Beautiful art on a big decision

Matthew has made a brilliant little piece of art; the way the Remain campaign should have been done.


If you are on a mobile you will have to "request desktop site" (it's always there somewhere) - it's because of the music, which is hilarious.

The Travels of Tuneage - Dark Eyes

It appears that the words of the song known as "Dark Eyes" were written by a Ukranian poet called Yevhen Pavlovych Hrebinka, who published a Russian version in 1843, possibly as a compliment to the woman he later married. It was then set - it doesn't seem clear by whom or when - to a waltz written, probably in Russia, perhaps as early as the 1810s, by a German (or possibly French) composer called Florian or Feodor Hermann.

First, here's the playlist link for this post, in case you want to open it in another window and just let it play.

The title of this waltz is given by Wikipedia and others in French as "valse hommage", but this pianist, Alexander Zlatkovski of Alaska,  calls it "Recollection", which seems to me like a reasonable translation. His research has found one account saying it started out as a march and was changed to a waltz by the composer, which is interesting in relation to what happens later, although he's not at all convinced.



The result - perhaps with a minor rewrite adding some gloomier words, since Hrebinka and the young lady seem to have got on fine - was the song popularised by the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin. The title Очи чёрные is written in several ways in Roman letters, but most often as "ochi chornye". A similar version is played by violinist Albert Sandler in this Pathé clip (not on the Youtube playlist).



At about the same time - 1915 to 1920 - it seems to have been rewritten with English words by an British Italian composer, Adalgiso Ferraris. He made one big change; the rhythm. Here's Al Bowlly singing. Rhythmically and melodically, and minus the over-drastic changes of speed towards the end, this would be a sweet tango, a bit like Rafael Canaro's French ones. It doesn't have enough oomph for me, and it's too dominated by the vocalist, but it's quite nice.



Ferraris is also the credited on this '78 by Harry Parry and his radio sextet; but they're taking it in a totally different direction, dancewise.



Toto, I don't think we are waltzing any more.

Nor, apparently, did Louis Armstrong, or his percussionist:



That's the one that started me making this little collection, when Deborah Segantini posted it on Facebook.

 So, we get lots of different versions, each artist adding their own riffs to complement the simple and memorable tune.

Django Reinhardt called it "Les Yeux Noirs".



This French movie version of Les Yeux Noirs, is a waltz again, with accordion. But only until the end of the vocal line. Then it changes at 1:50 and goes for the 'gypsy' sound.



This bombastic performance by the Red Army Choir does the same thing. Eventually.

There's also a German waltz version which seems to be just a translation - Schwartze Augen - of Chaliapin's hit, and, in my opinion, need not detain us, not even on the playlist. I far prefer the drunk-sounding jazz one from the soundtrack of Das Boot.

Chet Atkins' version follows Les Yeux Noirs in starting out as a waltz and then changing after the first minute and doing something else.



I can't really compare all these very different styles of music. But of all the ways this melody gets extended and enhanced, I think Francisco Canaro's B-tune in Ojos Negros is exceptionally good. Instead of brilliant variations on the tune and rhythm, this beautiful tango - with Roberto Maida singing the Spanish words - adds a second melody the equal of the first. As far as I know, the second melody is original to this piece - if anyone knows otherwise, do put it in the comments.



Now, let's meet a totally different sound world. This one was written in Sundanese (the language of the western part of Java) by an Indonesian composer Ismael Marzuki in honour of his wife, who was from round there.



It actually reminds me, a bit, of the more lyrical kizombas (kizomba is the "angolan tango" that I sometimes play at work to drown my colleagues' wittering - check it out on YouTube. It varies a lot).

 Panon Hideung comes in a Karaoke version, with dancing. Go on, click.



You may already be wondering what this song is called in Japanese.

It's called Dark Eyes. The title is written 黒い瞳 and pronounced Kuroi Hitomi. Embedding is disabled on this version by popular 50's crooner Frank Nagai, whose singing I must say is lovely. I thought I had the wrong thing at first, but then realised it does the reverse of what Canaro does: the words have their own, different melody, and Dark Eyes doesn't come in till 1:38, with the instrumental section. There's a very regular ballroom tango beat.

