Silence is Indeed Golden!

What role does music play in our daily lives in this day and age? It's a question well worth considering.

Most of the time, it is no longer uplifting, inspiring or life-changing.It has become just noise - noise that we can't escape, can't turn off, can't choose.

In order to appreciate music, you must be able to listen to silence, hear it and enjoy it. Unfortunately, silence no longer seems to exist. I would even go so far as to say that music organizes our lives into meaningless chunks of existence. Waiting on the phone to be connected to a person, one hears a series of computerized notes sometimes resembling a fugue. The different home delivery services blare out of recognition popular tunes from their loud-speakers. On the bus-ride home from work, the radio is turned up - mostly a stream of commercials. In the waiting-room of the dentist or the doctor, at the shoe shop trying on shoes, whilst you are eating a meal at the local restaurant, music accompanies your every move. When a new pop song is released, it is presented as a video so you have to watch music as well. And it all sounds the same - tinny, empty, unnerving sounds that grate on the ears rather than placate and uplift ruffled senses.

The 5th century philosopher, Boethius, divided music into three categories: Musica Universalis, the order of the universe as God created it in measure, number and weight; Musica Humana, the proportions of the human body; Musica Instrumentalis, manifestations of mathematical proportions in sound - sung or played. Everything was music for him. Others have defined music as "organised sound"(Edgard Varese), "the organization of sound into forms that carry culturally derived meanings, cultivated for aesthetic or utilitarian purposes" (Micheal Linton). And from the 19th century onwards " the artful or pleasing organization of sound and silence". In 1990, Jean-Jacques Nattiez said " just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant or both". And that seems to be the case today in regard to music in the 21st century. I feel it is time to re-define music yet again.

I would add a further two categories, since whether a sound or sounds constitutes "music" is a subjective choice on the part of the listener:

Voluntary Music - the music that I wilfully listen to, with attention or as a distraction, pleasing, stimulating, calming, conveying moods, emotions, thoughts, concepts and impressions to the listener;

Manipulative Music - advertising for example, where the product is defined and recognized by the accompanying music, computer products and software with tunes that characterize them, alarms and doorbells announcing the arrival of someone, the atmospheric music in the larger shops and malls attracting and luring customers, to name just a few.

There is rather a quaint relic from bygone times still on the streets of Montevideo - the knife-sharpener, who gets around on a bike with his grinding machine blowing on a five-note flute to announce his arrival in the neighbourhood.

Of course, there still remains the option of selecting a piece of music and actively listening to it when and where you choose.

White Sugar

I was born into a world where sugar was white and came in paper packets. Later on, paper was swapped for plastic.
I found out that white sugar was extremely poisonous owing to the process by which it is whitened, as are many other foodstuffs. Common knowledge today of course. You can always buy brown sugar ,though I wouldn't be surprised to find that it has also been chemically treated to make it brown!
To make matters worse, I'm a three-teaspoonfuls-to-a-cup kind of person, at eight cups a day! What a dilemma!
Why this fixation with white sugar? Anything less than white strikes us as unclean, impure. So instilled is this idea, that we willingly go to an early grave. Consumers of white sugar never get to voice their anger at the way things stand, they are never taken seriously. In fact, consumers are seen as the villains of the story - having no self-discipline, sugar addicts - and it is as highly addictive as any hard drug - irresponsible souls bent on their own self-destruction.
Has anyone tried to put pressure on the sugar-producers? Has any government body anywhere tried to improve the manufacture of sugar, so that it could be considered healthy and fit for human consumption?
Seems strange to live in a world where we don't get to decide the exactly what we eat!!!
Against poison food production! Foodstuff producers should be held responsible for what they produce!
No more poison in food!

So. . . . zapping around on the health-site my friend Marilyn Monroe sent me, I decided to convert my weight from kilos into pounds, so as to experience the peculiar shock of weighing so many stones, yet so few kilos ( must be a first world trauma!! Appropriate boxes are provided, so I entered my height as 1.73 and weight as 48 kilos with the devastating result that I was only one inch tall!!

From that moment on, my life took a violent turn! Charlie, the cat, had been perched on one extreme of the kitchen table, soaking up the warm air from the gas heater, when I instantly became a mere inch long – a bare three centimeters I think, perhaps not even that!!

To begin with, I crashed through the table to the floor, scaring the lives out of everyone – Kata starting a riotous barking, as did Bizkit, and the cat pounced on my head almost decapitating me. Luckily, I was able to escape by hiding under the mouse left dangling from the remains of the table.

Still dazed from the shock of finding myself just one inch tall and weighing 48 kilos, clinging on for dear life to a slippery black snake of a cord, I desperately sought a solution – I must get onto the PC again and revert this disaster . . . somehow . . . ( my computer skills aren’t good at the best of times!). So began the long haul up the cord, millimeter by millimeter, inch by inch!

At the top, further catastrophe – the PC was balancing precariously over the chasm, but the plug still seemed to be firmly in place though. To cut a long story short - the strenuous struggle of manipulating the keys to revert the situation, without smashing the machine to pieces in the process, well, I suppose you can imagine! Let this serve as a warning to everybody out: BEWARE! especially if you are clumsy!

It's A Dog's Life For Dogs and People Alike

Look at that mangy, bleeding dog on the corner. There's another one outside the supermarket. In fact, Montevideo is teeming with stray four-footed friends. Weird people have even gone so far as to throw puppies into the rubbish containers, where they will most certainly die of starvation and hypothermia, if there is no one around to rescue them. Do they really deserve such a dog's life? Your dog will always love you whether you are rich or poor, he will always be glad to see you even though you are in a bad mood, or ill, disabled. No matter what race, creed or inclination, you dog will always stand by you, defend and protect you and just keep you company. So next time you see that mangy dog on the corner, perhaps you could give it something to eat, or and old cardbox box and discarded jumper, so he won't freeze to death. You may criticise me for putting dogs above people - but people have more possibilities, except abandoned and homeless children, of course. If you have any canine tales to tell, I would be most interested to read them.