Just the Way You Are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhCEhWiKXk

The song above is the one Shani is currently working on. It requires some weird tuning that I have never in my guitar-loving life heard of. Luckily, her guitar tutor has; and also luckily, he is happy to (a) let her learn it and (b) tune her guitar for her.

Which leads us to a problem. Once her guitar is tuned for that, she can't play anything else on it. She CAN tune her guitar back to normal, but then, obviously, she can't play Just The Way You Are.

So we came up with a plan.

She has an accoustic guitar, and an electric guitar. The accoustic guitar is a 3/4 size one; it's the one on which she learned to play; and though she still loves it, the electric one is getting more air time at the moment, and that's the one her guitar teacher tuned for her.

So we sat down and she played string for string on her electric guitar while I listened and tuned her accoustic guitar for her; then I tuned her electric guitar back to normal. So now she can practice Just The Way You Are on her accoustic guitar and everything else on her electric guitar.

This still leaves us with the problem that there are songs that need to be practised on the accoustic guitar and now can't be, without losing the special tuning.

However, she's 13 now, and grown enough that she could in fact use a full-size accoustic guitar; and what do you know, there's one of those upstairs. Mine, unused for some 25 years now. That being the case, the strings are so tense that if they snap they'll have her eye out. So, I restrung it last night.

And, inevitably, remembered one of the last times I played it. It was at my Mum's place, and we had had a visit from Uncle Piet and Aunt Bunny; and as he loved music himself, he asked me to play, and I did.
So the last time those strings were played, two people that I loved and have lost were listening to them. My Mum and Uncle Piet are no longer with us. 

Sentimental fool that I am, I couldn't throw the bent strings away afterwards.

Two nice men

The first one is called Devi, and he works for technical support. Somewhere; he wasn't specific about it; what he was specific about was that Support had detected a malicious virus on my computer and he was ringing me to talk me through evacuating it.
Since my jaw had dropped I was unable to reply, so he clarified by adding, "Your Microsoft Office computer. We are monitoring it and detected this virus."
"Which one?" I asked.
"The Mi-cro-soft-Off-ice one." He had obviously concluded he was talking to an idiot.
"I see, " I said, "but which Mi-cro-soft-Off-ice one?"
"Do you have more than one? How many are there?"
"Tell you what, you tell me the IP address of the Mi-cro-soft-Off-ice com-pu-ter that has the virus and we'll work from there."
"We don't have that information."
"Then how the hell are you monitoring it?"
Click.
And then this morning there was an email from Eric - I used to go to school with Eric and he and I are Facebook friends - asking me to join Netlog because it would make picture-sharing easier, so I did. And not long after there was an email from Netlog with a message from the second nice man - one Denzel, who is clearly so head over heels in love with me that he has totally lost his grip on grammar.

The angel on my eyes is clearly wearing jackboots, since it has given me a headache. What I do find funny though is the fact that the profile he mentions - my Facebook one - has this photo:

Kiwi biltong

No, seriously. NO, SERIOUSLY!!!!

Now, where I come from (South Africa, for anyone confused about that), when you call it beef biltong, it comes from a cow, and when you call it ostrich biltong - you have a fit and possibly demented butcher. (Ostriches can run 62 mph and disembowel humans with their claws; this may be one of the reasons ostrich biltong is so highly prized).
So I have to say the product pictured above seems illegal, immoral or just plain unfair, given the kiwi is a small, flightless, protected bird.
Also, they are going to run out of supplies fast.

Sir! Drop the offensive weapons and put your hands on your head NOW!

Neil Gaiman is a genius

Okay, I'm sure everyone already knows that; but I am here to tell you Neil Gaiman's take on Dr Who and the Tardis really, really, takes him into another dimension of genius.
Spoiler alert.
Humans. So much bigger on the inside than the outside.
And that's ALL I'm saying. Watch it, folks. Your brains may hurt, but in a pleasurable way.

Plank-tonne

Rapture Zombies!

Report follows in the wake of the postponement of the end of the world to October 21st.

Upcoming rapture to include zombies! the Christian Post reports: "Doomsday preacher Harold Camping predicted Monday that corpses of the 'unsaved', which includes those in the US armed services, will be flung out of their graves and on the ground like 'manure' on October 21 ...
But then again, he also thinks sheep are the way forward: "Our job right now is to feed the sheep," Camping said on his radio show. "Millions have become saved and many of them ... know very little about the word of God. And now we have a tremendous task to nurture them."
And now we know where Harold the Flying Sheep got his ideas….

June 1st; and that's all Im saying about that.