I Know a Little Bit…

I take a lot of pictures, and I’ve tried to educate myself about what makes a good photograph.

On the other hand, I have never been much when it comes to music. Since playing/carrying a sousaphone in high school band, I’ve done next to nothing with a musical instrument. Music composition never entered the picture.

Until lately, anyway. I’ve installed Mixcraft to put together production music for YouTube videos, and have had more fun doing it than most anything else I have attempted lately.

It’s simple to assemble a piece of music by dragging recorded sound files onto a timeline. The program adjusts beats per minute and even the key if it detects a conflict.

Music’s too important to be left to musicians, I suppose…

So how does a piece sound when it’s assembled by someone without natural-born musical aptitude? Here’s one example.

Long-ago dreams and fantasies… here’s a title I came up with for an imaginary HBO comedy show — “Bobby Barnes: This Is No Act.”

The morning after Hurricane Irene passed through, my wife and I cleaned up the yard. No large branches had fallen during the storm, thankfully, but lots of little ones were on the ground, along with plenty of leaves from the pear tree.

We took turns raking and piling up twigs and placing them in a yard bag to go to the township yard waste pile. Some of the twigs fell in our freshly mulched landscaping, and no matter how lightly we pulled the rake, bits of mulch went into the grass with the twigs.

As I picked up the last of the twigs and put them in the bag, I told my wife, “That’s all I’m doing. I’ll mulch the leaves and leave the mulch.”

Another reason I’m glad I learned English as a child and not as an adult: The phrase “get off of a train” = wrong, wrong, wrong. Should be “get off a train.” You wouldn’t say “get on of a train,” would you?

OK, says the non-native speaker, understood. No un-necessary “of”s. All is well until that same person hears someone in a crowd yelling, “You’re in the way. Get out of the way!”

So why get excited? Just remember, get up off of that thing…

… and hey, you, get off of my cloud.

Among the voices of experience that I turn to time and again is this advice from U.S. Rep. Barney Frank: “When you’re engaged in a political fight, if you’re doing something that really, really, really makes you feel good then it’s probably not the best tactic.”

In a broader sense, that statement is likely true with the word “political” excised from it. However, recently I was put in an uncomfortable situation in which I reacted by doing something that quickly ended the problem with no repercussions, but also made me feel really, really, really angry and frustrated afterward. Later, when I was capable of rational thought, I realized for the first time that the corollary to Rep. Frank’s advice is that its mirror image is also true.

Like many people these days, I have a car with plastic headlights that have grown hazy with road grime. I tried using toothpaste to clean them as described in this post, and while it didn’t take off all the crud, at least now the garage smells minty fresh.

I was looking at the monitor, trying to make out a customer’s email address, a process complicated by a larger font that obscured the lower half of each letter in the onscreen form.  I thought I’d sussed it out, though, and asked her to confirm “homeguilt at somedomain dot com”.

She looked at me, puzzled, and paused before slowly answering, “homequilt.”

At work yesterday, across the room I saw a man with his hands on top of his head.  It looked to me like he was wearing a red tartan yarmulke.

This should be a very quiet corner of cyberspace…