Saturday 27 January 2001

Pic of the day: Dyed in the wool? Annabelle the sheep. Not quite a "love ewe", but a Real player.

Annabelle the sheep

Upgraded my Realplayer in the dark of the night. Yes, I use RealPlayer. Not very often, even though it is my default MP3 player. I don't have a big library of MP3 music, as I try to avoid rips of commercial records. I've tried Napster and found it impossible to find any legal material within reasonable time, so I generally use MP3.com or Freetrax.com.

Anyway, I was made aware that it was time to upgrade when I tried to see the teaser for Lord of the Rings, the upcoming movie. Am I going to see the movie sometime? Possibly. Not alone, though. Anyway, that's still far off. In the meantime, there is Annabelle the sheep.

After downloading and installing RealPlayer version 8, I tested out a few of its features. Actually I don't know how much of this is new: I'm not a heavy user of this kind of software. But clicking on the button "visualizations" called up this small picture of a sheep, drawn kiddie style, with a pink ribbon on its head. It does it best to hop and sway with the music, while micro events unfold in the background. Clouds drift by, or a few birds or a butterfly, or more sheep. Oooh, why am I suddenly getting tired? :)

***

OK, went to bed and dreamt a series of dreams with the same theme. I was the scion of some criminal family (like the Mafia, I guess) but I did not want a life of crime. I had some innate superpowers, unlike my father and older brothers, the criminals. At first, erratic flight was all I could do, but eventually my telekinesis and partial invulnerability matured into being. (I was in my teens in these dreams.) And through relentless influence, my father eventually tricked me into assisting him with a robbery, by placing himself in a position where he might be shot unless I came to his aid. I tried to explain it to my girlfriend, but I knew that I had failed. A life of crime lay ahead of me now. (Even a boy who is pure of heart ...)

***

I woke up late, and a little later I took the bus to Tangvall to buy some food and shaving gel, and a battery for the smoke alarm. On the bus I heard a song that was strikingly familiar. In particular the voice of the female singer. It was a very special voice, that tickled me. I cannot find a better word. It tickled my brain. I felt like giggling, and I'm pretty certain I grinned sheepishly where I was sitting. Luckily the bus was almost empty. Then I remembered where I had heard it.

I had heard the song that very night, after midnight, while quickly exploring Freetrax. While Freetrax hasn't nearly the sheer size of MP3.com, it has a pretty good selection of Scandinavian upcomers. One of this, I think, was Fragma. Yes, that's the name. Pretty silly name, don't you think? It reminds me of Lobo the Preacher: "Repent or be fragged!". Ahem. I guess it's meant to be a bit like Pragma, too, which doesn't hurt either.

For further ticklishness, it helps to listen to it loud in the headphones while Annabelle the sheep rocks her head in tune to the music, and then starts to jump as the beat heats up... Woohoo! Go Annabelle! (Annabelle steroids?) The owner of the ticklish voice, incidentally, is quoted as "Maria Rubia". I don't know if that's a real name or what.

***

For someone who is humming a tune all day, I am not much of a radio man. That's funny, I grew up with radio, and had one even at the time when my very christian friends frowned on them. But I usually only turn on the radio to hear the news. And with the coming of the Web, I can easily look up the news I want right there, actively following the links that interest me, rather than letting someone else set the order. So I rarely turn on the radio at home anymore. At work, I listen to the "always news" channel, sending various newscasts through the day. Of course, if something exciting happens at work, there is no time for the radio.

As a side effect of not using radio much and not having a TV at all, I am quite ignorant of contemporary music. The whole new genre of "dance" music, for instance, I stumbled upon by accident. As a long-time computer owner, I almost had to know about Techno, and I had read about Ambient in Wired or some such place. But to me, Dance music was the stuff they played on fiddle and accordion on the barn dances Friday night. Well, this is not your grandmother's Dance music. There is more than orthography connecting it to Trance. But it is the most melodic of Techno's descendants. And I like melody. So once I passed by a record shop and heard some really delicious music, I just walked straight in and asked to buy whatever they were playing right now. That's how I came across the Swedish band Solid Base. Later the same happened again, with the Norwegian band Infinity.

But by and large, I have relied on my younger friends, and in particular the inexhaustible SuperWoman, to introduce me to the pearls in the dirt. For make no mistake, most of contemporary music is bad. I am sure that was the case also at Vivaldi's time, but the talentless hacks are mercifully forgotten. I do not have the inclination to sort through all the muck of this generation, where humans are more numerous and more productive than ever before. If I hear something good, I try to latch on to it. But listening to music would typically take a bite out of my play time ... I can't do it while I sleep, and the music at work is generally worse than the news. If I had Net access at work, I'd fire up my Realplayer and home in on some of the thousands of channels, I guess. But I haven't, so I don't.

And besides, I doubt that Annabelle the sheep would be welcome at work.

---

Having finished the above a couple hours ago, I asked myself: Is this how I want to be remembered? And I answered myself: Yes. Even though I was born at the time of the first man-made satellite, and grew up in a place where horse and cart was as common as the car ... my heart still belongs to the next generation, those who come after us. I do not believe that progress is automatic, a law of nature. But right now, I see it everywhere. An explosion of creativity. And I think that's what we are here for. Even dogs can love, obey and be faithful. (Good things all of them, when used wisely.) But only we, of all creation, can create.