Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Pete to win!

I'm still ridiculously addicted to Big Brother, but thank goodness it finishes this Friday, so I can have music on in the background instead of housemates arguing. It's weird that I like BB so much, because I detest all the other reality shows... go figure...

Anyway, this is just a quick post to alert you to two new music-related blogs I just discovered. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have just started a joint blog, with posts so far by a cellist and a trumpeter. Example: "Towards the end we were required to “whisper in any order in random rhythm ‘ss’ ‘k’ ‘f’ and tongue click”. Being a loud-mouthed brass-player type, this is what I’ve been waiting my whole playing career for!! We were also asked to make wind noises, an instruction I think the trombones took a bit too literally." And there's also a very entertaining blog by a harpist, called Twang Twang Twang. I particularly liked the Joyce Grenfell harpist sketch :-)

I've added both those blogs to my sidebar (i.e. that list over there to the right of my page) so you can keep an eye on them. (They both have RSS feeds, if you're au fait with all that. So does this blog, for that matter, if you hadn't noticed.)

Oh, and also, in case you missed it, orchestral musicians are having big problems as a result of the new air travel rules.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please enlighten me. Why do several of the highly intelligent people that I know watch this tripe?

Anonymous said...

BB, that is.

Jocelyn Lavin said...

Well, I can't speak for the others, but I can tell you how I got addicted to it. (And I don't believe it is tripe.)

I didn't watch the first series of it, because I knew I always hate such things, so didn't bother trying. But the second series was the year E4 started, and therefore that was the first year they put on live coverage through the night. And, to encourage people to watch this, they set a task for the housemates that involved keeping a fire lit for several days, with the rule that at least two people had to be watching it at any given time. (This more or less guaranteed that there'd be conversation regardless of the hour.) And one night, in the middle of the night (for I'm a night person, you see) I turned on the TV, and when I flicked through the channels I discovered these people having a vaguely interesting chat.

Well, it wasn't the most interesting chat ever, but it was interesting enough that I left the TV on that channel to listen to it. And a few hours later I realised that even though I hadn't listened to everything that had been said, and I hadn't watched much at all (I was working on the computer), I rather liked the companionship of the whole thing. Living on my own, in the holidays I often go for days without hearing another human voice other than those on TV, and although these were still on TV, the fact that they were real people made all the difference from a companionship point of view.

From there, of course, it was only a short step to getting intrigued by the whole thing, and hence addicted. But it's the through-the-night coverage that hooked me.

Anonymous said...

Yep! As I said - tripe.

I live on my own too and often channel hop during the early hours. Now if it it's a toss-up between watching paint dry and watching someone asleep in bed I'll choose the paint. At least it changes state!

Jocelyn Lavin said...

Well, I don't watch if they're ASLEEP. That would be silly! But you'd be surprised how often they were still talking at 4am.