Things Rob likes to do (apparently)

This is a meme I picked up from little.red.Anna, so before it was a meme it was a herher. (Sorry about that.)

The basic idea is, you type into Google "[insert your name here] likes to" and see what the first ten hits reckon you like. Apparently Rob likes to:

....tan [tan? tan? what is this tan of which you speak? is it a mythical regeneration which happens after the burning and the falling off of skin? I know it not]

....go fast [OK, who was watching me on the M90 on Sunday? own up...but I don't get a buzz from speed in itself. The Russian Air Force used to sell flights on their Mach 3 interceptors (I forget which MiG number) and I suppose being briefly the fastest (or joint fastest - unless the pilot has fallen out) person on the planet might be quite cool]

....draw [nope, not to save my life - though I did briefly do a good line in "Dassa's lellow car", that being a cartoon of our cream-coloured 2CV done for my daughter Vanessa when she was very small]

....smell feet [ewww]

....get his friends drunk [while I like to drink and don't mind getting drunk if it doesn't get inconvenient, why would I pay for other people to get drunk? It's hardly a spectator sport unless you have a rather sick sense of humour]

....play music [now you're talking: yes please, as much as possible]

....rock and roll all night and BBQ on Saturdays [sounds good to me if the music's right and it's a good barbecue, though I'd probably then be too full to rock and roll on Saturday night. Roll, maybe]

....talk about difficult subjects [oooh! oooh! I do that! Or then again, I can get all enthusiastic about Wagner operas, stellar evolution, the St Kilda archipelago, points of common ground among religions, and antique clarinets, to name but a few. How many kinds of nerd are you?]

....lick people [ewww]

....sleep in on Saturdays when he is not volunteering at the Humane Society [I never volunteer at the Humane Society. I do like to sleep on Saturdays though. And other days, given half a chance.]

So: any of my regulars care to take up this challenge?

I'm sorry to have missed this

Model T Ford centenary celebration

I was at work in any case, but I wasn't aware it was happening until I saw the TV news tonight.

My hero (or one of them)

Just read this and thought it worth sharing. Having become familiar with Peter Brook both through his reputation (his RSC Midsummer Night's Dream is, I think, still a contender for greatest Shakespearean production ever) and through his films (Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, Meetings With Remarkable Men) I was very disappointed to have to miss his production of the Mahabharata which inaugurated (I think) the Glasgow Tramway Theatre (my daughter's birth was imminent). However, he returned several times to the Tramway, with La Tragédie de Carmen, Impressions de Pelléas, La Tempête and The Man Who....., all of which I did manage to get to. I believe there are people who do not fall instantly under Peter Brook's spell when they see his productions. I am not one such.

Who put the goat in there?

Sal just linked to this down in one of my comments boxes, and I thought it deserved greater exposure, combining as it does two of my enthusiasms (linguistic humour and Bollywood). There's evidently a lot of this kind of stuff about, but this particular example is rather splendid.

And hi, Sal (waves).

A new metaphor for blogging

The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

I've just been checking to make sure I recorded Queen Of Sheba: Behind The Myth properly off the History Channel. (It's the first time I've tried recording from the cable receiver onto the new hard disk recorder, but I seem to have got the settings right.) It was all about excavations at her old capital at Mareb, on the edge of the Yemeni desert, and looks as though it will prove really interesting.

My ass would truly have been grass had I screwed up (hence my checking before the programme was repeated at midnight): Hilary and I are both fascinated by all things Yemeni, having visited the Yemen Arab Republic, as it then was, back in 1987. Our visit to Mareb came right at the end of two and a half weeks, and was one of the high points of the holiday. Quite apart from its archaeological marvels, Mareb stays in my mind because of a memorable breakfast. We were eating our omelettes and tomato salads - the full Arabian breakfast, as it were - in a little cafe just opposite some big Ministry of Defence site or other, and noticed a trail of people coming in. Now in Yemen the carrying of a gun is very much the macho thing for males to do: from teenage boys to decrepit old men, from muzzle-loaders to AK47s, there are enough tooled-up tribesmen to gladden the heart of Charlton Heston. But what if you work in a secure building where they won't let you take your gun in with you? Why, you pop over to the cafe, leave it in their Left Gun Office, and take a cloakroom ticket for later collection, that's what. I still giggle at the thought.

