While Luzar and Jim have tea

Brownie points to anyone who knows what famous Christmas song contains the line above (without googling!) It's one of several for which I was working out chords yesterday.

It's Messiah season for the next two weeks, which makes lots of the choir very happy. I'm enjoying it about as much as usual (i.e. not very much at all), but at least it will soon be over. (It's a great piece - I just hate the rehearsals for it, for reasons I've explained in the past and don't plan to go into again. Sorry if you don't agree with me - I know I'm in a minority!)

For choir members that haven't sung it before, I've put mp3s of all the choruses online for you on my mp3 page.

I'm much more excited about Christmas carols and Christmas pop songs. I'm rehearsing with my band tomorrow, and I have four new songs (well, new only in that we haven't tried them before) to give them in addition to the fifty-five Christmas songs already in our repertoire. As usual the main problem will be deciding what to miss out!

Anyway, here's some stuff I've seen online recently. A few musical items, and then lots of Manchester-related news!

Over on ChoralNet, Allen H Simon wrote this article about candy music. I particularly liked the description of Bruckner and Mendelssohn as well-prepared vegetables.

I've mentioned the vuvuzela in the past - that's that trumpet that's very popular in South Africa. Well, it seems that Japan as asked for them to be banned from the World Cup! FIFA's comment is That would mean one would have to take away the cow bells from Swiss fans and ban English fans from singing. I like that they seem to consider our national instrument to be the voice.

Peter Phillips, in the Spectator, gives us an article about music expressing moods that is well worth reading but hard to describe briefly!

I'm amused to discover that Stairway to Heaven was popular with DJs because it's the perfect length for a cigarette break. And there are also toilet tracks.

From Intermezzo, news that a German chamber music group is to give a recital in a brothel.

This might be nice for any amateur guitarists among you: a guitar lesson based on Happy Xmas (War is Over) (another song I wrote out yesterday).

This will mean nothing to people who weren't at tonight's rehearsal, but I wanted to look up a couple of things that were mentioned. To save you doing the same, here's Ralph Allwood's website and his Wikipedia page, and a page about St Peter's Ancoats, and the newspaper article about it.

I'm sure you've all seen the news that Manchester Victoria, the station in which I've probably spent more time in my life than all other stations combined, has been named as the worst station in the UK. (More on this story here, here and here.)

Did you also see that we won the battle over the National Football Museum? And it turns out that the 2012 Olympics could actually start in Manchester. (The Londonist blog mocked us a bit for getting excited by this. I suspect they're probably just a bit jealous.)

Via the J-Walk Blog, fifteen Google interview questions to make you feel stupid. See if you can get ANY of them. I got three, which I was quite proud of. (There were several that I didn't even understand when I saw the ANSWER.)

And finally, here's a place I really want to visit: Galloway Forest Park.