What has been seen, can never be un-seen. I was listening to some folk music played on a nyckelharpa yesterday, and as it played, I happened to look over at the track name for one particular piece, called, “Randig kjortel”. I know that randig means striped, or streaked, or even brindled (or somehow, there is a pattern of lines involved), but kjortel was not familiar. I guessed it probably meant something like “kirtle” because it sort of sounds like it, and this is traditional folk music, so a song is far more likely to be about a kirtle than low-rise jeans. Rather than bother with translating the word, I just did a quick Google image search for “kjortel”. I’m never doing that again. The first few images were fine, and a kjortel is indeed a garment very similar to the kirtle worn in England in the Middle Ages, but one of the thumbnails featured the kjortel lifted in front, and I thought, “Oh…that’s to display what was worn beneath them,” and I clicked. According to Norwegian modern artist Odd Nerdrum, the appropriate apparel to wear beneath a kjortel is…an enormous gut and an obvious erection? Jesus. I have nothing against naked guys in art, photos or real life, but why does it always seem the ones anxious to show off the goods are the ones you wish would keep them covered? The shirtless road crew worker isn’t the hot guy with six-pack abs and those cute little indentations above the hip, it’s the beer gut guy with moobs, hair on his back and plumber-bum. The artist who wants to get naked for a painting called “Selvportrett i gylden kjortel” isn’t Michelangelo’s “David”, it’s this guy. Odd…indeed!

While we’re on the subject of Norwegian modern artists, I’d be willing to bet that Bjarne Melgaard is making more money than I am, even though what he’s claiming is “art” looks like stuff I drew in elementary school. How delusional must the art world be if someone would pay actual money for this? I might stick it on my fridge with magnets if he was cute enough, but…

This one’s worse…I could’ve done this before I even started school!

Um…yeah. Well, if I ever get tired of what I’m doing, I think I can handle a career in modern art!

Oh yeah, and to convert wma files to mp3, the instructions I found don’t work; I had to do it with pcm:waveheader instead of pcm -waveheader. This worked just fine:

for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader “$i” && lame -m j -h –vbr-new -b 160 audiodump.wav -o “`basename “$i” .wma`.mp3″; done; rm -f audiodump.wav