Welcome to my weekly attempt to lessen my own ignorance and connect those oh-so-slow-to-connect dots.
This week: still listening to Mythos; still very Ancient Greek inspired. Also, I’ve been picking up — and picking at — the guitar again, and getting into some music theory. So expect chords and discords in the coming weeks.
- Tantalising comes from Tantalus who — after bizarrely cooking and serving his own son to the Gods — was punished by spending eternity trying to reach some dangling grapes.
- Manufacture literally means “made by hand”. Head slap. Manu-to-brow.
- Cashews actually grow on the outside of a fruit. They look like apples with anger issues. The only other fruit to have its seeds on the outside? The strawberry.
Pictured: one furious cashew - Presentism — a new word to me — means to judge something by the standards of today. It does not, however, excuse heinous acts of the past …
- The Trans-Siberian railway runs from Moscow to Vladivostok. It runs for (the suspiciously precise) 5,772 miles. The main ignorance here: Vladivostok. I confess, I hadn’t even heard of it. A whole city lost on me. (That said, I doubt there’s anyone who knows every city on Earth … which is somehow a sad thought.)
- (Also: I knew Russia was big, but Google’s new 3D Earth map really drums that home.)
- A power chord — think Smoke on The Water, and just about every other rock riff ever — is a fifth chord. It only has two notes: the first and the fifth. In other words it’s missing the note that gives a chord its minor or major tone. It’s neither happy nor sad. Some people dispute that it is a chord, due to its two-note nature — it’s a line, not a triangle. Well, two fingers up to those people. That’s two, not three.
- Note to self: Those cold patches that sometimes appear on the windscreen? They’re on the outside of the car. Use your wipers.
That’s it for now. See you next week.