Qu’ainsi périssent les ennemis du Cenovis !
Posted by Angela Brett in Culture, The Afterlife on December 12, 2010
Note: This is now available on video
This weekend is the Fête de l’Escalade, an annual commemoration of the night in 1602 when the Genevans defeated the invading Savoyards with the help of a diligent housewife and a pot of vegetable soup. I think this should be held up as an example in Good Housekeeping.
As part of this celebration, it’s traditional to smash a marmite while saying ‘Qu’ainsi périssent les ennemis de la République !’, which means ‘Thus perish the enemies of the republic!’ I happen to have several kinds of Marmite at home, mostly purchased for the tasty yeasty taste test at a Swiss party I held in New Zealand a few years ago.
The marmite at the back of this picture is a soup pot made of chocolate, usually filled with marzipan vegetables before being smashed by the youngest and oldest people present. The one at the top is British Marmite, a by-product of beer brewing rich in vitamins B1, B2, B3 and B12. It’s usually spread on toast but sometimes used to make a thin, yeast-flavoured soup. It’s probably the saltiest of all the yeast spreads I’ve tried. As far as I can tell, it is identical to the yeast spread sold as ‘Our Mate’ in New Zealand. The one at the bottom is New Zealand Marmite. It’s also a by-product of beer brewing used to spread on toast and make soup, but it tastes different, has iron in it, and is available in larger pots. It has to compete with the Australian yeast spread Vegemite, which has no iron or vitamin B12 in it and gives the illusion of being more vegetarian than Marmite.
In Geneva, however, the word ‘marmite’ is widely used to describe an even larger pot, often made of iron but rarely made of B vitamins, such as one might use to cook soup or foil invading Savoyards. In military slang, it means a shell, such as one might use to foil invading Savoyards. So when the Swiss finally discovered that they could spread the leftovers from beer brewing on their toast, they had to call it something else. To minimise the chances of having to compete with Vegemite, they chose Cenovis — a name which is known in New Zealand and Australia as a brand of multivitamin. Cenovis spread, which is rich in vitamin B1 but not B2, B3, B12 or iron, was added to Swiss military rations, so that the soldiers would be well-nourished and better able to fire marmites at invading Savoyards. It is also available as a liquid, for adding to the marmite if the vegetable soup doesn’t have enough flavour or killing power.
Cenovis multivitamin contains all the B vitamins and iron, along with plenty of other vitamins that you’d be better off getting from a pot of vegetable soup. It probably doesn’t taste very good on toast.
Video hodge-podge: Open Mic Night, JoCo Day, and a few musical evenings
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on December 2, 2010
On Friday I went to an open mic poetry night run by the Leman Poetry Workshop. I had forgotten about it until my calendar reminded me the day before, so I didn’t have time to prepare anything to read. In the end, I read two poems I’ve already read at other gatherings, and also recorded for YouTube. They seemed to go down well. I told a few people there about my blog, so I’m reposting videos of the two poems here in case they want to see them again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Get your own Mac to sing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on August 24, 2010
Somebody on Twitter mentioned he’d like the file I used to get my Mac to sing Still Alive, so here it is. If you have a Mac, you just need to open this in any application which can view text (TextEdit, for example) go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and select ‘Start Speaking’. You can try different voices by changing the system voice in the Speech pane in the System Preferences. For best results, use a high quality voice such as Vicki or Victoria. Alex is supposed to be the highest-quality, but it’s a male voice, and I don’t think I’ve tried it. Voices that already have their own built-in tunes (such as Good News and Bad News) won’t work. You could also create a sound file of it using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action.
It won’t sound exactly like the recording in the video I made, because I edited the resulting sound file in GarageBand to get the timing to match up with the original song. If you want to shortcut all that, or if you don’t use a Mac, you can get your computer to sing (or lip-synch?) Still Alive by downloading this mp3.
This file is released under a PleaseDon’tSueMeValve-Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which is explained in detail in the file itself.
What I like about Internet Explorer
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on August 23, 2010
An oddly powerful number of people liked this when I posted it on facebook, so I may as well put it here as well.
I have a few other things I will put on this blog once I get time, including the source file for the MacinTalk Still Alive, since somebody asked for it, but this will do for now. I’m also testing out the link between Twitter and WordPress, because I got tired of only twittering about goats.
Poem: Soardough
Posted by Angela Brett in Old Stuff, The Afterlife, Writing Cards and Letters on July 11, 2010
By request, here is the pantoum that restarted it all. I wrote it in 15 minutes during a workshop on pantoums at the Geneva Writers’ Conference in 2006 after a long time without writing, and the positive reception it received convinced me that I could still write if I tried. Two barren years later, it inspired me to embark on the Writing Cards and Letters project to so that I’d try more often. I still haven’t come up with a good name for it.
