Chinese Democracy

I’m becoming increasingly worried about the people of China and their space programme.. It’s really all about one of their flagship projects and how it could go very wrong. I cant help but wonder how they will ever get to the moon if they can’t blow their noses. This inability could lead to some serious space suit malfunctions which, if left unchecked may jeopardise the whole mission. It may be they have developed an in house solution but I doubt it. It would require a huge space helmet and some kind of built in repository. I predict that it’ll be up to the lumbering West to provide a solution. I see that  taking place in the form of an educational and marketing programme, aimed at the new middle classes, one that promotes nose blowing as a cool Western thing, like cocaine, Marlboro or Pepsi.

The script is that smiling male and female Chinese actors in smart clothes, shining with clean hair and tossing their fringes emerge in slo-mo from open top Mercs and BMWs in some bright location (one that looks like the South of France), they remove their oddly shaped but fashionable sunglasses and before greeting or kissing the glamorous friends they are about to meet they all take out their nasal equipment and blow their noses into their colourful designer monogrammed hankies. The dirty hankies are then collected by toadying uniformed European servants who seal the used handkerchiefs in special disposal bags. The bags are then collected and shipped to New Caledonia for recycling or incineration; a requirement if the used mucus contamination is serious.

We’ll run this little number for a few weeks and then hit them full on with Kleenex ads, wait till they hear about the aromatic balsams and the neat pocket packs. Buy your paper tissues shares now! Then order your moon landing ticket for 2021 safe in the knowledge that all the cultural nose clearing issues have all been dealt with. All that remains is the small problem of building a better spaceship. I believe this is being tackled at the moment, they’ve already got some iconic Alfa Romeo designs that are being slightly modified and updated.

Black hole mining

Home recording is a curious one dimensional experience. The sound lives only in the cans, wide and booming, panning from side to side or oozing warmly across your head, a kind of sonic titillation. So it's not really living, it's a trapped animal in tubes and plastic sheathes and metal boxes, fed and manipulated, tamed and beaten back, encouraged and then kicked around. Nobody hears, nobody gets offended, floors don't vibrate and doors don't slam shut. Across the way no one taps a foot or closes a window in diversion and disgust. The TV can play on whatever it likes and the dishwasher and dryer produce a rousing chorus that doesn't matter. Traffic's patter and hum is irrelevant and low flying aircraft are anonymous. No signs and signals, smelly armpits,  cigarette smoke or spilled coffee. Just a strange hidden treasure in an imaginary mine. Buried deep in there. Still it's better than £50 an hour and humping big speakers about.

Old School

They (?) are tearing down Dunfermline High School (probably the Mark II building) and replacing it with some glass PFI centre of educational excellence and mediocrity. I drove by it the other day then stopped to reflect and possibly mourn it's sad passing.The lyrics of the old Steely Dan song came back to me:

Well I did not think the girl 
Could be so cruel 
And I'm never going back 
To my old school 

Quite irrelevant really, I don't recall the girls being cruel, it was the teachers and they were just doing their job and it was 1969 when beating up kids was still ok. All the young student teachers with their Triumph Spitfires are now grey and retired and the Headmaster whom I despised with my best home made revolutionary left wing vigour is long dead. When I departed after three years of soft drugs, sports avoidance, smoking, alcohol, discovering art and progressive rock, chronic under achievement and various cultural misunderstandings -  I left it behind quietly and without fuss. It was 1972 and I didn't look back, I didn't know how to. A full blown teenage life and the confusion and corruption of some kind of a potential adult life to follow was calling like a Siren on a reef. I thought of myself as being like Peter Gabriel leaving Genesis, "feeling part of the scenery, walking out of the machinery etc." even if that didn't happen until 1974, I'd always prided myself on being ahead of the times. I really did not have a clue about anything.

Anyway this palace of pain, educational ruin and hypocrisy is about to be turned to dust, recycling materials and architectural salvage, shielded from the public eye by safety fences and bollards. At least I have a few snaps of the dear old place (sniff).

Bringing it all back home

Artists impression of our new residence as seen from 50' below the earth on Google Subterranean.

