Mike has tips for new bloggers from a seasoned old hack. He’s been going a looong ole time, although I note with horror from the sidebar that it’s been two years since I started.

There’s a good-looking new Lib Dem website. These forums seem to be springing up hither and yon. Does anyone have time to do all of them? And why .org and not .org.uk? Creator Rob Fenwick seems to be having trouble this avo on his blog.

Iain seems to think like a Lib Dem on prison reform. A new institute is being set up to rebut the Howard League‘s views on the penal system, called Prison Works. A wag in Iain’s comments suggests it sounds like the Michael Howard League.

Did you know I’ve been keeping a public food diary on Fitday?  Dogwood Tales says Richard Herring started the trend. I haven’t remembered to fill it in every day. I ‘fessed up on Leigh’s posting about edging towards 13st, and I’m much closer to 15, if not over. I can’t remember if Leigh is taller than me or not. The fitday website is free, but only knows about American foods and weights, which means telling it your weight in pounds not stones, and having to find alternative ways of telling it about English chocolate, cereal and the occasional thing like sultanas, which apparently they don’t have the States. Alternatively, you could import US candy… or just not eat it.

It seems people have better personalities than me. Leigh is extravert and neurotic (who knew?). Matt is extremely conscientious. Well, actually, Matt is extremely everything, which fits, except agreeable, which doesn’t really.  Dogwood’s graph looks a little different, but continues with the trend of being more conscientious.

Since I posted last, I have been listening to Jolene a lot. And playing Jolene on my guitar. And singing Jolene.

I have strummed Am – C – G – Am – G – Em – Am, the same chord sequence for verse and chorus hundreds of times, and the blister on my strumming thumb is back. Maybe I should learn to use a plectrum (although I find that’s much louder, and I have to sing louder to compete.)

And er, recording it, and uploading it to a draft new website I have been working on that is not quite ready to go live.

At the bottom of the post, thanks to PodPressy goodness, you can hear the few bars I can manage to play without going wrong.

This is exactly my relationship with music. I can suddenly get completely obsessed with just one track and play it over and over and over for weeks at a time. Previous obsessions going back years:

Especially for you, Beautiful South
I worked for Ludlow Library while I was doing my A Levels, and this was on a CD I borrowed one week and didn’t take back for months. I had only just got my first CD player and didn’t own very many CDs. I was staff, I could renew my own borrowings as much as I wanted and didn’t pay any fees. Just last post I was talking about listening to Radio 1 on the school bus — well, “Good as gold” from the same album, Miaow, got a lot of airtime, but Especially for you was what I had on repeat. When I was first getting into MP3 technology a few years later (not all that many, probably was doing MP3s by 98) my ripped copy of the track was slightly corrupted, and jumped at certain key places. Even now when I hear the song direct from the CD or with a properly ripped version, I expect it to jump at certain stages.

Marblehead Johnson, The Bluetones

This has strong memories for me of a previous job where I’d stay late into the night and crank the MP3s up loud enough to hear them over the printing job. To-ni-iigh-ight we’re not gonna solve anything. This must also have been about the time I started going out with P.

Schubert Piano Trio, Opus 100, Eflat major (Andante con moto)

Now, this was on the soundtrack of a movie P was watching this afternoon and I heard strains of it wafting up the stairs, and it took me right back to Paris, 1999, and watching The Hunger (movie with Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve as topless lesbian vampires egged on by David Bowie. And you thought this was going to be a classy anedote?) in bed with F, my then, erm, sugardaddy. Although his huge appartment had been designed, minimalistically, by some top notch designer, and had some lovely pieces of furniture, his bed was two double mattresses alongside each other directly on the floor. The film was his choice, and he had the soundtrack amongst his collection of thousands of CDs – so many that he’d removed them all from their cases and stored them in four or five three-foot high piles of the discs themselves. I became obsessed with this one piece of music and played it over and over again on his extremely expensive stereo. I continued to play it long after he got fed up with it.

Hit me baby one more time, Fountains of Wayne

I have definitely become obsessed with this cover in the last few months, and specifically one chord/key change towards the end. I’ve been playing it in the car on the way home from Chesterfield, and can spend the entire hour-long journey playing this over and over again. The song reminds me of a troubled young man from university G&S who thought Britney was singing it to him because some of the lyrics sound like his surname.

So, obsessions with single tracks is a well-trodden path for me, and Jolene just becomes the latest in a long run of songs that little to do with each other.

He talks about you in his sleep, it’s all that I can do to keep
From crying when he says your name, Jolene.

Anyway, here’s 8 seconds of Jolene, recorded by yours truly, for your listening pleasure. What do you think – should I burn the guitar for firewood?

My Personality

I’m not sure what questions I  answered that gave it the impression I’m not conscientious!

Now, where are those leaflets I should have delivered in July?

It would have been Freddie Mercury’s 60th birthday today. Neil has all the details.

You may know Neil as the one who thinks I don’t get out often enough for not recognising a Metallica musician.

To be honest, even if I was going out every night, I still don’t think I’d understand what you young things are listening to these days.

Today, I had an accident – I fell down the stairs. So although I am acutely aware of my hip, I’m not feeling particularly hip.

