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Start the morning off right with some delightful cat haikus. Molly got these from one of her teachers.

Blur of motion, then - Silence, me, a paper bag. What is so funny? You’re always typing. Well, let’s see you ignore my Sitting on your hands. My small cardboard box. You cannot see me if I Can hide my head. Terrible battle. I fought for hours.  Come and see! What’s a “term paper”? Small brave carnivores Kill pine cones and mosquitoes, Fear vacuum cleaner. Want to trim my claws? Don’t even think about it! My cries will wake dead. I want to be close To you. Can I fit my head inside your armpit? Wanna go outside. Oh no! Help! I got outside! Let me back inside! Oh no! Big One has been trapped by newspaper! Cat to the rescue! Humans are so strange. Mine lies still in bed, then screams! My claws aren’t that sharp. . . .

Look, I got a new icon. Yay, me.

A couple days back I picked up the Phantom of the Opera movie soundtrack. I did this after watching the newest trailer, which is one of the better trailers I’ve seen recently. Alas, some aspects of this soundtrack are pretty disappointing.

I’m a big fan of musicals, although as a general rule I prefer the Lloyd Webber “operatic” musical over the older style that is sort of a play with songs. As I love the sound of a big orchestra, I look forward to movie versions of musicals because they almost always use big, excellent orchestras instead of the smaller pit orchestras that most often play the “Original Broadway/London Cast” recordings of musicals.

There are some exceptions (the 1982 movie version of Annie, which is just terrible, for example) but for the most part, movie soundtrack versions of musicals are my favorite. They have excellent performances, and orchestras and other instruments that just wouldn’t work if they had to hide in front of the stage.

This new Phantom soundtrack definitely features a comparatively large orchestra, but it is marred by strange arrangement decisions and some very bad mixing, particularly in the early tracks, like the extended Overture. (I imagine to accommodate opening credits) The bits of the overture that they extended are particularly problematic. I found the orchestrations weird and boring.

Another example is Christine’s “vocalizations” at the end of  “The Phantom of the Opera” (the song). There’s this really annoying rambling electric guitar in the background, and Christine’s wailing is very soft. I think it might be so soft to prevent you from noticing that it is synthesized. I can’t be sure, but it just doesn’t sound real to me.

The performances of most of the cast, overall, are pretty solid. Christine is probably the best of the group, particularly in “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” which is one of the highlights of the disk. In fact, once you get to this song, the quality of everything seems to improve. The phantom is the weakest performer of the group, in my opinion. He just doesn’t sell his anger or feel anywhere near as menacing as Michael Crawford. When I let Molly listen to a track, I used the word “pansy” to describe how he sounded in his rant in ”The Mirror.”

Ultimately, they don’t ever reach the level of quality that soundtracks such as The Music Man and Evita did. Evita is probably the best example of how to record and mix orchestra that I can think of. Evita is just so amazingly excellent sounding quality wise, and has some excellent vocal performances too.

My final verdict is that this is a pretty good soundtrack, but I don’t think it is better than the cast recordings in any way. They just didn’t seem to put much effort into putting together a big, well balanced sound. And their casting choices seem to have been made based on looks rather than singing talent. That is always a mistake with a musical.

Disclaimer:This is, of course, my opinion. YMMV.

Yesterday I had the first meeting from Helen’s room scheduled for this week. Tomorrow I have the one I am dreading the most.

Even worse, due to yesterday being an OFIM to remember, with problems and deadlines distracting me all morning, I was late to the meeting. And since I ran up several flights of stairs and all around the floor trying to find the room, I was very frazzled and out of breath when I finally made it. I just love Mondays.

Now for some

I’m still very pleased, and I’m learning my way around more every day. I’m starting to find solid replacements for many of the applications I used on a daily basis. Here’s what I’ve settled on at the moment, but if you know me at all, you’ll know this is subject to change on a daily basis.

I’ve switched from Firefox to Safari. Safari just feels faster, and is very well integrated, but it does lack a couple features which I miss, like tab session saving.

For mail, I’ve switched from Thunderbird to Mail.app. Mail.app is probably the best mail client I’ve ever used. It has everything I liked about Thunderbird, and many things I now can’t live without, like inline spell checking.

Itunes has replaced XMMS and/or Winamp very effectively. I did miss the many plugins I’d found for winamp and XMMS over the years, but I’ve found Quicktime components for many of them.

I’m currently using Adium for IM, but I’m looking around for an alternative, mainly because of bugs like filesending not working and occasional crashes. iChat is close, but it doesn’t support YIM, and has a really a poor conversation logger.

I’m still looking for a good usenet client. Unison is pretty good, and I might end up going with it.

I’ve also been playing with Konfabulator, which is quickly becoming an app I can’t live without. It fills in all the gaps and reminds me of Desktop X from Stardock, only much more cleanly implemented.

I’ve bored you to tears with that list of software and Mac rambling. That should qualify for my villainous deed for today. I hope everyone has a GREAT day. Thanks for reading!