Ten years of living in the sticks and only now are we beginning to understand the inner and outer workings of septic tanks and such. As usual Wiki-explains explains.  So we'll retain this link for future possible reference and in the bright new light of our bright new enlightenment carefully observe all the rules and operating procedures that go along with this watery/sludgy and highly necessary plumbing device. Any family members or occasional house guests stumbling onto this please take note.

As it's a wet 1st of September, today will be a rare "recording day" - let's see where that takes us. Brain cells are about to be seriously stretched, heated up and over taxed. 

(Conspiracy theorists please note the secret message(s) in the above text).

Summer's end

Actually I couldn't care a horse's arse that summer's almost over. It was a long blue, sunny, grungy, wet but interesting blur and state of affairs. Much like the rest of earth's time it'll turn back into whatever unseasonal seasonal pattern of weather the wild Atlantic Ocean decides to dump on us via the vagaries of the jet stream and various bits of uncontrolled global warming's evil work. All together I  had almost three weeks away from work plus a few nice weekends and in that time traveled extensively around the nicer parts of Europe and thankfully experienced and enjoyed a lot of fine weather, company, wine and food and got a few good photos. Family fun also figured highly. I'll remember the summer of 12 for a long time, at least until the relevant brain cells pop out to lunch never to return and erase the finer details.

So next month, tomorrow in most countries, we have the official start of the Indian Summer, generally better and slightly more predictable than it's regular cousin. I'm already making plans and they are in no way influenced by TV, sports, advertising or mass media campaigns. This Brave New Indian Summer will be the best, most creative, funniest and funkiest so far this year. I'll bet anyone a home made bowl of Linda McCartney's steaming sweet potato and basil soup  that it will. In fact the new and inspirational stories are already flooding out from here in well managed dollops.

Beyond the postern gate

If you look really closely you'll see what it is I'm going on about.

Some of you may be genuinely perplexed and confused about life, it's many possible meanings and the direction that you (voyager) should now be traveling in.  These feelings are common and you shouldn't let them get you down, there are in fact the many golden opportunities that are out in the wide world before you, waiting for you.

As an example I came across this old and mysterious Fifeshire gateway the other day. I'd no idea to where it led or what was beyond, I was of course curious. So, heart in mouth, cigarette stubbed out and legs akimbo I entered and passed through - unscathed apparently.

I can't say too much about what happened next, you'd hardly believe it anyway. Suffice to say that now, grass has grown, dew has gathered, time has passed and I'm on the other side, beyond this gate in another place and in a position to review the entire gate entry and crossing experience. Overall I'd give it a nine out of a possible eleven. If you've gone grey early, have irritating problems down below, hate your best friend's job, you're iffy about modern music and dislike tying leather shoe laces because of how they feel then do something about it; try exploring the shock of the NEW today.

Signs of the times

Beware! WW1 tank about to begin raking up in the garden.

Beware! Blokes out and about wearing itchy or tight underwear.

As a connoisseur of toilet cleaning signage images I often stumble over these badly placed signs as I go about my daily duties. But whatever can they really mean?

In my life

Here is the (the non-exhaustive list of ) categories of people who I've know in my life who have either harmed me or done good things to me in my various life time encounters...

Well I had a wee think about this hoping to arrive at some kind of score and maybe see a pattern and somehow make sense of it all. I even went as far as consider origins, education, professions even going as far as to think about football fans i.e. Rangers or Celtic. Then I thought about the type of people I'd either harmed or helped. That's an interesting line to follow. Then I stopped thinking and gave up, walked away and began to whistle "In my Life."

Living beneath the volcano v lost in the Cosmos

I do feel bad about that mountain of sweet little lost socks that remain...lost.  There's very little anyone can do in such a situation, we're all lost somewhere in the vast washing machine that is the Cosmos.

