms with his mouth open and constantly coughed spraying germs liberally into the air, there is the occasional half-hearted effort to cover the mouth, but most of his loud and violent explosions are done unmasked. I have headphones on and listening to loud music and I still don’t drown him out, time to just kill him with the foldaway table I think.

Okay, 40 minutes later and he has a spare chair as the bloke who was sat next to him has moved, maybe to jump off the plane rather than be next to him, and so he has placed his feet up on the seat, that’s not a crime, leaving the shoes on however is just plain awful. I am not being prissy but there is something deeply wrong with shoes on furniture, I dislike it, take your fracking shoes off. Especially if they are boots, this just compounds a social sin.

I wonder if this piece will be used against me in court…

And as we land he takes off his belt while we taxi and turns on his phone to check his messages, please slam on the brakes so he flies face first into the seat back…

–END RANT–

Music to fly to – 1st Movement

Flying to the United States I decided to do some writing and since I wanted to drown out an odious nearby person and the drone of the planes engines (which I normally tune out from but the odious man was too irritating – ranty post to come). I therefore went to the music channel and was delighted to find some albums that intrigued me as they were by artists I wasn’t familiar with playing compositions I didn’t know that well (aside from the Liszt).

This is what I heard…

Works for Cello and Piano

Mendelsson – Watkins Brothers

http://www.classicalarchives.com/images/coverart/9/4/a/9/095115170120_300.jpg

This was a new experience for me, I have not heard many of Mendelsson’ s works done before and have never encountered the very talented Watkins Brothers. Very delightful to listen to while writing on the flight over the Atlantic.

The experience was only ruined by the imposed-by-software pause between tracks which meant that several of the multiple-movement pieces had nasty breaks in their reproduction making it jar quite horridly several times. The worst being a piece split into about five sections by track number with each piece being only a minute or so in length. Ugly cutting and easily avoidable with a fully digital reproduction and playback system, that should be a software switch.

Liszt: My Piano Hero

Lang Lang

Also heard some interesting interpretations of Liszt by the clearly talented Lang Lang, not come across this young Chinese man either though the pieces by Liszt were all familiar to me. For the most part I loved the way he had interpreted them, in fact it is an album I may have to pick up. Wonderful orchestral accompaniment, especially on Piano Concerto No. 1, by Valery Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Interesting that the first exposure this young man had to the works of Liszt was via a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Cartoons are probably where I heard the majority of my first classical pieces. In fact T&J did a wonderful pair of ‘toons where they used Gershwin and Jazz symphonic to great effect.

 

Debussy and Ravel: Music for two Pianos

Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy

And the introductions continue as I then heard Father and Son play a magnificent series of pieces on two pianos. The synopsis states that Vladimir “the flamboyant pianist turned conductor returns to the piano alongside his son” and this is “powerful, fiery and spellbinding”. Not being familiar with either the musical pieces in question or the performers all I can say is it was breathtaking.

En Blanc et Noir (3 movements) is a brilliant introduction to these two men and is a great build into the stunning Jeux, and the rest of the album is filled with similar brilliance. A well thought out collection masterfully played. I was very delighted as neither Debussy or Ravel have been on my listening list much, I had a thing of not liking Ravel because of Torvil and Dean, so this was wonderfully new.

Mark Keating
The Quick View Mark Keating is an odd male with roughly five decades of chronological competence in his girth. He is married to Leigh a girl of great patience and unsurpassed kawaii-ness. They both live in Lancaster, UK, conveniently since they are wed, with their sons, Benjamin, Elliott and Asher. They are terrorised by a cat called Darwin and various tropical fresh-water fish.