Pangrams

Two years ago I wrote about mechanical keyboards which I use with my PC. But the OG mechanical keyboard is a typewriter, like my Japanese-made Royal 202 (previously featured here).

The typewritten sheet has four pangrams – sentences which use every letter of the alphabet at least once. A perfect pangram has no repeated letters, so it contains every letter of the alphabet once and only once.

Wikipedia has several examples of English pangrams, as well as pangrams in other languages. Here are my four favourite pangrams and why I like them, in decreasing order of "perfectness":

Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.
26 letters

My favourite perfect pangram. Wikipedia explains it thus:

cwm is a loan word from Welsh meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed, and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. Taken together, it means "Symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person".

Although it uses obscure words and contrived grammar, I prefer it over other perfect pangrams which rely on abbreviations, contractions or proper nouns. And of course, it has the word cwm. One time I wrote a post about a cirque lake (as I called it), and Tommy commented, "I couldn't imagine posting a pic not just of a cwm, but of a cwm in Wales, and not using the word cwm in the accompanying text."

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
29 letters

This is the shortest pangram I know of which, to me, still sounds sort of natural – like it could be worked into, say, a fantasy novel, without seeming obviously forced or out-of-place. And it scores high on eldritch quality (if that were a criterion), nicely captured by u/joabaldwin in this digital drawing.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
32 letters

Perhaps the most natural-sounding pangram on the Wikipedia list. At first glance it can even pass for a sentence that might occur in the wild, although if you stop to think about it, "five dozen" is an odd phrase. Unless the jugs come in packs of twelve, which is possible.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
35 letters

Longer than the other examples, but it's the first pangram I ever learned. It's popular for a reason – rolls nicely off the tongue, and scores high on whimsy.

Lakshmi Amidst Pindou

My Chinese friend Muzi recently became interested in Hinduism. She says her favourite goddess is Lakshmi because she is "nonchalant" (Gen Z turns of phrase can be so amusing).

I gave Muzi a little terracotta figure of Lakshmi, and she put it on her dresser alongside various pindou characters. Pindou (拼豆) or Perler-bead craft is apparently trending among young people in China.

Coincidentally, while I was procrastinating over this post, my friend Beverley also posted an arrangement of a female figurine amidst (mostly) Chinese objects. I thought it pairs well with Lakshmi Amidst Pindou, so I asked Bev's permission to share it. A cute detail: the song playing on the iPod is Blink-182's All the Small Things.

Weight Update

Earlier this year I wrote that my weight, for the first time in my life, had crept north of 60 kg, and that I was trying to get it back down. I then neglected to post any updates, no doubt keeping my readers on tenterhooks.

Well, long story short, I got it down to the 59 kg range, then went on a long holiday to Malaysia where I ate out a lot (they have amazing food), and ended up at over 61 kg.

Now it's back under 60 kg, and I plan to keep it that way.

It seems that for me, the most reliable way to reduce weight is to cut down on rice. Just a few days of eating bread, chicken soup and boiled veg for lunch, instead of my usual generous portion of rice, helped me lose around 2 kg. Unfortunately, humans just need rice – or at least, I do.

But that's if I'm trying to lose weight. If I'm just trying to maintain my current weight, it seems I can keep eating rice, as long as I do some light exercise – which I should be doing anyway.

I like sports, but I've never been one for going to a gym or working out for the sake of it. Lately, to help me stick to a light daily exercise routine, habit stacking has been a very useful strategy.

My electric toothbrush has a two-minute cycle with short pauses after every 30 seconds, which is super helpful as an exercise timer. While brushing, I do squats for the first minute, and calf raises for the next minute. This way I'm doing some lower-body exercise at least twice a day.

I shower twice a day, and before each shower, I try to do ten pushups. While boiling water for my coffee, I do some toe-touches. While watching movies or YouTube videos on my computer, I do a few minutes of skipping or light jogging on the spot. And before going to sleep, I do some reclining hip stretches, though I haven't settled on a specific routine yet.

A pretty light regimen, all things considered – but it's better than nothing!

