I went to pay for the paper this morning. I reached into my pocket to pull out a tenner. There were two. They slipped between my fingers. One fluttered to the floor. These new plastic notes are a pain. There is so little friction on them, they are difficult to grip.
A five year old Huddersfield fan went with his dad to watch them take on the might of Manchester United. Not only did his team win 2-0 but he also found a fiver. His dad, however, said he couldn’t keep it because it belonged to someone else. They had no idea whose it was. Some poor soul probably lost it from his pocket as he fished out his ticket. The lad sent it to the club and asked it to hand the fiver to Aaron Mooy, the man-of-the-match, because he deserved a bonus. Heartwarming story were it not for the fact that a slippery plastic note had found another victim.
Those bloody new notes, eh? They can survive a forty minute spin cycle after a sixty degree wash but they won’t stay in your pocket for long. I’m better off with brass.
Which first world problem is troubling you?
Agreed, they are awfully slippy, BUT you can play records with them.
The remaster in the new box might be bass heavy, but that’s the worst Sound & Vision I’ve heard.
You want to hear my 7″ copy. Pressed off-centre it is, makes you feel right woozy.
There’s also Sound + Vision ’90. Yuck.
I quite like the new notes. I hand over a scabby £20 note for milk and I get shiny new coins, and a shiny new fiver and tenner in my change. I get rid of twenties as soon as nowadays.
Australians would be the best for advice as they’ve had plastic notes for years.
CD shelves are full again.
The big re-organisation of the summer has now amounted to nowt as I have a stack of new CDs on top of the stereo with no home.
“Well stop buying ’em then” is Mrs D’s solution.
This is not an option.
It looks like another visit to Ikea and some further re-shuffling of furniture
Same here. Been grappling with both CDs and LPs today, first world nightmare. More likely a visit to the charity shop than Ikea though.
Which reminds me of another first world storage-related problem. Having a bit of a space making clear out and taking a bag of tat to the charity shop, before coming home from the same charity shop with a bag of different tat. And twenty quid lighter. Oops.
Which reminds me of the time when I had a huge book clearout and a local second-hand bookseller (remember them?) came round to view the pile. Trouble was, I’d made two piles, keep and sell – and I couldn’t remember which pile was which.
I recommend the Oak Harrogate CD/DVD storage system. Lovely they are.
Nice looking – looks same as one I found on Wayfair
But furniture wise, sort of locked into Ikea – another Billy bookcase is the most likely.
FWP No. 1 – My four CD storage racks are now full. Ikea “Robin” is the model, if I remember correctly. Ikea stopped selling them about 5 years ago.
FWP No. 2 – My stack of CD box sets has now reached the ceiling from the top of CD storage racks #1 & #2. My breezeblock-size Rudy Van Gelder Prestige Jazz CD box set has had to be placed on top of CD storage rack #3 instead.
FWP No. 3 – The stack of new un-filed CDs on top of the RVG Prestige box, on storage rack #3 is beginning to obscure the calendar where I scribble my upcoming gigs, social events etc. so that I don’t forget about them.
Mike: try using a hard disk to store all those CD’s. It’s the next big thing! You will never — okay rarely, rarely enough to not justify all that storage — look at your CD’s again once you have gone digital, promise.
They are all digitised already. With 2 backup copies.
I just can’t bear to part with the physical manifestations of my collection.
And yes, I almost always play the digitised copy rather than the physical artifact.
I’ll tell you what’s bugging me this evening though. I’ve a nice new CD to play (Sonny Rollins – The Bridge) and the text on the insert – you couldn’t really call it a booklet – is TINY. I’ve had to find a magnifying glass, it’s that small.
What do you need to know? Jim Hall plays guitar, Bob Cranshaw double bass and Ben Riley drums.
I need to know what it SAYS, that’s what. Grrr.
There are some convenient apparatus invented that put Two small magnifying glasses in something that looks a lot like regular glasses. I believe there was an earlier thread that suggested they might be “sexy”.
