Pointless

I like Pointless, it's a quiz show that actually demands some intelligence and you do learn things from it. Richard Osman's "House of Games" is similar except in includes "personalities" (most of who'm I don't know) and is extremely good natured because although there are prizes it's done for the fun of it. Rge "celebrity" Pointless game is also done for charity and, again, is very educational and enjoyable, co-hosted by Richard Osman and Alexander Armstrong  (President of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society and responsible for some extremely funny comedy sketches as part of the Armstrong and Miller duo with Ben Miller). So that's a hundred words which have nothing to do with what I was going to post about, apart from...

... I awoke from one of the most pointless dreams I've ever had, essentially I was doing something, either laying a floor or lawn on some waste ground under The Tyne Bridge which had a channel running from top left to bottom right towards the Ouseburn. There was a big mirror and records may have been involved and it might have been a carpet. Then I decided that the channel needed to run bottom left to top right so had to take everything up and redo it. It was on the Quayside side (North and Left is West and Right is East and I've just realised on the Gateshead side this would , at one point been a vague possibility. But my work life often means I have to undo things adn also reading Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" could have something to do with it and the carpet and been unwoven and now is being rewoven. But as you can see ultimately pointless.

So I am going to share Armstrong and Miller's streetwise Spitfire pilots with you as it's extremely funny. Although this unrelated pointless site is quite amusing.

Not Bored

I don't do blog posts when I'm away on short breaks although I haven't posted in nearly a week, which is quite a long blogging break for me, but Edinburgh was great but cold.

Edinburgh whilst being the joint capital of Scotland seems a remarkably unplanned city , which just adds to it's interest, and is small enough to easily explore on foot as well as having some amazing buildings and constructions. It's also full of small alleys, high level walks, stone steps and you can usually see some landmark so you can always find your way back if you ever get lost.

I got back yesterday evening and watched two episodes of 30 Rock, two of Veep and the final Frankie Boyle Scotland travelogue and then thought I don't have time to blog and realised how the quantity of choice on television can actually steal your time. The thing is I don't even have Netflix and despite it having lots of series I want to watch , my ivo disk is 90% full and I have Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer and the commercial channels hubs to watch so much television that I really don't have the time.

People often tell me they binge watch series, but more than two episodes of anything is too much for me, and then I have two Clive Barker books on the go and music to listen to too.

So as I close off this first March post to go to work , the sun is shining outside, and tomorrow I am going to visit Kirsty and Mark to see and hear Mark's latest record player upgrade and Edinburgh did provide me with four more pieces of vinyl , two New Order 12" singles , "Fans" by Malcolm McLaren and "Gris,Gris" by Dr John so I'll go with "Confusion" by New Order which has one of the cleverest covers I have ever seen, although I have seen similar examples before, but even the guy selling it in Vinyl Villains wasn't too sure what it was, and the remix I'm sharing (cos it uses the cover) was used in the film "Blade".

Amelia

I'm currently working my way through the discs of the box set "Forever Changing:The Golden Age of Elektra" and there is some damned awful folk music that wouldn't be out of place in "The Wicker Man" (an absolutely brilliant film which Christopher Lee did for free) , but the music improves as you work through the discs. Though there are gems on the early discs and duffers on the later discs.

"Five To One" by The Doors is a great song , vocals excellent and the bass and drums menacingly good, but the guitar and keyboards are just far too light, however on the self produced (with Bruce Botnick)  "Riders on The Storm" everything is perfect, and I didn't think I would recognise a song from the rain at the beginning. It sounds so good I am considering buying "LA Woman" on vinyl. Incidentally the following song "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be" also opens with rain and is also rather good and was going to be featured in this post but .....

... then "The True Story of Amelia Earheart" by Plainsong came on and starts by mentioning her Electra plane hit the ocean bed so given that I'm listening to Elektra albums it jumped to the top of the queue. The song is base on and unsubstantiated theory  but there is a website dedicated to her here if you would like to find out more.

There was also a great acapella version of "Amazing Grace" by Judy Collins which is worth tracking down.

So enjoy this Plainsong song my friends ...

Going Back

The older you get , the more stuff you have to revisit. Sometimes this works out and sometimes it doesn't. It happens with places, books , people , films and music. But you always have to try to see if it was as good as you think you remembered it.

The obvious song is the Byrd's cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Goin' Back" , and the Byrd's always made songs sound as though they were drenched in perfection. I first saw them performing Bob Dylan's "Mr  Tambourine Man" on Thank Your Lucky Stars around 1965 and loved it , but was shocked by how rough the original sounded. The thing is I eventually came to love Dylan's voice as well and sometimes found The Byrd's covers a little too perfect, as with "Positively Fourth Street" on "Untitled", but it's still good.

