Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A twofer today, one topical, one for an anniversary:

"So rigging elections is no longer limited to the upper echelons of the American Political Elite?

"Thanks, Diebold, for democratizing this 'interesting' aspect of elections!"

-- anonymous comment in response to a followup of the Princeton demonstration of Diebold voting machine vulnerabilities, in which followup it was revealed that the locks on Diebold voting machines use standard and easily obtainable hotel minibar keys one can buy online.

"Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

I should not be awake now. [I started writing this at 4:30.] I've documented my recent data and gotten Perrine to put a pawprint on the signature line attesting that she knows I only slept for one hour, and I'm sure I'm entitled to compensation (especially since this is the second night in a row and severalth time in a twomonth), but I don't know where to send the complaint forms. I can't find the Sandman's office in the blue pages of the phone book. (I'm not even certain which department I should be looking under -- Health & Social Services, right?).

So in frustration at my addled-sleep-addled* brain, I've weighed my options, having chosen to stick to the traditional emotional responses this morning. From the "suggestions for acting out" table on the "feel grumpy and put-upon" mood response page in the "traditional responses" section of the manual**, I picked "the world" as my primary acting-out target and "other members of the class you feel wronged by" -- in this case, brains -- as my secondary target.

So I'm going to describe a game that came into my AddledSleepAddled brain while I was composing the first paragraph, which I somehow managed not to forget again while inventing the second paragraph. It's a game for brains. For the brains of musicians.

Play a duet using the largest and smallest members of an instrument family -- e.g.: piccolo flute and bass flute; ukelele and bass guitar***; slide trumpet and bass trombone (or bass sackbutt -- I think those are prettier and I like the sound); bongos and tympani; garklein and extended great double contrabass recorder; bombard and bassoon. Or possibly extend the boundaries of 'family' a bit: mandolin and double bass; soprano natural trumpet and anaconda****. The thing is, every few measures, the musicians have to swap instruments with each other, so their hands have to adjust from tinycrampedfingerpositions T O . . . G R E A T . . . B I G . . . S P R E A D S. Bonus for picking transposing instruments in different keys and using sheet music all written at concert pitch. Finally, each time the tune repeats, it's played transposed by a fifth up or a fourth down (depending on what will fit on the instruments being used), but it's not transposed on paper -- you have to sight-transpose from the starting key.

First one to fail to play on her turn due to lack of skill, falling down with a giggle-fit, or a hand cramp, is out. Whether that makes her the winner or the loser ... I don't know and don't care, as long as one of the musicians makes that each-side-of-the-face-having-a-different-reaction -- half-startled, half-WTF, half-wincing, half-confused as to why the math doesn't add up^F [^†], that means that somewhere inside that person's head a synapse exploded in a burst of cheesy special effects with Kirk and Spock standing nearby making tickmarks on their lists of statements and puzzles lethal to computers equipped with speech recognition, completely unaware that in their smug self-assurance at the inherent superiority of organothinkers over mechanothinkers, they are standing inside a rapidly crumbling metaphor inside an organic brain providing what could be used by some cyber-rights agitators as evidence of the opposite of what they think they're proving. Where was I? Back about eighty words. Thanks. Wait, who are you? Don't ask -- you don't want another nested footnote, do you? Mu. ... synapse exploded, bruising neurons and those little star shaped thingies I can never remember the names of^{[yup, another footnote after all]} and generally producing a response along the lines of "My brain hurts" or, if I'm really lucky and am still in my "Must Hurt Other Brains To Cow My Own Into Behaving officially, but really just because I'm feeling grumpy and want to be mean" mood, "Ow, I think I just spraned my brane!" (all the better if I can hear the misspellings -- I know a few people who can pull that off). If you manage to take out the brains of anyone in the audience as you go down, so much the better.

Then perhaps I will feel I have adequately shared the pain, in my grumpiness at having spontaneously woken after a mere hour of sleep.

So quickly, let's get some volunteers in here so I can get back to sleep!

PEDAL TONES^{oh no, not again}

* In case any of you are just as sleepy, I mean "addled by having had my sleep addled". Or if you prefer, "[(addled sleep) addled] brain". "My addled-by-addled-sleep brain." One could also make a case for, "my sleep(addled) addled brain," if one wished to try one's luck^7½, or "my secondarily sleep-addled brain," but that suggests that sleep was the addler, rather than the addlement of the sleep addling the brain, I must add. Of course, choosing between AAS, SSA, and ASA drew my mind back to ninth-grade geometry class, and the various theorems used for determining congruence. I elected to go with "addled-sleep addled brain" because the symmetry appealed to me, and because I have a vague recollection THAT I'M TOO DAMN SLEEPY TO VERIFY BY WORKING THROUGH IT, BECAUSE I'M FEELING SO A.S.A, that the angle-side-angle theorem was a little easier to prove than the others.

