I was jamming round with some friends this afternoon and the Stevie Wonder tune Signed, Sealed, Delivered got called. I went through a period playing that a lot, when I held the bass chair in (the long defunct) Lovesjones but that was twenty or more years ago.
At its heart, SSD is a pretty simple song, with a handful of obvious chords and one key riff, more or less just running down a Dorian scale, that crops up multiple times. It seemed to come back satisfyingly easily although listening to one of my Lovesjones recordings there might be some details I need to check. Or perhaps we just made them up? It was a pretty free flowing band, which explains why the original is just under three minutes long and, at the particular gig I am listening to, we span it out for the best part of ten minutes.
Tomorrow, I think I need to sit down with (recordings of) Mr Wonder and do some proper revision.
I recently got contacted by a researcher at Loughborough University who is doing some work on ‘central nervous system predictors of balance and age related changes in ankle muscles’. Or, based on the understanding I took away with meeting with him today, understanding how signals that flow through the central nervous system between the brain and the muscles around the ankle might give some useful understanding of changes in our ability to move and balance. The primary purpose of my visit was to get a better idea of what is involved before inviting other people at church to sign up but, what better way to do than to sign up myself!
I’ve recently been eyeing up soup makers. I think these are a relatively recent innovation which both blend and cook ingredients in order to make rich, creamy soups. They tend to be pretty pricey though and, because they both blend and heat the ingredients, there are electrical components you can’t just put in a bowl to soak or stick in the dishwasher.
Jane recently had the opportunity to pick up a 600W Silvercrest blender (a Lidl brand) for a very low price at a local tabletop sale. Even though the blender body was pink, her least favourite colour, I encouraged her to pick it up and we got a chance to play with it tonight.
So far, I’m very impressed. I cooked a leek and potato soup up on the hob and, after cooling it for a few minutes in a bowl of cold water, I briefly blended it, yielding a silky smooth result. For the price she paid, I reckon about 5-10 soups will be plenty to cover the investment and, if it holds up for longer, it is all win. I think the original price was near £60, which would have taken a bit longer to pay back but it creates a much smoother result than we can manage using either our food processor or stick blender. As an extra bonus, you can stick the jug and the blade in the dishwasher although blending a mixture of washing up liquid and water also seems to work well when the dishwasher is full.
Consequently, my yearning for a soup maker is on a temporary hold!
Watching a recent episode of RobWords (video at the end of this post), I was reminded of something I mused on about 15 years ago – why do we call England ‘Ingland’? Rob asked the same question and said that he couldn’t think of any other example of ‘eng’ being pronounced ‘ing’. Since my 2009 post, I’ve moved another hundred miles up the country and reached the Midlands, where they don’t speak quite how I was used to and I have a theory.
You see, up here and certainly heading further north, I wouldn’t have a problem if a car mechanic told me there was something up with my ‘injin’. Different places, different accents, different sounds but the context would help me follow along. Could the so-called proper pronounciation of ‘England’ simply be a vestige of changing accents?
I’ve taken the step of posting a comment on the video so I’ll be interested to see if anybody else things this idea might bear some weight.
Back in December, we popped over to the onsite shop of local bird food producer Brinvale, where we picked various items including a finch feeder, full of nyjer seed. Nyjer seed is meant to be a favourite of goldfinches, which sometimes visit our garden. They had spent a fair amount of time on the seed heads of various plants we had allowed to stand and we wanted to contribute more to their diet.
However, despite hanging outside near the other feeders, it seemed the finches weren’t the slightest bit interested. We might even see them on the other feeders but not the one set up for their beaks and with what is meant to be their food! We wondered if it was something about the design of the perches or the bright yellow colour?
A few weeks ago (the day after complaining on a family chat about the problem) we had one finch spend a bit of time on the feeder although not feeding. Then nothing and finally, this week, they seem to have figured out what it is for! They still haven’t flocked en masse but at least they are using it. As with all these sorts of things, it seems patience is key.
Gardening hasn’t taken much time for the past two or three months but that is beginning to change. I’ve now got a bit of a plan for what I want to plant over the next few months and, over the last week or so, have started making sowings of things that either have a chance of getting in and out before later crops need the space (eg. lettuce) or which need a good long season to grow (eg. leeks).
If you saw yesterday’s post, about the updates I’ve made to my “Going to America” arrangement you might have spotted a rather grand painting in the background:
That took me all of five minutes to produce using, as you can see from the watermark, stablediffusionweb.com again. It uses the impressionism style and, unfortunately, it seems the site remembers the images I generate for a few days but not the prompts used to create them. This was something like “ocean liner sailing to usa with stars and stripes”.
One thing to note is, that although it was the blink of an eye compared to trying to create such an image by hand, I had to iterate through several progressions. My initial attempts began with the cinematic style and I mentioned showing a tuba player because that was the photograph I’d used with the first version of the music that I’d uploaded. I don’t think AI quite understands what a tuba is so I tried “concert band with stars and stripes” before deciding that I didn’t really want any musicians included. I switched to something about “sailing to america” (and changed to the impressionist style for a more painterly effect) and generated a couple with non-ocean going sailing boats before reaching the one you see above.
Yes, it is an “AI generated” image but it is important to remember that, although machine learning put the pixels together, the result you see still depends a lot on curation by natural intelligence. Credit – and blame – for AI creations still rests squarely on us humans.
A couple of weeks ago, Charnwood Training Band had a quick blow through the Dvorak piece I’ve simplified and arranged. It did sound unintentionally avant-garde at points and some of that will just have to be worked through. For example, even if I experimented to changing the key to one that is more familiar (D minor comes up more often than E minor), there would still be quite a few accidentals to negotiate to get some of the rich chords that flavour the piece. However, on reflection, I think some of the tempos I set pose unnecessary challenges (semiquavers flying by at 200bpm!) so I’ve created a new render with a few little tweaks.
