Tunes for a Tuesday - 30 September 2008

Jackson Browne - A Child In These Hills from Saturate Before Using
Rod Stewart - Bring It On Home To Me/You Send Me from Smiler
Osha - Come Again from Putumayo Presents: Caribe! Caribe!
Marc Cohn & Jackson Browne - Crazy Love (live) from Live Bootleg
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Energy Flow from BTTB
Bobby Brown - Every Little Step from Dance!...Ya Know It!
Bob Dylan - Hero Blues from Witmark & Sons Demos
Jimi Hendrix - Hey Joe from BBC Sessions
Richie Furay - I Am Sure from I Am Sure
Hank Williams - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry from The Ultimate Collection
Tom Waits - If I Have To Go from Orphans: Bawlers
Joe Jackson - King Of The World from Summer In The City: Live In New York 
William Shatner - Lucy in the sky with diamonds from Spaced Out - The very best of Leonard
Joni Mitchell - My Old Man from Blue
Stanton Moore - Poison Pushy
Peter Gabriel - Secret World from Us
The Who - So Sad About Us from A Quick One
Etta James & Sugar Pie DeSanto - Tell Mama from The Chess Story 1947-1975 (1967-1968)
Seasick Steve & The Level Devils - The first song's about livin'behind Lucky's Grocery Store in 1964 from Cheap
The Phoenix Foundation - The Posh Tiger from Pegasus
Squeeze - There Is A Voice from Play

Don't ask me ..(about A.A.A.D.D.)

Recently, I was diagnosed with A.A.A.D.D. - Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.

This is how it manifests itself:

Decide to water the garden.

Turn on the hose, look over at the car and decide it needs washing.

Start toward the garage, notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier.

Decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

Lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the recycling bin.
Which is full.

So I decide to put the bills back on the table and empty the recycling bin.

But then I think: since I'm going to be near the mailbox when I empty the recycling bin anyway, I may as well pay the bills first.

Take my check book off the table - only one check left.

My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the cup of tea I'd been drinking.

I'm going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the tea aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over.

Tea's getting cold so I decide to make another cup.

As I head toward the kitchen with the cold tea, I notice that a vase of flowers on the counter needs water.

Put the tea on the counter and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning.

I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I'm going to water the flowers.

I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote on the kitchen table.

I realize that at some stage I'll be looking for the remote but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs,

But first I'll water the flowers.

I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor.

So I set the remote back on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill.

Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day:

The car isn't washed

The bills aren't paid

There is a cold cup of tea sitting on the counter

The flowers don't have enough water,

There is still only 1 check in my check book,

I can't find the remote,

I can't find my glasses,

And I don't remember what I did with the car keys.

Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I'm really baffled because I know I was busy all bloody day,

And I'm really tired.

Too good to miss

19th century quilt depicting the solar system at the National Museum of American History.

Quite stunning

1 + 1 = ....Duh

Now, I'm trying not to go of on a geriatric rant here, but I did detect the odour of singed hair emanating from the neck-tie region when I read this...

1. 5 boys share a bag of 55 lollies. How many lollies does each boy get?

2. There were 60 cows inside a shed. 18 walked outside. How many cows were left inside the shed?

3. 38 x 6 = ?

4. David has 35 stamps. Bruce has 70 stamps. How many stamps do they have altogether?

People credited with this unit standard are able to solve problems which require calculation with whole numbers.

5. Write these percentages as decimals: 34% 52% 8%

6. Write these decimals as fractions: 0.5 0.03 0.95

7. Betty got 13 of the 20 questions correct in a biology test. What percentage did Betty get?

8. Gary ate 25% of a cake. What fraction of the cake did he eat?

People credited with this unit standard are able to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages; and solve problems involving conversions between percentages and fractions. (For these ones they could use calculators)

These are the questions you need to answer correctly to get a credit towards your National Certificate of Educational Achievement in New Zealand


Fair enough, you'd say.


But this is YEAR 11, for goodness sake.

/Rant Mode>
At 16, I was doing calculus and differential equations. (Not very well, but that's another story)
If I'd had this stuff, I might have passed University Entrance at the first shot.
Rant Mode/>


I keep looking to see if today's April Fools Day, but it's not......