Back to what I was originally going to post, I had started to reread "Weaveworld" by Clive Barker. Part of it brings back memories of my time in Liverpool , but two hundred pages in I think that it's as good as when I first got into iit. My memory has always been rubbish (it's why I had difficulty with English Literature  and Law, I could remember what things were about and describe them but couldn't remember quotes and cases) so things keep popping up in the book that I had forgotten such as The Rake and even Suzanna, though I remembered Cal, the pigeons , Shadwell , The Scourge and of course The Magic Carpet.

"Weaveworld" still has the magic for me and I am looking forward to enjoying the bits I remember and the bits I've forgotten.

202222022020

There seem to be a lot of twos and zeroes in posts and dates at the moment and obviously that makes my tiny mind decide to do another post about the veritable plethora of twos and zeros. I suppose it's just the natural pattern seeking human trait, which I have picked up on in the past and hopefully will be able to do in the future.

I've done numerically sequenced post projects in the past such as #ALifeInNumbers which I did when I turned 59 and I'm sure I did one month where I included the day number in the song I chose, but I can't identify it so I must not have set up a hashtag for it.

I'm still relearning my Google Pixel 2XL although it seems to be making noises when I want it to be quiet but two days in, I'm a lot happier than I was withe the Samsung Galaxy A3, which was adequate and did it's job.

So this is just about m noticing things and noticing unnecessary correlations and thinking of a song to go with that. It's my second post today , so it can be fairly short I think, though looking at the title it almost looks binary, although numbers are just a shape to represent a concept.

I've heard people say you need to be good at maths to do Sudoku. No you don't , you need to be good at observation, pattern recognition and assimilating that information. I do one Sudoku a week in The Observer and it gives my mind a little work out though every now and then I make a mistake a screw it up, and sometimes I do manage to correct myself.

So as we're talking numbers we can go with "6345789" , my favourite version is the upbeat Ry Cooder version, although It's a great song originally by Wilson Pickett and covered by The Blues Brothers

A Haunted Palace

While the visits to this blog hit half a million this week after 13 years I found that a friend is a part collaborator in The Haunted Palace blog. If you liken my diaristic ramblings to a Gregg's pasty, great if that's what you fancy and like, A Haunted Palace is a three course meal at a Michelin starred restaurant.

Taking it's title from an Edgar Allen Poe poem it has a wonderful gothic look and every post is a long and detailed book chapter on it's particular subject with references and links, a haunted library of dark corners, happenings and imaginings. I've have dipped my toe into it and am impressed by the standards it sets itself , and each article shows me something new that I didn't know.

While we are in the realms of ghosts and the unknown , The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing came to mind for a possible song to accompany this, they are one of my favourite live bands and a Venn Diagram would find a few overlaps between them and The Haunted Palace.

The Haunted Palace was also the name of a 1964 Vincent Price film but it was based on the HP Lovecraft story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" which I shall have to track down and watch again, as I tended to watch any film based on HP Lovecraft in my youth. A modified version (to avoid copyright issues) is on youtube here.

So we'll go with "This House Is Not Haunted" by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing which is a wonderful take on things that go bump in the night.

220020022020

This is post 2200 on 20/02/2020 . I didn't plan it, it just happened, though I could have planned it, but I didn't. That's a lot of twos and zeroes and no other digits. Numbers can be both fascinating and boring, it just depends on your frame of mind.

Today I dropped into Windows and was tempted by reasonable priced vinyl , a Best of Bowie , "Diamond Dogs" and "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac . I have all these on digital and to be quite honest now I tend to buy vinyl for the sleeve as well as the music. The whole lot would have cost £35. Oh I forgot , there was also Deep Purple "In Rock" , one of my earliest metal album and still, in my opinion , a classic with a great cover, but really my space for vinyl is sort of full.

I believe that you should play music, not just have it. I think I bought a lot to support the artist, especially on CD, but I cannot play my CD collection which is why a chunk of it is on Discogs.

I took delivery of a reconditioned Google Pixel 2XL today and I am still relearning it and setting up apps on it. I need to get a protective cover and load some music onto it but I've got the basic apps on it and am well impressed with my buy from Music Magpie, but still slightly miffed that my Google Pixel would be fine if the charging port worked. Still c'est la vie.

So on this numerically coming together I am thinking of the Cat Stevens album "Numbers" which I do have on vinyl, which is beautifully put together and the music is good as well. A definitely worthy part of my collection so I'll share the opening "Whistlestar".