Goat

Ran into a guy at the pub who used to fly Airbus320's from ATH to FRA. It was a short conversation, though, and I didn't learn anything I hadn't already grasped from Flight Tracker.

Unfortunately I have to suspend that flight for a bit. I really needed some breathing room in the Athens sequence and there was some thematic business I wanted to work in.

Figuring out the logistics, though, finally took tracking down all the important locations (figuring out where the actual tickets gates to the Acropolis are was a task for memory and a good hour in Google Street View) and painting them on to a screen shot with Gimp.

On the other hand, names have gotten easier for the writer. There are very amusing generators for everything from time-culture appropriate character names to names of classes at Hogwarts. I've never found anything I could use as generated but they can make a good start.

Baby name pickers and "what does my name mean" sites are plentiful these days. Sometimes their research is a little shoddy; I was at one that claimed "Penelope" was a three-syllable name and had no interesting stories attached. Homer doesn't count?

But if this site is right, the French girl that I cast as a walk-on to handle a bit of business on the Acropolis and proceeded to talk her way into an entire chapter for herself and her friend, suffered the same fate as my sister's kid; "Oh, this is a wonderful unique name that no-one else is using!" Eight years later, the teacher reading roll; "Justin? Justin? Justin? Justin..." (My sister's kid is a girl...well, a teen and going to school in New York right now, but you get the idea).

For my last bit of research for this added chapter I'm going into that JSTOR membership I pay for (and the Academic.edu membership I don't) and find what I can on the active archaeological excavations at the Athenian Agora.

And, yes, in this revised scheme my protagonist actually gets to Plaka to do some shopping. She'll have just about enough time to find a new scarf...then it is off to the Hesse, and possibly to scale a Rhein castle (if I can figure out a reason for her to do so).

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Also abandoned my "Viking" sketch when I realized the title theme to Game of Thrones is plausible on the Shetland Gue (and associated; anglo-saxon lyre, penny whistle, bodhran.) It is a nasty stretch finger, though, and I also discovered that playing with a drone is really, really sensitive to exact intonation. If I hit the notes just precisely right they sing. Even the ones that aren't in a strong harmonic relationship.

But then, that's unfretted instruments for you. The piano forced upon us an era of equal temperament; it is a system of necessary compromises because you can't, mathematically, achieve all the possible intervals cleanly. So the fifth and the third are in tune, the second and fourth are just slightly off pitch and don't sound good. This is why Western music is dominated by the fifth and the major (and minor) triad. But a fretless or equally flexible wind instrument can change; you can play A at 440 at one moment and then, when supporting a different harmonic relationship, shade it to 439.75

Sorry, I bollixed that all up. The standard tuning for electronic instruments is Equal Temperament, which simply divides each octave into twelve identical intervals. The advantage to this is that if you tuned so, say, Cmaj was in tune with itself, then switched to another key (which happens frequently within many compositions), many of the chords would be even more off. Basically, the compromise is that no key sounds WORSE than any other.

String quartets, a capella singing, and so forth can Just temper to the actual key they are in at the moment. So the remarks above.

And, yes, what drives the "ring" in intervalic relationships is the underlying harmonic series. Any simple resonator (a string or bar considered by itself) has implicit in its sound the entire harmonic series stretching up from the fundamental (c.f. Fourier transforms). In reality, the first few are the strong ones; that's octave, fifth, seventh, etc. (Twice the frequency of the fundamental, 3x, 4x...)

Still doesn't change the original problem. At what would be the scroll of the Gue, I have to be accurate to within a quarter of the size of my pinkie. Towards the bridge, it gets...worse.