You had plenty money 1922

Listening to soundtracks. The problem with musicals is that these have specific story bits attached to them by their nature. And some of them? You have mental images of precisely what happened off-stage, even if they have technically have no canon basis - like being a shipper for normal shows and certain clips got 'and this was the point where it was bloody obvious what happened next' assigned. Or in some cases, '...this so happened since we last saw them/ please stop doing that, we're trying not to ship you and you're not helping!' (in the case of the last variable, the Beeb does it on purpose to fuck with us)

The problem with the soundtrack? You'll be doing your work, idly humming along and then suddenly get the line '....and then they had sex.' going through your head. Complete thought process derailment.

Tripped and fell again :

Flaunt It!

Following on from its hugely successful sell-out debut in 2007, TheatreMAD's Flaunt It - a night of gender-swapping show tunes with your favourite West End stars - returns on 30th October 2008 to the Fortune Theatre.

Flaunt It follows one simple rule: boys sing girls songs and girls sing boys songs.

In 2008 we bring you another stellar line-up with show tunes picked from here, there and everywhere - sung like you've never heard them before.

Featuring:
Daniel Boys, Earl Carpenter, Anna-Jane Casey, Joanne Farrell, Josefina Gabrielle, Scott Garnham, Simon Green, Carl Mullaney, Amy Pemberton, Sophia Ragavelas, Jon Robyns, David Thaxton, Liam Tamne, Shaun Escoffery, Louise Gold, With more names to be announced!

...now I just have to find someone to crash with because it starts at 11:30. on a thursday. (hellooooo getting back from London) and possibly find *another* thing to go to prior to that.

Hmm. :pokes songlist: current songs inducing automatic tears/choking up in me :
He could be a star - Billy Elliot (when Tony's bit starts)
Fields of gold - Sting (bloody cancer research ads)

Andrew Lloyd Webber's birthday party in the park.

( Party in park )

Last Night of Proms good. Bryn, that flag jacket... OW. We liked you better in the rugby shirt. Hee to the conductor and his chinese jacket. I think I zoned out during the sea shanty because I don't remember it at all. mmmm, Bryn, feel free to do traditonal simple folk tunes any time. Also, kudos to the composer and her 'Froms' tribute piece ('for the proms') who is funny and that was a good music.

Shely's birthday today. One day, I will learn not to eat any chocolate cake whatsoever and just stick to the icing. I tried for the smallest sliver possible and I'm stilll fucking queasy.

Finally found a blemish stick that goes on as well as the Benefit and doesn't cost £20. Why did I never try Natural Collection before? It's £1.99, goes on easily and the shades work. I tried the Rimmel that bunch of people recced and it's plasticy.

D/l'd firefox 3 at work (laptop screwing up too much last night to even contemplate doing owt odd - when I re-started it it bloody went and re-loaded *saturday*'s session, so had to go through all the history and open everything that looked vaguely okay. Tonight, going through and closing all the duplicates and everything I know I've read...). it is indeed shinier and faster. However, dislike the default skin, so went and browsed the themes. And we loves Firefox's efficiency - you go to the themes page, and only the ones compatible with v3.0 have a highlighted button. :happy sigh: Streamlining. It's a beautiful thing.

Finally getting round to properly listening to Amy Winehouse's 'Frank' (first album) so I can go through it and delete the tracks I dislike/go 'meh'. Quite a different album to 'Back to Black' - hasn't quite found her own sound yet, and you can hear lots of influences. Occasionally you hear bits that sound like her later stuff, but then the rest of the song gets overwhelmed by some other influence (e.g. obviously Sade, obviously traces of Manhattan Transfer, breathy girl band, etc) and most of it's *way* too light/breathy/high. Lyrics seem to be where she was doing well. So far the only ones I really like are 'Cherry' and 'Amy Amy Amy'.

And now thinking - what albums come under the 'everyone's heard/owns' banner?

'Back to Black' was bloody *everywhere* last year.
Prodigy's 'Fat of the Land' back in... '01 was it?
Massive Attack 'Mezzanine'.

oh, there's awesome and there's awesome : Master and Doctor to 'Girlfriend' ...I need this track in my life. WHY DON'T I HAVE IT?

And of course, right in the middle of getting some more plot/vague writey bit for the endlessly on the back-burner Jack and Ianto 30s timeslip fic (which sadly seems to be getting further and further away from the original Jeeves pastiche - maybe I should finish this *then* write an AU crossover scene) I get a bunny for a torchwood Cardiff WWI ficlet (tw_history 'in absentia' challenge pimppimpimp) which is now 80% written, or at least 50% plotted out on paper, 30% in head that now just needs tidying/tweaking.

Finally getting round to listening to my recording of the Jerry Herman birthday concert. So far, good quality - a little fuzzy on the words occasionally (more so on anyone with a nasal voice - one of the guys had a really nasal voice and he cones off worst), pretty fuzzy on Angela Lansbury speaking (this is sans tweaking, first listen) and I'd forgotten just *how* evil Jerry and Don Pippin are when it comes the 'International Dolly' bit.

Don't have a full recording - I hit pause a couple of times by accident on the second section of the first half, but at least now I know settings.

Listening to one of Jerry's new songs that debuted at this concert. There should be rules about lines like 'I have barrels of rubies and breathtaking boobies' and much, much worse, 'I've been trained by Nijinsky and coached by Lewinsky'. 'he was small he was sleek he was smart he was rich he was ... gay' which produced gales of laughter from the crowd.

So this gadget with added ultra cheapo maplin mic (£5.99 or something) gets approval indeed. Needed for ... special journalistic purposes. Yis. (or as I put it to the gadget shop people, lectures)

Dad yelled for music to be put on for dinner. I put on the Julie Atherton cd, a tad trepidatiously.

Dad comes out of kitchen.

Dad : What's this?
Me : Er... Julie Atherton?
Dad : Is it new?
Me : Um, yeah, she's a musicals performer. She's kind of an acquired taste, I-
Dad : It is new. It will stay on.
Me : Uh, I did say a bit of an acquired taste -
Dad : It is new and it's someone I can blather on at work about that no-one else will have heard of!

:facepalm: Yes, my father wants to be John Peel.

Got over 3 thou done last night (thought it would be less, but then Methos suddenly started ranting about the evils of bloody plate armour suits when all I'd previously had on the subject was one line about 'never catch me in that stuff', but then we are talking me - the entire plane flight scene developed out of one stupid joke and then the bastards started bantering something chronic in my notebook), so reckon will definitely be able to get the word count done - three scenes left to write up that're actually *necessary* - plane flight back, meeting at Algiers (aka the '... I should've bloody known it'd be you', where I may have to womanfully resist using the casablanca line. Hang on, this is Jack Harkness. Of course he's going to use it. I still get amused that for a character who didn't get a joke about Spock in his first appearance is now canonically a pop culture tart.) and the end scene at Algiers, which also includes the coda. If I've got time I'll stick in something about their history with comparisons into the meeting at Algiers, but only when I've finished everything else. Dammit. Really, the Methos-and-Jack stuff should be take up a lot more of the novel, but Torchwood of the 1920s and 30s intruded and consumed my time and word count.

Ooops. Gone and scared people at work with the lungs. Specifically, relatively new people who tend to whine and think the coughing and sneezing that you can hear across the other side of the building is done for effect and attention seeking (no, really, they actually said that). This time? Wheezing fit. Have ten-second bout, get vaguely irritated with it (my wheezing isn't an attempt to get breath, it's lungs having their equivalent of hiccups) and look up to see the newish people staring at me in alarm. Cue the reiteration explanation of 'look, ridiculously powerful but ridiculously sensitive, okay? You know the coughing and sneezing? We're talking one iota of dust and/or the air conditioning. You'll know if I'm in trouble because I'll be in pain. Now STOP STARING.'

...okay, so they're probably a little bit reasonable about being concerned, but this? Nothing I can do about it, inhalers and so on would just be utterly useless and 99% of the time they're perfectly fine. Hence me automatically going on the defensive because the staring gets to me.

Listening to Lee Mead album. Not bad. It's all covers, the Paint it Black and Any Dream Will Do are nowhere near as good as the live versions. Any Dream is far too cutesy, for a start. Probably spoiled by the fact that Lee was on an utter adrenaline rush when he first sang it and you can hear the triumph and disbelief and glee at winning if you have the mp3s recorded off the tv, and his original performance of Paint it Black was what got the fabulous reaction shot of all the other contestants looking utterly ill, because they knew it'd just stolen the entire show. 'Stronger' had me blinking at first, because brain was going 'this is familiar. where the hell do I know this from?' And then realised why it sounded so odd. It's a Sugababes track. Female and choral rather than male and single voice. Surprising how much difference it makes.

Query : for the etymology geeks/those of greek extraction : what does '-opolis' or '-poulis/os' tagged on the end of a surname mean? I think it's the same as 'town/from this place/people of', but it might be 'son of' (like mac/son/o') - couldn't tell. Help?

Was fed Dame Bassey's new album by mate. Re-mixed old classics and her takes on some new stuff.

listening to 'Get this party started'.

...oh dear god, now it sounds like Pink re-worked a sixties classic. :snicker: It's like when Mike Flowers Pops re-did 'Wonderwall' and everyone went around with very confused expressions wondering if Liam had indeed just re-done a cheesy 70s Bacharach-style song. But you so know that future generations are going to think that Johnny Cash's version of 'Hurt' is the original.

...mutter. The re-worked 'Big Spender' would have worked a lot better as the Casino Royale title track. I now have visions of shots of Daniel Craig strutting to this with gun and doing lots of posing and cards and chips going everywhere in true 007 title sequence fashion.

Rest of album... not bad, but second half is a bit of a disappointment after the first five where she really belts it.

Hmm. For some reason I now wish to see a face-off of Charlotte Church and Dame Bassey : the battle of the Welsh powerhouse voices. You could sell tickets for the Millenium Stadium.

Sweeney Todd tonight at Royal Festival Hall. :bounce: Bryn Terfel, aka 'we're going to batter you bastards into submission with the power of my vocal chords'. Oh, and Daniel Boys and Philip Quast. Icing on the cake.

Looking at imdb for the film version of this that Tim Burton's doing. ooooooo. Timothy Spall. Tony Head. Alan Rickman. (does anyone remember if Rickman's voice is good enough for this? Sondheim's kinda... demanding on the vocal chords) And. Er. Sacha Baron Cohen? I've never seen him do straight acting - does anyone know if he can sing?

Due to rather nice weather of yesterday, decided to forgo jeans and tights and wore suede skirt and boots + torchwood shirt of subtle geekiness. Am poster child of many shades of mid-brown. However, the problem with the suede skirt is that it's one of those skirts that when you're sober and it's daylight, after about five minutes of walking you wish it was just that inch longer as it has a tendency to ride up a bit and stay *just* decent. Spent walk to work tugging at the hem every two minutes. But still, I look good and it's comfy.

Poking the various original fic universes. Some of which contain mary-sues. Several times I insert them into fandom universes when I feel the need to rant at certain things. Occasionally these random ideas once worked out find themselves into fic I'd be willing to post. The circle village universe (village/townsfolk a tad weird due to living on the borders of the Summer Country and entire area infused with the Wild - getting kidnapped/killed by elves is an occupational hazard) recently wandered into the SGA universe as soldiers. And then I had a disturbing revelation where it turns out that the Ancients are actually the elves once the two universes collided - time dilation fields, physical/mental tormenting of people in the name of experimentation that's fun and interesting, dropping stuff when it's no longer fun regardless of consequences to environment, etc, etc. Huh. Always weird when universes mesh upon colliding.

Listening to Putting it Together and pondering when it is that you gain the ability to pick an individual singer's voice out of a line-up - two listens to a track, after you've heard them sing a variety, constant listening over a short period? Some singers are *very* distinctive due to a trick/tone of voice - using this as an example, Ruthie Henshall is *very* distinctive - I'd only heard her on the Chigaco London cast soundtrack once, picked up an ensemble cd and went '...That's Ruthie singing on that bit.' Eartha Kitt and Shirley Bassey are similar, and interestingly, I'd say Ewan Macgregor is bloody distinctive.

John Barrowman, on the other hand, is probably only distinctive after you've listened to him a lot, and often that's a case of sheer clarity of singing compared to other voices. (slightly odd when you start doing comparison of voices, realising how few people sing clearly) Course, once you've got the stage of listening a lot, like with any singer, you can pick them out of a line up if they just sing a word. In a bad accent. When they have a cold. From the bottom of a coal mine.
To the point where, in the case of one track on a compilation cd, a bunch of Barrowman
fans wrote to the publishing company and went 'there's been a screw-up on this track, because that is *not* John.'
Them : 'It is!'
Fans : 'You are not obsessive. We have heard John when he's got a cold, on bad recordings from fuzzy tapes, and during phone interviews where the reception was terrible *and* he was two steps from collapsing in bed with bronchitis. That is not John.'
Publishing company : '...Okay, you win, we'll publish a retraction.'

Last few days, I keep coming across situations - wank, kerfuffles, archiving, beta-ing, why something's classified uninteresting/intrinsically boring and so on - in fandoms that get me quoting Steven Moffatt on the Dr Who commentaries.

'Yes it is. You are young and do not remember. I was there. John was in it!'

(to be said in a pedantic, hissed, histrionic tone of voice)

Oh my god, I've been in fandom too long.

Also, the problem with listening to mainly musicals. When you find yourself singing something under your breath idly, you realise you're either singing something so ridiculously sappy it's not true or you're singing something wildly innapropriate and probably filthy as hell.