When a plan comes together

Recipe for Whang Dang Doodle

1. Step one (and follow the vague, deconstructed photos for ease of reference), dewang your thang and untwang the whole thang to the point of unplayability until it flops. Pull vigorously and all will be well. You may need industrial wire cutters to remove the Kinks and the Steely Dans according to overheard master plans. You can also stop to crop your toe nails but avoid the troublesome  ricochets.

2. Step two is easy, open the packets and scatter the contents on the floor. Despite their look these are not cheap donkey condoms so handle them with care. Adopt a suitably penitent position and thank the various gods and machines at Amazon, Ernie Ball's wee hoose and Rotosound. Without their tireless science and exploitation a visit to a guitar shop c/w human interaction, withering stares and minor embarrassment would have been required. Dispose of waste products thoughtfully in the next door neighbour's garden. 

3. Step three is fiddly, even on a violin. Pull the twangs through the holes and ignore the dull fudds as you wind up the mechanism to at least 11. Suitably use a suitable tool and wear some chic and fashionable eye protection in case of blow back and some tension of grinding resistance is experienced. All resistance must be crushed by stealth and cunning within this current Conservative regime.

4. Step four is cringe worthy and scary but also the cat's whiskers as you tighten up the machine toggle tuning pegs and hear the far away cry of new born notes waiting to be released from the darkness of the void. These plaintive groans and howls from the infant sounds  are usually in Db or F# and are not indicative of how it'll all work out. You will never hear their like again until the next time or unless you trip out on the magic tremolo button once too often or if you're at a football match. 

5. Step five requires stamina, swagger and extra effort as you must trail out and wander on the long lost highway of the fretboard and Whang Dang Doodle all night long. You may require wholesome sandwiches, some kind of matured Little Feat repertoire and a decent plectrum. The next day your index finger fingerprint scan at work will fail to recognize your crushed digits as will your muzo friends but you will feel elated and entitled, a bit like the kid in Kid Charlemagne or Dr Timothy Leary. This is the blues and these are the bluer's blues.

Yesterday's Apples

That's the apples, all 9 of your English Kilograms stewed and stuffed and pruned and bagged and ready to head off the North Pole where a stupendous welcome awaits them. There are no apple trees in the North Pole and shortly there will be no North Pole either but that's just the way of cruel evolution, man's inhumanity to the world, the climate and various other things. Come the day we'll add a controlled drug know as sugar to these and so create the perfect "Crumble in the Jungle" as it's often called. In any other time of name creation it would be know as pudding but that's a term used by the chattering classes and not the likes of us. We don't call it dessert either because we can't really spell it and it can be ambiguous. No, the correct term is of course "afters". Custard can be added if you like that sort of thing.

Strange Fruit

A decent apple crop from the two trees resulted in about 9kg of stewed fruit, that's almost a record if we had only kept records. That made today officially "Apple Sunday". Dancing in the street did not occur as a) there is no street here and b) we seldom dance on the Sabbath Day but that's nothing to do with religion. Once cooled the stewed fruit is frozen and retained in order to help us ride out the Zombie Apocalypse or some random hurricane or apple price hike that hits us unexpectedly. We're screwed however is the power fails and the freezer packs in. You simply cannot trust technology these days, something I've shared on a daily basis with both my personal robotic assistant and my invisible friend. None of us fear the coming storm of AI but we do fear the coming storm of lack of "I" from our human fellow travelers and colleagues employed in the food processing industry.

Unexploded vegetables: So we tried something slightly different by growing aubergines and after a long gestation period they did actually produce something...here are their tiny, half formed and evil looking fruits. I think that may be considered a small success, perhaps an earlier planting or a better environment (indoors) might have helped. We may make use of these as cosmetic implants, ingredients for spells and potions or artist's materials, not sure what as yet, suggestions are welcome.

No it's not Friday

Speaking of memorable days...who can forget the day that SpongeBob finally became a real boy? The cartoon series never was quite the same though.

Friday was another day altogether, not particularly memorable but an alright day, a solid stab at 24 hours of time spent on various things, all across the world. A reasonable if slightly dull Friday. The kind of day you get when you just make it all the way to almost the end of the week. (Of course in some places it was not a dull day at all, things actually happened, storms, civil wars, alien abductions, fraud by fraudsters, cold blooded murder, sex of a kind, road traffic crime and general mayhem. Perhaps some important discoveries made or lied about, futile creative works embarked upon, pulp fiction books written, weird maths problems solved, faith healings, deaths by stoning and day dreams of all lurid kinds. There were unfunny  jokes made up and cracked, witty quips passed, things said and things gloriously forgotten). Well that was everybody else's Friday, well some peoples but not really mine, fair enough kind of normal day though it was. Funny thing is that in all of time's long passage from Eden in Cornwall to the Big Bang Theory and back again, there never will be another day quite like Friday past, which was only just yesterday (wrote on Saturday but posted on Sunday) and I almost missed it.

A plague of crayons

In these troubled times where posh buffoons are in charge of the most important things what this country needs is a plague of crayons somewhere, but not on our household. These are virtual images. By that I mean they have some virtues as well as not actually existing. This is modern art in as much as it was created a few days ago and some time after the actual Renaissance and in no particular order Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Realism, Pop Art and various other famous schools of arty things. Today we all have the tools and technology to become brilliant, all we lack is the energy and the inspiration and the few available lucky breaks meshed with the correct algorithm.

Big Slug

Yes it's a monster, a huge mutated slug, 6" long and longer when it stretches out to move. It might be radioactive. It may even have super powers, there's no way of knowing as I was careful not to anger or insult it. In the hostile environment of a wild garden you cannot be too careful otherwise the nettles, thorns and now slugs may bite back, sting or give you a nasty itchy rash. I observed it's low, sluggish you might say, progress across the stones and then, due my indifferent attention span lost interest and I guess it progressed on into the lush and dripping vegetation for some hearty meal or other. It may have done that or come a cropper, perhaps being eaten by some passing goose or a low flying crow. You can never tell and I'll never know.

Dear Satan #2

Dear Satan,

Sorry to bother you when you're so busy with your climate chaos, North Korea, whispering in the dumb-ass Trump family ears, fixing Facebook algorithms and reducing the size of chocolate bars but just what is it with you and our socks? I know that you read this blog so don't try to ignore this issue. Can you please explain why, anywhere in this (?) world, it is impossible to get comfortable socks at present time? 

I'm a size 8, socks tend to come in batch sizes of 6 - 9 and so on. My feet are at neither end of this scale and it's obviously bad news for the 6 and 7 folks. It must be an even worse torture for these poor people. Sizing and sorting needs fixed because socks do not stay in on one place on your feet (as you might reasonably  expect from any piece of clothing or footwear) they move and ride about in all directions when on your feet. Movement = friction = heat. That is not a good thing within a sock, shoe and foot sandwich, it causes rubbing, chaffing, red skin and leads to pain. Actual pain and tiredness. I suspect you're also meddling with the materials and allowing poor quality wool and other textiles to screw with our feet and trap sweat and heat regardless of what the labels and descriptions claim.

The bad behaviour of socks is a constant source of frustration for the world, they should not have sadistic lives of their own and be the cause of so much discomfort. Please get yourself out of the sock design business and allow the better parts of science to get involved so as to improve the quality in order to allow those of us who walk around a lot to at least have some comfort and less injury as we quietly live our lives.

Thanks in anticipation,

John

Steely Dan don't need tribute bands

Soft underbelly of the biscuit tin on the day I heard the news...

Walter Becker's death made me wonder about when a band is still a band. Donald Fagen says that a Steely Dan band will carry on and continue to play in Walter's memory. The old hits roll on like in that 10cc song who's name escapes me. That's a nice thought I suppose but once Donald Fagen goes then that really should be over for Steely Dan. I don't like bands of ghosts carrying on, milking the back catalogue of the founder band with some tenuous link to the original, a one time bass player or a roadie or an adopted cat. Things need to die away naturally and not exist in some perpetual roundabout of attributed members joining an everlasting and lucrative club. Yeah, I don't really like actual tribute acts either (I know it can be fun bopping to the past but...), maybe it's the young wigs and the old faces and nothing to do with the music.  But regarding the sad loss of Walter Becker I always loved the eerie and sophisticated work of Steely Dan, too many clever references and wonderful chords for me to ever fully understand or copy, too painstaking and perfect with the solos sometimes, too NYC and not enough LA, too clever and not enough stupid. Great formulas, ever lasting sounds and everlasting conundrums.

