Home Is The New Work

Today I was going to use a bit of my free time to put together a slideshow of "The Murderous Memorandum" by David King, but I am in contact with him and his partner and my friend tattooist Sophia Gourley and sent a message that he should do that given that he is an excellent artist and musician / composer. I shared my Nick Cane / Dr Faustus video which has proven quite popular and you can enjoy it here.

So that means I need to find something else to put my talents to, I am learning a couple of songs which may find their way to my Youtube channel and I have a couple of deliveries scheduled.

I have the first two series of "Orange Is The New Black"  which I am working through and am now on the final series of 30 Rock, but my TIVO disk is still 75% full so my Netflix trial is still on hold and I need to get a week of Now TV to watch series 3 of Westworld and Series 2 of Britannia.

I supposed that influenced the title of the post, and Home Is The New Work. I am wondering if people will have problems going back to an office environment if this ever gets back to normal. The situation has been predicted is so many dystopian future novels, and I am shocked how incompetent the UK and USA governments have been handling this.

As I am writing this I am listening to "Grand Hotel" by Procol Harum, and to be quite honest I don't think I have listened to it before and it is absolutely excellent. Windows Media Player and being at home is allowing me to explore my music collection a lot more than I have in years. iTunes and even MusicMatch were nowhere near as fast , efficient and convenient. People keep telling me a Kindle with Alexa is fine , but it keeps suggesting I get Spotify , and doesn't even reference the stuff I've bought on Amazon , and as for my ripped music , I can forget about that.

So we'll go with the title track from "Grand Hotel" and it is as impressive as it's title. Check it out.

Isn't Life Changed

So the UK moves towards a sort of lockdown, with too many people think that they are OK. I THINK I am Ok but I don't KNOW that I am OK, and that is probably true for everyone not showing symptoms. My posts will probably address the situation for the near future, but I am thinking this may never be over. Even if COVID-19 is dealt with there may be something more virulent waiting round the corner.

On the other the other hand many forms of Cancer are curable , as a kid that was it , AIDS , SARS etc have all been faught successfully so COVID-19 is just another battle to be fought.

We need to keep away from people we don't know (sounds like advice you give to children) but many adults seem to be just ignorant of this. I had to take a bus today , there was one other passenger on the bus so sat well away from them. Then someone else got on the bus, sat on the seat in front of me (plenty of others further away to choose from) and got on the phone to berate someone about the fact that the person they were phoning needed to make sure they kept away from others. Luckily my stop was next so I went to the front of the bus to distance myself and get off to renew my driving licenses.

Sharing "Isn't Life Strange" by The Moody Blues which seems vaguely appropriate for these times. One of my biggest worries is actually keeping my steps up, though I don't see us being confined to houses , just confined to as little interaction with people we don't know as possible.

Today I had a phone consultation re my Cirrhosis of the Liver but I know the consultant well and that was fine. We may find we don't have to travel as much. I remember the shock of someone at work saying "Maybe I shouldn't be travelling to London every day for a one hour meeting. My jaw dropped. Some people are either unbelievably stupid or selfish or both.

A Timely Writing - Group Hug

A semi poem for our current situation:

Group Hug

I don't know that you have it

You don't know that I have it

Let's stay a little away from each other

We can still talk

Wave

Sing to Each Other

Speak

Text

Speak on our phone

or Skype

Or Many Social Media Platforms

Look out for those Who Can't

We Can Still Be Friends

We Can Still Share So Much

You Matter To Me

And (I Think)

I Matter To You

We Will Get Through This

And We Will Hug Once More

Let#'s Look Forward To

A Massive Group Hug

Round Grey's Monument

(Or Wherever)

We Are Bigger , and Stronger thank this

Group Hug

And a song so go with it ... from the appropriately named "Life'll Kill Ya" album another of my favourite Warren Zevon songs "I Was In The House When The House Burned Down "

Inside

I'm glad to see that my posting is down this year, although I don't think the quality has improved any.

I am listening to a lot more of my purchased music thanks to this lockdown but also doing quite a lot more planned walking as it would be terribly easy to just stay at home.

