Thanksgiving Saturday

At McMurdo, we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday on the Saturday and Sunday closest to the the third Thursday of November.  Normally, we get only Sundays off but for the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's holidays, we get a second day off.


Workmates getting snazzy for the holiday weekend



That's how we roll in Southern Hemisphere Information Technology

For Thanksgiving, we have a fancy, dress-up meal with assigned seatings at 3:00, 5:00 and 7:00 PM.  For the past three years, the band Condition Fun has played our Thanksgiving gig later that evening.  Condition Fun is a band that started in 2005 by Sandwich and Bill.  Sandwich isn't her real name, but it might as well be...no one knows her real name anymore.  Sandwich and Bill wrote catchy tunes on guitar and tuba (yep, we even have a tuba at McMurdo) about the unusual vehicles here in town - the pickles (Case M4K forklifts, which are painted pickle green), Ivan the Terrabus (a big tire Foremost bus), mattracks (Ford trucks with triangular tracked wheels, and Pisten Bullys (tracked snow "pods" often used for grooming ski-trails at resorts).  They had friends join them on different tunes and played open mic evenings at the Coffee House.

Several years ago, Condition Fun decided to re-group and add drums, keyboard and bass.  I was asked to play drums and Ralph joined on keys.  The four of us have been playing together for the past three years.  The bass has been played by a rotating group of scientists and stand-ins.  The heavier sound leant itself well to doing more rock tunes and we added some cover songs with revised lyrics, like C-17 (our military airplanes) instead of "Sweet Caroline"  ("C-17, you're a really big airplane.  So big! So big! So big!") and 155 is Blue (referring to building 155, which they painted Ikea blue) to the tune of  "Nothing Compares to You". 




Susan rockin' the bass

The idea is to make people smile and poke fun at some of the ridiculous things that happen around here.  I guess it is sort of a Weird Al Yankovic concept.  It goes over well on Thanksgiving night because the crowd enjoys mellow entertainment after the big tryptophan fest.

Our friend, Kish, opened the show with his unique songs and thought-experiments and then Don McGlashan performed.  You could say that Don is a New Zealand legend.  He has been a big part of the Kiwi music scene since the early 90's and his work as the lead singer of The Mutton Birds yielded platinum selling albums (at least in New Zealand).  Don was invited to Antarctica by Antarctica New Zealand on an Artist and Writer grant and he ended up OPENING FOR US at our gig!  Only in Antarctica do a bunch of amateur hacks get a platinum-selling national icon as an opening act!

Kish opening the show

 

Don McGlashan




Rockin' the Chalet Deck

Condition Fun is a band that has been around for many years and is the brainchild of Sandwich and Bill.  They excel at writing fun and catchy tunes about the vehicles of McMurdo.  Last season, they asked me to join them on drums to fill out their sound.  Now we're up to five members with a sixth contributing clarinet and cigar-box guitar onarious numbers.

Last Saturday, Condition Fun was asked to participate in a live video tele-conference with the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California by the Pricipal Investigator for one of the marine science projects, Gretchen Hoffman.  Gretchen did 2 live interviews from the deck of the Chalet (Sation and NSF management offices), which, by the way, has the best views of any place on Station.  The first interview was with a group of six graders and the second interview occured at night in California during the aquarium's Halloween cocktail party and shindig.

Gretchen thought it would be fun to have us "play out" her interview with a popular tune, C-17.  It was a great treat for us and I think it came out quite well.

The video is on Youtube.  Check it out here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joghsyhnsjc