Playing Scrabble with Augustus John

Radio Spiritworld - The Other Side

Okay, I haven't posted for a while, but I'm breaking in gently.

Now who's bleating on?

Here we go on another marathon post - well it should be a snickers post I suppose, but I like my anachronistic ways, like I like my powdered egg and 78s. No? Okay, well it'll be short-ish and sweet I suppose.

Anyway, first off the mark is a small plug for John's new venture. He's looking for budding filmmakers, anyone with access to something that will record video, or just people looking to do something different. He has some lofty ambitions and a huge supply of enthusiasm, so please click on the link to read about it some more. You never know, you might like it.

Secondly, I'm just about to embark on the annual Beer Fest here in Bury St Edmunds. I think it's two of years since I last went, but it promises to be a good one - particularly as we'll have a couple of appropriate adults along to make sure we get up to no mischief. It's one of those CAMRA things where everything is served in halves. You can still lose count of halves though.

Finally, I'm posting a video of Joe Bonamassa from last week's Later. He's seriously good with a guitar in his hands - seriously good.

Right, I'm off to get ready. It's beer o' clock.

It's grim up North

I finally got around to finishing watching Channel 4's Red Riding. I wasn't able to watch it at the time, because of various geographical issues and the wonder that is the Tacolneston transmitter. Both of which prevent me from watching C4 on my own little goggle box. Anyway, it comes in three episodes of about an hour and a half each and is still downloadable/streamable from the 4OD website, if you so wish.

To cut a long story short, it's a story about police brutality and corruption in West Yorkshire in the 70s and 80s. The backdrop of the film centres around a series of murders and even features the real life case of the Yorkshire Ripper. If your idea of a good night in is a couple of episodes of Friends or some movie with Eddie Murphy in a fat-suit (take your pick of a dozen), it might not be for you. If you have a strong stomach for bleak, harrowing, dark and despairing drama, then it may just be right up your street. I personally found the first episode really hard going. I was left feeling despondent, full of pessimism and hopelessness. It was really, really grim. To be honest, I wasn't sure whether to carry on episode 2, but I remember a radio interview with one of the stars who said "Stick with it, it gets better"; that I did.In some ways he was right. Mind you, I'm not sure if that is down to a real change of direction in the films, or just that I been plunged into the emotional depths of hell in the first one and couldn't be dropped any further.

The plot is complicated and labyrinthine and only really starts to make sense once you start to watch episode 2, but it does reward your hard work in watching it. The acting is excellent, but the real star of the piece is the cinematography. Visually, it depicts a version of West Yorkshire (Wakefield and Morley particularly) that sum up life in the 70s, but probably won't find any friends in the Yorkshire Tourist Board. I've had the fortune to spend some time in West Yorkshire in the past and don't ever remember it being all that grim. That said, that was in the 90s and this isn't.

If you do watch the first (and let's face it there are worse things to do with your time), do stick with it. It is quite rewarding in the end.

Kepler

This is a cracking image from NASA's APOD by Ben Cooper of the recent launch of the Kepler telescope. Kepler will be looking for changes in the brightness of more than a million stars every five hours, searching for "winks" in light that happen when a planet passes in front of its star.

Planet spotting outside the solar system is still in its infancy with only three hundred odd Jupiter sized gas giants on record. What Kepler will do is look for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around stars where liquid water may exist.

Exciting times indeed.

I throw the fish away, and it comes back to me!

Am I the only one that sits confused when reading through Facebook updates? Last year I joined up really out of curiosity, but it wasn't long before my mailbox was deluged with invitations to take quizzes, play games, answer questions about myself, or to find out about my inner vegetable. I get a lot of email as it is - I mean a LOT and that's after the spam filters have sieved out the penile enlargement ads, 419 scams and invitations to buy as many hard core tranquilisers as I could possibly eat.

Since Facebook started, third party applications have popped up everywhere, whether it's so that you can tell people what you've read, films you've seen, or to play games and spread memes. Once you sign up for one, invites are spread and you get updates, referrals etc etc. Rather innocently, I got involved and before you know it, your home page looks like the dog has thrown up over it and you're getting more and more mail. Eventually of course, I learned my lesson. It took me a while, but I worked out how to turn off applications and to set it so I didn't get emails for an invites to every single application that someone had clicked the box that sends it to all their friends; which to be absolutely honest, cheered me up no end.

Back to my original point (you mean there was a point?), when I read through the status updates section and I see the groups people have joined, it has started to make me wince. On the whole, people don't take social networking sites that seriously (though my other half has checked up on her employees more than once - you've been warned folks!) and people create groups like a campaign to bring back Spangles,to advertise their love for chocolate covered bacon or one of my own favourites to Bring Back Hartley Hare. This is all just whimsy (except for the Hartley Hare one - which is deadly serious of course), but there is an element out there that seem to be using it to advertise their fascist leanings. whether it's a campaign to expel non-whites from the UK, string up sex offenders, gaybashing or promoting aryan purity. I suppose in this age of internet anonymity and emotional freedom, people think it's ok to say what they like. Yeah, right?!?

