Pug’s Place

No, seriously. I wore my Jedi Knight costume (complete with robe, tabard, two kimonos, boots, utility belt, lightsaber, etc.) to my Computer Organization and Design class. The strangest thing was I got very few odd looks. I got a few “Nice costume!”’s, but that was it.

I walked into the Womens Gym (to go to Aikido) in the full costume, as well. The Rec Sports girl who checks ID cards eyed me warily and asked to see my Gator 1 card. I replied, “You don’t need to see my identification” with an appropriate finger wave. She stared at me for a moment, and I produced the ID card anyway. Hehe.

Tom Sensei seemed most excited when he saw me walk into the Dojo. Woo! I took off all the Jedi stuff, and wrote only my Gi (of course) onto the mat. It was a good night of Aikido practice, even if Theresa and I are the slowest of the group. Hehe! After practice, I was asked to re-don the costume to show people who hadn’t seen. Wooo!

I’m finishing up Return of the King tonight. For the manyith time. Yay!!

I said I’d link it, and so I am!

[UF Performing Arts Description]

First off: WOW!

Secondly: Dude!!

With that out of the way, a brief history: The choir was founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1479. It has existed in various states without err since then, through name changes and what have you. The choir gained its present name when Peter the Great, a former member of this choir, founded his window to the West of St. Petersburg, and declared that his choir should reside there for all of its remaining years.

You can find much of their history online, and what I’ve read of it in this short time is quite interesting. But now for the present. Amazingly enough, this truly appears to be this choir’s first performance in the United States of America. I can find no record online of them ever playing in the USA before. Additionally, my program clearly states that the St. Petersburg’s Capella Choir makes its U.S. Premiere with this concert. Well, if this is their first trip to this country, then I can say with no doubt that they could not have had a more enthusiastic and receptive audience! Their performance for the evening was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, opus 37. The program assures me that this work “stands as the crowning achievement of the ‘Golden Age’ of Russian Othrodox sacred choral music.” Its 15 movements passed in what seemed to be a heartbeat, yet my watch clearly said it had been an hour. Something about Russian is more melodious than that French stuff that people always dote on.

The sound was a bird of prey in flight. At once high above the surrounding
audience, and then barely overhead, swooping in awesome arcs. The conductor
must not be ignored, though! Vladislav Chernushenko, born in 1936 in
Leningrad, was an impressive sight to behold. While all the women wore
Byzantine layered gowns of gold or white (if they were Altos or Sopranos) and
the men wore a mid-shin-length black button overcoat with gold trim and black
boots, Vladislav wore black slacks and a zip-up jacket the sort that my father
loves so dearly in the winter. When he guided the choir it looked a complete
departure of any manner of conducting that I have seen before. It was entirely
non-western. He seemed to be knitting, in truth. In quiet times, he was simply
knitting. As things became more intense, he began stepping about, tearing at
the air with his fingers. In the full resounding climaxes it was as if he were
facing a phantasm, and were rending it apart with his bare hands like a frenzied grizzly bear.

When the program drew to a close and the audience had its opportunity to
voice its enjoyment, the auditorium thundered. It was the first of many
standing ovations. Three minutes of unstoppable applause for the choir, the
conductor, and the various soloists (several of whom were incredible!) brought
the conductor to wave for us to shut up. The first encore began. It was a more
upbeat Russian song, definitely not classical. It had two soloists, one of
them being a strikingly blond (and tall) man (I think he was a Tenor), and the other this short Alto. I’d describe the piece if I could, but I can’t… It ended with a second standing ovation.

The choir could not have glowed any more than it did. They were positively beaming. The conductor walked off stage twice, I know not for what purposes. Perhaps asking someone if Americans were really this easy to please. At any rate, we were waved to silence once again. The choir opened their folders and their two people with (apparently) perfect pitch hummed in a curious sort of harmony. They began an English gospel song. I could make out the “Alleluia”’s and “Jesus”‘es, but that was about it. While the song was in English, their Russian accents made things quite interesting, and also quite impossible to understand in harmony. Oh well!

This ended to their THIRD standing ovation. I thought I could see the conductor saying “Go home, people!” But go home we did not, and cease they did not! Two of the men proved an extra use for their long overcoats and pulled from inside pockets small instruments - one, a triangle. The other a tambourine. This was a definitely more modern-tempoed song, and the choir had a good time bouncing (yes! bouncing!!) left and right while singing it. It was Russian, I should point out. It got my foot tapping, the same with the two people next to me!

