19:32

The evening of May 14th.

Esoteric

Stone cold holes

The world according to Beachcomber: Generally you search and discover a lot that is of little consequence, no pearls, no pigs, no buried golden treasure creeping through to the surface. Stoop to pick up driftwood, oddly shaped pebbles, sculpted glass and stagger over the detestable plastic and polythene remnants of some not quite passed by or passed out civilisation.  Head down like a lonely maniac, a loose metaphor, scavenging on the edge, bitten by unseasonal winds and spray that erupts like a slow vertical blizzard. This must be where everything ends the journey, bogged down and botched up and washed ashore like refugees and so much forgotten trash. The scale of everything is off the scale. We are all guilty of various misdemeanors and if you're looking for something to hang on to yourself with then it's clear to me it's mostly going to be  indifference.

We will hear them then

Quite a nice piece of random mash up Tomfoolery. It makes me feel a little sad for some reason, perhaps it's poignant and full of deep meaning. No doubt this process could be carried out on a thousand variations of their works but this'll do.

In other news here's a friendly donkey we (me + grandkids) encountered over the weekend. I called him Don Quixote and his partner Kong. From the safety of a wooden enclosure we fed them long green grass, rain in buckets and 50 Pence worth of Cornflakes, now we're pals for life. Highly unoriginal. The rest of the weekend was spent beach combing, cooking up storms and vegetating; it's that tough time of year when exams, studies and questionable weather patterns abound.

How we all lie

Stare at a website or newspaper through narrow, slitty eyes and say what it is you see = Randomly Misread Articles: 

How to make Sergeant Pepper Squid, 

Boris Johnston’s amazing but true half time statistics, 

Obituary: Octavia Mussolini, 

Gove attacks used Mr Man,

20 Great Ashes Moments - No 24, 

High hopes for Sheffield Dog Fest,  

Sending red Virgin blouses to war, 

Win a city bleak to paradise, 

Moth of a life on twitter, 

The rise of designer outlets in the rage of austerity, 

It’s official Moyes is on Toffee, 

Revealed the 750 hospitals that should never have happened, 

Bowie’s controversial new video mistakenly removed from the tube, 

Top Ten Books people die for, 

The rise of community ownership in whales, 

Recipe of the day: how to add stirrups to your drinks, 

This little job site could be our chance to love Charles, 

Four day week? Every job needs a costume. 

Boys detained for hugging death, 

Woman survives hairpin shooting, 

Teen: Why I created a man suit, 

Jurassic panic: did the great dinosaur feed ever really happen?

Lastly and most profoundly: How we all lie.

I guess that this is what bored or semi-retired people do in order to squeeze some bitter entertainment juice from the dregs of the day. Words and bright images are everywhere but few of them are of any actual interest as they are. They all need to be twisted to mean something.

Winona Ryder and getting screwed

Age: Turns out that Winona Ryder is 41, time passes pretty quick around this lonesome planet. Last time I looked I could swear she was 21. Is everybody else getting old at near enough the same pace, have aliens messed with our food chain or is there a really weird Voodoo Hoodoo going on?

Economics and the fetish of idle tools: There has to be something badly wrong with the system (by that I'm referring to the Illuminati's patented and highly secret methods for running world-wide economics) when you can nonchalantly wander into a drab Pound shop and get a tiny set of jeweler's screwdrivers and Allen keys (10 pieces) from 1/16" to 1/8" for 99p, not even a proper English Pound. Even if they were of Christmas cracker quality and made from stick insect dung it would be a bargain but they are much better than that and are perfect for the imperfect and ancient art of blundering around with the multi adjustable Fender bridge (as below). So once again I have the opportunity to fiddle with a guitar's fine tuning and so stop buzzes and then get a buzz (?). I would happily pay a fiver or provide a sizable blood sample for these sanity saving items but...99p is all the lady in the shop will take.

Fixing another hole and a lion

No rest today, no holiday for me it was all hard labour, cheesy crisps and Stella Artois. The hole fixing continues with some nifty kerb side alterations and then bolting an iron lion into some masonry (spell check wanted to change this to some missionary...nicely weird). I'll be glad to get back to work tomorrow. Now the sun's finally coming out, time for more Stella.

