Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I wish to lodge a formal complaint. I should not be dealing with "wake up feeling like I'm drowning in snot" levels of pollen at the same time as I am needing to keep track of my gloves because my fingers get cold when I go outside. This is simply wrong.

In other news, there's tonight's dinner ... The burrito, about four-fifths eaten, decided to attempt to fight back by launching a last-ditch counteroffensive against my face and shirt. Fortunately I headed off the shirt attack at my chin and ultimately emerged victorious with the burrito inside me. The shirt is safe and the burrito has been defeated devoured.

"A good epithet or imprecation should roll right off the tongue. Excellent ones sizzle or leap. It should never bounce or hop. Rhythm is critical here, and a working understanding of poetry never hurt anyone who was trying to swear.

"Word choice, and how you arrange them, is the single most decisive factor, and it is also the hardest to master."

-- naamah_darling, "Naamah's Swearing Workshop", 2007-03-03 (thanks to skreidle for pointing out the entry)

This just arrived in my mailbox via the Clan MacAthair^[*] mailing list. ("Louie, Louie" is the official MacAthair clan song, which I didn't know until just now.) It somehow seems an appropriate finish to a night when I have not slept a wink because leg cramps & twitches kept me awake the whole time... But it's too bad I didn't know in time to pick a related QotD.

From: "Louie Report" <lou_report @ louielouie.net>
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:25 AM
Subject: Today, April 11 is a day to CELEBRATE!

Today is a very special day of celebration.

Today, April 11 is INTERNATIONAL LOUIE LOUIE Day!

While no country has actually made any kind of official declaration, and there have been no mandated holidays that I know of, that shouldn't stop you from using the time to celebrate this very special day.

Why today, of all days?

1. Richard Berry, the author of this song, was born on April 11, 1935.
2. His original recording of LOUIE LOUIE was released during the week of April 13, 1957, which means this song is 50 years old!
3. The Kingsmen recorded their version of LOUIE LOUIE on April 6, 1963.
4. On April 10, 1998, The Kingsmen regained their original recordings back from the record companies that refused to pay them ANY royalties, despite the millions of sales.

There's some other great moments in LOUIE LOUIE history attached around this time in April, but I think it's best that you read the rest of this information for yourself at the LOUIE REPORT blog.

[...]

So today - enjoy INTERNATIONAL LOUIE LOUIE DAY!
Dancing is strongly recommended!
. me gotta go now .

ERIC PREDOEHL
http://www.louielouie.net/blog/

Something tells me a bunch of y'all will find amusement, delight, and excuses for mayhem in this. (And some will find it pointlessly silly, and I'm sure a few of you must despise the song or simply fail to understand its appeal -- «chacun à son goût», n'est-ce pas?). At the moment I'm too sleep-fuddled to say whether I'd have found this as amusing after a proper night of sleep as I do now. Perhaps.

[*] Yes, I'm a member of this clan, though I think my dues are overdue. The name translates to "son of a father", and the genealogical requirements for membership are that one must have, or at some point in the past have had, a father. They're a right friendly bunch. Look for their tent at the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival later this month.

Last night on the way to anniemal's after rehearsal, I started thinking about camera-phone video shot from a bumpy, moving car. I was wondering how easily the bumps and jitters could be removed from the video by splitting it into individual frames, re-registering each frame so that a feature of the car -- say a mark on the dashboard -- was at the same location within each frame, cropping each frame to the area common to all the tranlated frames, and reassembling them into a video file.

So, since I was sitting in the passenger seat, I shot a bunch of video clips to play with later, either by trying to figure out how to automatically indentify the reference feature in each frame and feed the location to ImageMagick, or by Googling for existing software already designed to de-shake phone video.

This morning I considered my to-do list and asked, "What was I thinking? When am I going to get around to that?" Whoops.

But I still need to figure out how to split a 3GPP MPEG file into individual frames (or convert it directly to an abnimated GIF) for a completely separate, much smaller project. ImageMagick, at least the versions I've got handy, doesn't seem to like 3GPP video. And a shareware tool advertised as doing what I want insisted that I needed to install a new codec even though the Windows machine I was running it on could display the video already (implying that the right codec was already present on the machine) and even after I tried downloading another codec from the web site mentioned in the error message. (I'm trying to compile another tool now.)

[Update: the tool I said I was trying to compile failed to compile under Cygwin/WinXP but did compile -- and do exactly what I had hoped it would do -- under Mac OS X. I hope it also runs at my house in case I need it again in the future -- my guess is that its working correctly on the first try under Linux is more likely than not. Now to re-read the ImageMagick 'convert' man page...]

Argh. Okay, first the good: after a frustrating no-sleep night due to leg cramps,I finally did manage to fall asleep late in the afternoon. But the bad: I slept through my alarm and didn't wake up until fidhle phoned halfway through rehearsal to ask whether I was coming.     :-(     Last rehearsal before a gig, too. (This after such careful planning to ensure that I would have a ride to rehearsal. I say again: argh.)

Trial tomorrow, of the guy who wrecked my car. I'm not sure how (or whether) I'm getting there. I'm an "on call" witness; if they call all of us in at the same time, I'll try to catch a ride with one of my neighbours. I don't know whether any of my neighbours are going if not called. (We have to be near a phone and not more than an hour travel from the courthouse.) I guess worst case, I'll take a cab. I wonder whether I'd get reimbursed for that, since the trial is about the reason I don't have my own car to drive there.

Crowded weekend coming up, about which I'll post more when I'm just a tad more alert. I will have to miss at least two different things I wanted to go to on Saturday because three events happen at the same (well, overlapping) time in three different cities; I'm probably going to choose between those three based on which will put me in a better position to catch a ride to the fourth ... and then I need to sort out Sunday.

I'm so tempted to just take the first car I test-drove and gamble on the cost of getting it through inspection, just to get the hated car-shopping process over with, and to make transportation decisions relatively straightforward again. Not smart perhaps, but tempting.

At least the weekend should be fun (if awfully tiring) once I do sort out the transportation details. I think. I'm not certain yet whether I'll have a way to get the double bass to the places where I'd said I would play it. And at least I learned a few basic ImageMagick tricks this morning while not-sleeping (though I couldn't figure out how to get the animated GIF that I wanted to use as an LJ icon down to an allowable size without losing a lot of what made me want to use it in the first place ... maybe there's a way I haven't figured out yet.)

I just stumbled across a blog-meme with a very short set of instructions:

Post the first paragraph of any of your works in progress.

Okay, I'll bite, though the most-recently-started work-in-progress in my brain is still just snippets of text and melody ... so while "verse" is a better fit than "paragraph" I'm going to wimp out and give just a couple of lines.

Evil is easy, if you want to be lazy
It isn't much effort unless you make it complex...

Note that this is still in the assembling-ideas stage, not even to "first draft" yet, so those lines may or may not actually appear in the finished version. But I'll let y'all know when it's done.