2 December 2024
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Mary and Joseph

Today’s music activities included firing up the Reaper DAW and knocking together a quick recording for the toddlers’ group at All Saints, Thorpe Acre with Dishley (Mary and Joseph… the very first Christmas). It’s a while since I’ve done any recordings of that ilk, so it was fun to brush up my skills.

One thing I don’t have with Reaper that was a boon on Logic Pro is an artificial drummer or even any built in library of drum sounds. My old MacBook would probably hold up for a recording session but I’m trying to build my Reaper skills. Today’s solution was to create some sounds on guitar, mess with things like EQ and pitch, and create a facsimile of kick and snare drum sounds. It ended up working pretty well, all told!

1 December 2024
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Slowly Does It

We had one of our best roast lunches for a while today. What was the secret? Probably a good dose of time. We had friends coming round to join us and, in the planning stage, we thought they would be round about 1pm but this morning we found out it would be more like 1:30pm. I’d already put the pork joint in for a low, slow cook before we set off for church and everything else was prepped. What the extra time meant was not having to rush and having plenty of time to cook things well.

How did we avoid overcooking things? The main issue was the pork joint. I’d already cut the fat off the top and seasoned it last night. When I put it in the over, it was in a covered tin, on a “trivet” of onions and tomatoes and with a good amount of cheap sherry and water. At 120°C, the meat itself was mainly being steamed but could have been in for a lot longer before any risk of burning. When we got home it was already cooked but the high liquid volume meant it wasn’t in danger of drying out. I took it out of the oven and left it covered in the hot liquid to hold the temperature in a food safe zone while the crackling layer went back in on a tray at a higher temperature, alongside roast potatoes and, later, carrots and parsnips.

The joint itself did go back for a bit, once I’d drained the liquid and vegetables to make gravy, but only for about 15 minutes to brown a bit on the top before a further 15 minutes or so for resting under a cover. The meat was succulent, the crackling was crispy, the roast veg were just right and even the sprouts (prepared with a cross slit in the bottom of each and microwaved) held up their end.

So, for a good roast, slowly does it.

30 November 2024
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Christmas Gig #1

That’s the first of the Christmas gigs out of the way – the lights switch on at East Leake. Compared to other years, it was neither as cold (mid-teens rather than near freezing) nor as wet (clear skies and no rain falling) so very easy conditions. The pieces also went well and I’m looking forward to the next Charnwood Concert Band at All Saints Church, Thorpe Acre, next Saturday evening, which will probably be a similar set but with one or two other pieces we dropped for the outside setting.

29 November 2024
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Clouds or Deserts?

At the Hathern Baptist Church prayer meeting Jane and I went to last night, it opened with a short reading from Psalm 68 (about vv. 4-10). Most people were reading from the pew Bible, which is the NIV translation but I had my NASB edition and I spotted an odd translation discrepancy between the two. What was read out from v.4 was, “Sing to God, sing in praise of his name, extol him who rides on the clouds…”. By contrast, the NASB says, “Sing to God, sing praises to His name; exalt Him who rides through the deserts…”. What is up with that?

As far as I can piece together, English translations typically go for one of those two options and they appear fairly evenly split, allowing for the fact that I’ve neither carefully counted nor made any allowance for the fact that not all translations should be weighted evenly. Commentaries on ‘cloud’ translations tend to make something of the idea that Israel’s God is being declared as greater than Ba’al, who was sometimes characterised as a storm god. However, aware of the uncertainty, they often include a note about the desert alternative. The NIV, for example, gives “prepare the way for him who rides through the deserts” as an alternative.

It was interesting to check on a range of commentaries via the BibleHub site. Most of those lean towards the desert option. For example, the comprehensive Barnes notes on the Bible, says:

The word used here – ערבה ‛ărābâh – never means either heaven, or the clouds. It properly denotes an arid tract, a sterile region, a desert; and then, a plain. It is rendered desert in Isaiah 35:1, Isaiah 35:6; Isaiah 40:3; Isaiah 41:19; Isaiah 51:3; Jeremiah 2:6; Jeremiah 17:6; Jeremiah 50:12; Ezekiel 47:8; and should have been so rendered here.

I’m nowhere near competent enough in Hebrew to cast a deciding vote but, personally, I’m inclined much more towards the desert angle. Even apart from the question of whether heaven or clouds could be an appropriate translation, it seems to make more sense that the psalmist would have in mind a reference to the story of Israel’s rescue from Egypt through the Sinai wilderness than feel the need to ape a reference to a god followed by other nations. I note that the King James Version picked ‘heavens’ and so I wonder if this is one of those places where later translators have been influenced by the poetry of the translations they knew well over and above the best choice for the text? The KJV team did an amazing job but would probably be the first to admit that their resources were meagre compared to what their modern successors have available.

28 November 2024
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The Christmas (music) season begins…

Even through I’m not responsible for music in a church this year, the Christmas season remains musically busy. My first official Christmas engagements are the Christmas lights switch-on in East Leake (free event in the town centre, with music from Charnwood Concert Band starting at 3:45pm) and, alongside Jane, singing with the University choir at the Cope Auditorium next Wednesday evening (7:30pm, tickets at £7 with concessions and available online or on the door).

It isn’t just gigs – there are also the rehearsals supporting those gigs and some additional events I’ve signed up for. Those include a scratch band playing in Loughborough’s Carillon shopping centre on the afternoon of 14th December (first rehearsal tomorrow night – I’m planning on tuba for this one) and guesting on electric bass with a big band which meets up in Nottingham on the afternoon of 15th December, so another set of music to get the hang of.

Phew!