Accidental Wes Anderson

Cheap blogging continues: As the lucky hordes, 50000 strong, are out there walking across the Queensferry Crossing and taking numerous smug, grinning selfies we here, left on the banks can only browse the internet and moan. Oh, wait a minute here's a site that celebrates things that are, by accident if you will, just a little Wes Anderson in their look and feel. Interesting and nothing to do with local affairs at all. At least it's a reasonably fine afternoon for the once in a lifetime trek. I'll get over my error in not applying and therefore my exclusion sooner or later.

Hell is full of recycled nothings

Dark things, dirty dark things lie together in the bin, cat food sachets, green curry containers, polystyrene pots and the awkward nozzle bits from Mr Sheen and used up hand soaps. Where will/does it all end up?

The dark recesses of recycling remain a modern mystery and a source of righteous guilt. What goes where, should it be rinsed out, what can you mix, why bother? We do our best but it's a fuzzy process and based on my discreet observations around the modern world most people don't give a modern toss (that's about 50p). No matter what you put on the packet it all goes unread and just gets piled up elsewhere. It's kind of nobody's responsibility to care, all we want is a simple, preferably coloured instruction that tells where to fling our juice/yogurt/chicken soup carton so we can reduce the guilt and feel smug. So what if it's sent to Spain or China or burned up to power essential services in hospitals in Glasgow, as long as it's done out there in the great unknown by young offenders and surly pirate types wearing donkey jackets and hi-vis then that's fine. It's too much trouble to learn and to worry where it all ends or how it returns to us as shopping bags, tins of sugary drinks,underwear and Kia Rios following a convoluted route there and back again. 

And there's the awful horror of knowing that what doesn't get used up is being compressed into squeezed up messy wee atoms and molecules and then buried at the bottom of the sea or in a secret mountain in the Far East where yellow trucks and diggers work 24 hours a day under arc lights piling up the world's waste. We need to stop buying rubbish that is only fit for recycling into more rubbish but we all need our rubbish and the perplexity of it's relationship with us for any of our lives to have meaning...said no one ever.

Last rays of August

A Laurie Lee or a Lewis Grassic Gibbon would have the language and the vocabulary to properly sum up and describe the last few rays of the sun on the final evening in August, leaving the door unlocked and ready for the arrival of September in a twinkling of hours. I don't however. Photo by Ali Graham.

Slow internet day due to porridge on the line

One of those days when I'm time poor and Internet poor, apparently it's running at the speed of low lying porridge today as is my conscious mind. Perhaps I've become too enthralled with Game of Thrones and am in some kind of cold turkey phase, maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, no that's no true. There is no adequate explanation (note spoof album covers, lot's of GOT revisionist twaddle out there). We did watch Logan last night, the TV was calling in some far away way. It was a bit of a disappointment, formulaic and without any real points to like. It could have been so good, "superhero mutants get old and infirm, a bit cranky and lose the plot", lots of potential, none of it realised and way too violent in stupid ways. I'm using the word way a lot, I blame the internet and the BBC and other things that gum up life with their gum and porridge.

Unexpected and disturbing

Well this is unexpectedly disturbing and sinister, a strange eye graphic that I've downloaded and then uploaded quite intentionally but under duress. It's as if my fingers and some (dull) part of my brain were briefly  taken over and controlled by an unworldly force of some kind. The good news is that these actions have neutralized the awful curse that came as part of the original eye package. However for those of you viewing this for the first time right now, I'm afraid the curse still retains it's full and unpredictable power, all set aside for you. Just of those things I guess.

Kits, Kats and Ants

Actual ants photographed by me yesterday in East Kilbride (or EK for short).

