Folks are starting to shop for turkeys and pumpkin pie, so you know what that means – it’s time to get your reservation for GAFilk 12!

On December 1st we announce our Super Secret Guest(s) for 2010, and the registration rates go up from an economical $40 to the at-the-door price of $50. This year’s GoH is the amazing singer/songwriter Alexander James Adams, and Interfilk is sending us Andrew Ross – two great Oregonian performers at the same southern con. Who’da thunk it? And Terence Chua is traveling all the way from Singapore just to be our Toastmaster.

Come raise a glass of champagne to ring in the New Year with people who actually know all the verses to Auld Lang Syne. Test your knowledge of all things filk playing the My Filk panel game. And don’t forget to bring your glitz for the dinner dance, with music by Play It With Moxie, one of the finest blues/jazz/swing bands around. (This even always sells out, so book your reservation early!)

We just want to spend time relaxing with our friends, so y’all come! Visit http://www.gafilk.org/ for more information!

Foundling

It was a surprise:
finding a tiny cherub,
sucking its small thumb,

out on our doorstep
in a white wicker basket.
It was a puzzle.

How do you do it?
How do you raise a cherub?
Do you tie it down?

What do you feed it?
Can it fly now, right away,
or does it first crawl

and then walk, then fly?
Is it a boy, or a girl,
or something other?

Can it learn English?
Is it hard-wired for language?
How do we begin?

Do we report it?
And if so, who do we call --
a social worker,

or perhaps a priest?
Can humans keep a cherub
left on their doorstep?

We don't even know
if it would ever grow up
into an angel.

The continuing balloon hoax story is interesting, largely because a "reality show" called "Wife Swap" appears to be heavily involved in it.

A few years ago, "Wife Swap" was spamming every filker they could find in an unsuccessful attempt to get some to embarrass themselves on the show. The idea of the show is that two families with fundamentally opposed ways of life are picked, and some members of each of the families live with the other family for a while, with TV cameras wrecking the privacy of both homes.

The show should really be called "Kid Swap," but that would make it too obvious whose lives the show damages for the sake of entertaining voyeurs. I'd like to think that its involvement with this hoax (which its producers are fervently denying) will spell the death of the show, but more likely it's doubled its ratings.

But She Scribes offers an extra chance to win a SodaStream Soda Maker if you blog about the give-away, and I've been wanting to play with one of those soda makers for a while. I don't much like that none of the pre-mixes stick to actual sugar for sweetening, but I'm thinking that an herb tea, carbonated, with some sugar syrup added for sweetening, might be very nice indeed.

The weekend was not at all what I expected. Drove down to Windycon with Gary on Saturday. Wil and I decided not to spend the money on the hotel, so we cancelled our hotel registration, thinking we'd just drive down for the day Saturday. Then Wil decided not to go at all, so I headed down on Saturday, a letter in hand to let Gary use Wil's membership. Then murphy struck. Apparently, our membership never reached them, and we weren't pre-registered at all! Well, given money being what it is, Gary and I decided not to stay. We wandered from one end of the con to the other a couple times and said hello to several people, then headed home again. No worries, though, I got to finish a good book. Now I can turn my attention back to memorizing chorus music for the concert in early December.

I will try to get some travel reports written in the next day or so, but we'll see how that goes.

For the moment, it was a great weekend, it's been a great 7 weeks of this craziness. It's good to be home.

Went out and bought Wii Fit Plus yesterday, as the whole point of us buying a Wii system is to use it for exercise. Started playing around with it and it is a lot of fun. I like how it keeps track of the minutes you are exercising, gives you beginner and beyond levels for every activity/game. It allows John and me to use the Miis of ourselves we created in the Wii system to do the exercises on screen. And, of course, it keeps track of your weight and BMI, your scores in balance and agility warm-ups and how often you exercise. You can also select what health issues/body issues you're trying to target and the program will custom-design a work-out program for you.

The balance board you stand on is used in a number of interesting ways. You can bend your knees to jump in ski jumping and tightrope walking activities. You stand on it to mimic yoga positions you see on the screen and the screen let's you know if you put your foot down too soon :). You can do stepping activities on it, down and up on all sides of the board. You can use it as a skateboard by pushing your foot to the side to make you go faster in the game. You can walk on it to make a bicycle move around the trails of an island. There are even jogging routines where you step off the board and run on the floor while following a route on the screen with an observation game at the end of what you saw during your run. It's all pretty cool.

