A Blur

This image surfaced randomly into my Instagram feed, posted by an Alex Harvey fan apparently. There's still a lot of them about. Indeed I was at this festival as a spotty teenager and of course most of that weekend (and the days around it) is now a bit of a blur, for various reasons. I do recall the weather being a bit on the damp side, dull and overcast but I did witness some decent bands, I think. Looking back at the line up I now wish that I'd been paying a bit more attention to the stage and not "other things".

Well that's age, appetites and experience for you. The £5.50 advance ticket fee seems crazy today. I think that it was about 50p more expensive to get in on the day itself but there was hardly any fuss, other than being in a queue for a few minutes. I'd like to end by saying something like "good times" but I'm not so sure that would be correct. Certainly not bad either, more easily described as completely out of reach, in some neutral and detached kind of way. You just lose touch really.

Suitable Photos

What if all the usable photos have been used up? Nothing decent is available and it's whatever day of the week and the weather is questionable and it's yet another month with an "R" in it. I guess everything you've thought about and planned for must remain on hold, until you can find a suitable photo. But what if photos are not really necessary? You just might get by on words alone. If only there was a sensible and meaningful combination of words you could cobble together that could work without an added image. Real writers do that all the time ...

Rubbish Modern Life Is

My twisted, frosted jpegs are too much for the internal whiz-bang memory system of this laptop. There's a price to pay for the repeated processing of things, going down to threadbare parameters and incredible spelling mistakes and poor naming conventions. They turn the digital air blue. Graphic sex, violence and design, with a smattering of foul language, but what is life without time to pause for reflection?

Making a birthday card on Moonpig has become as complex as editing a Ridley Scott movie using an etch-a-sketch (patent applied for). All those key swipe robbers of time and brain cells dictate that we must live in a visual world except for ...  other people who may either choose to or are made to do things differently. Other "other" people have few if any choices and that's never good. I blame those now long gone collective memories of conquest, still embedded in our brains; the silver psychopathic alien creators.

UPDATE FAILED!

I'm creating these artifacts as an alternative to keeping sour dough in the cupboard and giving it a pet name and allocating it some kind of (sour dough related) assumed personality. You may wish to inquire of your sour dough what pronouns it might prefer to go by. I'm going to be sticking with collages, all so topical and abstract that they can mean anything but mostly nothing. 

To avoid offence don't ask me for my views on whatever kind of music you like, or literature or modern chocolate. Inner conflict results. I'd want to give an honest answer but in the end I'm more interested in being a people pleaser and just making opinion related things up. Truth matters but not that much really, not if it's hurtful or petty. 

I'm still bitter about the Glastonbury experience but I can't tell anybody. I feel the same about the National Lottery and the two weeks holiday nearly everyone in a useless profession is granted at Christmas time.

A Predictable Outcome

How it started v how it ended, as per last year, so a mild feeling of deja vu or something vaguely similar. They very kindly put a new ticket allocation system in this year and so successfully reduced the torture time from about an hour to a mere 37 minutes. This marks real progress but I, like many others, am left with no tangible benefits. At least this year there won't be too many hurt and offended yoofs and boomers diving onto Twitter's (X) titanic hulk to complain.

Inside Outsider

Edinburgh daily photo, seen through glass, apologies to the purists. The view from inside the Outsider Restaurant, set in the fair but flawed city of Edinburgh. Restaurant is one of those words (and there are many) that I can never quite spell correctly and therefore have to check up on each time I try to use it. It seems that my brain can no longer easily accept new information because it is so full of toffee and media trivia. Be warned younger people, this will happen to you all one day. 

Having had a nice lunch in the Outsider and now back home I'm still feeling full up despite the portions being only reasonably sized and not excessive or large. So to sum up, human digestion and brain systems do appear to have finite limits that may reduce with age and maybe that's a good thing. System overload is likely but also tolerable.

P.S. I still stand by this unrelated comment or observation or whatever:

All Chalk No Action

Chalk marks before the rain (original).

 

Sounds like a 90s guitar band, probably based in the midlands, nothing wrong with any of that. Some free joined up information that came with a set of locking tuners from eBay. What a time to be alive.

A culinary word to the wise old vegans. When cooking up fresh broccoli it is essential that you suffocate it first. The process is said to be painless and humane. As advised by various reliable ancient writings found in the Pentateuch.

If You're Feeling Sinister

Actually there's nothing sinister going on here, just a repeated clip from our music video "dancing" (not sinister or scary at all but serious enough) coupled with a still from Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog, one of my favourite movies. These things have nothing in common other than the happenstance of Google's random interventions, whatever that may be about. 

Perhaps interventionism is the future of art, by that I mean humans and digital beings(?) accidentally working together but moving from different starting points and then arriving at the same conclusion at the same time. This has probably been done to death already and I've missed it all somehow. Apologies for my delayed arrival into the arena.

The Wax Candidates

The wax candidates

made in god's own image

confirmed by their mirror's

pale reflections

or so they believe

planning and musing

over

the future of the parties

in systems and organisations 

close to you

seeing themselves as role models and leaders

influencers and practitioners

bringing it all together

or pulling it all apart

with their idiotic ideas and

feet of finest clay

they pray

for prey

but who can tell what's really going on

and who can say what must be done

to save us from this fate?

Cat Tales

Miscellaneous cat related trivial events No. 99: The alternative Frankenstrat guitar has been having some minor surgery carried out because of a faulty jack socket, truss rod adjustment and some slight blemishes on the body. There's a little more to do but that'll come later some day when I can be bothered. Bungle the cat isn't too interested in any of this at all and demonstrates excellent examples of feline indifference whilst remaining focused on searching for a warm spot in which to curl up and take an afternoon nap. Something I think we all need to be on the lookout for.

Baked Off

Homemade biscuits never fail to please.

Sometimes I seriously doubt the sanity of others. Then I remember that erratic or odd behaviour is pretty much normal, like making spelling mistakes or putting too much sugar in your coffee. As a species we are mostly thoughtless and clumsy - apart from people who can dance really well, walk in a straight line when intoxicated and maintain a good posture as an audience member during some boring performance. These are our modern gods but I still wouldn't trust them to allocate planning permission to quite simple home extension projects or do well on "Bake Off". 

This TV show teaches us that everyone has a capability that they can exercise and perform quite well in, up to a point, but that maintaining sustained brilliance or achieving consistent high quality results is a tough hurdle to get over. Almost impossible unless you're a certain type of serene Japanese engineer. The Scots are a decent but mostly mediocre bunch really, terminal dullness abounds, apart from our  famous and mostly crackpot inventors.

Outside 195/45R16 84V

Sometimes it's best 

to just say what you see

Outside one nine five / 

four five R one six

eight four V

Magic Beans

It was 2024 and they had used up all of their magic beans.

Just like in a fairy tale, but sadly not the good kind.

Things going backwards, steadily.

So let the fuckwittery commence.

Blah Blah

This sort of thing has been said many times and of course nothing ever happens. I wonder what it would actually take for some sort of successful revolt to take place? The tweets, headlines, articles and shouty debates over royal greed and skullduggery are just basic news space fodder. People will nod and agree and then go back to sleep. Nothing to see here just somebody moaning about the royal family (God bless them). There are more pressing issues you may say, but where exactly does social injustice begin? At the bottom or at the top? Who has the power to set up a properly weighted balance? It should be acceptable just to want to live in a fairer, better and more open world and maybe have a road map to guide us. And yes, just in case you didn't know, the monarchy do live in another world and you'll not be going there. 

Anyway, here's a cute cat called Zippy.

Vietnamese Condensed Milk Party

A party for one. Good health's fractious dream and general dental welfare are cast to the wind. The persistence of the inevitable aging process and internal rot that robs me of my looks and faculties seeps into every aspect of my fragile existence. I hear a constant buzzing, some distant appliance churning up electricity, the edges of my vision go fuzzy, my teeth are on end, there's a new pain in the place of a familiar pain, my thoughts are distinct but foggy, my imagination rewinds to find familiar paths where I'm lost, my breath is sour to the taste as I breathe in the fumes of a soul's lifetime pollution. I now have more hills to climb that I ever expected. It's that bloody but marvelous, sweet as heroin's opioid sugar, running straight through the condensed milk that's fighting for it's very existence as it nearly drowns in an ocean of hot dark coffee; Vietnamese style.

Asparagus Dreams

Untended and misunderstood bits of the garden can go crazy over time, a bit like people might. It's not as if we've ignored the asparagus, it's just remained untrained and now it's sort of unkempt. I've not really ever had a dream in which asparagus featured strongly either. Then again I'm a bit of a non dreamer. I have not as yet received the gift of regular dreaming. The inside of my head is an unfathomable void at night time. I'm highly skilled at sleeping though, it comes naturally to me. My one true but mostly hidden talent. 

When the (great?) day comes and I'm judged on the contents of my life and what I've achieved I'll be sure to brag about sleeping as soundly as a bag of damp concrete and doing it on a regular basis. I doubt that such a claim, however honest, will get me over the finishing line. There have been many other things. Aye, eternal life and all that. Now back to taming the unruly asparagus. This randomly generated post may have been inspired by a Kate Bush ear worm. What do you think of that Google AI?

Radio Amazing

You might get all the money! Turns out it's not all that amazing* ... so few things in modern life are really. I thought that this free gift of an AR graphic would toggle me onto their website and our account but no - so here's the link. I'm ruminating over whether or not to use AR. Anyway I wish them and all the artists out there, fighting like ferrets in a sack for a wee bit of attention, all the best.

*One of my least favourite words - but who cares?

Found Things

I discovered a fragment of the True Cross.

Early morning self portrait prior to a decent shave.

The world's most expensive coffee? It's real and I have some, the famous Weasel Coffee of Vietnam. Best served with a mighty slug (?) of condensed milk. I was of course unaware of the story behind this product, there's more information here. Don't judge me.

October 31st

Other People

 

A big thanks and shout out to all the good people from the land of "Other", 148k views for this blog in eight years* is good going. You know who you are. Cheers.

*To be clear this blog has been going since 2004 but for some reason the CIA and MI5 web crawlers (possibly following the instructions of the Russians and the Fessbook Mafia) decided to delete a large number of years and traffic records from my scattered and battered files. However the good news is I'm no longer considered a threat.

Scotland

Tonight's statistically unproven weather forecast for the land where those brave and resilient Scottish folks live.

"Tonight will be mostly cloudy, but the north-east will see a few more frequent clear spells. Light rain or drizzle is expected in both eastern and western areas and will also develop for the Northern Isles."

Unless there's heavy sleet or snow and winds in excess of 30 knots expected this is the forecast we get most nights/days.