Just a-postin' for postin's sake

Had a bit of difficulty getting video from my new JVC Everio camera to work on YouTube. Unfortunately, YT destroys audio when it tries to convert AC3 into its native AAC format. But if I convert to MP3 first, it's all right. Slowly but surely am beginning to post video shot at the 2009 West Coast Ragtime Festival.

We did the Red-Rose-Rag-as-Elmer-Fudd routine in the finale concert. A few people in the audience really laughed at the "ever since the merger" line. All in all, everyone thought it went over even better than it did in Sutter Creek. I saw a couple people in the audience holding their video cameras, and I know one person who posts to YouTube was one of them, so hopefully there will be video of it online before long.

I also joined the featured musicians on stage in the mass final performance, playing my kazoo. Woo!

Got some snow on Friday night. It's melted here now but the hills are still white. It was already low-30s by 6 p.m. tonight. Gonna be a cold one. I'm really hating having to work in the garage in sub-freezing temperatures these days.

We saw Planet 51 and The Fantastic Mr Fox this weekend (well, the former on Thanksgiving Day). The latter film was much more amusing, but the whole 1950s feel of the planet in the former was kind of cute. I just felt like the concept was nice but it didn't really have many laughs. I was surprised by the amount of Spanish names in the credits. Discovered at the end that the CGI was all done in Spain. Interesting. Of course, Mr Fox was stop-motion animation. Funny visual gags and lines. Amusing character movements for action scenes. Just all-around nice movie.

I was going to write something else, which I thought of as I typed the title, but it has since slipped my mind. Sigh. Memory is the second thing to go... I don't remember what the first is.

Mad Scientist Rag

My profile photo here was one that I took after waking up one morning and seeing my hair. I grabbed my camera and made a face as I took the picture. I thought that I looked somewhat like a mad professor or something.

A couple years later, or maybe just one, I realized that Mad Scientist Rag was a great title for a ragtime composition, so I wrote one. I used that photo for the cover of the tune, pasting my head into a jar of a "mad scientist's laboratory" stock artwork.

Anyway, a classically trained pianist just posted a video on YouTube of himself playing my Mad Scientist Rag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucjsXrWtSo

Click the link above to view it!