In the symphonic wind ensemble in college, we played a piece called "Scenes From Out on the Water" where the sheet music had markings that translated, more or less, to "play notes in this range for approximately this long, at approximately this speed and volume." It also involved an altered piano (all kinds of crap on the wires to change the sound) and electronically generated sound, as well as a person on the soundboard doing simultaneous recording, distortion, and playback of what was being played onstage. The idea was that every performance would be different, while still being recognizable as the same piece of music. The interesting thing was that it completely nailed the ambiance of being out in a small sailboat, on a large body of water, at night: all eerie groans and mysterious noises and creaking rigging, with the electronics evoking wind and water lapping against a hull.
Then there's In Memoriam: Dresden, which is a piece about the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during WWII - notable because the incendiary bombs caused a firestorm which literally turned the entire city into a raging inferno and killed pretty much everyone unlucky enough to be caught in it. The last movement recreates the firebombing itself. Out-of-tune trombones do an eerily accurate mimicry of the sound of Flying Fortresses passing low overhead. Immediately following that, the piece uses various whistles, instrumental and vocal sound effects, and screams (first in German, then inarticulate) to make the sounds of bombs falling and a city being transformed into hell on earth, while the stage lights flicker to simulate explosions.
It is not an easy piece of music to listen to, but it is incredible.
On a lighter note (ha), the same symphonic wind ensemble played a piece, I forget what, in which the trombones were given the performance direction "Ballsy".
Clearly I was aiming at the wrong sports. Should have gone in for weightlifting. I've got the thighs for it.
It's never too late!
We had an older fellow who was born in 1948 compete in the last meet.
His numbers were nothing amazing except when you consider you have a man that is 67 years old qualifying for national and world events just by virtue of competing and still being able to perform the movements.
diablo III - beardsnbeer#1508 Mechwarrior Online - Rusty Bock
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Cattle egrets, with cattle
There are many bird species that have gotten all over the world because some stupid human thought that they should be released in a new habitat for some unfathomably stupid reason. "Well sure, North America has hummingbirds and prairie chickens and other neat sorts of birds that we don't have back in Europe, but you know what it's missing? Loud, noisy, messy starlings! This must be rectified!"
And then there are cattle egrets. No one introduced them to the Western Hemisphere. They just showed up. Apparently they just flew across the Atlantic. Some people claim with some grumbling that they may have had a ship assist, stopping on a boat to catch their breath or something before moving on, but there's no evidence for that. Cattle egrets regularly travel randomly to far away lands. They had been spotted in South America as early as the 1870s but weren't quite established and breeding until the 1930s, meaning likely multiple waves of colonists. And once they were established they spread.
Here's the thing about cattle egrets - although maybe you could kinda say possibly that because they spread so rapidly and far that they are invasive, but really they seem to naturalize into wherever they go. The Global Invasive Species Database basically states that they theoretically could be invasive, but there's no evidence of it. They show up, join in peacefully, and nest beside the natives without causing any problems or conflict. Because most egrets like eating aquatic species but cattle egrets are mostly terrestrial, they don't compete; the niches are different. They even seem to help cattle farmers wherever they go by eating insects around and even directly off the animals' backs. Cattle egrets weren't introduced - they immigrated, and that's alright.
tl;dr We hit a new page so I had to throw together some quick bird fact.
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TrippyJingMoses supposes his toeses are roses.But Moses supposes erroneously.Registered Userregular
Well, if they immigrated, where are their papers?!
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
There are many bird species that have gotten all over the world because some stupid human thought that they should be released in a new habitat for some unfathomably stupid reason. "Well sure, North America has hummingbirds and prairie chickens and other neat sorts of birds that we don't have back in Europe, but you know what it's missing? Loud, noisy, messy starlings! This must be rectified!"