(Via)

This week has been a good week for televisual reminders of our trip, as over on the BBC Dan Cruickshank visited Shibam (as we did in 1987) for his Adventures In Architecture series. I recorded that, then inadvertently deleted it before Hilary had watched it (hence the ass-grassiness referred to above if I fouled up with Sheba). Fortunately the BBC put Dan Cruickshank's programme onto iPlayer, so Hilary will be able to see the amazing mud-brick high-rises of Shibam once again.

(Top and bottom pictures from here.)

The Other Other Hand - RSAMD, Glasgow, 2 May 2008

I know, I know, it's taken me a while to get round to reviewing this, the second performance (the first was the previous night) of a piece of music/theatre/multimedia/humour by J Simon van der Walt. Simon is one of my wife's colleagues in the Stevenson College music department, and TOOH is his Ph.D piece for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. (I reviewed an earlier premiere of his a couple of years ago.) When I were a lad, this kind of stuff was more common than it is today: we called them "happenings" back then. It's still a pretty good way to describe the undescribable. To quote Simon van der Walt:

What we have here is not so much the realisation of the vision of the composer, but rather, the outcome of an extended period of collaborative devising, experimentation, and revision. Look at it another way: the performers are not there to play the composer's music. The composer comes up with music for the performers to play with.

Six performers played with Simon's music on Friday, on piano, violin, cello, euphonium, saxophone and clarinet. they played, sang, moved about (on and off the stage), played into echo-delay units, sat under the piano, loaded piles of music treatises into and out of the same piano, and seemed to be having a good deal of fun, as were the audience. Audio-visual materials were projected behind the musicians.

Oh, sorry, what was it all about? Well, its inspiration seems it have been as a riposte to C Hubert H Parry (composer of Jerusalem among other things). In 1896 Parry published The Evolution of the Art of Music, which Simon describes as "an entertaining and well-informed romp throuigh the history of Western music up to the time of Wagner". However:

What is particularly worrying is that the central narrative which he proposes - of an 'evolution' from 'a kind of vague wail or howl' produced by 'savages' to the music of 'special races' who have 'arrived at an advanced state of intellectuality' - is still in essence what is believed and taught about classical music today.

So at least part of the nature of TOOH is a group of highly-trained classical musicians giving vent to a mix of complex musical structures and primitive wails and howls, often at the same time as if daring the audience to distinguish between them. And part of it, you see, isn't.

(J Simon van der Walt, 2008)

By general consent (from an admittedly highly musically-trained bunch of Stevenson College lecturers with whom I was sitting) the evening's highlight was one of the audio-visual segments, in which Simon demonstrated the rising cyclic chord structure of the piece. He did this using Sibelius, the industry standard music scoring software package (written by two brothers called Finn, hence the name)(you'll get there), and his demo not only included some amusing harmonic jokes such as his accidentally arriving at the Tristan chord by mistake, but many in-jokes for the Sibelius user, most of which probably passed me by. His examples did have an alarming propensity to shift the rests around in an arbitrary manner which is a 'feature' of Sibelius. They also had all kinds of mis-typings and corrections which came and went bewilderingly fast, so I speak for us all when I say: please put the Sibelius bit up on YouTube so we can all appreciate it better.

Anyway, here is a link to the blog which Simon has created for the piece.

And here is a splendid article by Michael Tumelty, music critic of the Glasgow Herald, about Simon's music. If that doesn't get you listening to the mp3 files on Simon's site, I don't know what will. (And it has the best picture of Simon that I've found online to date.)

The gift that keeps on giving

Back in November, Gordon Brown won considerable praise for his commitment to working for a global ban on cluster bombs. The praise dried up a bit when shortly afterwards the Ministry of Defence defined cluster bombs as containing ten or more bomblets. The most widely-used British cluster bomb, the M73, happens to contain nine. Well strike me pink. (Or if I happened to chance upon a leftover M73 bomblet, pink and splashy.)

