So, I’m a week in on the Kindle Unlimited program and I’ve got about a thousand pages sold. Now that’s like five books worth. Which is not much but the curve has been increasing for the last five days so I’ll keep an eye on this for a few weeks to see if it goes anywhere. If any of you guys currently uses Kindle Unlimited explain how it works. Do you read it on the website one page at a time or how does it work? It seems kind of clunky to me.
So, Camera Girl and I went to the Dunwich Spring Middle School Concert which includes both band and chorus sections at both the upper and lower levels. This is a remarkable experience because the range of accomplishment varies from fairly good to nonexistent. But realizing that the teacher has managed to get these children to even organize into an orchestra is almost inconceivable. The choral songs aren’t mostly to my taste. They tend to try to introduce a foreign language song that doesn’t translate to an American audience. One exception was Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). The Tokens version is a favorite of mine so I was excited. But something went wrong with the arrangement. As is typical in these school choruses the ratio of girls to boys is seven to one. So, the deeper voices are always practically missing in the song. But Wimoweh famously has a towering falsetto section and of course all those girls should have been able to translate it into a powerful soprano part. But instead, they had the three boys with their barely audible tenor voices whispering through this part. Oh, the pain.
But the highlight of the evening was the band giving their rendition of the theme to “Jurassic Park.” And the kids did a serviceable job of John Williams’ Fanfare for the Common Dinosaur. But the funniest thing was a kid sitting behind me. He must have been three years old and he started exclaiming loudly, “Giraffic Park, Giraffic Park!!!” at the top of his lungs and all the parents in the front rows started laughing. But the Conductor/Music Teacher never missed a beat and her band performed the miracle of producing a recognizable version of the popular melody.
I’ve started reading “Project Hail Mary.” My oldest grandson has loaned me his copy and I’m treating it with kid gloves since I remember what it was like when I had a mint hardback copy of an sf favorite. I’m a hundred pages in and it’s interesting. It’s definitely a millennial book. There’s a difference in the voice. It’s a kindler, gentler voice. There’s much more emotion. Now the protagonist is a Middle School teacher so you can say this is just the consequence of this particular character. But the choice of the character is part of this younger generation of readers and writers. Well, the book is good so far. It’s inventive and well-paced and has an interesting manner of unfolding the story. It starts in the middle and flashes back to the beginning but one flash at a time. Weir has come up with an interesting twist on an interstellar drive. It dovetails with the crisis that is forcing the need for a trip to Tau Ceti. Now I don’t think it’s a particularly plausible mechanism but it is entertaining for sure.
Well, that’s enough.
I do remember the Middle school concerts for Choir for both daughters and band for younger daughter (elder daughter tried flute and threw her hands up end of 5th grade, Younger did percussion and enjoyed it). Middle School bands really fall into the dancing bear category, it is not how well they dance, but that they dance at all. And having been a chorister in middle school, I know my voice didn’t really change until late 8th grade. Some of the guys switched mid-7th, a lot didn’t really switch until freshman year in high school. And singing is right out… Read more »
Well, part of it wasn’t her fault. Very few male volunteers. But at least this season she bunched all the boys in one location so they could at least hear each other and resonate.