26 November 2024
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Super failure?

I have to say that my superglue sun visor repair hasn’t held up too well. I thought it was doing okay and then, this afternoon, it popped out again. However, I’m not entirely sure it was either my brute strength or the material strength of the repair but because the motion of the visor has become incredibly stiff. It should need enough force that it doesn’t flop around but not an excessive amount. With a bit more reading, it looks like this is not an uncommon problem.

I’ll probably need to order a replacement but I might just have a look at whether I can clean and lubricate the rod in the existing one first.

25 November 2024
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Superglue Boosts

Last week, I reached up to adjust the driver’s side sun visor in our car and it came off in my hands. I’d probably been a bit careless but I was trying to quickly block the sun streaming in through the side window after I’d turned a corner and I was concentrating mainly on the road. I think it was mainly trying to lower and rotate it at the same time which caused the problem but the result was that, although we had the bits, we didn’t a sun visor.

The assembly involved a lot of plastic, some of which was cracked or had sheared off, and a couple of awkward metal clips. Over the weekend I figured out how to remove the clips, which were still fixed in the car (insert a flat screwdriver and twist it, allowing the clip to be worked down – squeezing with pliers seemed ineffective and like to result in some nasty pinches). Further research revealed that a new replacement would be the best part of £200 and even one from a breaker’s yard could be over £30. Then Jane came across an idea, which I’d seen before but not tried, of using tissue paper along with superglue for plastic repairs.

It turns out that superglue wicks into the paper and quickly sets, creating a way to mould the adhesion around the target rather then relying on minimal natural points of adhesion. Doing a bit of further research also suggested bicarbonate of soda as another substance that could be used to add extra utility to superglue.

After a bit of fiddling around I seem to have achieved a sufficient repair that I’ve been able to fit the original visor (and clips) back into the car. It looks like new on the outside (or perhaps just a hair off perfect) and hasn’t fallen off yet although I’ll be extra careful for a while to come. I would say the results weren’t quite as marvellous as most YouTube videos you can find on the subject but probably enough to keep us going for now.

24 November 2024
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The Message I Didn’t Preach

There was a possibility that our friend, who was leading the service and preaching at the church we went to support this morning, would be called away at short notice. In the end, that didn’t happen but I made a few notes in case I needed to step in. The overall service leading would have been easy enough but I wanted to have a thread to hold onto in case I ended up delivering the sermon as well.

The theme for the day was Christ the King (standard for the last Sunday before Advent) and the readings in the service were to be Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 and John 18:33-37. My plan was to start off with something that is well-rooted in the UK perspective on monarchy: how many people have got to the point when they don’t need to check themselves from singing “God save the Queen” when the National Anthem comes up? I didn’t want to get mired in royalism versus republicanism but, in a sense, Christians would have to agree with those who protested at the Coronation last year. If we have to choose, Charles isn’t our ultimate king but Jesus is.

I was then going to touch on all four Lectionary readings for the day – the two mentioned and also Psalm 93 and Revelation 4:1b-8. If in doubt, much better to bring attention back to the Bible and set people up for pondering it over the coming week rather than blathering on down my own dead ends.

I would have started with the John reading, Jesus before Pilate. In fact, I would have extended it to include v38. The Psephizo blog noted a clever pun in the Latin Vulgate this week. When Pilate says “what is truth?” (Quid est veritas? in Latin), that is an anagram of ‘the man who stands before you’ (Est vir qui adest). Only a few hours earlier, Jesus had declared to his followers “I am … the truth” (John 14:6) so, although the Latin anagram isn’t part of the inspired text, it is a notable comment on an important observation. Another observation is that, when Jesus was talking about his kingdom not being of this world, one of his followers had tried to defend him with violence and, of course, Jesus had not only stopped that but healed the man who was wounded. Jesus was the spotless lamb, not guilty of the charges of either the Jewish authorities (because he was God) or the Roman powers.

I then planned to navigate through the other passages although my notes there were much briefer. If I hadn’t done more than just read them and encourage the congregation to look at them together, that would have been enough. Finally, because I have just finished studying the seven ‘I Am’ statements Jesus makes in John’s gospel, I would have come back to that because, together, they give us perspective on the kind of King that Jesus Christ is. Bread of life (Jn 6), light of the world (Jn 8), good shepherd (Jn 10), gateway (Jn 10), resurrection and the life (Jn 11), the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14) and the true vine (Jn 15).

I didn’t get to use it today but I’ll keep my notes filed away because Christ the King Sunday comes around every year and its truth is life every day.

23 November 2024
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The Deep Purples

Here is a video that entertained me today, an imaginative rendering of Deep Purple’s 1970 album In Rock as if it had been recorded in the 1950s:

Of course, it should be noted that 1970 is not so far away from the 1950s. I had the original album on cassette sometime in the mid to late 1980s, so about an equidistant time period from the actual release to this imagined version and it is now over 50 years ago!

22 November 2024
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Reverse Cappucino

Just under 15 minutes into today’s “How to Cook That” video, there is an exploration of how to make a coffee foam. When you whisk egg whites or the ‘aqua faba’ out of a tin of beans, the proteins firm up around the air and so it swells in volume and retains that. It turns out that instant coffee contains a concentration of gums that do the same thing and so we set to doing some experimentation.

The recipe was 2 tbsp of instant coffee, 2 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp water, whisked up. Our best blending option was a stick blender but the blades did the job. However, I’m not entirely sure we needed the sugar so next time I’ll try it without. I think the sensation Ann Reardon was looking into was about making drinks but the best use we found was to serve with ice cream – a novel and pleasant way of getting an icecream coffee (and the icecream is sweet enough).

So that’s how to make frothy coffee in a way that isn’t just frothy milk. I suppose you could call serving it on ice cream a reverse cappucino (cold, with frothy coffee on top of the milk layer)!

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