Discovering Music Through Instagram Reels

Instagram reels have proved to be an interesting and unexpected channel for discovering new music.

Last year I did a dance shoot with my friend Jieying. She edited together some of the footage and shared it, set to Blueprint Supreme (大展鸿图) by Chinese rapper Skai Isyourgod.

If you're on Instagram, you can see the dance video here. The music video for Blueprint Supreme is pretty cool too. The song was going viral in China right around this time, but Jieying's reel was my introduction to it.

Another, much older Chinese song – Ye Lai Xiang by Yoshiko Yamaguchi – was also an Instagram discovery, but I can no longer find the reel in question.

My next example is not a discovery but a rediscovery. Like most Bengali kids, I grew up listening to Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, but it's only after watching a reel about Kolkata at night that I truly came to love Olir Kotha Shune (অলির কথা শুনে) – a heartbreakingly lovely evocation of lovers drifting apart. "The bokul flower laughs to hear the bumblebee's song / How come you no longer laugh at the things I say?"

In my last few examples, the songs in question were just background music. But there are some Instagram posts which specifically recommend certain music, and one such post – by a record store in Copenhagen, of all places – is how I discovered Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh. This Guardian interview from 2011, four years before Singh's death, is a fun read.

Rolleiflex Mistake in Nouvelle Vague (2025)

Nouvelle Vague (2025), directed by Richard Linklater, is a movie about a movie, reenacting the making of Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 film, Breathless (French: À bout de souffle, literally: 'out of breath').

Frank Cicurel plays Raymond Cauchetier, who was set photographer for Breathless and many other French New Wave films. You can see some of Cauchetier's original photos here, shot with a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex (TLR) camera.

As this Guardian interview relates:

Later when Henri Cartier-Bresson suggested he work for Magnum, [Cauchetier] refused to buy the required Leica, sticking with his trusty Rollieflex [sic] that had so often survived being dropped in the Mekong river, thus forfeiting his chance to work for the agency.

Linklater's movie is obsessively attentive to period detail, and of course, Cauchetier is shown using a Rolleiflex (the still below – and all others in this post – are from Nouvelle Vague).

We then see the scene he is photographing:

...and also the image through the Rolleiflex's waist-level finder:

But wait! A TLR finder is laterally inverted, and this image is not. Aubry Dullin, playing lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, is on the left – both in the actual scene and in the finder.

Funnily enough, a subsequent scene doesn't have this error.

Here, Belmondo, in the white shirt, is on the right in the scene:

...and on the left in the finder, as it should be.

I'm guessing the TLR finder image was composited in post, but I have no explanation for why it would be correctly oriented in one scene but not in the other. Maybe they left it in just so that pedants like me could discover it and feel smug.

Improvising from Memory

Years ago, Sujaan (my younger brother) and I directed a school play – a dramatization of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

Towards the end of the play, we had a dance sequence in the court of the arch-villain, Khattam-Shud. The scene was meant to be dark, scary and chaotic, and for background music, we chose Hans Zimmer's Why So Serious? (Joker's Theme) from The Dark Knight OST.

At the same time, we wanted an Indian or pan-Asian (as opposed to purely western) sound, so Sujaan had the idea of layering classical vocals and tabla over the Zimmer composition.

Among our high-school cast, we had a girl named Titas who was a very talented classically-trained singer. We played the Zimmer track for her and asked her to come up with a taan (a Hindustani classical music term for vocal improvisation of rapid melodic passages).

Usually for such a recording, the singer would be wearing headphones and listening to the backing track while improvising into a mic. But that day, it turned out that we had some problem with our barebones audio equipment – we could either play music or record it, but not both at once.

Sujaan and I assumed it was a no-go; we would just have to try another day with working equipment. But Titas, in her unassuming way, said "Let me try, maybe I can sing it without playback."

"Uh, okay. Do you want to listen to the track again?"

"I think I got it."

Sujaan and I were still skeptical. If she improvised with headphone playback as planned, we were pretty sure she would do a good job. But without it, maybe her key or tempo would be off. Or maybe her taan just wouldn't fit with the track.

Still, we figured there was no harm in letting her try.