I dreamed I was flying around on a biscuit
raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
their hands cleansed by hand, and not sterile.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
Raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
I wish I could have done more.
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
I wish I could have done more.
By serving their need I prolonged it.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
By serving their need, I prolonged it,
I added dark minutes to their darkest hour.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
I have flour, sugar, chocolate chips.
I added minutes to their darkest hour.
I dreamed. I was flying around on a biscuit.
Video: Chemistry
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 4, 2010
Well, my last six months are over, without the rules really having been adhered to, and I’m still alive. On the subject of Still Alive, Steam is now available on the Mac so I finally played all the way through Portal on the very Mac that sang Still Alive for my last video (the older Mac only lip-synched, although it was perfectly capable of singing.) And on the subject of my last video, that wasn’t my last video after all, because here’s a new one. It’s a ‘performance‘ of the scientific love poem Chemistry, which I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters and revised for a challenge on Fictionaut.
It’s one of those things that was meant to be simple but resulted in my buying lipstick, cotton swabs, a T-shirt, nerd specs and two fake moustaches, and breaking a wine glass which I never used anyway. I bought the moustaches in New Zealand because I couldn’t find any here. While I was there I recorded another video, which is not quite finished yet, so watch this space.
To save you a click, here are the words and study guide, mostly cut and pasted from other posts but with some irrelevant bits taken out and other bits added:
Video: Mac singing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months, video on March 29, 2010
The weirdest thing happened yesterday. I was using Ayu, my as-yet-unnamed MacBook Pro, and suddenly Axis, my old PowerBook G4 booted and started singing Still Alive, the theme to the game Portal. I really should stop naming my Macs; I hear it makes them sentient.
Okay, that’s not really what happened. Actually, a couple of weekends ago, all three of the parties I had been invited to (yeah, I don’t understand how I got this social life either; just believe me) were cancelled or too difficult to get to, so I used my unexpected free time to do something I’d wanted to do for ages: get my Mac to sing Still Alive. You might remember that one weekend way back when I had an excuse to avoid being social, I wrote a parody of Still Alive, and a program to get my Mac to sing it using the TUNE input to the built-in speech synthesiser. Back then, I had to enter the notes and durations to sing one by one, and it was too tedious to do the whole song.
V Day’s over, because it has to be.
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months on February 15, 2010
Isn’t it though? The title of this post is an homage to Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘Summer’s Over‘, about things (or in his case, Things) ending because they have to. As Valentine’s Day was ending in my time zone, I recorded a video of my poem about love ending because it has to. It’s Love Letters, from my own Thing a Week. This poem also serves as a mnemonic, should you ever forget the alphabet.
I also added a stanza to Chemistry, a funnier love poem, so that I could participate in the Valentine’s Day challenge over at Fictionaut. Here’s the revised version. I would have liked to record a video of that one, but I didn’t have all the props I needed. Perhaps another time.
Little Things That Don’t Necessarily Count, But Still Involve Numbers.
Posted by Angela Brett in Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, The Last Six Months on January 24, 2010
The problem with relaxing rules is that they keep on relaxing all by themselves. In an attempt to make up for missing a few weeks, here are some small things I’ve done. Firstly, a big thing which I played a small part in: the video for Gödz Pöödlz‘ song ‘345-5316008’, also known as ‘She Boogies’. The song was written in response to a Masters of Song Fu challenge to write a song about a number, which is why every word of it can be displayed on an old upside-down calculator. For the video, they asked for photos of calculators showing the words, and girls dancing with calculators. I submitted an ‘eligible’ calculator picture, and some dancing with the closest things I could find to calculators. I don’t usually dance, if I can help it, but I thought it’d be a good excuse to wear my Klein Four T-shirt, and I wouldn’t have to show the video to anyone I knew. But they edited it to make my boogying less embarrassing, and the rest of the video is great, so here it is:
Another small video thing I’ve made is episode two of Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, in which Arch-Enemy continues his conversation with Mr. Super-Elephant by inviting her out. I started this series on December 14 with a silly improvised three-line scene to try out xtranormal, and decided I may as well continue in this fashion, since it only takes a few minutes. Don’t expect it to make sense, or be good.
And one final small thing which I’m only adding to make these add up to something less small, is some kind of weird poem-like thing I wrote in a few minutes one day. The first line was something I actually thought would be cool to do, but then it unexpectedly turned grim. But compared with the Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, it makes sense:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 