So now a hundred or so countries are meeting in Dublin to try to thrash out just such an international ban as Gordon pretended to care about, and Britain is generally perceived to be the main obstacle to such an agreement. We insist on keeping our cluster bombs because the manufacturers say they self-destruct. The American forces who had to avoid their lethal remnants in Iraq, and the civilians killed in Lebanon long after the Israeli cluster-bomb attacks had ceased, might beg to differ.

Watch this video, and imagine life without a leg.

40% of the victims of cluster ordnance are children, usually long after the war that brought them has ended. While the threat to civilians from landmines, for example in Cambodia, is well-known, spare a thought for its next-door neighbour Laos. Fewer mines, but the world's worst unexploded bomb problem.

Wouldn't it be good if this timeline could be finished off with a ban in 2008?

Not a generous settlement then

People have images which help them to make sense of German hyperinflation in the 1930s. Workers being paid with shovelfuls of notes off the back of a lorry, for instance. My personal favourite has long been the man with a suitcase full of cash looking in shop windows for things to buy with it, who put the case down for a moment: when he turned back, the case was gone. The money, however, was dumped in a pile on the pavement.

The following report, culled from a Unite finance sector newsletter, has helped me at least to get some kind of a handle on Zimbabwe's current hyperinflation. (The red highlighting is mine.)

Protest to Standard Chartered Bank chairman over Zimbabwe sacking

Unite and UNI the Global Union has condemned Standard Chartered Bank’s chairman, Mervyn Davies, for not intervening to reinstate two union leaders sacked in the bank’s Zimbabwe subsidiary.

Standard Chartered Bank Zimbabwe dismissed two trade union leaders, the Chairman of the bank’s National Workers Committee, Mr. Peter Mutasa, who is also the Vice-President of affiliate Zimbabwe Bank Workers’ Union (ZIBAWU), and the National Secretary, Mr. Shepherd Ngandu, for carrying out their legitimate union duties of representing and communicating with the workers: a clear abuse of international labour standards.

Although the two employees have successfully appealed against their dismissal, the British-based bank chose to pay them damages and terminate their employment, instead of reinstating them.

The two employees were awarded seven and a half years salary, calculated in Zimbabwe Dollars at the rate applicable at the time of dismissal. Taking into account hyperinflation, the bank paid them USD 15 and USD 16 respectively.

The bank’s chairman has refused to intervene and considers the matter closed. UNI Finance demands that Standard Chartered Bank either reinstates the two colleagues without loss of pay or compensates them appropriately taking account of inflation.

“We strongly condemn the behaviour of Standard Chartered and consider that the company is failing to respect recognised union rights, resorting instead to victimising union leaders through unfair dismissals”, says UNI Finance head of department Oliver Roethig.

Rob MacGregor, of Unite and UNI-Europa Finance Vice-President, says: “Instead of acting like a leading company and a responsible employer, Standard Chartered is profiting from the political, social and economic hardship that Zimbabwe and its people are facing”.

I'm stunned....

....by this revelation.

Awww inspiring

I thought this story was interesting, having visited Hirta with Hilary 25 years ago (almost to the day). The sheep are great: it takes a lot to make people go "Awwww" over sheep, but Soays have the same soppiness-engendering quality that Highland cattle have.

Look:



















And while we're on the subject of soppiness, the same Google search that returned that picture also came back with this, which I couldn't resist publishing:

I'm not here. Apparently.

Why does the post I've just done show up as published on my list of posts when I go into the "Manage Posts" bit of Blogger, but fail to appear when I view the blog?

****ing B**gger.

And yes, I've checked that it hasn't had the wrong date attached to it.

I expect this post, too, will vanish into limbo....

Killing Hitler and other mistakes

My friend Gill over on LiveJournal linked to this very funny short story. Not only is the basic idea pretty funny, but as she says, anyone who's ever either moderated a forum (Gill is a Compuserve mod herself) or hung around one with a really anal moderator will particularly appreciate BarracksRoomLawyer's contributions.

