That's the spirit!

Aww, your ex-professor passed away? That is so sad. Was he a favourite of yours? I know I would feel the exact same had that happened to one of my favorite ex-teachers.

*She* was actually a professor I'd never been taught by, but I highly respected her work -- Wendy Allanbrook, a Mozart scholar. She was on the side of us performer/scholars, who try to compromise among the physical demands of early instrument replicas, the aesthetics of today's audiences and teachers, and the historical knowledge, slim though it, that we have for early classical music performance, from about the 16th century through 1925 and the beginning of electrical sound recording.

... Okay, I need to turn off the academese. *boggles*

I barely understood a word of that, but it sounds intellectually spiffy. Still, shame about the news. :( *pats*

LOL. Let me restate that, taking my brain out of midterm grading.

I play baroque cello, which means that I have an instrument copied from the ones they had in the 18th century. In order to play this instrument, I have to take into account the instrument itself and what I can make it do. I also have to consider what we know about how they played it back then—we have pictures, instruction manuals, concert reviews, and things like that, but none of them are really good sources of information. Since we don't have recordings, we can't really know what things sounded like. And, I also have to consider what today's audiences like to hear, and what makes my teacher happy. Often, these three things completely contradict each other.

*hopes that makes more sense*

Anyway, this professor wrote about Mozart in a way that's very useful to singers who like performing Mozart's operas in a "historically-informed" way.

Ahh, yes, that does make more sense! Very neat.

*phew*

Gah, must rescue cat Milo from something he's managed to tempt in from under the screen door...

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... and I have no idea what he's cackling and staring at, because I can't see anything...

Maybe it was a bird? My cat acts like that every time a bird lands on my balcony.

Usually I can see the birds. But sometimes he goes after bugs which are so small I simply can't see them, or they just look like part of the usual specks of dust.

BUGS. Ick. I HATE bugs! Even the teensy weensy small ones!

I rather like bugs when they've become cat prey. :D

Ehh... but then you've still gotta clean up the dead bug afterwards. Unless, of course, your cat actually eats it whole... which mine doesn't. My apartment is very clean and I live near the top floor in a high-rise building, so luckily I haven't had any major bug encounters yet. I'll get the odd flies when I have my balcony door open, but I don't mind flies so much--especially since i own a fly swatter. And my cat can't go outside, so it's not like it could ever bring anything in.

We get bees crawling under the screen door, and once a cockroach crawled in. Three cats had an awful lot of fun with it -- though I found it when I was moving furniture for the pesticide folks. They eat spiders, flies, beetles, stuff like that, but I've never seen them actually eat a bee or a cockroach.

Ugh... don't even get me started on cockroaches. I used to live in Bermuda, which, in practical definition, is cockroach utopia. You'd think I'd get used to them after living with them for 14 years... NOPE! I go back to visit and, I swear, each time I encounter the little fucking buggers, a chunk of my lifespan is knocked off.

What's so hilarious but not actually funny is that cockroaches are probably the least dangerous of all bugs -- even ladybugs bite. Cockroaches are just DISGUSTING.

Except the one in Wall•E, which was cute. Somehow.

I know!!! I always try looking at them in whatever light I can, but I just... ugh, I can't. I never succeed. I'm actually so afraid of them that I can't even kill them--I can't kill something that I can't even bear to look at! This is why I'm so lucky that I live where I do now... I don't have cockroach issues. But heaven forbid if I move somewhere that does...

Ohmygosh. That one is an exception! Any animated bugs are cute.

Apparently the artists weren't even trying to make it cute. I think the sound design is what does it!

It was just like a mini pet. I mean, obviously if you were alone with a cockroach on a purged planet, I highly doubt you'd get all buddy-buddy with the cockroach. Well, vice-versa, really... but, the way they portrayed it in the movie where the cockroach was the robot's only friend... that was just too cute.

Totally. Especially as Wall•E's consideration of the roach was one of the ways the movie made him "human." I've got a paper I hope to publish someday on the ways Wall•E's love for Eve is made realistic.

Aww, that's so sweet. Some of their moments made me cry--not out of sadness, but just because they were so lovely.

I know! It's such a great movie. I really loved working on that paper, because I got to watch the film about twelve times.

Haha! I do that with certain movies without even writing any papers. :P

Well, an advantage of being a film scholar is that it's actually work, and I actually get paid for it. :)

Ah! That is quite the advantage, then. You're lucky, I wish I had that kind of job.

It was hard work to get to where I am now, and it's nothing but hard work ahead, but I'm really grateful it's not a nine-to-five office job, or anything where I'm just a cog in someone else's machine. (Though technically I'm just a cog in the academia machine, but it's a really interesting machine!)

What sort of work do you do?