Tchaikovsky’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

Aziraphale (an Angel, and part-time rare book dealer) and Crowley (an Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards), are in Crowley’s Bentley. One particularity is that all tapes left in a car for more than a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.

Somewhere around Chiswick, Aziraphale scrabbled vaguely in the scree of tapes in the glove compartment.
“What’s a Velvet Underground?” he said.
“You wouldn’t like it,” said Crowley.
“Oh,” said the angel dismissively. “Be-bop.”
“Do you know, Aziraphale, that probably if a million human beings were asked to describe modern music, they wouldn’t use the term ‘be-bop’?” said Crowley.
“Ah, this is more like it. Tchaikovsky,” said Aziraphale, opening a case and slotting its cassette into the Blaupunkt.
“You won’t enjoy it,” sighed Crowley. “It’s been in the car for more than a fortnight.”
A heavy bass beat began to thump the Bentley as they sped past Heathrow.
Aziraphale’s brow furrowed.
“I don’t recognize this,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s Tchaikovsky’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust,'” said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough.
To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd’s “We Are the Champions” and Beethoven’s “I Want To Break Free.” Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”

“Good Omens”
by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder

I swear I knew what I was going to blog about, mere moments ago. I was only missing the title. I knew I had several things to list. /me scratches head, looks confused. Damn, I should make a better use of twitter.

I could blog about ADD, mind you. Note the absence of H; “Hyperactivity” seems preposterous as far as I’m concerned.

Now, where was I?…

I wanted to share the irony of this Temperature Monitor program that I use and that seems to simply stop when the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (in this case, it was 83C/181F for the CPU A Temperature Diode). How dumb is that?
Also, I note that I have yet to hear the fans of my MacBook Pro.

There was something else…

Oh well, it probably wasn’t that important. My minibreak time is up anyway.

4tf?

Something very weird just occured.

Opera crashed (this is not the weird bit –they all crash–, it’s merely annoying –merely, because thanks to the ability to open the last saved session, it’s just a matter of being patient to find your opera right in the state it left you).

What is odd is that I had downloaded a .ogg file in the afternoon and that I was playing it with VLC, from my “Temporary downloads” folder, where all my (opera) downloads go. The .ogg file is no longer in the folder. The .ogg file has totally disappeared, in fact.

I’d like to download it again, and oddly enough, I can’t find the URI in the history.

Language barrier, problems reaching out

My parents sent me to the UK for 3 weeks, one summer, when I was 10. I stayed at the Carvers’, in Frome, not far from Bristol and Bath.

I don’t know why, but today I was reminded of watching TV during a weekend afternoon with their daughter, who was 13 years old. A soap opera was on and I was struggling (and quite failing) to understand what was going on.

I thought I had figured out the main female character was in early pregnancy. At this point I was barely paying attention to the show. I was looking for ways to speak to my companion. So I was rehearsing my side of the conversation, over and over.

Is she waiting for a baby?

That was the translation of “elle attend un bébé?”, which is the French for “is she pregnant?”, which I had never learnt to say.

And I rehearsed it (and other variations) for so long that eventually, it wasn’t worth saying anymore.

I had been concerned not only with the language barrier –I suspected my words weren’t right–, but also it was difficult for me to initiate the conversation. Yet, I wanted to. I didn’t.

I am not sure whether I wanted to find out if the woman was actually expecting, or if I simply wanted to talk.