Now I totally need me a French version of the My Fandom Plays Bouzouki icon.
Because yum, oh my, and hell, he even looks good just HOLDING the bouzouki. Fortunately, he can also PLAY it:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QShZSiu9Mio&w=560&h=345]
Furthermore, it must be said that damn, that boy’s voice is pretty too:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkDUXQtFuvg&w=560&h=345]
Also, this pic of the pretty Monsieur Beaudry and his colleague Monsieur Demers on the fiddle TOTALLY wants a caption. I love that look on Olivier’s face. I’ve seen looks like that exchanged between The Doyle and the McCann!
And speaking of reasons to need my passport
Early warning to all my Canadian peeps who haven’t seen me mention this on Facebook, Twitter, or G+ already: next year, 
solarbird
The core of this is this music festival in St. John’s. I’ve wanted to hear Newfoundland music on Newfoundland soil for a while now, and so when I saw Mr. Hallett of the B’ys tweet about this, I went HEY! Also, I do have writing-related reasons I want to see St. John’s, as those of you who’ve read Faerie Blood have probably heard me mention–and I’m given to understand that if you want to visit Newfoundland, July-August is about the window wherein the weather is probably not going to suck.
But! The Trainventure part of this comes in with how Dara and I want to take the train across the country rather than fly, and stop in interesting places on the way. brightbeak
Also, for those of you who actually are in Newfoundland, if you have any recommendations on good little hotels or bed-and-breakfast type places that Dara and I might stay in in St. John’s when we’re there, I will totally want to hear them.
And if any of you want to arrange to see us, let me know! Actual details won’t be hammered out until early 2012 probably, but I wanted to get the word out just so interested people can start discussing it with me. :)
Going to VCON, need new passport!
The last time I remember having my passport was on the way back from Vancouver last year, when solarbird
This is important because we want to go to VCON next month! One, we want another excuse to visit Vancouver, and the B’ys have not favored us with another Vancouver show on the tour schedule yet this year. Two, it’s a fairly tiny convention and we’re looking forward to attending a convention Dara doesn’t actually have to work. Three, we haven’t had a formal vacation this year, and don’t have one scheduled, so this’ll be a bit of a mini-vacation!
So I’m going to have to fill out the forms for reporting a passport lost and applying for a new one. Fortunately the courthouse down in Lake Forest Park takes the appropriate forms, AND they have Saturday hours. So I’m going to get that done and dealt with next weekend, and pay the fee to expedite a new passport, and hopefully that’ll get VCON all squared away. We have hotel reservations but we don’t have train tickets yet.
Anyway–yo, Vancouver peeps, if there’s any chance you’ll also be at that convention, let Dara and me know! It’d be nice to see you.
And the winner is…
Le Vent du Nord, who take over as my official Second Favorite Band. They narrowly, narrowly beat out La Volee d’Castors on the grounds that:
- Simon Beaudry is gorgeous, and as previously noted, I have a marked fondness for cute dark-haired bouzouki players! (Note: yes, I am aware he’s holding a guitar in that picture. I have not yet found a suitably pretty picture of him with a bouzouki. Being imaginative, I can extrapolate!)
- LVN actually seem to periodically do US shows, if their tour calendar is any indication. Which means there’s an off-chance I might actually get to see them perform if they ever head out this way, and if they do, I am ALL OVER THAT.
- LVN’s website has an English edition as well as a French one. LVC’s website currently does not, and while I can still kinda poke my way around theirs and make reasonable guesses about what’s what, a coherent full English site is still more helpful.
- LVN also provide lyrics on their website. While I speak only a meager handful of phrases in French, I can at least use the French lyrics to read while I’m listening to the songs, which can let me start to try to parse them as words, as opposed to “lyrical nonsense being sung by guys with sexy voices”! The English lyrics provided are spotty at best, and are clearly the half-assed output of a translation engine, but they are at least enough to give me a half-assed idea of what various songs are actually about.
- Nicolas Boulerice has a hurdy-gurdy, and Unusual Instruments FTW!
Now, all this squeeing aside, LVC are still very, very close behind the gentlemen of LVN, on the strength of their music alone!
And I fear that Carbon Leaf has now slipped to fourth place. Sorry, lads! (I do however resolve to check out CL’s forthcoming live album/DVD set, and show them some love too.)
