As well as tidying my room up, I went looking on YouTube for videos of people playing the Super Mario Brothers theme tune.

OK, so it turns out that many people on the planet have recorded themselves recreating this masterpiece in various forms -- there are some quite impressive displays by talented groups of people.

For starters, the Rollins Percussion Ensemble put in a workmanlike performance on this version.  I was a little disappointed that “percussion” included tuned percussion, such as xylophones and whatnot.  They were very good, but I was hoping for 100% drumkit action.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkamVRYBkfg

Moving on, an a capella choir put together this video game medley.  Again: very talented, but the problem with this sort of outfit is they can’t seem to perform without injecting a massive level of smugness into the performance. Although I’ve got to admit that their Tetris-choreography made me giggle.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSBIAGCulDw

Diametrically opposite, there’s a thoroughly awesome Metal version.  This could even rival the Nine Inch Goombas’ mashup version of the Mario theme with Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4MHttszOGk

Moving on to solo renditions, it seems there’s no shortage there either.  Ocarina lovers, strap in & relax, because there’s no shortage of small-round-clay-pipe Mario goodness on YouTube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sw76wHUmk4

Moving on slightly in the trickiness stakes, this chap gave the tune a go on the button accordion.  Every time I hear a new instrument cranking this song out I find myself wondering how close to the sound of the original it gets, and in this case, I’d say “very”.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI2a7_XfKaI

Which makes a fairly stark and obvious contrast to sciency hand-wavey favourite, the Theremin.  It’s not an instrument I feel that many people would honestly fall in love with the sound of.  Unless they were mental.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMshU5ql3vI

The performances got more virtuosic, such as the chap playing the 11 String Bass -- quite why a bass needs that many strings is a bit of a frigging mystery, other than to say that “this one goes to 11!”.  It seems a fairly impractical instrument, however he does a fairly handy job of cranking out the piece using almost a double-hand-fingerpick simulation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf56jYDv2fc

Of course if you can’t get access to an 11 string guitar, you can always do like this guy and just employ 2 normal guitars and a big fuckoff metal clamp to hold one in place.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpD0btOZx8

Wind instruments were largely under-represented in this particular niche.  There was a bassoon quartet, but they were playing the tune from Mario 3, which wasn’t the one I wanted.  Another chap on the flute also incorporated the art of beatboxing and nailed a fairly spectacular version using a technique which is presumably called Fluteboxing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=crfrKqFp0Zg

But why should music be limited to conventional means (assuming anyone regards a theremin as conventional)?  Expanding on the tuned percussion notion, there’s no earthly reason why you can’t create a playable musical sequence out of a bunch of glass bottles filled up with various amounts of water lined up along a flat surface, then run a small hammer across them somehow.  Super Mario, on the Remote Controlled Car & Bottles:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4CHkN-Dkw

Not all performances need be so intricate however.  They can still involve common household objects, such as the guy who claimed to be able to play the tune on the Banana tried to show (I excluded that one from this compendium, on the grounds that it was too silly).  Thrubbing a Ruler on the edge of a desk, however, seems perfectly reasonable.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx2E6YMSFP8

For every homegrown talent-show novelty idea conceived by a 12-year-old, you’ve also got an enthusiast highly skilled in some esoteric and wholly unmarketable field, such as The Manualist.  It truly fills the heart with joy to see this man at work.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bKq3x74UE

But the hands-down best rendition of the tune on YouTube today is without doubt the one that combines science, danger, and retro-musical stylings -- the Singing Tesla Coils.  Watching this video left me thinking all sorts of things, notably, “I wonder what would happen to the dude playing the theremin if that was cranked up to 10,000 volts too?”.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1O2jcfOylU

So there we have it folks -- this is why I go out on weekends.

Luckily, I found the following draft blog entry which I can entertain you with.  Please enjoy with me now.

~oOo~

News here is mainly just me getting less interested in this job by the day - I applied for a new one on Friday morning after stumbling on a fairly promising looking ad.  I heard nary a peep out of the agent for the rest of the day, but was surprised to get a call back on Saturday afternoon.  The idea of an IT recruiter working on a Saturday already got my suspicion gland twitching.  However the ensuing conversation confirmed an awful lot of theories I had:

Recruiter: Hi there, I was ringing to see if you were still interested in the Webmaster/Developer role which you emailed me about yestarday morning.