There is one addition to the "plus" upgrade that is cute. It also allows you to make Miis of your pets and you can keep track of their weight by holding them and then stepping on the balance board. The program subtracts your weight and tells you the weight of your cat. One thing that's fun about the Wii is that you can create as many characters as you like and those characters show up in the games and exercises along with your personal Mii. We noticed yesterday during running and biking exercises that a little dog runs along with you and we were curious if we made Miis of Edward and Kara if we'd have little cats running with us, instead. Sure enough, as soon as we entered them in the system we now have a black cat and a gray cat who run with us during those exercises instead of a dog :).

The program seems to have great potential for motivation. I'm doing thirty minutes of exercises each day right now (as well as my physio exercises), but I hope to move up to sixty minutes of exercises. I also find it does encourage you to want to eat better and lose weight, something I've been slacking on terribly since hurting my wrist, so as of tomorrow I'm back at Weight Watchers on-line. It seems foolish to be faithful to the Wii exercises and not making a better effort with healthy eating again, too.

WindyCon is done for the year. I think things generally went well, but am a bit too tired to say anything else coherent at this point.

Maybe tomorrow. (But since I still haven't posted about Saturday and Sunday at OVFF... :) )

On Jan. 16, 2010, Patti and I are hosting a Robert Burns Day Housefilk (a week early) at our home in Columbus, Tx (west of Houston). Anyone who would like to filk and party with us is welcome (please RSVP at denefoye at yahoo dot com) we'll have some munchies and soft drinks (bring your favorite beverage). We'll also suppy the Haggis. :)

The proximate inspiration for this song was It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies!: A Book of Zombie Christmas Carols. It's actually not a bad little collection of songs, and I'll probably bring it to the December MASSFILC meeting -- but I noticed that all the songs are very much alike. As are all of the recent zombie movies, as far as I can tell (not that I go to such movies, but the descriptions are consistent). So I wrote a new song, complete with original music, which I'll also bring to MASSFILC.

( Song behind the cut tag )

I was soooo reminded of elisel when I read this article:

http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/full/96/11/1990


In other news, much cleaning accomplished. Much purging of stuff. I almost caught up on sleep.

Now, back to vacuuming the wall so I can move the shelves back so I can reload them with the "survived the purge" keeper books piled up on the table ...

We replaced husband's computer monitor and I will be getting his old one ... a nice widescreen LCD unit far better than the ancient Dell CRT on my desk. The cats will be unhappy at losing their buttwarmer, but they'll deal.

Unfortunately, his old monitor is NOT one of the ones you can install on a desk "arm". So there might be some juggling of the planned recumbent-bike-included room layout coming up ...

Hello, fellow filkers!

In Meorot, an upcoming Israeli science fiction convention, I'm going to run a filkwriting workshop - to the best of my knowledge, the first of its kind in Israeli conventions.
Since I have no experience to rely on, I wanted to ask this community's help. Has anybody reading this run a filk workshop? If you could share from your experience I'd really appreciate it, especially if you can point me at existing resources.
Specifically, this workshop will center on writing songs to existing tunes, and doing so in Hebrew, but if anyone can point me at songwriting resources of any kind that'd be cool.

Just returned "Death from the Skies," a book recommended by beige_alert.

I knew that you're more likely to die from an asteroid impact than from a plane crash, and I had guessed that it was also a bigger risk than a terrorist attack. But I hadn't realized that you are also more likely to die from an asteroid impact than in an amusement park ride. So, sweetmusic_27, keep riding those coasters, but watch the skies!

In other news, when you hear someone in the library parking lot honk their horn once, then twice, then three times, what do you exppect next?

After a pause, he/she honked twice.

"That's not the next prime number," I muttered.

Am I a nerd?

Just a reminder that Carla Ulbrich’s newest CD, Live From Outer Space, is available for purchase. I’m giving this CD a plug not just because Carla’s a very funny and talented songwriter/musician, but also because I did the cover. :-)

You can find out more about Carla and her CD at Carlau.com.

Mirrored from Debbie's Blatherings.

December is the month of ex-felines, it seems. We have a... what's the collective noun for dead lions? Not a pride, clearly... ah! We have an *embarrassment* of dead lions coming up in the month of December:


The cut-off for booking programme slots is December 1st.

Contrary to the rumours going around, the Van der Filk programme is NOT FULL! A lot of people have expressed an *interest* in having a slot, but surprisingly few of those have actually booked one yet. Given the number of people expressing interest, I have no doubt we *will* have a nice full program, but people should by no means be put off making their requests... PROVIDED you have joined the convention first! (For groups, at least half of you must have joined for your slot request to be accepted.) ( Read more... )

Well, we went ahead and got my daughter a guitar for Christmas. We took all your great advice and walked into the local guitar store with her- without telling her anything! You should have seen her eyes light up when her dad answered the "can I help you" from the store owner with "Our oldest is interested in getting a guitar and we're pretty much lost."