Once you know how to copy/paste the title, you can quickly find versions with the "Dark Eyes" melody sung. Here's a Karaoke one. I notice "J. Iglesias" is mentioned in the opening credits. Investigating Julio Iglesias' involvement with this particular tune is left as an exercise for the reader. there are probably lots more directions we could go in.

I will sign off for the night, however, with this indescribably sweet Japanese choral take. It's a waltz to begin with, then changes, like Les Yeux Noirs. It seems a lot of mid-twentieth-century French songs have versions in Japanese, and that may well be where this came from.



Special thanks go to Deborah Segantini for the idea and to Hidemi Asano for her Japanese research.

Last Tanda in Holborn

And the single women say:

That's not my sock.

This is my sock. Whose sock is that?

I don't know whose sock that is.

Are you walking to the train?

Unrecommended books

There are such things as books about how I.T. ('Information Technology') ought to be done in ordinary companies. This genre is known as "ITIL", and you don't need to care what that stands for. I have even attempted to read one or two: as a genre, they are inane, with diagrams worse than the text.

It came into my head today that one of them, to which I had been foolish enough to refer after reading the title, was so entirely useless and unrelated to how anything actually happens, that it seemed to have been written by someone from Mars.

But no; this is nonsense. A person from the planet Mars would have written a much better book, because they couldn't have based it on anything but observation of reality.

Anyway, I'm off now for another long weekend, and very happy to be out of the office. I had one colleague - a database administrator - who wrote his out of office message in the form of a rhyming couplet. I didn't manage that today.

Smirking survey

CALLER 

Hello, I'm Linda from T.N.T. Research, we're doing a survey about smirking and brand awareness, would you be able to answer a few questions? 

HEDGEHOG

... From what, sorry?

LINDA

I'm from T.N.T. Research. We're doing a small survey about smirking, and brand awareness?

HEDEGHOG

Smirking? As in ... a small smile? And what, sorry?

LINDA 

Er, smirking, as in smirking cigarettes. 

HEDGEHOG
Oh! Smoking. Er - I don't smoke, I'm sorry.

LINDA 

Is there anyone in the household who smirks?

HEDGEHOG 

Er, no, sorry. No, thank you. [Puts phone down].

I don't even know anyone who smokes, any more! Extra points if you can tell me where Linda was from. And I honestly wasn't taking the piss out of her accent - my brain was a bit tired, and without any context I just couldn't rearrange the sounds into anything I recognised from life.

Luxury

You know what my favourite thing about having a smartphone is so far? The ability to read John Hempton in bed. Or watch Periodic Videos. Both jobs it does better than my laptop - silently and coolly, without annoying interruptions.

Go Gladys!

This is Gladys Tejeda, who was born to a family of subsistence farmers, two and a half miles above sea level in the Andes of Peru. Today she completed the Olympic Marathon.

Gladys Tejeda with the Museum of London in the background

She finished in 43rd place, in a personal best time of 2:32:07, nine minutes behind the winner and totally unnoticed by the cameras. I was standing at 33.7km when I took this picture. I wanted to know what would happen to her when I saw her carrying the flag in the opening ceremony.

The crowd all around me cheered every single runner. If they couldn't pronounce her name and didn't know the name of her country, they just shouted "Go Oooonn!! Keep Goinnnng!". And quite a lot of them, including me, stayed to cheer on the runner in 107th and last place, making as much noise for her as we could. The men in the clear-up van applauded us right back.

Chinese bus mystery answers!

Awesome comments today! The Chinese bus, pictured again below, is explained.

