I got up this morning and needed lights on everywhere. The days are getting shorter. The Mail and Express blame it n foreigners . Seriously, we're still in summer, the weather has been great , it's Friday which means the weekend is here, so all is good.
This is my 1100th post on here, that's quite a lot , and does provide me with a great online diary of stuff worth remembering.
Recently I started another blog just for me to let off steam here as I do like to keep this one positive,and there are still lots of great things to be positive about. The UK are doing well in the Olympics and the EU actually tops the Olympic table , or it would do if we were part of it.
Anyway, as I said it is Friday, the weekend is nearly here , the weather is great (although skies at the moment are grey) so everything is in place for maximum enjoyment.
I know this isn't a particularly memorable post but 1100 is not a particularly memorable number really.
Over the past couple of days I've noticed a lot of smiles and a lot of glum faces. The people are all in similar situations. I don't know what their situations are but I find even (and maybe especially ) when things are not good a smile makes YOU feel better and it becomes contagious. Generally if you smile and someone , they will smile back at you and you will both end up feeling better.
I know I've written about this lots in the past and I may be repeating myself and you may read this and thing "Oh No he's going on about smiling and being happy AGAIN!". I make no apologies.
I know there are people who are only happy when they are miserable (often centred on Manchester .... only joking) , but it makes me feel much better when people are happy, so maybe I'm being more than a little selfish,
Just a thought one of my favourite albums of the moment is Manchester's Improving Daily by Edward II , and it really is one of the most beautifully produced albums I've seen in my life. It retails at the same price as any other CD but when I got it delivered the package was secured by sealing wax and you can see what it looks like on one of my Instagram Posts here. It really is a beautiful package so I will use a song from it "A Humorous and Interesting Dialogue" that was used in support of the NHS.
But the weekend is almost over , so if you are with someone smile , and if you are going to work tomorrow , smile, and your day will be much much better.
Every smile you give , you will get back in spades. Enjoy my friends.
Last night Preston North End hosted Hartlepool United in the latest incarnation of the League Cup, first round at Deepdale. I use an app called Fotmob and discovered that since 2010 Hartlepool had not scored a goal against Preston and had lost every match by the odd goal apart from one 5-0 defeat. Jeff Stelling is the world number one Hartlepool supporter.
Last night they defended heroically until the 94th minute when Eoin Doyle scored for us as extra time, and a draw loomed. That mus hurt, it would hurt me definitely.
It is good to see partisan , knowledgeable sports presenters , and lets face it I don't like all the 'B' clubs near Preston (Bolton , Burnley , Blackpool, Blackburn) and everyone hates Leeds and Millwall, but it adds to the interest of the program.
So cheer Jeff up and buy his book. I 've included my favourite football song because this is a vaguely football related post so you can enjoy England's Irie by Black Grape.
When I write blog posts I often get sidetracked and end up writing about things that weren't there when I started writing. This is just to see if I can write something reasonably focused.
People have described be as a Corbynista , because I am generally left wing. It's more about caring that people get the best and are not mistreated and stay under the heel of privileged classes. I will expand this in my new blog And Annoyingly but I started out as a Tory voter (my dad still is) , and recently watched an excellent TED talk by a right wing conservative here which rightly points out that in the modern world we need to work together , watch it here it's excellent.
I'm also reading PJ O'Rourke's "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards" which again has a lot of useful and pertinent points in there . His one paragraph evaluation of Donald Trump is brilliant which is basically "if he didn't have paroled Enron accountants he'd be worth less than your cat"
The title of the post is just something that came to me and basically I suppose with what I've been going on about is surreally appropriate.
Anyway there is only one song that this post can have, and that's the Bonzo Dog Band's "No Matter Who You Vote For, The Government Always Gets In".
Last week I didn't post much for various reasons (see here) and then got to thinking what is a normal rate of posting things. Almost everybody on Facebook posts something everyday , often several times a day , and often it's just reposting something they have seen and liked. So I post more on Facebook than I do on here.
Usually Facebook is about being in the moment , it's what's happening at the time, and then things get lost and forgotten. People often use it to let off steam or moan about things, and too be quite honest a lot those sort of things I just ignore, though if someone is having I bad time I will contact them and see if can help.
