JohnCalvinYoung.com » Humor

God Rest Ye Merry Gentle Chipmunks

John Calvin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:07:25 +0000

Yesterday my good friend Stephen Nasby, whose work I have featured here before, posted an interesting piece of music he and his musical family put together. I quote from his Youtube description:

I was working on an arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” for me, my brothers, and my Dad to perform at a wedding, when who should pop in the studio… the Chipmunks (or a reasonable facsmimile thereof). They were kind enough to record their own version of the song; but, don’t be too picky about their pitch, they could only do one take

This is a really neat, classy arrangement of the classic Christmas carol. And may I mention for the record that I prefer these Chipmunks to the recent film adaptation… Listen and enjoy.

[See post to listen to audio]

Murphy’s Law of Announcements

John Calvin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:58:00 +0000

Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Young’s Corollary for Publicly Promoted Announcements: If a definite time for an announcement or a release is made, events will conspire to make it ludicrous or plainly impossible to try to meet the deadline.

Yes, I am here. I am not dead. I am not even dead tired. But there will be no announcement tonight. I registered the domain, I picked the images for the splash screen. I even opened Photoshop and began the layout. That’s when my iffy-but-working AC power supply for my laptop decided to fail, apparently irreparably.

30 minutes of fiddling later–still not working. No problem! Web work is by definition portable–I’ll just move over to one of the other computers. (BTW, you don’t begin to appreciate something like Adobe Photoshop until you have had it and suddenly don’t.) So I fired up the trusty-and-free GIMP to finish the job and suddenly it crashes. With an unexplainable error. I download and reinstall GTK+ and GIMP 2.4.6. Twice. With no better results.

Rather than attempting to do it with Microsoft Paint, I decided to have another go at fixing the laptop. 45 minutes, three rubber bands, a piece of aluminum foil and a Norton Anthology of American Literature later, the power blinks on!

Joyfully I power up the laptop, open PS, and am importing my images when it decides to quit. Going back once more to GIMP, I reinstall it again, witness it crash AGAIN, and seized by some kind of desperation, begin disabling any .dll in my system32 folder that comes up with an error message. Finally, at 11:58, I belatedly conclude that apparently I am not to get this announcement out before midnight.

That is the comfort of being a Calvinist–the Lord must have a purpose of some sort behind this–who knows, possibly forcing me to get some sleep so I can get up and get to work in the morning. So I shall. The announcement will come tomorrow or the next day when the Lord enables me to get my electronic world put back together. Apparently it is also time to buy a new AC adapter…

Until then, a teaser…
What occurred on July 6th, 1938 that would have repercussions for the next 70 years? Hint: it’s been in the international news a lot lately.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Port Out Starboard Home

John Calvin — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:18:00 +0000

In the department of interesting movie trivia, I recently heard a possibly apocryphal story explaining both the origins of the word “posh” and the somewhat nonsensical lyrics of the “Posh, Posh” song in the much-loved film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (imdb). As the story goes, rich travelers sailing between Colonial India and Great Britain would pay extra for the priviledge of a cabin on the port side going out and the starboard coming home, as the peculiarities of the route would put the cabin in the shade for much of the Indian Ocean leg of the trip. Only the richest, most picky passengers could pay, however, so the modern definition of “posh” as “Smart, fashionable” with a subtle connotation of picky superiority followed from that original acronym of Port Out Starboard Home, supposedly printed on the higher-priced tickets. There seems to be a lack of concrete evidence for the practice, but the explanation certainly appeals to the imagination–and the rhyme.

This is livin’, this is style
This is elegance by the mile

Oh the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain’s table regal company
Whenever I’m bored I travel abroad
But ever so properly
Port out, starboard home
Posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

The hands that hold the scepters
Every head that holds a crown
They’ll always give their all for me
They’ll never let me down
I’m on my way to far away tah tah and toodle-oo
And fare thee well, and Bon Voyage arrivederci too

O the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain’s table regal company
Pardon the dust of the upper crust
Fetch us a cup of tea
Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

In every foreign strand I land the royal trumpets toot me
The royal welcome mat is out
They 21 gun salute me
But monarchies are constantly commanding me to call
Last month I miffed the Mufti but you can’t oblige them all

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
Oh rumpetly tumpety didy didy dee dee dee dee dee
Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
First cabin and captain’s table regal company
When I’m at the helm the world’s my realm and I do it stylishly
Port out, starboard home

Posh with a capital P-O-S-H
P-O-S-H, P-O-S-H…

(lyrics from http://www.lyrics-n-tunes.com/lyrics/chitty_posh.html)

Whether the story is historically valid or not it does explain the song beautifully. I enjoyed hearing this and just wanted to pass it on to you.

John Calvin Young

Conducting In 6/8 Time Isn’t So Hard…If You Know The Tune!

