Friday, June 02, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Four Maestros, by JD
Friday, May 26, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Mathematical sounds, by JD
"The number e is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 2.71828, which appears in many different settings throughout mathematics. It was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest, where e arises as the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity."The number e is of eminent importance in mathematics, alongside 0, 1, π and i. All five of these numbers play important and recurring roles across mathematics, and are the five constants appearing in one formulation of Euler's identity. Like the constant π, e is irrational: it is not a ratio of integers. Also like π, e is transcendental: it is not a root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients"
Friday, May 19, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Rutles, by JD
Friday, May 12, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, by JD
SOLARIS Penguin Cafe
Sunday, May 07, 2023
COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Northern Lights, by JD
Here is one of Tom Thomson's paintings of the aurora; one of several he did. It is in the National Gallery of Canada, Thomson being Canadian. This from Wiki:
"Thomas John Thomson (August 5, 1877 – July 8, 1917) was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career, he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas. His works consist almost entirely of landscapes, depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. He used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's accidental death by drowning at 39 shortly before the founding of the Group of Seven is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art."
| theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-the-globes-annual-christmas-painting-northern-lights-by-tom-thomson/ |
Friday, May 05, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Golden Oldies, by JD
Friday, April 28, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Alehouse Boys, by JD
Friday, April 21, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Golden Oldies - the 1950s, by JD
There are, on our televisions, a number of channels dedicated to playing 'golden oldies' music from the 60s, the 70s and the 80s. But there is no channel dedicated to 50s music for some reason. It cannot be because the music was bad, perhaps it is because of the lack of video/film showing the artists performing their songs.
So as a small contribution to keeping the music alive, a selection of goldne oldies from more than 60+ years ago. I think it would be fair to say that musically the fifties ended in October 1962 with the release of the first record by the Beatles and their inspiration came from the music of that era. Without the 50s popular music of today would be very different.
Sunday, April 16, 2023
CULLER SUPPLEMENT: Cullercoats, by JD
Friday, April 14, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Mose Allison, by JD
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Those evil, greedy doctors!
The BMA says the pay of a junior doctor has fallen by 26 per cent in real terms since 2008/09 because pay rises have been below inflation. It is calling for 'full pay restoration', which would amount to a 35 per cent pay rise and be worth up to £20,000 extra for some medics.
Never mind the 'some medics' - a ploy to get us envious and angry; the maths is correct.
If your real-terms pay drops by 26 points from 100 to 74, you need (1.35*74) to get back to 100 where you started, i.e. a 35% increase.
This is not a pay rise but, as the doctors' association says, a restoration - and I haven't seen a claim for the money lost in the intervening years.
It's what happens when a government loses control of inflation.
In a way it's a rerun of the 1970s, when Arab oil producers retaliated against the West for supporting Israel in Middle Eastern conflict, by inflating the price of oil. This made everything pricier in our energy-dependent economy and triggered a wave of industrial action as groups of workers tried to recoup their real-terms earnings losses.
Yes, there were some Marxists in unions trying to destabilise the system so that - the great Marxian dream - a better world would magically arise from the ruins; but there was a lot more going on that was not doctrinaire-political.
I remember two words cropping up again and again in these disputes:
'parity' - a claim to get the same pay as another group doing the same work somewhere else; and
'differential' - a claim for higher pay by more skilled workers who found that despite their more valuable expertise, their earnings were getting closer to that of less skilled workers as the latter won their pay bargaining cases.
The 'oil shock' started in 1973, the Conservative government fell in 1974 and the incoming Labour Government had to deal with industrial disputes for the next five years.
It was a very long time before I found out that Alan Bleasdale's BBC drama series 'Boys from the Blackstuff', described as
'TV's most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture'
may have been screened in 1982, but was based on Bleasdale's 'The Black Stuff' Play For Today, scripted in 1978 during the Prime Ministership of Labour's James Callaghan.
In rugby there is a move called a 'hospital pass' where you throw the ball to a colleague who is then obliterated by the fast-oncoming opposition. Similarly, some political parties may be tempted to lose a General Election so that the 'other lot' has to clean up the mess and take the blame for all the hard things they are forced to do.
This could be where we are now. 'Demirep' speculates that both Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US are trying not to win the next election because they can see what is coming:
Saturday, April 08, 2023
WEEKENDER: The water company scam, by Wiggia
| Perhaps water should be charged as to area that needs to covered, just a thought………….. |
Friday, April 07, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Easter, by JD
"Every Orthodox Holy Saturday in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thousands gather to witness a flame “miraculously” appearing in the tomb of Jesus.
Orthodox Christians believe it’s a potent symbol of the resurrection.It’s the Church's most important miracle. And it’s believed to have been happening annually for the past 1,200 years.
The ritual begins with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem (or another Orthodox archbishop), descending into the empty tomb of Christ within the church and reciting special prayers. A non-Orthodox Christian is also said to examine the edicule (a small structure surrounding the tomb) to make sure no oil lamps have been left burning inside that the patriarch could use to light his candles."~~~~~Victoria Clark recounts a conversation she had with Orthodox Bishop Theophanis in which she asked about the miracle. He replied: “In this ceremony we are offering created fire and from it comes uncreated light, by the grace of the Holy Spirit…before the ceremony begins, a kantila – a little oil lamp – is placed, already lit, on the tomb. The patriarch lights his candle from it while he says a special prayer.”Bishop Theophanis likens the miracle to Holy Communion when the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation/ metousiosis). The natural is transformed into the supernatural. In his mind the Holy Fire really is a miraculous fire because the prayer has changed it from ordinary fire to Holy Fire.
Tuesday, April 04, 2023
An Everyday Tale of Online Banking, by Wiggia
This was one of those moments which did not come to light until I returned home and tried to start normal procedures in my life after a spell of oblivion, it transpired that various updates re banking, shopping, Google and other sites had updated their log on procedures and in the case of banks two had actually frozen my account making access unless I updated all the info and supplied new paswords and security information.
Friday, March 31, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Sam Brown, by JD
"Sam Brown is a musician, songwriter, performer and recently, ukulele teacher from London UK. She currently lives in Dorset UK.Born in October 1964, Sam has been ‘doing’ music from the age of 12.She has worked as a backing vocalist, song writer and lead vocalist and has sold in excess of 3 million records. In the 1980/90’s she had her biggest hit Stop which was in the top ten."
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
PandeMIC: the enemy above
‘Crap’: all that cyber-snooping and GCHQ can’t analyse its data to see why my wife is not in the frame for a job with them! But then, how come two Russian agents were allowed to fly into the UK and wander around Salisbury in 2018 during Toxic Dagger, an annual military exercise themed around chemical warfare? And that narrative of the Skripal poisonings, which has more holes than a string vest! I thought our spooks were good at lying.
‘Evil’: it’s not just foreigners who study the technology of mass murder. The laboratory at Porton Down is less than 20 minutes’ drive away from Salisbury and has a long history of potentially lethal experiments both in-house on Service personnel and covertly on the civilian population across the country.
We have had a UN Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since 1975, forbidding the development of such things; yet across the world, well-paid and -pensioned whitecoats are at work on them. ‘Oh, but we have to do this research, because of what the Other Lot might do,’ they will tell us. ‘This is for defence!’ But everybody can make that excuse; really, the whole lot of them ARE the Other Lot. Go back to the BWC and try harder, harder! Meanwhile, if only they could be rounded up and sent to some remote Pacific island, concocting their hellbrews in segregated valleys and constant mutual fear.
Actually, that may possibly have started already. Seven years ago the French opened a ‘biosafety laboratory’ in Tahiti, allegedly for research into mosquito-borne diseases. Oddly, the original announcement in Tahiti News has since disappeared and the laboratory is not on the main island but on a tiny two-square-mile atoll called Tetiaroa - hardly a convenient commute for the staff. Still, let’s try to believe it is what it says; at least it’s safely isolated.
There are four categories of lab biosafety precautions; Tetiaroa is equipped to NSB3 containment standard; good, but not the best. A microbiology facility in Beijing was also a Level 3, yet the SARS virus escaped from there, twice; presumably that is why China’s first NSB4 lab was constructed in Wuhan, 650 miles away and with a population a third the size of the nation’s capital.
Now the West is claiming that despite Wuhan’s top-level safety rating - the same as for the UK’s Porton Down - Covid was another lab leak. That is worrying, for as the Telegraph and Mail have reported, Imperial College conducted ‘gain of function’ research on the Covid virus last year in a lower, level 3 setting. Are our boffins definitely more safety-conscious, less fallible than the Chinese? They were combining elements of the original disease - one that is estimated to have killed 6.8 million people worldwide so far - with those of Delta and Omicron variants. What were they hoping to achieve? What if they had succeeded in breeding a new strain that was as transmissible as WuFlu but far more lethal? Was that the intention?
There are so many potential monsters of modern war under construction: biological (including genetic targeting of ethnic groups), chemical, atomic, drones, robotics, artificial intelligence… Think of all those clever people preparing a Hell on Earth, for nothing but money and power, things that they and their superiors can enjoy for only a blink of history’s eye. That is why I say the enterprise is evil: an irrational project to cause lasting harm for the sake of fleeting gains.
President Eisenhower warned us about the ‘military-industrial complex’ in 1961:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.How much do we invest in peace research?
In this context it is very interesting to hear what Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been saying recently. Leftists often dub Carlson ‘far right’, i.e. not a revolutionary Communist; yet unlike them he can confess to being mistaken and ashamed, as on the issue of his former support for the Iraq War.
Carlson now goes further, drawing a line between the murder of JFK, the defenestration of Nixon and the derailment of Trump’s foreign policy. What have they in common?
‘Elements in the federal bureaucracy… working to undermine the American system of government… Unelected lifers in the federal agencies make the biggest decisions in American government and crush anyone who tries to rein them in and in the process, our democracy becomes a joke.’Peace initiatives like those the three Presidents above attempted are a threat to the Masters Of War whom we must seek to oppose. Quite possibly radical change - reform - may come not from the anarchic Left, but from the decent-hearted faction among conservatives: not the money-mad globalist British Tories, not the crush-the-poor American Rightists. It will take radicals like us, not ‘woke’ but disillusioned, who see emerging from Pandora’s box the last and only real gift: Hope.
Friday, March 24, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Mean Mary James, by JD
'Mary James, youngest of six children, was born in Geneva, Alabama, though her family lived in Florida, a couple miles below the Alabama line. Mary learned to read music before she could read words and was an official singer/songwriter before she’d started her first day of kindergarten.'With the help of her mom, she wrote her theme song “Mean Mary from Alabam’.” The press immediately baptized her with this handle, and she’s been Mean Mary ever since.'Mary plays 11 instruments and has recorded 16 albums, her newest being Cold. There is not room here to tell the whole life story of Mean Mary, but if you would like to hear more of it, listen to her music—it is all there.'
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Fake freedom: transport
Friday, March 17, 2023
FRIDAY: Music - and horse racing - for St Patrick's Day
This is a retread of a previous post which has been amended with a few additions and a few subtractions as some videos have disappeared and other references are a wee bit out of date.
St Patrick's Day once more so tonight's music offering is a celebration of all things Irish plus a few other non musical things.
The Dubliners - Whiskey in the Jar (best version!!!)
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
- James Joyce, 'The Dead'
So far we have had a taste of drinking and singing and dancing and death; another great passion among the Irish is horse racing andthis week there is the annual (temporary) emigration to England for the Cheltenham Festival, a week of racing at its best. Irish trainers and jockeys will, once again, win most of the races!
Among the leading jockeys in recent years has been Rachael Blackmore the first female jockey to win the Grand National at Aintree which she did in 2021.
On Tuesday at Cheltenham she won a race in fine style on a horse called Honeysuckle and the reception she was given in the winners's circle was amazing. I have never seen anything like that before. There were so many people in and around the paddock she couldn't get the horse through it all. The Irish are very good at chaotic celebration!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Blackmore
Geesala Festival 2012
The Orange Rogue - Irish Harp & Hammered Dulcimer - Zekley
Nolwenn Leroy - Mna Na Heireann
Nolwen Leroy - Siuil A Ruin
The Irish...
Be they kings, or poets, or farmers,
They're a people of great worth,
They keep company with the angels,
And bring a bit of heaven here to earth
Galway Girl - Sharon Shannon, Mundy & Galway City
Friday, March 10, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Franklin sisters (Aretha & co.), by JD
I think most people will know of Aretha Franklin, often styled as The Queen of Soul. What is not so well known is that she had two sisters who were also singers, all three being daughters of the Rev C L Franklin who was pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit from 1946 until he was shot and wounded in 1979.
Franklin senior was known as the man with the "Million-Dollar Voice" and he and his daughters (as well as his sons) would sing in his church.
The recording industry is unpredictable such that only Aretha made a successful career in it; she would say that her elder sister Erma was a better singer and yet is relatively unknown.
So a brief selection from all of them including father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Tuesday, March 07, 2023
Monday, March 06, 2023
Cash for Ukraine: an alternative
It is also expensive. There were 32.2 million UK income tax payers in 2022 so for my wife and me those two years represent a compulsory joint contribution of £285.
That’s quite a lot for us and surely the money could be better spent on other official projects such as secretly euthanising my friends in hospital, employing the fascist 77th Brigade to spread disinformation on social media, and barricading urban streets to impede the free movement of the populace.
Please note, I call the 77th and their numerous ilk fascists because they are part of a system of oppression on behalf of corporate interests including not only the military-industrial complex but the government itself, which has become a monolithic corporation positively exulting in the nuisances it is able to visit on ordinary people - as we see from the Hancock Covidisaster emails recently leaked by Isabel Oakeshott.
Since killing Russians in Ukraine - and far more Ukrainians, to boot - is a sort of hobby or sport instead of a public necessity, it should be financed by its supporters on a voluntary basis: personal approaches by chuggers and churglars; internet crowdfunding; maybe even a telethon - ‘Fascists In Need’?
The spiel would be on traditional lines:
‘£x buys a bullet to fire into the femoral artery of a Russian prisoner of war; £y purchases a cubic yard of the concrete needed to block off fresh water to Crimea again; £z is the price of a roll of silk wallpaper to decorate a foreign bolthole for the former TV nudist comedian turned tyrant who is such a lethal ‘Servant of the People’ that he is running out of people to serve and has to send out gangs to forcibly recruit boys and old men.’And then when they come along with GoFundMe we shall have the liberty to tell them to GoFu**Yourself.
Saturday, March 04, 2023
New on 'Now and Next': No Debate, No Democracy
Here: https://rolfnorfolk.substack.com/p/no-debate-no-democracy
'People who complain about the power structure call in aid the notion of democracy and the will of the people. There’s a hazy notion of ‘hey, let’s all get together and do X.’
'No chance. Quite obviously the people love to quarrel about the smallest things, as we can see every day on social media.
'New technology brings in new modes of action...'
- continued as per the above link.
Friday, March 03, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: A musical miscellany, by JD
A miscellany of musical delights for your entertainment and pleasure!
4 Non Blondes - What's Up (Official Music Video)
CELEBRATING ONE BILLION VIEWS!! REMASTERED IN HD!
1,471,217,029 views 23 Feb 2011 #4NonBlones #WhatsUp #Remastered
Eddie Buchanan & Love Machine Dancing In The Nude 1976
Bob Azzam "Chérie je t'aime" Ya Mustapha!! (1960) FullHD/HQ
Springtime For Hitler; The Producers
Public Image Limited - Hawaii | The Late Late Show | RTÉ One
Rita Moreno - Animal - fever.avi