Dude, stay the f--- away from my car.

Upvote for Arrogant Worms!

Look at the keyboard, starting at middle C, which is a white key. All the keys in C major are white keys, so going right from middle C, the keys are named: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, then C again an octave higher.

The simplest way to hear the difference is to play a C major chord, which is the first, third and fifth notes of the scale: C, E, G. Just hit all three at the same time and you can hear they have a certain sound together - call it majorness.

In a minor chord, on the other hand, the middle note of the chord (the third, E in the case of a C chord) is flattened -- so, instead of hitting the white E key, you hit the black E-flat key to its left, while keeping the same C and G. You can hear those notes also have a certain sound to them - call it minorness. Go back and forth between the major and minor chords and you'll start to hear the difference.

Here's the thing: scales are based on the *intervals* between the notes in them. C to D is a full step, or just a step. D to E is also a full step. D to E-flat, on the other hand, is a half-step. So the major scale goes like this:

Step, step, half-step. Step. Step, step, half-step.

Notice how the first part and the second part of the scale are identical, with an additional step separating them? Now try flattening the third note of both parts to make a minor scale:

Step, half-step, step. Step. Step, half-step, step.

That's the minor natural scale. Starting at C, it goes: C, D, E-flat, F, G, A, B-flat, C. If you start from a different note, you transpose into a different key and end up with different notes being sharp or flat, but the major- or minorness of it still comes from the interval pattern.

Anyway, what they basically did was take the flattened third (E-flat) and seventh (B-flat) and raised them a half-step while leaving everything else the same. Boom, it sounds like a more upbeat song. Cheers!

Cool. I just wonder if it works the same way in non-winter temperatures.

*quality

Upvote for the Shatner reference. That was a promo for a biopic starring The Shat as Gore Vidal's grandfather. The guy's been around forever, hasn't he?

Stop calling it "aluminium". It's aluminum, damn it!

>> ^spoco2:

I never would have thought of an assassination attempt happening in Canada. But then my knowledge of Canadian politics could be written in large font on the inside cleft of one of my buttcheeks.


Then you've never heard of the October Crisis. To sum up, in 1970 the separatist FLQ (a Québec nationalist terror group, not a political party like the PQ) graduated from bombings to kidnapping and murder. This prompted the federal government to invoke the War Measures Act and suspend civil liberties to rein it in. Now this Anglo asshole, apparently, has taken it upon himself to even the score. To see this happening in my country makes me sick.

Upvote for William Daniels: Mr. Braddock from The Graduate. Dr. Craig from St. Elsewhere (great asshole character). And the voice of K.I.T.T. the talking car. Respect.

ROFLMAO at the Sift serving an advertisement for "roof racks" -- this video kinda gives the term a whole new meaning, don'tcha think? To say nothing of sweaty palms...

The 1541 disk drive must not have been as popular in the U.K. as it was in Canada, because no one I knew even had a tape drive -- it was disks or nothing. But even the 1541 was, as the ad for the Epyx Fastload cartridge put it, a lumbering hippo. It used to go out of alignment constantly and couldn't read disks until you paid someone knowledgeable (more knowledgeable than I was, anyway) to fix it. But we liked it anyway! Hooray for the C64!

I actually posted a different video of this madness on my Facebook feed a couple months back. Upvote for 3:02-3:12 -- it's not prog rock if it doesn't have a flute!

Clearly, subtlety isn't dead. It's just sick.

Clever. Anyone who has read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach will recognize this as a crab canon. Well done!