No comment necessary:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNabSidq2XU&context=C3ae8240ADOEgsToPDskJG-_jV26Uliu2ZXVTAvfWD]
. . . and for something completely different, here, as promised, is the audio for Myths and Legends. Good job again to Jared, Kory, and the BYU Chamber Orchestra!
When people ask, I often hem and haw about my favorite this or that. I have many movies, books, songs, and so on that I like, but I can rarely rank them.
This week, though, I found a clearly rank-able category: My four most favorite fruits are
with apples and pears receiving honorable mention.
To all those who have bemoaned my inability to pick favorites, there you have it.
P.S.—I also love panettone. It has fruit in it . . .
My Dad’s in town this week, and it being summer, we wanted to go swimming. Only thing is, he didn’t bring a swim suit, so he, my siblings, and I all went shopping for one. Three stores later, he found a simple red one.
In the process of looking for said swim wear, my brothers and I got distracted by the tie sections in Ross and TJ Maxx. We all served missions, and after two years during which the tie you wear is your only outlet for expressing personality, you get a taste for ties. Naturally, then, we were curious about what was in fashion these days.
Were we ever surprised: the ties were hideous. And it wasn’t just a few. It was most of them. They were the kind of ties you’d dig up at a secondhand store—only these were new. While I could show you many examples of the awfulness, I thought I’d limit it to three runners up and the hands-down winner.
First runner-up (left): This beauty chalks its hideousness up to an awkward pattern and color. Instead of being a classy diagonal stripe tie, it tries to be multiple diagonal stripe ties—all in the same tie. To add to its gauche, the monochromatic shadings of purple and gray are more drab and nausea-inducing than they are subtle and refined.
Second runner-up (right): Speaking of nausea-inducing, this blue and pink fish-scale-esque tie is downright dizzy-ing. Which way is the pattern going? What exactly is the shape of those scales and what’s with the black dots at the end of them? Its attempt to replicate the fish-inspired aesthetics of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao museum simply crashes and burns.
Third runners-up (left and right): Admittedly, ugly fish tie was hard to beat, but we found a challenger in this retro-styled Pierre Cardin. Of all the ties we found, this one screamed “thrift store escapee.” Here was a tie so plain ugly that in any Mormon mission it would have become a posterity tie.
. . . then we found its siblings. Apparently, having one “sweet spirit” of a tie in gold isn’t enough—it also needs to exist in pink and purple. It was as if Pierre Cardin took a cue from the ice climbers in Smash Brothers. And while this discovery seemed to be top off the day, nothing could have prepared us for what we would see next.
Grand prize: These days, the skinny black tie is coming back into fashion, and I can respect that. A good, skinny black tie projects “smooth” and “hip.” At first glance, the tie to the right fits the bill, yet on closer inspection, it has so many things going wrong.
While the photo to the left makes it look normal, when I first saw it, I was baffled. It looked like a cross between a belt, a table cloth, and a bicycle inner tube. The thing was made out of a single sheet of vinyl. It didn’t sit flat and felt slippery under your hands. It was, in a word, repulsive.
Now none of us were sure what caused this recent bout of senseless neck ware design. All we could conclude was that right now is not a good time to buy ties. Gentlemen—consider yourselves warned.
So BYU has a reputation of having a great dance program. In fact, its top team won two firsts at this year’s Blackpool Dance Championships. Since good number of my friends are also involved in the dance program, it was only a matter of time before I decided to take the plunge.
Actually, I already plunged six years ago when, as a freshman, I took the obligatory Dance 180 (“Social Dance”). As my first ballroom experience, I fumbled through and somehow got bronze level certification, even though I was pretty certain that dance was beyond me. One mission and four years of undergraduate degree later, I decided it was time to have another go, and accordingly signed up for Dance 280. In the intervening years, the occasional dancing I’d done convinced me that now I did not have two left feet, and maybe only one and a half.
So this term I am taking “Social Dance 2,” and as I had expected, things actually have begun to click . . . mostly. The class is going just at the edge of my being able to keep up. Most of the time, it’s all I can do to learn the steps let alone apply the technique. The other day the TA came up to me and the girl I was dancing with and suggested that we try to dance in more masculine and feminine ways respectively. Right now, he said, we were dancing too neutrally. He showed us what he meant, and I might have noticed some slight difference, but mostly I thought to myself, “Mr. TA, I’ll accept the compliment that you seem to think I have enough control over what I’m doing to make that difference.”
That was cha-cha. When it came time to take the test, I did okay, though I had only negative (though valuable) feedback on my test sheet. With that, we moved on to triple swing. I think dancers need a translate function, too. There’s one step we were doing, called the “windmill,” that took me forever to figure out. The step involves leading the girl around you, kind of like a windmill. In the mean time, the guy is supposed to rotate himself while triple stepping. I couldn’t wrap my feet around how to do that nor could any of my friends or instructors point me in the right direction (though they tried). Finally, I sat out watching the rest of the class as they did the step until I realized, “That’s what I’m doing wrong!” (I’m not even going to try to describe it.) Then all the advice I’d been given suddenly made sense.
So today we tested swing, and this time there was a positive comment among all the “too much back lean” and “occasionally shuffling”: “You’ve improved a lot since cha-cha.” There it is, folks: I’m moving up in the dance world, one comment at a time. Mostly, I think I’m beginning to learn how to translate dancer sense of space and rhythm into a musician sense of such.
