Mark Carroll's Journal

When people pause in uttering a sentence, my mind is often eagerly prompt in filling the space. For example, on the train there is an announcement about the carriage, I forget what, but there's a pause where I want to fill it in with, … may be larger than it appears or somesuch, which I suppose my brain concocts from some combination of Doctor Who and car side-mirrors. There is also an announcement instructing to tell them if one sees something strange (a headless horseman or a two-headed goat or whatever) which also includes a brief pause, ripe for completion with, … then throw something at it.

More striking, though, is that my brain wants to put words to music. I notice when existing mundane sentences fit a line of music from some song or jingle, could be from any time or genre, ranging from Henry Mancini to South Park. And, with little tunes like fancier alarm tones, my brain wants to add lyrics to them. They range from nonsensical to unprintable but there you are. Sometimes it will just substitute part of a sentence: for instance, from this commercial from my childhood, I notice various other unlikely things that might be, … just enough to give your kids a treat.

For me, the most striking part is that, although I am neither musical nor lyrical in any competent sense, my brain clearly notices when an existing verbal phrase fits an existing line of music or vice versa. This suggests that I am indexing somewhat by syllable patterns, perhaps emphasis too; that would explain why, when I am trying to remember a word, I will typically have a good idea how many syllables it has. There's some cognitive architecture lesson here about how brains handle language, at least mine.

I was listening to some older Blondie recently and I noticed a couple of things. One is the bass guitar line: there's often some decent contribution coming from it, at least in my amateur opinion. It's fairly rich and skilful, enough that I am glad to have noticed. Another is that, although Debbie Harry's vocal definitely helps to make the song at times, it also often sounds technically rather imperfect to me. R. suggested that, basically, she has a good voice, it's just fitting the song well; perhaps it's all as intended. (As a point of comparison, here some years back, I mentioned Chrissie Hynde in the Pretenders' Glastonbury set; I always think well of her vocals.)

A few of the songs seemed better when I heard them again in the final. Some of that was that the actual performances were improved over the semi-finals but I suspect that most of it was that I simply liked them more on a second hearing. Unfortunately, while some were agreeable enough, there weren't any songs that I feel a strong need to hear ever again.

After the song contest, it seems that I always comment on the difference between the jury vote and the popular vote. Each year brings interesting discrepancies between the two. I wonder if the UK's song selection process should, at least in part, return to including some kind of popular vote element. The current internal selection approach has proved poor at finding songs that win popular approval.

( Listening to old music )

( Playing more with AI/LLMs. )

( Money is tight. )

It occurred to me to try to remember all fifty states of the US. I thought I would do better, I could recall only forty-seven, my daughter did better and faster. I shan't disclose which I forgot in case a reader wants to try. It was annoying to note those I did forget: a reader here lives in one and I was open to moving to it a few years ago, and I used to work with a couple of people who hail from another.

It was interesting to hear of the flight chaos caused by London Heathrow's power loss, so many flights diverted and passengers ending up all over Western and Central Europe. That must have caused all sorts of problems and taken the airlines quite some effort to recover from.

We had a pet food delivery from Amazon (insert hisses and boos to taste) shortly after half-past seven on a Sunday morning which impressed neither me nor R. At a glance, I failed to find a summary on their website of when they think is reasonable to make residential deliveries but at least we now know that it may happen again.

While I'm in a constituency where my vote could help it to swing from the SNP to Labour, which I've now decided would be preferable, I think I like the Liberal Democrats enough more than I dislike the SNP to give them some support instead, even if they aren't a likely contender this time around. Not quite a last-minute decision. In general, my life's a bit more lurching-between-urgencies than I prefer.

I visited West London in assisting the aforementioned consular tedium and drove back up to Glasgow yesterday. While down there, I was interested to see a Porsche Carrera that was maybe forty years old, and a Citroën 2CV that was probably older still.

Thinking back to the Eurovision Song Contest, I think I found the Armenian and the Finnish entries quite fun and liked the Estonian and Lithuanian ones, maybe somewhat also the Ukrainian. Perhaps there's a little bit of geographical clustering there.

We might go camping again some weekend soon. ( We've camped a couple of times beside a loch. )

We failed to find a buyer for our flat. I've taken it off the market and will try relisting next month to get it back to the top of the search results. I am cautiously hopeful, it's not as if we require anything beyond its valuation.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how this year's Eurovision Song Contest followed the usual pattern of my concurring with the public televote rather than the verdict of the panels of industry professionals. Yesterday I reflected on how last year's contest was an exception to the pattern.

The United Kingdom's song scored unusually well last year yet I thought it one of our more mediocre entries. France's and Germany's scored the worst, yet I thought both to be quite decent songs. Perhaps neither song was positively a gem but nor did they seem superlatively bad^* against the other finalists.

^*superlatively bad tempts me to imagine words like sublative

One thing that brings home to me that I now live at the heart of a large city is, on the way back home tonight after heading out for milk, I noticed that Joe Satriani is playing just several minutes' walk away.

This evening we took a pleasant walk over the Clyde and around the various office and retail in the city centre. Stopping in a Tesco Express, I got to hear Alison Moyet. Over on our side of the river, it's more industrial, less shiny, though various new developments are thought to be good for this neighbourhood. As we threw away rubbish nearer home, a rat ran out of the bin.

Around here we often walk under bridges for various motorways and some rail. Having all the motorways reminds me of my childhood, my walk to my first primary school passed under the M60. I thought back to then and remembered, from those early days, a fish and chip shop. I wondered if it was still there and, from looking online, surprisingly, it is indeed: Chau's Chip Shop on Lostock Road, established in 1979.

My desk is situated with a good view of the exit ramp of a motorway and it occurred to me that technology is probably good enough that I could arrange a system for reading all the car registration numbers to build up some database of sightings for analysis. What I'd look for in that data, I don't know. It reminds me of when I had a work desk in Boston that overlooked where geese would sometimes congregate and I wondered about goose-tracking and analyzing their social kinetics.

I distantly recall that, a couple of decades ago, there were plenty of affordable sound modules in the market. One plugs in one's MIDI controller, tones are generated electronically, and good-quality sound comes out of the other end. With modern hardware, I can't imagine that there's much cost to them at all beyond the intellectual property for a good sample library for the instruments. Still, in briefly perusing the market, I notice Miditech Pianobox variants, not much else. What happened to the other stuff from Roland and Yamaha and company? For a lot of money, sure, various products exist, I am just surprised at the lack of options for, say, a couple of hundred dollars. Although it should be easy to offer capable equipment cheaply, what people actually seem to do is to buy the old stuff off eBay. Perhaps having modern music production all happen in one's Mac or whatever has caused the bottom to drop out of the market for external accessories for what is ultimately a computational solid-state task.