Tuesday Twothings

[magistrate]

1. Here is an instrument I've never encountered before: the cas cas.

Watch on YouTube

Having seen a clip of this, I felt as though there were one or more instruments being played offscreen. Nope; there are beans or pellets inside the balls which produce the faster rhythms, and hitting the balls together produces the loud clacks.

Watch on YouTube

Clearly the instrument for people who possess the rhythmic chops of a polyrhythm drummer and the manual dexterity of a nunchaku master.


2. Here is a map of Finland's bear population, rendered in adorable cartoon bears. (direct image link)

I want to invite everyone to join me in appreciating that the last color on the legend represents 6.1 - ∞ bears per thousand square kilometers.

I choose to take this as evidence that there are portions of eastern Finland with infinite bears.

Comments

[sholio]

This map became a lot less alarming when I remembered that Europe uses a comma as a decimal point and therefore your best-case scenario is not the deeply worrying 2000 bears per 1000 sq km.

[magistrate]

A bear every half-kilometer. Seems reasonable to me.

Anyway, Finland seems to have its bear game down cold. Granted, 100% of my perception on this matter is informed by this comic, which offers as its supporting evidence this Canadian video and this Finnish one.

[squeemu]

Holy crap that instrument is so cool, I could listen to it for hours.

Vaguely random aside - every so often I wish I could get a track of some of the marching step drum line beats our drum line did in marching band (I forget what they were actually called), because it just had such a good upbeat rhythm to it. And these videos remind me a little of that, somehow.

[magistrate]

The entire drum corner of the percussion instrument family is just so amazing. Some day, when the world opens up again, I'd love to find a way to see live Taiko drumming, frex. Or see if there are any polyrhythm artists working locally. Surely there must be.

Also – drum circles. I miss drum circles.

I feel like if you search "drum line" in YouTube there has to be something good. If you have the time and fortitude to go trawling through YouTube.