Nearly three years ago, we began a group project to record a play over at Librivox.

Today, it’s finally completed and available for download here: Librivox Pygmalion. It is of course the play that gave rise to the musical My Fair Lady, and I play Prof Henry Higgins.

For nearly two years, half the files lay languishing on servers, before one of the excellent co-ordinators at LV made me sit down and record the missing Henry Higgins lines. It was a job I had been putting off for years, but when I finally sat down to do it it took less than an hour.

To make a play at Librivox, we sit separately in our offices and houses across the world, and record the lines of each character one at a time. Another volunteer takes the various sound files and edits them together. The background sounds are not perfectly the same, and you can tell that this is the process we’ve used, rather than an expensive studio process with all the actors in the same place. And yet the finished project is really listenable and enjoyable.

Hmmm.

That would certainly solve a few problems.

A little scary how many of the niceties are completely interchangeable and can be performed by total strangers, though.

(via)

My long car posting made it into Brit Blog Roundup.

This last happened for a posting of mine in August 2008, and my thoughts haven’t much changed:

BritBlog is one of those things that I think is a good idea, and think I ought to support, but actually only read when it happens to crop up on a site I read anyway. Mostly Jonathan Calder.

Thank goodness for Google Link Search, or I’d never be any the wiser!

A friend of mine sings in a band called the Saboteurs, so I’m a member of their facebook group.

A message arrived yesterday to say they have a 5-song EP on iTunes for the bargain price of £3.95.

And it’s really good! You should totally buy it.

No, not our book (for sale, very reasonable cost).

I use fountain pens (when I remember to take them with me), and recently it seems to be harder to buy cartridges. You used to be able to get them in big boxes, now you can only get them in small boxes of six. Which seems a bit of a faff.  Even if they do last for ages.

So I wondered about converting my pens to run on bottled ink.  And googled around a bit, found a few sites, but eventually settled on Andy’s Pens. His website looks a bit dated, but has tons of useful information on it and I was able very quickly to identify the pens I own and indeed see that he had converter kits.  He also has a stock of bottled ink.

So I emailed to ask about availability, and got a reply within 24 hours.  He accepts Paypal, which is convenient, and within a few days, he’d sent me everything I needed at a very reasonable price.  

So if you need to do anything with pens on the internet, try Andy’s Pens.

And I’m also learning the guitar the Will Howells way.

And what did I learn today?  Caw, but video is hard work!

EDIT – yes, it is a cuckoo clock you can hear at the end.