dead brains don't dance

[baaa…] booklist

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:56:31 GMT

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see." I've added a strikeout option, because I wanted one.

Look at the list and bold those you have read.
Italicise those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.
Strikeout the books you wish you hadn't read.
Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [¹]
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
~~Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis~~
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
~~The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis~~
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding [²]
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [¹]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[¹] read too long ago to be sure, but probable

[²] read too long ago to be sure, but ~~probable~~

Watching the abbey dance

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:47:25 GMT

On this grey and drizzly summer solstice, here's a winter solstice gift of darkness and light for you all from The Book of the Night:

The finger of the moon touched the face of the rose window and suddenly, as if in answer, a thin film of flesh covered the bones of the abbey and the bones of the abbey became rounded and soft, and the towers became … what is it … knees. And the crack of doors, a human, fleshy ass, and the rose window—the great seat of birth—burst open with the light of birth as a living eye. A cathedral of flesh, the abbey became, her belly the roof of it all. I raced from the barn but stopped at the Tree of Life and hid, somehow, in its shadow. (Aah, Nicholas, you fool.) There I saw her navel, the nave, her arms outstretched into the apse, and her head as altar. Her woman part opened in the red-gold of light. I saw her and knew that I looked upon a woman with her knees in the air, giving birth to living light. What had been the soft gold reflection on the glass, now became her own fire. I watched. Stars rested on her fingers and glinted on her kneecaps.

And then she stood and shook stiffness from her limbs and the transparency of flesh became solid and she walked along the Street of the Dead down toward the sea, past me, knelt, dropped her long dark hair into the pool of sea, and washed herself. And then she stood and spun over the fields, her robes of moonlight twisting about her, twisting until she became a triangle of light, five parts four, four parts three, shimmering, and the moisture from her hair dripped as dew on the fields. She lay down again where the abbey had been, lifted her knees to the sky, stretched out her arms across the fields, opened herself, her woman part, and was stone again. Doors, towers, window, stone. The moon rose above her knees as if it had been born from them. I saw the miracle, that night, only once, but I knew then that the true light came from the darkness and it was to the darkness I must go. I could not hide.

Want WANT

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:52:43 GMT

I'm not normally seduced by SHINY! but beautifully crafted hardwood bike frames are beyond my terminal squee! threshold. Renovo wooden bicycles have to be the most beautiful things I have seen in $LONG_TIME and (leaving aside trivia like not being able to afford one) I want one that meets the principles in the article on economic relocalisation from On the Commons that I found them in; one made to their pattern in the UK from English oak. The pony would be nice too, but I haven't anywhere to stable it.

More photos from BikePortland, who have a review online.

[baaa] the lexicon of love

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:57:13 GMT

[ via lpetrazickis ]

The 5 Love Languages quiz:

Score	Love Language
11	Quality Time
9	Physical Touch
4	Words of Affirmation
4	Acts of Service
2	Receiving of Gifts

How to interpret your Profile Score:

Your highest score indicates your primary love language. Your second highest score indicates your secondary love language. If two scores are identical, you are bilingual (you have two primary love languages). If the scores of your primary and your secondary language are close (for example, 10 & 9 respectfully), it indicates both are important to you. Whatever a significant other does to express love in either of these languages will get emotional points with you. The highest possible score for any language is 12.

Gonna wait for the…

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:06:17 GMT

It's RTD, isn't it? My expectations weren't high, and the first five minutes easily lived down to them in their sloppy, anachronistic cheesiness.

Trouble is, what we got from there on in was, by some considerable margin, the best NS4 episode; writing, pacing, acting and direction were pretty much flawless. I felt genuine tension as Sky turned round (even if it was mostly worry that we'd be getting another Photoshop smear job) and the portrayal of human reaction to fear, in all its ugliness, was chillingly convincing. Val Cane's bit of reality editing at the end was a lovely (if that's the right word) gracenote too. Nobody came out unambiguously in there, which was if nothing else honest, and especially so in a programme aimed at children, a space too often filled with oversimplification and easy answers. No Donna, but that's right: having any companion in there other than as a frame would have added a vector that couldn't help but dilute the impact of the programme as a whole.

Oh, and I agree with Alex Wilcock: It was a superb choice for the BBC to show to a group of politicians in a preview. Not that it would do them any good.

