2019

This is post 2019 in the year 2019.  This year my aim was to hit 2000 posts since I started blogging, I ended up doing that last month here.  I was thinking that maybe this would be another record posting year but this month posts have dropped off so it may or may not happen, we shall see.

Today has been a very hot Bank Holiday but that is nothing to complain about, though tomorrow is a return to work for a four day week.

Over the weekend I was completely cut off from music apart from listening on the train journeys to and from Scotland and was thinking I haven't played "Rain" by The Beatles on the new RPM record player.. The rumour is that Paul McCartney's bass on the original single was so heavy that it caused the needle to jump. I have a re released single but will try that before work tomorrow morning.

I've dipped back into the swirling currents of words that make up "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" and still finding it entertaining as I pass the three quarter level. Totally mad with probably some snippets of truth to be taken with large doses of salt.

So on the burning day I think "Hot Hot Hot" by The Cure from possibly my favourite album of theirs "Kiss Me,Kiss Me,Kiss Me" would be good to sign off with.

Growly Night

There's thunder, lightning and rain. It's getting dark early. I'm amazed how accurate the weather information app is though I always look out the window to confirm what's happening . Another lightning flash , another roll of thunder.

Today when mowing the lawn there was a small short shower, but now we have the reall stuff. The positive is that I don't have to water the garden. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to walk into work without being forced to get a bus.

I wasn't going to post today but the image of "growly night" just seemed to be something worth capturing and recording.

My grandma used to say that thunder was the angels playing then pin bowling, which is a fairish analogy.

So given that I've nothing really to say I'll share an appropriated of music, "Night on Bare/Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky possibly rearranged by Rimsky-Korsakov and featured in Disney's "Fantasia" which he created to teach children about classical music and it is largely successful with stunning animation.

"Night on Bare Mountain" was also rejigged as "Night on Disco Mountain" on the soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever"

So enjoy.....

Realisation

Nothing deep, but due to my rate of posting from March this year , if I post twenty two times a month for the rest of the year then I will have another record year. I'm not expecting to do that though given this is my second post today you may not believe it.

The thing is the more you post , the more you feel like posting. I just wish I could get myself into gear with writing , and writing songs and recording them. I have all the tools so no excuse not to do it, just the extreme lack of discipline.

Today I found a couple more covers of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by The Cure and "Ceremony" by Radiohead. I was completely unaware of these though the song has been covered by almost everyone but it still belongs to Ian Curtis.

These songs don't seem to have been officially released but they are on Youtube so you can listen fairly easily.

So enjoy them , I am off to my pit.

200

This is post 200 this year , which means 2019 is, so far, my fourth highest posting year since I started. This week I will hit my two thousandth post. I hit my thousandth post , here, in November 2015, eight and a half years after my first post here.  . So my second thousand post has taken about four years so I have doubled my posting rate, which my be a good or bad thing , possibly quantity of quality. You can check the first against the thousandth against this one and see if there has been any improvement at all.

I just got my latest bill from Discogs and I'm now selling about two CDs a week, which is quite impressive as often they are going for above ten pounds, way above the 17p I would get from CEX or Music Magpie. That's nothing against those companies, because they have to take the hit of the stuff they can't sell and then have to hold what they have until they actually sell the things. The latest one will be posted off to Germany this morning.

Today is another sunny day, and I am going to take myself off to work soon so I know this is short, but this won't feature Nico for a change.

I opened the curtains and there was a big fly on the window, but then I noticed it was outside so that was a good start.

So what are we going to have music wise? Just noticed the Faces box that my daughters got me for a birthday, so we'll go for a live take of "That's All You Need" one of my favourite slide guitar rock songs , and this is very rough but totally brilliant.

Enjoy your Tuesday

Go - 50 Years Since Apollo 11 Lift Off

Sunny days can lift your spirits, and we have a sunny day this morning and hopefully it will be like that all day. Yesterday, without making any particular effort I did over 20K steps (6 Miles). I walked into work for the first time in a while and had to walk round town a bit so that's where it came from, but it was really no great effort on my part. That is really the best way to do things, so they are either part of the norm , ideally pleasurable and afterwards you can feel satisfied with what you have done.

One thing I keep noticing is spelling or grammatical mistakes in my posts and tweets but they seem to have been done by autocorrect but there is also the possibility that I have made the mistake, but I know what I wanted and intended to write and that is not what is in front of me.

Today is fifty years since Apollo 11 was launched and sent the first men to the moon.Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, but you got to feel for Mike Collins who just had to stay in Orbit while the other two went down , but you can read more here.