Yesterday was mostly about the end of the working week, West African Groundnut Stew and the sipping of red wine. Eating said stew created some anxiety and curiosity, we were hungry and ate at a steady pace, whilst our guests, possibly a lot less hungry ate at more sedate speed, probably a "normal" speed. Eating in small sociable groups does from time to time raise the issue of mismatched eating speeds and misaligned appetites. Perhaps we should be more open about this in society.  Restaurants and cafes could ask the diner when booking or being seated where they currently reside on the consumption speed and attitude scale*. Are they regular fork hangers? Do they like to contemplate their meal or dither? Can they (or can they not) carry out a conversation while food's on the go? Are they just really bloody hungry and filled with the joy of life to the point where they want to stuff themselves regardless of manners, talking or other assumed social niceties? Are they feeling a bit like Henry VIII?

This measure (*needs a scale and name) and division could lead to separate seating and eating areas where this behaviour was taken into account. The result would be better and more profitable use of restaurant space, quicker churn and turnover, more couches and cushions in the slow lanes, more stools and standing areas in the fast lane. So eat free, eat fresh, live long and prosper and enjoy your food whatever consumption model you belong to. I'm still not sure what you should do in your own home, maybe just be a good observer and chew each mouthful 33 times.

*There's a project here for somebody, EEC funding may be available.

Obscure but pleasant places

Yet another obscure place from which our material can be downloaded (and some others versions various odd locations and then some general creative stuff that gets quite accidentally but usefully Tweeted about).

John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1

winter honeymoon (part 2) from Wild West Lothian on Impossible Songs's @nimbitmusic store! #nowplaying #musichttp://www.nimbitmusic.com/impossiblesongs/#shop/wildwestlothian …

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18hJohn Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1

http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/352870/impossible-songs … http://fb.me/1z6grurnA 

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21 AugJohn Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1

Sometimes Sound Stops http://fb.me/1h7sPLPwa 

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Funny how everything is interconnected these days, you make a move here and then find there's a record of it over there. Of course it's all still lost and swirling, caught up in the waves of that big bad cyber sea...

Septic tank on the Fritz?

A form of street art not found on streets.

Today I'm mostly uploading the mysterious .wav files to the mysterious Nimbit site which promises many marvellous things whilst possibly delivering very little. It's a two laptop job coupled with a certain amount of roving cat interference, cats and keyboards are not a good mixture. I reckon that I've completed 52% of the first 31% of the second part of 61% of most the of project, quite a score for so early in the evening. Oh how that hard drives hums and struggles and the heat generated is unbearable.

There's never a good time to hear that your drains are blocked. We've been hearing it now for about ten days. The slow deep gurgle and the mischievous swish of rising waters as the toilets stubbornly refuse to allow the flow of miscellaneous household  effluent of various types to go down in order to return to the centre of the earth from where it came. The good news is that a team of men with the obligatory white van are seeing us alright. They have various useful rods and the promise of a new underground tank being installed somewhere over by the spot where we suspect there is a badger's set. The badgers will love the additional new feature no doubt.

I have seen the future; there will be a world without libraries, bookshops, paper, snotty topped pencils and all of that sort of thing. In the land where the .pdf is considered to be a passable king the Kindle Touch rules supreme. What a marvellous and simple little piece of sexy, wordy, book burning kit.

My Pastrami nightmare is over, I have some, toasted with cheese and other edible accessories and a warm peace has descended on us all as the spicy smell emerges from beneath the glowing grill.

Joni Mitchell lyric of the day: "Somehow these old feelings keep on coming around, you think they're gone but they just go underground, will you still love me when I get back to LA town?" (Earworm).

She's here again

The proud owner of a newly presented Cloudland mug. 

Almost back to the pre-holiday season normal this weekend, busy reconnecting with the garden, saying hello again to a crop of vegetables we buried in the ground a few months ago and eating fast and noisy family food in Frankie and Bennies. On my way to work this morning, driving, listening to the radio and thinking about the previous two days I realised why it is I slavishly take five minutes to complete this blog on an almost daily basis. Of course it's not really for anybody but myself, it's an unreliable memoir and partial diary, a sketch pad often full of daft ideas and attitudes coupled with the occasional golden moment worthy of celebration and hopefully illustrated with interesting or inappropriate pictures. I forces me to remember something of the day or at least record a view that, maybe for the briefest time I held in the seconds before some other bright, shiny thing came along into my field of vision and distracted me a little more. Anyway, tonight I'm uploading music to this place http://www.nimbit.com/ , we'll see how it goes.

