bethybabes

zoerobinsonfeed @ 1:42am: Resolving

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GenericJournalTitleNumber7/~3/-VfvxYoIGSM/resolving.html

I'm consistently amazed that the articles I write on a whim tend to be my highest earners. The article I wrote a while back on making magazines for free online has brought in a small but consistent stream of revenue for the past month or so; which is certainly welcome. My legal articles on the other hand, go in spurts. This is of course expected, as people are generally only looking at legal articles when they need them and not, y'know, for fun or something. Not everyone is as enamoured with the idea of talking about laws as I am, after all.

Jenny and I recently made the trek up to the cold and inhospitable wastes that are the North East of England. I say cold and inhospitable wastes because when it comes to snow and ice, the only place that beats the North East in terms of guaranteed inhospitably is Scotland. Thank goodness we didn't have to go that far. I don't think I'd have coped with even more weather.

We went there to visit family over Christmas and it was great to see everyone again. We all played a variety of board games, which is traditional Christmas fayre in our house, and also sang a lot of songs on Singstar, which is not but went down so well that it just might become so. I also managed to make several people think my taste in cheese is so awful I should be ashamed, because my addition to this year's cheeseboard was not the usual brie or stilton but sticky toffee cheese. It was actually very nice, and most people who dared try it agreed.

While heading up to Durham, and then back down to Bolton, Jenny and I got ourselves reasonably well versed with the history of the early and middle Republic eras of Ancient Rome. This is a fascinating subject and Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast presents it in a very accessible, highly enjoyable format so if you've not heard that yet, I'd definitely recommend it. Consider it a New Year's Resolution, or something.

Speaking of resolutions, I've decided that my resolutions are threefold this year. I plan to get my comics back on track, so they update regularly; whatever the schedules I eventually decide to set for them. I also plan on making my article-writing regular again, so I can hopefully start deriving a reasonable income from that. At present I'm not well enough to go out and work a normal job, but I can get an article a day done if I take regular breaks, so that's got to be worth doing. Finally, I intend to get a reasonable mastery of Norwegian by the end of the year; which will mainly involve going hard at my Teach Yourself Norwegian book and CDs, plus reading a lot of Nemi.

With luck, I'll manage all three of these, but if I don't I'll just keep trying. The key to success is not to give up at the first setback, after all.

What will your resolutions be?

zoerobinsonfeed @ 5:20am: Ohrwurm

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GenericJournalTitleNumber7/~3/75BBfOylT3E/ohrwurm.html

When I get a piece of music stuck in my head, I often find listening to that piece of music is enough to get the tune to go away. It's like the mental equivalent of a craving: my mind is telling me what it needs, either because it wants to process the piece properly or simply because it likes it and wants to hear it again.

This is all well and good when I know what the tune is because either I've already got it (Save for one album or so, I have my entire music collection on iTunes; which tells me it would take over nine days to listen to it all, so my collection is pretty extensive) or I can find it on the Internet. It's safe to say that I can either play any tune I want from the comfort of my own home, even if it means looking up the odd one here and there. All I need is the name of the tune.

That's where the problem lies, of course.

For the last three or four year, on and off, I've had a certain tune going around my head but I've never been able to work out what it was called. You'll no doubt have heard it too; it's used on everything from film trailers to adverts. It sounds dramatic, it sounds classical and above all, it sounds good. Whenever I've heard it, I never got a chance to find out what it was called and it has driven me crazy because the iconic part of it tends to repeat in my brain.

Then I heard it on Top Gear of all places. To be specific, I heard it on the Top Gear Polar Special, which meant I finally had a program title to go with the song. Internet, here I come!

A quick search later brought me the cure for this particular Ohrwurm. The title is Requiem for a Tower and it's a reworking of Summer Overture from the 2000 film Requiem for a Dream. I was surprised about this, because I thought it was a lot older than that. Nevertheless, I have now heard it and it's no longer going 'round my head. For this I am thankful.

Now if I could just get a mental version of one of those iPhone applications that tells you what a song is after hearing a snippet of it, I'll be very happy.