Tunes for a Tuesday - 16 September 2008

Robert Cray Band  - Bouncin' Back from Midnight Stroll
Rasputina  - Cage In A Cave from Oh Perilous World
Ivor Cutler  - The Even Keel from Velvet Donkey
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with Eddie Vedder  - The Face of Love from Dead Man Walking
Richard Thompson  - Guns Are The Tongues from Sweet Warrior
Billy Crash  - Hup's from Die Wäschbrigg
Fairport Convention  - If It Feels Good, You Know It Can't Be Wrong from Heyday: BBC Radio Sessions, 1968-1969 [Live]
AC/DC  - Riff Raff from If you want blood you've got it
Bobby Day  - Rock'n'Robin from Billboard Top 100 of 1958
Five Horse Johnson  - Rolling Thunder from Mystery Spot
Son Volt  - Strands from Diggin' Deep - The essential alternative country collection
Augie March  - There Is No Such Place
Del Amitri  - To Last A Lifetime from Change Everything
Neil Finn  - Twisty Bass from Try Whistling This
The Who  - Two Thousand Years from Endless Wire
Elastica  - Waking Up from John Peel's Festive Fifty 1994
The Pixies  - Wave Of Mutilation from John Peel's Festive Fifty 1989 - Radio Version
Percy Sledge  - When A Man Loves A Woman from Billboard Top 100 Hits Of 1966
Ghosty  - You Are A Big Screen from Answers master
The Underwolves  - 68 Moves from Café Del Mar - Volume 7

I have a question...

Just who is responsible for this stuff?

The top 3 are bad enough, but you at least get a vague idea about their purpose.

But the new Tourism Auckland logo has me stumped.

OK, so it's the first letter of "Auckland", which is fair enough.

(If they'd chosen "K", people might have mistaken it for Karachi. Or Kawerau, pearl of the Bay of Plenty.)

What I don't get is the apparent terminal necrosis of the image.

I mean, it's not a Boden shirt - I'm used to those.

Could of course be an hidden reference to Auckland's crumbling infrastructure - hour-long journeys to work over the bridge, repeated commuter rail signal failures, the THREE WEEK LONG CBD power outage in 1998.........

Jane Berney, an Auckland University of Technology lecturer in advertising creativity, puts it rather well:

"The 'A' element - Rangitoto rising out of 'Auckland' - (Oh, so THAT'S what it is - Ed.) seems to me to be more about deconstruction and hairs in the lens cap than heritage and spirit."

Cheap enough, though.


Only cost $174,000....

I have a question...

Georgia's military academy - their equivalent of Britain's Sandhurst or the US's West Point - is in Poti.

Would that make them Poti-trained?

.and the Home of the Brave

There's not a lot you can say to this, eh.

I have a question

Does "bipolar" mean that you've been to the Arctic AND the Antarctic.....?

Don't ask me ...(about The Box),

The BBC comes up with some seriously cool ideas.

They've stuck a GPS device device in a 40' shipping container to track its progress around the world for a year to display the logistic chain that underpins globalisation.

Sort of like Pietra Rivoli's excellent "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" - just a bit more mass market.


Not that it's a new idea, of course.


The Arp Museum in Rolandseck recently exhibited a project that dates back to 1980 in which 200 wooden suitcases were distributed to 200 European artists who duly artified them with the sort of things that artists do.


All sorts of wondrous stuff, from yer common or garden oil painting to electrickery things that flashed and made sounds to chess boards to my favourite - an accelerometer that documented the suitcases travels from A to B by rail (Long periods of hanging around interspersed with bouts of terrifyingly violent behavior at the hands of the railway staff. Pretty much par for the course...)

But the thing that sets the BBC's effort apart from the rest is the fact that they appear to have created a Time Machine in the best traditions of Dr Who and the Tardis.

It starts off in Glasgow
on 10 September at 09:35











but by the time it gets to Southhampton, it's 06:35 on 9 September - 27 hours earlier.





If it keeps on going at this rate, we'll be back in the 18th century in no time.


They're certainly going to get their minds seriously f%@*ed when this thing turns up.


On a sailing ship......

