Writing July 16, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Ramble,Rants,Scraps , add a commentIt seems like every time I have the urge to write something, a blog post or whatever, there are always so many hurdles to overcome to actually get to the writing.
Today is the perfect example and indeed typical of what happens when I visit my blog. First I start by having an idea for some writing, or indeed just a strong urge to do some writing. So I fire up the blog and always the first thing I am met with is the news that wordpress has been updated. So, of course, I must update.
Now I’m very easily distracted, meaning that while an update in itself wouldn’t take that long, it takes a long time for me to actually complete the update. FTP clients take a little while to do all the deleting and uploading that comes with an update (unfortunately my webhost doesn’t let me update automatically due to the security settings) and by the time I’ve done that I’ve found myself pouring through my last.fm reccomendations, fishing out more stuff to listen to.
Once I get back to wordpress I find that every single plugin I use is also out of date and must all be manually updated. Again, this wouldn’t take so long if I didn’t figuratively look away whenever it does something any longer than 5 seconds. And so, the process stretches out longer and longer until finally the blog is ready to use again! Hooray! Now I can finally make that post I wanted to make.
Oh wait, no, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write about. I guess I’ll just have to wait till I get another idea and go through this whole thing again…
Meant to be May 5, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Life , add a commentI’m not really a superstitious person. I don’t beleive in black cats giving bad luck, or breaking mirrors, or whatever archaic ideas still have some hold on a select minority of the population. I’m also not religious at all, since I see the two as pretty much the same.
Sometimes however, I have to acknowledge when the universe just seems to want something to happen. I’d say a pretty good example is my car. I got this car, a ’93 Vauxhall Astra hatchback, back in February, after accidently haggling it down to the price I was originally willing to pay. It cost me £100, which gives you an idea of the kind of quality we’re looking at.
It had a few problems I knew about, like tires needing replacing, hole in the exhaust etc. Fixing those initial things cost me just over £200, but £300 for a working car, pretty good I’d say. Taking it to MOT I fully expected a list as long as my arm of things to fix and to send it straight to the scrap yard. I was astonished when I heard that there were literally only three things that needed fixing. One washer jet wasn’t working, a headlamp was dim and there was a sharp edge due to rust.
It was only after looking through the extensive list of things that the MOT checks that I realised what a miracle it was that this car, a car only three years younger than me, with nearly 150,000 miles on the clock, was actually looking like it was going to live on for at least a little bit longer. I fixed all of the issues for less than £30 and scraped through my MOT.
It seems like I may have managed to patch the hole in the radiator through use of some £5 radiator stop leak, despite having put that job off for about two months, fingers crossed.
It looks like this car may actually be taking us on the road trips we talked about taking in the future, in some other car, after this one’s inevitable (so we thought) demise.
After over coming all of that it would really seem like this car, the first and only car I even looked at, was indeed meant to be. It’s certainly a car to be remembered.
Perspective March 24, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Essay,Politics,Rants,Society , add a commentThere’s been a lot in the British media lately about the fairly new legal drug mephedrone. Charlie Brooker did a humourous piece on the fuss being made in his Guardian colomn and his points very accurately demonstrate why making it illegal will do nothing to help. However, under our current classification of drugs in this country it should be illegal, the effects are similar to those of a couple of class As and Bs.
The recent furor has come about after the deaths of two young men. Naturally when people’s kids start dying you get sobbing parents explaining how their kids didn’t think it was a risk and about how lovely their children were which throws anyone middle aged, middle class, or both into something of a rage against the drug. What people seem to completely wash over is rather an important point: they didn’t just take mephedrone on it’s own, they took as part of a cocktail with the opium substitute methadone, which was also combined with alcohol.
So a couple of idiots take a load of drugs at the same time, and of course it’s not the legal high alcohol that is targeted, woah no, it’s the legal high mephedrone. There has been so much in the media lately about “legal highs” as this scarey word. Oh my god, people are getting high and it’s not illegal! We must put a stop to this! No one should be allowed to get high! Not ever! It’s morally wrong!
Not once have I ever seen mention in a news article of the most highly consumed legal highs in the world: Alcohol and Tobacco. Or for that matter caffeine, which many people in the western world rely on to get them through the day. If people were relying on mephedrone or even something like cannabis to get them through the day it would be calls for a intervention. But not goood ol caffeine. When it comes down to deaths, mephedrone can be associated (but not even be declared as the main cause) for no more than a handful of deaths in the short time it’s been available. Tobacco on the other hand is responsible for the deaths of one jumbo jet full of people every hour, every day, 365 days a year. 5.4 million people.
