The Eighty Minute Hour

It is sort of strange and amusing how when the weekend starts petering out that time seems to go so musch faster. It's basically the fact that on Friday night after the Friday afternoon where the clocks seeme dto stop and hours stretched out to seem like eighty minutes or longer despite the fact you were doing so much and seemingly becoming unbelievably productive.

Then when you get out you have the whole weekend , and full hourglass of being able to take it easy and do as you please. Then at nine o' clock on Sunday night the sixty four hours of pleasure time you had are reduced to eleven hours and seven of thoses you will hopefully be sleeping.

It's like when you are trying to meet a tight deadline (although with devcnt planning you can always meet deadlines as long as everyone does their job and there are no surprises or unexpected hitches).

I've borrowed the title from Brian Aldiss' excellent story which is a wickedly simple concept and I suggest you investigate it further, and you may soon believe it is actually happening.

I always illustrate why time seems to get faster by this concept:

When you are six, you get six weeks summer holiday from school. That seems like forever, a week for every year of your life. To get the same effect now I would need a sixt week summer holiday to see a break as unbelievabley wrong, but we get four weeks a year and I never take more than a week at a time because I don't want endless weeks at work without a break.

Sorry if this is a bit of a downer, it's not meant to be so I'll leave you with "Time Capives" from "Journey by Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, a wonderful band who were one of the first to you the Bentley Rhythm Ace Drum Machine which once went on a fifteen minute drum solo that they couldn't stop. Ah when things were mechanical in the pre digital age.

Sleep well.

Saturnight

I'm sure the title was used for a Cat Stevens compilation in the dim and distant past, in fact it was a Japanese only live pressing from 1976. Here's the description scraped formAmazon:

"CAT STEVENS Saturnight - Cat Stevens Live In Tokyo (Scarce 1974 Japanese-only limited edition 12-track LP recorded at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo in June 1974 & housed in a unique numbered sleeve with world tour dates that year printed on the back with an illustrated inner six-page Japanese/lyric insert & obi-strip. "

The title is a contraction of "Another Saturday Night" the song of Sam Cooke's that he covered and had a biggish hit with.

I am enjoying "The Fourteenth Letter" though people are dropping like flies and there seem to be a plethora of subplots to unravel and get tangled in.

I've also finished the last episode of "Timewasters" and hoping that there is a series two in the pipeline.

It's eleven of the clock on Saturday night so Cat Steven's "Another Saturday Night" would be appropriate, although it shares it's title with a great zydeco compilation by Charlie Gillett which I have a copy of on vinyl.

Sleep well.

Friday Night

"Blackness Within Blackness

Shadows Within Shadows

Darkness Within Darkness

Hidden and Sightless

This is Life For Some ......."

I'm not sure what brought that on, reading "The Fourteenth Letter" may have done it.

It's Friday night and I am ready for the final episode of "Timewasters" the rather excellent spiky, jazzy, time travel comedy with class lines, lots of laughs taking on institutionalised racism and sexism with more than a little good music.

I think they have been influenced by Post Modern Jukebox but the comedy quality an dthe music is totally spot on, so I'll include a clip from the series and  a take on Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" by PMJ , ironically returning almost to the Stevie Wonder original ("Past Time Paradise" from "Songs In The Key Of Life").

Finding Timewasters is a little difficult but there may be a legal option here.

So I suggest you sample all of these musical and visual treats, you will feel much improved by them.

Sleep well.

Friday Morning

I was thinking August would be difficult to keep up my steps because of my Liver Biopsy at the start of the month, but surprisingly that's not actually been an issue hitting 20K steps on a couple of days and sitting with a 30K step surplus and close of play yesterday.

I was also thinking that #August50 was an impossible target but after this post I only need to post 18 more entries before the end of the month and we still have two weeks to go, so that's nine posts in each of the next two weeks which is more than doable (is that a word? and how many times have I asked that question).

The problem with doing an hour's walk it that it takes an hour of your time and  to hit my 11K a day that does take two hours and i often think that could be better spent doing someting else.

