Academia bribes white hens

Yay school! (I'm surprised no-one pointed out to me that my invisitext here didn't make sense.)
(RIP witty, but irrelevant, invisitext. )
First off, a few housekeeping matters. It occurred to me this afternoon that although I had posted a link to Trading Yesterday's More Than This, I'd forgotten to utilise the great source of music that is YouTube. I've added links to the songs in Feierliche Eröffnung (and a few other things, too), modified the layout so that blockquotes get a lighter background, and put a whole slew of links on the right. If you have time to burn, the sites/bands listed there are made of win.

 Uncustomisable bullets are intolerable. Here is one sad substitute: an inserted image and an em space. I nearly didn't end up doing this, until I realised the HTML had been set to give images ~15px padding.

It occurred to me the other day that I seem to have a lot of green around. Our school colours - green and white (and no matter whan a certain foodstuff says, we are teh awesome); the new fence the church has half-erected at the moment... and this blog skin. Hah.

Spent a few hours this week messing around on the piano, trying to play various Within Temptation songs (which are more easily played than Evanescence and Nightwish, with their generally heavier guitars, and Trading Yesterday/Age of Information, which uses a lot of repetition that works for singers, but not piano). Epic Epoch fail. Some songs I tried out:

 Angels - kinda works, but is kind of boring. The chords for the extra end of the chorus (Good heaven, forever...) sound awkward, and the short instrumental interlude between chorus and bridge is odd, too.
 Memories - boring in the extreme. Doesn't really work on piano, I don't think. Perhaps if piano was only playing fast arpeggios and another instrument (like, say, cello) took the melody? Bleh.
 Somewhere - boringish, but otherwise fine.
 Frozen - the keychange every time you reach the chorus throws my left hand off whack. Works pretty well, though.
 Hand of Sorrow - Trading Yesterday-esque repetition of a melodic line in the chorus makes the piano part boring.
 The Cross - I think I've found a way to play this that I like, although it of course is hugely lacking in power in comparison to the original song . . . ah well. It feels weird imitating the "ah, ah ah ah a-a-ah"s.
 All I Need - works, but something makes it sound boring to my ear.
 The Truth Beneath the Rose - actually works, yay! Cut out the first part of the outro (with awesome choir) and skip straight to the "second" outro, and it sounds pretty good. Of course, I'm biased; awesome song + chance to hit fortissimo right-hand chords (that I can do decently) makes me happy.
 Forgiven - combined my playing-by-ear with a piano part I downloaded that is crazy-syncopated (read: hard), but deviates too much from the melody's rhythm for my liking. Yaaay.

In other musical news, we have a lot of new cellists in orchestra. Three in one year, not to mention two others only joined us in Term 4 last year, is pretty damned well amazing. As the second cello on the first desk, I feel very inferior listening to these guys play, too. Better practise some more. Two funny things happened in orchestra today, both in the morning session.

 We're playing An Outdoor Overture (Aaron Copland) at the moment. (Sounds great, but I'll be damned if I don't hate playing the same quaver-quaver-crotchet group thirty-two times. Then later on, forty-six times. Yay!) There's a section early on where the violins have the theme, and we celli play quavers on the offbeat (4/4 time: quaver rest|quaver|quaver rest|quaver|etc). We, as an orchestra, seem to suck at playing on the offbeat. So our conductor, Mr Pratt, in another bit of what I like to call "Learn to Count with Uncle Phil", pulls the whole section out in front of the orchestra and gets us to stamp on the beat, and clap on the offbeat. We quickly slipped into doing the opposite. Bleagh. I noticed, and stopped for a sec, then started going again, doing the opposite of everyone else. 'twas awkward until Pratt pointed out that I was right. GLEE!

 I actually took notes on this, I really wanted to keep this in my memory. The band were told to bring in and use earplugs in their sessions on Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, and apparently sounded phenomenal. Pratt quoted a teacher as saying that she'd "never heard a school orchestra sound so phenomenal" (paraphrased), then, concluding his case as to why he's making us bring in earplugs next week, said that "it was all because of the earplugs". My mind quickly constructed a scene of a concert with only instruments and earplugs on the seats. (First person to say how lame this is gets eviscerated with a spork and single chopstick.)

Thursday presented a classic case of "check, the obvious, IDIOT" computer troubleshooting. Autocancelling dialog boxes and magically-appearing carriage returns in MSN led me to believe that I had something wrong with my enter key, or had been hijacked. I rebooted in safe mode, started up Ad-Aware and Trend Micro scans, and vented my anger with cello practice for an hour and a half or so (the first movement of Elgar's Concerto in E minor serves this purpose reaaaaally well). Came back, and my dad suggested pulling out the USB cable for the wireless mouse. I then (finally) remembered that the receiver for said mouse also has a keyboard, which was sitting on the desktop's desk with a couple of my brother's textbooks on top of it, pressing down the shift and enter keys. Bleagh.

Overall, Thursday was a stupid day for me. I'd packed everything I needed for sport except shoes and socks, somehow. Once more for a detention!

Batman beheads heirs! Confused? That's an acronym for my full (English) name. So are "babies heard anthems" and "seaman rehabbed s%#$". My Chinese name apparently means I'm "an ice whiz" ("ice" as in "crystal meth"?), my abbreviated (first and surname only) English name can become "bearish Batman" and "Rabbi: neat sham", and my English name with Chinese name as middle names (redundant, by the way; my parents picked English and Chinese names with the same meaning for me) turn out to be "academia bribes white hens" and "wide ibis, beseech amaranth" (noteworthy for the final word, which I learned from an awesome Nightwish song). Whee. Acronym finder used to waste time I don't really have can be found here.

I was going to write a discussion on people acting like this, but the concept lost steam over the course of the school week, so I wil close by saying that if any of my 16⁻⁴/3i readers don't read xkcd, they should. This week was even-awesomer than normal.

...Lass mich beweisen, dass es ein lustiges Wort ist: Bauchspeicheldrüse. Schau mal, du lachest!