Now, if we could only have lost ~~Mary Sue~~Rose flashing up the monitor again, and the trailer for next week's OMG! it's the Conjunction of the Million Spheres and Rose Tyler saves the Multiverse!!!11!…

a first outing

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:06:21 GMT

I took my bike trailer out for its first proper run yesterday, to North Street[¹] and Sainsbury[²]. A smidgeon over 7 miles. My tentative methodology - buy small stuff first and put in backpack that I can wear between shops and take into Sainsbury - worked well; the only (and anticipated) hassle was parking the bike/trailer combo: it's long. A lamp post on North Street did me well, but the bike racks at Sainsbury were too close to the wall really, with only two positions I could have used at all and the front of the bike sticking out slightly anti-socially even in one of those. Manoeuvring backwards takes some getting used to too: the tow bar has very little sideways angular freedom, so it's actually more difficult than backing a trailer on a 4-wheeler.

Coming home, I certainly noticed the extra weight both up and down hill - it would be very easy to run out of brakes if careless in descent, so I'll make sure I don't do that :)

In the afternoon, I set off again (sans trailer) to CostCo[³] in Avonmouth, via the Avon Gorge leg of NCN41. 10.2 miles each way, and I was feeling it when I got to the climb up from Bower Ashton to the Ashton Court car park on the way home. The nicest part, though, was that just as I started climbing the Avonmouth bridge on my return into a brisk and cold head wind, the sky started drizzling on me. And I was too hot in the morning: we get weather more than climate in this country.

[¹] thin and round rye crispbread, 2xconc. apple and blackcurrant juice, breadflour, dishwasher tabs, smoked paprika, pumpkin seeds, G&B almond choccie from the Southville deli; ginger root from the greengrocer

[²] plain and spinach lasagne, 2x24 bogrolls, sliced ham and beef, milk, soured cream, marmalade, binliners, jaffa cakes, plain chocolate Bahlsens

[³] 2 packs of kabanos, 2 packs of bagels, a pack of part-baked demibaguettes, 2 packs of butter, a wheel of brie

Sunday

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:21:07 GMT

Craig Murray reports that Chris Huhne has written to our glorious Home Secretary, asking her to reverse the ban on Sunday's anti-shrub march. I reproduce his letter here:

Dear Home Secretary,

I am writing to urgently request that you review the decision of the Metropolitan Police to ban the anti-Bush march taking place this Sunday 15 June from marching down Whitehall. As you will be aware the Stop the War Coalition have organised dozens of peaceful marches past Downing Street, and I am deeply concerned that the request has been denied.

In this country we have a long tradition of peaceful protest and I would be shocked if British civil liberties were curtailed at the request of a foreign government. I hope that you can also confirm that the decision of the Metropolitan Police was not made at the request of the US authorities.

A static demonstration in Parliament Square is no replacement for a protest march down Whitehall and I urge you to work with the police and the protesters to ensure they are able to make their voices heard outside Downing Street. Just because the votes of these protesters cannot be bought does not mean that their voices should not be heard by those in 10 Downing Street.

Kind Regards,

Chris Huhne
Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary

A good letter, I think you'll agree.

I voted for him as leader, as the lesser evil of the choices granted me by Cowley Street; it's probably my fault he lost: I've never in my life voted for a winning candidate, so I likely hexed his chances by my support.

dead trees

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:30:42 GMT

Well, that seems to have generated fairly violent disagreement across Blogistan :)

For my part, I found the two-parter mostly good with some reservations. Mostly, the ending was just wrong: it felt to me like a OMG-nobody-dies bit tacked on because someone up the foodchain thought River dying was too downbeat for a children's slot. Funny that the Library managed to find the lost data to patch together its rendering of Miss Evangelista for the coda, too ;)

I'm not entirely happy with SM's writing for Donna, either: kicking the door down was good, but there was a bit too much (ie. non-zero) Catherine-Tate-Silly-Voice, Donna would for sure have sussed out at least the principle of River's and the Doctor's past/future relationship, and did she really have to exist in semi-detached heteronormative Family conformity whilst in backup?

I would have liked more expansion of the Library/Moon relationship, and some explanation of the presence of cipher-Father and concomitant absence of any mother in the Library's withdrawal. OK, the girl her avatar was based on died, but I don't recall Lux saying anything about (the girl's) family that would explain that.

