Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

1. The other day, I was wondering aloud about whether or not I should consider Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling as part of my Plato's Nightmare stable of stories. Yesterday, I remembered that search engines are my friend, and I could probably find some critical essay on the story and how it fit into Andersen's life, and his motivations behind writing it.

Well, it didn't take any deeper digging than Good Ol' Wikipedia to discover that Andersen thought of The Ugly Duckling as his autobiography, and that he chose the metaphor of the swan raised in the barnyard to represent his own artistic temperament and being teased for loving music and singing in a small, provincial, town where only practical careers were valued.

So the way it was used in the Danny Kaye movie of 1952 is a modern take.

So I'll leave that story for another place and time.

2. For spiralsheep: I won't include links, or anything, because then I'll be marked as in the market for the stuff, but I just saw a "crafts" video about magnetic fingernail polish. It comes in many glitter colors, and it has iron filings embedded in the liquid. It also comes with a special magnet, which, if you hold it close to each nail before the polish dries, pulls the filings into position for very specific patterned designs -- so your nails end up with different glitter-and-black stripey designs.

Magnetz! And Glitter! It's obviously the wave of the future...

3. In the end, I decided against hunting down a YouTube video of Si Kahn's "It's Not Just What You're Born with" just so I could post my own song in response. I'll definitely do that if one of the singer/music vloggers I already subscribe to decide to cover Kahn's piece. But to hunt down people I don't follow, otherwise, just so I could post an opposing view?

That's being a Nasty Troll. And I don't do that.

So, instead, I sent a link to my song to Dave Hingsburger, since it was his writing, this past couple of months, that inspired me to go back and change half the lyrics, and also gave me the courage to make a video of the song, in the first place.

And today, he's posted my video as his blog entry of the day: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2012/03/simply-human-by-capriuni.html

Excuse my moment of being slightly chuffed.