Posts Tagged My Favourite Things
King of Clubs: Some People I Met on the Cruise
Posted by Angela Brett in Pirates, Writing Cards and Letters on March 5, 2013
Here is yet another parody of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, this time about some of the interesting people I met on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 — not even including the official entertainers. I could fill several more verses and link to more examples of some of the descriptors; Sea Monkeys really are diverse, yet we have so much in common. I’ll add more links to explanations of the various people as video goes online. Some of these links relate to previous cruises, but the same kinds of people were on the third.
Whovians, früvians, knitters and quitters
Charming teen boys who don’t need babysitters
Folk most surprising and folk just like me
These are the people on JCCC.
Beardos and weirdos, who cares what the norm is?
Queer folk, craft beer folk and chiptunes performers [substitute ‘standup’ or ‘improv’ or ‘nerd rock’ here if you like; they were all there]
Coders and yodas and soda geeks too
All folks I’ll miss now that crazy week’s through
Linseed boilers
Fans of Euler’s
Scary horse head dudes
With 80s cartoon fans and two singing snorks,
There’s no-one this con excludes!
Dancers and -mancers and cancer survivors
Makers and bakers and pantses-McGuyvers
Writers, fist-fighters, devisers of clues
These are some people I met on the cruise
Those who keep horses, cats, dogs, dare I say ‘bees?‘
Artists, Kickstartists, mustachioed babies
Snake breeders, cake eaters, ‘fake’ geek girls too
Now that they’re gone I don’t know what to do
Famous vloggers
Weekly bloggers
Details I’ll forget
Please tweet, post in forums, put faces in books
I’ll see you all on the net!
Now if I may blow my own horn (which is probably out of tune) a bit more, here are a few other things I did on the cruise which I’m quite proud of. After using Mike Phirman‘s song Chicken Monkey Duck as mere word fodder to illustrate grapheme-colour synaesthesia and binary trees, as the cruise approached, while I was procrastinating from practising the poem I planned to recite for the open mic night, I finally got around to actually memorising it. Then on the cruise, I had the honour of singing it with Mike Phirman himself, and made one mistake (a monkey instead of a chicken; I am not counting singing the album version instead of the video version he does live, which has an extra pause in it, as a mistake), which I’m going to say was for the purpose of wabi-sabi.
Mike said nobody other than him had memorised that much of it before. I’m sure I’ve seen people doing it on YouTube, but perhaps they were reading the lyrics.
Later in the cruise, I recited my poem about Star Wars during the open mic, feeling justified in using Chicken Monkey Duck as an excuse for the inevitable mistakes (this is how it should have gone.) Still, it’s better than choosing a poem on the night and then reading it, as I did last year.
Mike Phirman (who, in case you were wondering, had said earlier that when you go on stage your body shuts down its vital functions and ‘you can really, really, really have to pee before you go on, and then you walk on stage and your body goes into like war mode, where it’s like, ‘There’s no time for that! We are at war!”) said it was awesome and Paul Sabourin commended my nerd pandering, so I’ll consider that a success! Sure, they’re pretty much paid to say that, but they’re paid to say it partly out of my pocket, so I’ll take it.
There’s one other creative thing I did on the ship, but that’s worthy of being the Ace. I will post it very soon.
Queen of Clubs: A Few Things You’ll Need for the Cruise
Posted by Angela Brett in Pirates, Writing Cards and Letters on February 3, 2013
Here is some advice on preparing for JoCo Cruise Crazy, to be sung to the tune of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, because the cruise is one of my favourite things:
Plan out your formalwear; book some excursions;
catch up on memes from the previous versions;
make your own fancy pants, moustache and fez;
read every word every Sea Monkey says.
Sign up for Cruise Monkey, hug tags and Twitt-arrr;
learn to play Artemis, drums, uke or guitar;
buy things for nerd cred and smuggling in booze,
then you’ll be halfway-prepared for the cruise.
What the sluice-muck? It’s a cruise, schmuck!
There’s no need to stress.
Just book, grab your passport and get to the port
and please don’t forget to dress.
Memorise bios and work of performers;
make sure your stateroom and friend group’s enormous;
map out free WiFi at each port of call;
learn not to sleep so you won’t miss it all.
Practise for open mic and karaoke,
and to meet idols without sounding croaky.
Pack things for signing and panties to throw,
then you’ll be three-quarters ready to go.
I repeat: it’s all unneeded;
do what piques your geek,
then bring any meds that you need to survive
and you’ll have an awesome week!
One of the things on my pre-cruise to-do list is ‘write something for the Queen of Clubs’, but I couldn’t think of anything but my pre-cruise to-do list, so this is what I wrote. You can do all sorts of planning and preparation for the cruise, and it’s fun to do it, but even if you do nothing more than get to the port on time with clothes on and the relevant documents, you’ll have a shipload of fun. More advice, especially for first-time JoCo cruisers, can be found on Alice’s blog.
This is my third parody of My Favourite Things, after My Favourite Strings and The Bad Coder’s Favourite Things. It’s an easy song to parody.
Seven of Clubs: The Bad Coder’s Favourite Things
Posted by Angela Brett in Star Wars, Writing Cards and Letters on December 23, 2012
To be sung to the tune of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music (though like in my other My Favourite Things parody, the structure is modeled more on various other parodies of that song.) Feel free to record yourself singing it so I don’t have to:
Catch all exceptions; what are they the heck for?
Just return nulls that the callers won’t check for,
or show an error box, if they insist,
brought back by loops every time it’s dismissed.
Checks and injection and joins are just theories;
just add more levels of nested subqueries,
lace all your filters with unescaped strings,
fetch from a multi-use table called THINGS.
Love the warning
marks adorning
all your huge source files;
they’re all just suggestions, there’s no need to test
as long as it all compiles.
Code reuse means not one code block is wasted —
ev’ry last one has been copied and pasted.
Make up for duplicates no more the same:
reclaim some space with a one-letter name.
I’ve used these same antipatterns since FORTRAN;
why should I listen to hacks I’m paid more than?
Even my students are older than you;
how dare you tell me I need code review?
Slam resource leaks
till you’re hoarse, geeks!
Rail against that kludge.
There’s no way to beat them; you’ll have to submit
to The Daily What The Fudge.
King of Spades: My Favourite Strings
Posted by Angela Brett in CERN, Writing Cards and Letters on June 1, 2008
The following is to be sung to the tune of ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music. For those of you who either don’t know the tune, or prefer to listen to something being sung badly than to imagine it being sung well, here is a hastily recorded demo.
Leptons and sleptons and quarks and gluinos,
positrons, Higgs bosons, muon neutrinos.
Some folks will tell you that all of these things
are just vibrations in closed loops of string.
D-branes and p-branes and strings heterotic,
worldsheets and nerd feats and mesons exotic,
Scores of false vacuums and questions they bring,
many more concepts that I can not sing
All existence
from Planck distance
strings can well explain,
and if you don’t think that 1D is enough,
then gen’ralise to membrane.
Don’t tie your strings into everyday chatter.
Don’t tell the truth when they ask what’s the matter.
Ordin’ry people just ask on which fing-
er they should put your new synchrotron ring.
Start off by getting all Klein-and-Kaluzy.
Add more dimensions and then you’ve got SUSY.
Have fun with spinors and Lie groups and rings,
call it a theory of everything.
When they mention
your dimension
doesn’t seem to show,
you simply remind them they’re all curled up small,
and that we will never know.
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Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 
