Up In The Air

"How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World" by Francis Wheen started with political and philosophical observations and showed me just how idiotic and evil Thatcher and Reagan's policies were and laid the foundation for the disgusting states of the UK and US economies today. The book has now settled into how Mumbo Jumbo now means far more than solid evidence.

This blog is still getting over three thousand hits a day and this month is now the most visits I have had in a single month, over 71K. While I thought one or two posts a month on my writing were OK to keep it ticking over, this month I will hit double figures. If I don't post then figures drop off. I am not sure how this will benefit me although advertising revenue has started to pick up, I was hoping I could cause some traffic to go to my Vocal site though I have not seen any evidence of that happening yet.

Grammarly is still being annoying.

If you want to buy a book my dark poetry is on the link below.

The music is Kites by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound with a slideshow I made at the Washington Kite Festival in 2010.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not others. C'est La Vie.

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer

Aboard The Fabulous Riverboat

I have finished the first "Riverworld" book  "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" and started "The Fabulous Riverboat". Grammarly and this blogger are totally useless. I cannot just select a font or size or whatever and if I make a mistake and Grammarly catches it puts the corrected word at a random place in the text, so I have to do everything manually,

"The Concept of "The Fabulous Riverboat is Sam Clemons (Mark Twain) with the aid of Lothar Von Richthofen and some Vikings. Sir Richard Burton (the adventurer not the actor) from the first book has just turned up.

Clemons has a problem as King John wants the Riverboat as well and is less than trustworthy.

I am forty percent through this book and will keep you posted on how it goes.

Today's Music Choice - River - Bishop Briggs

I had never heard of Bishop Briggs until I wrote this piece but her song "River"

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. The Never Ending Story - My Directory
2. The Never Ending Music - My Music Directory
3. The Never Ending Poetry - My Poetry Directory
4. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
5. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
6. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
7. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer

Grey

The sky is a uniform grey (or is it gray), surfaces outside still are covered in rain / dew, the lawn is finally looking very well but is obviously too we to be mowable and I am drinking decaffeinated coffee as I write this. I've taken the Grammarly spelling  / context checker off because it became too intrusive and was slowing down my typing everwhere. Maybe I should prepare my blog posts in Word to ensure  that it's reasonably grammatically correct and the spelling is correct.

It's my sister Yvonne's birthday tomorrow, which I knew was coming up, but last night my dad said he was worried because he couldn't remember how old she was going to be. I told him she probably wasn't bothered and she would just love a card.

It is amazing how you can miss words out but it still makes sense to you , but to someone else it may look as though you don't know what you are talking about.

I'm not sure if it's raining outside, so I'm not sure if I will be walking into work today.

This weather seems to create an oppressive quiet, though I will disperse that by leaving on my Donna Summer and Malcolm McLaren mix on my player. That's another thing, it now takes a minute to put together a Spotify / Deezer whatever playlist but in the seventies a live DJ had to do that in real time, then we got cassettes (I know there was reel to reel but they were hardly portable) and you could create your mixtape but a sixty minute tape took more than anhour to put together, and if you made a mistake it took even longer.

I'll leave you with Donna Summer's take on Jon & Vangelis' "State of Independence".

Have a great Tuesday

The Numbers Universe

I'm currently reading Simon Singh's "Fermat's Last Theorem" which I picked up after reading "The Mathematical Secrets of The Simpsons" and it's probably the first book that I've read where I immediately reference the footnotes and appendices as soon as they are referenced in the book. I'm not sure what my fascination with numbers is but I do enjoy exploring the concepts to some of the ideas may cause people to say so  "So What?".

The value of Π (Pi) for instance is essential to be right for all sorts of calculations and engineering constructs. The mechanical clock would not work if Π were not adhered to and more importantly neither would the wheel.

Fermat's Last Theorem is basically:

In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2.

And a lot of people will say "So What?" to that but it is an intriguing puzzle that certainly fires my imagination and Simon Singh's presentation of the story certainly keeps my interest up at 100% as it's mixed in with a whole slew or other theories and conjectures taking in Pythagoras, Euclid and of course Andrew Wiles who finally proved the Theorem.

I've also installed Grammarly to see if it can improve my blog writing. It has spooted the odd mistake but also has flagged the theorem aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ as an error so I will see how this progresses. Though this post seems relatively free of howlers.

One of my favourite TED talks ever is a twenty minute talk on prime numbers by an Australian DJ, Adam Spencer. And Grammarly just flagged up an error then so it's just proved it's worth.

Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam as he is now) released an album in 1975 called numbers which was in a nice package which is not available digitally but I will close this post with "Banapple Gas" from the album.