Notices by David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)

@cyberlyra
I would guess that very few people in the US TikTok demographic have any idea what the original little red book was. Am I underestimating people?

@cyberlyra
A useful correction:
https://hachyderm.io/@liztai/113848757311154768
(@liztai @zdl)

@Iva852 @bmacDonald94
Hope is more than just wishful thinking; it’s related to perseverance.

Secret tip: If you take almost any line in one of my “classical” scores and play it with the feel, accents and inflections of post-bop jazz, it will work, and will sound closer to the way I hear it.

https://musicians.today/@mcmullin/113686795827733483

@nat
Now that I think of it, if a newborn in a NICU gets COVID, you know for certain that they didn’t catch it somewhere else. So even if they don’t care about patients, but only about legal exposure, they really ought to be careful there.

@nat
It was extremely telling to note the timing of when mask mandates were lifted in hospitals here (in Boston). It wasn’t when vaccines came out, or when infections or deaths dropped below a certain level, or when wastewater measurements showed less COVID. It was when the disease became prevalent enough in the community at large that it was no longer possible to prove you caught it at the hospital. “We don’t care if we give you the plague as long as you can’t sue us for it.”

@nat
It is insane that no one even masks in hospitals now. No masks on doctors, nurses or patients in ICUs and oncology wards. Anyone smart enough to work in a place like that surely must understand that, statistically speaking, their “personal choice,” their stand for “freedom” and “self expression,” is •guaranteed• to kill some of their patients. But no one sees anything wrong with this.

@FlashMobOfOne
Sure, they still may not start taking precautions. But the more they see it, the less impossible it will seem.

Almost everyone has decided that they would rather suffer permanent brain damage than the social stigma of being the only one around who doesn’t want brain damage. I don’t get it.

Please be that one masked weirdo who still cares. It will give the second, third and fourth weirdos permission to care too.

#CovidIsNotOver

@KydiaMusic

This implies an interesting corollary, toward which I’m already inclined. They recognize that it doesn’t matter what we fight about as long as we fight and distrust each other.

That would suggest it also doesn’t matter what we care for as long as we care. To act lovingly, even on a small scale and with no obvious connection to politics, directly undermines their efforts.

https://musicians.today/@mcmullin/113447994027797889

@liztai
I’ve always been curious about this. In my home now we speak English and Mandarin, but only my wife is fully fluent in both, so her parents and I each speak to each other with a different proportional mixture of the two, either switching back and forth, using a stray word from the other language here and there, or using the vocabulary of one with the grammatical structure of the other.

@inthehands
I think usually those hoops, boilerplate, and check boxes exist so that a machine or database can digest it. For example, I think most of what’s required to go into electronic medical records isn’t to help doctors care for patients, it’s for billing done automatically by the computer.

@KimCrayton1
I’m so sorry. It’s infuriating that this goes on at all, let alone with such depressing consistency. And it’s especially frustrating that any time someone mentions it, (white) people jump in to say no that can’t be, prove it.

I don’t know the solution, but for starters, can we stop pretending this isn’t a real problem? We’re way past isolated incidents or misunderstandings. Almost every Black person here describes the same kind of experiences.

@liztai
It’s a shame but it’s true that as a 老外 I can get away with a lot, and am sometimes afforded respect I don’t deserve.

@liztai
I’m at that beginner-intermediate level that elicits suspicious praise and encouragement meaning more or less, how nice that you tried. Like if someone’s dog could say a few words, you’d pet him and say that’s great. (At least that’s how it works for a white American. I suspect if I were ethnically Chinese and spoke as I do, the reaction might be more like, what’s wrong with you?)

@KydiaMusic @mattly
I speak Mandarin, badly, at a roughly intermediate level. And Mandarin has just 4 tones, so it’s not as complicated as many other languages. So I’m no expert but I can answer this. The tones are really pitch contours, and they are relative, not fixed. You could usually understand enough from context probably to know what people mean even if you don’t register the tones. 1/…

@KydiaMusic @mattly
But if you speak with the wrong tones, (as I often do because I forget which one I need) then people just look at you blankly. Or worse, you say things that make perfect sense but aren’t the words you think you’re saying. Think of the tones like the vowels in English. If someone said “ham” when they meant “home” you might or might not still understand, but if they mixed up all their vowels at random they’d make no sense at all.

@KydiaMusic @mattly

For two years before I realized my mistake, every day when I reminded my in-laws to do their daily exercise (zuò cāo / 做操) I said the second word with a 4th (falling) tone instead of a 1st (high) tone, thus telling them not to exercise (操) but to fuck (肏). Oops!

(Fortunately they are too cultured to hear it that way and/or too polite to correct me.)

@violetmadder @KydiaMusic @mattly
This could have gone on indefinitely. But at some point I heard someone else say it correctly and noticed the difference: oh it’s cāo not cào… hmm I wonder what cào means then… so I looked it up and oh, “fuck.” There are tons of homophones in Mandarin, so usually there are at least half a dozen possible words for one pronunciation. But in this case, as luck would have it, really just the one.

@mattly @KydiaMusic @chris

How does #amusia work in cultures with tonal languages? (Any #linguistics folks know? This must have been studied.)

If as many people were truly “tone deaf” as claim to be, and if the proportion were the same in China, then there’d be at least a hundred million Chinese people unable to speak intelligibly or understand speech well. So it must be either much less common or much less of an obstacle.