DCfolk - a query

Who can recommend a tattoo place in the general DC metro area? Top marks for clean and safe, obvs.; price is less of an object than quality.

tomorrow shall be my dancing day

New girl in the sop1's this year is English, and I'll tell you what, I'd forgotten how I had to concentrate (for about twenty minutes) on my vowels when I was singing in England, in e.g. the line above - until we got to break time and she said to those of us around her in general, "So - can I hear your vowels again, on sought and bought?" Poor thing is from Kent. I don't think she has anything as far forward as the vowels we tend to sing in those words, much less the ones we say when we speak them. After some experimentation she agreed that starting from (her pronunciation of) last and rounding it a bit she'd be more likely to hit something matching the rest of us than if she started from (her pronunciation of) the words in question.

Could have given her the vowel in dance, as well, now that I think about it. :-)

this is what's wrong with this game!

It seems something remarkable happened on Wheel of Fortune not long ago. A twenty-six-year-old kid looked at this:

_ ' _ _   _ _ _   _

_ _ _ _   _ _ _ L _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _


and solved the damn thing. With $900 in the bank - but it was a Prize Puzzle, which I guess means who cares how much cash you've got, because the puzzle carries a special prize with it? - but look, what I've been saying for years is, the puzzle should have a value when it starts, and every time you add a letter to it, you should get the cash for that letter but the puzzle should lose some amount of its value, so the strategy would involve maximizing cash in your bank vs. value of the puzzle if you solve it Right Now, which, by the time you get to where all the letters are filled in, would be nil.

Does that make sense? I mean. There should be some reward on such a game for being clever, instead of only for being greedy.

( (solution) )

last post of the night, honest!

Sorry to spam, but here is something funny that happened at rehearsal tonight. We've got a piece that's actually lovely but includes some tricky chords and weird melodies, so we'll always be spending a little time on it.

chorus master T: It's just important to know your interval over that bar line. Second sopranos have a major fifth, so that's easy - but first sopranos, you've got that tritone.
first sopranos: [grumble]
chorus master T: Yeah, someone asked me last week, if the tritone is diabolus in musica, why would this composer have used it on the word Son? Go figure.
me, within my section: Oh, he was just being ironic.
second sopranos: [bust up laughing]