I am thirty pages from the end of "Weaveworld" and the story has not gone exactly the way I remembered it,  although it is a definite one for a revisit, and think it would make a great film, it's gonna be followed by "Cabal" which did surface as the film "Nightbreed" in which humanity show themselves to be the true monsters , a situation reflected in how b=people are behaving these days.

I did receive to amazingly excellent news today which I can't share with anyone but close friends until the news becomes public.

I've also caught up on a lot of recorded TV and if it keeps on like this I may have to watch some DVDs , it's a long time since I did that.

We'll go with "Inside" by Jethro Tull which is semi appropriate for these times

Memory

The last few days I've forgot things I should know , but the fact that I've remembered that I forgot means my memory is not totally shot, though it has never been good.

Firstly I forgot the name of a model of a Ford that I once had (two cars) , I knew the car just not the model name then I forgot the name of someone I've been working with. Someone mentioned her name and it clicked in, the information is in there just at times it refuses to surface.

I did a search of Ford car models and there it was , Ford Sierra, a car I liked but the name just wouldn't come to mind. And that's the thing , I may not know things, but I know where to find things , or to spot things in the midst of other things. The thing is , if my memory is so bad , how can I know how to find things , because that ability must be something that resides in memory.

It's not something that bothers me, because I always fine what I need.

I'm going to share a Spanish video of Soft Machine's "Memories" with Robert Wyatt on vocals, which is a song I've always liked and has been revisited by Robert down the years.

Windows Media Player?

Yesterday I tried using the recommended Windows 10 Media player Groove which would not recognise the music library. For years I've been using iTunes , but that is just slow , cumbersome bloatware,  and Amazon Music is not much better.

I then went to Windows Media Player and accidentally pressed a small icon which changed the view and very shortly had logged all my network music in it's library (iTunes took about two days to do this) , the only slight problem being that it defaults to the 32 bit version , but I have put the 64 bit version on the quick access bar.

So today I have listed to a Joy Division boxed set, a best of Julian Cope and a best of Warren Zevon. While the sound quality is a bit imperfect , it's great to listen to my own music collection rather than my normal 6Music diet, not that there's anything wrong with 6Music.

The thing is I am very happy with my musical options around my computer.I'm now listening to "God Save Us" by The Oz Elastic band which was released on Apple Records (and featured John Lennon) to raise money for the Oz Magazine Obscenity case.


So we'll go with "Mr Bad Example" one of my many favorite Warren Zevon songs, I think it's a polka , the lyrics are just perfect. Just a thought he looks very like Heisenberg (Walter White) from "Breaking Bad" which would be very appropriate ......

A Play(List) For Today

Thanks to Sky Comedy I am working my way through Veep and 30 Rock. 30 Rock is not on demand and is broadcasting three episodes a day, which I am trying to keep up with, and am now just two episodes in arrears after watching four of five episodes a day for the last few days. It is an easy watch , and the episodes are short as well as being on the nail funny, but am I watching too much TV?

I'm also going through Lucifer and Picard on Amazon Prime as well as having two Clive Barker books on the go, sio am I doing to much being entertained rather than actually doing stuff?

Also today I went to a local supermarket who's shelves were being cleared by panic buyers and the queues at the tills were backed up with huge loaded trolleys, I laughed , walked out , and went to a smaller local shop, got what I needed and came home. Most of this is fuelled by a lying media and a government that is only bothered about lining pockets of the already wealthy, but c'est la vie , what do I know.

After my earlier post I thought I could list a few songs relevant to our current situation, though it's still not that long when you had to put together a tape in real time rather than a playlist. All the songs link to a Youtube video for you to watch and listen to.

So here we go:

• Panic in the World - Be Bop Deluxe
• Spreading The Disease - Queensryche
• Isolation - John Lennon
• Panic - The Smiths
• Virus - Iron Maiden
• Splendid Isolation - Warren Zevon
• Virus - Bjork
• Shake The Disease - Depeche Mode
• Isolation - Joy Division
• Hot, Hot, Hot!!! - The Cure

I had to have something by The Cure in , didn't I? And from 30 Rock we have Alec Baldwin in a quartet singing on the underground.