Seaside Man

Or just resting?

Cheers, Tom.

...but I have no idea what it is:

(you can see the colours better larger - click on the image)

Cheers, Tom.

Some flying machines seems natural:

Some don't:

Some are cute:

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. All pics get bigger if you click on them.

This is a very old blues song that was "revived" by Taj Mahal. It is played here on the sort of guitar it would have been played on originally, a Resonator guitar dating from 1934. I have no idea who this chap is, but his playing on this vintage instrument is very good. I have always wanted a Resonator guitar myself, but they are rather expensive. One like this one would be several thousand pounds, although cheaper modern copies are available.

Cheers, Tom.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band from late 1967, featuring Ry Cooder on lead guitar (if you don't know this, wait for it to get going):

Singin through you to me; thunderbolts caught easily
Shouts the truth peacefully Electricity!

High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need to hide their shadow deep

Go into bright find the light and know that friends don`t mind just how you grow

midnight cowboy stains in black reads dark roads without a map To free-seeking electricity

Lighthouse beacon straight ahead straight ahead across black seas to bring Electricity!

Seek electricity...........

Cheers, Tom.

There is a great quote in the film "If":

"Some say that George III was a mollusc who never found his rock"

There are many people for whom this description applies, pursuing lives of "quiet desperation" and screaming silently into the void. If you look like this, finding your rock is easy:

Many people, like George III, never find their rock because they have unshirkable responsibilities which limit their choices. Lots do not search for their rock and take the path of least resistance through life. Some find their rock and cling to it for grim death. Others still realise that even though they appear to have found their rock, there might be a better one. I used to play a lot of Chess, and I learned this from the world champion Emanuel Lasker:

"If you see a good move, don’t play it: look for a better one!"

The same applies to rocks.

Cheers, Tom.

Comfy:

Itch:

Scratch:

Better:

Someone much smarter than me once said:

"The time when you absolutely must hold your tongue is the time when you think you just have to speak"

I think there is a basic truth in this: timing can be crucial.

Cheers, Tom.

(P.S. sorry about the barbed wire in the pictures)

The plant above is apparently growing straight out of the top of the sea wall. There is no evidence of any soil, and it's subject to almost constant high winds and regular drenchings by salty water. How it survives and on what, I have no idea.

But it is us humans who manage to leave this mess on the beach:

That's not so clever, is it?

Tom.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. The upper picture isn't mine, I got it from a stock photo site and it was claimed as copyright free.

24 little hours. 2 pictures with more or less the same composition, taken from the same spot, at the same time, on consecutive days. The lower one was taken last night, the upper one the day before. The difference is staggering. For the earlier one I was wearing a t-shirt and no coat, but last night I had on 2 jumpers, hat and coat and my hands were freezing after just 2 minutes.

This is the angel-voiced Dinah Washington singing "What a Difference a Day Makes". This clip had the best sound quality - the video is Nicole Kidman as Lady Chatterley and is best ignored:

Cheers, Tom.

Mother's Day, flowers strewn down the beach. If I had to guess I'd say either a mother lost at sea, or whose ashes were scattered on the beach. It could just be a coincidence that it's on Mother's Day of course. What do you think?

I have seen this a couple of times before and I even posted about it once before too. When I did, I got a complaint that I shouldn't have photographed such a thing. There was no card and no-one about, so I don't see a problem with it.

Cheers, Tom.

As promised, two pictures of the bench "in action":

(click on the pics to enlarge them)

Cheers, Tom.

This saying originally comes from the bible, Proverbs 16:18:

"Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall"

There is this one too:

Proverbs 16:5 "Everyone who is PROUD IN HEART IS AN ABOMINATION TO THE LORD; though they join forces, none will go unpunished"

This is all sounding a little on the harsh side as, to me, pride is mostly a good quality, it's one of the things makes us want to do a good job:, to "take pride in our work". The Cambridge Online dictionary says the phrase means:

"... if you are too confident about your abilities, something bad will happen which shows that you are not as good as you think"

That sounds more reasonable - according to this it basically means "don't get cocky". So if that is what it means, why does the bible phrase it so harshly? As you might expect, they have a larger devilfish to fry. There is a lengthy discussion on pride here:

http://www.bible-knowledge.com/pride-before-fall.html

"This cancerous, lethal, and destructive quality, probably more than any other negative quality, has brought down more kingdoms, toppled more empires, caused more wars, destroyed more marriages, ruined more friendships and led more criminals into our jail systems than all of the other negative qualities combined and put together

It will first completely destroy a person's soul and spirit, and then it will eventually destroy and ruin the rest of what life they still have left. And then for many of them - they will end up being cast into the most horrible place imaginable when they die and cross over - hell itself, and then eventually into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone (where)  the smoke of their torment will ascend forever and ever"

Wow, talk about having a downer on it! The logic is that it was pride that ultimately got Satan thrown out of heaven, and therefore pride is a satanic quality and an "abomination".