Iain gives the following two links:

Joanna Scarratt UA Brands: Chinese Happy Backpacker

"With a bit of digging, I discovered that Ogilvy’s Beijing arm created a campaign earlier this year for Yili, the leading Chinese dairy brand and official sponsor of the Olympic Chinese Sports Delegation. It’s called “Let’s Olympic Together,” and aims to uncover ordinary Chinese people’s extraordinary stories. There are outdoor print ads, short films, TV commercials and digital engagement initiatives inspiring viewers to realise their own “Olympic” dreams by embracing a healthy lifestyle"

At ChinaSMACK, Yili lauches new campaign to coincide with Olympic hysteria includes a video of the runner shown on the bus, which is also here. He is apparently Li, a 62 year old marathon runner.

Louis independently gives the pinyin and a rough translation which agrees with the above:

"ping(2) fan(2) zhong(1) guo(2) ren(2), bu(4) ping(2) fan(2) de gu(4) shi(4). A bit rusty with my pinyin so I wasn't sure of the correct way of indicating the tone. A rough translation is: An ordinary (or common?) Chinese, an extradordinary story."

Thanks guys! It doesn't entirely explain why the ad is on a London bus outside the umbrella shop. My best guess is that it's directed mainly at a TV audience back home, via a carefully-planned campaign to get the ads on TV and talked about, partly by that very oddity. Worked on me!

Head screwed on wrong

You know when you have your head set for the wrong thing? I was all set for a quiet afternoon at the Letchmore Heath tea dance, a bit of nice dancing, a bit of sitting and catching up, working on some friendships, a little trivial gossip about people I long to talk about with sympathetic people who will talk about them without pointing that out, perhaps a few ill-advised confidences, maybe indulge in some minor histrionics, and then all these really lovely unexpected people turn up and I do nothing but dance and drink tea. It was great, but it wasn't what I had my head set for, and I ended up wanting more of everything, both thrilled and inexplicably disappointed and having a totally confusing afternoon before ending up eating an orange in bed.

O London Bus, thou art translated ...

Today, for the first time, I saw a London bus advertisement (apparently for drinking milk, or something) written entirely in a language I cannot read at all, let alone translate.

Don't misunderstand me - advertisements in languages other than English without a translation are very common in London and not at all remarkable, but they're usually small in scale, the largest being shop names saying obvious things like "POLISH FOODS" in Polish. As far as I remember, this is the first time I've seen a foreign-language ad on a bus.

O London Bus, thou art translated! Click to embiggen.

Although the shapes of the characters are of course vaguely familiar, the only one that means anything specific to me is the fifth one which I know as "rèn", a human being. Now, there are numerous languages written in Chinese characters, and I have no reliable way of knowing even which one this is, although under the circumstances Modern Standard Mandarin seems the most likely candidate, with Cantonese perhaps second favourite.

I am curious to know if the man in running shirt and glasses is 'just a man,' or someone the target audience would recognise.

I can't use Google Translate for this because I don't know how to write the characters on my computer. Can any of my readers (a) confirm the language, (b) make a pinyin transcription (c) translate the text? [Edit: Answers here]

The location, incidentally, is the corner of New Oxford Street, where the umbrella shop is.

Flying Baby Elephant

Another dumbphone picture, sorry it's so small.

Flying Baby Elephant

We were driving back from a fabulous birthday surprise milonga in Bristol. Not only was there a baby elephant flying in the sky, it was a thundery sky generally, with intermittent rain, and for a long time every vehicle had its own individual rainbow attached to the rear wheels.

For more clouds: The Cloud Appreciation Society, fighting the banality of blue-sky thinking.

Three Pairs of Glasses

I was SO depressed at six o'clock - my work week had just been depressing and I had practically convinced myself that I was a disastrous, shameful failure with no hope of redemption. Minds like mine do that sometimes, especially when exposed to boredom and stupidity together.

And now I've had a great evening, and I was so happy on the Tube home that some woman about fifteen years younger than me, who wasn't even obviously drunk, as she was getting off, said "You look so happy! and I love the flower in your hair. Give me a high five, don't leave me hanging". So I gave her a high five and wished her a very good night.

There was a moment when I wished I had my proper camera. I only had my dumbphone, so we'll have to make do with this tiny little picture.

