Been a while since we’ve had an Aussie wildlife thread. Here’s a lunatic living dangerously with an Eastern Brown.
Son of Wordle close season thread
Does what it says on the tin.
Muted Randy Newman biography klaxon
There’s a new biography of Randy Newman just out: A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, by Robert Hilburn. It doesn’t sound as though it’s any good (“toothless hagiography”), but the NYT review is well worth reading. Perhaps the reviewer should have written the biography.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/books/review/randy-newman-biography.html
September in the Brain – the new and increasingly desperately titled Wordle thread
THE BEETHOVEN’S NINTH OF TEENAGE ANGST – long post alert
Gene Pitney was a slight oddity in pop history, more at the Roy Orbison end of things for operatic drama. He had plenty of hits, all sung in that melodramatic high tenor that I generally found rather difficult to listen to: 24 Hours from Tulsa, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, It Hurts to Be in Love, Looking Through the Eyes of Love, Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart, a re-recording of which with Marc Almond in 1990 gave him his only no.1 hit ever. He was much more popular in Europe and Australia than the States, where the hits dried up fairly quickly. He had a brush with the Stones in 1964, playing piano at some of the sessions for their first LP and recording the first-ever cover of a Jagger-Richards song, That Girl Belongs to Yesterday. Like a lot of his peers, he had a vague stab at progressive cred in the late 60s, but it didn’t lead anywhere and after spending the 70s being popular in Australia he contented himself with the oldies circuit, finally dying of a heart attack after a gig in Cardiff in 2006. He was also something of a songwriter, turning out » Continue Reading.
PSA: 2 1/2 hours+ of Richard and Linda Thompson live goodness from 1982
Live at the Bottom Line in NYC. Amazing how these things surface after all these years.
Welcome to the first month of the rest of your lives – it’s the pre/post-Tory apocalypse Wordle golf tournament
Hope I haven’t jinxed anybody…no.1108 please.
Wordle close season thread
For training purposes only.
RIP Francoise Hardy
Obituary
A lot of gentlemen of a certain age will be sad today.
ATM – HDMI splitters
Mrs thep has a tech question I can’t answer – partly because it’s Windows and partly because the internet gets bored before I’ve even finished typing the question and tries to sell me an HDMI splitter.
So: the Mem is setting up two monitors on her home office desk, but the docking station has only one HDMI out. A splitter is the obvious answer, but her supplementary question is: will she end up with the same thing on both monitors, in which case there’s no point, or can you shuffle stuff between them on the laptop screen, as I vaguely remember doing when my MacBook was plugged into a monitor?
Info gratefully received.
RIP Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry
Obituary
There will be those who don’t know he was ever alive, but another tiny fragment of my youth gone to that great barrelhouse in the sky: The Ain’t Got No Home and I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do Norlins hitmaker Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry.
Nobody tells it quite like Dylan…
“With X, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop. After ‘X’ he was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal . . . His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’. – Bob Dylan
So who’s he talking about?
April Wordling Foolishness
So here we go, first hole April 1 wherever you are.
Let’s hear it for Rufus Wainwright’s Going to a Town
Rufus Wainwright’s Going to a Town popped up on DiD this week, courtesy of playwright James Graham, and reminded me what an absolute stone-cold masterpiece it is, intense, musically adventurous and – as you might expect – beautifully sung. The lyrics are a little on the cryptic side, but once you clock that the town in question is Berlin, it all makes sense.
When I was in the a capella choir at the Eden Project we sang this, a touch less beautifully it has to be said, arranged in 4-part harmony by our natural genius couldn’t-read-a-note-of-music leaderene. It was an incredibly powerful experience – when we didn’t fuck it up, it wasn’t easy to sing – and we were always completely wrung out at the end. A couple of American tourists stormed out once, which was nice.
There’s an ok version by George Michael, which is just a little too smoothed-over for my taste. Any other RW favourites?
It’s the new Wordle comp! Guaranteed beetroot and anchovy-free!
Pinch punch, rabbits etc. It’s the first of the month and off we go.
We start with Wordle 957 wherever you might be…
The World at War/Great War klaxon
These two epic doco series have turned up on archive.org, complete episodes streaming in good quality and downloadable. Essential viewing of course – I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched them. Last time I was in England I started laboriously ripping the box sets but got bored, so it’s good to have them so easily available.
Vale Glynis Johns
Obituary
She’s left us aged 100. She was Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins, among loads of other roles in a career that lasted nearly 70 years.
Time Somebody Started a New Wordle Thread? I think So.
Golfers and non-golfers welcome.
Only in America (for a change)
Killing a tick with a handgun.
Afterwordle Masters V: The Big End-of-Year Tee-Off
More of this sort of thing!
To celebrate Moose’s return. May he never bugger off again.*
*Drink may have been taken.
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
We’ve been doing plank spanking wrong all this time, apparently. Stop thinking and wear a hat. Play to a bush. No mention of electricity though.
ATM – powerline adaptors
Bit of a niche inquiry, this…we’re turning the tin shed in our back yard into an office/girl shed for the Mem, and my thoughts have turned to t’internet. We have a 5G wifi dongle, about the size of an iPhone, which dispenses wifi goodness round the house just fine, but doesn’t reach the shed in any useful way, particularly for Zoom meetings and the like. We’ve experimented with taking the dongle to the shed, which works fine but leaves me without wifi in the man cave – I can hotspot off my phone, but it’s a bit hit and miss, so I get cranky, which obviously we want to avoid.
Which is why I’m wondering about powerline adaptors. Do they do the job, and do it all the time? The dongle has an ethernet socket so I’ll be able to plug the base station in OK, but do they actually work with 5G dongles? Does anybody indeed have experience of 5G dongles? They’re magical pieces of kit, but there’s a lot I don’t know about how they work. I read somewhere that the powerline base station can interfere with the workings of a modem/router, but I don’t know whether that » Continue Reading.
Japanese jazz joints – Afterword home from home…
‘Japanese cafes stacked with whisky, vinyl and high-end audio systems…’
Fascinating article in the Grauniad today.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/oct/05/one-kissa-is-all-it-takes-tokyos-finest-jazz-haunts-in-pictures
https://www.tokyojazzjoints.com
Any love for Dodie? (Not Dido.)
So impressed by this. An unfeasibly large Tiny Desk band, quite a few of whom were roped in for the occasion, producing absolutely superb music which brought a tear to the eye. (That seems to happen more and more often these days.) There’s a hint she might have listened to her parents’ Joni Mitchell elpees when she was a kid, but the songs are brilliant, full of light and shade. Did I mention that I think she’s quite good?