A selection of fresh posts for your delectation
I did something unusual this week. I saw something wrong, stupid and annoying online and didn’t get into a fight with the person who said it. It’s something I’ve found myself doing more and more lately, and it becomes a little easier each time, although it never feels completely natural. Wanting to correct misinformation or…
For years, I was the living embodiment of that classic Private Eye cartoon by (I think) Barry Fantoni: Two men. One says: ‘I’m writing a book’. The other replies: ‘Neither am I.’ The Book lived in my head as a fantastic possibility. I could do it any time, and it would be amazing. Any time.…
MOST of what’s gone wrong in British social and political life can be summed up with a fairly simple example using Jameela Jamil, a fruit-filled banquet and some bees. It’s about belief, fact-picking, tribalism and self-deception. But first, the bees. The story is fairly simple. The activist, actress, presenter and occasional model Jameela Jamil ran…
My family and other animals
Trudy came to us earlier this year from Romania, via https://www.silverfoxdogrescue.com. She’d been on the street, then rounded up…
Our time with Lola was brief but sweet. She’d been a breeding cat, passed about from owner to…
Meet Rosie. We adopted her from the SPCA in 2016. She’d been living rough in a coal…
This is Eli. It’s important to note that, even when half-asleep and upside down, Eli is still judging…
All the stuff from the outside world
I did something unusual this week. I saw something wrong, stupid and annoying online and didn’t get into a fight with the person who said it. It’s something I’ve found myself doing more and more lately, and it becomes a little easier each time, although it never feels completely natural. Wanting to correct misinformation or…
MOST of what’s gone wrong in British social and political life can be summed up with a fairly simple example using Jameela Jamil, a fruit-filled banquet and some bees. It’s about belief, fact-picking, tribalism and self-deception. But first, the bees. The story is fairly simple. The activist, actress, presenter and occasional model Jameela Jamil ran…
‘Vote Corbyn, lose Scotland.’ That was the big scary warning from clodhopping would-be provocateur Toby Young on Twitter this week. While it might play well with the Tobester’s target audience of enthusiastically gullible bullshit-swallowers, it brought something else to mind for me: The music of Scritti Politti. More specifically, this pungent lyrical nugget from ‘The…
Sounds, instruments, gear, music and more
There’s something indefinably magical about the intricate, chiming sounds of a finger-picked acoustic guitar. It’s something I’d always longed to learn and yearned to do well, but it always seemed too far out of reach – both figuratively and, as far as my permanently tangled sausage-fingers are concerned, literally. I’ll never be in the Tommy…
Mark Hanson’s ‘The Art of Contemporary Travis Picking’ is one of the guitar tuition books I’ve returned to most often over the years. If you love players like Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Scotty Moore or John Renbourn, Travis picking is a style of playing you’ll really want to add to your guitar skillset. I certainly…
I recently rediscovered a batch of old files from my first PC, dating back to the mid-to-late nineties, crammed full of old music reviews, interviews and oddities. It’s an interesting time capsule of how I felt at the time about music many of us have been living with (sometimes unwillingly) for decades now. FROM…