I'm sure any of you with pride will be pleased to know that this makes you like Stalin, Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and that what you have is a  "cancer".

But of course there is an even deeper reason why the bible has a downer on pride: because it diminishes appreciation of god and the very human authors of the bible didn't want to allow that. We are all supposed to be humble and only glory in the supernatural.

A big fat NO to that! If you have worked hard and done a good job and you feel satisfied with your achievement, this is pride. It is a positive quality that spurs us on, not an "abomination". You can even be proud of the achievements of others and be happy for them - your children for example. At some point over the last 1000 years, the meaning changed to have all these negative connotations.

What sometimes comes before a fall is not pride, it is overestimation of one's own abilities, or underestimation of the severity of problems.

Cheers, Tom.

Click the picture to enlarge it.

Cheers, Tom.

We had a lovely walk on Borth Bog this afternoon and I took a few gorse pictures. 4 of these are below, and they all get bigger if you click on them.

Cheers, Tom.

There wasn't even a wisp of cloud when I took this last night:

Cheers, Tom.

This was the song that the DJ John Peel asked to be played on the radio after he died. Roy Harper's original has a brass band on it, but this is just me and guitar in front of a green blanket.

I'd welcome opinions on how good or bad a job you think I make of this, if you wouldn't mind.

Cheers, Tom.

Prompted by Jenray's Grateful Dead music, here is a photograph of Ripples.

And here is Birdsong by The Grateful dead, featuring a nice acoustic guitar solo by Jerry Garcia:

Cheers, Tom.

Cheers, Tom.

Shep runs round with such enthusiasm still that it's all too easy for us to forget that he's actually an old man. The vet has advised short walks several times a day, but yesterday he had two reasonably long ones instead. As a result, he was limping last night before bed time because of his arthritis. So, just a couple of short walks today.

I said yesterday I'd cut out the orange pictures for a while. This one is a bit less orange:

Cheers, Tom.

This is technically not a very good photograph as it's overexposed, but I like it anyway because the colours of the sunset have brought out the tones in Molly's fur rather nicely. It's also rare for me to catch her staring into the camera!

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. click the pic to enlarge it

(the pic gets bigger if you click on it)

The pictures in my last few posts have all been pretty orangey, so this will be the last one...for a while. I can't resist just one more from last night though, as the colours were just so stunning. In case anyone is wondering, I haven't fiddled with the colours on this at all, it's exactly as taken. Mother nature in one of her very many fine forms here. Here is a total contrast to the above picture:

Cheers, Tom.

The view outside right now (well, about 2 minutes ago):

Cheers, Tom.

We are required, these days, to spread ourselves too thinly. Where has the time to think gone?

In the past it was fine to work an 8 hour day, have dinner and then relax until bedtime with a book, a good film, some music, the television or whatever. Now, society piles pressure on people, and the pressure comes from all angles: advertizing, newspapers, television, family, friends and even from blogs.

The expectation now is that we must use Twitter and Facebook, write several amusing and erudite blogs, go to the gym, do the garden, paint the spare bedroom, make a few phonecalls and send some texts. Then walk the dogs, texting as you go, updating your myspace page as you throw a stick, and ordering a pizza timed to arrive just as you get back. We are expected to know about sport, fashion, celebrities, the best new game, the best new band and the best retro item of the moment. Oh, and if you have kids you have to look after them as well as all the above.

If you can't do all this you suck and you are a failure.

Except you don't and you aren't. .

Life is short and it ends in the cold, cold ground. Choose wisely how  you spend your time!

Cheers, Tom.

