S e n t e n t i o l a

sententiola:

Today I had an owl on my head.

I just felt you ought to know.

Good night.

It was this owl, by the way.  His name is Bob.

[Video shows Bob, a burrowing owl, being trained to run in a straight line towards a miniature ‘finish line’ like at a race-track.  His body is a bit bigger than a soft drink can, with mottled grey and white feathers, and he has long legs that give him a sort of bouncing, hopping gait when he runs.  He is also shown flying short distances and eating worms.]

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EDITED TO ADD:  Apparently clicking the grey ‘video’ rectangle will open this post on my tumblr.  Sorry, I don’t know how to make it play on the dashboard.  :(

It’s funny how the unconscious mind makes connexions.

I often become aware of some song or other running through my head and then realize, after letting it play through, that it has some lyrical snippet or theme that relates to what I’m doing or thinking about.

I’ve spent much of today, for instance, researching how English law was imposed on British colonies in the Caribbean.  And then an hour or two later I noticed I was humming a song that I haven’t heard or thought about for months.  I was puzzled until I remembered what the song is about — the Falklands war…

Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello (written by Costello and Clive Langer) is worth a listen, if you don’t know it.  Here’s a live performance that looks like it must be from near the time the record was released (1982).  Lyrics here.

hanuueshe:

thedailywhat:

Afternoon Snack: A cute lion cub tries to roar like the big boys.

[thanks bdp!]

He also needs to brush up on looking down.

Tchy, look, look Tchy!

(Video shows a lion-cub making roaring faces but producing only small squeaking sounds.)

(Source: thedailywhat, via ladysaviours)

Video description / transcript here.

silentpunk:

bitemebeautiful:

Meet the really lovely Holly Rae, brave enough to film the first video for the new feminist vlog channel ThosePeskyDames (of which I am a part). This week is introductions week, so keep an eye out and every day you can meet a new member of our lovely team.

 Hey I just met Holly Rae this weekend! She’s so cool and pretty and stuff!

All five daily vloggers have done their intro posts now and they all seem pretty nifty.  I don’t always get time to watch video-based things but I’m gonna subscribe to this one and see how it goes.

Summary: the transcript / video description for Games with Edna, an episode of the 1981 UK cartoon series Willo the wisp.

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Video transcript / description here.

Willo the wisp was a children’s cartoon series on British TV in 1981, repeated in the late ’80s (which is when I remember seeing it).  The narration and all the voices were done by the glorious Kenneth Williams.  (I don’t know about other countries, but the UK has a strange habit of getting spectacularly notable people to do voice-acting on programmes aimed at children far too young to be remotely impressed.  See also Willie Rushton on The trap door, David Jason on Danger Mouse, Ringo Starr on Thomas the tank engine, and most recently Sir Derek Jacobi on In the night garden….)

Cruel fate has it that only three episodes appear to be known to the internet, at least as far as my limited powers of googling can discover.  The other two are The dragon and The thoughts of Moog.  I am given to understand that a new series was made recently, obviously not involving the late Kenneth Williams and changing Evil Edna to a flat-screen television and making Mavis less fat.  Needless to say, I refuse to sully my eyes with any such abomination.

mbt-shoes-sale liked your video: emilyswash: hey anon, here is nearly eight…

In the nine months since I spent painstaking hours transcribing that video, this is the first note my reblog+transcript has ever received.

I’m so delighted that I’m going to completely ignore the possibility that this curiously-named tumblr is a spambot possibly selling shoes.

Instead, I’m going to watch the video again and laugh a lot.  Satah, you are all the awesomes.  (Sorry about the pronouns in the transcript.)

Video shows Beyoncé and a group of musicians performing ‘Single ladies’ live on a crowded little stage in what may be a rehearsal.  All the musicians appear to be people of colour and probably either women or FAAB people, and they’re all bopping around while they play.  The group consists of three drummers, a guitarist, two keyboard players, three backing singers, a brass section consisting of two saxophones and a trumpet, and one person playing a keyboard and a sparkly gold bass guitar.  Lyrics to ‘Single ladies’ here.

torayot:

dionthesocialist:

Beyonce - Single Ladies rehearsal.

You can’t tell me that’s not “real” music.

A group of WOC making music. :D

Oh my goodness this is so awesome.

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency does a nice summary of the ‘mystical / alien pregnancy’ trope in screen sci-fi and fantasy.  (Some cissexism and US-centrism though.)  Doesn’t mention the recent Doctor Who plot but one can see easily how it fits in.

I’ll try to do a transcript tomorrow if I have time.