There is a Larry Niven short story (in his collection "The Flight of the Horse") in which a character travels back in time to make a copy of a Model T Ford for his museum employers, but accidentally hooks up his duplicating machine the wrong way round and destroys the original Ford instead. Then he has to do all kinds of complicated time travel (lugging a Model T in his machine) to correct the error.

Or then again, there's Douglas Adams's inimitable take on the matter:

"Concentrate," hissed Zaphod, "on his name."
"What is it?" asked Arthur.
"Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth."
"What?"
"Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth. Concentrate!"
"The Fourth?"
"Yeah. Listen, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third ..."
"What?"
"There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!"

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Gosh, a week already. Sorry, guys: I've been rather busy, with normal work stuff, trade union stuff, music playing (an Edinburgh Symphony Orchestra concert last weekend and the first rehearsal of a new piece tonight, not to mention rehearsals for another orchestra and practising for a Beethoven piece I've been asked to play at our local music club) and music organising (for the ESO concert last week, the one we're rehearsing for, plus taking over as interim chair and sorting a few minor crises). Also not to mention helping my son revise for his standard grades, writing to a friend going through a bad patch, responding to an email from someone I haven't seen in a quarter-century, and so on.

So, yes, Why I Have Not Blogged, Should get more time either tomorrow night or at the weekend. I am acquiring a neat backlog of things to blog about.

Patientia Vinces, as they say in Stockport.

Two Leaves Fallen

OK, maybe early days for too much hinting, but the two unguessed songs are roughly contemporary.

#2 was an American sitcom which ran from 1965 to 1966 (one series). At one time it was distinctly obscure: when I found one of my college friends remembered it I'd been beginning to think I'd dreamed the whole thing. Often rated the worst sitcom ever and with something of a cult image as a result, it was actually very popular in its day with with younger viewers (hey, I was 10, OK?)

Persephone may wish it weren't so, but it is indeed My Mother the Car. Maybe those of us who watched - I won't say all but I'm guessing most - of the series should get T-shirts made. They could have this picture and "Guess Who?"
















You can find out all about the show, and hear its theme song, here.


#8 was a British comedy thriller series which ran from 1966 to 1967 (two series) and made its lead character a star, in the UK at least. It is said to have inspired Jon Pertwee's characterisation of the third Doctor in Dr Who.

And of course Lisa guessed it was Adam Adamant Lives! Best write-up on the web I've found is halfway down this article.

Oh all right then, here's a picture.


















Discovering that the series were almost exact contemporaries, and ran for similar periods of time, was rather a strange experience.

Time to show your age....

Time for another 'first lines' quiz. This time for a change I haven't picked songs from my CD collection, but theme songs from TV series I have watched and enjoyed over the years. They'e a mix of British and American shows, which might be felt to disadvantage my transatlantic visitors: but them how many Brits remember American 1960s sitcoms?

Usual drill: answers in comments box please, and I'll annotate the list below as people guess correctly.

1. Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be
M.A.S.H (guessed by Persephone)(and I'd forgotten the TV show only had the intrumental version - sorry!)

2. Everybody knows in a second life we all come back sooner or later
My Mother The Car (guessed by Persephone)

3. It was boredom at first sight
Watching (guessed by Jane)

4. Hey baby I hear the blues a-callin', tossed salad and scrambled eggs
Frasier (guessed by Persephone)

5. Here we come, walking down the street
The Monkees (guessed by Persephone)

6. Oh, what happened to you, whatever happened to me
Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? (guessed by Phil)

7. Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip
Gilligan's Island (guessed by Persephone)

8. Bold as a knight in white armour, cold as a shot from a gun
Adam Adamant Lives! (guessed by Lisa)

9. So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Friends (guessed by Persephone)

10. Rollin' rollin' rollin'
Rawhide (guessed by Persephone)

Destroy the Evidence

Also via linkbunnies, a set of woodblocks used to help Chinese children learn English. Or something......

My daughter will be pleased by the Starbucks product placement

Here is a short film about the life of a digital artist (via linkbunnies). I suspect most of us can identify with the protagonist to some extent.

I'm certainly emailing the link to my orchestra desk partner (and section leader) who is blowing off a concert in June on the flimsy excuse that she has to deliver her first project for her new employer and they've brought the date forward from end of September to end of June (or something like that).