John Calvin — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:53:00 +0000

I had a somewhat embarrassing event happen to me today… I am the hymn leader at our small church, and that typically means I get to pick the hymns. We have a very good pianist, so usually I just bring a list of the hymns for the service (we don’t print them in the bulletin). Today though…

1. I had been out of touch this week, preparing for exams, and so when the pastor found out that we would have extra people for the service and would be using our backup hymnals, he went ahead and picked hymns so that he could verify that they were in both hymnals. No problem…yet.

2. I get the message such a short time before the service that I didn’t get to talk to the pastor about it.

3. When I read the list, I realized that two of the five hymns he had picked I didn’t even know! Needless to say, I couldn’t get to talk with him before I had to lead them. He had printed them in the bulletin this week, so there was no going back!

4. When I look up the hymns, I find that one is in 6/4 and the other in 6/8 time–both of them REALLY hard to conduct, at least compared to 3/4 or 4/4.

5. I’m pretty good at sight-reading, so I just ask the pianist to play the first hymn through once before we sing it…

6. Somehow, I manage to figure out the tune and lead the singing. Didn’t sound like many others knew the tune either, but it wasn’t the worst singing I’ve ever heard. When I finished, the pastor stood up and asked us to sing the second verse over again–a capella!

Somehow with the Lord’s help I managed to get through it without disgracing myself. When I talked to the pianist later (our pastor’s daughter) she was shocked I didn’t know them–apparently they are both old favorites in her family. Memo to self: I think next week I’ll make sure to correspond with the pastor and pianist about the hymn selections a couple days ahead of time!

Feeling somewhat more humble about his hymn leading now,

John Calvin Young

The Filmmakers’ Night Before Deadline

John Calvin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:27:00 +0000

Sometime last Tuesday or Wednesday night, mired deep in the middle of the edit for A True Patriot, poetical lines of frustration began seeping into my mind around my concentration. I took a few minutes off to write them down, and it quickly morphed into the Filmmakers’ Night Before Deadline. Thankfully not EVERYTHING in the poem happened to me this time, but a good bit of it did…including multiple power failures due to a bad AC power adapter during the edit and …

It’s rather rough, and some of the lines don’t really scan, but this is more-or-less just as I wrote them down. With no further ado…

Twas the night before deadline, and all through the house,
Every timeline was rolling, and I burned out my mouse.
The titles were perfect, animated with care,
But the effects shots were not–in fact far from fair.

I was still up; could not go to bed,
Visions of transparency danced in my head.
When I the spacebar to output did tap,
My camera decided to take a short nap.

Then from my laptop the hard drive did clatter,
After Effects had eaten the RAM and crunched on my platter.
I sprang to my desk and quick as a flash,
Shut down iTunes for the fast final dash.

As soon as free resources had hit a new low,
The circuit overloaded and my power strip did blow!
Thank God for Autosave; my files were fine;
My nerves were not–I ’bout lost my mind.

My rendering sure wasn’t moving too quick,
Time, on the other hand, was continuing to tick.
Faster than sound the deadline approached,
But then I remembered how I’d been coached:

“Bake cookies!” I shouted up, “Raisin!”
“Chocolate, Oatmeal,” to tempt the mailman!
Let me print up the cover, clean up that shot,
Finish my render, and you’ll have the lot!…

Hope this helps relieve some stress for a filmmaker rapidly approaching a deadline!

IHS,

John Calvin Young

Film Shoot + Life = Stress & Sleep Deprivation

John Calvin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:50:00 +0000

Ohh…It’s 1 AM here at the Studios, and I and my brother are deep in the throes of Film Shoot Eve-itis. You’ve all been through this before, and will recognize the symptoms–red-rimmed eyes at 9 AM on-set, the D.P. (me) falling asleep standing straight up, and…storyboards that made “perfect” sense at the time, but will probably look like a script for “America’s Funniest Home Videos” come daylight. There’s a mic shockmount that needs to be fixed, software which needs to be reinstalled, and the final storyboards to finish before we go to bed. And that’s with approximately 5 hours and 17 minutes until we HAVE to be up in the morning to leave for the shoot. Thankfully this is only a short project, but it seems the simpler the project, the closer the deadline… I guess I’ll post more information later, including some fantastic shots from our trench set for the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge that we shot last week. Teaser: it includes a live-firing field gun and muskets. Right now I just need to get the storyboards approved and make a decision about the shockmount before we go to our belated rest…and we’ll leave the rest in the Lord’s hands.

IHS,

John Calvin

The Preventer of Information Services

John Calvin — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:12:00 +0000

This is what Mom and Dad call me sometimes: either that or “IT: the Impairment of Technology Department”. If something goes wrong, they look for me–probably I have been messing up some settings someplace (fine-tuning, according to me). They mention a certain time I updated OUR network and then headed off for an overseas trip (no kidding). I seem to remember trying to talk them through a major network glitch over a trans-pacific Skype connection…Remind me not to make changes right before I leave for somewhere! I saw this Dilbert comic strip yesterday and it brought it all back.

Note: Dilbert® is copyrighted, but I figured this fair use–I pulled it off of the daily page at http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/. Many thanks to Dilbert.com for making it available online, and as always my use of this strip does not imply their or the author or publisher’s endorsement or permission in any way.