Unfortunate mouse

This unfortunate mouse seems to have met a sticky end and, for some inexplicable reason, was deposited somewhat disrespectfully on top of the cowling of the electronic cat flap (yes we have two of them, that's cats and cat flaps). Naturally the cats are the prime suspects but nothing can be proved as all the evidence is pretty much circumstantial. I scooped him up and after saying a few interfaith type blessings gave him an appropriate woodland funeral. The post internment function went well despite the short time I had for preparation and planning. The catering was of a high standard with the sausage rolls and salad bucket in particular both deserving a special mention. Many thanks to Bambi's mum, the two naughty fox cubs, the robin, the woodpecker and a family of disturbingly inbred rabbits who also attended. I then played a slowed down and shortened version of "Ain't Nobody Got Time For That" on a rather distorted guitar and so ended the proceedings in what I considered to be a sweet and uplifting spiritual moment. The official version is here...

Cigarettes of the future

Yes that's right. It's the ultimate fate of the automobile that's yet to come. The love affair will die, spiralling away into oblivion. There will be a slow dawning, a gradual realisation that these washing machines on wheels are a thing of the past. We will no longer worship their stylistic subtlety, their speed and comfort or their extravagance and expense. They will  become extinct and so will petrol stations and forecourts and garages. Our world will no longer have these things,  but it will happen gradually. Firstly the fuel prices will be hiked up by wars and the SNP, then the roads will be too busy and angry, the infrastructure will break down as the routes and surfaces become unrepairable. At the same time virtual travel via the internet and other unreal means will become quick, commonplace and affordable and so we'll just stop...we'll stop exploring completely, we'll settle. Well I suppose other than the odd ride on some uncouth piece of public transport should we need to visit to see somebody or do something. Meanwhile the super rich will fly free in streamlined helicopters and humming private jets, high above out of reach and at improper speeds in five star comfort. Our only course of action will of course be to systematically take them out with our hand held rocket launchers as they streak across our grey skies...it'll become one of the brave new Olympic socialist sports by 2044. Having said all that I may just stick with the old Volvo for as long as I can afford it's stalwart protection and clunky comforts and where else can you listen to music in peace and occasional tranquility?

Washing the house down

I eventually got around to watching Part 2 of the Eagles' history. That wasn't so good. All serious pronouncements, justification and money troubles (too much money that is) mixed up with not a lot of good music, the 70s was their era really. It was hard to stay with it but it seemed like it was some important part of modern history, how not to behave when you're successful. I don't think anybody has cracked that one yet. The low key thrill of being unsuccessful, obscure, undiscovered and possibly overlooked may have some advantages for those wishing to retain their sanity and self respect.

After a while and some beer and sausages I went outside and washed down the house with a high pressure hose. It was a soothing and cathartic experience to remove all the bird shit, spider webs and debris from the white walls and made my evening. Then I applied varnish to guitars and spoke to cats about cat related matters, they ignored me for most of the conversation. Perhaps I'm rusty or they may have heard it all before. I should get out there and practice more often.

Moving on and backwards

When blogging - make the pictures large

Joni time and goin' back to Canada: Whilst bumbling around and ironing I watched two fascinating and contrasting documentaries this week. One was a conventional face to face interview between Joni Mitchell and a Canadian journalist. Joni now nearly 70 is chiseled, old, defiant, alarmingly lucid and self aware, violently self critical, clever and bright. She sits in some fortress Californian home, her own paintings on the wall, random guitars and glinting frames everywhere. She is a strange kind of wispy golden woman. Unattractively she chain smoked through the chat and always returned to her formative years in Canada to pin the blame and find the proof for her lifetime’s motives and actions. She was a talking lyric book, a feast of tangled memories and names and things that are to her still important and relevant - trying to make some sense of a life. A sign of ageing I’ve often seen, reliance on and recounting the past to make a more measured explanation of the long road here. She can no longer sing, she paints and holds court (with a spark or two) and lives the kind of life you’d imagine. She talks about the greats of song writing, the modern masters, artists and poets but nothing really sticks. She never liked poetry…I know what she means.  She struggles just to be in some place and to stop That’s what a lifetime of travel gets you, itchy feet and sore legs, aching backs and a stubborn inability to stop keeping up the illusion. I wont ever meet her, that’s probably a good thing. She's like some kind of weird spiritual mother but one best avoided...here come all those absurdities and the good/bad ideas.

Joe time and the long journey out of Eden: Then it was “the History of the Eagles” Part 1. I’ve not seen Part 2 yet but Part 1 was traumatic enough. Nobody was ever happy for too long in that band and strops, fights and bad moods coloured a lot of their history. Then along came loose cannon Joe Walsh in the mid seventies, a clown and a buffoon and another alpha male genius in the mix. I forget Joe Walsh periodically, maybe deliberately but of all the good guitar players out there he really had an effect on me. I recall the first gold top Antoria Les Paul and the James Gang’s Greatest Hits. It must’ve been 1973 and I was for a short time trying to learn to play almost properly. Something in Walsh’s playing, sound and phrasing on his James Gang stuff really went in deep. The arpeggio, the slide and echo, the bounce he got into his riffs, his harmonics and the busy filler pieces - or guitar field as Joni Mitchell calls it…more guitar field, more barnstorm. Maybe Walsh just had a simpler style than Page or Clapton, maybe they were too speedy and too far out of reach. Walsh was concrete and space, he stopped a lot and unplayed parts. He was also a crashing and untidy player, in and out of funk and classic bolero moments, unpredictable. So his career took a new and a lucrative path in the Eagles where he beefed up their sound but then he really sank in that corporate sludge of big band ego and he never did recapture whatever patchy magic was in the three James Gang albums or the Smoker You Drink. That’s what big bands do when they implode. We’ll see what he makes of things in Part 2 if I ever get a big enough pile of ironing to get round to watching it.

Get down from that cross, we could use the wood

Of course this means something.

Timber lizard in hibernation. 

Guitar headstocks that require sanding and varnishing and sanding and varnishing and so on.

When phones, cameras, all the electronic preachy shit we have and even simple file transfers let you down, (as they always will) it's good that you can rely on wood just to be...wooden. There's hardly a more pleasingly reliable material, easily worked (?), come by, burned, polished and ultimately turned into useful / useless objects - heat in extremis if you are desperate. Round here we specialise in the useless variety and have spent a number of years producing a great many useless but pleasing to us objects. Does that then make these things useful? Probably. Valuable? Not really. Wood working, design, injury, fatigue, repetition and the long practiced art of self deprecation, somehow they were all meant for each other and go hand in glove like a duvet, a kitten, cult membership and an atomic bomb.

New album

Those clever Goldfrapp electro twins may well have come up with a new album of music, songs and sounds. Father's Day gift anyone? Click here.

Tweet of the day

As a fan and a critic of all things to do with road signs I'm now on the look out for the sign(s) referred to below in a possible Tweet of the (other) Day. Truth is I seldom leave the confines of Fife these days, the borders and boundaries being something of a blur and so I've not had an opportunity to catch up on this new strident and historically correct sign language. Need to get out more and broaden my horizons but what with the guitar, driftwood and sculpture workshop taking off, currys to make, dishes to do and cats to entrap it's all too difficult right now.

Graham Spiers ‏@GrahamSpiers4 Jun

Just passed a sign saying 'You Are Entering the Kingdom of Fife'. One of the world's great road signs.

 Retweeted by Andrew C. Leggatt

The waterfall of eternal Zen

It was so sunny today that we lived in the garden. We ate pasta, trifle and olives, drank wine, water and pear lemonade and then jammed on various guitars drums and voices. It was a very fine day. Then at 1815 along came the clouds and that was that but the happy memories  remain and the waterfall will again start and stop and flow at the bidding of the sun another day. Sometimes everything is just the way it should be and the universe just moves to the tapping of your foot, the whistling of the birds  and the buzzing of a rare and lazy bee.

The significance of the trivial...

...is easy to say but more difficult to define. It's possibly untrue, unless you can somehow add all the trivial up till it reaches some point of significance, like a blog or a Twitter feed might do.  Like bad or accidental science, chaos forming up into creativity or just random constructions in twigs and Lego or bits of forgotten guitars banged back together in the hope that they/it might produce a decent tune.

A lukewarm cup of coffee.
Appreciating a Ford Focus.
A pen runs out.
An airport ticket is changed with no fuss.
A sunny day.
Falling asleep while travelling.
Waking up in a strange room.
Two over fried eggs eaten with brown sauce.
Cats jumping in a playful fight.
Reeling up a garden hose.
A battery runs out.
Messages on an answering machine.
Planning a trip.
Three items received in the post all hidden in different places around the garden.
The washing machine set to the wrong temperature.
Thinking of things but not doing them.
A charitable donation.
A spilled drink.
Looking out of a window.
A hot bus.
People out walking dogs and children.
Dirty laundry.
Serenity.

Samsung v Apple

If Samsung and Apple iPhoto were a married couple they'd be throwing china cups and pints of milk at one another, then storming out in a huge huff, then coming back in and slapping the other on the back of the head, swearing and pouting and then either setting fire to the wardrobe or slashing the seats in the BMW 5 series estate. Whatever way these guys are just incompatible and I'm getting a little tired of their childish behaviour. So here are some unedited photos of questionable cowboy guitar projects that are currently underway round these parts. Over and out Samsung.

The sword swallower's cat

There are only sixty genuine sword swallowers in the world. Here's one I saw at the Taste of Grampian  food fare and sword swallowing extravaganza in Inverurie. He's also Scotland's only practicing SS performer apparently. Long live the eccentric and scary world of street theatre I say. N.B. this guy also eats fire, juggles knives and does the old bed of nails routine - all whilst telling quirky jokes. He didn't have his cat with him on the day.

If albums were books

More lazy blogging (due to unseasonal seasonal weather and being busy entertaining numerous guests). This site is rather good if you like to see rehashed classic (?) albums re-imagined as books.

These are not the logs you are looking for

They certainly are not.

Imaginary Robin

There's not much worse than getting followed around by a figment of your imagination. This has been happening to me for a few months now - in the form of an over friendly robin. Frankly the tiny red-coated fellow is stalking me. Here, there and as John Lennon might have said, everywhere. But mostly in the garden. When I whistle, along he comes, winking and blinking and set to briefly enjoy my company before winging away into the safety of the shrubs from where he can safely observe my antics. I have encouraged him, saved his life (from the jaws of a cat) on one occasion and regularly fed him assorted nuts coated with second hand fat from the butcher shop in Limekilns. It's all my own fault really. Relationships can get complicated.

Blackie Strat

What it should look like.

Building up a Blackie Strat from EBay'd and found bits and beach combings. Well I've not done any building yet, just purloining the pieces and preparing to clean up, titivate and repair. There will be periods of doubt, disappointment and some frustration but I shall struggle through. Once completed this priceless mongrel  pedigree tribute to rock n' roll n' blues history will be priced at £350 or thereabouts. Form an orderly queue.

Smartphone ownership

My actual screen pic minus the ever morphing shortcuts.

Sadly the Samsung Galaxy smart phone honeymoon period is over. A fun and proud to have novelty for a few days it's already revealing a wider, possibly world wide "Emperor's new clothes syndrome" type of deception that I suspect everyone has been duped into following. OK it's not a total crock but one week in I'm hungry for a proper button to press, I dislike the stupid flicky screen. My clumsy flicks or nose wipes are generally misunderstood and it warps of into god knows where whilst covered in fingermarks. It moves in my pocket and resets or changes the view. It's always looking for some connection, like a Los Angeles hooker. It's always telling me something isn't available and it still chirps randomly (I suspect Googlemail) in some desperate bid to get my waning attention. Texts and typing are a muddle, I'm doubly confounded by the tiny non-button buttons and the irritating spell check that rattles on with unwanted suggestions all the time.

Them there's the camera, the one bit of mobile tech I had bonded with. I don't see it happening with this fickle baby. It wants it's own way all the time, it  blacks out in any sunlight, does the flicky thing to video when you least want it to and in a unforgivable way it refuses to mate with an Apple MacBook. That means that to get photos into the laptop (because I don't want to stuff everything on line unedited) I have to extricate the tiny memory card and then use an adaptor to regain control of the shots. Unless some unexpected Epiphany occurs it's headed for the bottom of a sock drawer or the bottom of the Forth.

Out of my system

The warden's house. A job for the summer, advertised once in a while and probably well worth it...I've signed up.

Here's the ferry looking steady...but it's anything but.

The green lump between the sea and the sky is in fact the island.

The old, ruined Aberdour jetty, made to look older by adding black and  white.  Once the centre for river traffic, ferries and holidaymakers.

Views of the mythical isle of Inchcolm set out in the Forth of Fifth or as we call it the Firth of Forth. It was the recent location of a magical family wedding. The island is a strange mix of the abandoned and the derelict and the stridently restored. Seagulls and puzzled explorers pick their way here and there in the remnants of the old abbey complex and Napoleonic and 20th century gun emplacements. The wind never stops blowing and the birds eye up unwilling targets, that's just the island life. All rather good and stiffly Scottish, the boat journey's pretty interesting also - as is the landing.

Obvious

Says it all really. Some things are just out there, hidden in plain sight.

Been playing this all my life

bacon tetris Share on twitter Share on facebook Share on more MAY 16

The act of arranging bacon strips on a frying pan in the most efficient way possible given the dimensions of your pan. The goal is to maximize the number of bacon strips on the heating surface without leaving any part of any strip uncooked.

"I have 100 square inches of bacon and only 36 square inches of frying pan area. Time for some Bacon Tetris."