(Hat-tip Chloe Angyal.)

THAT WAS 3 WEEKS AGO, MR PEAR.

torayot:

sententiola liked your audio post: Martin Phipps - Essex, sung by Mediæval Bæbes….

Aren’t you supposed to be preparing for worky type things or have you finished or are you procrastinating on your breaktime?

So a lot of the time when I’m reading Tumblr I can’t listen then and there to the music people have posted — maybe because I’m half-watching television or listening to other music or because I’m in the sitting room and my flatmates are watching television or talking or whatever, or sometimes because I have so many windows open on my computer that audio won’t stream smoothly.  So I have a method.

I open the music post in a separate window or tab, bookmark it in a folder that exists specifically for this porpoise, close it, and carry on scrolling.  Then when I’m able to listen to stuff, for example now while I’m doing paper-based work, I go through what I’ve got bookmarked in that folder and listen to it.

I use the same system for videos, but it’s rarer that I get chances to watch those because then I have to be able to spare my eyes and my ears rather than just having music on in the background while I do other stuff.

So that, followees (leaders?), is why you get me Liking your music posts a long time after everyone else has moved on, and your videos sometimes even later.

As for work, no, I haven’t finished, but as I said above I can have music on while I’m working, as long as it isn’t too thought-intensive work.  And I’m taking occasional breaks like this one here.  So there we are.

Video shows two fluffy kittens alongside one another on a sofa.  One is white with grey bits — this is Too Cool For School — and one is white with orange bits — this is Too Sweet To Cheat.  Too Cool is lying stretched out; Too Sweet is sitting up and cleaning itself, then curls up in the arch of Too Cool’s stretch.  A pair of light-skinned legs is visible next to the sofa, and an associated hand comes down to tickle Too Cool’s ear; he waves his paw vaguely at the hand, which moves to tickle Too Sweet under the ear.  Too Cool stretches, rolls almost onto his back, absent-mindedly nips at Too Sweet’s ear, then rolls all the way over and stretches.  The hand comes in and scoops up Too Sweet: she hooks one claw into the fabric of the sofa and Too Cool reaches out a paw to her, but then the fabric falls away and Too Sweet is carried off, leaving Too Cool’s outstretched paw hanging off the end of the sofa.

These are the kittens.  Like all my friends, they have been given tumblonyms to protect them from the embarrassment of being outed as people (or in this case animals) who know me.  The legs and hand belong to my flatmate Cinema Rolls.

I actually took this video back in early April but somehow lost track of it until now.  They are a fair bit bigger now, especially Too Cool For School.

dinokitten:

sparksthegabe:

okay. can we discuss this song and the feelings i have about it? well, you don’t really get a choice because that was a rhetorical question so i will do it anyway.

[Remainder of original post omitted because it’s personal to sparksthegabe, whom I don’t know and probably a lot of my followers don’t know and so I don’t know whether he necessarily wants it wandering around strangers’ tumblrs attached to unrelated commentary about the video. — Jamie.]

<3333 There is so much love in this video I cannot even handle it.

Video is lots of clips of people sitting on a red sofa in a coffee-shop wearing big headphones on apparently listening to something.  Many of them are in couples, some with babies, and there are various combinations of gender-presentations and colours.  Mostly they look happy and are interacting affectionately.  The song is First day of my life by Bright Eyes (2005), a gentle acoustic guitary thing with lyrics that go like this.

This is cute.

Are all these people actors, or are they random people one whom just randomly happens to be Daniela Sea (at 0:42 and 2:29)?  If the latter, that’s pretty cool.

(via cumbersuffix-deactivated2011062)

nothinginlifeisperfect:

quixotess:

This is a video wherein fifteen pendulums of carefully calibrated length are swung, and the view from the side forms PATTERNS and it is MATHEMATICAL and BEAUTIFUL oooooh

I was surprised by how interesting and also pretty this turned out to be, though in hindsight it makes sense.

(via rollingforaye)

Yuck

I’m a bit ill.  Like, I’m okay, but just weak and grotty and yuck.  I bet you all wanted to know that.

Here, have an irrelevant video of some nifty guitaring.

Video is of a live performance by Antonio Forcione, a pale-skinned clean-shaven man wearing a soft hat a bit like a tuque or a kufi and a short-sleeved shirt with white and brown stripes and zig-zag patterns.  He’s sitting down with an acoustic steel-string guitar on his knee plays a quick-fingered, bright-sounding instrumental version of the Whitfield / Strong song I heard it through the grapevine.  About five minutes into the performance does some rather funky stuff by slapping the strings quite high up the neck of the guitar.