Dead Wood Soap

 

A simple explanation of an unimportant point. 

Unless you think it is important.

Inspired by recent events.

And observations.

Detail from an Aesop soap box.

Mountain Dew

The USA is mostly batshit crazy: We have experts. They always have something to say. Quite rightly too. As for the colour of Mountain Dew, all I know is that it came in a number of different colours - at one time anyway. Most of them were quite bright. Lurid even. Possibly disgusting. Why drink that stuff?

Kids like it. I have personal experience.

Is it actually for sale on this septic isle these days? I think a ban would be in order. Outlaw it, quickly. Along with any other things that are too bold or vivid to be safely ingested. It's for the common good ... but that's a fine and disturbing line to take.

So don't worry about the colour of your neon urine (thinking of mainly male health problems here). It's a tone thing. When you reach a certain age you're glad if you can just painlessly and smoothly produce the amber nectar at the required point of delivery. Don't forget to wash your paws afterwards either and always open the toilet door "hands free" using only your Swiss Army Knife.

Old Fashioned

 

Night cap: When a family member creates an Old Fashioned for you sometime after midnight and it really hits the spot*.

Method etc.

Take the orange peel and squeeze it with your fingers. Rub the peel around the insides of a whisky tumbler, then place into the glass. Add the cherry, sugar syrup and bitters, along with three ice cubes.

Add half of the scotch or bourbon and stir for about ten seconds. Add more ice and the remaining scotch or bourbon and stir again for 10-15 seconds.

To serve, garnish with orange or lemon peel.

"That all sounds fine to me."

Yamaha APX-5A

So the slow guitar renovation project rolls on with this twenty four year old Yamaha. A bargain basement workhorse of a guitar. You'll not really lose money on this kind of honest Yamaha but you'll never make money either. It's solidly built in Taiwan and has no frills other than a basic electro-acoustic system that still works. At some point, and I can't remember when, I fitted it with Grover machine heads as a quick upgrade. 

Over the years it's been used everywhere in all sorts of settings and gigs. Other folks had fancier and more expensive makes and models (no bad thing) while I still plugged away with this old donkey. It's all about the fight. With a quick clean up, the usual tinkering and some new strings it sounds fine i.e. good enough for my cloth ears ... like any old Yamaha APX-5A should. It's a keeper.

Solsbury Hill

It was a long time ago now. 1985. That's over 41 years that have passed. We were living in Bath, on Great Pultney Street at the time, and I was a mature but immature student on a Bristol University course. I was mostly eating jam donuts and larking about in between assignments. Every other lunchtime I'd go for a run along the canal, hurried on by younger and fitter fellow students.

One Saturday morning my two little boys and I went out in our jet black and flimsy Fiat Panda, drove through the city and out onto the country lanes, stopped at some point and wandered up to the top of Solsbury Hill. I guess that I was on a mission of some sort.

A short stroll up a hill in the countryside. No voices were heard. No eagles were spotted. We looked over at Bath in the valley below. Then we wandered back down and bought some cakes to take home. After a while, maybe eighteen years, I just walked right out of the machinery, but that's another story.

Antonio Pinto de Carvalho

APC EA200 OVA: Here's a guitar that I picked up dirt cheap on eBay a few years ago. It needed some work. It's hand made and a rare, in their range, steel strung guitar from APC Luthiers in Portugal. I used it on the Collection album for a couple of things that were in a drop D tuning, then stuffed it into a case at the back of the cupboard and quietly forgot about it. 

I just looked at it again the other day and I've given it a fret tidy, a new nut, new strings and reset the action. The pickup was added by the previous owner and works fine despite looking a little strange. It's turned out pretty good, quite a comfortable and easy guitar to play. 

Antonio Pinto Carvalho is/was a distinguished Portuguese luthier, recognized for his exceptional craftsmanship with stringed instruments - but he did have a factory and workers. Their output includes a variety of traditional style instruments such as guitars, cavaquinhos, and ukuleles. 

Not very many of this type 👇though.

I Thought It Was Spaghetti In Her Hair

It's an easy enough mistake to make. We've all been there. Don't let it bring you down. It never was spaghetti. Good news: you can own a copy of the original artwork (as above) quite easily but I'm not going to tell you how to do it. Frustration is good for the soul, so they say. Success in life requires determination, patience and treachery.

Satire

 

This is satire … and like all great satire, it exposes the truth but it's not real. Not written by me either. I just copied it into the page. I didn’t know who wrote it but I know now.

Peter Girnus (you can easily look him up).

“I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.”

Unexpected Magic

The sword in the stone: Here's a 12th century relic from the Abbey of San Galgano. In 1180 Galgano Guidotti decided to renouce violence and warfare and thrust his sword into the rock as sign of his conversion to a life of peace and piety.

"According to legend, while on the road near Siena, Galgano's horse threw him into the dust. An invisible angel, the archangel Saint Michael, lifted him to his feet and led him to Monte Siepi, a rugged hill close to his home town of Chiusdino."

"In a vision, he saw a round temple on the hill, with Jesus and Mary surrounded by the Apostles. The angel urged him to repent his sins, but Galgano protested that he could no more do this than to split a rock with a sword. To prove his point, he drew his blade and thrust at the stony ground, but the sword slid easily into the living rock, where it remains stuck fast to this day."

"Galgano settled on the hill as a poor hermit. He befriended wild animals, and once, when the Devil sent a wicked monk to kill him, the wild wolves brought down the killer and gnawed his bones. Galgano  died in 1181 aged 33 years."

"In 1960, the sword was broken in an attempted theft. It was repaired and fixed in place with cement."

"An analysis of the protruding metal handle done in 2001 by Luigi Garlaschelli confirmed that the "composition of the metal and the style are compatible with the era of the legend". The analysis also confirmed that the upper piece and the invisible lower one are authentic and belong to one and the same artifact."

So this is all almost perfectly normal, though despite that I still like to think there are little bits of unexpected magic and mystery out there in the wider world that nobody can quite explain. Fuck your maths and science ... well sometimes.

Ovation

 

I haven't had this old Ovation guitar out of it's formidable flight case for a couple of years. It was almost perfectly in tune out of the box but the electrics are a bit goosed. Hence the spray cans and some annoying fiddling about that I had to do. There were some slight improvements after a while. 

These are odd guitars. Tight and heavy. The plastic bulge of the back body shape makes them awkward to play standing up and/or sitting down. It's a very physical thing. The action is OK but ... it needs lighter strings. Sounds good though. Maybe my fingers have lost strength over the last few years. I need to toughen up. Mess about less. 

You can't beat fighting with a guitar ... said nobody ever.

October

Another piece of solid truth from the internet: I might have known ... some medieval scribe may have decided that the symbol for my birth month should be a cat licking it's bottom. I think this is also available as a tattoo. Obviously I'm seriously considering the possibility of getting that done right now. Perhaps on my bottom. No gain without pain etc.

Lightning Bolt

Top wrap v Tune-O-Matic guitar bridges: You can get into a mess of trouble here. There’s a perception that the intonation flexibility of the old style lightning bolt design is inferior to that of bridges with individual or partial string adjustment screws, such as the Tune-o-matic. I’ve been wrestling with this somewhat idealistic theory for a while, but I’ve finally come down off the fence.

I’ve been experimenting with an LP Junior and an SG Junior, trying different wraparound bridges but always finding them troublesome. Often, they simply don’t go low enough, and actual intonation accuracy isn’t really possible. It’s fiddly, without delivering consistent results.

So I’ve reverted to the old school lightning bolt design, named after the zigzag intonation pattern cast into the bridge itself. Unlike a Tune-o-matic, where individual saddles can be adjusted to alter the length of each string, the lightning bolt has a fixed compensation pattern. String length is adjusted only by rotating the bridge on its two mounting studs, moving the contact points for all six strings together. This is a compromise, but one that seems to work well enough in practice.

The picture above shows two Tune-o-matic-style wraparound bridges and a Wilkinson model that allows partial intonation adjustment on the G and B strings. I wasn't happy with it. More importantly, the mounting arrangements don’t allow the bridges to sit low enough on the studs, which limits how far I can lower the strings to achieve the action I want. All that extra adjustment flexibility is of little use if the bridge itself won’t sit at the right height.

Lightning bolt on the SG: Sits nice and stable. The wraparound feature provides good tension, and the intonation is pretty much OK (close enough for jazz) without a lot of messing about.

Lightning bolt on the LP: Seems well enough bedded in, despite not being under full tension because I’ve added a small tailpiece as an anchor. I did this a while ago, when I got fed up with the Wilkinson bridge. It's hybrid design and Allen screw slide adjustments made it too awkward to adjust, so I ended up using it as a dumb bridge.

The lightning bolt was added recently. I kept the unorthodox tailpiece, and the whole thing looks neater to me.

LBs are £10 on eBay if you're quick.

It's All True

"It's all true, up to a point. But never be afraid to say a firm no to cigarettes and existentialism. Drinking doesn't help either but I really wouldn't know. Perhaps that's going too far. Don't take my word for anything."

From the big book of the "same name as nobody" by my good friend and fellow bass player Jules Delorean.

La Joie de Vivre

George the cat scuttles up a tree and a few seconds later appears near the top. Not quite sure why he's there or how he got there. He's pleased. I know that feeling well, though you'll seldom find me stuck at the top of a tree. I'm glad that the cats have enough of La joie de vivre to pull this kind of thing off. Be a little more cat - but don't throw up fur balls onto your carpet.

Pics by AG - using telephoto drone tech.

Wonky Pears

 

Still life of some sort: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a fine selection of wonky pears. Did I grow them, did I buy them? No I did not. But I can confirm that they came from a reasonably local, not too far away source. Are they at all edible? Absolutely not. 

Sorry about the gratuitous use of a banned "A" word there but I suffer from a limited vocabulary. Weak thoughts and mumbled prayers are required.

Somewhere in Skopje

Above: From our TA clan representative in Skopje. Macduff and that other national drink "Moray Cup" are now celebrated in a pub light fitting. 

Below: One of the better bits of poetic lyric writing forming a fitba chant. Balamory v Pocognoli. Genius. Sound clip omitted but you can imagine.

Wefail Art

If you're the kind of knockabout person who likes to dress up their abode with some politically tinged artwork, then the people (?) at Wefail Art are right up your unloved and potholed street. It's not cheap, it's not free, but it is art after all, and more fun than a rogue "Ring" front door security system. 

Click on this rather sardonic but effective "Scotland Travel" poster to find out more. What better way to remember the messed up summer of '26?

In the Voice of a Goat

"I'm not a faun, but I just might be a goat. An old goat. Probably the one on its hind legs. At least that's what I'd like to think. But perhaps I'm more the one behind, standing slightly further away. Yes.

I'm uncomfortable. A reluctant participant. I'm answering the call. A bit half hearted about it. No good will come of this. Pan can be unpredictable. I don't want to end up as goat's head soup either. 

Woodland creatures and actual gods are beyond my understanding of things.

Besides, this is no Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is a faun by moonlight. We should all be asleep. 

It was me who saw it first. It's a proper full moon. That could be an explanation. A bright light arriving at the wrong place and time. It caught him out. As if he was not able to read the signs. Or perhaps he read them perfectly. He's a star gazer. Everybody can have a theory.

Maybe that's why Pan is so reckless. He's a little confused. Too much stimulation. Too many messages from beyond the heavens.

Or is he just happy, being himself? 

I wonder if we all simply got in his way. I'm fairly certain this is our meadow.

But I haven't danced in a long time and it looks like fun. 

There's something strangely sweet in that tune, drifting out and across in the moonbeams. Like it wants to take us somewhere.

As for those shadows, I'm not sure they're ours at all.

They seem to have arrived by themselves."

Faun by Moonlight - By Léon Spilliaert.

Apple Products

Absolutely here for the apple juice. 

Don't know who did this but 👍

Ten Years Gone

Another Substack interlude. Almost everything you've ever wanted to know about Porsche 911 ownership but were afraid to ask. Click the pic to read. You can thank me later but most likely you won't. Never mind. Only 10 years plus in the making.