"When it's a good tanda, this happen!"

Beto, who was DJing, saw me spotting this, he laughed and said "When it's a good tanda, this happen!". The glasses belong to two friends, who were busy having a good tanda together, and one other person who I was convinced, a moment later, had picked up the wrong pair - but I was mistaken, it was all right.

Affordances

I was in a café where they hand out those buzzing things that tell you when your order is ready, so you can come to the counter and collect it. All they do is buzz and flash little red LED lights to attract your attention, then keep buzzing till you hand them back in exchange for your meal.

A young man was chatting with his friend when the thing buzzed. Startled, he jumped up, at the same time seizing the buzzer, staring at it intently and tapping its insensible plastic face, as though half his brain knew it was time to fetch the food and the other half thought an acknowledgement would materialise it in front of him. Or at any rate, knew how to react to a rectangular hand-sized buzzing thing that wanted its attention.

Both of them fell about laughing and he entered into the joke by waving it about and lifting it to his ear.

I regularly try to wave my Oyster* card at my front door; at least half the doors and gates in my life open when you wave things at them, and it is an effort to remember that this one requires a physical key.

In my place of work there are so many doors that behave in totally different ways. There are a few normal doors that you push or pull. There are doors that you wave a card at, and they slide open. There are doors that you wave a card at, and they open on a hinge, but very, very cautiously, so that thin people go in first. There is a door consisting of two glass blades that meet in the middle, which requires you to wave a card at it, and is so very like the barriers on the Tube that I always reach for my Oyster card; except that the LED "go" or "stop" display means something totally different and contradictory.

There is a worrying kind of glass revolving door, such that you have to wave your card at it to unlock it, then step into a little 45-degree pocket, whereupon it starts revolving, and you shuffle very slowly around to be spat out at the other side. On no account must you push anything, since if you do it will panic, freeze, and trap you like a fish in a tank, so the security guard will have to come and press buttons to let you out.

There are two variations of a subtly different kind of revolving door that does exactly the same thing, except that it starts revolving when you get close enough (there's no indication of where you have to stand, or what is going to happen). One of those has a green button nearby that looks as though it might be a "request to exit" button; if you press it, the door gets stroppy and freezes, much to the annoyance of the people outside trying to get in. There are also some old-fashioned revolving doors that you just push; so that you stand there like a lemon trying to guess what you're meant to do.

And almost all these doors behave differently depending on whether you are going out or coming in. There are many doors where you have to do something to unlock them, and then do something else to open them, such as push or pull, with all the possible confusion that entails - but not too quickly, and not too slowly. Different doors I meet in the course of my day's work require staff cards issued by two different companies, both of which I am supposed to wear in a visible way (unless I am crossing the road between buildings, in which case I am advised to conceal them). But you cannot keep these two cards in the same container, because then they stop working. Neither can you keep any of them with your Oyster card, or that will stop working, too.

I am always standing in front of doors and hunting around for the "Open, Sesame" buttons that mean "unlock, I want to get out". They all look different from each other, and they're never in the same place twice.

It's a DOOR. You're not supposed to have to read the instructions.

The world is so confusing. No wonder it makes us nervous and inexplicably vexed.

* For non-Londoners, the Oyster card is the electronic ticket card that pays for bus journeys and opens barriers on the Tube.

Dance Participation

This one took a while.

Pineapple Studios is a building in Covent Garden, London, with several floors of dance studios, changing rooms and a café. The deal is that you pay a daily entry fee to the studios, and then pay the teachers whatever they charge for whatever particular classes you take. (You can join Pineapple, and not pay the entry fee, which works out cheaper if you visit more than once a week).

At the desk, they have A4 leaflets, folded twice, printed all over in very small print with the full weekly timetable, classified into levels along the lines of "Beginner", "Elementary", "Intermediate", "General", "Advanced" and "Professional", with mixtures and variations.

I picked up the leaflet recently, and on the Tube home, I started to count the different kinds of classes, got rather interested, and thought I would make you a chart.

