The A-Z of awesome

I'm going to be doing a series of posts just for the heck of it, and it's really quite simple. I shall take each letter of the alphabet, and find something awesome starting with it. Hopefully they won't all be boring and obvious ones... So here goes the first instalment!

Adipose: as in, the adorable little adipose monsters in Dr Who, not the real stuff, yuck!

Courtesy of Google Images

Bats (I couldn't resist): their young are called pups, and they groom them by licking and scratching them gently, all this whilst hanging upside down, of course.

Squeeeee! Baby bats are too cute (thanks to webecoist.momtastic.com)

Clair de lune: the piano piece is the third movement of the Suite Bergamasque by Debussy, and is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, in my opinion. It's also one of those pieces with the peculiar tendency to reduce me to tears whenever I hear it (some types of music do that to me, for no good reason. A bit lame, but there you go).

Dorian Gray: it would seem that Oscar Wilde's masterpiece had been revised to hell and gone to rid it of all the "unclean", "poisonous" and "discreditable" parts (so, the good bits); luckily for those  warped souls out there, an uncensored version has just been published containing (the horror!) more homoerotic references and dialogue between Basil and Dorian. I think I know what I want for Christmas this year...

Music memories

I love how music has the power to transport you to a particular time or place. How hearing a band or a song suddenly triggers dormant memories of people, emotions and situations. It's good to sometimes go back through your musical archives, to remind yourself where you came from, and how you've changed for better or worse. It makes a good measuring stick.

I have this a lot, because I tend to do life in stages; I listen the hell out of a band or an album for a couple of months, and then move on to the next one. It's not that I stop liking them/it, I just naturally progress to the next one, and the next, and the next. This means that when I hear them/it again at a later stage, it's like stepping through a wormhole in time. Some songs that have got me through bad times, and that have meant a lot to me, give me quite a serious emotional kick, which I find fascinating. I would just love to study the psychology of music, as I think that the world would honestly just collapse without it.

Another part of that hypothetical study would be the reasons for one's affinity to specific genres of music. How much is nature and how much is nurture when it comes to individual tastes in music? Why am I drawn so strongly towards minor keys, when some others prefer major keys? Why do I find a piece sad when others find it happy? WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE R&B FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS UNHOLY? I think that if you could understand the psychological patterns behind music tastes, one could potentially discover a whole new way of looking at people.