For the first time this year, it's warm enough to leave the door open:

Spring is definitely here :-)

Or is this poetic nonsense?. It comes from John Keats' poem of 1820 "Ode to a Grecian Urn"

"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe   
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all     
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"

There are lots of ideas about truth. Here is a small selection:

"Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented" - Georges Braque

"Facts are the enemy of the truth" - Dale Wasserman

"The truth is a matter of perception" - William Ginsburg (Monica Lewinski's lawyer)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound statement" - Niels Bohr

"The truth is more important than the facts" - Frank Lloyd Wright

The question "What is Truth?" has been discussed by philosophers for thousands of years and there is still no agreement on the matter. However, I'm pretty sure that Keats was talking a load of old nonsense.

Cheers, Tom.

A very powerful song this one, and an intriguing video. This tune has been stuck in my head for days now.

Rows of houses, all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out

This machine will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again

Cracked eggs, dead birds
Scream as they fight for life
I can feel death, can see its beady eyes
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out again

Immerse your soul in love
IMMERSE YOUR SOUL IN LOVE

---------------

Thom Yorke says the song is about "staring the devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh... (it) hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there"

Over 500 years ago, in 1500, Leonardo da Vinci said this about the possibility of a photograph:

"Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!”

And over 300 years later in 1839, when photography had actually been invented, a German newspaper printed this against photography:

“This is blasphemy... God created man in his own image and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. This is an invention of the devil”

Isn't it funny how there can be so many different views about the same thing. One thing you can be sure of: if there is something that you think is the best thing since sliced bread there will be someone out there who disagrees with you and thinks it's a bad thing. This is a very good thing. Without dispute there would be no progress, just stagnation. We rarely learn from those who agree with us.

Thesis ---> Antithesis ---> Synthesis

So let us praise dispute and realise that one voice, however small, can make a difference.

Cheers, Tom.

"In our globalised economy a pound spent in Beijing or Bremen is a job saved in Bradford or Birmingham. This is what the G20 presidency is about" - Alistair Darling

What a huge, steaming pile of nonsense.

Cheers, Tom.

A different sort of cover by me this time: Smash It Up by The Damned. I really enjoyed doing this, and thanks to Martin (TheRavingLoon) for suggesting The Damned. He requested Absinthe, but this one was more feasible for me.

This gave me a chance to thrash away at my electric for a change, which I must do again soon.

Cheers, Tom.

I was a giant hen that laid cannonballs instead of eggs and I couldn't sit on them because they kept rolling away, no matter how hard I tried to stop them. But when they rolled away, they grew and grew in size until they were crushing houses and they got bigger and bigger and crushed cities and rolled into the sea, where they made tidal waves. The waves went right round the world and knocked me off my nest, and I surfed them to safety on top of a mountain. The mountain turned into a volcano like in that James Bond film and I was blasted into space on a rocket, where I landed on a distant planet and started laying proper eggs again, and they all hatched out into beautiful chicks.

What do you think it means?

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. Broadband still down. Apologies for my lack of ability to respond to comments and read posts by my friends here.

I read a book some years ago by James Gleick, called "Faster". It was a fascinating read and went into a great deal of detail about how every aspect of our lives is getting faster and faster and how, over time, we are getting less and less rest time.

The driving force behind laptop computers and mobile phones wasn't to make people's lives easier, it was to allow Corporations to use their staff more effectively, to get more work out of them. We are now expected, even those of us without jobs, to be contactable all the time. I read recently that 5% of adults have actually interrupted sex to answer their phones [and it's probably more than 5% for children!]. Priorities, people!

I bet there are a few bloggers here who take their laptops into coffee shops to take advantage of the free Wifi. Whatever happened to just enjoying your coffee and watching the world go by?

The more time that has passed, the more I realise how right Mr Gleick was. I've quoted this here before, but here it is again:

"What life is this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare"

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. I'm still missing my Broadband!
P.P.S. I'm posting this now instead of tomorrow morning - no time for modems on Thu a.m.!

...and now I'm popping down below. Just like this chapess did last night:

That's the best picture I've ever managed to take of the moon (click on it for full size). I wish it didn't have that yellowish tinge, but that's really what it looked like. I think the last light of the sun might have been on it. That would make it look a bit yellow, wouldn't it?

My cryptic title is because my Broadband is still down. I shan't bore you all with the saga I had with BT. The upshot is that I won't be around much for reading my friends' posts or replying to comments on here. I will, however, catch up when it eventually gets fixed, which might not be for 2 or 3 days since we are at the end of the world here, it seems.

I hope everybody is well.

Cheers, Tom.

(Posting this by modem)

So, I will be around only a little until it's fixed as rhis place now seems chronically slow!!! How did I ever put up with modem access for so long???