Spud U Like

Potato still life with carrots and parsnip.

Funny how by not planting potatoes this year I've actually managed to get a better potato crop than I did last year when I planted lots. Clearly I'm not much of a son of the soil or green fingered hero. What I do makes little difference, the spuds seem to do it all themselves, naturally.

Jumpers and stooges

Jumper. There was a man who jumped from the Forth Bridge and survived, he did it just the other day. The CCTVs picked up his erratic behaviour on the bridge. They saw the signs, they read the signs. They decided that he was likely to jump so they scrambled a rescue boat. He spent a few moments on the bridge, maybe running things over in his mind, then he got up on the parapet and jumped. Jumped looking ahead, serious, determined. He travelled through the grey air, straight down, body tight, vertical, in line like a nail, a perfect dive, perpendicular. He hit the water and hardly made a splash. He went under but the boat was there, on station, hooks and lifebelts ready, hands over the side, searching. Then they saw him. The boat picked him up alive, dazed, unconscious. They got him ashore and rushed him to the hospital, all blue lights and sirens. The boatmen sweated and returned to their homes, others just carried on with other duties. There is always something else to do. They got the man to the hospital, he came round. His only injury? A twisted ankle.

Stooges. “Contains dangerous behaviour but in a slapstick context” Thus reads the warning on the film currently running at the local Odeon, the Three Stooges. It's not a franchise I'm familiar with, I seem to have missed the Three Stooges during my formative years, they mean very little but I do like the idea of “dangerous behaviour but in a slapstick context”, I wonder under what circumstances it might be used as a legal defence. Is their a legal definition for the term “slapstick”?

Pussy Riot v soft furnishings

I watched the latest Pussy Riot video on the Guardian website it begins of course with a ten second couch commercial for DFS or some thing like it, there's no opportunity to skip it either. It's little things like couch commercials set against political messages and the tale of an (obvious) injustice that I find unsettling. Here am I reading the news for free on their website, they add a Pussy Riot video to the story and so that it works the whole news promulgation thing is financed by a soft furnishing company in the UK. I imagine that DFS aren't all that bothered about their struggles against the Putin Regime or punk music or the ridiculous and outrageous sentence of two years in a Russian jail.  Another disturbing example of the constant juxtaposition of the banal, the serious, the tragic, the funny and the odd, that's the media and the Internet. 

As for the girls of Pussy Riot, their music is terrible, not even good bad punk. It sounds like a squadron of MIG21s crashing down on a Lada factory and reverberating across the frozen wastes of Siberia for a long time. You just want them to stop and stick with a bit of quiet protesting and so pass their message minus the headache inducing thrash of badly played instruments. Maybe Putin was right about putting a swift jackboot onto their tunes (although I'm sure he quite likes the accordion so he's no music lover), but of course it's not about the quality of their songs, it's about something far more serious. Hopefully that message wont be silenced.

Once every 5050 years the three Great Pyramids line up with the Moon, Mars and Venus. The event has a mystical name which for the life of me I cannot recall. It's all worked out just as the ancients had planned it, they knew their stuff. Luckily I had my camera handy as I passed by. If only there were some ancient Egyptians alive today to see it all come together.

A safe passage to Ecuador

One day the grass was green, the sun was in the usual place and visible and my shadow  looked a little better than I did. That's shadows for you, always trying to get the better of you and steal the moment.

Well the assurance of a safe passage to South America might be alright for some. Me, I'd take my chances in a Swedish jail and take the opportunity to write a book and generate publicity with whatever case it was that had to be overcome. Ok, they may send me to the U.S. at some point, some things in life you have to suck up and at least they have decent peanut butter and coffee in their jails. The media don't really know how to cover this story, there are too many hero-villains in every part of it, individuals, countries and governments. When there is no black or white, shades of grey between one and forty nine in human rights are not easily understood, digestible or reportable.

Olympic Hangover

Yes, it was awful, awful on a number of levels.

Two days gone and it's back to normal telly, thunderstorms and slightly less hysterical news reporting. We now know that without the Olympic hullabaloo and feel good factors ordinary life is ditch water dull here in the sticks and uncultured provinces of the UK. We don't even have any post Olympic shit or litter to shovel up, London retained all that. Our various irrational and prejudiced dreams are over and so it's back to rail fare rises, Jennifer Aniston's next wedding, various bits of non-news worthy speculation about primitive tribes, Euro Million winners, friendly football matches and tittle-tattle. I'm sure we'll survive, all you need is a tomato juice smoothie, six paracetamols and a few back to back episodes of the Borgias on the Sky box. That'll make it all right again.

Oh and while we're at it, rather than holiday in Spain like a lazy lump, Mr David Cameron and his fractured government should cash in on the UK's inspirational and golden moment and recapture Ireland, invade France, declare war on Iceland (and any rogue volcanoes), leave the EU, reclaim the South Pole and nationalise the railways, airlines, banks and Jaguar Land Rover. Then we can announce the discovery of a huge oilfield under the Falklands, the re-colonisation of the Caribbean, Canada and Central Africa and launch our first expedition to Mars, via China and the Moon.  At that point we inject £100 billion into the NHS and give everybody a public holiday, a slap on the back, a bottle of whisky and a good cigar this Friday. That should fix things for the weekend and stop all the artificial post-Olympic nostalgia  and depression in it's tracks. Pull your socks up laddie!

The algorithm that ruins the world

Well maybe it's not that, maybe it's the algorithm that runs the world, the world has, according to most religions already been ruined. So it was invented by Euclid, developed by Turing and Shor and everybody else and then let go to run wild in order to power inventory systems, banks, manufacturing, digital recording, rockets, 747s, Olympic Scoreboards and the tills at MacDonalds. Anyway it may be broken and so may be all of maths and geometry and as result at some point the world will just end, like that, with a whimper. (Sigh!).

The same can't be said for the Olympic Games. It overran and ended with a peculiarly bombastic celebration based on a focus group / committee's idea of what Britain used to be all about. Taxis were covered in copies of the News of the World, Mary Poppins walked dogs for a living, BMWs abounded and everybody hummed Beatles' tunes and spat on Rolling Stone's albums. You could tell more about modern Britain by the featured acts that didn't turn up or appeared on screens in grave spinning drag as flickering chanting ghosts. An interesting catalogue of weird juxtapositions and misunderstood or deliberately distorted songs; Kate Bush, John Lennon, Take That and a punk free generation worth of hypocrisy and cheese, all  trotted out for a TV scoop and calibrated fireworks. At least the Pythons in the guise of Eric Idle had a brief spotlight reprise and a few moments of managed lunacy. None of it really matters of course because history is written by the planners and the victors and at the moment that's not the medal winners or the "inspired" and fickle public, it's the Conservative Party. It was a late night  for a Sunday and the new working week but looking back I did enjoy most of the last sixteen days. Soon it'll be a distant memory.

Meanwhile it turns out that today's featured artiste, the divine Mr Ronnie McD (above) is a real person and there is only one of him operating  in the UK. Now I'd have thought he'd be well fagged out and burgered somewhere in the Olympic Village or washing up at that world beating restaurant, a man has to do etc. But no, turns out he was visiting Dunfermline (but just for 60 minutes or so) and then onto some other drive-through or superstore. Apparently there's an algorithm that works out his magical McD venue appearances. It may of course be in the process of slowly running down just like the other bigger one.

Aberdeen

The beach, Aberdeen, looking south and looking north. Up early today thanks to a wonderful two year old grandchild who has her own time clock running on it's own individual time pattern. So it's blueberries and Shredded Wheat and out for a walk. Healthy.

Strathcaro pie and cake

Strathcaro Services: A non nuclear, unabandoned location that's a time paradox stuck in a time warp caught in a time slip and at  junction between opposing parallel universes, so quite a normal place in which to find yourself on a Saturday morning in modern day Scotland. You don't go there for the food, the ambiance, the value for money or the clientele. You go for the uncomfortable experience and physical improbability of it all.  So what of the coffee, the chicken and mushroom pie and the sponge cake? Indescribable and edible and bizarre and strangely tasty. ****  = 4 Stars but I refuse to score the toilets under any circumstances. Of couse I'll be back.