Ants: If you look closely at this photo you'll see lots of tiny Leaf Carrying Ants carrying pre-cut leaves along a piece of rope to some ant friendly destination or other. It's hardly dangerous tight rope artistry, in fact it's a bit like you or me carrying a large leaf across the Forth Bridge but fair play to the ants, they just get on with it without any obvious complaints.  It does illustrate a certain amount of commitment, team work and dedication by the ants which I roundly applaud. I do wonder however about the actual ant political system that runs silently in the background and the methods by which this repetitive labour is organised.

Actual Kit-Kats photographed by me today in the kitchen of our house.

Kit-Kats: Loved the world o'er and particularly in Japan, the humble Kit-Kat is defying (for the mean time) the universal shrinking ray of progress that other sweet treats have succumbed to. You still can get four reasonably sized CHUNKY Kit-Kats for £1 in reputable stores, maybe even in Poundland. This bucking of trends will probably spell economic disaster for the brand eventually but I for one am happy to be indulged by their maverick style and marketing recklessness. Of course they may just be there as loss leaders or perhaps they're just taking the piss out of skinny Mars Bars and puny Snickers which are now so small they'd pass convincingly as Celebration sweeties. I suppose smaller sweets are no bad thing, assuming you only scoff one and stop there. Greedy bastards who eat two where they'd have eaten one need to hang their heads in shame and look out for the great grinning diabetes monster  and likely dental chaos lurking in the dark shadows ahead of them.

Start your engines

Festival Best

There's some kind of big arts festival on in Edinburgh at the moment, quite busy really with all sorts of people attending. Multicultural you might say. Zany in places and generally expensive as well as expansive. A nice day though out for those of us from the sticks used to fences and fields. Just too many things to see and do so I missed a load of photo ops, easily dazzled by everything going on really. I even had to drink water to cool down at one point. People and footfall generate heat. Perhaps that's why the world is hotting up with the warmth of misty global warming coming up from our shoes and armpits rising to the bright heavens where even God himself or herself cannot shield us. There may be other reasons also but don't tell Dee-Dee Trump.

High hopes, rhythm and jam

I also find spelling tricky, words with no vowels are particularly hard, rhythm is probably the worst. How can that first h be correct and why isn't it just rithem or rythm if you want to lock out the vowels? Anyway I always find cheeky chappy guitar god  Jeff Beck  amusing as well as being stunningly brilliant and hypnotically watchable. He seems to be the late bloomer of the famous Yardbirds (or Yyrdbyrds) three pluckers and the most consistent and arguably original player still going. Clapton had a long and purple phase, mellowing out as he aged and got bored. Page burned super brightly but never, ever matched the quality of his early work from 69 to 74 and seems only to be  interested in remastering old tapes and recordings these days. Beck emerges as a plucky and stoical workhorse of a guitar player who has plugged away and grown in style and technique to his current masterful place. He has a quirky, fluid and explosive style that the other two can't really match. OK the tunes are mostly covers and rehashed classics but his take on them is wonderful to watch and better to listen to. The tortoise beats the hare ever time, if it takes a life time. Over indulgent use of coke and heroin doesn't help either. 

Four whole days

So, this evening marks the end of a spell of work that has lasted a whole four days. It's a fine, quiet, tired kind of pleasant feeling. Like settling down for the evening on a forgiving couch with a grey goose, a Marmite toasted sandwich and flagon of Choco milk, the one you love and various singing birds and mammals crooning in a pleasant Walt Disney style as the end of day's shadows lengthen and the promise of always more is always more than you might have expected. You fall asleep and dream of great clouds of common sense and brevity floating by but tethered by fishing line that's almost invisible and there are no fish to speak of. Then you play a joke on  the Hebrew God by pretending to create an alternative universe of your own  just to test his sense of humour. Oh how we laughed and how he out smarted us with his new and very serious  version of Hell.

Knitted Bunny

Just a simple, knitted rabbit sitting on a barrel in the Biscuit Cafe in Culross. We were there the other day, Ali had wholesome warming soup and I had a scone with jam and cream. Speaks volumes I guess.