Trumpet

It's time to face facts. I'm never going to be able to play the trumpet. Or the cornet, or any other similarly sized brass instrument.

I've always been half convinced that I could probably do anything I wanted to, as long as I was willing to put in the hard work. This means whenever I say I "can't" do something, at the back of my mind I always tack on the word "yet". I might never put in enough work to be able to do it, but I still think the potential is there.

Heck, even math related things fall into this category. I suck at anything that requires something more elaborate than adding two digit numbers, and I truly hate maths. However, I believe I could probably improve if I stopped chanting "I hate this, I hate this" and put in a bit of effort.

When my brass instructor had me switch from cornet to baritone because he felt it would be a better fit, I held to the belief that, while the baritone was easier to play, I would still be able to play the smaller instruments if I just tried hard enough. I realise now that I was wrong.

It actually is about fit, not effort - and I mean this in the literal sense: fit as size, rather than fit as feel. I can't play a trumpet anymore than I can fit into a pair of size six stilettos. I cannot physically make my mouth fit into the space needed to hit any note higher than an E above High C - and I really struggle to hit that.

It's a bit sad, really, especially since I own both a trumpet and a cornet. The trumpet is a cheap tin pocket trumpet that looks a lot better than it plays, and the cornet is a third-hand ex-Salvation Army thing that I bought from a second-hand store for $50 and an accordion years ago. Now I have to figure out what to do with them, since I know I won't be able to sell them for anything near what I paid for them...

Anyone want a pocket trumpet or a cornet? I'm happy to give the cornet away, but I'd probably be looking to sell the trumpet for about $200 (I bought it two years ago for $400).

*sigh*.

New Bike!

New bike, new bike, new biiiiiiiiiike!



I was going to wait until my birthday to assemble it, but I couldn't help myself. I just love assembling stuff. I have been known to buy furniture just so I could assemble it later. I find the occasional jigsaw puzzle can quell this need, as can the fact that I live with my mother and she won't let me bring any more furniture into the house (yet another reason to move out in ten years, after I've finally saved up enough of a deposit to buy my own place)... but a penny-farthing to assemble was just too tempting to pass up.

I had to pull all of the pieces out of the box anyway, you see, because I needed to check they were all there (actually, the guy said he'd throw in some spare spokes, and they weren't in the box, so I guess they weren't all there). Once I had those pieces laid out, and the assembly instruction in my hands... Well, what's a girl to do?







In case anyone was interested, my "workshop" consisted of leaning the thing against a disused dog kennel and holding it in place with a bucket of dirt. The bucket of dirt once had a purpose, now it seems to be taking up space for no good reason. Ah, well, at least I got some use out of it.

I had a sad and unfortunate thought half-way through today, though. In Queensland, it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the road without at least one working break. I think that means I might have to get a break installed somehow in order to ride it anywhere other than a path...

The bike is finally here

Took two days to get from America to Australia, and over a week to get from Brisbane to Townsville. There's something not quite right about that.

Haven't taken it out of the box yet because I had to get to work.

I knew I was getting the "small" one, but it's actually a bit smaller than I expected. Could possibly fit it in the back of a station wagon without too much difficulty...

Once it's out of the box and in one piece I'll take photos.

Wonder Woman

This is sort of an amalgam of several women I know who fit the same description. If you think you're one of them and you want to claim it, you go right ahead.

Wonder Woman.

Then again, you may find it vaguely depressing, so perhaps you shouldn't read it.

Herman Brix

I think I might be falling in love with Herman Brix.

I have, in the past, mentioned my adoration for Tarzan in general, but Herman Brix has to be the best Tarzan I have ever seen.

I mean, he is clearly superior in every way to Gordon Scott, and Scott's always been my favourite.

I can't stand Johnny Weissmuller. Never could. He irritated me even before I started reading the books and realised just how far from Tarzan he really was.

I mean, Tarzan rocks. The guy managed to survive being "abandoned" by his parents shortly after birth (does dying of jungle related illnesses count as abandoning?), being raised by apes and getting into regular scrapes with gorillas, wild cats, giant snakes and the like. He taught himself to read using children's books, taught himself to speak French by imitating a French guy he found in the jungle, can communicate with almost any animal he comes in contact with and managed to learn the language of every people group he's ever encountered. He's a giant of a man with a lithe, muscular figure and incredible strength whose every sense has been enhanced by living wild in the jungle.

He's the epitome of "good breeding", being physically and mentally superb and therefore capable of surviving any adventure you could possibly throw at him. And he's an English Lord, an African Chieftain and the uncontested king of the jungle. He's certainly not some flabby, inarticulate monkey man.

And yet, when MGM took a crack at Tarzan films in the 1930s, they decided to go with the flabby, inarticulate monkey man take on things, and that's the version of Tarzan most people know today. Okay, to be fair Weissmuller wasn't that flabby to start with, but by the 40s he definitely wasn't the Olympic swimmer any more.

The 1930s period was an interesting time for Tarzan, though, as there were actually two different film franchises created by two different companies. On the one hand, there was Weissmuller (who obviously won the battle for the public's love and adoration). On the other hand, we had Herman Brix.