** No, you can't borrow it -- do you know how hard it is to find one of these? And even when you get one from the source, they won't send you the manual until your warranty has already expired, so it's no wonder so many people are looking for the instruction manual. Interesting that it turned out to be a lot like a manual for an RPG. (Hmm. First edition, and it came with a large stack of numbered errata slips, and some of the numbers are missing, so I don't know where all the mistakes are. And waitaminute, all of the pages about gender had a printing problem and came out blurry in my copy. WTF? Anyone know where I can get a copy of the second edition? Did they change the Wandering Opportunities Table much in 2ed?

*** Technically, at least by musicotaxonomists (or are they taxonomusicologists?) the ukelele is classed as a type of guitar. (And the bass guitar should really be called the double-bass guitar, since it's the same range as the double bass viol ("doghouse bass", "upright bass", "bull fiddle"). That's why a "tenor guitar" is smaller than what we XXth/XXIst Century folks think of as a "regular" guitar. The standard guitar is a bass instrument ... sort of ... er, like the, ah, piano is a, um, bass instrument. I'm a gonna go lissen to some wailing, screaming classsic rock guitar solos now, where my favourite bass inatrument plays way above the treble staff (even accounting for the fact that guitars, bass guitars, and double basses play an octave lower than written).

**** Yes, the anaconda is in fact an extremely large serpent (IIRC, they were made of brass instead of wood) and that was the name some people used for them, not something I made up trying to be cute. Well, okay, it was something I said trying to be cute, but right after I said it the person I was talking to pointed to a page in a book showing that I'd had yet another joke stolen by yet another time traveller (okay, maybe not, since they didn't have time travel back then^{[see: how to use a fake missing footnote after a clearly incorrect statement to see who tries to retcon it]}) and the "anaconda" name got play before I was even chicken-scratches on my designer's drafting table. So don't blame me for that one even though it's all my fault. Unless it makes your brain/brane hurt, in which case the DM will give me +2 glee points if you blame me.

^F Unless, of course, both musicians experience brainsprain at the same moment, and divvy up the facial expressions between them.

† Well, five asterisks in a row looked unwieldy, and I didn't trust the cantilever (can't have that row of asterisks break off and scatter themselves all down your screen, confusing things, can we? Or worse yet, overbalance the whole word so that it tips forward and slides out of position? That would never do. So I borrowed a trick from Roman Numerals, but I wasn't sure what symbol should mean five asterisks. I use a Remington keyboard layout, I noted that 'V' is down two rows on the diagonal then left two, from 'I'. So I started at '*', ran my finger down two on the diagonal then left two, and landed at 'F'. So "F:*::V:I", and presto, I had a shorter footnote without having to go back and change the first four to digits.

^{[yeah, one more footnote anyhow]} "Astrocytes". Somebody less sleepy go make a pun tying astrocytes to asterisks in the context of this document. ("My God, it's full of stars!")

^{seven and a half} "Do you feel lucky? I know what you're thinkin': was that thirteen commas in that footnote, or fourteen? Do I have one more left to comma-splice you with?

^{[said the bowl of petunias]} "Foot" "Notes". Am I not clever? What? It's juvenile and predictable? Why, I ... I ... Look, gimme a break, I only got <whine>one measly hour of sleep</whine> [Error: invalid mood pseudo-tag, author must fix or be laughed at. Attempt to imply separate whining section in an entry written entirely for the purpose of whining. Raw contents next door.] And I had to do something to remind folks that the inspiration for this entry was the clever musical game[Warning: Narrative inconsistent withSHADDAP, YOU! I'm tryin' ta finish up a journal entry here! *ahem* Was the mental imaage of the clever musical game, not the poor sleep[Warning: NarrSHUT. UP. Or I'll drive through your datacenter with e biggest damn electromagnet I can put on my car! [Note: According to MapQuest, Six Apart is 2819 miles from you by road, with an estimated driving time of 41 hours 26 minutes. The edge of your rage will be blunted by the time you arrive. Pbbbbbbbt!] Okay, fine. I was pretty much finished and ready to post this anyhow.