I'll get the hang of this yet!
and I have been doing this thing for the last several weeks where we go to session only every other week–and use the off-week as a practice night. Meanwhile, I’ve shifted from taking the General to session to taking my piccolo instead, and focusing on learning the actual melody lines for various tunes.
This is working out pretty well! I can only play five or six tunes semi-reliably–by which I mean, I can actually play “Si Bheag Si Mhor” by heart, and about five others if I’m reading the sheet music at the time. I ALMOST have “Banish Misfortune” down by heart but the C part is still eluding me. What this tells me though is that by practicing, I CAN learn these things. And it gets noticed in session, too! Once you start showing up and being able to play the tunes, you get significantly more cred, even if you’re still pretty much a newbie like me.
Right now I’m focusing my efforts on the handy dandy PDF session leader Matt gave me, with about 25 tunes he’s fond of and considers a good introduction to sessions in general. From that, I’ve been working on “Banish Misfortune”, “Road to Lisdoonvarna”, “Morrison’s Jig”, and a bit of “Blarney Pilgrim”. Although I haven’t actively practiced them yet, I can also whip through “Kesh Jig” and “Foggy Dew” if I’m reading the PDF.
Meanwhile, I’ve got TunePal on the iPad and I spend a good chunk of session these days just listening to what the others are doing–and seeing if TunePal can figure out what the tunes are so I can save ’em for later exploration. Half the time, the app has a pretty good idea of what it’s hearing. If it wibbles and has no goddamn idea, I’ll just ask! Then I can look it up manually. And once you have a tune in the app, you can make it play it for you, adjusting the tempo if you need to. It’s a GREAT learning/reference tool for session newbies. Highly, highly recommended if you have an iPad.
Last night’s session in particular was relaxed and groovy, with just me, Dara, Matt, and a couple new folks Dara and I hadn’t met before, a woman who played fiddle and mandolin and a guy who played guitar and bodhran, and from them I picked up a couple more tunes to add to TunePal for later investigation: “The Yellow Tinker” and “The Frieze Breeches”. Plus, I had to giggle and giggle at one particular wibble TunePal had trying to identify tunes–when it offered me “Whiskey Makes You a Lunatic”. Which had NOT A GODDAMN THING to do with what was actually being played, but the title alone made me LOL, so I had to add it to my list.
And to tie back to my French Canadian fangirling post, I’ve also decided I have designs on learning “The Jig of Slurs”, “Irish Washerwoman”, and “Atholl Highlander”, which make up the “Fortierville” set that’s track one on La Volee d’Castors’ kickass live album. It’ll be approximately oh, I dunno, EIGHT YEARS before I’m able to play that set nearly as fast as they do, but TunePal helpfully provided me the sheet music to each. I’m armed. I’m dangerous. I HAVE A PICCOLO. BRING IT.
Fangirling, French Canadian style!
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can ever dislodge my beloved B’ys from the top of my music list–but I gotta say, Le Vent du Nord and La Volee d’Castors are duking it out HARD for the esteemed position of My Second Favorite Band. Especially after I went and found some videos of Le Vent du Nord this afternoon, and realized WHOA HEY WAIT A MINUTE, their guitarist/bouzouki player is really rather cute. Thus continuing my grand tradition of being partial to cute dark-haired bouzouki players!
Here, have some Le Vent du Nord goodness, them doing “Cre Mardi”, one of my favorite songs of theirs. The dude in the front, nearest to the person who took the vid, is the aforementioned cute guitarist/bouzouki player. When he moves out of the way towards the latter half of the song, you can see more of the awesome podorythmie action from his bandmate behind him! WHILE THE GUY IS PLAYING THE FIDDLE. I mean damn.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzkD9nEAK2k&w=425&h=349]
I grabbed a couple more of theirs for my YouTube favorites list as well, like this one, which is a full ten minutes of a capella excellence (all four guys in the band take turns singing lead, and I got a giggle out of this one featuring a tune La Volee d’Castors covered, “Les Coucous”), and this one, which is also long but is a nice segue from an instrumental into vocals. Mad props to YouTube user bordurat, too, who took all three of these vids and who is clearly an LVN fan.
For comparison, I also give you La Volee d’Castors here and here. I like these guys just about as much as Le Vent du Nord–their harmonies aren’t as smooth and polished in these vids (although NOTE: they’re really a lot more polished on their latest album, Le retour), but they have GBS-like levels of vigor on their awesome live album Y a Du Monde À’ Messe! and I TOTALLY want to see them in concert. And check THEIR foot-rhythm guy, who totally meets and matches LVN’s–LVC’s guy makes with the footstompy + accordion!
