Stratocaster

I've always been fascinated by the name "Stratocaster". It evolved from the names Broadcaster and Telecaster. Leo Fender brainstorming those names in a full 1950s flow of guitar creativity and perhaps some minor plagiarism, I don't really know. These were the names for the television generation. They were about to become the space-race generation. The first modern Americans, as I imagined they imagined themselves. 

So one day I simply said to some artificial intelligence the word "Stratocaster". The picture above is what came out of the mindless and faraway mincer. Perhaps this AI is not so smart or it's incredibly smart and nuanced and sees connections I cannot imagine.

Vika Kaj

Vika Kaj sounds like a Viking warrior or an Icelandic sex worker but it's neither. Just another IKEA tag, this time for a table top with telescopic, extendable legs. We've had one for twenty years and we're currently giving it away via some social media site. It still has a bit of life in it albeit one leg has the screw head that fits into the base stuck in it. Some lucky punter will hoover it up I hope. So this ramble is really just about IKEA hacks, as pictured above; a Vika Kaj has been nicely (?) converted into some kind of very industrial looking sink set up. There's a simple principal here: pass on, recycle, upcycle, and remodel and reuse. We need to do more of this.

Relegated

 

Saturday afternoon: When your team loses the second leg of the playoffs against a team they should easily beat without showing any proper gutsy fight and is instantly relegated. Now we're in the seaside league and we deserve nothing better. A poor board, poor managers and some terrible business decisions have pushed us right into our lowest point in years. You can't blame the fans and supporters, they've been rock solid. Now we'll be stuck down in the nether reaches of the leagues for a while and that's about all I have to say. Taking a summer break from it all and it's not even summer.

C'est Chic

Reaching a point in life where  don't really give a fuck about mass media output, though at times do I enjoy some of the photography or a pithy cartoon. Editorials and opinion pieces ... no, not really. Wait a minute this blurb may well be an opinion piece. Time for a factory reset or a long cool beverage.

Shut Up

 

Aspiring guitar players, the up and coming up and comers. While you may enjoying the delights of old masters like Fripp, Beck or Summers, or the shredtastic metal heads of the 80s and 90s or even strummy shoegazers from whenever to get your ideas and inspiration there's one name you should add to the list of players. He's dead and lacks god like status. He was a difficult genius and that's hard to market, even once dead but ... "Shut up and play yer guitar" (albums 1, 2 and 3) might just disturb you in a fairly disturbing manner. The playing of Frank Zappa isn't really appreciated or celebrated. I suspect he'd have wanted it this way, obscurity knocks etc. His invention, fluidity, speed and range is impressive and exhausting. He also knows how to use wah without wah tones being the prominent sound too. So shut up. Just buy it on eBay, cheap as chips. Nobody will ever know.

Blame my frenzied cropping for the tiny guitar Frank seems to be holding.

Simple Pleasures

 A picture once hung on the wall, 

But then it wasn’t there at all.

A dirty mark and a pin hole show, 

Where that stupid picture didn’t used to go.

Abstractathon

Once in a while everybody should make up a new word.

Abstractathon: A long period of time spent thinking fundamentally stupid but still interesting thoughts about nothing in particular.

Date Collective

 

Date Collection: The slow hobby of date collection and consumption is moving on at a pace that might be said to be comfortably slow. The dates of the date palm are harvested by experts and then stuffed by beginners. It can best be described as being a process. We use both exotic and mundane fillings. Examples might be and are not limited to: Diced grapefruit and brown sugar, crushed cumquat, slivers of anchovies in oil and sardine paste, coriander and mushroom, Malteser and sweet pickle, shortbread (crushed) with clotted cream and brandy, scrambled egg and peanut butter and of course finely chopped Mars Bar. 

Doctored dates are popular in Catholic and Islamic countries across the world thanks to various works of Biblical fraud. In an apocryphal story Jesus turned a pile of donkey dung into sweet dates flavoured with cinnamon and the honey from wild (or fairly upset as I understand) bees and distributed them amongst the poor and the Roman colonists in order to illustrate some now lost teaching points via a forgotten parable. Hence “The Miracle of the Lost Parable”, a new film due out in December 2024 on Netflix starring literally a cast of thousands of CGI peasants and funded by the Date Marketing Board of Canada. Expect a sharp uptake in date demand that party season.

Dates are a fruit. Did I say date and mean data or did I say data and mean date?

Still Lives

 

Feel refreshed, feel fulfilled, feel content. Colours and composition can satisfy. 

Velux Exhibition

Velux Window Collection* and Exhibition: We’ve been secretly accumulating these roof windows and hiding them in the house in various cupboards, box rooms, secret passages and at times in plain sight. It’s such fun to confuse house guests and unwelcome visitors with the pitter patter of rain or the scrape of a low hanging tree branch on a discretely placed Velux frame high up in the darkness of an unlit bedroom.

They can also be a useful source of extra ventilation in a confined space, simply follow the manufacturer’s instructions and the installer’s advice.

We also collect long and sharp, pointy knives and there’s an axe under the bed**.

*Frames without names.

**The long, fingery tendrils of mean spirit tree branches may decide to interfere with your sleep pattern in ways that could be unpleasant or even dangerous. They do this by accessing your space via the Velux window. It comes from their deep and understandable dislike of humankind.

Macchiato at the Kitchin

Keeping things low key: A tiny macchiato served up after a superb meal at the Kitchin down by Leith. I did not expect to be so satisfied and impressed with both the food and the service. Yum.

Red Diesel

Fuel Duty: They came down from the hills. Red diesel in the tanks of their Landrovers and quad bikes. Roads were built for softies. The secret paths, glens and gradients were all theirs. They had tamed the wilderness with the whip of the 4 x 4. The dogs loved it all, riding shotgun as the heather parted before them. The sheep were less sure but queued up for turnips and the deer stayed away. That's what deer tend to do. 

As for people, they know their place in the organic machine, crammed in a car park before pottering into the wild purple yonder on their bikes or in their new boots. The latest water bottles from Tisos on display, dangling from backpacks. Soon the sky will be slipping into the colour of the diesel as the sun sinks into the western sky.

In the countryside water is a vital resource, just getting it into the ground and into animals can be a challenge.

Not all holiday homes make the cut, some are just too basic and rustic for the wide eyed townies. The landscape is scattered with the wreckage of a failed colonial economic theory.

Fools on the Hills

 

Lost in our own country, shadows on a strange hillside, scouring the landscape for clues. The traces of what might have gone before disguised with lichen, moss and heather. A motorway of rabbit paths.

Old stones and broken timbers. Now banished and crushed by nature's persistence,  treasonous history and it's repeated excuses. The landowners thought they knew best and the locals were no better than cattle to them. Their portraits still hang in their empty halls. They died in their arrogance without issue or remorse and still their influence drips down like a dirty oil spill on the land. This peculiar economy is their legacy.

The truth is always troublesome, bothering the soul and tarnishing the dream. It was a nice day to be up there anyway and the deer on the hills were in fine form. Could do with a few weeks of rain though.

Lord of the Aga Rings

Aga cookers get hot very gradually. There’s no hurrying an Aga. They are the plodding dinosaurs of the cookery universe. Jurassic and basic. Functional in an unhurried world of their own. But you can still burn the food if not careful. That’s plenty pent up and uncontrollable heat for you.

I am the Master of the Aga. Bow down. I can shuffle the pots. It’s a form of dance fused with the management of sources of intense heat and burning metal. You could lose your fingerprints or fingertips. It’s very dangerous but when it works out for you it’s satisfying in an abstract and ancient way. However the naan bread that became a biscuit was less successful.

As children we burned many books and things, mostly sausages and some books, some Ladybird books. Currently I am burning logs. Logs harvested by the great wind of the winter of 2022 that flattened Edzell Woods and many others. Now we burn their tree bones. There’s nothing else to do with the piles of timber debris. I don’t know what environmentalists might make of this action. When nature fights back the rules change and the logs are harvested.

Logs, secure in their resting place awaiting cremation.

Holiday Homes Under the Hammer

If you see the internet as a great cloud that covers the land then you’ve obviously never visited the backyard, backwards arse of the beautiful back of beyond. We were there and there was no waves to speak of other than stray blips of digital distortion that refuse to be gathered together into a pattern of credible pixels. Cloudy blips of inconsequence that flew overhead and for a short while promoted baseless optimism then for a longer while some stiff resignation, acceptance and gallows humour. The crawling of the Twitter Bots, the Facebook Posts, the refreshed screens, those reflected creations of repeated opinions, swirling in the mind’s eye of an invisible force that asks no questions but always asks questions. 

We just communicate badly because we quickly forget everything we ever said. We outsourced the memories to a memory bank that’s in crisis but doesn’t know it so reality is no longer recognized as a thing. How did it happen? More badly presented history perhaps. How did they (?) amuse themselves back in the day when alcohol, sex between consenting adults, sex with horses (??) and imagination was banned by the all seeing, bespeckled eye of the Kirk? Now we can see everything but understand nothing. I no longer feel at home on your cloud. Nothing good will come of this digital withdrawal. Well maybe not. We all need a break sometimes.

First of a Few

Interesting artwork carried out artists I don't normally like, No.1 "The Haunt" by L S Lowery. My tastes are of course uniformed, petty minded and variable.

Potential Compost

The eternal compost of the spotless mind: Compost is the nuclear power in gardening, the dilithium crystals of plant life, the Coca-Cola for the garden's perpetual hangover and you can mix it up yourself like a pro. The photo is of course showing vegetation and gathered material in what I would describe as a "pre-compost state", with all the chemical and bio changes only slowly beginning and a long way from completion. To kick start the process I use copious amounts of amber urine and enforced darkness with applied compression added to the source material. If you think that sound pretty awful then you're right and it's never easy to get these items all together in the correct proportions. It's the ugly side of gardening. Anybody got any spare worms?

Fall Friday

 

Fall Friday is a Twitter thing. Not much to say about it today. Perhaps this image describes things as they are, maybe, up to a point. Or not. Soundbites and knocked off or knocked up images, that's all I really do.

Speaking of which, this is possibly the best bit of advice you'll ever get in your life, "If you're not in the queue, don't stand near the queue - you're causing a hell of a lot of tension." I'm glad that this has been written up (as opposed to written down) by somebody. It hasn't be attributed to Mark E Smith so far.

The Ballad of Greenfingers

 

I made these raised beds from old pallets and filled them with liners and compost. My dear wife planted the plants, marked them up and diligently cares for them in a highly professional manner. As we're optimists this is surely going to end well in a few months when we harvest a magnificent crop of vegetables and greenie, herbie things.

If you're at all worried about intruders and pests (not that we are) I can vouch for our fence, with it's weld-mesh sections and sturdy timber bastions, making it now fully Red Panda proof. Slugs and snails are however not applicable to the security tests we applied. As for cats, well that's another story.

Resorting to Woodbutchery

 

The journey into / onto / around stable tuning continues with these Vanson locking tuners being fitted to "Bodge", a partscaster Telecaster. Bodge has had a few troubles over the years and I thought locking tuners might help resolve them. That's how it goes in the world of guitar, you try everything to fix it, allow it to stew, then chuck it onto eBay as a sort of purge and penance. In truth I've never tried *locking tuners before but I though it was worth a punt.

Due to a unexpected set of incorrect dimensions in the headstock area some serious unplanned wood butchery was required. Turns out that 10 mm items cannot and will not fit themselves into 8 mm holes. Another failure to read the small print. However I managed to drill, file and sand my way around the problem and now they are fitted. They're still subject to a thorough test and implementation regime that is as yet to report it's findings. Perhaps it never will.

*As usual a big thanks to numerous YouTube content makers and layabouts for advice and explanations.