#58, Do You Remember Where You Were?

I Must Be Dreaming, or Maybe Not!, East Oahu, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view, click to enlarge.

I am looking right now at The Girl From Ipanema music sheet. Written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, still looks very fresh, and the English words are also very familiar. Should I go any deeper into this classic? No doubt, I am going to go through all notes, one by one as I always do, at least twice. Then we can decide if that is enough, or I might play some portions later on the piano. The sheet music is for the vocal, guitar, and piano. You never know if you are looking at the original, or if somebody transcribed that piece just for these instruments. The difference could be quite pronounced and I definitely prefer the original to the transcribed version. But sometimes you have to take what’s available, and the second option may be everything that you can lay your eyes on. “Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes I smile, but she doesn’t see.” the words go. Quite nice, even with a small error, but forget about that for a moment, and enjoy the beach scene.

Now we are changing to a different subject. It is another day, already after a good dinner, unfortunately again with too many calories. Will have to walk a bit more to burn all those unnecessary calories. Actually this has been more and more of a challenge recently. As a young guy, I used to weigh more or less the same amount over many years. But now, things are more difficult to control. The weight keeps piling on with ease, and removing it becomes more and more difficult. Things taste too good, and the physical activity level is no doubt lower than it used to be. The higher crankiness factor settles in. It is good that no lower mental activity is evident, at least can still watch iJustine videos and understand, I think. Well, I have to go back to those several-hour long hiking trips in the mountains, with plenty of swimming hours, followed by many miles of biking. Less seconds and draft beers and more leg miles, and no ice cream either! OK, enough of whining!

If you did not fall asleep while I was mumbling, let us go back to this morning. Did you see software called grader mentioned on http://twitter.grader.com? It lets you evaluate your standings among other twitter users on a scale 0-100. I started not long time ago, and accumulated only a relatively small number of tweets and followers. Therefore my standings cannot be very high as you might expect. But Kevin Rose’s or Leo Laporte’s numbers are probably approaching 100. Try it for yourself if you are on twitter. If not, open an account, and start to tweet today.

An evening is upon us, time to check emails, news, tweets, own websites, and finish this blog entry. An extra long weekend is coming; it is always pleasantly anticipated.

This is also the day when Bloomberg News almost published Steve Jobs’ obituary. Actually it did happen inadvertently or so we are told. I wonder who else’s obituaries are already prepared and only waiting for the XXXX to be replaced with actual dates? Sometimes faster is not necessarily better. Unless the whole point behind this exercise is still unknown to us! “You told us the iPhone worked, we thought you died!”

MP3 music: http://002e972.netsolhost.com/ .

#57, An Evening On The Town

Wouldn't You Like To Join Them?, East Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, May ‘08, artistic view.

This blog entry is going to be somewhat different. I usually write either in front of my computer or not too far from it. It is very convenient, fairly fast, and allows me to access all additional resources needed to publish my blog. Now I have made a small change, and bought a 5x7 inch notebook, and a Techniclick pencil. You already know what is coming, there will be more blogs written away from the desktop and much closer to the real scene. Well, almost. If I were to write what is realy happening in front of me, you would not believe anyway. A very young lady is studying heart and vain cross-sections, apparently something related to medicine. Now she came back after talking to someone outside on her cell phone. Then, what is so unusual? Nothing, except when you look at her, you are going to see her boobies first, then slowly everything else. There you go, it would not happen if I were writing the old fashioned way!

This morning on Twitter, I found a message that summarized how well known authors come up with ideas to write about, and subsequently how to write down what they came up with. Many of them take notes, carry a notebook wherever they go, or dictate to small recorders what is happening in front of them or comes up to their minds at that moment. Just gave you away a small notebook and pencil combination. If I find the link to that Twitter / blog reference that I read this morning, you can check it out for yourself.

At a restaurant, this evening, the music had some extra spice added to it, probably by a DJ, but I’m not sure about that. Every tune was somehow related to summer and beaches, 60’s and 70’s kind of Beach Boys music. Except that, and I am not making this up, the words were kind of – beach, beach, bitch, bitch. And the second song again went like that – beach, bitch, beach, bitch. A family sitting next to me also noticed something unusual, but did not do anything about it. Can’t believe that it is only the quality of the speakers, there must be some radio DJ behind it.
Also overheard how a mother talked about the length of her daughter’s skirt. “You know, she said, people may confuse you with a female dog?” Let us leave it at that.

It has been more than a week since I wrote any music. I am reading plenty of music related stuff almost every day, now need to go back to writing.

We can close at this, unless something else pops up in my head at the very last moment.

Blog: Alan Rinzler, Writing habits of successful authors I’ve known, http://www.alanrinzler.com/, 8/20/08.