Also, just of late I've been "friended" by a bunch of old school "chums". This in some ways is good. Since I moved out of the area, I've had no opportunity to catch up with anyone. It's probably why I joined Facebook in the first place to be honest. Some I remember fondly (they'll know who they are), others I wasn't at all fond of (again I'm sure they'll know who they are), whilst the rest were those whose names rang a vague bell, but as far as knowledge about them and any memories I had, maybe they rested amongst a group of neurons that expired when I drank too much port one night. Sorry, I forgot you. It's nice you remember me, I suppose. Then again, maybe they don't, maybe they just got referred on etc etc. Maybe I'm just one of a thousand Facebook email updates they got one morning. If they get as far as clicking the note on my page linking them to this post, I suspect they will "unfriend" me (oh the shame!). Since there is only one of them that I kept in any real contact with after 1986, I guess it won't be a terrible loss. Then again, Facebook seems to be about how many friends you have, as though it is a measure of you quality and value as a human being. Maybe they'll keep me for now.

There are of course a few people (who I haven't found on Facebook) who I'd like to know about. There's one I have some vague information about, while another good friend I had at school died tragically, nearly two years ago. I guess most of them, unlike me, are far too sensible or have rich enough lives that they have no need of Facebook. Who knows?

Finally, as a handful of you may or may not know, I've got into Twitter. It's a lot easier than standard blogging and has the advantage of not getting invitations and emails. Of course, if you're not on Twitter already, please join and add me to your "followed" list. That way I'll have some idea of the measure of my quality and value as a human being - because being popular is everything to me. There have some peculiar things happen. I subscribed to a political blogger and all of a sudden I'm being followed by a couple of other political bloggers. I tweeted (oh yes that's technospeak folks) Kate a few days back and I seem to remember mentioning the Muppet Show. I'm now being followed by Fozzie Bear. I don't know if it's the real Fozzie Bear, or whether he uses TweetDeck or not. I daren't mention them again in my twitterings as I may end up being followed by Lew Zealand, which would just be surreal. It's bad enough that I'm being followed by a Transformer as it is - and I don't even know anything about Transformers. I certainly didn't mention them on Twitter.

Anyway, it's all keeping me amused for now - well when I'm not doing my usual stuff anyway. I'll try to resist the temptation to find out which Cliff Richard song or Bond villain I am and try not to cause any more trouble for now.

Don't Forget to Catch Me Francisco Scaramanga.

The day the music died....

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the crash that killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Richie Valens and piot Roger Petersen. I mention this, because I pretty much had this event drummed into me in childhood, because my father was mad about Buddy Holly. I mean MAD about Buddy Holly. When Paul McCartney sold his rights to the Beatles back catalogue so he could own the rights to Buddy Holly's, the world gave a confused shake of the head. Not my dad though, who nodded approvingly - one of the few people around, who "got" what Mad Macca was doing.

If you go through my dad's collection of records, you will find numerous singles and EPs (extended players for anyone under thirty out there) by Buddy Holly and it does hit you how productive the guy was and how much of an effect he had on the music scene in the fifties and sixties, all the way to the present day. For someone who died at the age of 22 to do what he achieved in such a short space of time was nothing short of incredible. Dad used to say that he thought Holly would be bigger than Elvis and when you look at this, it's hard to argue. Dad was properly gutted about the plane crash, even many, many years later, about what he felt the world has lost. Fifty years on, it's hard to argue, as the popularity of this bespectacled singer who was only active in the industry for sixteen months, seems to increase year on year.

St Pauls

I caught sight of this today as part of a collection of photos by Jason Hawkes. This picture of St Paul's Cathedral is in a set of aerial pictures of London by night. How he did them, I have no idea. They are stunning though.

Up, up and away...

This is a neat little part of the NASA site, where each day they post a different picture. This one is a picture through a telescope of a science balloon over Antarctica. The balloon is over 70m in diameter and it is hoped that it will carry instrumentation to carry out experiments in the upper atmosphere.

IT heartbreak

I sent an email today and somehow managed to misspell the address. Dutifully, my mail server sent a failure notice which arrived in my inbox.

"This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out."

Why is it feel I've been "dumped" by Thunderbird? I have a strong urge to eat chocolate, drink too much (well much more than normal) and listen to The Smiths. Ah well, maybe I'll feel better tomorrow.

I know people tell me I'll get over it, but at the moment everything seems so black and depressing. A couple of weeks writing poetry should help me move on. I might not forget, but I'll learn to live with it :)

The only rule of Tennis Club....

Well, well, well, tempers boiled over during the Australian Open third round match between Novak Djokovic and Amer Dilic. Bosnian and Serbian fans clashed in scenes usually reserved for international football matches and police were forced to make a number of arrests.

What gets me, is that I find it hard enough to stay awake if tennis is on the TV - let alone get heated enough to start fisticuffs. What on Earth is so exciting about two blokes knocking a ball back and forth that drives people to behave like this? Next thing you know, you'll have flares being set off at the snooker, or shots being fired at the bowls. Some people eh?