There is no better rock song

Living easy, living free
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everything in my stride
Don't need reason, don't need rhyme
Ain't nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too

I'm on the highway to hell

No stop signs, speed limit
Nobody's gonna slow me down
Like a wheel, gonna spin it
Nobody's gonna mess me round
Hey Satan, payed my dues
Playing in a rocking band
Hey Momma, look at me
I'm on my way to the promised land

I'm on the highway to hell
(Don't stop me)

And I'm going down, all the way down
I'm on the highway to hell

Too good to miss

Christoph Buchel is known for his conceptual projects and complex large-scale installation pieces. In some of his projects he explores the unstable relationship between security and internment, placing visitors in the contradictory roles of victim and voyeur. This experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed. For the Sydney Biennale, Buchel presents two conceptual projects: Guards involves having inmates in Australian prisons guarding the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, which stands where the ‘First Fleet’ of prisoners from England came ashore in 1788. For the second project No Future a group of people, aged over 80 years, practise continuously the song ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977) by the English punk band The Sex Pistols in one of the galleries.

Here's the original

Tunes for a Tuesday - 9 September 2008

Buddy Holly - Ain't Got No Home from The Buddy Holly Masters
Arid - At The Close Of Everyday from 2 Meter Sessies Volume 9
Bob Dylan - Bound To Lose, Bound To Win from Witmark & Sons Demos
Tommy James & The Shondells - Crystal Blue Persuasion from Billboard Top 100 Hits Of 1969
Cozy Powell - Dance With The Devil
Grace Potter - Deliverance Road from Original Soul
Claire Waldoff - Dösköppe haben heut keinen Platz lieber Schatz from Perlen der Kleinkunst - Claire Waldoff
Rick Danko, Jonas Fjeld & Eric Andersen - Last Thing on My Mind from One More Shot
Morrissey - Late Night Maudlin Street from John Peel's Festive Fifty 1988 - Radio Version
Tight Bros From Way Back When - Make It a Habit
Richard Manuel - Mitzi's Blues from Whispering Pines (Live at the Getaway, Saugerties, NY 12 October 1985)
Van Morrison - Oh The Warm Feeling from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher
Joe Walsh - Pavane (de la Belle au bois dormant) from So what
Pluto - Radio Crimes from Pipe Line Under The Ocean
Of Montreal - She's My Best Friend
David Crosby - Tamalpais High (At About 3) from If I Could Only Remember My Name
The Particles - The Trumpet Song from The Particles Anthology
Bonnie Raitt - Walk out the front door from Home Plate
John Lee Hooker - Wednesday Evening Blues from Face To Face
Billy Joel - Zanzibar from 52nd Street

True stories - The Swizzle Stick

"Well, dear boy those things did happen at various times, in different places, but mainly not to me" Basil Boothroyd


Dad told me this story (frequently) as a warning not to get involved with birds with expensive tastes.

Yeah right.

Wartime in Edinburgh and he's a young handsome (don't know where I got my "ugly" genes from, but anyway..) NCO in the Royal Scots, waiting to be shipped out to India to fight the Japs and teach people how to blow things i.e Japs up.

He and his mate get lined up with two birds and they're in the pub (2 pints of bitter, 2 G&Ts), when his target for the night opens her handbag and pulls out a flash-looking swizzle stick and proceeds to use it very proficiently to disappear the bubbles in her drink so they don't find their way into her nostrils and provoke an un-ladylike sneeze.

It's obvious it's not the first time she's done this.

Dad looks at his mate, his mate looks at Dad and they quickly remember that they have to be off, they're raiding a German port at dawn.

"Close call" he said " You don't want to get involved with birds with expensive tastes."

Not that I listened to him, of course.

But I've always wondered where the word "swizzle stick" came from until recently and now I know - it comes from "Zwiesel", the traditional glass manufacturer from the eponymous town in Bavaria.

They picked up on the trend when it first appeared in America and started including elegant glass sticks with the shipments of cocktail glasses.

Took off like a rocket.

Of course, given the Americans' inability to pronounce anything with more than one syllable correctly and their penchant for mangling the English language at every opportunity, the "Zwiesel Stick" quickly became the "Swizzle Stick"

There you have it.

And then of course there's the story about Bernie Ashwell....

Happiness is .....Matrix II

"Erwin Redl's "Matrix II" is a 36 by 26 foot installation piece composed of a grid-work of floating green LEDs. Hung from long strings, the lights become a patchwork of points as if space itself were punctured and emitting a soft green light at its joints" writes Michael Noonan.

Doesn't quite do it justice.

Saw this at MCASD in La Jolla.

It's cool enough if you're standing still.

