24 December 2008 – 8:46 pm
Answer me this: after receiving gifts on Christmas Day, what is it that children proverbially do with them within 24 hours? Do they (a) break them or (b) give them away?
Fairly straightforward, I think you’ll agree. Now let me put to you a second and superficially unrelated question. When a man loves a woman, as [...]
20 November 2008 – 9:42 pm
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
Autocomplete blog meme. Simple procedure: type each letter of the alphabet in the address bar (one at a time, obviously) and see which blog comes up first. The result should be a map of your personal blogosphere, or at least those bits of it you’ve visited recently.
I saw this on a blog somewhere years ago [...]
10 February 2008 – 11:04 pm
I think the real problem was that I’d finished the gin a couple of nights before. Obviously gin wouldn’t be a good alternative to vodka, but if it had been there on the shelf it would have reminded me that there were alternatives to vodka, and then I might have thought of using brandy. Which [...]
7 October 2007 – 10:53 pm
Yes, this is a very fine song (and this is a very fine version of it, which I hadn’t seen in 25 years).
You see Robin,
I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels.
I’ve been searching everywhere, I can’t find them anywhere – where have you hidden them?
How we laughed.
The strange thing about “There there, my dear” [...]
6 September 2007 – 3:27 pm
I don’t know Tilda Swinton. At all.
There are, of course, many people I don’t know; the list could be extended more or less indefinitely, potentially forming the basis for a rather unchallenging game (“Yeah? Well, I don’t know Charles Kennedy, Jason Orange or Hufty from the Word…”) The point about Tilda Swinton in particular is [...]
2 September 2007 – 6:19 pm
I happened to watch Matt Weddle’s acoustic cover of “Hey ya” today, courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube. The video’s great, if you like watching bearded men playing acoustic guitars. After watching it I spent a happy five minutes reacquainting myself with the video for the original song, which is still a very fine [...]
I’ve been away for a week & come back to a letter from my MP, Tony Lloyd. Who writes:
Whilst I do not think there should be a blanket policy for all Iraqis working for the UK Government, we need to give proper consideration to the many Iraqis whose lives are at risk. It is important [...]
Welcome back* to Imprecise Song Lyrics Club.
This evening our featured lyricist is Mr Paul Weller, one-time tunesmith with popular beat combo the Jams. In his song “Porcelain gods”, Mr Weller writes:
Too much will kill you,
Too little ain’t enough
On first reading both propositions advanced here seem intuitively valid, but – I put it to you – [...]
I used to buy a lot of singles as a way of checking out new bands, & hyped new bands in particular (occasionally I still do). Trial by single is quick but brutal; once they’re in it, bands tend not to make it out of the “tried it, didn’t like it” box. They have, after [...]
4% of 568 is 22.72. Hold on to that thought.
A ‘unit’ of alcohol is actually 10 ml; if you’re a man, your recommended weekly dosage amounts to a bit less than a pint of gin, or rather more than half a pint of cask strength whisky, or rather less than half a pint of [...]
Time for a bit of pure self-indulgence; I’m doing the 20-first-line thing again. Only with 25 (thanks Rob), and with a whole bunch of songs either missed out or included for completely arbitrary reasons. (So I skipped some albums which appeared in the earlier attempts, but not all of them.) The difference from the previous [...]
As the upload of Robert Wyatt’s A short break completes, I have now ripped my entire CD collection; rather smaller than my vinyl collection, but it still amounts to 2690 songs (or seven days and 20 hours, as iTunes helpfully informs me). So let’s do this properly. Hit it! (And for a bonus point, name [...]
[Updated 19th May - all is revealed.]
Jim: I decide to go hunting for a musical blog meme.
Cheers, Jim – don’t mind if I do.
Step 1: Put your media-player on random play.
Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 20 songs that play.
Step 3: Let everyone guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: [...]
29 January 2006 – 11:22 pm
Or: what gets left out of those ‘meme’ things.
7 places I’ve loved
1. Pendine: the cliffs, the endless horizon, the beach in the off season
2. Scilly, especially St Agnes (and the view of St Agnes from St Mary’s, at sunset)
3. Florence
4. Paris
5. Edinburgh
6. Brighton (and Hove, actually)
7. London, especially Somers Town
[The only] 6 membership organisations I’ve [...]
9 January 2006 – 10:32 am
“Yes, I know, I know. 2005’s over already, we’re more than halfway through the decade… you’re not the only one who’s embarrassed, how do you think I feel? Yes, I know it was supposed to be all m-computing and always-on GPS and ubiquitous wifi jetpacks by now, but it’s been difficult, I mean, look at [...]
29 December 2005 – 9:07 pm
I quite liked the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although I have to admit to a certain bias in favour of any film featuring Tilda Swinton – particularly Tilda Swinton riding in a chariot, wearing chain mail and a lion’s mane (spoiler, sorry), brandishing two large swords and glaring, always glaring
Sorry, I seem to [...]
In a piece which appears in The Salmon of Doubt (I don’t know whether it was published in the author’s lifetime), Douglas Adams writes:
There’s always a moment when you fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years [...]
I don’t think the word ‘blog’ is really a contraction of ‘web log’. I think the ‘b’ stands for ‘back’.
The other day I worked out I had four blog posts planned: one on religion and hatred (half-written); one on attitudes to technology (complementing some of Chris’s recent posts); one on ideas of ‘old’ and ‘new’ [...]