Tom.

(all pictures here get larger if you click on them)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7933565.stm

News came out yesterday that:

"Youtube is blocking all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Right Society. Thousands of videos will be unavailable to Youtube users from later on Monday"

The PRS is "outraged" and "shocked".

This is happening because google want more profit:

“Youtube ... has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by google for $1.65 billion in 2006”

The PRS want more per video, so google have taken their ball and gone home.

--------------------

So, what do you reckon will happen next? I reckon the PRS will back down mightily and google will toss them some scraps. This is what happens when monster transnational companies get virtual monopolies over markets: they can throw their weight around and everyone has to kow-tow.

The next few days/weeks should be interesting and I might be wrong...we’ll see. I hope it gets sorted out amicably as I really like youtube - I treat it like a request show on a radio station where you get to make all the selections yourself and you even get video if you want it too. The original youtube idea was to get every music video in the world on it. That has been compromised for some years now, and might have just become much less effective.

Cheers, Tom.

Accepted wisdom has it that:

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"

There is undeniably some truth to this. When a group of people want to throw off the yokes of their oppressors and negotiation has repeatedly proved useless then terrorism will be suggested as a possibility. And as someone once said:

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but no Air Force"

There is some truth to this too. However, the victims of terrorism tend to not be important people but normal people doing their jobs. Rather like the 2 people killed and 4 injured in the Real IRA shootings in Antrim on Saturday night. Here we have a case where it's hard to justify this as freedom fighting. Shaun Woodward described it as "an act of criminal barbarism".

I think the point at which a possible freedom fighter becomes a terrorist is when they have little support and little chance of winning and that seems to apply to the Real IRA. Even former IRA member Martin McGuiness wants nothing to do with them:

"I supported the IRA during the conflict, I myself was a member of the IRA but that war is over"

I hope the people who carried out these murders get found and punished. Too much blood has already been lost over Northern Ireland and the minority who want more of it seem to be very small indeed. And here is Harvey Andrews singing about a not entirely dissimilar incident from 1971:

Tom.

Have you noticed there seem to be an unusually high number of doom and gloom stories circulating at the moment? You'd think World War 3 was about to start or something. Oh, perhaps it is. Whoops.

Perhaps we should have a Happy Blog Day every 3rd Monday in March or something.

Tom.

The wind is howling off the sea with outrageous force, and the rain is hammering against the windows as if it wants to come in. I feel some fried eggs coming on!

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. I took the above picture 2 days ago, not today!

"May you live in interesting times"

Whether we like it or not, all of us are living in interesting times. Technology is changing faster than many of us can keep pace with, the map of the world is changing year on year, the risk of WOMD falling into the hands of non-elected terrorists grows by the day. World War Three, environmental meltdown and the total collapse of the world's finances all seem like real and present dangers.

William Burroughs wrote about "The Naked Lunch", that moment of ultra-sharp focus when the world seems to stop and you are utterly concentrated on what is on your fork, what you are about to eat: a piece of flesh hacked from a slaughtered cow seasoned and cooked. Your lunch is stripped naked, exposed for what it really is. There are far more "naked lunch" moments out there now than ever before. Have you ever stopped to consider how utterly astonishing the mobile phone is? The MP3 player, the internet, dirty bombs, nukes, anthrax warheads, the digital camera, electric cars, the lightbulb? A new-born lamb?

An experiment was done last year that could have destroyed the planet. If "nanobots" get created, the world could be reduced to "grey goo" in 3 days. Perhaps a New World Order is about to arise and turn us all into slaves; perhaps we're all just biological batteries in a huge Matrix.

What, really, can you trust? Nothing, my friends, nothing. But you should do it anyway. Life is a sequence of choices and those choices can be ultra-simplified into up or down. As long as you keep choosing up, maybe you won't do too badly. Sometimes down might look like up and vice versa, but you almost always get to rechoose if you mess up.

When you get a Naked Lunch moment, when you get a moment of realisation or even of horror, use that moment well. Absorb the message you get, think about it. If necessary, change your life accordingly but most importantly, never stop thinking. And try and think up, not down.

Cheers, Tom.

'Elucidation: When media file state from" unsettle" change into" success" indicate the PC to have installed the decode of this file type, the tool can play the media file, and can proceed to convert after stopping playing, certainly before not playing the media file it can start converting directly also, but for converting the media file success, we suggest that the user makes sure the file can proceed the conversion after playing.'