Bottle bottoms.
Apparently I’m not ready for varifocals yet, according to the optician last month.
*peers at Drew over specs*
My eyesight’s fine too.
Whatever happened to “Stop that or you’ll go blind”?
Mine’s 20/20, so long as I keep me bins on.
You can see three years into the future?
Ace!!!
I think it’s called The Bridge because he’d had some kind of breakdown and stopped playing, or at least recording, for a bit and he used to practice on – or possibly under – Brooklyn Bridge at night because he could guarantee being alone.
This comes from the indispensible series MooseNotes™️
Three years it was. These days, that’s a mere pause for breath.
Was it because of Coltrane? I seem to remember there being some kind of Brian-Wilson-Hearing-Strawberry-Fields thing of SR feeling the need to take his own playing apart and put it back together again.
I don’t think it was about Coltrane per se but he certainly felt under pressure and lost confidence in his sound and style.
No, it was Williamsburg Bridge actually. And apparently he practised there so as to not disturb some pregnant girl.
And my first world problem is desiring English girls, like Sarah Taylor.
There was a girl who was pregnant for three years? Wow!
Ha ha! I presume he meant that’s how he got into the habit.
My Sonny Rollins story (possibly again); I saw him live in Geneva, at a Victorian concert hall more suited to string quartets and lieder. The audience (all sitting neatly, of course) were typical Genevois(es), starched, prim, totally fucked-up as human beings. The men wore immaculately ironed “jazz shirts” and grey tidybeards. Rollins and his band – including an absolutely berserk percussionist – played like men possessed, to hushed golf applause from the audience. It drove me nuts. I left my seat next to my wife (and left my wife, as I later realised) and found my way down to the orchestra pit in front of the stage and danced about a bit, ignoring the disgusted looks and programme-flapping from the burghers in the front row. I was close enough to get the sweat off the percussionist. It was a total release from the whole Swiss thing, everything my life had been missing. At the end of the concert, Sonny (as I was calling him by then) came to the edge of the stage and pointed at me with a great big grin on his face and said yeah! This may make it sound like I was being a rather sad old outsider making a fool of himself in public, because that’s exactly what it was. Not that old, maybe, but foolish enough to understand that he wanted us to dance, to feel the music, not appreciate it from a respectful distance. Oh, and by the way – fuck you, Geneva.
You did the right thing… fuckin’ Nazi gold-hoarders….
Onya HP
Yay! You stick it to the man, HP.
Yeah! But def worth retelling. I wonder if SR ever says, dreamily, “I had that H.P. Saucecraft on top of my groove once…”
I wish!
@minibreakfast I have the same problem with the new St.Vincent album – Can’t read any of the notes or the tracklisting. It’s almost like it is wilful.
Blimey. I can sort of understand it on reissues where they’ve just shrunk down the original LP sleeve notes, but on a new release it’s unforgivable!
Have we reached a tipping point where record companies are downgrading CD in order to persuade you to buy vinyl? The ironeeeee!
Somewhere, my 17 year old self is laughing his towelling socks off.
If vinyl is the “now thing”, does this mean that in 5 or so years there will be a resurgence of the 8 Track Cartridge?
And then later, the TDK vs Maxell Conundrum will rear its head again
(TDK – always, no question. You can hear the difference (despite Maxell having the best TV adverts))
I think that honour should go to Memorex* – yer man out of Bauhaus sitting in his chair with the windows open… coooooool!
As for VHS, don’t get me started on that skellington singing about Scotch’s lifetime guarantee…
(*Is it live…. or is it recorded in a chip shop?)
Re-record, not fade away
Memorex had Ella Fitzgerald in their ads, shattering wine glasses with her voice.
“Is it Ella or is it Memorex?”
While Scotch had to make do with Deryck Guyler.
Was it? I always thought that voice was Brian Wilde (Barraclough from Porridge).
My old teacher’s admonition seems to hold: no matter how much petrol you put on your school book pyre, you’ll never stop learning, me lad!
