Song of the day: Math and Physics Club – La La La Lisa

We’ve got broadband. Since yesterday. Forty days after we applied for a landline, making the waiting sound quite biblical. Finally we have been able to borrow albums from the internet at a normal speed. And I can wholeheartedly agree with all the praise for the new Math and Physics Club album.
Though my main focus for the following days is not to spend too much time behind the screen. There are lots of other things to do, the wheather is still quite nice (can’t believe it’ll be November tomorrow) and, well, I tend to get quite zombie-ish spending longer periods behind the screen. Life’s too good for that.

We’ve got a working fridge too. One that keeps our food cold. Finally. I suppose it all is a good lesson in the humble appreciation of simple things.

Song of the Day: Primal Scream – Velocity Girl

I still intend to write something about C86, because I too want to step on the bandwagon pulled by Bob Stanley’s CD86 compilation. For the time being, I may as well link to a pretty good article in The Guardian on the movement, written by Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers Fame, who apparently has been a big C86-fan for the full twenty years. (And that makes me wonder: is it fair that I never really cared about the Manics?)

More on C86 at Indie MP3.

I think the talk went quite okay. Of course, there are some things that I would do better next time –like, despite some practical complications, use transparents next time; or really practise on blackboard-writing– but I think I’ve managed to get my point through to the (seven) attendants.
It is surprising to see how little maths-departments all over the word differ from each other and I really appreciated the warm welcome. In fact, they made me something like ‘honorary guest’ which is nothing more than a formalisation of me attending local seminars and getting access to the library, but it’s quite nice nevertheless.

The location of Exeter University is excellent, by the way, with classical buildings among green grass that only seems to exist in England, on top of a hill with views all over East Devon and the Exe estuary, almost as far as Exmouth. I wouldn’t mind working at such a place.

Song of the day: anything by the Shimura Curves.

Not that the talk I’ll give later today has anything to do with Shimura curves, or that I am an expert on the subject at all, but these London electropop-girls are the only band I know of that took their name from a topic in algebraic geometry and I am (supposed to be) an expert on that field in general. And I’ll try to show that to some people at the University of Exeter this afternoon.
And now I should do some final preperations. I really hope people will understand what I’ll be talking about. That sounds easy, but I have the statistics against me, as I heard even one of the best professors claim that he doesn’t understand anything of half of the talks he attends…

(Shimura Curves, by the way, have a blog too.)

Of the two essential Dutch electro-pop duos, Persil is the more poppy, and also the one whose members are more equally distributed among the genders. They released a new album, Comfort Noise, this summer, which I haven’t heard yet (like in fact 99.99 percent of this summer’s new albums), but which judging from the three songs I did hear, must be pretty good. Again. So let’s continue the silly habit of choosing ‘songs of the day’ and declare Light up my Life the one for the 24th of October, 2006. It can be downloaded from their label Transformed Dreams; albeit in the less user-friendly wma-format. (And while you’re at it, that other Dutch electro-pop duo, the more orthodox-sounding and male-only Zea have a new album out too: Insert Parallel Universe. It is released on the same label and three songs are available from the same page.)

Apparently, a recent survey has shown that the Dutch are the people that overestimate their language skills the most. The could have had asked me.
Born with the fate of parents who never really thought I’d leave the country, I have had to spell out my name hundreds of time on the phone past months. But after I got letters addressed to Mareijn Groopen, I realised I needed to clarify things a bit more. T for tango, N for November, etcetera.
But when I had to choose an account name the other day, I thought I’d be even smarter and chose thinksmall. After all, even if my spelling wasn’t understood completely, a sane person would still make out what was meant.
Or so I thought. Yesterday, I got a letter confirming my new account name phinksmall. Ouch.

(And come to phink of it, what about all those people that I excitedly told about my blog, but never got further than a Google search for phink small?)

Once a scientist, always a scientist, I do like to understand the why behind the smallest things in my life. Through Amazon, I have bought a second hand book, a comprehensive overview of the Java programming language, for the price of exactly one pence. Admittedly, the book is from 1999, which is comparable to the early middle ages in non-computer years, but still useful enough to be worth a few hundred times its price.
(If only they had a similarly priced book on Fortran as well. Or, to sound less like a spoilt brat, if Exeter’s general library, which has such a book in its collection, wouldn’t’ have closed ten minutes before I got there today.)

Speaking of tags: for a few days I thought I had fallen in love with a band called Elin 8, whose song Here Comes The Knight had mysteriously ended up on my mp3-player. Until, after a failed Google search, I found that the band is actually called La Concode (with Elin being the lead singer) and that I had downloaded it from Hello! Surprise! Of course, that doesn’t make the song any less great. Indiepunk-electropop (though any other combination of those four words would work equally well), very catchy, very energetic and very here-and-now – which will probably mean that my affair with the band won’t last forever, but who cares.

So what’s that thing with Myspace who don’t tag their songs? If you download a song –which is about a thousand times better than using their crappy flash-player– and don’t manually rename them instantly, you end up with songs like 61538da1 by the band 68832227 or 67f4880c by 68994349. You can’t really brag about these to your indiepop friends, can you now?
The real bands behind these mysterious code names are Bubblegum Lemonade and Strawberry Whiplash respectively, both from Glasgow, and if you happen to think they’ve played with some classical C86 bands’ names, using a pair of scissors and a bit of glue, then you are right. And actually, they didn’t just play with their name with their names. That makes seven songs of the day.

(Via various sources. Thanks.)