Born Harold Herman Brix and later working under the name Bruce Bennett, Brix played Tarzan the way he was written - intelligent, articulate and bounding with power and energy. He was tall, had a lithe, muscular physique and was completely convincing when climbing trees or bounding through the jungles of Guatemala (barefoot, no less). He did his own stunts, spoke in complete sentences and looked completely at ease with monkeys and hamfisted actors alike.

He's just perfect. I've never seen an actor better capture the Tarzan of the books. Why oh why did Weissmuller's version take off when Brix is clearly the superior Tarzan?

It was probably MGM's doing. No way an independent film company was going to beat a megacorporation at the box-office - not even in the 1930s.

The Watch

My new watch isn't as good as my old one.

Have I even mentioned how much I loved my old watch? It was a Timex from the "Expedition" series. I bought it almost completely by accident a couple of years ago from Rebel Sports. It was about a month before the Julia Creek Dirt'n'Dust Triathlon and I wanted a watch that was likely to survive dust, mud, water, sweat, sun and a whole pile of other conditions likely to completely ruin the cheap watches I usually wear.

This was the first time I've bothered paying more than $20 for a watch, and I fell head over heels in love with it. Three time zones (and at one point I actually used all three), three alarms (brilliant!), a stop watch with lap settings, a timer, a 'hydro' function that beeps every set number of minutes and an "occasion" setting for anniversaries/birthdays and the like (which I never worked out how to programme). Oh, yeah, and the light, but whatever. It probably has other features too, for all I know.

About those alarms... Three of them. And you could set them to go off everyday or only on weekends. I had one to remind me it was getting late and I should probably stop reading now. One to start the whole waking up process and one to mark the time when I really had to get out of bed if I was too lazy to get up when the first alarm went off. Good stuff.

Oh, and it didn't obviously look like a man's watch. I mean, it was extremely useful, so obviously it was a man's watch (nothing designed for women is meant to be useful - just pretty. After all, women don't do useful things and are meant to sit around being pretty...), but it looked nice and unisex. I didn't feel like I was wearing an obviously gendered piece of equipment (which I often do when I opt for the useful things).

I really, really loved this watch. I loved this watch more than most people love their phones. With this watch on my wrist, I felt like I could take on the world. Even when I wasn't wearing the watch, it was close by. I keep it on my bedside table when I sleep...

Sadly, for a $100+ watch, it had a fatal flaw. The same flaw most watches have - the band. After two years of being being worn all day, every day and being dragged through every weird thing I felt like doing, the band snapped. It was connected to the watch in a very peculiar fashion, so that regular watch repairing people couldn't replace it for me. I even found a shop that specialised in Timex watches, and they said it was unlikely the company made those bands any more (after two years? Who are these people?). Besides, I had no idea where my warranty was, and no one seemed interested in sending it back to the factory for a replacement band without one.

So I decided to buy a new Timex watch. One with a band I could easily replace when it failed. Which is when I discovered their nefarious scheme. You see, NONE of the watches that have the kind of functionality with which I have fallen in love have normal, easily replaced bands. The only watches that had practical bands had fewer functions. I wasn't going to fall for that trick again, so this time around I went for the band rather than the multiple alarms...

And, dammit, this watch isn't as good. I really want multiple alarms. I really, really want them. I can live with only two time zones. The fact that the timer can be set to repeat so that it can do the same thing as the hydro function is okay. I can live without the occasion function (I never used it any way). But I really, really want my multiple alarms. This watch will let me set the alarm for every day, weekdays or weekends, but what's the point of having the option to set the alarm for weekdays or weekends if you can't have a different alarm for each?

I have valiantly tried to save the old watch by stitching it onto the band for another, cheap watch, but now it just looks like some ugly franken-watch. I still have it by my bedside, but I don't feel comfortable wearing it to work - especially when I have a nice-looking non-franken-watch I could be wearing.

Just one that's not as good.

Encoding

DVD players.

You probably don't realise it, but they point out something wrong with the world. Deeply, distressingly wrong.

You may not know this (but many of you may), but the whole region coding thing for DVDs is a scam.

It's not like VHS tapes, which actually used a different technology for recording and playback in different regions. DVDs are the same the world over, but someone somewhere has decided they should be sold and used in certain countries only, so they add an encoding which tells your DVD player to reject the disc if you are in the "wrong" region.

The really cheap DVD players - you know, the ones that have trouble with dual layer discs and occasionally decide to break down with your disc inside it for no good reason - they're too cheap and nasty to handle the encoding, so they just ignore it. Thus, you can watch just about anything from anywhere.

If you get a good quality DVD player from a "reputable" brand, they'll be sophisticated enough to read and apply the encoding. But they don't have to. There is nothing in the technology itself that stops the machine from reading the disc. Just the code - deliberately and intentionally written to tell your machine to not do something it is more than capable of doing.

Then, they try to sell you an even more expensive DVD player that is, supposedly, "region free". But it has absolutely nothing to do with getting "better" technology - and everything to do with what the technology is programmed to do...

It's a scam. Nothing more than a money grubbing scam.

On the one hand, the "reputable" brands are getting more money out of you because they can make sure you don't buy a cheaper DVD from overseas - or import a DVD into the country where it hasn't been officially "released". On the other hand, the big corporations of the world have decided they want to control who watches what and where.

Not good, people. All sorts of Freedom-of-Information-Trampling not good.