Fixing more holes

 This isn't really fixing a hole, it's more of an exploration, a bit like Arnie Saccnuson though not quite getting to the earth's molten core, more like getting down about 2' deep to reveal a non-existent cellar and more importantly the firm foundations. Sure enough, if you dig underneath any house you'll eventually find them. A sledgehammer and a strong back are also required.

A cat on a spiral stair case, taking in the view and pondering the likely percentages of success and risk for taking a flying leap from the stair to the couch. Doable for cats, not recommended for humans.

I like food, I like people who like food, I love people who make good food but I'm neither knowledgeable about the subject nor am I a foodie. However I can testify that these books work, read them and follow the instructions and, possibly,  a big WOW! effect will take place.

Fixing a hole in the world

Fixing a Strat: Maybe I'm more practically minded than I think, maybe I'm deluded. You can never tell really. Everyday I encounter people who think they are capable...but they are not and nobody's telling them, so they blunder on creating havoc on stilts. That's probably why the world's so screwed up, we're failing to stop them and they are just getting on with it, making things worse all the time. I must remember to do something about this next week and so commence the long overdue social revolution that's necessary to free us all.

So how hard can it be to be good at things? (I am haunted by this question. I am also haunted by other questions but I'm not very good at remembering what they are), and why is it are we often just mediocre at things? Anyway I'm good with Allan Keys and screwdrivers and fiddling with stuff. Probably accidentally good if that is actually similar to proper good, a kind of second rate but effective good which could be enough, so I'm mostly unprofessional but still a completer/finisher as well as being a compulsive fiddler. Britain needs more folks like me.

Carelessness: that's the big problem and it will kill us all. That's a basic truth that's never really occurred to any of the main political parties, religions or institutions and they practice it all the time.

Word of the week: Pyrographic.

Guitar Project

So you enter your guitar's serial number details and it tells you...a little bit about it; some vague dates and locations and that's about all. It's free to use and maybe, one day it will be a source of vital information. The top one is for a Fender Strat quite rightly dated about 1990, the other is for a Yamaha Pacifica that I did think belonged to this century rather than the last. This was purely on the basis of a lack of chips, dings and the build up of dirt and dust. All important details to be able to capture if the virtual guitar shop is going to proceed or even succeed. Just noticed that this site's not been updated since 2008 :-(

Turner Prize Nominations

These childishly painted and forlorn signs sit at a busy road junction pointing to a non-existent gallery. Somehow becoming a piece of art in their own right; abandoned, absurd and anti-artistic all at once.

Copper Trees

The sun sinks slowly and lazily into the west and shines a still copper tone across the trees as they struggle to turn a late green in this early May day. The fields  buzz in the distance across hedges and jumbled woodland. The birds twitter and coo and forget where they are going, cats run riot in feline slow motion on the cut grass and out on the waterfront the mad human optimists fish in the still evening water. For a short time all is calm and peaceful in this world within worlds.

Interesting artworks

The piece at the top was done by Alec Galloway from Skelmorlie in Ayrshire, his website and some fine examples of his other works (by the magic of electricity) can be found by clicking through this mystical portal just here. Somehow or other his work is also being featured on Tom Morton's late night radio show as well as appearing on Facebook.

The other picture is a cake type representation of LZ1. No idea who actually was daft enough to try this.

News-jackers

Today is a new and as usual rather unsanitary and blustery day and it marks my (almost) umpteenth consecutive day at work. Who ever said that the Europeans never did anything for us?   However the weather has now finally stopped working in our favour and god and the great fissures and isobars of air pressure are set against us on this small and exposed outcrop. Meanwhile I’m taking a crash course in news-jacking, the new form of advertising that catching on and killing the story but then lifting the brand. It’s almost religious in it’s concept. I’m still not sure what current story I can news-jack in order to shift more of our paper thin mp3s and herald the great up and coming but yet to be properly named virtual guitar shop. In fact the more I think of it I’m not sure which part is virtual, the shop, the guitars or the proprietor, it must be one of the three or I’ll get soundly done over under trades description.

Now that the demise of popular blogging (if you’re thinking of starting then don’t bother, I watch the stats) and the death of western civilisation are both imminent I’m getting strangely drawn into the spiral of knowledge and depravity that is Reddit. Controversial, repetitive and quirky it’s somehow less Spammy than the irritating Facebook and more visual than the  constantly gabbing Twitter. It does from time to time shock as it totters between gross teen humour and world-wide or deeply personal tragedy, you need to approach it with care but it is somehow cleaner and more compulsive now than the other social (and now highly managed and targeted) shit hot media darling things. Of course that could just be an illusion created by the clever dick creators who create all the things that we ordinary people just seem to readily encounter and then eagerly adopt. We swim like a school of Icelandic herring into their devious traps. Then once millions of moolah are generated and all our lives are ruined we seek pastures new and then devour the next next big thing. That may well be an event that’s open for some great feat of news-jacking. I’ve now known the term for all of ten minutes and I’m soundly bored with it already. Next!

Virtual Guitar Shop

First of all you get an idea...

Postmodern Family

At times you can learn a lot from TV comedy. How to be yourself or someone else,  how to behave, what to avoid, when to do the right thing, what to do in a tricky situation and that there is no normal (and there never was). Trouble is I'm a slow learner but it seems after a few years I'm now getting the hang of the whole grandpa thing, maybe the whole parenting thing. So we had a good day today, birthdays in the sun with food and noise, cake and balloons. Modern life isn't rubbish.

Kinda sad really

For Betelgeuse, a star with 1000 times the diameter of our own sun, the end is nigh. A million years from now (which is hardly a blip on the scale of the universe), it will explode into a supernova. Recently, astronomers in England have recorded Betelgeuse emitting an arc of gas that is nearly the size of our entire solar system. I presume nobody other than me confused this star with the character in the film of the same (well similar) name...Beetlejuice.

In praise of mushroom soup

The thoughts of the people who build websites, write books, compose music, draw, work in science labs and classrooms, develop empirical organisations or just build houses out of used up motor car tyres. Your ideas and actions make you special. You have that ability to put things together, to juxtapose, to compose and create something. Do you ever stop to think what type of people do that? Is that a normal thing to do? Are you troubled? Perhaps it’s just  that the uncertainty of it all that’s about you that’sjust getting to you. That feeling, that sure and resonant feeling that those who develop and cling onto high principles or absolute views, the seekers of truth and light are the most deluded of all human kind. It’s sad really. For them everything needs an explanation, then it can be described, catalogued and packaged and then because of the process it can be believed in and, in worst cases shared and pursued. In the scheme of things all that is quite unnecessary and wasteful. Scribbles on paper, pixels on screens, sound and fury, whispers carried away by a toxic breeze.

Somehow we never quite learn from history. At an early age everybody should be made to read a series of biographies, look at them candidly, take in a wholerandom life laid out and described, what did it amount to? School kids should visit graveyards and attend funerals, listen to eulogies and read obituaries and then discuss the choices those folks did or didn’t make and maybe learn something. Was the person happy and what did they achieve? How can we break this pointless cycle of repetition? Am I a passenger here or am I driving something? Of course if somebody happens to have invented or developed the wheel or the iPhone; carried out open heart surgery or built atomic weapons they may feel that their contribution was worthwhile – quite rightly. There’s a measure to be made and recorded. But what of a Sun journalist, a checkout assistant in Morrison’s, a Ryanair pilot, a vagrant, a soap star or a philosopher? In the end there is no value judgement to make, we do what we do and we are all equally fulfilled and unfulfilled. We just pass the time the best way we can.

It may be that all life is a bit part in some David Lynch film, walking on and off screen in the background, unnoticed by a daydreaming audience, disguised by our own indifference and anonymity; Mulholland Drive – “a load of moronic and incoherent rubbish” according to one critic. If you find any of these things troublesome then try sitting still and  dosing yourself with a mug of mushroom soup.

Like Audrey

Few people know about Audrey Hepburn's unsuccessful audition for the role of Emperor (with a capital E) in the 1983 film, Return of the Jedi.

The Fabulous Doodles

It brings a whole new depth of meaning to the word mediocre. Yes it's the boring routes a pen takes across  a page when disconnected from the brain during a long telephone call. If this is your experience then maybe it's time to leave this place and get a different job, apply here.