This means that when Chip Clark comes to conduct his new symphony, instead of seeing this immediately in front of him
















he will see this.


























Ah well. less distracting, perhaps.

It was thirty years ago today....

.... that I was first greeted, by a Capital Radio DJ (I was living in London at the time) with the immortal lines:

It's Star Wars Day...

...yes, that's right....

May The Fourth Be With You!

And amazingly, I still find it funny.

I have three toes on either foot, or half a doz. on both

I couldn't resist linking to this on the Times Online letters page. I think slide # 7 is my favourite.

Which reminds me of Flanders & Swann's take on this charming animal:

A Bradypus, or Sloth, am I,
I live a life of ease
Contented not to do or die,
But idle as I please
I have three toes on either foot,
Or half a doz. on both
With leaves and fruits, and shoots to eat,
How sweet to be a Sloth

The world is such a cheerful place
When viewed from upside-down;
It makes a rise of every fall,
A smile of every frown;
I watch the fleeting flutter by
Of butterfly or moth
And think of all the things I'd try
If I were not a Sloth.

I could climb the very highest Himalayas,
Be among the greatest ever tennis players,
Win at chess or marry a Princess or
Study hard and be an eminent professor.
I could be a millionaire, play the clarinet,
Travel everywhere,
Learn to cook, catch a crook,
Win a war then write a book about it.
I could paint a Mona Lisa,
I could be another Caesar.
Compose an oratorio that was sublime.
The door's not shut on my genius but
I just don't have the time!

For days and days among the trees
I sleep and dream and doze
Just gently swaying in the breeze
Suspended by my toes
While eager beavers overhead
Rush through the undergrowth
I watch the clouds beneath my feet;
How sweet to be a Sloth.

From a Distance

I am writing this blog entry on a newly-bought laptop as my old one was smitten by a disorder of the registry and the cost of restoring Windows to a maybe-usable state (and I've had bad experiences that way) would have cost nearly as much a a new machine. I'm also using my new toy, a Vodafone mobile broadband adaptor, which will enable me - as now - to blog from the Ballater flat. The bandwidth available up here is fine for blogging and email, though attempts to use BBC's iPlayer proved frustrating to say the least.

Time to zzz now, Byee.

The clue is in the word "local".

OK, I don't get it: clearly I'm missing something.

Thursday's local elections in England & Wales were a disaster for the Labour Party. OK.

Yesterday's London Mayoral election result was a disappointment for the Labour Party and a disaster for Londoners. OK.

As leader of the Labour Party Gordon Brown must obviously take some responsibility for the unsuccessful campaigning. OK again. But why on earth should these results be viewed (as they seem universally to be) as some kind of a referendum on his performance as PM? Why should his abolition of the 10p tax band or his other tax policies be deemed remotely relevant?

Call me traditional, but I have now spent 34 1/2 years as a UK voter, and have participated in general elections, European elections, local government elections, Scottish Parliament elections, not to mention a referendum on EU membership and one on Scottish devolution. And I can tell all of them apart. When voting on EU membership it never occurred to me to use the referendum vote as a way to express my opinion of the Heath government. When voting for my MSPs I was never tempted to use my vote to show dissatisfaction with the City of Edinburgh Council. And my council votes have been about which councillor I wished to have as my representative (who has not always been of a party I would wish to have as my national government).

If the people of England & Wales really used this week's election as a way to protest against Gordon Brown, then while it explains the result it also explains why the UK has such inept local government: because hardly anybody gives a shit about it. Think: you have the chance to elect the best person to represent you on your local council. Or if you have no preferred candidate, to put in someone from the party which you think has performed best in the council over recent years. But ooh, no, that might require taking an interest in local politics and thinking about what exactly you are voting for. Far better to pretend it's about Gordon Brown and David Cameron, because you've heard of them, maybe even seen their picture under the ones of the latest celebrity drug addict.

So all across England & Wales people have been waking up thinking that they've struck a great blow for their political beliefs when in actuality all that's happened is that they've voted in someone they've never heard of and about whose confidence they haven't a clue. Dickheads.