To create the charts below, I typed out the name of each of the 266 classes offered in the timetable, and made a fairly vague, best-guess classification, first by looking at the words in their names and then by manually classifying the ones that didn't work for. I've totally ignored Pineapple's own classification on their website.

By "World" I mean anything characterised by a specific place of origin. Those dances have nothing else in common. This includes Brazilian Samba, Irish Dance for Performance, Island (Polynesian) Rhythms, Flamenco, Salsa, Bhangra Grooves, Bollywood Dance London, Capoeira and Egyptian Dance. It would include Argentine Tango if there was any, but in this particular leaflet there isn't a class listed. So the "World" bar in the charts doesn't tell you very much. It could equally reasonably be seen as a lot of little tiny bars - all these dances appear once or twice each.

"Street" is a very, very vague classification including Break Dance, Popping, Locking, Waacking, and a few things I'm not too sure about such as "New Skool". There are also two or three wild guesses in there.

You could dispute lots of things and do the classification lots of different ways. It depends what you're trying to do. Here, the only thing I am trying to do is get a general impression of how many people every week want to take what sorts of dance class, to see if I could learn anything from that.

A lot of classes fall into more than one category, like "Commercial Jazz" and "Ballet-Based Body Conditioning". That means double-counting, and it raises the total count from 266 to 296. There was one class, Singing, that only happened once a month - this is classified under "Music/Stage" along with a couple of other classes apparently designed for people appearing in musicals.

Here's the first pass:

On a second pass, after a quick Google, it seemed to me that perhaps I should add together "Street" and "Hip-Hop", and perhaps also "House", as a broader classification of closely related (but living and rapidly evolving) styles. If you do that, something interesting happens; taken together, they almost catch up with "Jazz". If you added "Commercial" as well, they would comfortably overtake "Jazz". But I feel as though the reasons you would do "Commercial" are different from the reasons you would do "Street" or "Hip-Hop", even though they might be physically similar, or even danced to some of the same music. I could be completely wrong about that, though.

Another interesting thing: Ballet is very popular. In fact, that's what inspired me to do this. I noticed how often the word "Ballet" came up, and wondered why we don't see more of it in mainstream culture. Many, many adults and children participate in a ballet class every week. It's popular. How come it's so invisible to non-participants?

Carole tells me that a lot of adults who are mainly interested in other dance forms, do ballet for body conditioning, and also to plug themselves in to the traditional European language of dance; if you work as a dancer, it's extremely useful to know, and to have other people know that you know, what a plié is. Those things still make it very influential; it seems strange to me that it doesn't somehow come up more often as a thing that people are interested in and do. But maybe I'm wrong, and it does; I don't really watch TV.

266 classes a week, with say 10-20 people in each class, is a lot of participation. This is just one place, Pineapple Studios - albeit a rather unique place, right in London theatreland, with an extraordinarily long, easy-to-analyse class list.

But I suspect there are many, many adults all over the country who regularly dance for their own enjoyment, and not that many of them ever have any intention to perform, professionally or otherwise. Even at Pineapple, 80% of the people in my weekly samba class (about 19 out of 20 of us are usually women) probably have no such intention and are doing it purely for fun and fitness. Why, I was wondering, does dancing for its own sake not seem that mainstream, plus-or-minus Zumba? Why is dance not something that people talk about at the water cooler, much, the way they do about their Sunday-league football adventures? Strictly Come Dancing has done a certain amount to change this, but it's essentially a ballroom programme, with a mindset that sees dance mainly as a stage performance rather than a regular mainstream recreation. And only about five of the classes listed are partner dances at all.

It made me think. But I don't have any conclusions for you.

Lovely smell

After a dance:

"Oh, I can have a mint now, after that. I wouldn't have been able to smell the lovely smell if I'd had one before ...

 ... I don't know what that stuff is that he puts on ... I'd be quite happy to just stand there and smell it. There was somebody in [town] who I swear had the exact same stuff  ...

... Sugar now."

The importance of NumLock

I was trying to write the word "empañada*", which requires [Ed: or possibly doesn't, depending on the sense, thank you comments] one of these: ñ. Naturally, this doesn't appear on my keyboard.

Like most not-especially-special characters, it's easy to produce it using its numeric code by holding down ALT and typing (in this case) 0241 on the number pad.

But you have to have Number Lock set. I didn't, and one of the resulting keystrokes turned my computer's display upside-down.

I had no idea at all that my computer could do that.

Natural Experiment: Idiot Research

In the organisation where I work, it appears that (for a given subset at least), we have a Directly Measurable Idiot Factor of roughly 1%. It goes without saying, if you know me at all, that this is better than I expected.

"Idiot" is here defined as the kind of person who hits reply-all when a routine but esoteric administrative request has been accidentally sent to a mailing list 9,187 names long.

Bear in mind that the last idiot to send a reply-all stating "this is not for me" had already had the opportunity to read all of the other 86 replies, plus the original. In the table below, I have not been able to show this deepening of idiocy over time. To protect the guilty, I have not recorded his name. Except in my personal records.

Total number of individuals on mailing list used in error: 9,187.
Total number of reply-all messages received in my inbox: 87.

Idiots to Total: 0.95%.

An attempt to classify the messages:	Count	Description of classification
Friendly / baffled / neutral / mildly annoyed idiocy	49	"Sorry,this request is not for me, I think you have made a mistake ...", "Please remove me from this list", "I am not too sure why I have received this email" ...including blank emails repeating these types
Recursive idiocy	25	"I'm replying all to say PLEASE STOP replying all!"
Angry idiocy	1	PLEASE USE CORRECT EMAIL (other individual's email)
Clueless idiocy	1	"I think someone may have a virus!"
Constructive idiocy	2	"I can do this if you tell me how", "I have forwarded this to ..."
Attempts at amends for idiocy	3	Recall messages
Apologies for idiocy	1	From sender of original message
Opportunistic attention-seeking - basic	4	Attempted joke, irony, contentless wind-up responses to other idiocy
Opportunistic attention-seeking - advanced	1	Joke is funny
Total	87

How to make a heart-shaped boiled egg

For those of you who can use such things.

Anna the Red: How to make a heart-shaped egg

You'll need an egg, a piece of stiffish paper, a chopstick or something roughly the same shape, and two rubber bands. Hat tip Desigrub via Malcolm Eggs.

Don't Eat Noodles on the Hong Kong Subway

Language Log is always totally fascinating. Today, Victor Mair's admirably informative post about linguistic aspects of the politics of Hong Kong - a subject I would never otherwise have heard anything about - contains the following aside:

I should mention that Kong's tirade against Hong Kong was prompted by viral videos of a conflict between local passengers on a Hong Kong Metro train and mainlanders who contravened regulations by eating noodles on the subway.

I wonder if it's specifically noodles, or is it eating anything at all that is forbidden on the Hong Kong subway? On the Underground we only have sweet cartoony posters saying "Don't Eat Smelly Food". It would be fairly difficult to eat noodles on the Underground, but I suppose it could be done. Maybe the Hong Kong metro has a smoother ride?

Balloons of 2011

Memorable balloons of 2011:

A velvety dark reddish-brown one with a gold ribbon.
Another one almost the same warm colour, but glossy with a grain, like a cello
An absolutely perfectly smooth brilliant matte silver one with a white ribbon
A burnt-orange and yellow pattern of interlocking squares
A black-and-grey spiral pattern with one line of dark red and a curly white ribbon
A pattern of curving stripes in several different blues
Like paisley, but spikier, in shades of brown and ochre with touches of lemon-yellow and white, sort of Aztec paisley.
A very pretty lemon-yellow.
Bright green, like grass in sunshine, with a very long yellow ribbon.

Love to all my dance partners.

I think the colours come partly from the individual, his dress sense, his dance style, and partly from the music of the particular dance.