So really it's gotta be something from "The Race For Space" by Public Service Broadcasting and we'll go with the highly positive "Go", which is based on the Apollo 11 mission.

Twitteringmore

Facebook is definitely finished on my phone but I feel I am getting too much political stuff on Twitter, well that has replaced the stuff I used to see and share on Facebook. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but it's nice not to let Facebook really track me as such, so no check ins or film sharing as such. I use twitter to share my blog posts as not many people read them on Facebook and Twitter gets me more (robot) attention. Twitter does however open my eyes to a lot of political stuff that I then try and check from other sources, and I do enjoy Mike Harding's posts which are often funny but always with a serious point, and Matt Haig's posts which are always helpful.

I do share the odd positive or funny picture but I am just waiting for my three month ban, as Facebook doesn't play by it's own rules.

I don't know if this will be a short or long post, but I got a couple of classical vinyl albums today (Bizet's "Carmen highlights" and Elgar's "Enigma Variations") from a charity shop and hopefully that will satisfy my vinylisation for a while. IT is good to just put and album on with no remote option and let it play, and that applies to classical and contemporary albums.

I also need to mention this is post 1984 and 1984 was the year my youngest daughter Kirsty was born and she has turned out to be talented, well adjusted , sensible with a reasonable taste in music, books and media , taking after her elder sister Juliet in many respects while being chalk and cheese in some areas. However as sisters and daughters they are as perfect as you could expect.

While I love "Carmen" I also love "Carmen (L'Oiseau Rebelle)" Malcolm McLaren's "Fans" , his take on the theme from Bizet's opera, which is a much harder edged piece but extremely listenable and that's what we shall go with.

Before Bed

This is post 1977. There can only be one song, can't there. Is this going to be the shortest post I've ever done?

Well not quite because this was my first ever blog post, and it was fairly short maybe about fifty words (I can't be bothered to count but you can do it yourself.

1977 was the year that punk really got underway. but it started way before that. The Bok sent demos to John Peel , Stiff Records and Rabid Records in Manchester. John Peel said we were primitive , Stiff sent a rejection letter , but Rabid wanted us. It was only when Rabid asked which studio we had recorded it that it dawned on us the reason for Peel's reaction. We'd never seen a studio and recorded direct to 2 track cassette. The single was decided, people stopped talking to be because the bassist said we were going to be on Top of The Pops , then Rabid went bust and the band split.

We formed on a Tuesday and played our first gig on the following Saturday, and it that time we managed to write and learn songs for something like a one hour set, including "Waiting For The Man" , "Gloria", "The Passenger" , "Egyptian Reggae" , "Shot By Both Sides" and the demos on the link above.

One of my favourite guitarists was Ollie Halsall who recommended learning with heavy gauge strings and playing with light gauge strings. What this didn't take into account was the fact that in the heat of the gig they went out of tune almost immediately. After a gig one guy said he was impressed with my in song tuning.

Anyway 1977 was the year of The Roxy , any number of punk bands , many still around now, and off course "1977" by The Clash , the "B" side of "White Riot".

"No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones

 In 1977"

Absolutely brilliant and The rolling Stones are still going but The Clash aren't , two trully great bands

Women's World Cup 2019 - How To Play Football - Target 1965

This is post 1965 and my original target this year was to hit 2K posts by the end of 2019. I've now changed that to hit it by the end of July, so that's another 35 posts to do. The blog has dropped off the Feedburner radar. I am quite amazed that although I have friends that read this , subscribers are virtually non existent, and you can't ask people to subscribe, I very seldom subscribe to anything so cannot point a finger.

I'm still enjoying the Women's World Cup but have a despairing chuckle at the number of people (mostly men) who won't watch because it's not real football. Every match is full of skill and passion and heartbreak. While the reactions of the Cameroon team were wrong , they were caused by extreme passion and the accusations of FIFA racism were over the top but given Europe and The USA's treatment of African nations and indigenous people in the past and even today that is an easy card to play. The referee should have immediately called the captain and coach over to the VAR screen to explain the decisions. The Cameroon disallowed goal was unfortunate but the correct decision.

The thing is the competition has been brilliant and very little cheating , cynical fouls and the like that permeates the men's game.

So it's a very grey morning as we head to another Glastonbury Weekend, and though I love music and like smaller Festivals , bt the thought of Glastonbury the Festival leaves me cold, but I love the town and Glastonbury Tor gives you some amazing views.

So given that with my last Women's World Cup post I used Echobelly's "Dark Therapy" (one of my favourite ever songs) , and Echobelly liked the post although I barely mentioned them, for this one I am going to choose the more appropriate and brilliantly uplifting "Great Things". This will get rid of the grey skies this Wednesday , a brilliant record.

Enjoy.

Bookwise with Laura Purcell

I finished Matt Haig's excellent "Notes on a Nervous Planet" and decided to start on Laura Purcell's  novel "The Silent Companions". I bought the book from Amazon to to make up a package so I didn't have to pay postage and it is definitely not the sort of thing that I normally read, although it has definitely drawn me in with it's gothic creepiness. It jumps between three time periods the link being a potential murderess in an asylum , her family and their time ravaged home. It has been compared to various classic gothic novels, and although I I can't really comment on the comparison I can say despite finding it claustrophobic and not my normal far it has got my attention so well that I will happily continue on the end, and I don't really expect it to end well.

I had intended to hit 2K posts for this blog this year which meant I had to post about 210 this year,, but I have already posted 168 times so I could easily hit that target in July, which then means I will be thinking about hitting 3K posts.

Walking, I am still doing the rolling million steps every three months and to complete June I need to do another 56K steps by a week tomorrow so that is another positive for this morning.

I also need to mow the lawn and cut back some hedges, although it never fails to amaze be how much hedge actually grows and needs cutting back, but we have to remember that with a combination of photosynthesis and drawing water from the ground provided by rain plus the recycling of carbon dioxide to produce breathable are, these are essential to use staying alive.

I've also seen a rat in the garden, it actually looked cute and friendly, and was scavenging spilt bird seed and then looking round for something once the seed had gone. I think it was just an itinerant rat , like the hedgehogs and frogs that sometimes appear unexpectedly.

So what do we go with ? "Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story)" by (Peter) Lawlor fits the bill, named after a street in York. It was used in a Land Rover advert and reminds me a lot of Portishead and has a very disconcerting vibe while being a great record, although difficult to track down, but not impossible.

Enjoy your Sunday

Coming Up

I wasn't going to post today, I'm not sure it the increase in visits has sort of addicted me to writing posts, although professional writers write a hell of a lot more than I do so maybe it isn't an issue. This is post 1951 so my target for this year is to hit 2000, and at this rate that will happen next month, not sometime in December as I originally hoped to do.

The thing is my writing here is not subject to editorial scrutiny aor targetted an a particular audience in order to become an influencer or to sell products, so I can post when and what I want. Also I have no deadlines to meet apart from self imposed ones.

I'm enjoying "Notes on A Nervous Planet" by Matt Haig and am coming to the conclusion that it's essentially a manual for surviving the modern world illustrated by his observations and experiences. It's not as uplifting as "Reasons To Stay Alive" but that's because it's more Haynes Manual than Harry Potter, it is still very good and you should get your own copy  (both books) and read and enjoy them.

I'm just reading how the consumerist world wants us to be unhappy so it can SELL us things to make us feel better. It is partly the reason I have 5K CDs and 400 DVDs because I have bought things because I thought I should have them, and then not watched or listened to. To address this a lot of CDs and DVDs have gone to the Westgate Ark Cat Shelter charity and I have a pile of 170 CDs that are listed on Discogs here.

I titled this because all of a sudden the 2000 target is coming up and it's also the title of a Paul McCartney song that I really like (The opener from McCartney II) so I will share that with you on this wet Thursday.

Living on The Edge of the World

I just wanted to write a post with that title. It doesn't really mean anything to me or my situation but it does sound grandly isolationist, also reminds me of a line from the Bob Dylan song "Joey" that has always summed me up:

"Always on the outside - Of Whatever Side There Was"

I am always on the outside of whatever cliques are going on, always the weird or abnormal one, but if I wasn't I wouldn't be me. I suppose there is a little jealousy in not being included, but it doesn't mean I don't enjoy life. Also not being included does not mean being excluded, which can be very hurtful.

So why am I writing this?

I am still on holiday and actually relaxing and I wanted to get this title down.

Also it's an excuse to share the latest lovely release by Panda Bear "Buoys",though I have apparently bought stuff from them before (see here) and this is the great thing about keeping a blog, you can use it to remember things that you had forgotten, but I'm pretty sure it was Panda Bear Meets Grim Reaper which I will revisit when I get home.

Time for bed soon

Expectations

Last month I expected to get 30-50 hits per day on the blog with maybe 20-30 for each post. At the end of April Feedburner seems to have somehow picked up the blog and now I am expecting more that a thousand hits a day. That's a twenty to thirty fold increase but I am now expecting that. I personally have done nothing knowingly to casue this, and I don't know if it's a temporary or a permanent thing , so I am just appreciating the attention while I am getting it.

I had never heard of Feedburner and in theory if I start getting too many hits I may have to look at self hosting rather than using the blogger.com platform (which I believe is part of the Google Empire.

Recent post visits are in the multi hundreds so hopefully one of them will depose the "Buying Lion Pooh At Dobbies" post from 2009 which has been at the top of  my posts for years although in reality the top one is "Devon - Record Shop Heaven" from 2010 which is far more relevant to my main blogging areas.

So what should I share with you today. Given we're talking about numbers, maybe I should share my most visited Youtube slideshow which features Christopher Lee's take on the Paul Anka song "My Way" probably more familiarly heard by Frank Sinatra and Sid Viocious.

A Strange Thing

A strange thing happened on the blog today . Normally I'll get 100 hits if I post and 20-30 if I don't.. I did post today but I have had nearly a thousand hits today from the mysterious "Unknown Region". This is probably just some mad robot but will it is nice to have your hits increase, it only matters when it is like that on a daily basis. It would be nice to think these are reading visitors, but I would only know that it was if people were to leave comments or communicate with me about it.

The numbers are below:


As yet there is nothing, which does imply robots.

So I will see if this continues into tomorrow, and if it does , or I start  to get communications , I won't be sure why, as I haven't done anything differently to what I have been doing over the last ten years.

This post number 1918 so the post numbers are like the years from the last century, 1918 being the year World War 1 ended, so maybe if the year / number is significant I will mention something about the significance.

Maybe I could even choose music related to the year 1918, and in looking I found a metal band called Sabaton who have produced a concept album about the Great War. It is almost amusing how noticing one thing (the post number was the year that WW1 ended) which resulted in me finding even more music that I have never heard before.

A short post with a new band for you to check out, Sabaton with  a Great War concept album.

Connected Centurion

This is my hundredth post this year and in December 2011 I first did 100 posts in a year. You can get get an idea of how I have progressed / regressed / stayed the same by seeing what I posted here . I'm currently listening to a Stone Roses and influences playlist show presented by Tom Robinson and sent in my suggestion of "Halleluhwah" by Can from "Tago Mago" which "Fools Gold" has more than a similarity to.

Today I walked into town, I've completed my steps for the month, but thought I would walk in anyway as was a nice day. Before mobile devices things like this usually needed a decent amount of planning or assumptions, but now you are permanently connected to people and information almost anywhere that you are, especially in an occupied area.

So I will share "Halleluhwah" by Can so you can hear why I thought that was the Stone Roses although the actual bassline for "Fools Gold" was taken from "Know How" by "Young MC" which also sample "Theme From Shaft" by Isaac Hayes, which you can track down on Youtube or Amazon.

Hope your Sunday is going well

#AprilSongs #10 Wednesday Morning 3AM

It's looking cold out this morning, well it is April, and the weather is British. As it's Wednesday the #AprilSongs installment is "Wednesday Morning 3AM" the slightly subversive title track from Simon and Garfunkel's 1965 debut album. I  have always loved Simon and Garfunkel even though Paul Simon stole Martin Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" and they produced a remarkable body of work, with Simon producing an amazing body of work after they split.

Art Garfunkel is a wonderful interpretive singer but reliant on other songwriters, but I suppose you could say the same of Rod Stewart.

I recently bought an ebook on how to get lots of readers for your blog and essentially it said don't write for yourself, write for a target audience so that may explain why my readers have dropped to single figures, as essentially it's a diary which features things that catch my attention. I'm not going to change and am quite happy that this blog enables me to go back and find things that I remember recording and sometimes find things that I forgot about recording. So it is doing the job that I want.

So off we go to work once more,

Snackwallah Diction, Snackwallah Gain

Why would you pay for something to eat. In my opinion the food has to be good and hopefully value for money. About three weeks ago I tried Snackwallah in the Grainger Market for the first time and was absolutely floored by it. When somewhere advertises "street food" very often it's sort of "like in a restaurant but on the cheap but not as good", this is definitely not the case with Snackwallah as I've been back there about ten times in the last three weeks.

As well as the Indian Street Food aspect it's also vegan sp that is a huge plus. Here is a list a things that make this place great:

• Absolutely great food, full of different stimulating tastes and flavours
• Wonderfully engaging staff, great to talk to, who will help with any questions
• Big range of dishes to both eat in and take away
• Great atmosphere to eat in
• Vegan
• Excellent Value For Money
• Perfect Portions for a working lunch

This place is in the Grainger Market and is competing against Meat Stack (best burgers in Newcastle, and I don't normally do burgers) and Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Lebanese and English eating hubs, so it's not as though it's the only option. Every time I consider what for lunch I keep ticking things off and Sbackwallah keeps winning because after everything else it tastes great and it's vegan therefore healthy,

Today I am serving a ban from Facebook for posting a shot off the Helmut Newton image in No 28 and also Google+ has gone so I have signed up with MeWe to see if that can offer an alternatibe to share my ideas. It may turn out not to be the greatest idea but we shall see,

So after this morning's snow I'm hoping for a quiet night bit may go Indian (Bangla Deshi actually) for my tea and order an Aloo Chole from Rajnagar. Music wise I'm going share possibly one of the greatest records ever to go with some of my favourite eating places, "Reach For Love" by Marcel King.

Today Is So Gorgeous ...

...that I went out in the garden and refilled the bird feeders before seven am. When I first started blogging that would have been enough for a post, and as it's more like a diary than anything else, it should really be enough for a post now, but although my posts are still bite sized, one sentence is never enough.

Lots of friends start blogs and come in with a big excellent piece and then that's it. On the one hand they may think that's enough or they may just realise what they have let themselves in for. Here's a few:

• The Ape of Wrath
• Peas on Earth
• Grumpy Geordie
• Little Wittering
• Dust on the Stylus
• Molecules of Madness
• Soul and Tonic
• Thumbrella
• Tea on The Tyne

These are just a few that seem to have been abandoned, but what they contain is still worth taking time to read and enjoy.

So yes a very short post and I'll leave you with "Eye Know" by De La Soul  because it just came on 6Music and sort of goes with the mood.

Have a great Friday everybody we aren't leaving the EU today and hopefully the whole Brexit thing will crawl away into a corner and die.

Strange Lethargy

I just feel tired and lethargic, which is strange after a wonderful and relaxing holiday, with Preston beating Blackburn (again) as well, also a couple of things to do , a delay repay claim, and claim for a lost Discogs delivery (Royal Mail can find the USA, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan but not Scotland) and a couple of old phones taken to CEX (A Wiley Fox and a Samsung) , cleared some more CDs to the Charity shops, and basically this afternoon has been spent watching TV  ("The Martian" and "The Lost City of Z" two excellent films) but I have been almost falling asleep.

I did do 21K steps yesterday which is about five miles, and I am ahead of schedule on the walking , and really I have actually done quite a bit without thinking that I have done anything.

Also my writing this year has been very sporadic so I am going to think of a theme for April that will force me to write a bit more often, I'm averaging 1 every two days when I really need to do 3 every four days, but like always, with something that is in my control, I will catch up.

So for absolutely no reason I will play you "Definitive Gaze" by Magazine as  "Real Life" was on the wall in Skipton Sound Bar. Hope you are having a wonderful Sunday. It's work tomorrow!

Aqualung

Still on a Jethro Tull kick and decided to spin "Aqualung" on yesterday's walk to work. Aqualung is a fine album and full of great songs about Ian Anderson's attitudes to religion and God and obviously he's not too impressed.

The album is great and then gets blown apart by the standout song "Locomotive Breath", which starts out with a piece of more than acceptable lounge piano  before drifting into a little more upbeat driving piano before stopping and hitting you fair and square with that monster three chord riff, as potent as anything you will ever hear. It is so good that it just put's the rest of the album in the shade.

The thing is "Wond'ring Aloud", "Wind Up" and the sinister title track (I'm sure the red tops would have an obnoxious field day if the knew about the second line of that song). It is a great album though, but in my opinion only betterd by "Thick as a Brick" and "Passion Play", but does bear lots of repeated listening.

It seems that Google are ditching Google+ and this combined with Facebook's suppressions means that each post in this blog barely hits double figures for visits and reads, but as I have said this is for me and if others find it interesting then that is good.

We're in a 28 day February which means and increase in the number of steps I have to take to hit my monthly 340K steps, but I did it last year and this year shouldn't be a problem either.

It is Friday which is good, and I will share you the Fargo into that uses "Locomotive Breath" to stunning effect., but get yourself a copy of the album if you don't already have it.