The ad voiceover which still does my head in is whoever it was in the washing machine ad going ‘And on, and Arist-on, And on, and. . .’
Ullo Tosh, Gotta Toshiba?
Ian Dury did that – the only time in history that the advert was actually made by someone classier than the original record (with respect to Jerzy Balowski)
I though Allo Tosh was that Alexei Sayle….
Yashima had Cleo Laine. True.
“Zoooboodoo-baboo, what’s that bloody hissing!”
Since “retiring” and starting a new job, much, much nearer to home, I don’t have enough time to listen to new music and it is building up and annoying the wife.
Why not listen to new music at work?
New Musik? I just played this album (From A to B) for the first time in years. It’s marvelous, chock full of real tunes. I might have to revise my opinion of the 80s (slightly). Propaganda are next up.
@nickduvet
That New Musik album was brill…haven’t heard it in years. Hope you enjoyed a bit of Propaganda…A Secret Wish is epic. Don’t bother with the follow up…pants.
A Secret Wish is still terrific, I’m glad to say. Never had the follow up. A friend played the Welcome To The Pleasure Dome the other day, which still sounds epic. My favourite synth pop from the 80s remains Scritti Politti.
The remix album Wishful Thinking too. I almost prefer it, since I heard it first!
Forgot about Wishful Thinking. It is good but I have to be in the right mood for it, I find it a bit much at times.
That proper second album “1,2,3,4” is just awful.
It’s alright. At the time, it didn’t seem all that compared to the amazingly diverse New Wave music of 1978-1982, the peak of *music* as far as I’m concerned (small group Jazz of the fifties runs it close, though).
Too busy blogging.
My amp acted up. Turn it on and other equipment cut out. Did it repeatedly with same result.
Took it to the hifi repair place and they put it on the desk. Never missed a beat in 2 weeks. Brought it home and been fine.
Should I be pleased a costly repair was averted or pissed off at the hassle and $88 for “having it looked at” ….which is pretty just what they did , put it on the bench and look at it? Being a glass half empty kind of guy I’m leaning towards attitude#2.
There is the possibility that your other equipment is crook (that’s the correct Southern Hemisphere term, isn’t it?) or your electricity supply is playing up.
No. Don’t thank me. I’m just happy to help.
Yep crook could be used but not really a term one would use for power supply. I suspect it was loose connections and I should have hauled it all out and reconnected. But I didn’t so I’m $88 poorer.
I had 2 spare amps. I suspect if I had none spare and facing the prospect of being amp less I’d have investigated more thoroughly.
Ah. Inertia.
My first world problem. I hugely dislike the writing of JD Salinger, apart from A Good Day For Bananafish.
I have just read May Day by F Scott Fitzgerald this evening.
Fucking Salinger ripped off that damn story in Bananafish. I had no idea (obviously). So Salinger’s saving grace is now no longer that.
I feel strangely sad about this.
I’ve scratched my head all morning and the only solution I can think of for this problem is to stop reading novels altogether.
Scratched your head all morning? May I suggest Head & Shoulders?
No. I need that stuff for lice infestation. But, thanks for the offer.
I quite like “Raise high the Roof Beam, Carpenters”.
Was at Brighton station a few months ago. Handed the station florist cash for my grannie’s flowers. He refused it with a look of pity and disbelief, “we can’t accept this old currency mate.”
I understand your point of view, Rec, but, really? I’m sure your gran is worth than just a quid for flowers. 😉
It wasn’t coins, was paper! Lots and lots of paper.
Guess it should’ve been the Plasticty-Paper. With kate bush on it.
Countries gone to the dogs, etc.
Have you still got paper fivers and tenners? Most excellent.
You guys still use notes and coins? Do you still write letters on stationery, listen to music on a vinyl platter, capture daguerreotypes and purchase a daily lithograph?
Of course! This is the Afterword. We only use phones for making phone calls. You don’t use yours for anything else, do you?