NOW my body says IT WANTS SLEEP !! But it is time for work , the time for sleep was last night , not this morning. So it's time to load up on drugs and porridge and coffee which will keep me going and cause me to have a great day.
Yeas it's very short but it's an excuse to play some Julian Cope
OK I've had very little sleep and my eyes hurt a bit but I am going to make sure that today will be absolutely brilliant. I don't know what's going to happen , but there are so many opportunities everyday that we often don't take and I'm just going to grab me some.
The amazing thing about last night is that all I ate were two nectarines , so it was hardly going to give me a sugar rush that would keep me awake.
Anyway being up at this time means I can let these words fall out of my head through the keyboard on to the printed screen to reside forever on the world wide web in the cloud or whatever.
If you see me say hello , and smile at every opportunity , it gives you the same rush as eating chocolate. Keep cool , I home the sun shines and we get a summers day , but friends can make the sunshine and that's the sort of thing that is worth getting up for (especially of you can't sleep).
Gone are the days when I could survive of three hours a night sleep , but I am sure tonight I will sleep perfectly. Here we go no
And what better way to start the day than with one of my favourite Clash songs "Train In Vain"
Wide awake on a school night , with absolutely nothing on my mind. I've tried to sleep, got up , found something to do , read, gone back to a warm bed, thought about playing guitar , but it's three o clock in the morning , which the neighbours wouldn't appreciate.
Ages since this has happened. I know I need sleep cos it's work tomorrow , but I don't want to be reliant of coffee tomorrow to keep me going. Yes it's a day closer to the weekend but I still appreciate I need to be fresh.
I ran into and exchanged emails with an old friend yesterday so that perked me up , though I am just going through one of those down phases I suppose. Everyone gets them and often use it for a reason to rail at someone or something. I am always looking to channel even negative energy into something positive , so that's why I am writing this.
I obviously need some social contact but , hey it's 3 in the morning and everyone with any sense is in bed , tucked up and asleep.. One positive from this is that it's another post closer to my millennium aim which I hope to hit before the end of the year. I'll roughly have to maintain three posts every five days to hit that target (87 posts in five months so roughly 150 days , you do the mathematical calculations)
Anyway , the obvious song for this is the Dictator's "Sleeping With The TV On" except I'm not sleeping and the TV isn't on. As I pointed out recently on Instagram and Facebook , once you see the cover of "Go Girl Crazy" you don't even need to listen to the music to know you will love this band , and if you do listen to their music .... well you are in for a total treat.
Today , and the last few days have been sodden by rain and black clouds. I came home to my website not working and my favourite FTP program not working , but it's so old I can't trouble shoot it so have to get used to a new one , then I went out , luckily with an umbrella but got hit with another downpour.
Anyway I'm sorting things out slowly but finding it really hard to be positive about the whole thing. I think part of it is the dark clouds that don't exactly brighten your mood. But I always find positives in things even when all seems like it's disappearing over a cliff. If that's what happens then you deal with it . If stuff goes your probably not meant to have it. Certainly my old FTP program hits that category nad my new one is Windows 10 Compatible so it was probably going to have to be done.
Thing is it's half way through the week , for most people it's on or near payday , and tomorrow will be a bright and lovely day , with lots of great fun things happening . There is so much good to enjoy that most of the time you can ignore and forget about the bad. Which is my intention for this short post. And I will choose one of my mum's favourite Carpenter's songs "Happy" because will make me happy and it's a damned site more uplifting than that Pharrel song.
Last night I watched an episode on Odyssey on catch up TV. I'm also reading "A Brief History Of Time" by Stephen Hawking and today discovered what a quark is . I knew the name and know it's a vegetarian filler food but I didn't actually know what a quark was. This started me thinking and I recalled an incident from twenty years back after taking a psychometric test....
...after the test the guy told me I had a problem , but it could possibly be corrected. I asked him what the problem was. He told that my problem was that I always wanted to be right! I didn't see this as a problem, and asked him didn't everybody want to be right , as an example didn't he want to be right in his assessment assessment of me? His assessment was correct , but I didn't see it as a problem and still don't see it as a problem. I still want to always be right, but that statement unqualified does not show the full picture. I WANT to be always right BUT I am often WRONG, and when I am wrong I want to be told how I am wrong and to be shown how to get it right. I know that I'm not infallible , I would just like to be .... especially when I put a bet on the horses! At the time I was working with a manager who took me to one side after I's questioned a situation and told me "You might be right ... but I'm in charge" .... though that was was true I knew he was wrong and I was right but there was nothing I could do about the situation. I was right but not in control.
