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Below are the 7 most recent friends journal entries:
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12:00 pm
sunflowerinrain
[Link] |
Stones and stars
Brendan is here this week, doing some more work upstairs - the last of the really messy work, I hope. He's hacked and scraped huge quantities of low-grade cement and crumbling mud from between the stones of the upper living-room walls, and is now pointing them. It's a horrible job in the current temperature, especially as the cement mixer (for the chaux, not for cement) is out in the garage. Yesterday was cloudy and cold; last night was clear and extremely cold; today we haven't yet achieved zero Celsius, and the sun is brightly reflected from the white lawn.
Last night was very cold, but so clear. The sky was stunning, so bright with stars that it was hard to pick out constellations. Sadly, much too cold to take out the telescope!
This entry was originally posted at http://sunflowerinrain.dreamwidth.org/438369.html. Please comment there using OpenID (for example, your Livejournal username.livejournal.com).
Tags: house, weather
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12:06 am
katsmeat
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/95269576/2817626) [Link] | Oooohhh....
For once, the job centre came up with useful results - a couple of numerical modelling gigs with the British Antarctic Survey in Cam, doing stuff with ice shelves.
I'll ignore that 50%-of-jobs-come-through-personal-networking-and-5%-come-from-replying-to-ads statistic. Which seems to imply that because I've only have a piece of paper, as opposed to a favour-owing bosum buddy in the BAS, I'm screwed before I even start.
Hey ho and all that. At least my quite totally awesuumm Velma Zombie Apocalypse T shirt arrived today.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
http://katsmeat.dreamwidth.org/182052.html#comments
Current Mood:  awake
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04:30 pm
sunflowerinrain
[Link] | Vocabulary is curious and fascinating: local usage, specialist words, and the "false friends" of words which came from the same ancestors but haven't been on speaking terms since that row between many-great-grandfather and his brother. I can read Voltaire, Dumas, and Mallarmé pretty well; the reading list at university included many mid-twentieth-century works and a dictionary of Argot. Two days spent in a French school on an exchange visit left me with some grasp of the difference between poetry and verse and an ineradicable ear-worm of the first four lines of La Cigale.
Colloquial speech is sometimes easy, and sometimes not so easy (remember the English wine-dealer and old-house-owner who said his conversational French wasn't very good but he spoke excellent Building). For example, trying to establish what animal was hit by Y's car had me lost after she and C decided it was too small for cerf or petit sanglier, and too big for lapin[0] - I didn't recognise the names of any of the others.
I've been meaning to check some musical terms, particularly the term for "sheet music" aka "the dots". Note that English doesn't have a word for it: the fact that we commonly refer to it as "music" can be very confusing when trying to define "Music", a hard enough task anyway. It turns out that the French use one word rather than a phrase, and I now know what it is.
At Monday's rehearsal, the director commented that I was ranging my partitions.
[0] deer, baby wild boar, rabbit
This entry was originally posted at http://sunflowerinrain.dreamwidth.org/438069.html. Please comment there using OpenID (for example, your Livejournal username.livejournal.com).
Tags: language, wildlife
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01:52 pm
katsmeat
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/95586150/2817626) [Link] | I generally don't have a particular interest in anthropomorphic fiction (aside from Usagi Yojimbo).
But I say this comic looks awfully, awfully good; it's tempting me.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
http://katsmeat.dreamwidth.org/181779.html#comments
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11:47 am
katsmeat
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/95990401/2817626) [Link] | My new, mild enthusiasm for flying boats had me randomly finding this page this morning. The text reads like it's been (badly) machine translated, which is odd as the person who wrote is seems to be British. But the pictures are wonderful. Here are my two favorites:
It's sometime in the 1930's. The big fast thing is a Short Singapore, the pilot of which is currently screaming expletives and hauling the control column into his chest, to clear the suicidal idiot in a small boat, who is looking to win a Darwin Award.
These three seem to have just landed their Sunderland. Apparently if your plane got a hole, say from hitting some floating debris during take off, the correct procedure was to find a large, grass field and hope for the best (I suppose fixing a flying boat with a torn-up belly was easier than raising one that had sunk.) The chap on the right seems to have the happy grin of somebody who's done an awful lot of damage to something very large and expensive, but who knows there's no comeback on him. Presumably the car's there so they can top it up with left-over fuel, salvaged from the plane's tank.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
http://katsmeat.dreamwidth.org/181210.html#comments
Tags: amused
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06:34 pm
sunflowerinrain
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/20557931/977394) [Link] |
Tutoie or not tutoie, that is the question
I've mentioned before the curious thing about the use of "tu" in this area. People are all kissy-kissy as soon as they are on first name terms, but still use "vous". The French person with whom I travel to choir-practice clearly doesn't know me well enough to kiss, though he kisses the other co-chorister who is English: but then, they've known each other for about 5 years. However, he addresses me with "tu".
Ah. Of course. He's not from round here. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://sunflowerinrain.dreamwidth.org/437837.html. Please comment there using OpenID (for example, your Livejournal username.livejournal.com).
Tags: france, language
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10:41 am
sunflowerinrain
[Link] |
Téléthon concert at Saint-Léger
Last night's Téléthon concert at Saint-Léger was good.
Y, C, and I arrived before 8pm, the time requested (I like to get to places in time to grab a nearby parking-space). The concert didn't actually start until after 9, which was a long time in a church where the heaters had only just been switched on. It warmed up nicely, though, and there was much chat amongst the choir while we waited. I'm not in favour of talking before singing, but it was all very friendly and took our minds off our cold toes.
The programme was Arc en Ciel (us), Le Rallye de Saint-Antoine, cake and hot drinks, repeat apart from the cake and hot drinks. Most of the female singers had to decline the drinks because the church has no loos. Not a problem for the blokes, of course, though a few of them helpfully suggested forming a circle for us out in the graveyard.
We sang well and bouncily: carols and songs in French, Russian, English, Hebrew, Spanish, Zulu, and three comic songs in French.
The Rallye... was a surprise.
It looked like this, except the St-Antoine rallye's coats are green. Somebody behind me joked "how rude" when they turned their backs on us and put on their hats. I don't know why they turn their backs because the trompes are loud enough to be heard whichever way they're facing. Very loud. Those of us in the front row (i.e. members of the choir) had to put our fingers in our ears. It's an exciting noise, and beautiful when they played softly; decidedly raucous when loud. The "trompe" is obviously difficult to play, and it's amazing how many notes they can get.
I hope someone has taken a photo of the rallye wandering around with the instruments, because they didn't carry the trompe - they wore it: most of them, round the neck. I wanted to comment to my neighbours but realised that French uses the same verb for "carry" and "wear", so it needed too much explanation. They have special cases for the trompes. Well, all musical instruments have special cases, but these were unexpectedly special. The case with a hole!.
The pieces are short (they need a lot of breath) and most of them consist of short phrases in a call-and-respond pattern; a few pieces are more lyrical. Apparently the trompes de chasse bands started around here about 20 years ago (or re-started, I'm not sure). I'd like to get more information: next year I'll visit the St-Antoine riding school (about 5 miles from here) and ask.
As the announcer said at the end of their last set, the wild boars in the forest around St-Léger would have been very nervous that night.
Got home at half-past-morning.
This entry was originally posted at http://sunflowerinrain.dreamwidth.org/437080.html. Please comment there using OpenID (for example, your Livejournal username.livejournal.com).
Current Mood:  anxious
Tags: charente maritime, music, singing
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