Posts Tagged song
Ace of Hearts: She Went to Pick Flowers (Mara Levi music video)
Posted by Angela Brett in Flowers and Animals, Kräuter, Wildblumen, Wildflowers of Canada, Writing Cards and Letters on March 5, 2013
For the Ace of Spades I posted a music video incorporating some footage shot on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, so for the Ace of Hearts, here is a music video I made with the help of a lot of sea monkeys for Mara Levi‘s song ‘She Went to Pick Flowers‘ during JoCo Cruise Crazy 3.
It was filmed on Coco Cay, St. Maarten, and the conference center (game room, for us) on board the Freedom of the Seas. While it’s a little ironic to film a video for this song during a luxury cruise, we had all the appropriate scenery available and I really wanted to share the song and hopefully get Mara some more fans. If you like the song and think Mara should have a few flowers, please buy it or other Mara Levi music, and maybe also support Mara’s band The Pushovers in making their first album together. And if you really like her, I certainly wouldn’t complain if you requested her for JoCo Cruise Crazy 4.
I got a lot of help from other Sea Monkeys (JoCo Cruise Crazy attendees) to make this, some of whom showed up and rescued the project right when I thought I’d never find the time or people or locations to pull it off. I didn’t even get everyone’s full names, so if you’re in it and would like a proper credit, let me know. I hope my amateur video editing does you justice.
My star Cass (‘she’) for example, showed up out of nowhere right when I thought there’d be no time to do it, with a rental car to get us to the beach, and agreed to be in the video with no prior knowledge of the song or of me. And when I was held up on Coco Cay because (having been Half Moon Cay where everything is paid using the ship’s room card) I didn’t realise I’d need cash to get my hair braided, another Mara Levi fan let me into the cabana area to film there instead of on the beach where I’d have made ‘old houses’ out of sand. The drawing and origami are by cartoonist Lar DeSouza, and I bought the flowers from flauxers, which is run by another sea monkey who also happened to end up in the video as a tenant. I had been confident from the beginning that some sea monkey would have a top hat they could lend me (there’s a whole ‘monocled monkeys’ group) but it would have actually been difficult to locate one had Robert not been wearing one from the beginning. A few more names are listed in the video description. I’m also grateful to the people who wanted to help but didn’t manage to meet me at the right places or times because I’m not very good at organising things and I didn’t get to the beach for long on Coco Cay.
Mara Levi says she loves it, in capital letters with three exclamation marks, so I’m calling it a success.
Flowers for everyone!
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 (Moxy Früvous parody)
Posted by Angela Brett in 52 ways to say I love you, Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, Bäume, Dinosaurier, Famous Pirates, Fische, Golden Gate Bridge, Holland, Hunde der Welt, Johnny English, Kama Sutra, Katzen der Welt, Kennedy Space Center, Models, Scenic New Zealand, Star Wars, The Best of Switzerland, Writing Cards and Letters on June 24, 2012
This is a parody of King of Spain by Moxy Früvous, written by me and sung by my not-so-top-secret collaborator, whom some of you recognised as Hello, The Future! She was sick for a while, which is why this is a week later than promised. There’s an mp3, but it probably makes more sense with the video.
Here are the lyrics (forgive the spacing; if I could have a superpower, it would be to always be able to make WordPress space lines the way I want):
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Oh, how I planted that naked lady now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now it takes lady luck to play me
Wan, 2 3 4!
Chicks dug me, spades really suited me
digging up bones from the late Cretaceous or planting downy birch trees
Now I eat humble pie whenever the ace is high
Caught in a flush for a poker cheater, plotting to crush the other guy
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
A pirate’s deckhand, burying lucre now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now my hand sweeps the deck at Euchre
Once this was the King of Spades
Folks would rave, they’d die so I’d dig their grave, the people said:
“King, how are you such a genius?”
“Your mounds are convex”
“and holes are concave!”
Kill chafer grubs so I would have safer shrubs
I’d do yardwork all through the weekend
and dig diamonds to give the lonely hearts clubs
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Old tree falls, new sea walls, you sat back, I’d hack that. now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Now the Ace hits me up to save you at blackjack.
Once this was the King of Spades
Ladies and Gentlemen, make your bids for the instrumental bridge!
Now some of you might be wondering how I came to be a playing card
after being a real life king of spades. Should I lay my cards on the table?
(shouting)
Deal me in!
You see late one day, I’d just dug a wishing well
Clearly I had to test it, I’ve pride in the service I sell.
And I thought, well this number’s fun, but I should be in the pictures
Next thing my heads are pounding, I’m upside down,
and I’m too legless for britches.
Ship and flatfish, banquet and cat dish
How I wish I’d never made that wish.
Counter to all intentions, I only have two dimensions.
If you’ve felt you’re bored with the cards life dealt
Remember, real life beats royal flushes
so dig your way to gold rushes!
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
I was dealing out gem stones from pyroclastic now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now my dealer is Angelastic.
Once this was the King of Spades
It was obvious I should parody this song for the King of Spades. I assumed I’d end up writing a nonsense song describing all the Kings of Spades I have in rhyme, and that it wouldn’t make any sense at all without a video showing the cards. Sort of like Jonathan Coulton’s Flickr. But to make a video, I’d need someone to sing it. Naturally, I thought of Hello, The Future! since she has already written one King of Spain parody, and when I first met her she was wearing a ‘Hello, The Future! is the name of my Moxy Früvous cover band’ T-shirt. Also, I knew she had a fez and had experience wearing a fake moustache. I commissioned her to do it even before I’d written anything. Once the lyrics were written, I sent her my shouting parts, some noises I made with my rainstick (which I am determined to use in everything now) and a plastic box full of kings of spades, and the one line which I realised, to my horror, would only make sense if I sang it myself, and she mixed it all in. It ended up being some kind of story about a real-life spade maven who turns into a playing card, and it might make some kind of sense without the video, but it’s still more fun with it.
One thing I hoped I could make clear in the video was that the ‘naked lady’ line was referring to amaryllis bulbs; I’m not sure how widespread that name is. But alas, amaryllis is out of season here.
One of these days, I should put this and several other things on my podcast. Unfortunately, I chose a podcast hosting platform which is a real hassle to use, so I’ve been lax in adding things to it.
I used cards from several new decks of cards this week. Obi-Wan Kenobi from a Star Wars Heroes & Villains deck I got in Sweden made an appearance (he’s a King of Spades, but was the ‘Wan’ as I shouted ‘1 2 3 4’), as did a Queen of Hearts (in the lonely hearts club) from the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Also in the lonely hearts club is a King of Spades from a Kama Sutra deck I found while searching for panties to throw at Paul and Storm. Underneath the ship card, you can see some information from a Golden Gate Bridge deck I was given on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, and somewhere in there is a King of Spades from a pirate deck I bought in Aruba (the same place I got the rainstick) during that cruise.
Five of Spades: Options
Posted by Angela Brett in Cadbury Heritage Collection, CERN, Fische, Hunde der Welt, Johnny English, Katzen der Welt, Kennedy Space Center, Lingo Pix, Models, NASA 50 Years, Scenic New Zealand, Space Shuttle, Things To Listen To, Wasservögel, Writing Cards and Letters on April 8, 2012
Note: This is a song-like thing. Here is an mp3 of my Mac singing it to approximately the right tune, just so you can get the same tune in your head that I had in mine when I wrote it.
Feel free to make your own recording of it with human vocals and actual music if you wish. I make no claim of being musical, and I probably accidentally copied the tune from something. Sosumi.
If I can’t have this, then I’ll have that
If I can’t have a dog, I’ll have a cat
If I don’t like today there’s always tomorrow
If I can’t be Superman, I’m Bizarro
If I can’t have coffee I’ll have tea
If I can’t have a pool I’ll have the sea
If I can’t have chocolate, I’ll have cakes
If I can’t have cities, I’ll have lakes
But if I can’t have you there are no good fakes
So I’ll be very sad.
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can get something that’s just as nice
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing that will suffice
If I can’t have Mars I’ll take the moon
If I can’t be first I’ll be there soon
If I can’t have shuttles, I’ll have Soyuz
If I can’t fly from you I’ll fly for youse
If I can’t have Skylab I’ll have Mir
If I can’t leave Earth then I’ll stay here
If there’s no zigazig I want all your base
If there’s no E.T. I’ll take the human race
But if I can’t have you there’s an empty space
And I’ll be very sad.
