Sub Ubi

I was trolling through YouTube, and found a few fun videos.

Here’s one of the Gas House Gang and a women’s quartet doing the 8-part barbershop arrangement of Lida Rose. The video quality isn’t so good, and it isn’t a perfect performance, but it’s fun to hear it as a 2×4x arrangement. (Ah. Here’s a higher-quality version with the women’s quartet Showtime.)

In the realm of barbershop comedy is 50 champs to get Osama. You have to know a fair bit about the barbershop community to find this funny.

The Acoustix was a trend-setting quartet; I believe two of the four were classically trained and sang with the Dallas opera (although that’s based on old memory cells). Tonight, Tonight is a marvelous arrangement, with the melody passing through all four voices, and the tag (or ending) is one of the more mind-bending chord progressions I’ve encountered in a tag. An interesting video is this one of the Acoustix jamming in an airport tram-car…

I also wandered through some videos of Rockapella… for example, their jam on Under the Boardwalk with True Image is fun, and Zombie Jamboree in concert is also cute. I think this came from a concert somewhere in Pennsylvania… their rendition of Tempted by Squeeze. (And, for comparison, the original.)

Which might as well drag me all the way back to collegiate a cappella. Here’s the UNC Achordants doing Wayward Son, which they’ve really done a nice job with. They also do a nice job with MacPhearson’s Rant, if that’s what the song is actually called…

Well. Firefox crashed. Who knew.

So, no, we don’t have TV. And I don’t usually spend an evening poking around YouTube. But it’s fun being able to wander around the world of a cappella music with no particular direction in mind, and enjoy the music found along the way.

In case the situation isn’t clear:

1. NJ county buys electronic voting machines.
2. Princeton prof offers to help independently verify the vote from said machines.
3. Maker of machines threatens to sue if independent verification occurs.

Would anyone like to tell me when corporate interests trumped democracy? How is this different than some goon with a baseball bat standing at the voting station telling me “Don’t worry… we’ll make sure your vote gets counted.”

Closed, unverified electronic voting machines are a threat to democracy.

From the Star-Ledger:

Union County has backed off a plan to let a Princeton University computer scientist examine voting machines where errors occurred in the presidential primary tallies, after the manufacturer of the machines threatened to sue, officials said today.

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

As seen here. Students left to their own devices on spring break are a funny bunch.