Me: Well yes, that’s why I emailed you – it sounds really interesting.   Now, I realise this job’s a bit less development and more content management, and my CV shows a fairly strong leaning towards the dev end of things, but I…

Recruiter: Oh, yeah – since posting that ad I’ve spoken to the client, and it turns out the role’s got a lot more development in it than I initially thought.

Me: Oh, ok…

Recruiter: In fact to be honest it’s primarily a development role.  It’s a role to be a developer. Does that sound interesting?

Me: Well, sure, if you can tell me more about the platform & setup?

Recruiter (cutting me off): Now, what salary would you be looking for?

Me: Well, I thought that the salary on the ad was…

Recruiter (cutting me off, again): Ah, again – after speaking with them this morning there’s been a slight change in finances, and they’re offering something more like (£7k a year less): will that be a problem?

Me: Good bye.

What we’ve learned here is that some recruiters will post a job ad without having first confirmed with their client what the job description actually is, or what the salary offer is.  So, essentially other than advertising a job that vaguely had something to do with computers, and was broadly located in London, the advertisement was a complete work of fiction.

The somewhat sinister suggestion is that agents are advertising jobs that don’t exist in order to get applications from people in order to shore up some sort of personal sales contact figures.  However Hanlon’s Razor tells us that this can’t possibly be the case.  Even when the recruiter tells you that he’s been talking to the finance department of a multinational corporation on a Saturday morning.

And that’s why a *good* recruitment agent is an individual to hold in very high esteem.

Oh, and my new job’s in the Bloomsbury/Tottenham Court Road area, in case anyone’s wondering.

Hurrah.

Firstly, here’s my stuff:

So, there’s a bottle of American Crew conditioner – that’s the tingly minty stuff which is awesome, and the white deposit on the bottle is because I’ve had it since my visit to Oxford in 2004, because though I love the stuff, I don’t really do conditioner that often.  It just never occurs to me.  At the back there’s some Original Source shower gel/shampoo, and to pad out the photo a bit I’ve put in my shaving gel plus the two tubes of other miscellaneous shaving-related gubbins that Will King sent me after I wrote a blog post on how much I liked the King of Shaves stuff – there’s moisturiser and facewash, and I’ve really got no idea what to do with either.  I thought washing your face was what happened when you put water on it, so buggered if I know what facewash does.  Actually, same goes for moisture.  I never did study Chemistry.

Anyway, that photo is the compare & contrast with the other photo, being the collection of the various bottles of shampoo, conditioner & shower gel we’ve got lurking in our bathroom.

Am not complaining – it just amused me.

I did mention that it’s just the two of us who share that bathroom, right?

However so.me of the more as.tute of youl will have noticed. the so.mewhat unorthodo.x punctuation that appears. in this. pos.t alread.y – for reas.ons. known only to its.elf,. my ag.ing. Tos.hitba laptop has. elected. to mete out further sp.ite upon me by rand.omly ins.erting. full s.tops. into my text as. I type it!  And. to make life more fun,. so.metimes. it j.us.t tacks. on huge. s.tring….s. of fulls.tops. if I d.on’t type another letter q.uickly enoug.h

Reward.ing.,. no?

When I s.ay “rand.om”,. I’m being. d.is.ing.enuous. – I think I’ve narrowed. it d.own to when I type an s.,……..,. a d.,. a g., and. so.metimes. a p – but not that time, ……..evid.ently

Oh yes,. and. it also. appears. the full s.top key is.n’t working…….

This. oug.ht to make the next 10 or 20 thous.and. words. j.us.t S>AIL pas.t

It started when I was about 8 or 9, and Dad made us a sort of cubby house in the back yard which was essentially a wooden motorcycle crate with 4 corner posts to raise it off the ground, and then we lined the underside with cardboard-box walls to create the requisite fortress.  The trouble was, being outdoors and next to a load of trees, it was long before the odd huntsman or two took up residence inside.  To an 8 year old the information that these aren’t particularly dangerous takes something of an urgent back seat to the fairly obvious point that it is quite a big, ugly looking spider, and with hairy legs (never a good sign) to boot.  Our distinct instructions from Mum & Dad were to “leave them alone and they’ll go away”, which I naturally suspected to be motivated by an idea I had that they thought insect spray was expensive.  When faced with this massive arachnopodial foe, casting parental advice to the four winds, we unloaded most of a can of Pea Beau onto this thing, which sat there more or less unaffected other than appearing to be covered in soapy suds.  We prodded it with a stick, figuring that surely there was no way it had survived the neurotoxoc onslaught – it sort of scampered off, and left an impression in my mind that spiders were indestructable.