Great, that's much clearer!

'Intercepting the video snippet to take out from the media file a fragment for needing proceed the conversion, at this time should set the start position and the end position of the video fragment. Intercepting the video fragment has two kinds of set method; the concrete operation is as follows'

OK!

'The option’s default is not hook, for get more wonderful effect, please use the default settings'

Will do!

Tom.

I've talked on here before about how the MP3 and illegal downloads will, over time, destroy the music industry. Opinions vary as to whether that is a bad thing or not, and there are both pluses and minuses to it. One thing I haven't talked about much is the lower quality of MP3s and let's face it, they sound rubbish unless you use a compression rate of at least 256K, which most people don't.

They don't sound as good, because the music is compressed. But guess what, music is now being made for people to listen to on their MP3 players, i.e. tinny, with no bass and little dynamic variation. It was in The Times on Thursday (I was given a free copy).

Research has shown that the "iPod generation" actually prefer the tinny and flat sound of over-compressed MP3s to the clarity of CD or the depth of vinyl. Appreciation of High Fidelity is rapidly spiralling down the plughole of time. The research has taken 8 years and was done by Jonathan Berger, the professor of music at Stanford University:

"I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in the preference of MP3s".

Perceptions of music have changed. Many "young" people now prefer the lower quality flat, tinny and metallic sound of their over-compressed MP3s played through the tiny headphones of their MP3 players. So, music is being made to make the most of that sound. Also, attention spans are short so music has to sound louder. As Producer Steven Street puts it:

"Now there is a constant race to be louder than other people's records...what you are hearing is that everything is being squared off and is losing depth and clarity. I'd hate to think that anything I'd slaved over in the studio is only going to be listened to on a bloody iPod".

Apparently the latest album by Green Day is very tiring to listen to because of heavy compression.

The dance music producer Rennie Pilgrem now actually mixes his music using iPod headphones. This is a huge change from mixing it to sound good through monster speakers in a club. As he puts it:

“To my ears iPods are not even as good quality as cassette tape. But once someone gets used to that sound then they feel comfortable with it”

I agree with him - the quality is very poor. Here is a rather nice analogy:

“If young consumers imagined that what they were getting from their iPods is all that music can give them, that would be like thinking that if you worked your way through the McDonalds menu you’d have tasted every culinary delight in the universe”.

For me, perhaps the more worrying aspect of this is that the “iPod generation” might grow up not even knowing how good music can sound. That’s a great shame.

Cheers, Tom.

Up:

Down:

Cheers, Tom.

"In the blue wardrobe of heaven are many unused clothes, too tight-fitting yet too beautiful to throw away. And in that wardrobe we hang our likenesses, yellow diaries yellowed with yesterday, thumb smeared with tomorrow. But the now, the present, like the hollow screech of ancient flamingos in search of shrimps, is still vibrantly shocking pink." -- Vivian Stanshall

It's 14 years to the day since Vivian Stanshall Died, on 5th March 1995. A true English eccentric (even though he hated to be called one) and the mastermind behind "Sir Henry at Rawlinson End". He is perhaps best known for "I'm the Urban Spaceman", but I prefer this one - "Canyons of your mind" - bizarrely brilliant:

If that isn't the best guitar solo ever, I don't know what is!

Cheers, Tom.

The news from yesterday that ITV is "scrapping for it's life" comes as no surprise to me:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7921427.stm

The quality of television in the UK has been dropping steadily for a long time now, at least 20 years, and it seems it will continue.

ITV has a grand plan and part of it is to get the rules changed to allow "product placement". Oh lordie. Now as well as having adverts between programmes, the programmes themselves will also be adverts. And they think this is a good thing! I'd be even less likely to watch such programmes than I already am under those circumstances! You can imagine the scenes:

Doorbell rings, woman answers
"Morning Steph, would you like a yummie cup of Nescafe coffee"?
"Oh yes please Jane, I love the taste of Nescafe. Bill has left me"
“Oh poor you. Would you like a McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuit”?
“Thanks Jane, and do you have any super-soft Kleenex tissues”?
etc.

Not pretty, is it? What’s the betting the BBC loses it’s licence fee before too long as well?

Good programmes were getting so rare that over a year ago, Helen and I decided we would give up television for good. So we did, and we now pay no licence fee and have much more time that we can spend productively rather than vegetating in front of the "idiot box".