Can't help wondering about River/Doctor too: since she clearly knows the Doctor across a wide spectrum of times and incarnations, she presumably hadn't (using her perceived timestream) spent huge parts of her life actually travelling with him. How did/will they work it? Does he just turn up in her life, in an arbitrary order, whenever he fancies a shag, or what? Her character doesn't strike me as one who would accept a fundamentally imbalanced relationship (even with her evident hero-worship), but how else could it be?

[baa] my philosophy, innit

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:06:27 GMT

Via rozk,

What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)

You scored as a Existentialism

Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
--Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.”
--Blaise Pascal

More info at Arocoun's Wikipedia User Page...

Existentialism

90%

Hedonism

70%

Utilitarianism

60%

Justice (Fairness)

50%

Nihilism

45%

Kantianism

35%

Strong Egoism

25%

Apathy

15%

Divine Command

No surprises there; I'd probably choose "Phenomenologist" if I were to choose a label, but I guess that's more metaphysics than philosophy. Hedonistic Existentialist it is then.

ETA, in utter irrelevance, that "Bubo" is a good name for a rat.

Trailing

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:21:00 GMT

The bike trailer that ramtops found and ordered for me on eBay (from this retailer) arrived this afternoon from Germany. A small w00t! at least is in order; I've been wanting such a device for quite some time, and it means that pretty much all of our shopping from now can be done without firing up the car. The thing even has a waterproof cover so, within reason, weather can be disregarded.

It weighs 7½kg, and you hardly know it's there when pulling it (empty at least; the load limit is 40kg :) though it's a bit of a pig getting through bollard chicanes. I took it for a test run along the village cycle path and up Glebe Road, which is enough of a hill to judge how much work the thing is going to be in practice: I dropped a gear (middle 2nd AOT middle 3rd) getting to the junction at the top, but it really isn't nearly a gear's worth of extra effort.

It's really well thought out: it folds flat when it's not in use and is remarkably simple to set up and collapse. You pull it along with an articulated tow bar that mates with bracket that sits neatly inboard of the back wheel quick release, held on with a pin and circlip (and emergency strap). My only minor quibbles (apart, of course, from the beast being utterly insecure: order of shopping is going to have to be taken into account) are that the knobs holding the crossmember in place are irritatingly overendowed with thread and there's no strap or other mechanism to hold the folded trailer closed, or its detached wheels to the rest of the machine. Oh, and there's nothing to hold cargo in place, but a suitably sized bungy spider will fix that.

Turns out, of course, that we don't actually need anything bulky from the shops this weekend, but its time will come soon enough…

Recommended.

Pertwee is Orange

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:24:58 GMT

Pertwee is Orange
Originally uploaded by perlmonger.

My Stokke Wing is over 20 years old now, and its second incarnation (reupholstered by a ~~friend~~ some years back) wore through a fair while ago.

As you can see, it's been running on emergency repairs: there are trouser-wrecking spikes sticking out of that ply, hence the strapped on cloth.

We finally got round to ordering new pads from Back in Action a few weeks ago when we went in to have a peer at MBT shoes, and they arrived today. A quick whizz to College Green on my bike and a bit of hot Allen key action, and I can haz bouncy orange intelligent sit! And restored use of a couple of belts too.

Surallen

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:45:47 GMT

surliminal asks who will win:

View Poll: who should win?

Teh Moff

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:06:56 GMT

"Spoilers", eh? :)

There were perhaps one or two too many nods toward fandom last night, but there's still a whole different quality to Steve's writing (and, to an extent, to the production). As ramtops said to me, I hope he still has time to write when he's running the damned thing.

On The Book: I can only assume that its not full of static dead-tree-equivalent pages and, presumably, Prof Song could have found the Doctor's first encounter with her in there is she'd bothered to look? After all, she managed to give us yet another damned presentiment of Donna's demise (I'm guessing she gets restored from wherever she's been backed up by the library/girl next week).

The girl is obviously the library AI itself; what does that make Dr Moon, and her "father", who has to be out of "earshot" when Dr Moon tells her the Library is reality?

Elsewhen, Miss Evangelista's buffered personality decay was one of the most genuinely moving moments in this season's Who thus far, and a rare bit of what I probably shouldn't think of as Proper SF in the show.

Overall, without knowing how it's going to be concluded, joint best with "The Fires of Pompeii" this season.

Pointless what-I-did-today post

Sat, 31 May 2008 18:03:23 GMT

I've not posted anything for a while - not even about last weekend's rather fine Eurovision-fest with agc, purple_peril, Pat'n'Dave WANOLJ joining ramtops and me - so here's a completely pointless post to prove to anyone reading that I'm still in some sense alive.

Today, ramtops and I went to the garden centre in Cleeve, for hanging basket plants and basket liners, and some herbs. They had sold out of 16" liners, which we need for the largest basket that's going to be filled with strawberry plants, normal and (Blessed Be!) metsämansikat, we bought along with a whole raft of other herbiage from D the LibDem. So, we stopped at the Brockley farm shop on the off chance they had some (they didn't) and walked out with a punnet of strawberries, a tub of cream (we already have chocolate cake; these will be combined later tonight :), a small loaf of bread-with-roasted-peppers, some sossidges and a pack of locally sourced pig bits which we're going to consume tonight.

We stopped to drop some of Mac's surplus shoes (yes, you read that right) at the village charity shop and discovered a small but perfectly formed crisis as we got back into the car: it turns out that Mr Rodda is less than conscientious about the fastening of his tubs of cream (bad bear!) and about a third of the tub had redistributed itself in the bag, on the floor of the car and on Mac. Thankfully, home was only a few hundred yards away, and cleansing wasn't too traumatic.

The bread, which was exceeding good, was consumed for lunch, with apples and cheese.

This afternoon, I cycled home » Ashton Court » chocolate path » centre » Slavers Quarter (where I sent water filters for recycling at Dyers in the Galleries) » Easton » St Pauls » St Werberghs (refilled washing up liquid bottle, buy more Greens cheddar, porridge and dishwasher tabs) » Ashley Hill » Montpelier » Gloucester Road (apple and blackcurrant juice, round rye crispbread (but no thin rye crispbread, and neither did the scoopshop up the hill)) » Redland » Cotham (yay! thin rye crispbread, and some green tea) » Clifton » Leigh Woods » Ashton Court » home. Weather: hot and humid; your correspondent: likewise.

Minor mishap on the cycle path through the village: I had to stop quite suddenly to avoid ploughing into two people just round a blind right angle bend; I stopped, went to put my feet down, and found that I hadn't stopped and in fact continued gracefully sideways with my bike onto the path. All most undignified (and down to not taking enough account of a raised centre of gravity caused by my fully loaded backpack), but no real damage to me, bike, shopping or (concerned!) pedestrians.

Tonight: food, wine, Dr Who and likely more West Wing (we've finally got a couple of DVDs into S4).
Tomorrow: gardening, lots of.

bugs

Thu, 15 May 2008 16:54:00 GMT

good: notice an unlikely edge-case and program for it, when writing some code 3½ years ago.

bad: find out, 3½ years later when that unlikely edge-case comes up for a customer, that you made a silly error in the code (and evidently never tested it properly at the time).

meh: on examining the code, find it uses a nasty-but-devious workaround for ColdFusion struct keys being case-independent (and whose brilliant idea was that then, Ted?); replacing that wodge with a Hashtable (now we have Java under the hood) not only simplifies the code, it factors out the bug too.

It was only matter of time…

Sun, 11 May 2008 13:32:14 GMT

…nostalgia_lj has written TARDIS/GCU instafic.

It's quite sweet, really.

ION, ramtops and I ran the bar at the annual N Somerset LibDem 'ossidge'n'mash dinner'n'quiz last night, as we have for the last few years. A good time was, I think, had by all but we both woke up with mouths that felt like Lilith had left some of her discarded Bits inside, which was deeply unfair as I drank precisely one bottle of Butcombe Gold, and Mac even less. I blame the ersatz ice cream Cornettos we were given near the end of proceedings. Chock full of Ingredients, I'm sure; toxic waste, I suspect.

Pavane

Fri, 09 May 2008 22:34:16 GMT

Pavane
Originally uploaded by perlmonger.

A belated note: ramtops and I finally dragged ourselves to the North Somerset show on Bank Holiday Monday; we've been meaning to go for about as long as we've lived here, but lack of ertia has done for us until now.

Monday was a pretty much perfect day though; a mite overcast (though not enough for my not to get slightly burned and be glad of my hat), but warm enough to attract a fairly seething throng.

We wandered, ramtops bought a hat, I bought a wooden spoon (though still not a replacement for the irreplaceable Spoon That Died), we ate some fairly disgusting "food", and we walked back home along NCN33. Oh, and I've added Pavane to my ever-growing to-read list should I ever actually finish Quicksilver (I'm in Lyons, and the king is dead). Keith Roberts was a reactionary arse, but he wrote some fine books nonetheless.

GIP#2

Fri, 09 May 2008 21:51:55 GMT

While I'm at it, this photo seems to have attracted some attention since I uploaded it this morning (99 views in 14 hours, as I type), and will make a handy icon for those many, many times I feel the need to write about mouseless heads.

GIP

Fri, 09 May 2008 20:55:10 GMT

"He stole a bicycle!"

Well, I said I needed a cycling icon.

δz

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:09:51 GMT

I need a cycling icon.

I've just ridden from home to Winford via Wild Country Lane, Hobbs Lane and Barrow Lane. The sign said "Dundry 1½ miles"; how hard could it be? Dundry Lane was ok, but that last stretch of Winford Lane to the top of the ridge was fucking hard work.

I'm a lot fitter than I used to be, but I've a way to go yet before I'm truly comfortable with gravity defiance.

Still, Dundry Lane, the Bridgwater Road, Barrow Street, Hern Lane and Wild Country Lane was pretty much all downhill on the way back. Time to sort out tonight's dinner now, and finish updating our backup server's Ubuntu (having isolated the fscked memory stick that was upsetting it earlier today).

ETA route.

I'm going on a juice hunt

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:55:50 GMT

I've spent this afternoon going to most of the wholefood shops in Bristol, in search of a bottle of decent concentrated apple and blackcurrant juice.

Long Ashton -» Ashton Court -» Leigh Woods -» Clifton

Fresh and Wild: Crazy Jack 6% homœpathic only
Wild Oats: Crazy Jack only
Cotham: Suma 10% (purchase one; I also picked up dishwasher tabs and rinse aid)

Cotham -» Gloucester Road

Shop 1: Crazy Jack and… Meridian 12%! (purchase one, and a jar of tahini)
Shop 2: bugger all
Shop 3: Crazy Jack and Meridian 12%

Gloucester Road -» Montpelier

Farm shop: bugger all
Grocery on the corner: bugger all
Italian Grocer: bugger all (though they had both A&B and Blackcurrant at decent concentration, but sweetened: why?)

Montpelier -» St Pauls -» St Werburghs

St Werburghs: Crazy Jack only (but I bought a hunk of Green's unpasteurised, organic, Somerset cheddar)

St Werburghs -» Easton

Sweet Mart: Crazy Jack only (but I bought some coriander and two tubes of squit)

Easton -» railway path -» Temple Quay -» Redcliffe -» Cumberland Road -» Southville -» Bower Ashton -» Ashton Court -» Long Ashton

and home, and an apple, and a pot of TEA.

And no sign whatsoever of the Meridian organic good stuff with a sensible proportion of blackcurrant juice in it.

Who'd athunkit?

Thu, 01 May 2008 19:01:46 GMT

A dock strike in the US against the war? Something from over the pond to give me a warm glow inside, for once :)

Bugger all on the BBC yet, of course.

[ HTT ginmar for the heads up ]

Last night

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:01:27 GMT

I was talking to someone (I don't know who) about my past; I was describing the Welly Club as it was in the early 80's, at the tail end of the Mrs Wilson years, and we ended up thern.

For some reason, there was a chap there selling records in a corner of the bar area: he looked like Dave Langford (hell, he may have been Dave Langford). I spotted the cover of a Terry Riley LP I didn't recognise (and still don't :) and went over and grabbed it. It was in some sort of gatefold or boxed sleeve and, when I opened it to check the disc was OK, found that it also had at least a dozen 7" singles stuffed inside as well. I started going through them to see what they were, then sat down so I could look at them more easily, but someone told me to move as I had sat in the record-seller's seat.

No, I don't know what it means…

nom nom nom

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:13:40 GMT

nom nom nom
Originally uploaded by perlmonger.

Some people will do anything to avoid werk: this is what I was extracting from our washing machine / dishwasher drainage plumbing, instead of programming, this afternoon…

ramtops photographed the extraction process from the other end.

I was reminded…

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:44:18 GMT

…by the sad loss of Humph of Rossmore Road (tangential I know, but there y'go).

If anyone has a spare copy, or a reasonably clean rip, I'd be interested to hear from them.