Showing posts with label Housemartins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housemartins. Show all posts

Thursday 25 October 2018

I Smell Winter


There was a red sky last night , and one this morning, so I don't know what that means. It's cold and snow is forecast. I have a feeling that we may be in for some inclement weather. This week it has been dark and windy and not conducive to sitting out on the porch with a drink.

This month my walking has been excellent and I expect to hit the target by Saturday, so almost a week to spare.

I also  have been listening to more Bowie, this time "The Lodger" and again, I am finding it an incredible list, possibly "Yassassin (Turkish for Long Live" is one of my favourites but all the songs are excellent. I just can't believe that one person can be responsible for so much consistenly excellent music, but I am not complaining.

I took th etitle of the post from and excellent Housemartins song which seemed perfect for the time of year, and the video highlights the plight of the homeless and rough sleepers, and it has majorly worsened since this song was released and this video put together.

If you can please support organisations such as Shelter to help get people into accomodation.

Sunday 7 January 2018

Straws


It's 9:30 on this Sunday night and iTunes is still importing my music collection. It started at around ten am this morning. I don't know how far through it because I can't query it without stopping he import. Also as it imports it starts randomly playing songs from album playlists, it never plays a complete song and the songs it plays are random and unless I stop the import not of the buttoms work. Typical Apple rubbish programming. I'm just hoping iTunes will work when it has imported all the songs.

Anyway today we went for a nice brunch at the Tyneside Bar and Cafe and were treated to "Close Encounters of The Third Kind" (now a thirty year old Steven Spielberg classic) . While at the bar we got talking about the plastic straws that were in my mang smoothie and I asked about if it would be more eco friendly to use paper straws. They said they were often not actively providing staraws but leaving them in a cup on the bar so those who wanted them could take them. One guy also pointed out that paper straws are often laminated like paper coffee cups therefore probably can't be recycled. Here's one campaign to make a difference, though there are a few. If you go to a pub or restaurant state you don't want a straw BEFORE they serve you , not after they've brought the drink with a straw in it.

So what should I leave you with at the end of this weekend, I suppose "Think For A Minute" by The Housemartins really instructs us how to approach the problems of addressing small changes to look after our environment.

Tuesday 12 September 2017

The Housemartins - The Greatest Marxist Band Ever To Pick Up Guitars


I read that statement twice when I read it in Jordan Ellenberg's "How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life", I know the Housemartins were committed left wing and Paul Heaton definitely still is but does that make them Marxist.

Maybe Robert Wyatt could be Marxist, especially listening to his stuff post Soft Machine. His band after that was Matching Mole which is extrapolated from the French for "Soft Machine" , "Machine Molle" apparently. My french is only 'O' Level but Google translates as "Machine Souple" though the reverse translation comes out as correct.

There were a lot of bands that may have been Marxist  that are in my collection , a possible list here:

And to some extent Billy Bragg, Woody Guthrie and the list could go on for a long time.

All these bands are well worth a listen whatever your politics, they are probably all on Youtube so go and have a look and listen. This is one of the great things about this digital age, you don't read this and then think I will have to go and research that tomorrow. I remember in the seventies when you read about a band you often had to look in the music mags like Sounds and NME scour the adverts and then order an album on import, hoping it would be as good as the title and blurmb made it sound.

Anyway I've included "Sitting On A Fence" the song that Jordan Ellenberg used to illustrate his point, and if you want to know what the point was you will have to read Ellenberg's book.

Have a good Tuesday.

Thursday 1 December 2016

The First Day Of Winter



I heard today that today was the first day of Winter. It doesn't seem two minutes since Autumn came upon us. I still haven't cleared the leaves from my back garden, maybe I will get the chance to do that on my return to home. The weather here is cold and foggy, which means I can take photographs and go for walks.

No doubt we will hear predictions of snowdrifts and arctic colds, but I still take my weather predictions by looking out of the window. The weather is a complex beast capable of changing at a moments notice, so I take predictions with a hefty pinch of salt.

Today will be spent in Litton, relaxing and watching some catch up TV, and listening to music. So what else to play but The Housemartins playing "I Smell Winter".

Have a brilliant day my friends.

Saturday 14 December 2013

The Fear Of God


I always thought it was odd that the devil was the bad guy and god was the good good guy but sometimes he was painted as loving and caring and other times as the classic "dies irae" , angry , vengeful, and fearful . so we had to toe the line , go to church on Sundays and basically be scared of him (oh and yes he was a white man). The sequence in Monty Python's Holy Grail gave be a decent slant on this (where he complains about how depressing psalms are).


The thing is if a being is omnipresent and omnipotent then that being will not be concerned with human emotions and motivations , in fact if you can do anything , then pretty soon you would get very bored , well I would. Part of the the joy of living is the uncertainty if things and striving to achieve goals and not knowing what's going to happen next. Yes there are certain things in place and the sun tends to rise and the seasons are reasonably predictable (though still waiting for The Daily Mail & Express's ice ages and tsunamis), so you have reasonably solid foundations to build on when you want to do something.

If there is a god , and I'm hedging my bets by being agnostic, I believe that the god would want us to tho live our lives to the best of our ability, and be kind to every living thing. The insecurity of life is demonstrated in the TED talk below which I found difficult to take in just because of the concepts including the Higgs-Boson particle , and in a tangential move away the seasonal song is "I Smell Winter" by the Housemartins, which I don't think has appeared on any Christmas compilations.

Also the fact I'm doing a seasonal song a day and tagging it with Christmas , means that Christmas is now one of my most common tags on here , soon to outstrip Apple and iPhones! It's quite funny that some of my most used tags are about things that I don't particularly care about , a bit like on Twitter , where if you want your tweet to go viral usually it's a complaint , which surely is not what our god would want if that god were on Twitter.

Oh and I do follow God on Facebook here , he is very good and I can live with this God's existence. Have a brilliant weekend everybody.

Monday 14 December 2009

I Smell Winter





It's dark and rainy , all we need is snow and then winter will truly be here. I was hoping there'd be a video of teh Housemartins' "I Smell Winter" but it wasn't to be so I've put in "Build" instead. A truly wonderful band.