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always want what you’ve got
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing to hit the spot
If I can’t have ATLAS there’s CMS
If I can’t find the Higgs I’ll make another guess
If I can’t prove that, I’ll become a believer
If I can’t go to PAX I won’t be a reaver
If I can’t write songs then I’ll still write Things
and if my voice sounds bad my computer sings
If I can’t have Hexley, I’ll have Tux
If I can’t have a princess, I’ll have ducks
But if I can’t have you then that just sucks
And I’ll be very sad
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always rehypothesise
It is not very likely the answer you seek
Is the only one that satisfies
If I can’t have some things I’ll have others
If I can’t have sisters I’ll have brothers
If I can’t have rhythm I’ll have rhyme
If I can’t have space then I’ll have time
If I can’t have proof then I’ll have trust
If I can’t make love then I’ll take lust
If I can’t have lovers, I’ll have nudes
And if I can’t have ladies, I’ll have dudes
But I can’t have you so we’ll have feuds
’cause I am very sad
Well you can’t always get with the person you like
but you can always find someone new
It is not very likely the one that you want
Will be the only one that’s meant for you
Well, they say there are plenty more fish in the sea
Though I don’t think they mean that literally
And while I can’t seem to stop the overfishing
I always can be careful what I’m wishing
‘Cause if I can’t be linked then I’ll be free
If I can’t have you there’s another three
And if I can’t have them then I’ll have me
And you’ll be very sad.
But you can deal with that:
Just find another lad.
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.
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.
Get your own Mac to sing Happy Birthday to the London Science Museum
Posted by Angela Brett in News on December 16, 2009
Somebody on YouTube asked where I got the file to make my Macs sing happy birthday to the London Science Museum. I realised I’d forgotten to upload it anywhere. Or perhaps I didn’t think people would be interested, since in general if they wanted their Macs to sing happy birthday, they’d want to customise the name. The software I wrote to do this (and other things) is really still a prototype unintuitively bolted onto an unrelated prototype, with the default CoreData interface, so I’d rather not release it yet. But just in case you do want your Mac to sing happy birthday to the London Science Museum, here’s the file. There are instructions in the file on how to get it to sing.
I also just made this file where you can put the name of your choice instead of the London Science Museum; just search for ‘your name here’ in the file, and change it. It will just speak the name rather than singing it, since to get it to sing it you’d have to figure out how to write the name in MacInTalk phonemes.
Alternatively, if you want to personalise the song while still having the name sung, you could record your Mac singing to a sound file using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action, and then open that in GarageBand and splice in a recording of yourself singing the appropriate name.
Addendum: I just thought of another possibility: you could use the Repeat After Me application (which comes with the developer tools) to get your Mac to sing the name however you do. This is not what I used for the rest of the song, since it’s made with normal speech intonation in mind rather than singing, and it gets quite tedious for anything long, but it is a very cool program and would be great for just recording the name.
Recording: Why?
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months, Things To Listen To on December 7, 2009
Here is a very rough robot choir recording of Why? a song I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters which looks at 24 different Queens of Hearts and asks of each the titular question. It might make more sense if you read the original post.
I didn’t have much time this week, what with editing We’re Having a Party until Tuesday, and meetings all Sunday. In fact, technically I’d already finished We’re Having a Party this week and didn’t need to release anything else this week for the ‘The Last Six Months’ thing. But I did anyway, because I said I would. I’d like to fine-tune it a bit more, improve the pronunciation, add some instruments, and then make a video, but I’ll do that some other week. This version is so rough I don’t think I’ll even put it on the podcast yet.
For the video of this song, I’ll just show the cards for the ‘why?’ lines, but I might need some help drawing pictures for the rest, taking each three-line ‘answering’ verse as one picture… e.g. a picture of somebody suave (e.g. wearing a top hat) not shutting his eyes to a free-falling turd for the appropriate verse. If you can draw something for one of the verses, please do, and I’ll credit you in the eventual video.
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 