The European starling was purposefully introduced to North America in 1890–1891 by the American Acclimatization Society, an organization dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into North America for cultural and economic reasons. Eugene Schieffelin, chairman at the time, allegedly decided all birds mentioned by William Shakespeare should be in North America. The bird had been mentioned in Henry IV, Part 1, and a hundred of them were released from New York's Central Park.[6]
travel back in time, show shakespeare a cassowary, watch as herds of cassowary run wild over the american plains
(the holy roman emperor rudolf II had a cassowary, which would have been brought back by dutch sailors via the amsterdam docks, so it's at least plausible that shakespeare could have heard of or seen pictures of one)
this is Roelant Savery's Landscape with Birds, painted in Utrecht in 1628
note the New World parrots and turkey, the African ostrich and crowned crane, the Mauritian dodo and the Australian cassowary
although in fact Rudolph's particular cassowary was apparently picked up in the Banda Islands in 1596 by a Dutch captain who would have gone there to gather nutmeg, which was worth more than its weight in gold at that time on account of how its only source was the Banda Islands
the source I'm reading says the cassowary killed the captain in transit but I would need to factcheck that before I believed it
anyway he definitely had one. he had all kinds of shit in his castle in Prague, on account of being one of the weirdest guys ever to live. Savery was a painter at his court for a while, which I assume is where he saw it
the source I'm reading says the cassowary killed the captain in transit but I would need to factcheck that before I believed it
I know what you mean, but I'm almost inclined to just believe it, those guys are pretty aggressive and in confined quarters on a ship it might be difficult to get away. Or maybe it got him in one blow.
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
Now the Blood Dragon variant makes even more sense (more aggressive because they've gained enough sentience to realize both how stupid they are and how they can't fly).
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Erin The RedThe Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered Userregular
Are cassowaries as dangerous as they seen in Far Cry 3?
I saw a thing at the zoo for cassowaries and it says they're mostly herbivores and will eat bugs and OCCASIONALLY some small animals, but they only kick at you in like an extreme self defense sort of situation. They won't chase you down and kick you in the dong.
Well, there's the Legion of Doom's Petting Zoo and then there's the Legion of Doom's Heavy Petting Zoo, adults only, please sign this Standard Contract.
Well, there's the Legion of Doom's Petting Zoo and then there's the Legion of Doom's Heavy Petting Zoo, adults only, please sign this Standard Contract.
Grodd is in one. Cheetah the other. You only find out which after you enter
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
NCG Cinemas in Lansing will soon begin offering special showtimes for people with disabilities.
Another movie theater chain announces plans for special showtimes for people with disabilities.
NCG Cinemas will start Sensory Friendly Showtimes next month, after putting all of its employees through training on how to better serve customers with special needs, like autism and cerebral palsy.
“NCG’s commitment to wanting to better serve their customers with special needs is an example all businesses and organizations should follow,” said Lindsey Turner of Special Needs Certified. “Knowing we have helped educate the employees at NCG, means there will be more environments where individuals with special needs and disabilities will be welcomed. This is a great testament that we’re moving closer to our vision of creating a society where everyone, regardless of their abilities, feels love and acceptance.”
Celebration Cinema! is also offering sensory showtimes, which means the movies aren't as loud, the lights are dimmed and movie-goers can get up and walk around.
Never hears of this before but it sounds like a good idea
Autism screenings are actually fairly common in the UK. Stuff like that helps fill seats on what would otherwise be dead time slots. So it's good business and awesome from a PR stand point.
The money discussion last page is a convenient point for me to talk about one of my favorite things: national personifications. Having a deity that represents your nation is a practice that goes back to, well, basically that point where we first started telling each other stories about the powerful beings that wielded control over the elements. But for brevity's sake we'll skip several thousand years of prehistory and recorded history and land ourselves smack in the 19th century.
This post got long and has images so I've spoilered it for ya.
The 1800's were a time of huge social and political upheaval. Colonialism was declining, though nobody really knew just how much further it'd go. New science and knowledge was giving birth to huge technological changes, which often drove new political changes. And that's all fun and worth reading about but basically it's a backdrop because this was also a period of time where a lot, and I do mean a lot of European countries were fashioning themselves as the New Greece. They all wanted to be that mythic figure of knowledge, and wisdom, and war, and following the trends of humans since forever, they appropriated one of the most appealing of ancient Greece's mythology: Athena.
Now, Athena is of course a super cool mythological figure. Daughter of Zeus, born from his head after he had a wicked hangover. Literally the goddess of wisdom, though also a war deity. Patron goddess of Athens, remembered then as now as the most important city and symbol of democracy. She's a great figure to latch onto and recast as a goddess of your own nation, and man that's exactly what most every European country did.
