Audience...Participate!

Given the overwhelming response of my readers (Thanks Kath and EEbEE!) I've decided to post the music for you to use to write/sing lyrics to! It's a very short loop, and it's not a great quality for now as it's just easier to upload and stuff this way. It's the little mp3 player on the side bar under the subtle heading of 'Competition Music!'.

The piece is a very chilled lounge piece. I did this because I figured that it's appealing to a wider range of audience (compared to, say, industrial...?) and because if the music is slower, it might make it a little easier to write/sing to. If you'd like me to mail you the loop itself for you to listen to over and over, please drop an email in my inbox (see previous post for address) and I'll happily send it your way.

PS. Let me know what you guys think!

PPS. For the record, it's an absolute bitch to find an mp3 player add-on that actually plays music you want to play and not the 'Top 20' from some arbitrary Russian site...

Audience participation!

I have had an idea, but I'd like to gauge it's potential success. So here goes.

I would like to collaborate with one of you on a piece of music! So, what I'm thinking of doing is compiling a loop sample that I will upload onto this, here blog for your auditory enjoyment. There is a catch: I'd like you to try and write/record lyrics for a song to this! Now, I know that not everyone has the most sing-worthy voices, but if you feel confident enough to do so, please do record and email me the recordings! Otherwise, strap a friend/family member to a chair and force them to sing for you! If possible, please make sure the recordings are of relatively high quality and are in a *.wav format. But this isn't crucial...

I royally suck at writing lyrics of my own, so I'm sure you will do far better than I can!

If you think you'd be up for it, please mail me at watchmonkeysblogsong@gmail.com with 'I wanna write your song!' as the subject line and I will then know how many of you are interested! Fill the contents of the mail with whatever you want (provided it isn't offensive...or viral in nature).

It's also a neat way to see how many of you are still avid readers here...

Post? But I'm too scared!

I may, or may not, have mentioned this at some stage, but I am...a bedroom DJ. Yes, I confess, I am a closet music producer whose works never reach the public domain! I can feel your damning glares spearing at me over the internet burning little glare-shaped holes in my mind!

So, on Friday, someone made a comment along the lines of '...you should post the music [my own music] onto the net somewhere and let other people enjoy and critique it! Otherwise the whole process is tantamount to [self-gratification] and nothing else!' He used less child-friendly terms but you get the jist of the message.

And now I am completely torn. I do want to release my work onto the vastness of the internet for all of you to partake in, but at the same time, I'm paranoid about copyright infringement and people stealing my work! What do I do? To post or not to post, that is the question...

Long weekend! Alas, not long enough...

[I must apologise upfront; this post was written about a week and a half ago, but thanks to blogger's misbehaviour, none of my pictures would upload. Thus it has been maturing in my drafts folder until blogger cooperated...]

So, for those of you who read from abroad, this last Monday was a public holiday in SA: Human Rights Day! I personally find it rather ironic as the university made me work on the Monday, especially on Human Rights Day of all the public holidays, but moving swiftly along...

I was away this weekend, on a field-trip for one of the university's second year courses. The job was not particularly exciting; drive the students to the university's farm east of Nelspruit, help them identify some bugs and plants for their insect and plant collection projects, drive them home again and do all of the above without getting anyone hurt/killed. Apart from nearly crashing one of the rental vehicles into a wall (Toyota recalled their cars for a brake malfunction, right? Well obviously not all the cars...) and one of the lecturers almost running a student over (same brake malfunction...) it went off without any major hiccups.

The problem is that now, I am absolutely drained! I have SO much work to do and I just can't muster the energy to do it! So instead I'm blogging and posting some pics from the trip:

A fishing spider! These guys are pretty big (about 8cm diameter legtip-legtip) and hunt fish! They can actually go underwater for short periods of time. The hairs on their bodies trap a layer of air around them which acts like mini scuba gear so that they can hunt underwater.

Here we see one of our lecturers performing the trademark (not really) 'zoologist crouch'. He's actually looking for water scorpions amongst the leaf litter in a rather disgusting pool of water.

A personal life-ambition fulfilled! See a live vine snake in the wild: Check! These guys are ridiculously venomous but are apparently relatively docile. They're part of a family of snakes that actually have their fangs at the back of their mouths, instead of having the hinged sabres in the front, like vipers, that we think of when we think of snake fangs. Hard to spot against the branches of a bush too...

A little piece of froggie paradise. The pond behind the house in which we stayed. We checked it out one night for frogs; they were everywhere! And there were so many different kinds! It was awesome!

A stunning view from 'sundowner rock' where, oddly enough, we have sundowners! Unfortunately, it was cloudy almost all weekend, but the view is much more spectacular when the suns out!

A local amphibian resident. Very well camouflaged and very cute!

Some local flowers. Unfortunately, I suck at plants and so I can't really tell you what they're called. :(