Years later I was sitting at the computer typing up a uni assignment and upon glancing up the other end of the passageway of the back half of our house saw that the huntsman which had previously been sitting on the kitchen window was no longer there, and quickly swept around to see where it might have relocated to.  I noticed movement about half way up the corridor – it was that huntsman, and it looked very much to be running towards me.  I sat there giggling at the ludicrousness of the idea, and then spotted that it was coming towards me, and had progressed quite some distance.  Now concerned, I hesitated.  It didn’t.  It covered the last few feet of carpet, and then climbed up the leg of the chair towards my arse.  By the time my advanced sapien brain had grokked this, let me assure you – the arse was no longer anywhere near the chair.  I’m not 100% sure what the thought process was going through its tiny creepy arachnoid mind, but there was no way that fairly ineffectually armed creature was going to make off with an entire human being.  But he was prepared to give it a red hot go.

Australian spiders are not only as a rule wildly poisonous – they’re also made of pretty tough stuff.  I’ve tonked one pretty hard with the heel of a boot (wielded in the hand), and the spider just sat there staring at me (I figure he must have been, from at least one of those eyes), silently goading me with “Is THAT the best you’ve got, you great nancy?”.  Seriously, in that part of the world, it’s kill or be killed.  Sort of.  Granted, huntsmen don’t generally cause fatality (unless one pops out from under the sun visor in your car when you’re driving along apace and scares 7 shades of shit out of you).

English spiders – from what I’ve seen so far – are a much more amiable genus of invertebrate.  They is still real ugly, but they seem to know their limitations and as a result don’t tend so strongly toward home invasion.  In five years, I’ve seen 2 spiders in our house – one in my room, and the one I’m about to tell you about.

I’d nipped into the bathroom to brush my teeth & get ready for bed, and noticed that there was a small arachnid perched on the edge of the washbasin.  As I stood there it must’ve shot a web strand up to the cabinet somehow (an improbably large distance as far as I could tell), because it set to climbing upwards, but something went awry and it tumbled back to the basin.  Another wrong-footing sent it tumbling towards the plughole.

Yes, my spider-sexing skills are limited at best.  It’s a lot easier in Australia, because you can easily spot the boy ones – you can normally see their gonads from about 3 metres away.  Did I mention how big spiders are there?

Sensing that it wasn’t going to try to climb up my toothbrush at an opportune moment and try to paralyse me to be saved for a later snack, I employed the services of a nearby comb to pick it up and reposition it on the basin, and went to bed.

The next morning I was slightly disappointed to see a little 8-legged carcass floating in the toilet bowl.

The little thing had made it all the way across from the basin, and fallen to its doom in the bog.  What happened?  I guess we’ll never know...  Maybe it was suicidal.  Maybe it was drunk.  Maybe it was swinging its way across the expansive chamber Tarzan-style, and caught a glimpse of its own reflection in the cool clear waters from one of its many eyes.

That’s probably what happened.  We had a narcissistic spider.

(there’s no photo, because for starters taking pictures of suicide scenes is weird, and secondly – it’s our bog, innit.  You’re better off not knowing.)

It’s a shame the intro was so long, and then the actual story went nowhere.  Oh well, you people know what you’re getting by now I guess.

Now, last time anyone futzed around with our aircon (“cleaning it”, I think was the term they used) it stopped working for about 4 weeks.  It wasn’t all that long ago either, really.

General consensus in here is therefore that systematically breaking, then repairing, the air conditioning unit in our office is some sort of modern day indoor equivalent of the Keynesian cornerstone theory of stimulating the economy by paying people to dig holes in the ground, and subsequently filling them back up.

The first hurdle to overcome was natural cynicism: why the cart?  Were they trying to get on board with this whole “quirky, independent coffee retailer” thing, or did they mount it on a cart purely because it’s cheaper to have a temporary outdoor licence during business hours only, and the cart’s a more practical way of moving their gear about? (You wouldn’t believe the size of the chip on my shoulder about people consciously trying to be a bit “quirky” and “street”… <cough>ISSUES!)  Something which had also piqued my ire was that, in walking past them a couple of days beforehand, they’d put out a display board prompting customers with “What do you think we should call our company?”, and then providing dry-wipe pens so that people could vote.  Voting for a company name.  That just smacks of lack of preparation.

They’d been there a couple of weeks, and eventually curiosity got the better of me – the coffee options around here are generally only as good as they have to be, given that there’s loads of offices and most people wouldn’t make a special trip somewhere else for coffee after buying their sandwich/pizza/etc.  Cappuccino thanks.  The exchange was perfunctory, and having procured my coffee I scampered back to the office before taking the first sip.

Not fucking bad.

The next day was made of deadlines, as was the day after, so upon my return on the third day the toss-meter got flicked into overdrive.  The cappuccino was duly ordered, and while preparation took place the smalltalk began – “You were here the other day, weren’t you? What did you think?”.  “Nice beans”, I said.  Here it came.  “A lot more people now are really interested in where their coffee comes from…”.

Thankfully, my phone rang at this point and stopped the torrent of wank issuing forth.  I paid, and scurried, letting my latent anger run its course rather than carve out a spiteful niche for the java-vending dude.  I’d spied on the blackboardy thing that the bean roast currently being served was a blend from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica.  Maybe I’ve got it wrong.  Maybe Londoners, on the whole, are more geographically wise than I give them credit for – just seems weird to promote point of origin as a selling point when there’s a good chance that a large number of the consumers wouldn’t have any idea where any of those places are on a map, or indeed what difference it makes that the beans are from there.  Sort of an extension of the conversation that happens to cute exchange students at every single party they ever go to:

Keen guy: Hi, where are you from?

Cute girl: I’m from France.

Keen guy: Yeah, but whereabouts in France?

Cute girl: [names a part of France that isn't Paris]

Keen guy: Oh.

My assumption had always been that coffee came from places hot and leafy, and it turns out I was right.  Beyond that, I don’t really care much.  If I think about it too much then I’ll start wondering about how much fuel was used in transporting it, how well the farmers were all remunerated for their toil, and worst of all, trying to make sense of what characteristics each one has, so that ostensibly in future I might be able to use that information to make a decision – but in reality I’d just use it as a conversational crutch, should it ever come up.

(Yes, I suspect I do have issues about this sort of thing)

A while back I was at a certain London market, and was in a bit of a hurry to be somewhere, however I needed some more coffee and it seemed silly not to get some here.  The discussion was along the following lines:

Me: Hi there, I’d like 500 grams of espresso-grind coffee.  Strong, dark roast.

Coffee Lady: This is our [something] blend.

Me: Good, I’ll have that.

Lady: It’s got 60% beans from [somewhere], 20% from [somewhere else], 10% [third place] and 10% from [fourth place]…

Me: Excellent news.  500 grams please.

Lady: Would you like to perhaps try some?

Me: Yes.  I’ll drink that while you bag it up.

Lady: [looking puzzled that I could possibly want to buy coffee without trying it first or having heard its entire family tree] Oh, wait… 500 grams…  how many cups would you say you drank a day?

Me: [thinking "none of your damn business"] Oh I don’t know… 5? (a lie)

Lady: Hmm… it’s just that 500 grams would take a lot longer to get through, and we find that after about 7 days the beans start to lose some of their complexity.

Me: (thinking to myself that of all the coffees I’ve ever made for anyone, nobody’s yet complained about the complexity of my beans) Oh OK, good point.  Make it 250 grams then.

Her: Oh wait a minute… 5 a day… oh no, you should be OK…

Me: Nope, too late now – 250 grams.  Go.

Maybe I was wrong in assuming that the relationship was one of purchaser to vendor: perhaps she was some sort of historian/guardian figure.  I suppose equally what was going through my head was the conversational exchange to be had next time I had a guest over that I made a coffee for:

Guest: This is great coffee!

Me: Thanks – 60% of the beans are from [somewhere].

Guest: Oh.

Moot point really – wasn’t going to be having anyone over for at least 10 days, and there was no way I’d serve them complexity-depleted coffee.  What a massive faux-pas.

The “point” is: the guys around the corner do a bloody good cuppa joe.

For reasons not immediately obvious, my beverage has a trilobite in it.

]]> http://jasonbstanding.com/2009/09/pardon-me-is-that-an-afghan-melon/feed/ 6 http://jasonbstanding.com/2009/09/life-once-again-has-meaning/ http://jasonbstanding.com/2009/09/life-once-again-has-meaning/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:33:49 +0000 jasonbstanding http://jasonbstanding.com/?p=1875 Another absolutely excellent weekend judders past and highlights how much fun it’s possible to have if you really put your mind to it.

