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".

Today's The Day

SevenDaysIn has just gone over the half million visit line. Also by tomorrow I will replace the Samsung Galaxy A3 with a Google Pixel 2XL , an older phone but significantly cheaper than a new one with the same twelve month guarantee and not much more expensive than repairing the defunct charging port on my Google Pixel. The really annoying thing is that I have a perfectly functional phone that I can't charge and therefor is NOT perfectly functional any more.

Over the last week my steps have significantly dropped off mainly because of the biting cold weather, which means the bus is a preferable option.

6Music was playing Tone Loc this morning, and I always loved "Funky Cold Medina" so we will share that on this extremely short post, although it still clocks in at around 150 words, a definite novella compared to some of my early posts (like the first "mission statement" one here, but I suppose diary entries can be like that,

So enjoy your Wednesday my friends.

Tomorrow's The Day ....

... that the blog hits half a million visits. It's taken a long time and after the visits dropped I wasn't sure how long it would be, but given that I'm now polling 150 visits a day and there are 80 more visits required it's safe to say that Wednesday the 19th of February is the day that SevenDaysIn hits the half a million mark. I'm quite surprised that that single sentence consists of over fifty words, though there is something that tells me that at school I used to write 100 word essays, that's like two or three sentences, there is no way that that could be true so I think my mind is playing tricks on me there.

My initial attempt at book writing floundered and died, and I do admire the people who can actually string together coherent text that grabs and keeps you attention. Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" and "Imajica" certainly do that , although not for the more genteel folk among us but for me riveting stuff.

So this is a latish Tuesday placeholder, which may bring itn one or two more views before I go to bed. I'm not really sure what piece of music to play although I introduced some friends to Barclay James Harvest recently via "Poor Man's Moody Blues" and for some reason the incredibly contrived "Titles" maybe appropriate , wonderful tune, wonderful music but the lyrics are made up of Breatles song titles so it can be deemed very clever or very crass, but I do actually like it.

See what you think and let me know with a comment.

.... a Magic Carpet

I finished "Follow The Music" who's final chapter was very contrivedly 33⅓ and was wondering what to read next. I sort of wanted fiction, but something I know I'd be happy with so I have gone back to the first Clive Barker book I read, "Weaveworld", it's in a large format BCA edition with "Cabal" (which found it's way into film as "Nightbreed" , an interesting twist where the real monsters are the humans and the "monsters" are ghettoised and persecuted and features David Cronenberg acting as the major villain).

"Weaveworld" was Barker's second novel after "The Damnation Game" although he had produced "The Books of Blood" short story collection. I am currently reading "Imajica" on Kindle  (my favourite book ever) but I now know why I was hooked by "Weaveworld" , sixty pages in wit just a glimpse of the magic carpet referred to in the title and part of this is telling me "when you have read this you know you have to read the other books" so it looks like I am unlikely to be reading any more new books for a while.

I was trying to think of a song to go with this and while I could have chosen "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf (great name from the Herman Hesse novel), "The Magic Suitcase" by Carbon/Silicon has been playing in my bed, while the subject matter is a little dodgy (the suitcase contains a bomb, I think) it's a superb song and the second best song on their brilliant debut album.

It's grey Tuesday and time for me to leave the house, but if you need some new book places to visit "Weaveworld" is a brilliant place to go.

Keep Yourself Alive

One of the things I say to people is YOU are the most important person in your life, to which people tell me I'm wrong and say it's their partner , their children or grand children. My reply is is you have to keep yourself it the best condition to be there for them, if you are not there, their lives would be missing you for love and support , so that's why you have to put yourself first.

There's a Michael Moorcock book "Breakfast In The Ruins" that finishes each chapter with an impossible "What Would You Do?" dilemma, if you follow the link you can see some of the horrible dilemmas listed, and I had misremembered one as "You and your child are taken by a group of thugs and they give you five minutes to decided who dies, you or your child" . The horrible thing with this scenario is that you know that you cannot trust these people and you are probably more able to defend yourself if you chose yourself.

So what brought this on , again it's finishing "Follow The Music" , the two artists I was waiting to be covered were Harry Chapin and Queen and the latter's first single was "Keep Yourself Alive" which impressed me no end, with the excellent guitar phasing and "No Synthesisers". I was unaware that the band were all degree educated and Freddie Mercury was classically trained. Jac Holzman love the first album but was not impressed with them when he first saw them live, so he wrote them a letter, which they took on board. He remarked how hard working they were and really the rest is history.

The thing is look after yourself because you are very important to the people in your life. I am diabetic and many people have told me they would never inject themselves, they would rather die. I said "What about your family?" and injections are just a tiny prick that you get used to. I still inject five times a day although the amount of insulin is reducing as it the weight (slowly) and I have to sort about twenty tablets a day , and while it is, at worst , a chore, I do this because I want to have a good life, and me having a good life means that everyone who I mean something to will be happy that I am.

So have a great Sunday , Storm Dennis seems to have calmed and there's not been too much damage here, which is good......