On my walk to work I am always looking for photo opportunities and vary my routes, but always in the direction of work (essentially Newcastle City Centre) from home. I seldom deviate from this direction except when I have to pick someting up from the Post Office, and to be quite honest I prefer traversing parkland to urban areas.

Walking is a simple form of exercise and anyone can do it and make it interesting. I always found gyms soul destroying but others swear by them, but it's different strokes for different folks.

Today on my walk in I kept with Mike Nesmith and listened to "Tropical Campfires" for the first time, and though it covers some standards such as "Brazil" and "Begin the Beguine" more than adequately the original stuff is excellent, I particularly liked the instrumental "One". Specific late period Mike Nesmith songs are difficult to find on Youtube (ie they are not there) but I found this full concert from 2012 at Union Chapel for your enjoyment, which includes a few songs from "The Prison"

While it is grey , it is Friday and we have a wonderful weekend to look forawd to. Enjoy

Aretha IS Aretha

It was sad  that we lost Aretha and I've seen lots of "RIP" Aretha posts on Facebook, and people suddenly people doing the Facebook sadness as though Aretha were a close family member. It was the same with David Bowie, George Michael, Freddie Mercury and Lemmy and any artist you can think of.

All of a sudden their artistic output is halted.

Thanks to human brilliance and science and things like Facebook ,we can share our memories and listen to Aretha's sing and even watch her perform anywhere we are on our phones, tablets and computers.

I shared her Blues Brothers sequence singing "Think" which summed up  a small part of her brilliance, but she had a brilliant range of singing styles.

I feel for her family, and they will be grieving quite rightly, but her fans should be celebrating what she has done for them ,and enjoy the music she made because all of it made you feel uplifted and feel better. That's what music does for you and and song featuring Aretha will make you feel good.

I will leave you with her collaboration with George Michael, the appropriately titled "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me" .

Have a great Friday and enjoy some of Aretha's music. Remember the wealth of great music she has given us.

Reading The Garden

Tonight when I got home, I decided to read and listen to Mike Nesmith's "The Garden". It's surreal and follows on from The Prison, The narrative is fairly simple and the story can be read as you listen to the album. The narrative is split into chapters that take as their influes seven paintings by Monet:

1. The Artist's Garden of Giverny (1900)
2. A Bend in the Epte River, Near Giverny (1888)
3. Vertheuil in Summertime (1879)
4. Valley of the Petite Creuse (1889)
5. Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny (1885)
6. Wisteria (1920)
7. Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge (1899)

The album clocks in at 55 minutes but it does seem to pass more quickly than that, or it seemed to for me. The Wiki page is here.

While you don't have to have read "The Prison" itis referred to many times in "The Garden" and it does help if you have experienced "The Prison" fully.

I enjoyed both, though I don't feel I have to reread either but can still enjoy the excellent music.

There isn't too much from either album on youtube so I have included the opener from "The Prison" to give you a taste.

Link Past Geek Talent

I often get requests from people to add me to their networks on Linked In and I usually add them no problem, mostly they are recruitment wallahs , but today took the opportunity to trawl though my network list and cull cetrain people, mainly people who didn't have a photo or who have crossed me since we linked up.

The big surprise was the number of people who I had just forgotten about, and the surprising titles of some who I actually have friendships with and respect for.

I remeber after my redundancy at EE that I was really happy about (though not how they were after) I spent a couple of months with Geek Talent who had a brilliant recruitment concept that used social media connections including Linked In to create relationships between you and recruitment targets They've come a long way since then and were using a lot of software which I found impressive but felt I was swimming the deep end, but the people I worked with knew their stuff and could translate any ideas or notions that I had into something that was actually useful. Their site is worh a visit to find out more about the.

Rather than a music video I've included a video about Geek Talent featuring among others my friends Dominic (the MD) and Keith.

It is surprising how a Linked In request sent me off on a tangent to write this post.