And this sort of brings me to the next part , is that in general we want to be in control , but not be controlled although we may need and want direction. When I was watching the TV last night I was thinking before the option of recording we were very regimented by TV . You had to be at your set at a particular time or else you missed that program , and god forbid there were clashes , yet people still complained about repeats (yet most digital stations serve nothing but repeats these days), but now I very seldom watch live TV, I let my recorder build up what I think I want to watch and watch it in almost chaotic fashion. Whatever I want whenever I want and with apps like BBC iPlayer and my Samsung Note 4 Phone and my iPad and Laptop wherever I want. So is that disorder or the control I want ? I think it's latter , I feel I have tools to manage my disorder and allow me to order my situation as I want.
I do think it's good to be right , but you have to also be open to new ideas and the fact that you may be wrong. We are at our most vulnerable when we lose control and are reliant the power and ability of others to help us get it right. I always try to be there for others , and part of that is that I want others to be there for me if I need their help.
Given the tone of this post , what else could I choose but Joy Division's She's Lost Control.
Incidentally this is post 911 given my last post was about numbers.
Anyway I didn't think I would finish this , but I still want to be right , I still want to help people , I still want to be there for my friends and family , I sill want to be in control and I still want to have a wonderful time. So everyone have a fantastic day.
I stated that I wanted to hit a thousand blog posts and a hundred thousand hits by New Year's Eve 2015. That's not likely to happen although combined views for both my blogs are over 100K now and the combined number of posts is up to 970 , so if I add the two together , then both the targets are achievable.
At the weekend I attended the rather excellent PKD Festival (see here for my review) and met a pirate at one of the burger vans . One the odd things was that there were lots of variations on meat sandwiches involving Aberdeen Angus Steaks ,Sausages , Chicken, and the like , and then you had salad! You can't have a salad roll , although that was your only option if you were a vegetarian.
A Classy Tricycle
Anyway apart from the music , there were pirates , big guns a small fairground , bike and cars , something for everyone , and I think they sold a lot of food on the day. Oh and they had a doughnut stand as well , but I'm not a huge fan so I gave it a miss.
Anyway this is just a short post about what I'd like to do and what I enjoyed doing at the weekend, so all of you have a good night and enjoy whatever you are doing tomorrow.
Although essentially this post was meant to be about numbers and I've always loved this Bob Doroug song so I thought I'd put it in.
When I was at primary school my headmistress Mrs Walsh told us that a genius who could see and explain things very simply. She gave the example of a guy who went to a match company and said he could save them a great deal of money for actually stopping doing something.
In those days match boxes were sandpapered on two sides. He posited that people always checked for where they were goig to strike the match , so the boxes only needed one strip of sand
paper instead of two. At a stroke halving the company's sandpaper bill. It does sound obvious, but until he came along no one had thought about.
I am currently reading Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History Of Time" , and there is no down in my mind that the guy is probably in the genius category. The book is less than two hundred pages, but is packed with content and not a word is wasted , which means it is slow going , but his style of writing comes across with a "Go On, You CAN Get This!" message.
That's a long probably unconnected intro to what this post is actually about . I may have blogged about this or touched on this before but it is really about musical genius. If someone were to ask for an example , Jimi Hendrix , Brian Wilson , Lennon and McCartney are probably goig to come over in responses and there's no doubt that these were musical Genii . I would add Joni Mitchell , PJ Harvey , Kate Bush and Sandy Denny to that list as well , but it's annoying that music is seen as a boy thing. Girls are good too.
The problem is that most of the music that these artists produced was complex, and taken to extremes by bands like King Crimson , Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes. One of the main ironies was that of Yes's initially simplest constructs "And You And I" is a lovely melody set to basically three acoustic chords , but by the time it's finihed it hits ten minutes with lots of additional bombast. I still love it though , and it was released , uncut as a seven inch single.
Ok we're here , real genius is to do something musically so simple that anyone can do it. Songs with three chords or less. The Velvet Underground's first album didn't initially sell many copies but everyone who bought it formed a band. The descening G riff from "I'm Waiting For The Man" can be heard in "White Riot " by the clash, "In The City" by The Jam and "Holidays In The Sun" by The Sex Pistols. The inspired Jonathan Richman , who's "Roadrunner" is only two chords "D" and "A" which any one can learn on a guitar in minutes. Van Morrison's Gloria and The Who's "I Can't Explain" are more examples of easy to play songs , along with The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" a staple of any garage band's repertoire , and The Kinks "You Really Got Me" and "All Day, and All Of The Night" also fall into this area.
Another example of genius is the one note guitar solo. If you can make one note sound good you are a true genius. To this day I am only aware of two examples of this "I'm A Hog For You Baby" by The Coasters and "Tommy Gun" by The Clash. To do that , is inspired genius.
So I've bookended this post with those two songs , sitting an Amazon MP3 selection in the middle for you to sample. Love to hear your thoughts on this , and sorry this one has gone on a bit