Anyway , in my first year of blogging I posted 6 items , that's an average of 1 post every 2 months (60 days) , here is my first post which I hadn't a clue why I was doing this. The next post was about Krautrock but I had just lifted from a music section on my Song of The Salesman site but then decided not to go further with but I thought the piece had some merit.
I then wrote nothing until I went on holiday to Dublin and decided this would be a travel blog , hence the name. But that didn't take.
Anyway the following year I posted 46 times , almost once a week , and really that should be what I am aiming for and since that time (2008) I have written fairly consistently, about absolutely anything. In 2013 I posted 244 times that's two posts every three days , which is a lot of writing. This year I have posted 66 times and expect to maybe do 100 posts by the end of the year.
Last year I posted my thousandth post (here) which was in the middle in the middle of my Oddysey58 project which was a song for every year of my life which I do intend to somehow turn into an ebook, combining it with another book project I have started but not finished.
My posts tend to get 50-50 views though the biggest one has had over 900 views but is a rubbish post (here) though my most read post ever is on my Spoongig blog about the reopening of The Old Fox in Felling with over 1,100 views.
I chose "In The Meantime" by Spacehog because they had a song called "Millions" but I couldn't find it but I love In The Meantime with it's motif lifeted from The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Telephone and A Rubber Band.
Anyway this morning started out very grey , but it's now sun shining but very windy, so it's the start to another week and if the weather is anything to go by , it's going to be a good one.
This is just about an email that amused me but because of a minor dose of "political correctness" (ie you can't ask the person who raised the question to clarify what they mean, you must ask someone at your level or lower). This email had gone through about six iterations (it was probably 3 or 4 but 6 sounds better) before it finally came to me.
It was a request for information on how to do something in the email title , nothing major , a simple question , but terminated by a strange sounding TLA , which I think was the cause of the problem.
It went like:
"How do you do XXXXXX EOM"
It was the EOM that was the killer. It was an email and the only thing that meant anything to me was End of Month, so I emailed the originator who told me with a smiley it meant "End of Message" , which meant the the person's question became crystal clear.
That was a bit of computer code being used as a TLA to end a sentence when a full stop or question mark would suffice. No harm was done and it made us all chuckle , but if someone like me hadn't entered the email trail trail , how long would it have gone on for ... or maybe that's why I was included as I often get things sorted. So it was a case of using something in the wrong place at the wrong time which to me is an obvious cue for Dr John's"Right Place, Wrong Time"
An Addendum to my argument is that apparently EOM can be added to the title of an email to signify that it doesn't need to be opened, so it was being used correctly , but no one on the email trail knew what it meant apart from the originator and now me.
It is another beautiful day so enjoy the wonderful weather and have a great Sunday.
,br>
I was just checking my blog and this post a bout the potential closure of Newcastle City Hall here, had been getting a lot of attention. I don't know who from but it's the third most read this week. I also missed the Dictators on Wednesday and Chase Park Festival today (here is my review from last year) , I have been amazingly remiss in my gig planning.
These days pessimists will start talking about Alzheimers , but the reality is that we all forget things, we remember things for no reason and some stuff becomes buried deep , so deep we don't know it's there.
One of the reasons I keep this blog , is the same as keeping a diary , except this is online and anyone can see it, and because of that people look at things that I had forgotten about and causes me to remember and revisit. Sometimes I remember that I had recorded something and then search the blog to find it. It really is a useful tool.
My memory has always been strange . When I did Law and English Literature I could remember all about cases but not the names of cases , and I knew what happened in plays but could never remember any quotations. I usually don't know how to do things but I do know where to look to find out how to do things.
So anyway I thought I would just share that with you and you could always do a random search of this blog , you never know what you might find.....even I don't know exactly what I will find ... and I'm the one who wrote the damned thing.
I've chosen a re-edit of Robert Wyatt'sMemories spliced with the finale to The Blue Angel , and that has led me to a whole new treasure trove of discovery
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Oh and below is Robert Wyatt's take on Peter Gabriel's Biko , and I just love it, one of the most powerful songs I've ever heard and although it sound slight at first , it works it's waky into your psyche . I love Robert Wyatt... and this one of the discoveries that I mentioned.
