Daily Slow Chat

4 comments

1. I randomly came across a cigarette ad on the street today. I think the last time I saw one was 20 years ago when I moved from Germany to the UK, which was around the time all forms of tobacco advertising got banned in the UK (Germany only did the same [embarrassingly recently](https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarette-street-ads-from-2022)…).

   Which did get me wondering: Let’s say you accidentally fell into a time machine while blackout drunk, and you woke up in 1995 on a random suburban street in your country. How long would it take you to work out it wasn’t 2023 anymore? I mean sure, we have more technology now, but visually I don’t think your average streetscape would look that different to, say, the 80s, and films set in the 80s only really feel like period pieces to me if they’re deliberately made as zeitgeisty as possible, [Ashes to Ashes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_to_Ashes_%28British_TV_series%29?wprov=sfla1)-style. Sure, some people dressed a bit differently in those days, but only a minority of people follow fashion trends that closely, and if I’m honest I don’t think my parents would stand out that much if they dressed today as they did in the 80s (well actually, my dad used to have a [70s dad moustache](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/xhdrVB8e5jbYPoP8evbL7H-650-80.jpg.webp), but you’ll be surprised how that kind of moustache still refuses to die the US, especially among white trash and Latinos). Cars don’t look that different to me than they did in the mid-90s or so, when they stopped being boxy. Phone boxes are still commonplace in the UK even though there’s no guarantee that they’ll have actual phones in them anymore. I think the main way you’d be able to tell something was off (I mean, unless you walked past a computer shop or a yuppie with a massive brick phone, of course) would indeed be if you saw a cigarette ad.

2. There’s a composer who turns well known Ballermann songs (party music with simple lyrics that are either about sex, or alcohol, or both) into genuine classical music.

   There’s e.g.

   * [“Saufen” (“Boozing”) as a baroque aria](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EpjJu7b4UqI) (with English subtitles)
   * [“Geh mal Bier holen” (“Fetch me some beer”) as a high romantic song](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FPTJ2g_aDFA)
   * but my current earworm is [“Ich schwanke noch” in an impressionist style](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BDwWE5jAjLc)

   The last one is originally by Ikke Hüftgold, who was almost our entry for this year’s ESC. And I have to admit that the title does have a clever little pun: “schwanken” can mean “to stagger” or “to waver”:
   “I’m thinking of never drinking alcohol again / but I’m still wavering/staggering”

3. Today I’m doing oral examining online (for Cambridge English).

   This used to be all face to face, and mostly it still is, but the online equivalent is becoming more common.

   I wonder how long it will be before they start to source online examiners from other countries, where they can pay them less ..or even do it all without needing a human presence!

4. It has taken a lot longer than expected to get my new tyres on my motorcycle, but it should be ready today which is very exciting. I found the culprit for my flat tyre, it was a roughly 5 cm long bit of steel. As I got the flat on a forest road, it must have dropped from a forestry machine or something like that. Just bad luck to hit a random sharp bit of steel on a seldom traveled gravel road, but I guess it is what it is. Pretty expensive this tyre changing circus. New tires, front and back, were about 300€ in total, new inner tubes were 50€, and I’ll probably pay my bike mechanic something like 50-70€. Oh well.

   I took trumpet lessons as a kid for maybe a year or two, but stopped since I was already playing the piano and haven’t really thought about it since. But recently I’ve been studying this one work that utilises a technique called multiphonics, or a horn growl or a horn chord, where a horn player plays a note like normal, but at the same time sings another one into the horn. Due to the way the sound waves of the two notes interact inside the tube it creates even more notes that are the sum and difference tones of the original notes. So, if you have one note that’s 130 Hz and another one that’s 392 Hz, the sum tone would be 522 Hz. Those are C3, G4, and C5.

   It’s super interesting, and now I hope I played a horn so I could experiment with this. I looked into buying a trumpet already, but even the cheap ones are like 700€, and that buys me two sets of motorcycle tyres…