My Latest Fad

I got my Chopin-Godowsky CDs (Godowsky: The Complete Studies on Chopin's Etudes) in the mail on Monday. Actually, it came a lot faster than I expected. I ordered through Amazon, along with a bunch of other stuff, but I found that some seller was offer the same item for a lesser amount. And what do you know, I ordered last Wednesday and the CD is already here. Meanwhile the rest of my stuff, ordered through Amazon-proper, was picked up by UPS just this afternoon.

I first heard about the Chopin-Godowsky etudes about 2.5 years ago, through some music forum online, where people were talking about some of the "hardest" piano pieces. Even after all this time, I haven't been that successful in finding MP3s of Godowsky's stuff. So, while I was making my big order on Amazon last week, I decided to get the CD set for Godowsky's transcriptions of Chopin's etudes.

What's so interesting about these CDs? Well, basically someone (Leopold Godowsky) took Chopin's 24 etudes and created his own etudes off of these. [FYI, etudes are basically studies for people who are excellent already.] He was a real fanatic about keyboard fingering and tried to make these exercises "better". In fact, 22 of the 57 Godowsky etudes are written for left hand only. Godowsky was crazy enough to take Chopin's two-handed etudes and rewrite them for only the left hand. When you listen to these pieces, you'd think that two or three hands are playing the music! I don't think I'll ever be good enough to play one of these suckers with both of my hands. Anyhoo, now I'm just rambling like a maniac. =P

For a really detailed biography of Leopold Godowsky, check out:
http://www.godowsky.com/Biography/bio.html

Helping out a friend

I got together with ######## for dinner on Thursday night. It's always good to catch up with good friends from time to time. Now that we've all graduated and moved on to (hopefully) bigger and better things, it's become harder and harder to keep in touch with people, especially if they're not local. It's great to be able to talk about all sorts of random off-beat things... =D

Anyway, if you're a straight Asian guy, of the summa-cum-laude-from-top-10-colleges caliber (except from Harvard***), and loaded with money, [and single, I suppose] she's interested in talking to you. She'll clean your very big house for you, do all the gardening, and probably will want to have your kids eventually. Oh, she does not cook, but don't let that get in the way, since you can always eat out and hire a cook with all the money you have. She loves to eat. ;o)

*** From a school where like 90% of each class graudates with cum laude distinction, it's kinda watered down. =P

Lost in Translation?

People in Asia are extremely fascinated with English... such that they'll try to insert random English words whenever possible. You can find blatant use of English in pop songs especially (look at all the English titles and the occurrences of the word "love" in jpop, cpop...). You have sites like engrish.com that documents abuses of the English language by Japanese society.


Here's an example. =) I actually think they're encouraging people to practice on each other.

Then you have cases of REAL abuse of the English language. The perfect example has to be from this infamous bootleg copy of Star Wars Episode Three found in China. Check out this link. It's probably the funniest thing I've seen all month. It's very entertaining when you first read the photo caption to see what the actual context is, and then look at the picture with the subtitle translation. After seeing something like this, I'm ashamed to be Chinese. >_< I mean, c'mon! They can't even subtitle English text from the movie correctly.

Surround Sound

Okay, some people are naturally loud... and I suppose I can't and shouldn't complain too much about that. But then there's this manager whose office is near my cube. I can hear her loud and clear even when her door is closed. Not that sound insulation is that great around here (they should have just used cardboard in the first place and saved even more money).

Anyway, once in a week or so, this manager hosts a conference call with her underlings. This wouldn't have been so bad, but this manager likes to use the speaker phone. We all know that we must speak even LOUDER for the crummy speakerphone to pick up the sound properly. My cube also happens to be surrounded by her underlings, who all happen to think that the use of speakerphones in cubes is really cool. So, I usually end up with this manager's voice booming from her office (it's more like an annoying shrill), and then echoed a number of times as her conversation gets relayed to all the speakerphones around me. And when her minions talk back, I can hear them directly, and also indirectly from their manager's speakerphone. It's like having a conversation from hell blasting from a 7.1 setup. I don't need surround sound at work.

Kill me.

Simpson's House

What a wacky concept. They were crazy to have built this beast....
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sun/dossier/misc/simpsons/index.html

Random Links

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Enola Gay's release of the A-bomb on Hiroshima. I'm not going to venture into the debate of whether dropping the bomb was appropriate or not. Was it better to kill something like 200,000 people instantly to end the war, or risk prolonging the war and losing more lives on both sides? Your call. I found some pictures from a photographer. Looking at these pictures was very... chilling. And they weren't even pictures of dead or bloodied people. [Link]

Here are two pictures taken by Steve Robinson from the underside of the Discovery during his spacewalk this week. His self-portrait picture (especially the high-resolution one) gives me an eerie feeling.

For something a little more uplifting, checking this guy's pavement paintings. I want to see the 3D ones in person. That would be really cool.

Milestone

Wow, as of yesterday, I've been working for *TWO* full years. Aw nuts.

Pictures of the Day 7/7

So I ran out of ideas from my stash of personal pictures for the time being...


Otaku gone wild.