We've lived in the same house for over 20 years (24?) and during each of those I've spent late Spring digging garden rows in the back yard and "improving" the soil one way or another. Sometimes it's with peat or manure added and dug in to loosen the earth; sometimes it's by building up the area with "triple mix" or some other enriched form of planting material. It hasn't changed the fact that digging some portions of our vegetable garden feels as if I'm working with dried-out modelling clay.

I'm waiting for another three cubic yards of triple mix to be delivered today and it got me thinking. If we had replaced all the existing earth in the area we wanted to plant with good-quality garden soil when we moved in, I figure the cost would have been something less that $1000 (including removal and disposal costs, not including labour). It's a weird thought, to me, but it would have paid for itself a few times over by now in additives alone

When I factor in the cost of extra pain killers over the years, it becomes an obvious missed opportunity for a win. :-)

Apparently I'm on a roll as far as having electronic toys reach the end of their lives. Somewhat recently, I've had a microphone die and a router become uselessly obsolete. The most recent addition to the scrap heap is a small mixer (Behringer UB1002). (Its right channel started generating audio all by itself and, although I support various types of creativity, that's not one of them!)

Thinking about it, I realize that a mixer is overkill for what I was actually doing with it. I have a number of hardware sound modules that I use infrequently and never more than one at a time. They all have their own level controls. Since I bought my M-Audio interface, I don't use the mixer mic inputs. Functionally, it has become a switch with dials.

What I actually need is a box with 3-or-4 pairs of 1/4" inputs, a pair of RCA-style inputs, maybe a 1/8" input, a n-way switch to select among them, and a single pair of 1/4" outputs. (Edit: It dawns on me that if everything were 1/4" I could work with that.) Anyone happen to know if such a thing exists?

(Searching on-line for audio "switch box" was my best guess but didn't get me anything that really matched.)

A friend mentioned in email that she was writing a song in Mixolydian. I have a decent understanding of the concept of modes, at least as they're identified in modern writings, but the names leave me utterly confused no matter how many times I look them up. It's like I'm reading a story about Snow White and the Seven Greek Dwarfs.

I want to rename them to be things I can relate to:
Ironic
Doritos
Friggian (or, possibly, Frakian)
Luddite
Mixed-metaphor
Aioli (or, more simply, Garlic)
Lackluster

The weather was fairly nice this afternoon after having been wet yesterday, too damp for digging in the garden but OK for attacking weeds. Maybe four or five hours of that was a bit much. Oh, well....

A few weeks ago I got a parody idea that went nowhere but I still had the words to the original song sitting on my desktop. Suddenly, tonight, I found a much better use for them than the one I'd started with. So here's a song for filkers who garden (as opposed to filk gardeners specifically).

( Done Too Much )

I've written before about my interest in high dynamic range imaging as a way of combining multiple photographs with different exposures into a single image with improved detail. As it happens, it can even be made to work in a limited way with a single photograph.

One of the steps in HDR processing is to modify overall contrast in a picture to emphasize local contrast. In other words, things appear lighter or darker because of what is around them rather than globally. This is the part of HDR that can be used to give better detail in a single photograph that's taken under difficult lighting. In the original of the picture posted here, the room is dark, the window is very bright and the cats are both. :)

I've been having an interesting conversation lately on songwriting and it has made me examine some ideas about the role of emotion in songs.

The title of this post comes from a Rolling Stones lyric that begins, "If I could stick my pen in my heart, I would spill it all over the stage. Would it satisfy ya?"

( An entire ballet about architecture )

Having heard Kathy Mar at FilKONtario and some more of her singing afterwards, I find myself earwormed by the song "Hell Froze Over Today" which she covers now and then. I mentioned to janeg that my internal parodist was trying to morph one of the main lines from that into, "Someone proved conclusively the silver bullet theory... was wrong."

Jane: Werewolves?
Phil: Lone Ranger?
Jane: Both?
Phil: OK, "Tonto proved conclusively the silver bullet theory... was wrong."

(Are there any existing songs that explain the Lone Ranger's silver bullets in terms of defense against monsters?)

This morning, while listening to some politician being quoted on the radio, I remarked to janeg that I hoped a particular speaking fad would soon fall out of favour. Her response was that she'd been hearing it all her life. I place my first memory of it at perhaps a dozen years ago.

The speaking tic that I'm thinking of is, asking oneself a question and immediately answering it. (E.g. Do I think this is a presumptuous and manipulative habit? Yes, I do!)

For how long have you been hearing people inject this kind of phrasing into speeches in place of a simple statement of opinion? Does it bug you also?

I now have the best of the rest of the weekend's pictures up.

Saturday's crop is fairly light. I went into the weekend with the idea that I wouldn't be doing anything on stage at all, having foolishly written a song for a contest theme that wasn't the one FKO had published. Things changed and had me on stage -- one way or another -- for four songs. That reduced the photo opportunities since tuning, practice, and getting my nerves under control afterwards are all impediments to taking pictures.

As usual, I'm planning on putting pictures on Flickr instead of any in-depth con report. So far, I've sorted through the Friday images and selected ones that I think are the best representatives of the activity on the main stage.

Follow the link for more of them.

I'll put up samples from the rest of the weekend when I have more energy for playing photo editor.