Titas recorded two takes, improvising to music she could hear only in her memory. Both takes were spot on.

I still remember going home and importing the tracks in our mixing software, and the moment we realised we had a perfect fit.

Shown below are the waveforms for the isolated vocals track, takes 1 and 2. You can see how well they line up – just for take 2, she cut it slightly shorter.

Here are takes 1 and 2 of the vocals:

And here's the final track, slightly shortened for this blogpost – an excerpt from the Zimmer composition, with tabla and vocals (take 1) layered on top.

Music System Update: Visualizers

Earlier this month in my music system "upgrades" post, I talked about equalizers and visualizers. Equalizers then got a separate follow-up post, so it's only fair that visualizers get one too.

I started out, as I said in my first post, with a Rainmeter skin called Monstercat Visualizer. It looks cool, especially with the album art, but since it plays on my desktop, it gets covered up by any active windows. What good is a visualizer if I hardly ever see it?

I often listen to music while doing other things on my computer, so I thought it would be nice to have a visualizer which is always visible, perhaps floating on top of other windows. After a good deal of searching and trying out different programs, I've landed on BeatHUD.

BeatHUD has a variety of visualizations – my favourite is pixel, shown below – with customizable colours and backgrounds. In HUD mode, it does exactly what I want – float wherever I want to place it, while also letting me adjust its size or minimize it if it's in the way. In the pic below, BeatHUD at bottom right is responding to Spotify, while I edit photos in Affinity.

I really like BeatHUD. It's surprisingly well-designed and full-featured for a free app – or by any standards, really.

I use Spotify for streaming audio, but for music that lives on my hard drive, I like to use Winamp. Mainly for nostalgic reasons: Winamp – and Winamp skins – were a big part of my teenage years. So while I was at it, I also downloaded Classic Spectrum Analyzer for Winamp:

Having sorted out the visualizer situation on my computer, I wanted something similar for our living-room system – a custom-built amplifier by Pradip Deb (which supports Bluetooth as well as wired inputs for turntables and such) plus two passive speakers.

Maybe someday I'll get a streamer with a display, like the WiiM Ultra, but until then, I'm just using my phone screen as it streams to the amp via Bluetooth:

On my phone, I use Spectrum Analyzer & Visualizer, which can display various customizable visualizations as well as Spotify album art (in the pic, I'm playing ฟื้น / Athithan by Yellow Fang).

This is a free app, but I like it so much that I'm going to buy it just to support the developer.

If you let the app access your phone mic, it can also respond to external audio, e.g. from a record-player. But when playing records, I like to simply display the record sleeve itself – the ultimate "Now playing" visualization.

Incidentally, I added a new track to my Speaker Test playlist which I mentioned in an earlier post. I thought I should have a track which uses obvious stereo panning, so the playlist now includes Pink Floyd's Money. The cash-register sounds in the intro pan between left and right before transitioning into the bass groove which is in the middle.

Snake in the Box

We have a toy – no one seems to remember how we acquired it – which is a wooden box with a lid. When you slide it open, a snake pops out.

I don't have a pic of how it originally looked, but here are a couple of product photos from Amazon:

I recently painted our box. It now has a coiled snake on one side:

...and a mini snakes-and-ladders board on the other:

I used my recently-acquired set of acrylic markers which, despite being super cheap, are a delight to paint with.

I also painted another box and sent it to Tommy. It's a good gift for him because he's working on the snake-in-the-box problem in higher dimensions. His box has a coiled snake like mine, plus another snake traversing the edges of the box in a manner that respects the constraints of the problem.

When I went to the post office to mail it, they asked me what the box contains. I said it's a wooden toy, but in their customs form, they only had an "electronic toy" category – no "wooden toy" or even just "toy". A sign of the times! In the end, they filed it under "handicrafts".

Speaking of snakes, the other day at the Dhakuria Lakes, we saw an Oriental rat snake's unsuccessful attempt to hunt a rat. The snake climbed halfway up a tree and crept into a hollow in which the rat was hiding. But the rat jumped out just in time and scurried away, seemingly unharmed.