Me for the last two weeks

[miko2]

Okay. What I did two weeks ago:

I came home on a Friday and accepted an invitation to join a Task Force. A Task Force is a long series of adventures in City of Heroes with a connected plotline, and at the end of it you fight an Arch-Villian. There are different ones you can do at different levels. The earliest one you can do in your mid teens, around level 13-16 or so, the Positron Task Force (given out by the hero Positron). I've never done that one, and in fact I almost always have avoided Task Forces because they can take many hours to complete. In over a year of playing City of Heroes I had done the Synapse Task Force once all the way through (the one you do around level 16-20) and had done part of the Sister Psychic Task Force once, but failed to defeat the end Arch Villian Clamor because there were only three of us left.

And then three weeks ago on a Sunday evening I did the Synapse Task Force again with a different character, working with some friends. It took us several hours (3-4 I think) but we completed it.

So... Friday I did the Sister Psychic Task Force, with the same character that I'd used for the other task force on the previous Sunday. And it took us six hours to complete. That's why I was up until nearly seven am, and didn't go to the bowling party. But I had fun doing a Task Force I'd never done before.

After the writer's night that evening (Saturday) I came home, and Tom wanted to play City of Heroes. And he was invited to help on a Sister Psychic Task Force. And he wanted me to help.

So I did the same thing Saturday night/Sunday morning that I had done the night/morning before. Once again, we managed to finish the whole thing, but it took six hours again.

So, that was my weekend two weeks ago. ^_^

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What I did last week: well, of course I attended the editorial board meeting. But on Sunday I went out and hit Half Price Books. I had in my hand a printed list of all the Newberry Award winners from when they'd started awarding them to the present. These include some books that I loved when I was young, such as Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Bronze Bow, A Wrinkle In Time.

My idea was that it would be cool to buy some of these books for my nieces and nephew. My nephew at least is the right age to read young adult books, and my nieces will be old enough in a few years, or I also know that my sister reads to her kids at bedtime, that sort of thing. It just seemed like a cool idea to me.

They actually make this pretty simple because most of the award winners and even the runner ups are labelled as Newberry Award books on the spine. And of course children's books/young adult books at Half Price Books mostly run $2.98 or less. So I went a bit crazy. I got around 15 books, and then bought some more at another Half Price on my way to work on Monday. I still didn't find two of the books I was looking for, but I've already got half a library going so I suppose mission accomplished.

The other thing I wanted to find at Half Price was either "Sparkle and Rain" by the Simple Minds or the Bruce Cockburn cd with "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" on it (the cd that has that is "Stealing Fire"). I didn't actually expect to find either, but in fact I came across a "greatest hits" of Bruce Cockburn that of course had Rocket Launcher on it. Great anti war song. Then I also found the latest cd by Split Lip Rayfield, one of my favorite bands, so that was a huge find. I picked up a Simple Minds cd that I dind't have (not the one I really wanted though) and lastly bought "Tears of Stone" by the Chieftans. I love their "The Long Black Veil" cd, which has a ton of guest artist appearances on it, but "Tears of Stone" turns out to be even better. :D And oh yeah, also picked up "Hot" by the Squirrell Nut Zippers. I never had anything of theirs before, and now I have the song "Hell" stuck in my head.

In the afterlife
You could be headed for some serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But pretty soon there'll be hell to pay...

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So I'm ready for July 4th. I drive down to Longview tomorrow. My plan is to stop at A Piece of Cake, the Asian bakery near Uwajamaya, and get one of their heavenly fruit-layered cakes on my way out of town.

I'm ready for the 4th because I've been listening to my John Philip Souza cds for the last 2 days. I have two cds of Sousa marches, two cds of various great marches, and two cds of patriotic American music. As you might guess, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" is on every single one of those cds.

It's fun to listen to the march collections, because you don't necessarily recognize most of the marches by name, but invariably you know the melodies. Most have been used in movies or cartoons that you've seen. "The Liberty Bell" is of course the theme for Monty Python's Flying Circus, and "The Funeral March of a Marionette" is Alfred Hitchcock's theme.

The two "patriotic" cds kind of annoy me a little, or make me scratch my head. One of them has right in the middle of it the march "Under the Double Eagle" which is a nice rousing patriotic march of course, but what makes a march from pre-WWI Germany in any way American? This is followed by a bagpipe march medley that is also nice but somewhat less than 100% American. Meanwhile, the other one does very well in the American department but contains some pieces that I'm not as fond of. It opens brilliantly with Fanfare For The Common Man, which is a great showstopper piece, but I'm somewhat annoyed by the inclusion of another piece called "Fanfare For The Uncommmon Woman", mostly because of the title. I don't mind writing a song to celebrate women, but it just seems to me as if this peice had a different title, it probably wouldn't have been included at all. It seems politically correct to me to try and balance Copeland's piece with a corresponding piece, and that invites comparisons and frankly it would be hard for any piece of music to compare fairly with Copeland's "Fanfare". But that's a minor annoyance, what I really don't like about this cd is that they of course close with "Stars and Stripes Forever", but they slow it down and try to make it a more serious, orchestral piece. The changes are subtle but they drain some of the energy and excitement from my favorite march. Much better (naturally) is the version on one of my two Sousa cds, which is performed by the Sousa Band itself (and there's also an old recording of Sousa directing his band through this song on there as well, but the sound quality from the 1920's isn't great). I'd be tempted to say that the difference between the two is just one of a real marching band performing the tune vs. an orchestral approach, but in fact probably the best version I have comes from "Bernstein's Favorite Marches" in which Leonard Bernstein, always keenly in tune with the music he's conducting, leads the New York Philharmonic and produces an even faster and more exciting tempo and a bigger bang than the Sousa Band itself.

So that's me geeking out on Americana. Not as much as Sarah Vowell, but you know...