Friday night I went to The Bloomsbury Theatre to see a standup gig from Al Madrigal and Janeane Garofalo.  Both were in excellent form, however the crowd was really fired up for Garofalo, and there was a general air of disappointment when she got to the end of her allotted time and had to leave the stage – we all wanted more, and she had plenty more to tell us.  Hopefully a revisit sometime soon?  She was charmingly cynical but in a venemously perky way.  Self-effacing and seemingly resigned to what life’s thrown at her, she gave us some great insights into her world.  I’m not 100% sure why, but she reminded me a lot of Bill Hicks.  Very, very glad I went.

Saturday I was out hankywaving in the St Albans area with The Westminster Morris Men again – as well as some top fun dancing with some excellent sides (St Albans, Hoddesdon Crownsmen, and Etcetera Morris Men), we alsohad a chance to visit historic country pile Hatfield House.  Does wonders for the self-esteem, that does.  Beautiful place though.  Wouldn’t mind retiring to something like that.  I’m convinced that I’ve had bedrooms smaller than the fireplace there.

Hoverdancers go WHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Saturday night we descended on a bar in Shoreditch – which had sadly swapped its cheesy “soft porn decoration policy” for an “inversely proportion music volume with ambient light policy” – to welcome Liz into a new period of chronological accounting.  Good people, nice drinks: top night out!  Not sure why, but I was momentarily overcome with excitement to realise that I routinely hang out with such a bunch of absolute babes.

Oh, you beautiful babes from England... will you go to the prom with us in San Dimas?

Sunday, for an extra special treat, we celebrated Ally’s birthday with afternoon tea at The Dorchester.  Oh yeah.  It’s easy to get caught up in the opulence and grandeur of the surroundings, however now becoming accustomed to such things I was able to concentrate more on the food – the rosé champagne we had was light, fruity & tasty, the scones were fluffy, and the most impressive thing was the “pre-dessert” of cherry sorbet with some kind of cinnamon creme on top.  Three thumbs up!  And the staff were unfailingly helpful & polite.

And on the way back up to Soho for champagne and salsa dancing, we saw the finest suit that has ever been made for anyone, anywhere, ever.  Behold its awesomeness:

There’s nothing further to be said.

Maybe it was George Lucas who ruined the term “digitally remastered” for me with his incessant re-releasing and screwing-around-with of the original Star Wars trilogy.  The wikipedia article on Remastering has this to say:

Remastering has become a powerful buzzword in multimedia industries, and it generally implies quality enhancement of sound and/or picture to a previously existing recording (frequently designed to encourage people to buy a new version of something they already own).

That’s probably the crux of it – the process of digitally remastering a recording is where engineers go back to the source recordings of an album (hopefully, back to the intrument parts, if they’ve still got them), then convert the analogue to digital, and from there combine them into a new master copy.  The attractive part of a digital sound recording is that you can reproduce it an unlimited number of times without losing any information.  In the “old days” overtracking was analogue, so each time your recording went through a generation you lost some of it.

The question arises then about how minute the changes are going to be, and whether they’ll be noticeable.  The answer to that question largely depends on what you intend to do with the recording – if you’re going to rip the CDs to mp3 then play them on your iPod on the way to work, then through the combination of sound compression, substandard headphones, and background noise, you’re probably not going to notice that much of a difference.  Whereas if you’re sitting at home listening to it on your vibration-isolated CD deck, plugged into a smooth-powered amp and a decent set of Tannoys then (their widely known reverb issues not withstanding) the extra effort will more than likely have been worth the effort.  Assuming your hearing isn’t knackered from years of listening to industrial machinery or loud music at live gigs.

There again, I don’t suppose that being able to appreciate the extra dimension of sound is the only reason to buy a remastered box set.  Oh man am I glad I’m not buying any Stuff this month…

(Incidentally, day 9 and I’ve only had one lapse – one new t-shirt, but technically that wasn’t just Stuff, it was a holiday souvenir… so still going strong!)

Peripherally, the thing that inspired this post was today’s date: 09/09/09.  The other interpretation very well could have been a more Rammsteinian tangent than a Beatley one, but then having entitled the post NEIN! NEIN! NEIN! the mind boggles over what it could have possibly been about.