My foot just slipped out from under me and I fell the full length of the stairs on my arse. I grabbed a bannister to stop myself but it just came lose and ripped a hole in my finger. I have carpet burns on my legs and bruises on my shoulderblades that banged every step. I didn’t come to a stop until my bum was right on the floor and my feet had pushed the mat into the front door.

I felt really stupid.

The noise attracted the cats who came bounding down the stairs and just looked at me and didn’t help much. P was already at work.

I didn’t need any help, nothing was broken or seriously damaged, but as well as feeling stupid I felt surprisingly shaken.

Did you know a significant number of older people die at Christmas because they go and stay with their children, wake in the night to answer a call of nature, get confused and end up tumbling down the stairs? Make sure you leave a night light on.
So it could have been worse.

But I really ought to write my will.

Yesterday at the movie recording was interesting. Amazing numbers of beautiful young people hanging around not doing very much. We got to work with Robert Webb and David Mitchell and Jessica Stevenson. We recorded a number of scenes. We spent a huge amount of time being subjected to a bad warm-up guy called Scott who told us he was just back from entertaining the troops, but clearly hadn’t had time to change his routine to something a litte more family friendly. They fed us – handing each of us a baggie with crisps, an apple, chocolate and water as we signed our waivers – then asked us to do everything we could to make sure the bags weren’t in shot. Easier for the guys…

ARGH! WTF’S THAT DANGLING DOWN BY MY FACE??? ARGH, A SPIDER! Fetch cat. Point cat at spider. Cat bats spider. Spider wanders off. Cat wanders off. Why don’t our mighty hunter cats eat spiders like every other cat I’ve ever had? I keep walking into spider webs in the house and garden. They like to span across the obvious walkways. Maybe I should hoover more often.

… anyway easier for the guys with overcoats to hide lunch bags than the girls following instuctions and wearing gownless evening straps in their magician’s wife costume.

The highlight was definitely the time when the talent spent five minutes just talking to the audience. Jessica Stevenson asked for questions, and I asked if there were going to be zombies. There weren’t, but she did promise a decapitation. The boors behind us asked her if she’d ever slept with Simon Pegg, and she, er, avoided the issue.

Towards the end of the end of the evening, I got my own best shot at the limelight. Robert Webb (v cute in person as well on TV) came and stood in the audience, right next to me. Right next to me. I shared his spotlight.

True, it was a wide angle with almost all of the 700 extras in shot too, but it was me right next to the star.

Shoes

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

Iain, when he was (knickerflash) nominating me for More 4 Podcast Blog of the Week, wondered whether I wore sandals.

I certainly do. I insist on a pair with nothing between the toes and nothing behind my ankle. They are very good for people with foot odour disorders to let their feet breathe. They are much less good for everyone around you in enclosed spaces.

It’s not a sin any more. Everyone’s wearing sandals these days.

Tomorrow, we’re going to be extras in a film. We have some unexpected spare tickets after friends had to back out at the last minute.

The film is made by the people behind Peep Show and is about magicians. One magician “accidentally” guillotines the other’s wife in half following a dispute.

We’re going to be the audience at a magic show. We have to dress as magicians (or magician’s wives/assistants) ourselves and sit in the Royal Centre tomorrow from 3.30pm til 9pm.

If you’d like to join in and can be in Nottingham for those times tomorrow, drop me an urgent line.

One thing’s for certain, I’m not dressing like this magician. this magician. (NSFW)

I’ve just seen this story at the BBC about lawyers representing two associations of music publishers in the States.

They’ve closed olga, the online guitar archive. The site had a large number of tabs – sort of like guitar sheet music – for thousands of songs.  They were unofficial, worked out by fans, and many of them weren’t much good at all.

But it’s the way I learned to play the meagre few songs I know.  I play a knackered second-hand guitar with bent tuning pins.  I can only just manage more chords than fingers on my fret hand, and I don’t have the time to practice.  I’ve no intention ever of buying guitar music written down, and no intention of ever buying a decent guitar, or
performing in public.

Now I have no way of even trying to improve my repertoir or play any more songs.

It’s not even as if the vast majority of songs were even available commercially.  And its not as if each artist who felt like his copyright was being infringed has requested his songs be removed.  It’s a blanket “take everything down” – and it even includes folk songs for which no copyright exists.

Go and read all the comments made on the BBC story.  They have everything to say, I think.

If you buy / pre-order the new Charles Kennedy book that’s hitting the headlines at the moment using this link, you can help the Lib Dems raise funds without it costing you anything.

I’m tempted to put the link so that it earns me money, too, but all the other Amazon links on here do that. I’ve earned about thirty quid that way since 1998, mostly off my own purchases.

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• Of the more than 1,000 number 1 singles in the UK charts, only 80 have been solo female artists.

• Madonna had 12 of those.
• Kylie, Britney and Whitney have had 15 between them
• Dusty Springfield only had one! (“You don’t have to say you love me”)

• Therefore one Windermere = 9 * 30.5 * 24 = 6,588 Albert Halls
• “Mere” means “lake”, so saying Lake Windermere is like saying Lake Winderlake

I like factoids like these.  My brain stores them up endlessly, then mixes them up with others and then regurgitates them randomly at parties.

What are your favourite factoids?