He sat her down and brought out a guitar that his daughter- who is only 2 years older- uses and had her "fit" it and get a feel for it. She was enthralled! He was very nice and informative. And we just happened to walk in on the day when he was having a 15% off sale!

So we thanked him and left for other stores to try and get a chance to talk about it without Thing One hearing. We got a moment away and all I said was "Do it." I took the girls to another store and The Fictitious Husband made some story about getting something from the van. He went back to the store and got the guitar, a soft shell case, some picks, and an electronic tuner- all for less what it would have cost to get her a DS Game (that she also asked for).

So this Christmas should be quite amazing- especially since we're going to get Thing Two a keyboard. My only question now...- how do I gift wrap a guitar?

:-)

What kind of day has it been:

21:46 has booked his tickets for GAFilk in January. #

Automatically stabbed through your living brain by LoudTwitter

The concert yesterday afternoon went pretty darn well, I thought. Just before that, I caught the first half of Luke Ski's, and he was in fine form and having fun. After, I hung out in the hall for awhile, talking to many nice people (including Bob Passavoy, who I never see enough of). Then I went back up to the room for awhile.

I'd got it into my head that the Masquerade was at 9:00. Well, at 8:20 I was getting ready to go down, and I looked at the program book to see where it was, and discovered that it was at 8:00.

I was downstairs by 8:25. Got backstage literally three minutes before I had to go on. Fortunately, it was before, so I got up there smoothly and got right into it... as it was announced that the masquerade winners would be announced after 9:45.

So I'm suddenly committed to an hour and fifteen.

Noooooooo problem. Rocked the house. I've done almost four hours of concert this weekend, with only two repeats ("Two Guys Kissin'" and "Rocket Ride").

Then I went to the open filk for a bit. Bill Roper, Kiki, Matt, others. Some guy noodling very well with a banjo. A new kid, Ray I'm pretty sure his name was, wrote a song yesterday morning, and he's got a very soft voice but the song was good and his guitaring is also good. Another new person, a young girl about the same age, did a couple of songs I presume are some kind of alternative folk-rock. Nice voice, good stuff.

Today: packing up, hanging out by the dealers' room for awhile, Closing Ceremonies, home.

How's by you?

On Twitter, I'm following a feed that tells me what new music books become available through amazon.com. The latest set of messages are about Hal Leonard Corporation publishing instructional books and CDs based on the music of Elvis Presley. I'm pretty sure I don't need Elvis for cello, violin, or tenor sax. I wonder how big that market could possibly be.

Edit: To clarify, that's one book per instrument, and I'm told there's a clarinet one too.

I'm rereading Inferno and Inferno, in parallel.

The Dante is in a dual-language edition, with the original and the translation on facing pages, but I'm giving only occasional glances to the Italian. Mandelbaum's blank-verse translation follows the original faithfully as far as I can tell.

Given the identity of the guide in the Niven/Pournelle treatment, I guess I'm still following the "fascism" thread.

The other thing that's been taking place over the same time period as dealing with our car issues is a strange little health thing, that I just feel like mentioning.

The same day as the CRX accident, I started taking a 12-day steroid treatment for reduced feeling I've had in some of my toes for a couple of years. The MRI shows bulging discs at the bottom of my spine, which could explain my symptoms, and the steroids are to help with that. But the drug has had the oddest, broadest, side effects I've ever had from a prescription.

I've gotten some tingling/burning in the extremities (which I'll take as being in the right direction, although I can't claim actual improvement overall). I have also had reduced irritation in certain unrelated places that had had issues, so that's OK. But then there's the fact that my face has gotten ridiculously greasy. Yuck. And a general, light mental "off-ness".

But the biggest one to me is what's happened to my sense of taste. Bleah. It kind of crept up on me during the first 5 days or so. My mouth has a sort of light slime coating it all the time, and the flavor of everything is seriously dulled and somewhat off and everything seems greasier. I found myself wanting to try different foods, to see if some things might get through to my senses better. The crispy orange chicken bowl at Applebee's was a relative winner, for instance.

I had started deliberately reducing my calories a week or so earlier to try to lose some weight, so it's been kind of a mixed bag: Less to taste, but wishing all the more to enjoy what I'm getting. I have lost a few pounds so far, though.

But I took the very last pill today. I hope this thing wears off quickly. I'm looking forward to being able to taste food properly again.

Bleah. Gimme back my flavors.