While I’m trying to catch up with music these days I discovered some nice new blogs, of which The Rain Fell Down is my favourite so far. Honest, well-written snippets of the bloke’s life that give you a good insight in the Swedish indiepop scene (although it is written from Glasgow these days) and makes me want to back there one day. And it occasionally drops a nice mp3 as well. And hey, read that manifesto!

From the blog I also learned that The Budgies have released a live cd-r last summer, called Kaninkanon 2006. Back in the days when Think Small was an over-active blogzine, they dedicated a song to it (quoting some bits of my review of their debut EP), and I’m happy to see it made it to this live cd as well. And well, of course, I’m equally happy to see that they are still around.

Song of the day: Celestial – Nothing Happens; Twice. Incredibly catchy heart-string pulling indiepop from, of course, Sweden. Kind of like They Go Boom!! (Except that I am ashamed to say I hardly know anything by They Go Boom!! They seem to sound like Celestial and that’s actually a damn good reason to finally check them out properly.)

Download from Music is my Girlfriend. And while you’re there, you may as well right-click-and-save their whole catalogue on your hard-disk, as it contains equally fine gems by bands like The Tidy-Ups, The San Marinos and Annemarie.

(Unrelated side-note, what’s that with Royal Mail delivering packages at quarter past seven in the morning?)

Song of the day: Camera Obscura’s interpretation of Abba’s Super Trouper. Download it, among some other fine new tunes, from Stereo. Which teaches me/us that a) it’s damn great to finally hear some new tunes, even if it involved taking the mp3-player to the library and maniacally downloading songs onto it; b) those Abba people did write some pretty nice songs after all and c) Camera Obscura are just great. And as Dimitra (“if I would post it on my blog, no one would read it”) said: they should consider becoming an Abba-cover band.

It sounds a bit like ‘George Bush admits that that whole Iraq things was one big mistake’ or ‘Kim-Sung Il announces free elections for next month’ but it is true: Microsoft has launched a new version of Internet Explorer which supports tabbed browsing. Admittedly, it doesn’t look too bad, but I still heart Firefox. And oh, how much I miss having Linux on my computer.

(Speaking of browsers and websites: I have been playing a bit with the lay-out last night. It looks a bit odd at places, I know and I am sorry.)

I finished Disgrace in three days – in fact, when I was halfway through, I didn’t put it down until I had finished it. Good book. And I can see why it has been praised so much. I suppose people in the Nobel Prize committee are more likely to like a book about the relationship between father and daughter to the background of a fast-evolving country than, say, one about a bloke in his thirties who spends his time putting his record collection in autobiographical order. At the same time, I’m not really sure which one I would prefer in the end; at least I do not feel like running to the library and read the rest of his oeuvre. But why does the record-collector in me feels the irresistible need to have a bloody opinion about the book?

(Speaking of records, I’ve really started to miss them. And the fact that the amplifier and cd-player, both of which arrived this week, had barely survived the journey to England, makes me doubt whether it is such a good idea to send them, especially the vinyl, to England by post…)

Yesterday’s Observer had an article about The Best Novel of the Past 25 Years. That is, the best novel written by someone from Britain, Ireland or The Commonwealth (or, as George Bush puts it, “someone from those countries of which I still have no bloody idea where they are, but where I can at least understand the local tribes”), according to 120 insiders. Now there’s much to say against such Best Of-lists –for example that there are way too many of them– but I have read only one book from the top 10 (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains Of The Day) and one among the 50 or so ‘other nominations’ (which happens to be by Ishiguro as well – he has another book in the top that I hadn’t even heard of before…). There’s at least room for improvement and, more importantly, some of the descriptions sounded quite interesting.

Luckily there’s the library, almost next door. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgraced, The Absolute Number One according to Those Who Should Know, is lying on my bedsit table right now.

To those who would like to reply that Dubya is the first US President to speak Spanish: did I say I was talking about junior?

Last Saturday, we found ourselves in Exeter’s The Cavern club, where the Electric Soft Parade were headlining an indie club night (just to make things clear: indie is not indie pop…). However, we left before the band had started to play. At least, that’s what I believe, but the combination of loud noise and many people had confused me so much that I had more or less lost notion of what was going on. Am I really the same person that used to go to at least one gig a week less than two years ago? Getting old? Me?
The three of us, which also included a not-so-popular local pop devotee, had a much better time in a quiet café round the corner. We discussed the possibility of making something happen here, and although we’re still thinking about what this something could be, I’m sure we’ll manage in not too long. Even while I’ve completely lost touch with what’s going on music-wise these days, there’s still pop blood streaming through my veins.

Said person also gave us two new CDs for our collection –an EP by Butterflies of Love and the new Sodastream, of which we especially have been enjoying the latter– which doubled again. It had already doubled on Friday, when I found a cd by Harvey Williams in a local Oxfam shop. Perhaps I should just get in touch with my dad and ask him to send those boxes with CDs that are still in the Netherlands. (And those, I knew you were going to ask, contain still loads of CDs that will be for sale.)

Oh, if you reached the conclusion from the previous paragraphs, that we got the flat we were waiting for when I last wrote something here, then you are right. It is a lovely flat, more or less in the centre of town, not too big, but with two balconies and a superb kitchen. I love eating and happen to be married to someone who loves cooking. Two weeks ago, we went to a big furniture store where all the stuff have fønny nåmes and now our flat is filled with Billy’s and Benno’s, though at this time they’re still mostly empty. And there are some other minor problems that I don’t want to bother you with, but apart from that we have settled down more or less.

If only I had found a job.