Belling on Halloween

 I am really enjoying "We Are Bellingcat" by Elliot Higgins, and just getting amazed by their methods which are essentially a meticulous attention to detail. On instance was tracking down a Russian War criminal though the Russian disinformation and obfuscation by finding a name and mobile phone number on an insurance application.

Thing on this when you fill informs and especially those one offs to find out what kind of potato you are and the like.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone for pointers and how investigative journalism has been turned on it's head.

It is Halloween and published a Halloween playlist here on Vocal if you would like to check it out. When I see all the costumes and creatures out on Halloween I think how would people react if these suddenly became real. Now that would be interesting.

My friend Ana has just had a book published , "Light and Darkness" which you can check out here.

Musicwise as it's Halloween , we are going with "Hellraiser" by Ozzy Osbourne ad Ian Kilmister which I never knew existed but it ghosted in on me, and I really like it.

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 - An Index of All My Vocal Writing
2. A Halloween Film Evening
3. A Waterfall of Clouds
4. The Witch's Promise
5. Waiting For The Green Light - The Genius of Bill Hicks

May Ja , May Nein

The 8th of May!

Well I have a homophone for May 9 , although I am not sure how long I can keep this going , although it has given me a line to keep the #maywriteabit going although I did like the 8th of May Motorhead / Lemmy (Ian Fraser Kilmister) memes going round yesterday.

The blogger went into the new format , which like Facebook , seems anything but an improvement. When you are writing , ideally you want something that is going to look in the same ballpark as the published item and the new blogger interface is not that.

So this Saturday is another gorgeous day , but I have been working and listening to more of Max Richter's "Sleep" , and also gone through the childhood upbringing of one of the protagonists in Christopher Brookmyre's "Not The End of The World".

I was sure I'd written about this recently but my Google Pixel 2XL only actually starts after unlocking when I switch it on. This may be true of other phones , but this is the first time that I have started switching it off at night.

I feel that this Bank Holiday is a total damp squib and although I didn't work yesterday I don't really feel that I have had a day off and work starts at 8am on Monday again.

While I have been walking , I like to take photographs of trees , grass and wildlife but with this good weather you get lots of people on Nunsmoor and the Town Moor relaxing in the sun and I always avoid taking pictures of people. Yesterday I managed to use trees to avoid some people, and I wanted the tree in the picture anyway , so if you see one of my pictures with a tree in it , there may be someone behind that tree.

Yesterday I heard a lounge jazz version of "Ace of Spades" played by Huey Morgan on 6Music and I was not impressed. I know the obvious song to go for would be Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" but I am going for another one that 6Music have been playing The Streets & Tame Impala's collaboration "Call My Phone Thinking I'm Doing Nothing Better" ,I do love Mike Skinner's word, this does sound like classic Streets. It is rather good.