Yet again, the audience pulled the conductor back, and he waved for us to be bloody silent again! With opened folders the choir began some sort of English song that involved the phrase “Move to (me?)”. That was all I could pick out of it. It sounded almost like a Handel piece. No real idea, though.

We didn’t let them go home yet. The fifth encore is the charm, you know! They finished off by bringing up the two soloists from the first encore. Thus began a song with very complex and common meter shifts… what must have been a Russian drinking song! Sure, the choir could just have been swaying back and forth unsteadily for fun, but when the conductor was conducting as if he were holding a massive beer stein in each hand, raising it in toasts to the various men who had short solo parts in the midst of the bass bum-dum-bumping, the nature of the song became pretty clear. The audience loved it! But that was all for the choir, because after a brief series of bows, the conductor led the sprite-footed, bouncing singers offstage.

Again, it was a “wow!” sort of night. If this talented group of Russians comes near your town, definitely get a ticket!

I added a link to Stephanie’s blog. She pointed it out to me this morning when I gave her a link to Pug’s Place. Check her blogness out.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, last night was Haunted Hume. Essentially, 16 of the 18 floors in the Hume Honors Residence Hall decorated their floors and essentially made their own haunted houses…

I had a very good time. The little kids in general loved my costume. I had a great group of about 8 girls aged all around 12. They were, of course, not going to be scared… yeah right! (I did a lot of hand holding. *grin*) Everyone in Hume did an outstanding job, and they sank a lot of real effort into their haunted houses! Especially the two mental asylum ones…

One of them was just disturbing. I mean, a guy walking around wearing a bicycle helmet and occasionally going insane and ramming his head
into a wall like a bull… the doctor operating on the kitchen counter — sawing off some guy’s leg while he screamed… The dude who kept asking me for rice. “I..I… I like…. it. I like it…. I…”

One floor did “The Enchanted Forest” with all the fairies and stuff. It was all pretty and happy until two — uhh, werewolves, I think — came and started wrecking up the place in front of my group. Running between the girls, startling the heck out of them. Oh no!

Luckily some odd shadowy adventurer man knifed both the werewolves and quickly guided us to the exit, before more came!

They even pulled off some mazes by creatively using plastic black garbage bags … Good mazes, too! One of which somewhat disturbed me, too, because I saw we had gone past that particular spot several times… yet we had never turned around. I figured it out when I was waiting at this one corner as the girls in front of me were huddled together scared into shriek mode and the wall behind me started pushing me. I mean, matte black wall…

I figured out that a couple of the walls were *people* and they were changing the maze!

(22:23:49) PugLord02: Honors kids can be pretty smart.

(22:24:02) Katie: Shocking, eh?

Theresa was a very good Ninja, too. She felt bad for accidentally scaring some kids, but I’m sure she’ll post a good brief about her night on her blog. I’ll link it as soon as I see it.

For the disturbed among you, by complete chance I ran across two very morbid pumpkin pictures. Morbid but funny in a Calvin and Hobbes sort of way.

• Pumpkin has a stomach bug (Subtitle: We didn’t like scraping out the gooey stuff)
• Pumpkin hates this world (Subtitle: Curious use of seeds and food coloring)

Milady reads slashdot. I’m in love!

I dropped the font size by 10%. Tell me if you like this better or worse than the previous size in the comments section. Thanks.

Diebold’s still trying to stop the spread of their internal memos detailing that their electronic voting system is insecure and contains no secure audit trail. Mary Hodder at UC Berkeley posted an entry wherein she reports all the recent developments. Best insightful quote:

Is It Real?

Although Ernie Miller has noted that in the AP article,
Diebold’s CEO Jacobsen has said, “We’re cautioning anyone from drawing
wrong or incomplete conclusions about any of those documents or files
purporting to be authentic.” If they are not authentic, the DMCA doesn’t apply in this case.

For safety’s sake, I made sure to get a copy of the documents. However, I don’t have the bandwidth to put it up safely (11.5 megs). Luckily, here’s a nice fast direct link to the Diebold documents.

That’s the new focus for my Genetics paper. Nice and narrow, and EASY! WOOO! This is going to be a snap compared to trying to dig information out of primary sources on computational biology.

To celebrate, I just ordered myself two large pepperoni pizzas (thin crust) from Dominos. Wootness! I’ll have to work to find refrigerator space, though…

Tomorrow night is Haunted Hume. I’m dressing in full Jedi regalia and going to my Computer Organization and Design class, and then to Hume to lead kiddies through the scariness. Theresa’s going as a Shirt Ninja. Should be cool!