My Whedonverse Ornaments for the Third Annual Buffyfest Ornament Swap were mailed out right before Thanksgiving. They should be received some time this coming week.
My son made the All County Choir for the second year in a row. The best of the best in our county, high school and middle school, met at Mainland High School in Daytona Beach Saturday night, after weeks of practice, and performed some beautiful music. Each group sand 4-5 songs. Here are a few that were uploaded to YouTube by me and other people.
Here is "Dance Today"
My favorite, "Elijah Rock."
Then the Middle School and High School group combined to sing "May the Music Live On."
The 2010-2011 Middle & High School All County Choir:
The kids from Jacob's school, with their choral director, Mr. Greg Lefils, and guest conductor for the evening, Dr. Norton Christeson
This review is for the BBC's "Being Human." The Sy-Fy Channel has their new series "Being Human" starting, calling it a "Sy-Fy Original." I'm not sure how that works as the BBC version already finished season 2 and is working on season 3.
The premise of the show is that three supes, a vampire named Mitchell, a werewolf named George and a ghost named Annie, who all share a flat and have a go at being human.
Mitchell fights against his bloodlust. He wants to forsake his vampire self and be good, but his past keeps dragging him down. George was attacked and turns into a werewolf once a month. A super-goofy intelligent guy, George detests what he is. He and Mitchell met, knowing what they each were, and moved into an apartment haunted by Annie, a very hyper girl with the self-confidence the size of a flea. She just wants to be with her boyfriend, whom she left behind when she died.
They each deal with their own problems separately, and sometimes the problems merge.
Annie tries to remember how she died, and with the help of her flat mates, she tries to exact revenge on the culprit. The local vampire regime wants Mitchell back in the fold. This affects all the flat mates as they work together to save Mitchell, and humanity, for the regime's evil plot to take over.
Overall, it's just six quick episodes. George, and his high-pitched squeal cracks me up and he gets the best lines. When he and Annie try to rescue Mitchell from the vampire regime, George yells "I'm looking for something to defend myself with. So far I have a whisk and I have my mobile phone recharger. What do we take, some crosses and garlic? I know, we should have watched more films. " Annie & George have a fight with the vamps that rivals the Xander/Harmony hair-pull-athon. After winning, George squeals "We're like the world's gayest ninjas!"
Mitchell is your typical torn dark vampire.
Annie...Annie needs to be smacked. I pretty much hated her character. She has NO backbone. She's a ghost and she gets intimidated by her murderer, who figures out she's trying to haunt him. Ugh. She's too hyper, she talks to much, her eye color alternated from blue to brown with no rhyme or reason and she won't stop making tea, although she can't drink it.
All in all, an enjoyable quick series, if you can get past the Annie character.
Isabel, the huge Little Big Planet Fan, searched online while playing LBP and found an Islands of Adventure/Universal Studios level. She found a fun level where the creator made the park exactly as it is set up. It was a great level.
Here I filmed the "Wizarding World of Harry Potter" section of the Islands of Adventure level. If you've been there, you can see it's quite accurate.
What a talented person! I'll need to find the user name who created this level.
Today, as he is walking to class, one of his teachers stops him to say "Jacob, you made the paper." She hands him the Daytona Beach News Journal for Wednesday November 10, and sure enough, there's his name.
I am not sure how long that link will work, so I scanned the newspaper article.
"Back on the boulevard, you could hear Padlock, a group that consisted of Deltona teen Jacob Frisenda, a laptop computer, keyboard, mixers connected with a spaghetti pile of wires and all worked with a lot of frantic motion at the controls. He played amazing ambient-breakcore-electronica."
What to do this year? What to do, what to do. I didn't want to be a one-trick pony; stamps again? Naaah.
I was surfing the web and for no apparent reason whatsover, I was looking at Shrinky Dinks. I love the idea of these! I went ahead and ordered the sheets that can be used with ink jet printers. Squeeee!
I've never made a Shrinky Dink before, can you believe it?? It really was so cool watching them shrink in the oven.
It was a crazy music-filled weekend, centered around our son.
First, he performed with the Florida 2010 ACDA High School Honor Choir. Tryouts were done by submitting audio tapes of the performances. Not many people from his school tried out, but he was the only one representing his high school.
They performed Jonathan Dove's "The Passing of the Year," a composition involving a double chorus, two pianos and percussion. It was a crazy-hard performance, and they did wonderfully.
UNFORTUNATELY, our video camera is not digital, and until I can take the cassette somewhere to be converted onto a dvd, I have nothing to show you. I am hoping SOME parent uploads their copy to YouTube soon.
Rehearsals
Rehearsals
He was the only kid from his school, but his school's choral director still showed up, on a Saturday, to watch him! I was so impressed and happy.
We drove home to have a late lunch and then get ready for his live musical performance debut at the 2010 Deland Music Festival.
Jacob, (performer name Padlock), has been creating breakcore/electronica music for over a year. He has a lot of his creations on Soundcloud.
It's not for everyone, I know. He likes it and some of them are really cool. These are two of my favorites:
He was on stage 6 of over 25 stages laid out across downtown Deland. He had such a good time.
At one point, people started dancing. He had a steady crowd, but I could not capture it on video because it was too dark. There was also a young lady taking pictures of all the performers up and down the street. She stopped and stayed the entire set, taking his pictures and crowd shots.
And like I said, I don't have a digital video camera. I used my point and shoot, which only holds a few minutes of video, so I took random small clips of the night.
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