Alcohol doesn’t look much better in this standing, claiming 1.9 million lives every year. As a direct result of it’s use. Not combined with other things. We’re talking over 7 million lives claimed every year from legal highs. And you know why that doesn’t get on the news? Because there aren’t sobbing parents. Because it’s not new and it’s not scary. But it should be scary. 7 million deaths is scary. The fact that our drug classification is based not on science, not on health risks, not on dependence. Not on anything other than supersition. That’s scary. That is petrfying.
Song of the Day: Delirious by Luka Bloom March 12, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment,Music,Review,Scraps , add a commentThis is like the fith time I’ve played this song toda and I think I’m going to be going in for another one very shortly. Not entirely sure why but it’s captivated me with melodic folky flamenco groove. He manages to make it sound like so much more than one man and one guitar. I’m pretty fascinated with his style of guitar, it’s ranging from soft strumming to a furious whip that makes for a snappy and punchy sound, all the time complimented by delicate and carefully selected melodic rhythm.
The lyrics touch that line of brilliance between a specific event and a vague generalisation, I think that anyone can get some level of connection with them, everyone knows a little bit of what he’s talking about. But most important is that groove, woah man, it’s just phenominal.
Here’s the video, I couldn’t find a way to embed it. If you can resist tapping your feet and bobbing your head I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
A surprise of an evening February 27, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment,Music,Review , add a commentThe stars finally aligned to allow me and one of my bestest buds to go into town on Tuesday in order to peruse some live music. Our intention was to go to an open mic night, but when we got there we found no such open mic, or indeed even an open venue. So we instead we headed the independent (and secretly Christian) Bar and Coffee house the Malt Cross, which we’ve been scoping out with timid curiosity for a while. The place is alarmingly hip and feels so oozing with indie cred that it’s a little scary for those of us new to that amount of music cool. It’s also a very interesting building and I’d urge anyone living around Nottingham to go inside and take a look for that reason alone.
Anyhow, as it happened Tuesdays are a night for free music (or at least this one was) and for young people with old, broken cars and pay cheques not coming till the end of the week this was rather perfect. We were there rather early for the music so we got to see the band sound checking. Not the best time to see a band but without this my curiosity would not have been piqued. It was a band not only with quite a large number of musicians but a quite ludicrously large number of instruments to go with it. Ukeleles, mandolins and trumpets combined with more traditional bass, guitar and drums. Plus they had a dedicated chellist. This was something I had to see.
It took us all the way till the very end of the evening to find out what the band were called, but I’m just gonna name them now for ease of writing and to allow me to speak about the EP that we bought (yeah, I have a 60% share in it). As it turns out they are called Hhymn, a name with all the indications of being appropriately indie without being too pretentious. They hail from Nottingham, which is nice purely because I like to find local bands that aren’t playing the derivative drivel of most of the ones I’ve seen.
I didn’t exactly fall in love with them from the live show, but I definitely enjoyed it. And it interested me enough to want some of their music. All live music is improved by knowing the songs though, repetition is such a core concept in music, there is only so much that I can enjoy something when hearing it for the first time. I have to be able to go and listen to it in my own space, in my own world. Luckily the EP captures the best elements of the band that I saw from the live setting as well as bringing in some minimalist production that just enhanced things that little bit. As such it has become a CD (figuratively speaking, all my listening is from my PC) that is really growing on me.
The songs are well put together, full of neat rhythms and piercing melody with a pleasant but yearning backing put out by soft clean and acoustic instrumentation. The structures and concepts aren’t ground breaking, they’re just very well done, and the sheer variety of instruments gives the necessary variety to make each track unique but still cohesive to the sound of the EP and the songs themselves. These guys have got a sound that I think has potential to appeal to a great number of people and I’m really looking forward to seeing more of them, I hope that they continue to write and play, as long as they do I’ll be followingand listening.
Repetition
The future of Dyson? February 11, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Internets,Scraps , add a comment
This was made by my friend and made me chuckle, I thought it should be out there for the world to see so he let me put it up here. For those who don’t know that’s James Dyson, inventor of a fine handful of neat things, probably the most awesomest being the Dyson Airblade. If you’ve never had the good fortune to use one you’re missing out, they are bad ass.