I highly recommend both of these groups for any GBS fan who either speaks French or digs the sound of it sung!
New Hidden Expedition game, woo!
If I may take a moment to do a work-related post, I am delighted to spread the news that we have a shiny new Hidden Expeditions game out! Check out Hidden Expedition: The Uncharted Islands, newly released today! (This is the PC Collector’s Edition of the game–if you’re a Mac user, sit tight, we should have the Mac version available soon too!)
Also, we have a shiny new site for the entire Hidden Expedition series, right over here! Highly recommended, especially Hidden Expedition: Amazon. I’ve played that a couple times now, on full computers as well as on my iPad!
I have a cunning plan
Which is to say, I’m going to take the entire week of Labor Day off since I have the vacation time to spare, and work on finishing my edits. To further this goal, I will be also dropping off the net for the duration of that week. I’ll still be answering email, but I won’t be monitoring Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, and for the most part I’ll only be answering email sent directly to me (as opposed to any of the mailing lists I’m on, or comments on any of my posts).
Noting this now by way of general accountability. I may post status updates during that week–again, for purposes of accountability–but I can’t guarantee I’ll answer any comments on them.
We’ll see how much I can get done before then; any little bit I can get done before does after all further the goal. And anything I can write above and beyond finishing the edits on Lament will be bonus. Christopher and Kendis are looking VERY expectant in the back of my brain, you know.
So there you have it. If you think you might want to get a hold of me during that week for whatever reason, email, text, or phone will be best! If you think you should have those means of contacting me and you don’t, let me know.
If Irish musicians played Nethack
It has amused me for a while now that in the vast repertoire of tunes available to Irish musicians, several of them have vaguely SF/F-nal names, like “King of the Fairies”, “Queen of the Fairies”, and “The Elven Cloak”.
That last one in particular, though, got me thinking of Nethack thanks to my propensity for playing Elf characters. Which, of course, led me to wonder about other hypothetical Nethack-themed Irish tune names! Such as:
- The Surly Shopkeeper
- Farewell to My Pet Cat
- Gold in the Bag of Holding
- The Cursed Loadstone Lament
- The Polymorph Trap Jig (this one would definitely change keys AND time signatures between the A part, the B part, and the C part)
- Yet Another Stupid Death Reel
- The Elven Boots
- The Infravision Jig
- Izchak’s Magic Lamp (That I Stole in Minetown)
- The Vibrating Square
- The Lich That Cursed My Broadsword
- Road to Gehennom
- Drowsy Maggie Needs Sleep Resistance
- A Luckstone to Banish Misfortune
- The Succubus Washerwoman
Anybody got any others?
Book Log #10: The Young Widow, by Cassandra Chan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I saw Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons mysteries recommended on LJ and decided to check them out–and wound up being very glad I did. The style of the series is very akin to Dorothy Sayers, enough that unless you’re paying attention it’s easy to mistake these books for period mysteries; they aren’t. That it takes a bit to realize this in Book 1, even with such obvious technological markers as cell phones and the Internet, is one of the reasons the series takes a bit to get its feet under it. But hang in there, because there’s a lot to like here.
The foundation of the series is the friendship between Phillip Bethancourt, a son of British nobility who’s dabbling in assisting police investigations, and the sergeant Jack Gibbons. Bethancourt gets away with participating in Gibbons’ investigations because his blue-blooded father has expressed strong interest in his son’s being able to productively occupy himself, and because he has an aptitude for it. For his own part, Gibbons is the more prosaic, earnest foil to Bethancourt’s elegance. The two men have an excellent chemistry to their friendship, even in this first book; I found myself a bit regretful that it’s already in full swing when the story starts, because it would have been great fun to see how these two characters meet and establish their relationship.
The case in The Young Widow gives them plenty to work with, at any rate. Wealthy Geoffrey Berowne has been poisoned, and the prime suspect, his young third wife Annette, is disturbingly alluring to Gibbons. The two friends uncover the expected pile of dark family secrets in their investigation, but what really drives this plot is the chemistry between Gibbons and Annette. It’s important character development for Gibbons that affects him throughout the succeeding books.
Three stars for a decent start to a series.