Side note: while grabbing images for this post I also looked into other countries' personifications and came across two Interesting Facts For Interested Individuals: one, way way way more countries used a clone of Athena than I realized, and two, the vast majority of national personifications are female. An interesting fact in the face of the overwhelming patriarchy.
There was Britain's Britannia.
Germany's Germania (seeing a pattern here?).
And many others. After France cast down its royalty and established its own democracy (and you know that whole Napoleon thing), they established Marianne. She was based more on Liberty than Athena, though of course depending on the usage and artist her appearance changed.
So, amidst all of this is the story of the plucky young United States of America, well before its rise to international prominence. The patron goddess of America would, much like Britannia and Germania, make use of an older name for the region: Columbia. She would be cast mostly on the French mold of Marianne, the two countries sharing at the time very much in common. Columbia in her traditional Stars-And-Stripes tunic and Phrygian cap in a First World War propaganda ad.
Other times she more strongly evoked the Athena mold and took on more of a warrior persona. Unsurprisingly this was more common during times of war.
Ah, but who is this, you might say? Well if you were born in the 20th century you've likely seen her in works of art but confused her for our current patron goddess: Liberty, Statue Of. France and the US were good chums towards the end of the 19th century. Mostly because they were all too eager to help the Americans out with their whole British problem a century ago, and somewhat more recently with the incredibly necessary infusion of cash money in the form of the Louisiana Purchase to help fund Napoleon's wars with literally all of the rest of Europe. Things were so swell between the two countries that France just straight up gave the USA a gigantic copper statue of the goddess of Liberty, and we liked it so much we stuck it out in the ocean so it'd be the among the first things new immigrants saw and also as a fun experiment to see how long it takes for copper to oxidize (a bit over twenty years, turns out).
And that's the story of how America tossed out one goddess and replaced her with another.
Posts
In an invisible jet.
they're super goddamn good
You could apparently lift and throw me in a fight
Then there's In Memoriam: Dresden, which is a piece about the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during WWII - notable because the incendiary bombs caused a firestorm which literally turned the entire city into a raging inferno and killed pretty much everyone unlucky enough to be caught in it. The last movement recreates the firebombing itself. Out-of-tune trombones do an eerily accurate mimicry of the sound of Flying Fortresses passing low overhead. Immediately following that, the piece uses various whistles, instrumental and vocal sound effects, and screams (first in German, then inarticulate) to make the sounds of bombs falling and a city being transformed into hell on earth, while the stage lights flicker to simulate explosions.
It is not an easy piece of music to listen to, but it is incredible.
On a lighter note (ha), the same symphonic wind ensemble played a piece, I forget what, in which the trombones were given the performance direction "Ballsy".
It's never too late!
We had an older fellow who was born in 1948 compete in the last meet.
His numbers were nothing amazing except when you consider you have a man that is 67 years old qualifying for national and world events just by virtue of competing and still being able to perform the movements.
Cattle egrets, with cattle
There are many bird species that have gotten all over the world because some stupid human thought that they should be released in a new habitat for some unfathomably stupid reason. "Well sure, North America has hummingbirds and prairie chickens and other neat sorts of birds that we don't have back in Europe, but you know what it's missing? Loud, noisy, messy starlings! This must be rectified!"
And then there are cattle egrets. No one introduced them to the Western Hemisphere. They just showed up. Apparently they just flew across the Atlantic. Some people claim with some grumbling that they may have had a ship assist, stopping on a boat to catch their breath or something before moving on, but there's no evidence for that. Cattle egrets regularly travel randomly to far away lands. They had been spotted in South America as early as the 1870s but weren't quite established and breeding until the 1930s, meaning likely multiple waves of colonists. And once they were established they spread.
Here's the thing about cattle egrets - although maybe you could kinda say possibly that because they spread so rapidly and far that they are invasive, but really they seem to naturalize into wherever they go. The Global Invasive Species Database basically states that they theoretically could be invasive, but there's no evidence of it. They show up, join in peacefully, and nest beside the natives without causing any problems or conflict. Because most egrets like eating aquatic species but cattle egrets are mostly terrestrial, they don't compete; the niches are different. They even seem to help cattle farmers wherever they go by eating insects around and even directly off the animals' backs. Cattle egrets weren't introduced - they immigrated, and that's alright.
tl;dr We hit a new page so I had to throw together some quick bird fact.