ITV are even suggesting a merger with Channels 4 and 5: that’s how desperate they are.

And why has this happened? Simple: it’s the internet and games. Just as television almost destroyed cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, with cinema fighting back with colour, widescreen, better sound, etc, so the net is now destroying television. And how has television responded? Not by raising it’s game, but by lowering it. Cheaper programmes, lowest common denominator programming. And next, fewer television companies and more product placement.

Cinema is raising it’s game again now, with 3D being the next big thing. Several major 3D films will come out this year (some have already come out) and many cinemas are now equipped with the necessary digital projectors to take advantage of it.

As society continues to fragment and become more insular, so-called “entertainment companies” will find times harder and harder. The lonely people in their bedrooms are beating the corporations and there is nothing the corps. can do about it. Who wants to watch some terrible programme when instead you can take your pick from millions of people from all over the world all doing their own thing, like LonelyGirl singing “Lazydork is better than you” (the funniest bit is at the end where she messes it up):

Bye bye television. Don’t let the door hit your ass as you leave.

Cheers, Tom.

I posted the above picture about a year ago, and that's what it's like again now (or at least it was yesterday afternoon anyway - sunny now). Here is Joni Mitchell singing "The Circle Game", which was supposedly a response to Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" (it gets briefly talked over):

Joni is just amazing. A perfect combination of singing, playing and writing: she does all three to the very highest standard.

Cheers, Tom.

I hope I am as fit as this chap is when I get to be his age. Whatever the weather, whatever the time of year he is to be seen walking around the village at all times of the day. He dresses for storms in winter and heat waves in summer. He happily flits between Welsh and English, which makes understanding him difficult for someone like me who knows very little Welsh.

My poor Welsh knowledge is a sore point with me. I had several lessons and was coming on nicely, when the teacher got a new job, and she hasn’t been replaced yet. DOH!

Here is A Salty Dog by Procul Harum:

‘All hands on deck, we've run afloat!' I heard the captain cry
'Explore the ship, replace the cook: let no one leave alive!'
Across the straits, around the Horn: how far can sailors fly?
A twisted path, our tortured course, and no one left alive

We sailed for parts unknown to man, where ships come home to die
No lofty peak, nor fortress bold, could match our captain's eye
Upon the seventh seasick day we made our port of call
A sand so white, and sea so blue, no mortal place at all

We fired the gun, and burnt the mast, and rowed from ship to shore
The captain cried, we sailors wept: our tears were tears of joy
Now many moons and many Junes have passed since we made land
A salty dog, this seaman's log: your witness my own hand

--------------

Guitarist Robin Trower looks so young in that clip, but he was 24.

Cheers, Tom.

Did we celebrate? No.

As far as I can tell, the main reason he was made a saint was because he was so pious and ascetic. His followers were supposed to live only on vegetables, bread and water, and to pull the plough themselves - no animal assistance allowed. They were also expected to spend every evening praying and were allowed no possessions whatsoever. It’s said that on one occasion when he was preaching that the land rose up beneath him so that he could be better seen and heard. He died on March 1st 589.

It’s also worth pointing out that he was a vegetarian. There are quite a lot of Christian sects that are vegetarian, with varying reasons. Some do it because Adam and Eve were, some because it represents a return to a more basic way of life, and some because they believe that the Jesus principles of pacifism and compassion require it. St David did it for “spiritual reasons“.

Helen and I are both vegetarian too.

Cheers, Tom.

I was just going to post these pictures of a nice horsey and two lovely donkeys without comment, but since I haven't mentioned the Straw business it's time I did. Not straw for a donkey's bed either, Jack Straw. This business:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7907991.stm

"Justice Secretary Jack Straw has vetoed the publication of minutes of key cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003

Releasing the papers would do "serious damage" to cabinet government, he said, and outweighed public interest needs"

See that last sentence there - he won’t allow the papers to be released because it would look bad for the government. And he is supposedly the “Justice” Secretary - the irony metre has just shot through the roof. Don't look so surprised:

Imagine how terrible the contents of those minutes must be, if it’s preferable to say “I’m not telling you because it would hurt us”. My guess is that they would categorically prove what a despicable lying rat Tony Bliar was. Lots of us are already pretty damned sure that he lied to us about the Iraq war. The level of Labour sleaze has now reached Tory proportions.

Here is the donkey again - his name is Jack:

Cheers, Tom.