50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums?

I do belong to that long lost and much lampooned generation who, for a brief moment believed that prog-rock was the unending answer to some kind of unending question(s) about life and more importantly music, hair and loon pants. After a while it turns out that nothing really happened and the albums were churned out in some self indulgent fashion and judging by the list here in Rolling Stone I certainly missed a few as they rolled by. Now I've a pile of virtual  catching up to do and of course I never will. I've still to read the full list but I do wonder what's better...try to listen to all of these (those I'm unfamiliar with anyway) or just try to catch up on Sparks' enormous and no doubt highly entertaining back catalogue.

10 Foot tall man

This piece of photographic history features my legs apparently but little else of interest. I enjoy playing the minor roles in these lifetime dramas. No animals or humans were injured during the process but there was a lot of rich sponge cake and pavlova consumed. The cart was unharmed.

I dream of Dreamies

 

I'm so easily by influenced by TV adverts. I'm a simple soul really. I blame the Discovery Channel (Turbo) and the advertisement segments during Fast and Loud. There, apart from PPI, shit loan deals and trailers for a myriad of other similar dumb ass pretending to be bad ass programmes I discovered Dreamies. There, on the silver screen where the cat jumps through a solid wall. It is the Discovery Channel after all so high quality educational images are regularly featured. Now there's no going back. I bought some and handed them out. One cat is already displaying the early signs of serious addiction and the potential to break bad, eyes spinning and mooning. The other is indifferent, like a Pentecostal Preacher at a Dundee strip show (?), or something. It seems that when it comes to peddling stimulants to animals or to specimens of basic level humanity there's no going back once you open the packet. The good news is of course is that they're all fit for human consumption...apart from Fast and Loud that is.

Puzzled

In many ways I remain perpetually puzzled by life and all that it offers, throws at, rains on, discharges or provides for me. Today it was a marvellous and unexpected piece of parking space design in a well known superstore car park. Complete with a jaunty curve, an immovable pillar and no obvious means of getting a normal car either in or out. Motorcycles and cars that have passed through a scrapyard crusher are all very welcome.

Mission for the dead souls

sometimes i wonder why i'm trapped into not writing things in lower case all the time like a proper artist or revolutionary politician or poet might do, there must be something wrong with me, unable to shake of the need for basic punctuation and the construction of 
sentences, 
usually as long as possible with extra words added in at the second or third edit and reread, i do all these things becos i take pride in what i do (like spelcqeking), however simple or off the cuff it might be, i wantthings to be right. i has standardz

Today I was reminded about my friends at RBS and £45 billion they lost and how that weighty sum of money will never return. I wondered how Fred Goodwin might be doing, what he's thinking, how he passes the time even, perhaps he reflects and perhaps he regrets. Anyway it's all going to be sold back now, back to the same regimes, old boys and mindset that ruined it and the rest of the world of banking. No local banks then, community solutions or nationalisation because you see we've all clearly learned some valuable lessons.

Warmest

On what has allegedly been the hottest day of the year (with many misshapen blokes spontaneously discarding their shirts and showing their tasteful tattoos as usual) here's some nice pictures of wrecked military equipment frozen to the ground somewhere in Siberia. It has been pleasantly warm mind you, the central heating was given a brief rest and we enjoyed a seasonal salad with the piping hot fish pie. Tar melting around the potholes and various dogs on the receiving end of a good walking. Nissan Micras are out in force traveling slowly and erratically and there are bikes everywhere. People put on shorts and buy those emergency barbecues that cook exactly four burgers before they die and I sip a warm beer somewhere in the distance.  That's summer for you. I wonder what the weather is like today in Iceland?

Squirrels

Summer has finally arrived in Scotland bringing with it those woodland vandals known as the squirrel contingent. When nobody is looking it seems that these uncultured squirrels get up to all sorts of squirrel type mischief and when they are doing that you may just capture some of the strange action on an apple device of some sort. Actually I think that somebody was looking,  it just wasn't me for a change. What you can't see in this image is the third squirrel who owns an impressive cloak of invisibility that he is putting to good use possibly just out of shot.

Banana disaster

Today has been the kind of day when you unpeel or unzip your breakfast banana and then promptly drop it onto the floor (in the kitchen at work). Even applying the two second rule and assuming you've no sore back so you can  pick it up quickly it has to go straight into the bin. It's a dirty, tainted banana and there is no nearby, easily accessible replacement. Oh how I cried (well inwardly) and how forlorn and half empty did my porridge pot feel. Is that a question of some kind? It seems to sound like one. Tomorrow I shall do better.

Sexual Healing of sorts

I woke up this morning to the strains of a marching band doing a perfectly loud and credible version of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing. Maybe not the most obvious or sensitive rendition but they carried the tune well in a hummable way. After that it was downhill all the other way into a party clear up, dishwasher emptying and breakfast foraging kind of morning. Along came the lazy  the sun to provide a warm and pleasant surprise as we rewound ourselves back to normal on a hungover Sunday morning. There are no workable rituals here other than getting on with it and sensing an inner peace in knowing that you "made it". When I say "made it" I'm referring to more huge, bottomless pots of Stovies - the meal that keeps on giving, relentlessly.  I am now reflecting. I have eaten too much this weekend; cakes, chocolate, burgers and buns, cheeses, light and heavy beers, red wines from far away lands and occasional dollops of salad, greens and pulses. Now I'm ready to fall over and onto the couch and never write another word, compile another playlist or drain a tinny of IPA, till next time that is. 

Look somewhere else for your stories

Don't expect any clever or controversial opinions here, nothing is ever original, all I do is lift and plagiarise whilst carefully avoiding eating any of the bones from sardines; I've developed a slick technique you know. You should see how I manage to dispose of the oil and the evidence. I also try to work up a cryptic lyric now and then but that's just a dull hobby like hoovering or selling unwanted stuff. I also believe that playing music helps you to understand quantum physics a bit more easily, all the stuff about matter/atoms/tiny balls changing shape and nature; think about how you move between scales, change intervals and bend notes, it also guards against early onset brain damage.

Muddy Waters Monday

Shirley Bassey Tuesday

Wednesday Velvet Underground

Thursday Lynyrd Skynyrd

Friday Flock of Seagulls

Sat to Sun a Crowded House.

(Lynyrd Skynyrd is such a joy  to type, it gives you a headache. It should be compulsorily to use it at school for English class, in adult teaching seminars and in T shirt fronted Apple Stores).

Death walks behind you

I just ate an enormous slice of chocolate heart, a chicken curry and two glasses of red wine and apart from feeling a little tired I'm fine. I also did the Ubble mortality test and I'm good to go...somewhere. Thirteen strange lifestyle related questions if you are male, eleven if you're female and then your Ubble age (50 for me giving me an extra 10 years of something) and your % chance of living another five years or dying within them; 2% for me to die and obviously 98% to live till sunny 2015. I'm sure there's some bad science and dodgy algorithms in their calculations that have already been discredited in the media but if it makes you feel good then fine. Shame that there will be a few people who'll just feel bad afterwards. If you do then try to walk a bit more briskly and invest in a second car.

Everything is annoying

I need to let this go. Particularly annoying are the items of mismatched garden furniture lazily bought on-line that turn out to be a) the wrong size and b) damaged in transit and c) just plain awkward. Preparing for the oncoming advent of summer and the passing of El Nino  has never seemed so complicated. I am of course exaggerating this just a little, life's little inconveniences are nothing compared to life's slightly larger ones, few of which I suffer from. The problem is recognising them and dealing with them in a balanced and proportional way that avoids conflict of the inner, outer and elsewhere kind. Gumtree (plugging again) may be the solution, now what was it that I was preaching the other day about planning your happiness?

Thoughts from Saturday

Set up for the Nepal benefit gig in Joppa.

Five simple things that will make you happy or even happier:

Listen to a favourite piece of music.

Spending five minutes more with somebody you like.

Going outdoors - explore.

Helping someone else.

Having a new experience (presumably a good one).

Context for life. Design and live in an environment that makes happiness possible. Willpower doesn't work, make it easier for yourself by design i.e. make your bank password or begenerous1 or stopspendingcash1 Do things and have things that make you smile.

Lazy blogging

It's been too busy (almost typed too busty there till the spell check kicked in) a weekend to post anything coherent but it's Sunday night by now which will soon give birth to another sterile Monday. So this image sums up something, somehow.

At peace with the world

After an afternoon of filing away at stubborn Chinese metal I've given up; 48mm into 48mm doesn't go and never will (unless you do a whole lot more filing). So I have stopped trying, stopped fretting and more importantly stopped sweating. I bought another pole, one of a more suitable size and...relax. The 48mm pole is about to feature on Gumtree in some badly worded form. How old do you really have to be to stop listening to that stubborn, irritating voice inside your head that repeats various kinds of noisy nonsense on a loop? 59 and a half apparently. 

Coop Sandwich

These are seriously good sandwiches, I'd recommend the salmon, egg, egg mayo (that's two kinds of egg on one sandwich) and salad big boy.  Available from some emporium near to where you are or my case the Coop in Balloch. Simple things please simple digestive systems that are mainly powered by a combination of gravity and perseverance and regular exercise. Look after your innards and plumbing and they will surely look after you. Send it down and see it from the premises. Tomorrow for rich and self indulgent mixture of sport and lifetime experience I plan to visit a bank and a petrol station in no particular order. Whatever next?

48mm dia hole

Here's the nifty, large and earth/beige/brown coloured sun parasol I ordered from Amazon for the garden. Perfect in every way apart from the fact that the pole diameter is 48mm meaning it requires a 48mm hole to stand up in the standing up device. Where on earth can I get such a thing?

Strange to think of finding a means to block out the sun's precious little rays when in May it's a little south of 9C and pouring with seven different kinds of rain.

A little screwy

Despite the advances we see in technology some folks still enjoy drawing cartoons, I presume mostly using normal, low-tech methods. Then they upload them on instagram or something. God bless them all.

At some point every generation stops, takes stock, looks out of the window and thinks, "things are getting a little screwy around here." That's what I tell myself and then, shortly after that I tell myself that in fact I'm the one that's getting a little more screwy. Then I stop all of that and stop thinking for a while. Meanwhile as I do I notice that based on the images that glide into my peripheral vision it seems that the screwiness simply increases. Learning lessons from life, recent history and ancient history doesn't really happen. It's a problem for all of us and none of  but maybe I can be a little more relaxed about it. I am after all a big part of the problem.

Forgotten pieces

The forgotten pieces of yesterday's Lego, as collected from the rug and rescued into a new life on the book shelf. Where will they find themselves next?

Today I seemed to drink a lot of tea and probably ate too much. I dreamt that the house dated from the time of the French Revolution and indeed it did. The morning was a fuzzy time, it took an hour to wake up and an hour to shower and an hour to fiddle with yet more versions of vehicle number plates. I also ate a fried egg. That's three hours of anybody's time and before long I was in a cafe eating lunch. Now I can't make my mind up as to whether I'm a bowl of lukewarm soup or a butterfly covered in butter. The afternoon burned away like an Embassy Regal so I pottered in the garden before eventually running out of pots and failing to find any ill placed trees that needed removing. As usual I moved the barrel into a better location, soon the torture will stop. I also sprayed things with teak oil from the bargain land of Aldi, that was a quite satisfying activity. The garden has a grammar all of it's own and I can't quite understand it. In the end all I knew was that there was a remarkable amount of dust up inside my nostrils after a lengthy spell of sweeping. I'll not be trying that again. 

Longer may you run

Gone to a good home , I hope.

OK blog in the doldrums, what could pull you out? Extensive tales of ironing to a CSNY soundtrack? The removal of old and stubborn number plates without causing injury to myself (can't say the same about the plates)? Selling a Dutch car to Dutch couple from Glen Clova who've had enough of French cars for the mean time? In that same sale getting half of what I paid for the car three years ago and 40k later? (That's not half bad for a half value thing). The possibly mistaken purchase of Moroccan lamb meat balls and couscous for tea? A sardine snack and clambering through the woods with a hose pipe? Deciding just for one bloody Friday not to got and  worship at the temple of the false god Tesco? Drilling holes in plastic? Wondering about guys like Alistair Carmichael and how they tick, what's the best position to take; pity, revenge, hate, hounding, ignore or just watch from a safe distance as he's devoured (for being a liar) by other politicians? All of whom may well have told a lie or two themselves...but they're safe for the meantime s they can stir up a frenzy. Time to fry some more potatoes, foil up some corn & butter, drink some beer and think deep thoughts in the dubious company of the Discovery Channel.