But if you move horizontally through the maze or alter your perspective vertically, you almost fall over.

"Even better if you wear shades" said the attendant.

Right he was, too....

The amazing conclusion

The sport of choice for the urban poor is BASKETBALL.

The sport of choice for maintenance level employees is BOWLING.

The sport of choice for front-line workers is FOOTBALL.

The sport of choice for supervisors is BASEBALL.

The sport of choice for middle management is TENNIS.

The sport of choice for corporate officers is GOLF.

Which tells us.....

The higher up the corporate ladder you get, the smaller your balls become.


Postscript:

I have it on very good authority that the sport of choice for academics is SQUASH.

Make of that what you will.....

This is the difference.....

.. between the military (that's where you get command of millions worth of kit and 50 men in your early 20s) and the Real World (where you THINK you have some sort of authority, but it's a mere illusion).

Excerpts for Royal Navy performance reviews.

(Would I have loved to have used some of them on people who worked for me at various times....)

His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.

I would not breed from this officer.He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his entire  satisfaction.

He would be out of his depth in a car park puddle.

This young lady has delusions of adequacy.
 
This medical officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port, and my officers to carry him from bar to bar.
 
Since my last report he has reached rock bottom, and has started to dig.
 
She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
 
He has the wisdom of youth, and the energy of old age.
 
Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
 
This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

Don't ask me.... (about Prada)

"Reduced from the outrageous to the merely ridiculous" Bill Leslie would say.

"ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE BLOODY EUROS?" I murmured quietly.

"FROM TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY BLOODY EUROS?"

"This is the cheaper place" sez Ms jb.

"I wouldn't DREAM of taking you to the OTHER place. You'd probably faint and you're much too heavy for me to carry....."

If this is how much ONE of their bloody shoes costs, I'd hate to see how much their sailing boats go for.

Oh

That's per PAIR.

So I suppose it's alright, then....

Why am I writing this?

First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name, you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.

Secondly, I've always operated in the belief that "bad things happen when good people stay silent." Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.


Third, I am just a housewife. I don't have a job she can bump me out of. I don't belong to any organization that she can hurt. But I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that's life.


Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the city librarian against Sarah's attempt at censorship.


Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.
 

Writes Anne Kilkenny in an email to her friends

YES! YES! YES!

Oh.

It's vapourware.

Sod it.

I was getting quite enthused there for a sec.

John van der Nieuwenhuizen is an Aussie industrial designer at HP in San Francisco by way of Motorola in Milan and Chicago.

He's designed the Hidden Radio.

Lift to hear, Rotate to tune.

It's just an idea at the moment. Can't buy it anywhere.

I wrote to him with just 2 and a half questions:

1.       When?
2.       Where
2.5     "How much?" is irrelevant..


John van der Nieuwenhuizen  hidden radio  industrial designer  motorola  HP

Tunes for a Tuesday - 2 September 2008

Leon Russell  - Alcatraz from Leon Russell and the Shelter People
Torrez  - The Evening Sun
Miranda Lambert  - Famous In A Small Town from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
David Thomas  - Fishing Blues from The Harry Smith Project Live Vol. 2
Avril Lavigne  - Girlfriend from The Best Damn Thing
Ashton, Gardner & Dyke  - Hymn To Everyone from The Best Of
Jimmie Rodgers  - I'm Lonely And Blue from The Essential Jimmie Rodgers
Dramarama  - Incredible from The Best of Dramarama: 18 Big Ones
The Who  - It's Not Enough from Endless Wire
The Pogues  - Lorca's Novena from Hell's Ditch
Donna Summer  - Love to Love You Baby from Billboard Top 100 Hits Of 1976
Elton John  - Madman Across The Water from Tumbleweed Connection
Anika Klar & Stefan Seitz  - Man maste vara manniska from Trax from the neighbourhood
Mekons  - Snow from Heaven And Hell
Red Hot Chili Peppers  - Suck My Kiss from Greatest Hits
Lindisfarne  - Together Forever from The Very Best Of Lindisfarne
The Beatles  - Wait from Rubber Soul
Bob Dylan, Bobby Neuwirth  - When I Paint My Masterpiece from Rolling Thunder Review - 8/12/75 - NYC
Summer Cats  - Wild Rice from Cloudberry Records Samples
Pulp  - Wishful Thinking from The Peel Sessions