felephant

I don't know to what extent this news has crossed the Atlantic, but, after four or so years of the winner of a nationwide British singing contest winning the accolade of Christmas No. 1, Rage Against the Machine's 1992 single "Killing in the Name" has won it this year. For fear you cannot believe this, and are looking through the sentence for evidence of misreading: Rage Against the Machine are 2009's Christmas No. 1. The song is being played on teen pop stations at 9am in the morning. This is surely the best Christmas ever.

I found this new website, dilettantemusic.com. It's a classical music networking society or somesuch. For example, on the homepage you see as a member (it's free to join), I see some boxes: one lists some new CDs you might like to buy, another lists some recent entries on the site's forums (fora?), one lists news; etc. I expect this could be a good means to discovering new music and other people who like classical music.

P.S. And it has a thingy at the top of the page which allows you to listen to what appears to be a randomly chosen piece of music. It's a song of some sort now - I don't recognise the composer. The sound quality is good.

Does anyone know why I've been banned from Convert_Me?

01. Think of the first word that comes to mind when you think of me.
02. Go to Google Images and search for that word.
03. Reply to this post with one of the pictures on the first page of results (don't tell me the word).
04. Put this in your own journal so that I can do the same.

I've always wished that YouTube had a feature that allowed you to listen to music (and post music to LiveJournal) without the big video messing everything up. Well, to my happy surprise, I've found a site that does just that - Grooveshark. It has an excellent selection of music; I'm listening to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G now, having just listened to his Concerto in D for the left hand. The sound quality is excellent; and there are a few recordings of each concerto too. The only problems are that there's no way to search by composer, so finding classical music is a bit awkward, movements of pieces aren't necessarily beside each other or in order - so you have to guess which movements belong to the same recording by the way in which the movements are described (i.e., is it "Piano Concerto in G - Allegremente" or "Piano Concerto in G major, 1st movement (allegremente)"), and the performers aren't given, not in the pieces I've looked at anyway.

But still - it's a great, great resource. I'm very pleased with the find. Thanks, Kate. Everyone should go on to it; and perhaps some

In other news. I broke a nail, which is particularly annoying at the moment because I have to practice some very fast music for the guitar orchestra tour in November.

Man, this piano concerto is divine. Let's try embedding.

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/08/21/happy-happy-joy-joy/

:)

A Syndney Morning Herald article.

Some commentary on it.

Two comments in response to this post are also very interesting, and are linked below in case you're lazy or are unsure to which comments I'm referring. But you should read all the comments.

http://community.livejournal.com/convert_me/1323978.html?thread=67264458#t67264458
http://community.livejournal.com/convert_me/1323978.html?thread=67293130#t67293130

I suspect we shall all become very happy, unless we have vested interests in Microsoft.

Google has announced that it will release an operating system.

It occurred to me that I am, even if only technically, on Facebook. Feel free to add me, because some of you guys are pretty alright. Do the Find Friends thing and type in James Camien. I must be the only one of that name (Camien is a misremembered phonetic spelling of Cameron), but if I'm not, you want the one with the hat. If I recognise your name, I'll add you back.