Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Actually, from a Jewish point of view, there is very little difference between humor and food products." -- Juan M, 2010-02-21, rec.humor.jewish [Message-ID: <1vGdnajEMPI7Xx3WnZ2dnUVZ_rqdnZ2d@centurytel.net>]

To my Jewish friends: have a joyous Purim!

Woke up from long, intense dream about trying to drive a carpool home in a blizzard of absurd magnitude and get everybody dropped off in different sections of a suburb despite sherrif's department trying to get everybody off the still-unplowed roads. Other than the LEOs, everybody in the dream was a filker, and when the wind died down a bit (but not stopped), as they got out of my car they'd make themselves and their clothing grow larger, like a comic book superhero but without changing mass (in my dreams conservation of mass is observed, it seems) in order to walk through the snow without sinking in as much (and also to make chest-high snow only hip deep). If they blew themselves up too far, they couldn't fight the remaining wind, of course.

When the part of my brain watching the dream asked how their voices would change when they changed size & density, trying to figure that out woke me up rather abruptly (just after I'd crossed the line between wondering about that in the dream, and trying to design an experiment using models of human chests and heads in different sizes, made of different materials to all the models all the same mass but keep the density of the 'bone' proportional to the density of the 'muscle' in each model).

I figure pitch is going to be based almost entirely on size, and therefore the singer's range would drop as she or he grows larger (right?), but the density of the flesh would affect the timbre, like how same-size flutes made of bamboo, ebony, glass, nickel, and gold all sound different ... or is that solely due to differences in rigidity rather than density? Argh.

And now, as I write this, I have a mental image of a superhero filker talking to an accompanist:

"Can you play that down a third?"

"I don't have a negative-capo."

Ah, okay then, I'll just shrink until the arrangement is in my range."