2007 — 12 Apr: Art Deco? Who's he?
Guess who watched the Channel 4 "Grand Designs" programme about the pair of pilots constructing a brand new Art Deco style house in Guildford? I can still remember some of the buildings in Miami back in 1992 from a memorable holiday (paid for, somewhat, by IBM).
A brave attempt, I thought. Mind you, I'm always struck by how casually some of these people can exceed their original building budgets by many tens of thousands of pounds. It would give us a severe case of the screaming habdabs, I'm sure. I'm obviously spoiled by having lived in the same house for over quarter of a century.
Moonlighting Moondance
I also very much enjoyed the Van Morrison live at Montreux 1980 DVD popped round by a chum. I had better (as it's now 55 minutes after midnight) save for tomorrow the second disc, from Montreux 1974. I've been trying to think where and when I last saw Van the Man live in concert. I expect it was the "Mayflower" in Southampton; I certainly enjoyed it.
New acronyms department
I always enjoy the discovery of an amusing acronym (probably best not to speculate exactly why). Two recent examples are:
- KIPPERS (Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) which had a particularly personal resonance until Junior's recent spectacular career progress. And,
- in today's Guardian obituary of film director Bob Clark (think of Porky's) I now find the slightly forced ACNES (Adolescent Character's Neurotic Eroticism Syndrome).
Though I can think of several films to which ACNES could be applied, it's not as bad as the ONE1 that was sometimes used to describe scenes in films in the late 1960s (after a new generation of the cinematic world had — yet again — discovered what you might call the "pulling" power of sex).
It's been driving me (monkey)nuts department
Since I let Media Monkey loose2 on my XP system, I have been steadily eliminating duplicate music tracks from my MP3 collection. (All legal, I hasten to add, and lovingly (if tediously) extracted from CDs I have bought over the last 24 years.) After trying Windows Media Player's horrific Library facilities, and WinAmp's horrific Library facilities, and FooBar's horrific Library facilities (do you see a pattern here?) I still live in hope, it seems.
But I stumbled across Metro's version of Criminal World and then spent too long last night looking for the David Bowie version to remind myself. Of course, it's not even in my MP3 collection (though I do have his Let's Dance album where it "lives") because it's buried on a minidisc downstairs somewhere. So there's at least one of my albums that somehow failed to make it through my MP3 extraction process. How many more, I wonder?
It's just picked Argent's "Celebration" which naturally reminds me that I once got a lift from Rod Argent's Dad in Hatfield when he saw me standing at a bus-stop! Memories, heh? I know full well I shall regret this, but I've just cleaned out all the various media players and music library systems on the XP system, and will start that particular journey afresh. Or, at least, after it's finished de-fragmenting the hard drive. It's been stuck on "76%" for quite some time now...
Mirabile dictu I still have BBC listen and play it again facilities working before I restore my chosen MP3 tool of the day. There is much to explore here by the way. Which shall it be this time, I wonder?
Too late, now... department
I haven't even finished3 a man without a country and Kurt Vonnegut goes and dies on me.
"What is it," she squeaked, "what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?".
That is stuff from a novel I've been working on for the past five years, about Gil Berman, thirty-six years my junior, a standup
comedian at the end of the world. It is about making jokes while we are killing all the fish in the ocean, and touching off the
last chunks or drops or whiffs of fossil fuel. But it will not let itself be finished.