What
(the holy roman emperor rudolf II had a cassowary, which would have been brought back by dutch sailors via the amsterdam docks, so it's at least plausible that shakespeare could have heard of or seen pictures of one)
this is Roelant Savery's Landscape with Birds, painted in Utrecht in 1628
note the New World parrots and turkey, the African ostrich and crowned crane, the Mauritian dodo and the Australian cassowary
although in fact Rudolph's particular cassowary was apparently picked up in the Banda Islands in 1596 by a Dutch captain who would have gone there to gather nutmeg, which was worth more than its weight in gold at that time on account of how its only source was the Banda Islands
the source I'm reading says the cassowary killed the captain in transit but I would need to factcheck that before I believed it
anyway he definitely had one. he had all kinds of shit in his castle in Prague, on account of being one of the weirdest guys ever to live. Savery was a painter at his court for a while, which I assume is where he saw it
Somebody should remedy this. I'm not sure if UK netflix has it though.
I know what you mean, but I'm almost inclined to just believe it, those guys are pretty aggressive and in confined quarters on a ship it might be difficult to get away. Or maybe it got him in one blow.
Are you sure about that Platy? That seems surprising considering you could waft away on a gentle breeze
Their mannerisms were observed and used as a basis for the raptors in Jurassic Park.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I saw a thing at the zoo for cassowaries and it says they're mostly herbivores and will eat bugs and OCCASIONALLY some small animals, but they only kick at you in like an extreme self defense sort of situation. They won't chase you down and kick you in the dong.
They are the showcase of my Aviary of doom
And now your doom.
Uhhhhh.....?
Kids get in free at the zoo sponsored by the Legion of Doom.
Grodd is in one. Cheetah the other. You only find out which after you enter
Never hears of this before but it sounds like a good idea
This post got long and has images so I've spoilered it for ya.
Now, Athena is of course a super cool mythological figure. Daughter of Zeus, born from his head after he had a wicked hangover. Literally the goddess of wisdom, though also a war deity. Patron goddess of Athens, remembered then as now as the most important city and symbol of democracy. She's a great figure to latch onto and recast as a goddess of your own nation, and man that's exactly what most every European country did.
Side note: while grabbing images for this post I also looked into other countries' personifications and came across two Interesting Facts For Interested Individuals: one, way way way more countries used a clone of Athena than I realized, and two, the vast majority of national personifications are female. An interesting fact in the face of the overwhelming patriarchy.
There was Britain's Britannia.
Germany's Germania (seeing a pattern here?).
And many others. After France cast down its royalty and established its own democracy (and you know that whole Napoleon thing), they established Marianne. She was based more on Liberty than Athena, though of course depending on the usage and artist her appearance changed.
So, amidst all of this is the story of the plucky young United States of America, well before its rise to international prominence. The patron goddess of America would, much like Britannia and Germania, make use of an older name for the region: Columbia. She would be cast mostly on the French mold of Marianne, the two countries sharing at the time very much in common.
Columbia in her traditional Stars-And-Stripes tunic and Phrygian cap in a First World War propaganda ad.
Other times she more strongly evoked the Athena mold and took on more of a warrior persona. Unsurprisingly this was more common during times of war.
Ah, but who is this, you might say? Well if you were born in the 20th century you've likely seen her in works of art but confused her for our current patron goddess: Liberty, Statue Of. France and the US were good chums towards the end of the 19th century. Mostly because they were all too eager to help the Americans out with their whole British problem a century ago, and somewhat more recently with the incredibly necessary infusion of cash money in the form of the Louisiana Purchase to help fund Napoleon's wars with literally all of the rest of Europe. Things were so swell between the two countries that France just straight up gave the USA a gigantic copper statue of the goddess of Liberty, and we liked it so much we stuck it out in the ocean so it'd be the among the first things new immigrants saw and also as a fun experiment to see how long it takes for copper to oxidize (a bit over twenty years, turns out).
And that's the story of how America tossed out one goddess and replaced her with another.
It's been some time since I used a bathroom scale, but that was about as much as I used to weigh back in the day
Maybe I'm just dense!