Musical Education

I thought I should quickly mention that about a week ago I received a CD in the post from Troubled Diva. There are a couple of points I feel the need to make in regards to this. Apart from thankyou, of course.

Firstly, for those of you that haven't been paying attention TD ran a quiz a while back to re-launch his blog. As well as getting 120 different people to answer a question each on his archive, he also invited strange, bizarre, compulsive people to send in a complete set with the promise of 3 CDs for the first to do so.

In the fit of self-enforced insomnia that was my drabble marathon, I embarked upon the quest to find all 120 answers. This wasn't as difficult as it at first seemed. A lot were already correctly answered by others, and it was a simple case of lifting those into a text file. The rest yielded to fairly simple search techniques. A couple required diligent skimming (really, the fellow owns far too many Ben Sherman's) and there were three left that I guessed. The three I got wrong. I only started reading this particular blog in mid-September on Cathy's recommendation, and indeed, I can still remember the specific post that persuaded me to keep reading. So I haven't been around long enough to know the blog that well, and, errr, I've still never actually read his archives.

Search boxes and google be praised.

In recognition of my inspired (monumental? histrionic? clinically insane?) attempt, I was awarded a consolation prize, and was to pick one of the three CDs to have as my very own. Recognising hardly any of the bands on any of the CDs sent me into a slight panic, but vaguely recalling a friend's rapturous approval of the White Stripes, I went with the third. I checked the list again and recognised only 6 of the 17 artists mentioned. And couldn't name a single song by any of them. Apparently, however, my music tastes run in the same category as 'proper grown-up music that men of [his] age are supposed to be listening to.' I'm not sure I want to know what that says about me, female, and most definitely not 'of his age.'

My music knowledge is, ahem, highly specialised. I know soundtracks (I instantly recognised one of the groups as being on the Tomb Raider soundtrack, for instance, despite not remembering the name of the track) and I also know January to August, 1998. January being when I returned from the EuroVision styled desert musical wastes that was my habitation of St. Petersburg, Russia, and August being when the novelty of having a top 40 to make notes on each week wore off.

Anyway, the CD arrived, I'm listening to it quite a bit, and as I have now mentioned this particular blog a scandalous number of times here, I now vow to never do so ever again. Read it for yourself, it's quite good. I'm done talking about it.