Merry Christmas!

Video on Lucid Dreaming

Here is an interesting video on Lucid Dreaming:

Da Blues

I haven't posted here for quite a while. I have been working (teaching English as a second language) and playing music (bossa nova, jazz and blues mainly) in the meantime.
I am planning to make a presentation about blues music next month. Here is the first draft using the online program Prezi. The "bubbles" contain some of my favourite blues music. If you think something is missing let me know.

Bang Bang by Gábor Szabó

Gábor Szabó was one of the most influential guitarists of the 60s. Sometimes he covered pop songs in his smooth jazzy way. This one is well known in the rendition of Nancy Sinatra. I like that version a lot. But Szabó's version is pretty awesome too.

And they listen

A message from Ray Bradbury

The following short film is the most inspiring thing I have seen in a long time. In it, Ray Bradbury speaks about his life and most of all about how and why he became a writer.

"The things that you do, should be things that you love.
And the things that you love should be things that you do." (Ray Bradbury)

Echoes - Live in Pompei

The spaceship zoomed upwards with its hidden booty of carved stone pictures. The town below was completely covered with volcanic ash and the magic carpet of future's music lay dormant in the little gadget left on top of one a building just protruding from the ash.

The teenage girl who was sitting in front of the open window and writing an essay on ancient art felt a strange sensation and lay down on her bed in order to calm down. She saw the huge white bird floating over the sea, which suddenly dived and plunged into the green waves. Below the waves everything was green and a distant noise was humming. She dreamt about this sound.

In the ruined amphitheatre the drums and the bass were bombilating and suddenly the black Fender Stratocaster started to cry its eerie, hair-raising song. It sounded like a huge window that slowly cracked open on the sky.

I Loves You Porgy

Today is the World Day of Water. I wanted to post something really watery and apt for this day, (such as the Tom Jobim song Waters of March for instance) but I didn't have that kind of water feeling because here it hasn't rained for yonks. But I found this and it is incredibly beautiful, so this is gonna be it then. Emotions can be like water anyway.

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day

Let's celebrate it with a marvellous song from one of the best Irish rock bands ever. Still in Love with You - Thin Lizzy.

Lego space shuttle in space

The 30-year space shuttle era ended when the last shuttle mission was successfully completed last July. A Romanian man, Raul Oaida, commemorated the event by sending a lego space shuttle to the edge of space by a meteorological balloon 'proving that although retired, this machine can still fly, albeit in toy form'. The balloon was equipped with a video camera and now a video about the flight of the toy spacecraft can be seen on youtube. Personally, I think that this video is pure awesomeness. If you are interested in the technological details you can read them under the video on youtube. Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy your flight! :)

The immense vastness (and smallness) of everything

So, it's another Saturday night without a party. (Well, I was out somewhere last week and the week before on Saturday, but I still feel I should be attending some  sort of festivity (a 'grog fest' my facebook account would say in pirate English:)

But the temperature outside is down to minus 15 centigrades and I spent the better half of this morning in the swimming pool doing my laps, so a quiet night seems in order. And this is an opportunity to catch up with the blog. I have just found a site which tries to give people an idea about the size of the universe and about the giganticness and the tininess of the things that you can find in it. It's well worth taking a look.

Click here: The size of the universe 2.

The Sound of Silence

Paul Simon's best known song performed differently by Leonard Cohen.

Why write? Why not write?

For a couple of months or so, I've been writing a short story. (I almost wrote 'trying to write' but then I just stayed with what I actually wrote, for this good reason here.)
I keep starting it over and over again only to get stuck with the wretched thing after a couple of paragraphs. Then I give up and relieve myself from the burden of having to write anything once and for all. But it ain't as easy as it seems. A few days later I am back to it, chewing the pencil like mad, staring into space.
So far, I have always sat down to the task as a future crime story writer, but what with all this struggling and not really coming up with anything that even slightly resembles a plot, I might as well decide to write a science fiction next.
The best by-product of this sweaty writing project has been finding this video, in which Kurt Vonnegut gives advice on writing short stories: