bunsen_h

If you'll forgive a brief cane-shaking kids-today-like-crappy-music comment (of the kind I've been making ever since I first heard music not selected by me or by my parents)...

Science, as a discipline — loaded word, that — requires long-term focus, both to learn a subject and to observe experiments.  You need to notice anomalies, exceptions to an expected pattern; if you're very lucky, they can lead to discovery of something novel and important.  If you're attracted by videos full of hard cuts, in which the longest uninterrupted segment is somewhat less than a second long, you're probably not going to do well in research.

(To say nothing of the bizarre and distasteful assumptions embedded in that video, about which much has been said elsewhere.)

Now imagining Magnus Pyke doing a voice-over: "She blinded me!  With science!  It's a Girl Thing!"
 

Last Sunday's Vinyl Cafe show featured a charming little song, "Your Personal Penguin", lyrics by Sandra Boynton, performance by former Monkee Davy Jones.  I did a quick search, and found that the song is on-line, along with a video with bits of the recording session.

The song is catchy, and riffs on Hoagy Carmichael's music for "Heart and Soul".

Last night I was having a bit of insomnia, and "Heart and Soul" kept running through my head.  I tried to derail it by thinking of other relaxing music, and immediately got into Pachelbel's "Canon in D".  Because there are some strong similarities in rhythm and tone pattern between the two.

And then I realized that the two pieces of music can almost certainly be combined.

Aargh.