Pink elephants on parade

Look at this from the BBC website

Podcast 4.0

Blodeuwedd's Song

A piece of soundart that I'm trying to get exhibited/played somewhere this year, as it's partly to celebrate Louis Braille's bicentenary and his brilliant invention of Braille (which makes such a difference to blind and partially sighted people’s lives) – and partly to, well, experiment I suppose. I make all kinds of art, material to abstract - and it’s kind of an artist’s duty to experiment. I got all inspired about soundart after my recent trip to New Zealand – Christchurch Art Gallery’s Subsonic exhibition especially.

Blodeuwedd’s Song is my response to how to turn Braille into music. I allocated each dot of the Braille cell a different note of the pentatonic scale, and used a poem I had written about Blodeuwedd as the base. I then transcribed the poem into Braille, and spent about three days placing each note. So one letter in my transcribed version can be up to five notes played together: for variation I spaced them out a little, and lowered the octave of a few, when I felt the poem intensified emotion – so this is a mixture of aleatoric and chosen notes. The soundart is set against a backdrop of a busy woodland and a lone owl.

If you know of anyone/anywhere interested in exhibiting/playing this piece, please pass on my details – the stories of The Mabinogion are a passion of mine, and lots of my art is based on the tales. I’m currently knitting a human skin for Blodeuwedd’s brother Blodeuben, and am also currently making a film called The Birth of Blodeuben.

More information on Blodeuwedd here and here, some on Blodeuben here.
More on Christchurch gallery's subsonic exhibtion here.
More on Louis Braille bicentenary and RNIB's celebrations here.

An end to buzzword bingo?

I just saw this BBC article. I hope to god it'll mean an end to ridiculous office buzzwords that confuse more than explain.

Although this is focusing on County Councils , hopefully the private sector will take note (are you listening, Lloyds TSB?)

Chickendog

Look at this:



This lady makes beautiful things, go and look at her shop.

Meme

1.) What was I doing 10 years ago?
Working in a bakery
2.) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order)
a. Pack goody bags for the Children's Eye Health project
b. Print Teacher's guides for the same thing
c. Go and have Cantonese food with Nina to celebrate her birthday
d. Pester Sioned for volunteers from Cymdeithas
e. Drink a lot of beer
3.) Snacks I enjoy
Jelly sweets
4.) Things I would do if I were a billionaire
Give loads to charity, buy my friends all houses, build Simon a studio, make sure my family were all okay, get teeth implants to enable me to bite through hulls of ships
5.) Three of my bad habits
I'm argumentative; I don't do enough excersise; I don't write enough any more
6.) 3 places I have lived:
Llanedi, Penybanc, Cardiff
7.) 5 Jobs I have had:
Baker
Waiter
Finance monkey
Youth Volunteering Officer
Shop assistant in a crystal shop

Books books books

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - well, not complete, but a lot of them!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I'm sure everyone intends to read this at some point in their life
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - I agree with Stephen Fry when he said (of The Da Vinci Code) "Complete loose stool water. Arse-gravy of the very worst kind."
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I bought the books in a charity shop, but haven't got round to them yet
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - makes me cry like a girl
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Zombiecoterie

This man is fantastic. Go and read his blog, but look at this first: