Aegithalos caudatus, the long-tailed tit, undertaking aerobatic manouevres among the bursting buds of hawthorn, the claws of dog rose and bramble in a hedgerow full of avian life.
Month: March 2017
Today, the Brexshit hits the fan
Here’s how the Brexit vote last June actually went, simplified for those who don’t like experts explaining stuff (numbers rounded to the nearest millions of people):
51m people had the chance to vote, just 34m of them did. 17m of those voters said they wanted to leave the EU, 16m said they wanted to stay.
So, is Brexit the will of the people, does the government have a clear mandate to deliver that Article 50 letter today, was it really a good enough reason to ruin 40(60) years of collaboration (in science, arts, trade and so much more) and cost us tens of billions of pounds? What do they do if Juncker is out when they try to deliver the letter, will they leave it with a neighbour?
Shouldn’t we have had more facts and less fake news?
Probably too late now, the sun set on the British Empire decades ago, but the EU gave us the opportunity to mean something, we were part of a team, a strong team, a growing team, with a wide range of players with great skills.
Now, we’re like the little kid storming off in a huff after missing an open goal and taking his ball home with him. We’re dragging our closest friends away with us too, but they’ll soon ditch us go back to the game leaving us crying in our bedroom.
And, of course, the players we leave behind have their own ball, and it’s one of those really cool fluorescent ones that bends in the air and gets them goal after goal, not a soaking wet, lumpen, leather caser like the one we carried home.
Yesterday, the NHS promised to cut lots of prescription medications and treatments to save itself 128 million pounds A YEAR. I’ll say that again 128 million pounds a year! Boris Fecking-Johnson lied on the side of a bus during the referendum campaign that pulling out of the EU would free up 350 million pounds A WEEK for the NHS. Will the NHS ever see that, of course, not they already reneged on that “promise” last June.
My emoji diagram above repurposed, I’m no fan and somebody needs to hit that sh*t…so hard.
They called us remoaners and told us to ignore the experts…the brexshits. Oh, and by the way, if one more brexshit tells me they’re not a racist and that it wasn’t about immigration, but sovereignity or some other spurious nonsense, I will take that fan and shove it where the sun will never shine again. It doesn’t matter why you voted to leave, you sided with those people…and they won…
Bowie band on Holy Holy trip to Hull
Last night we saw the final night of the homecoming of The Spiders from Mars in Hull City Hall. Bowie drummer Woody Woodmansey with producer/bassist Tony Visconti, Heaven 17’s Glen Gregory on lead vocals Visconti’s daughter Jessica Lee Morgan on 12-string guitar, tenor sax and vocals, James Stevenson and Paul Cudderford on lead guitars, Heaven 17’s Berenice Scott on backing vocals.
Bowie’s music in the early 1970s was fuelled by musicians from Hull (almost pure coincidence but he had a Yorkshire Dad and a Lancastrian mother). The core Spiders from Mars band of Woodmansey on drums, Trevor Bolder on bass and, of course, Mick Ronson on guitar were the foundations of Bowie’s glam rock period. This homecoming featured a supergroup (Woody being the only surviving member of the essence of the Spiders) of internationally renowned musicians. As Sheffield-born Gregory pointed out during the show, Woody and Tony (the TV of All the Young Dudes lyric) are the real stars, the others are but fans, like the audience in the sold out theatre.
I didn’t have a proper camera with me nor “pit” access in this Yorkshire city of culture, so I got just a few painterly snaps from our vantage point in the gods. Gregory was charismatic and clearly enjoying himself, eternally grateful to have been given the opportunity to sing Bowie and to perform the complete Ziggy Stardust album (the first time ever from start to finish) and so many of the classic Bowie from that period.
Scott was wonderful and understated on keys, giving a few knowing nods to the flourishes of the original songs. Stevenson and Cudderford rocked out, posturing and knee bending in that classic and timeless manner of all Les Paul bearing guitarists of the era. They vyed and dualled from stage left and right for pole position as having the bendiest strings and the biggest sustain (astonishing in heroes and brilliantly tight in harmonies throughout, but loud and heavy when Ziggy demanded it). They’re both famous in their own right, of course Cudderford having performed with Ian Hunter, Bob Geldof etc and Stevenson with The Alarm, Chelsea, Scott Walker, Gen X, The Cult).
Morgan too was astonishing on 12-string and sax (as she, her brother Morgan Visconti and bass-playing partner had been as support act for the show).
Visconti himself, the original Bowie hero was deepest energy from the off, you have to hope you’ve still got the chops like that by the time you reach your seventies. And, of course, Woodmansey, from the very first stick-to-skin beat to the sticks in the air at the end, was a powerhouse as only those rock steady rock drummers of his generation seem to be. Hull deserved this and the audience gave the troupe the audience it deserved.
There are still plenty of gigs to come, not sure which are sold out, but you can find out here.
Pause for thought – a comma
It’s an odd name…for a butterfly…a comma. Formally known as Polygonia c-album. Raggedy edged wings with a little white fleck on the underside resembling a punctuation mark, hence the name. Not to be confused with an Oxford comma, a point of housestyle that avoids the confusions of phrases such as “eats, shoots, and leaves” although it’s not quite that pointed.
Anyway, here’s a comma that alighted on the edge of our conservatory yesterday (first day of biological spring here in Cambridge, it was over 18 Celsius and there was so much bird, butterfly other springly activity, sadly almost all killed off in the nearer 10 degrees of today’s grey day).
Seeing these butterflies always puts me in mind of preppy-pre-hipster-hipster band Vampire Weekend and their marvellous allusions to grammar and Peter Gabriel. Who gives a %$*& about an Oxford comma? This is a Cambridge specimen!
An avian continuity error?
You wouldn’t have heard the plaintive and ubiquitous sound of an English summer, the incessant “coo-coo-coooh” of a collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto) here until 1953, when they first began to settle and breed.
According to Wikipedia:
The collared dove is not migratory, but is strongly dispersive. Over the last century, it has been one of the great colonisers of the bird world, travelling far beyond its native range to colonize colder countries, becoming naturalised in several. Its original range at the end of the 19th century was warm temperate and subtropical Asia from Turkey east to southern China and south through India to Sri Lanka. In 1838 it was reported in Bulgaria, but not until the 20th century did it expand across Europe, appearing in parts of the Balkans between 1900—1920, and then spreading rapidly northwest, reaching Germany in 1945, Great Britain by 1953 (breeding for the first time in 1956), Ireland in 1959, and the Faroe Islands in the early 1970s
Of course, they now feature in endless outdoor scenes in period dramas and films set well before 1953; you can think of them as avian continuity errors.
Seems that I have been prattling on about this for years. Just found an old archived blog entry from January 2005 that mentions the same continuity error!
A sympathetic song for the homeless
TL:DR – Wrote and recorded a song, Bridges, for the homeless around the time our choir sang with Jimmy’s Night Shelter in Cambridge. Uploaded to Bandcamp and offering any profits to the charity. The song has had numerous live outings, most recently in front of the choir during our 2023 “Partners’ Evening” Christmas event.
Tuesday night, three-hour demo from first idea (the line “embedded with waifs and strays” which sprung unbidden into my head) and two evolutions of the chord progression, lots of lyrical ad libbing in various takes, played it “live” to friends at Sunday Arts Night with some tweaked and hopefully tighter lyrics and a bit of a modulated turnaround in the second time chorus. A week after inception, I’ve re-recorded it entirely this evening with a slightly higher tempo and added a “duet” harmony. Not sure whether this is the final version or whether there will be a full one-man-band production with a drum track, bass, keys/pads, electric guitar and egg shaker as is my usual wont. (Latest version now on Bandcamp does now feature tambourine and stombox percussion and bass guitar). I hope the message, for once, is obvious.
Bridges (Crossed and Burned)
She is down on her luck, with no place to turn
Embedded with waifs and strays, her skin patched with bruises and burns
The clothes on her back are tattered and torn
She sleeps in the doorways, where drunks spit out their cold scorn
A lonely young man, with no money to spare
Staggered to see her pain, not sure if he should care
He stretches out his hand, clings to the hope that she can stand
But her fear backs her into the shadows
A helpless girl in a hopeless land
He’s a stranger to luck got no place to turn
Embedded with the waifs and strays, his sin was only to yearn
The coat on his back is matted and worn
He sleeps in old boxes, wishing he’d never been born
If only somebody, with a minute to spare
Would offer some tea and their hand, to prove that somebody cares
So he reaches out to touch them, Grasps at hope but he can’t stand
And their guilt drags them out of the shadows
Their focus sharp on their homemade plans
What do you do when you lose your way?
How do you cope with that pain?
In a world that just turns away
Well bridges are crossed and bridges are burned
You know that the truth is the proof
It’s a lesson that never is learned
You know that the truth is the proof
A lesson that never is learned
How to protect your contactless cards from digital pickpockets
TL:DR – A simple hack using tin foil to protect the contactless cards in your wallet or purse.
My astro news friend [the late] Paul Sutherland recently described how to make a simple protector for your wallet if your wont is to carry those new-fangled contactless debit and credit cards. The protection involves cutting a sheet of tin foil to size and backing it with a couple of strips of gaffer tape and then inserting into the back of your wallet. Once folded the flexible, yet robust, composite sheet will form a pseudo Faraday cage around your cards screening them from the kind of shoulder-surfing hackers with the right kit who might be able to read the radio-chip in your cards (and even perhaps the magnetic strip in older cards).
However, as a true paranoid neurotic I see this protection as essential to avoid the hacker getting a “red paperclip” from you. Do you remember the One Red Paperclip website created by Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald in 2005. MacDonald started with a single red paperclip and bartered his way up to owning a house in a series of just fourteen online trades over the course of a year. The subsequent book was a bestseller and I’m surprised that Hollywood has not taken up an option to make it into a blockbuster movie.
My point is that if a hacker can access data associated with one of your cards, then that is like a red paperclip to them. Hook that up with the possibility that you might be using the local Wi-Fi without a VPN (virtual private network), say, and they could also be accessing your Facebook, Twitter, email, bank or other service as you work online on a bus in a crowded coffee shop or wherever. It’s not at all far-fetched for such a hacker to have skimmed your contactless card, have all the info for that and then link that to your birthday, home town, pet and mother’s unmarried names via your Facebook and other social media contacts and then to give your bank a quick call requesting a replacement credit card. They could well know your home address by now or have found a way to redirect your post having told the local post office that you’ve moved house…of course, if you don’t shred your bills and statements before putting them in the recycling caddy outside your house every fortnight you’re also exposing your data. It’s all fodder for ID thieves…
There’s a blockbuster movie in my train of thought here…if anyone fancies taking up that option.
Classic FM author Tim Lihoreau’s Musical Treasury
Laugh-out-loud new book from ClassicFM’s award-winning breakfast DJ and Cottenham resident Tim Lihoreau out now from all good books shops, amazon etc.
In his latest tome, Tim uses odd British place names to help him define missing and orphaned musical terms, such as swavesey:
the cheesy side-to-side motion, stepping from foot to foot, beloved of barbershop competition choirs
and its counterpoint beeswing:
same as a swavesey, except starting on the off beat.
Then there’s the swaffham prior:
a celebrity who reveals a genuine, hidden talent for classical music, usually Grade 8 in a particular instrument...not to be confused with fickleshole (a person who professes a hitherto unmentioned love of classical music just before their first appearance on a classical radio station
There’s also a swaffham bulbeck:
a camera position beloved of TV concert directors in which the "fish eye" reflection of a musician is seen in the shiny bell of a brass instrument, before panning out
Coincidentally, cottenham is the “material traditionally used to make a standlake, which Tim defines as the “bespoke banner adopted by brass bands that adorns their music stands”.
Conflict of interest: Tim is my BFF and pianist (see entry for black torrington and black notley) for my choir, bigMouth (). By the way, if you’re struggling to prounonce his name, it’s t-im. Hear him weekdays on the More Music Breakfast show on ClassicFM.
Oh, and by the way a hacklet is the old name for a music blogger, perhaps one who favours the frampton end over the farleys end with his own band.
Three birds in one – Lapwing, Peewit, Green Plover
Three birds in one: lapwing, peewit (pewit), green plover (Vanellus vanellus)…actually also known as a tuit (tew-it), so four birds in one. The fact that its scientific binomial (colloquially known as a species’ “Latin name” is in this species case a tautonym (both parts are the same word), this indicates that this species is the “type” for its family. Similarly, Rattus rattus (black rat), Bufo bufo (common toad), Carduelis carduelis (goldfinch), Gorilla gorilla gorilla (Western lowland gorilla, a tautonymic trinomial in this case), Bison bison (American bison), Coccothraustes coccothraustes (hawfinch), more tautonyms here.
But, back to the lapwing. Its peewit and tuit names are onomatopoeia for its call, it’s a plover and it’s green, hence green plover. Lapwing refers to the bird’s decoy strategy for feigning injury to lure predators away from its ground nest and thus its eggs or chicks.