Sometimes going too slowly is as hard as going too fast so the first adjustment is that the famous Largo (the “Hovis music” as it is now often known in the UK) has been pushed up to 70bpm to help those with sustained notes. The third movement was marked Molto vivace in Dvorak’s original and I had it set at 200bpm (one source suggests that this is the top end of Presto). We didn’t try it that fast but I was struggling to keep up even on the relatively simple tuba part, so that has now dropped down to 150bpm (Allegro or the very bottom end of regular Vivace).
That brought another decision. I had a large chunk of the movement repeated because it went by so fast. It seemed like a lot of work for something that would pass in a few blinks and, for the listener, it would have come and gone too quickly. At the slower tempo, it seemed more balanced to drop the repeat and avoid the piece running over seven minutes long!
Finally, the Allegro con fuoco (fast and with fire) has been dropped from 150bpm (the top end of Allegro) to an almost stately 120bpm, still just within the regular range but where it might be described as Allegro moderato instead. Hopefully, with less danger of tripping over our feet, we’ll still be able to imbue it with some fiery energy.
We didn’t have a rehearsal this week, due to half-term, but I think we’re due to try it again in the next couple of weeks and I’ll get to see if these alterations help out.
When I got my tuba, I also got a trumpet and a marching euphonium (which looks like a massive cornet). Tuba is the one I’ve been learning properly but I thought I’d get the trumpet out today and see if the low-end experience has given me progress on the trumpet too.
I certainly can’t play trumpet just as well as I can play tuba, and it would probably be fair to say that I’m still some distance from playing tuba particularly well. However, I can now say that I can play tuba and I can get a range of recognisable notes out of the trumpet.
I only have so many hours in the day but what would I need to progress my trumpet skills? One step is to ask one of the trumpet players I know to check it out – is it a reasonable instrument to learn on or are there features which would be an impediment to even an expert. I also need to find out the process for tuning a trumpet. Which slides do I adjust? One has about 3mm of adjustment so I expect that is probably left alone while another has an attached ring and I think it is often moved up and down on the fly by expert players. Thirdly, what are the fingering patterns for a three valve instrument. My tuba has four valves so, even apart from the size of the instrument and mouthpiece, there are also other things that don’t transfer directly.
I haven’t got the ambition to become a full-on trumpet player but it would be useful to learn a bit more about it and also, as an ancillary benefit, get used to playing an instrument that is typically using transposed music instead of concert pitch scores.
I do like recipes on the YouTube curry channel Al’s Kitchen but they do take a bit of work to follow. It doesn’t help that the iOS YouTube app seems buggy when it comes to displaying the full description. I ended up having to take notes from the video although, having checked today from my Windows box, I can see that it should have been all there for me. Anyway, this is how I used Al’s video to cook up a bhuna using a boneless roll of lamb shoulder.
Step one is to boil 600g of peeled and quartered onions in about the same volume of water. That takes about 10-15 minutes to soften them after which the water can be poured off (and saved) and the softened onions can be pureed with a stick blender. While those onions are boiling, a further 300g of onion along with some capsicum pepper (he said half each of red and green – I used a whole pepper of each colour but setting the tops and bottoms aside) get prepared. All got cut into large slices and then flash fried in a small amount of oil, which softens them a bit but mainly adds some charring and colour. The onion peelings (except for the bases, which could contain embedded dirt) and the pepper offcuts got slow cooked with about a litre of just-boiled water, creating a veg stock for future use.
That is the preparation stage. Next comes cooking the onion puree in about 150ml oil along with 1 tsp salt and 1.5 tsp of sugar. Use a high heat and stir regularly (with the salt and sugar and all other additions, it makes sense to check you have them before you start and to weigh them out into containers before the main cooking starts). After eight minutes, drop in ginger and garlic paste (I used generous squirts from ginger and garlic tubes – I see the official recipe says 3tbsp), a bit of cinnamon stick and 6 cracked cardamon pods (I used the seeds from about 8 pods, most of which were quite old), cooking for another 2 minutes.
For the second block, turn the heat down low and stir in the spices. I used 1 tsp dried fenugreek, 1 tsp chilli powder, 2 tsp garam masala, another 0.5 tbsp garam masala (since I didn’t have tandoori masala), 0.5 tsp tumeric (I couldn’t figure out what deggi mirch was by listening to the video – it turns out to be a chilli and capsicum blend), 2.5 tbsp curry powder and about 1 tbsp cumin (the last not in the original recipe but I’ve still got a large bag of it!). Both the fenugreek and cumin were run through a spice grinder first. As well as the dry spices, I also put in 5 tbsp tomato puree, loosed with some water so it poured easily, the chopped meat and the reserved onion water. That was covered and simmered for another ten minutes, which might have been enough for the suggested chicken thighs but I ended up simmering for another ten minutes to cook the lamb.
For the final ten minutes, the lid is removed and the heat is turned up. The flash-fried pepper and onion from earlier is added along with a couple of quartered tomatoes and a handful of curry leaves (I think he used kasoori methi, which is dried fenugreek leaves but, again, that’s what I had in the cupboard). It is stirred regularly to reduce the sauce, which is the key characteristic of a bhuna.
Once done, I turned off the heat and mixed in some lemon juice (I could have used more) and, on my place, some chopped coriander from the freezer (Jane doesn’t like it). The meat was still a bit chewy but cooked and with a good lamb flavour. All in all, very successful and will end up doing the two of us for six meals (Saturday, Sunday and tonight).
If you want to compare to the original video, here it is:
