Leaf Mouse

It looks like the feedburner feed has finally fizzled out two thousand visits short of half a million, c'est la vie , I 'm surprised it has gone on as long as it has. The half million will come , just not as quickly as I was expecting.

Tonight I was out walking and heard a noise near my feet and thought it was a mouse or rat. On closer inspection it was actually a leaf! I may have been influenced by the rodent I saw aon West Cliff at Whitby. Who knows what can twist and lead our minds. I also saw and disposed of a huge spider in the kitchen tonight, I've seen bigger, but not that often.

I was thinking of writing a (science) fiction story as a post with the title "The Probability Conundrum" bas on the fact that everyone expects something to happen whether it be good or bad, based on fact or heresay (or heresy ... I wonder if those two words are related) and then do those people cause the expectation to happen abdor does it just happen ... eventually, and also could people make things happen for other people if they knew someone was expecting a particular outcome.

I wasn't sure where I would go with this but there's some bits here that I may pick up on one day.

It seems the tags on posts are working again so I've added a few for this post, which I hadn't really planned to do as it is past eleven on a Friday night and also this year I don't intend to post as much.

I've also stopped posting on Mewe but maybe I will post this on there and see if visits pick up.

So a song to go with this, maybe "Science Friction" by XTC which is a song from my long ago youth, but still worth a listen. This is one of the things about getting older , your back catalogue of experiences and likings increases with everything you do , or it should, and it certainly does with me.

Ok almost time to hit dreamland and see all my friends there.

Start Again

Surprisingly this month is already the highest monthly hit rate for a month since I started and effectively this seemed to be kicked off my the demise of Google+ , because I looked for another way of sharing my posts and tried MeWe that doesn't really seem to have taken off but provides an easy way to copy the link post which I shared on Twitter. That then seemed to kick it off. Under google posts, generally a good visit count would be 100 , average about 50 but when Google+ went I was lucky to get 20. Facebook doesn't really seem to help although a few of my friends visit via that link.

Anyway after sharing on Twitter I was picked up by Feedburner and since then I have had more than a thousand visits a day, still very few comments, so maybe it's all robots, though I would love to see comments from friends. Yesterday I had 2,600 visits , that's more than one a minute which is impressive.

I finished "The Secret Commonwealth" by Philip Pullman and although I am a very slow reader I always have a book on the go, and while my last few books have been fiction, I have a lot of music biographies and commentaries still unread. I briefly considered "Tarantula" by Bob Dylan which I have read several times, and for me is an easy enjoyable read being a stream of consciousness based narrative by Dylan. I decided to take "On Some Faraway Beach" by David Sheppard , the biography of Brian Eno.

When I opened it I immediately baulked, 450 pages of of tiny unrelenting text, books like this really do initially put me off and need to be special to keep me on board. I'm on to chapter two so it is actually a goer and will be my book for the next few weeks.

Today I am also going back to contact lenses so that's another restart for me, and at the moment the lenses feel absolutely fine.

Looking out the window it's still dark grey and featureless, but every day is another day of potential to discover and do new things. The David Sheppard book opens with a quote from the brilliant Edward De Bono who's books and methods taught me a hell of a lot:

"“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all. ”"

... and I suppose that just hooked me into the book. Many of the chapters are named after Brian Eno songs and pieces, so we will go with the creepily ominous  "The Great Pretender" from "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" a truly wonderful album.

Enjoy your Monday, Make it special.

Satellite

At the current rate of views I will have had 300K visits by mid October. The Feedburner boost is still continuing so I'm getting more than a thousand visits a day. This is a huge surprise but do wish it would translate into actual followers or something, but what the hell SevenDaysIn is popular with someone or something.

I wasn't going to write this, like I wasn't going to write the last post, but I am feeling weirdly tired but also wide awake. I think my mind is tired and so is my body , but my body does not want sleep, it wants to keep doing things, hence the fingers to keyboard causing this bog post to take shape. I am expecting maybe a hundred words or so then I will crash into bed and fall asleep maybe.

This morning when the alarm went off I was in some kind of deep sleep state and I really did not want to leave my bed, but, as always, I did and crawled to the bathroom still wanting to turn around and sleep.

Stepwise I hit 17.5K steps today that's about  five and a half miles.

I heard the sing "Satellite" by The Hooters today and it is still brilliant taking it out of the televangelists so sort of appropriate given I am reading "The God Delusion".

So before Saturday comes I will share this nugget of prose with you.

Follow

Just a short post about an odd thing. I didn't really use twitter until Google ditched Google+ and I looked for new ways to share my blog post as Facebook also seemingly stopped feeds. I'm not sure how many I followed or how many follower I had (this blog after twelve years has FIVE followers) so I am not the most popular person on the planet, but I am sure I had about seventy followers and followed a similar number of people.

Every few days I get a new follower but the number of followers I have seems to remain at a constant 77 (just checked it's now 78) which is a lot more than this blog (despite it's now daily 1-1.5K visits (and yes I know a lot will be robots and apparently French people (Merci, Merci pour les visites)  so overall that is a success and it's only since sharing the blog on Twitter that these visit spikes took off. Below are two images showing the spikes and the fact that France is the source of a lot of visits.

Big In France

Big In 2019

So since twitter , Feedburner picked me up and that I think is the main reason for the reason hike in hits. I would like to hit 300K by the end of the year and at the current rate that could happen by mid October , but that is assuming I sill get over 1K hits a day.

So I though I would just post this listening to the Giorgio Moroder album "Deja Vu" , and while it's OK it's not as adventurous as I expected although "74 is the New 24" is quite good and the first song that would fit with the "From Here To Eternity" album which is one of my favourites. That was followed by an excellent take on Suzanne Vega's "Toms Diner" with Britney Spears, which shows it's always good to listen to a whole album. Not as good, in my opinion, as "From Here To Eternity" but more than listenable with some good points.

I've also realised that Giorgio Moroder's moustache is almost as iconic as Frank Zappa's (see below)

So "74 is the New 24" would be a good one to share with you and the video is cool too.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Atheist

I'm currently reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and the foreword tells me that anyone reading this will be an Atheist if they finish it. This is the sort of evangelical preaching that annoys me about Richard Dawkins. I ton't like being told I am wrong without empirical evidence and I almost want to say I believe in God just to spite him.

I was made to go to church  by my parents until I was ten then it was my choice. I went to Catholic schools and some teachers every week tried to trip you up on what had happened in mass and certain pupils would tell teachers that you hadn't been to Church which resulted in various fors of denigration and punishment.

Jesuits taught me at secondary school and some of them were extremely logical by admitting that only faith could justify their position. That earned my respect because they were fine with people who were "unbelievers" .

Through my life I have come across lots of great religious people and none of them have tried to convert me.

In 62 years I have seen no evidence of God but I am always open to be proved wrong, that's PROVED wrong not told I'm wrong.

And I do have faith, faith that the sun will rise, faith that the light will turn on when I flick the switch, faith that the kettle will boil when I switch it on, a little less faith that I will get a phone signal or Amazon Prime will work when I want to watch a prong.

Because of evolution I believe that our minds continue after death, so it doesn't really bother me, but evolution tends to keep the good adaptable bits and in a lot of humans the mind is the most interesting and flexible part.

So "The God Delusion" is four hundred pages and quite a large book so think this will take me about a month to finish.

I'm still getting a thousand hits a day on the blog so the Feedburner thing  (something to do with syndicated content) is still working although a side effect is lots of visits from France for some reason though I can't say I'm complaining.

To go with this I'm going with "Faith" by George Michael just because I like it.

Reading Appendices

I know I was on the last leg of "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" have finally met the subject of the final book "Leviathan" then way before the end the book ends! It's been a wild kaleidoscopic ride (and I know that probably isn't a correct metaphor, even if it is a metaphor) but here I was at the end.

So I have still nearly ten per cent of the text to go through that consist of the appendices which I suppose is unusual for a work of mainly fiction with the odd drops of reality and even truth in there, so I still probably have a week's reading to go.

Is this a book I will keep? I'm not sure. I've loved reading it but I'm fairly certain this is a one read book for me and not something, for me, that I can dip in and out of, but I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to go off on a mad literary ride. I'm not sure what book I will read next, maybe something with a more stable narrative.

Also this week I have been, for me, binge watching TV taking in Catch-22 , Parks and Recreation, Carnival Row and Scamalot.

September is a 30 month so I need to slightly up my daily steps but that's going OK after last month fairly smashing it. I'm just wondering if I could maybe hit half a million steps in a month, which would require me to hit 17K steps a day so maybe that's not really an option as I am generally to lazy.

The sky outside is grey, the heating is on , there are seagulls crying which indicates rain but we are at the first Tuesday in September.

In that past month the blog has now had 30K visits thanks to Feedburner picking it up again and I'm glad that I have a new top post which is here. thankfully replace this, which was stuck there for years.

So what song for today. I really haven't a clue but as the KLF are the reason I am reading "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" we can go with "Justified And Ancient" their mash up with Tammy Wynette.

Enjoy your Tuesday.

Hello Again Hot Chocolate

It's 4am on a Wednesday morning and I should be asleep but have been woken up by a tickly cough, so have made a cup of hot chocolate to coat my throat and hopefully get an hour's sleep before I get up for work.. Basically I have stuff running down into my throat causing the tickle and that's what's causing me to cough and wake up, but I am tired and want to go back to sleep. The hot chocolate is helping.

The other thing is that Feedburner has picked up the blog again so yesterday the blog overall got over 1,000 hits rather than the normal 50-100 jhits , so not sure if this is just a daily spike or if I will get another month like May and June which hit 20K and 25K respectively, it it does then the blog will hit quarter of a million visits by mid September as it's currently sitting at 229K so that would be nice.

The thing is chocolate and paracetamol are scientifically the best things for treating a cough as the chocolate coats your throat better than any cough medicine according to several articles such as this one although this one says not.

So "Sleepwalk" by Santo & Johnny, the inspiration behind Peter Green & Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" would be suitable before I go and get a little rest before work.

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.

Forty Days

It looks like Feedburner has burnt out for the blog , but that's forty days of unexpectedly hitting over a thousand hits per day. It didn't actually bring it much advertising revenue either, but just nice to think a few more people (or a lot of robots) visited.

This has to be extremely short as I need to get to Durham and to attend a course , so we'll go with Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" which is ten days less than the forty days the Feedburner referrals have been upping my visits.

Actually it's been a day strewn with mini disasters, but worked out fine in the end but the visits are back down to 50 a day even though most of those are still from Feedburner.

Low Flying Cloud

Today has not really been raining but it's wet. It's like it's just very low cloud. I don't know if it will finally blow over but today has been a perfect example of dreek. The sky is grey the windows are wet and it's cold.

It's almost a month since the blog visits went from fifty a day to fifty an hour, starting with sharing on Twitter then being picked up buy Feedburner and since the 17th of May daily visits have not dropped below 1,100 and today is already up to 1,200 and I think it's based on the New York date line so there's still about five hours to go.

I do need to give it a day's rest but I keep thinking another post will fuel the visits, but I do need to try and have a day without posting, I've already posted sixteen times this month that is four posts every the three days.

The rain / mist is running down the window pane as I write this and to quote the cheesiest of lines it is a cold, dark, rainy night, not dark and stormy , just dreek.

I was surprised to be followed on Instagram by Louise Distras (her web page is here) who I saw, and was impressed with and chatted with at The Cluny where she was supporting The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing. She is an excellent artist and a really nice girl to chat with. My review of the gig is here. and that reminded me of the new video that Jordan Reyne has released for "They Came For You" from "Bardo" which is appropriate for this troubling times.

So it is time for bed, but it is worth checking out all these albums when you get the chance.

Drab Dreams and Diamond Dogs

Another gorgeous day, and this morning I woke at a reasonable time, not six am like yesterday. I've been having some very mundane dreams this week , which seem to be like going to work. Nothing I can really remember, or worth writing about apart from the pure mundanity, although when I woke up I thought that the guitar riff for  David Bowie's "Candidate" was the riff for "Rebel,Rebel" (the Rolling Stones song that they never wrote, or to my knowledge performed). Actually "Candidate" is sandwiched between "Sweet Thing" and "Sweet Thing(Reprise)" and the latter piece plays out in a crunching guitar sequence that perfectly leads into "Rebel, Rebel"

Obviously "Candidate" is not "Rebel,Rebel" but at least it's the same album and fairly close to it. I have a feeling the Feedburner spike is about to come to an end , but it's given me my highest blog activity since I started so that is rather excellent.

That means the song that I am going to feature is the nine minute "Sweet Thing/Candidate" sequence from "Diamond Dogs".

Enjoy you Thursday.

Missing ... Not Missing

This morning I switched on 6Music and an excellent take on Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" was playing. I was surprised because it was on Lauren Laverne's show and she is usually techno heavy, so I assumed it must be a modern song, but no, it was by Them and I had recognised the voice of Van Morrison.

So what am I really missing from Facebook? Playing Scrabble, seeing what friends are up to photowise (but I do catch a lot on Instagram) and posts from God (but again I catch a lot on Instagram)., also there's a few pages / groups that I share and update but a thirty day rest won't harm them.

I have a feeling the Feedburner effect is tailing of a little but I am still getting 1,300 hits a day so I thing that June should see me hit  40K in June which is fairly startling as I haven't really done anything different.

Today is meant to be grey and showery although it did start off very sunny, and , as yet, there's been no rain so fingers crossed.

So I will leave yo with the piece that I first heard this morning, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" by Them. Have a good Tuesday everybody.

To Buy or Not To Buy

... that is the question, I was thinking about getting a Google Pixel 3A and then I thought "What will it give me that I don't already have?". The onboard memory is double that of my Pixel , but that is really a minor thing. It may have better battery life, a faster processor and better cameras, but the reality is that it will not tangibly improve my life. I still miss the Samsung Note Stylus, but I am not paying a grand to be able to use a dedicated stylus every now and then.

Whether it's age or just being sensible I think for the foreseeable future I will just keep my current phone on my SIM Only plan.

It's like the roll out of 5G, seriously what do I need that for. I can see it's uses in a large scale or industrial environment, but for personal users the benefits, again, don't really affect you or me.

I've just finished Stephen Fry's "Mythos" and absolutely loved it and am following that up with Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology" which I am sure I will enjoy , being a fan of almost all mythologies, and I got into them at School not through Stan Lee's comics (that is not a dig at Stan Lee, just me showing my age).

The blog is set to hit 200K page views tonight, which is an unexpected surprise due to Feedburner helping me to hit 20K views this month. I really didn't see that one coming. Also I was only intending to do about 15 posts this month to hit 2K posts since the blog started, but I have manged to post 32 times this month.

A Sudden Surge on Seven Days In

Given that the post numbers are now corresponding with the years of our current timestream, I thought for the next ninety posts I could use a piece of music from the corresponding year. This is post 1932 so we'll go with the Cole Porter song "Night and Day" from "The Gay Divorcee" performed by Fred Astaire. I bet you weren't expection that. Although the first time I heard this song it was John Peel playing Tuxedomoon's take on it.

Lost In France

French Favourite

As I have mentioned Feedburner has been a huge boost to th esite visits. As far as I can gather it is a result of me sharing my posts via Twitter. I am no expert or avid follower of Social Media but that it my current view on the situation.

Another thing that I have noticed is that of my top ten all time posts on this blog, five now come from this month , or since I started sharing on Twitter.  So sharing on Twitter, which I don't really use that much, is beneficial to audience reach. And I only started doing this because Google ditched Google+ !

One of the real oddities is a huge number of visitors from France. Now I am not French , I don't post in French or feature much French related stuff aparat maybe bands like one of my favourites Gong,  or the darker Magma (who have some great logo / images) and are with listening to if you can take their relentless sound.


As I have said I do not know if this is just a blip , a short spike, or permanent, though obviously I am hoping it is permanent and I am happy to keep sharing on Twitter if this is the result.


I am currntly enjoying the lovely weather as we head towards the Bank Holiday Weekend and think I will share with you Gong's "I Never Glid Before" the finale from "Angel's Egg" the middle of the "Rafio Gnome Invisible" trilogy , one of my favourite ever riffs despite it being quite complex while retaining an excellent self depracating playfulness. Gong are extremely accomplished musicians with a wonderful way out sense of humour.

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.

Forget It ... Lets Burn Kings Landing

Tonight I have watched a lot of TV but then thought it's time for bed, then suddenly remembered I had a delivery from Tesco as they were offering 25% off wine and it meant I could order sparkling water as well, so it means I won't have to cart it back from a local supermarket in my rucksack. That isn't really a problem and it does stop you buying to much , a maximum of four bottles instead of the fifty that came tonight.

It seems that Feedburner is keeping up the hits on the blog, at the moment 1,200 so far today, when I was lucky to get maybe 1,500 a month. I'm not complaining about it, maybe someone might leave a comment if these aren't actual robots.

Lot's of people have been complaining about the end of "Game of Thrones" but I thought it was fine, if a little rushed and now we have "Lord of The Rings" and "His Dark Materials" to look forward to.

It is stunning the amount of television that we have at our disposal, and these days we don't even have to record it it to watch when we want as we can stream it. I actually watched a DVD of "The Golden Compass" tonight and very good it was. Lee Scoresby was inspired by William Scoresby who's house I pass every time I stay in Whitby.

Someone soundtracked the burning of Kings Landing with Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" but it is rather pedestrian metal and didn't do it for me, I was sure I could find a better soundtrack. I didn't have to do anything, someone had shoehorned "Hells Bells" by Ac/DC onto it and that's what I will leave you with, best seen on a big screen and turned up load.

Feedburner and Interrupted Dreams

It looks like the huge increase in visits is due to being picked up by something called Feedburner which is some kind to data feed. I'm not sure if this is permanent, although I wont complain if it is. I'm not sure if this is as a result of me sharing the blog posts on Twitter or including a link with my most visited Youtube slideshow. , 26K views and featuring Christopher Lee, so it could have been any one of those. Twitter has resulted in a few retweets and also I tried MeWe after Google dropped their social sharing although I do not think that has resulted in any visits. I use it to post on then stipe the post to post in Twitter on my phone.

This morning I woke at 5:30 and thought I had quarter of an hour to enjoy, but fell back into an unspecified dream and the was rudely awoken by the alarm going off seemingly about thirty seconds later. That's is the problem with falling asleep when you are about to get up. It always amazes me that often at night sleep refuses to come, but when you have to get up, especially for work, sleep is so, so welcoming.

I'm over halfway through Stephen Fry's "Mythos" and thoroughly enjoying it and am now thinking about which book will come next.

So what should I share with you tonight, Huw Stephens featured Caught By The River and from that Jeff Barrett's Labe's first single release was "Under Dubwood" by The Dubwood Allstars featuring the tones of Richard Burton and the music of King Tubby (think it was used for Ali Baba by John Holt)