The Best Name Ever and Music Class Shenanigans

It's Thursday night and I haven't baked since Monday. This is a long time for me. I am going through baking withdrawal and ate about 3 tons of oatmeal this evening to try to satiate my sweet tooth. I would bake but we really need to go grocery shopping, there may or may not be tumbleweeds in the fridge where butter and eggs should be. And dust bunnies where the flour should be. So unless you want some delicious tumbleweed-dust bunny pie, I'm kind of low on options for now.

Until I restock, here's some notes about the music class I'm taking. Joe, my music major boyfriend, somehow convinced me to take a music appreciation class as an elective. The class has been pretty good, actually, but there are some days when I'd rather kill myself than listen to atonal modern music for 75 minutes. You know the noise machine in the cartoon The Phantom Tollbooth? It all sounds like that.

Today was fun though. The entire class was full of weird nervous energy, probably because it was the last official class before the final and everybody gets a bit insane around finals. We played a Jeopardy style review game, with the class split into two teams. Naturally, my team was Team Awesome and we beat the pants off the other team, partly because I was the only one in the class to know the term "sprechstimme", which is a horrible, nightmare inducing, atonal vocal style. I only knew it because the example we listened to scarred me for life. It will probably haunt my dreams forever.

Anyways, since we kicked musical-history ass, my group could completely fail the final Jeopardy question and still win. So to answer the question, "Why did the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring cause a riot? (Name three examples)" we chose to answer:
The Rite of Spring caused riots because of the presence of:
1. Gypsies
2. Dragons (which usually don't appear in ballets)
3. Will Farrel

The gypsies were my idea.

Before I go to sleep, let's talk about my favorite person in music history. Mozart had a sister, who was a child prodigy as well and toured with Mozart until she grew up and was plopped in a kitchen and expected to do housework the rest of her life. The upside of this story is that her name is hilarious, I about died laughing when I heard it the first time.

Her name was Nannerl. Nannerl Mozart.

Is that not cruel? If that's not bad enough, I just found out her name was actually Maria Anna and people just called her Nannerl.

I, for one, would not stand for that. If somebody wanted to nickname me Noodly-Sqoudly I would swiftly poison them.

Nannerl. It puts a smile on my face every time. I may have to name any future daughters I have after her. Nannerl Blankensop. It kind of sounds like a skin condition. Cute.

Lack of baking and cramming for finals has clearly rattled my brain. I'll be back this weekend with some baked goods! I'll leave you with this picture of dear Nannerl.


Ha. Hahahaha.