All things must pass

I have an announcement to make. This is the last post at Shades of Grey here at Blogger.com.

What? I hear you cry, has the old fool thrown in the blogging towel?

Not at all. As one door closes, another opens. I'd like to introduce the new, improved, Shades of Grey hosted at its own domain using Wordpress.



I'm still getting the hang of it in my new home but I've managed to import the old Shades and Morleygate posts more-or-less complete. (What we IT people describe as a Partial Success).

Thank you for reading. Please update your hyper linky thingys to http://iangrey.org for your further enjoyment.

My Boomerang won't come back

Ozzie Scot Colin Cambell says they are going to race Camels down under. He also comments that the impact of horse flu is still being felt.

As well as exporting an Arabian Derby there, how about importing an Australian Derby here? You could race Wallabys, the prizes could be soft cuddly Koala toys and the stall holders could all dress like Crocodile Dundee and wear Bush hats with corks on strings.

Elton Games could give us another opportunity to hear the "popular theme of the popular theme..."

We're racing on the Australian Derby, it's here so play it now.
Roll the balls to get the scores,
Ride the winner the prize is yours,
We're racing on the Australian Derby, it's here so play it now.

In the meantime, more snaps of the Blackpool version:

Alone again... (un)naturally

The house is strangely quiet. Karen and David have gone off to Chessington World of Adventures, (which is in halloween season) with an overnight stay tonight and tomorrow. I was tempted to join them, but I really need to get my teeth into the Accounts for the Mercia Cinema Society which close on the 31st and need to be audited by the 1st of December.

So, thirty six hours to do whatever I want. I can leave dirty dishes in the sink,eat Spam Fritters, wander round in my underpants, play the music I want suitably loud. No-one to complain, except the Guinea Pig (& maybe the neighbours for a couple of these activities). I've failed miserably on the first one, I've had the Spam Fritters now.

I was going to link in to Gilbert O'Sullivan singing "Alone again, naturally", then I remembered that I have done that before, HERE.

Instead- here is a tenuous link. I have a Halloween Album from Andrew Gold (available on Amazon) who also performed with Graham Gouldman as Wax.

This is a fine video.

A couple of postscripts:

I went into the tyre slashing garage again today, as I pulled up a large angry beeping noise started. After a short while, the cashier pressed a button- and the traffic lights next to all of the stinger systems went off. It must have off days...

The story of the Duchess and the slightly offensive labyrinth:

"Visitors, you have seen everything.
We thank you.
Now happily piss off".

The Duchess originally wanted it to say "Now happily fuck off" (well, this is implied in the book as in "even stronger language") but she was talked out of it.

She got an eminent Latin teacher to translate (who wished to remain nameless and ergo blameless).

And another Blackpool snippet:

The Arabian Derby Camels are an Institution at the Plesh.

Apparently visiting Arabs keep the stall concession operators in suitable headgear.

These machines are made by a Company called Elton Games of Southport. You can hear the Arabian Derby jingle here (MP3).

LEA-DER! LEA-DER! LEA-DER!*

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Hat tip: Devil's Kitchen (& lots of Blogpower regulars)



(* as people with a strong sense of irony (or sometimes stupidity) used to chant to Garry Glitter before he was "Forgotten but not gone"...)

Celebrity Heretic

I blogged about meeting my first celebrity a few months back as a Young Scientist.

He has a good piece on Times Online with a blast of climate change healthy scepticism. I have to say that I pay more attention to a hairy scientist like David B than a politician like (say) Al G.

You can read his piece here. Check out the comments as well.

(Image attribution: Wikipedia Commons)

Everything reminds me of something

This is a great book. Ian Clayton was in the Morley Literature Festival and is a well known "professional Yorkshireman", a term he resents. The book is about the music of his life and it all gets brought back to his own home in Featherstone, a mining village in the Wakefield/Pontefract/Doncaster triangle. Rather than attempt to review it here, I'll link to a better one on the Beeb here.

The show consisted of readings from his book interspersed with a few stories and music. He featured a blues band put together from a selection of musicians he was friendly with and also a banjo player who was also a Publican. Ian Clayton even sang in the last song, pictured here.

We got him to dedicate a copy to David after the event and he suggested we don't let him read it for a few years yet! More reviews and how to buy on Amazon.

His book suggests an eclectic list of his top 40 recommended Albums and I've found it online on the Grauniad here.

Through a process of random connected thought and erratic surfing after reading his book I have now found out that the well known Dexy's Midnight Runners song Jackie Wilson said (I'm in heaven when you smile) was written by Van the Man. (I also now know who Jackie Wilson is as well). That reminded me of the first time I saw this episode of Top of the Pops (aired in 1982 but I was abroad at the time) and laughed like a drain when I got the in-joke. (Watch the vid below without clicking the in-joke link to see if you can get it if you don't remember it).

Remember you're a Womble

I found out at work that someone else is a blogger today. I was wandering past his desk at lunchtime and was several paces further on when the hindbrain prodded me and whispered Blogger posting template in my ear. Womble is pseudonymous (or at least he was until I caught him today!) and has been posting for three months. He described his style as controversial but I felt that the posts I have read so far are all in my comfort zone. He doesn't have much of a readership yet but I think that could change. He blogs because he loves to write and I have seen his comments before on Iain Dale's Diary.

I love my country but I hate its government. I love freedom and I hate those who restrict it. I love AFC Wimbledon and I utterly hate the franchise. What I want from my government is far less of it, and the chance for personal freedom and responsbility (sic) to take flight again. This blog will talk about many things, but one of its common themes will be a fervent desire for the State to get off the backs of the English people.

Womble on Tour is well worth a look, he makes the Shades List and he could be worthy of the Blogpower one if he keeps it up.

Give my compliments to the Chef

I've just finished reading a book which starts (and finishes) with the words: Everything reminds me of something. This is a great blogging metaphor- if you sit and rack your brains for something to write about you can sometimes struggle. But if you just let the muse take you, something will set the mind off on a flight of fancy.

Sometimes the results are equivalent to a First Class journey on Singapore Airlines, other times the substitute bus rail replacement service from Bolton to Chorley.

Today's mental meandering was inspired by Terry Wogan who was on Radio 4's A Good Read this evening (click for listen again, although it may still be playing last week's programme or be long gone if this is an old post). Talking about Chefs, Terry described the type of person who becomes a senior chef as "madder than a box of biscuits", an odd metaphor, with no Google hits (yet).

This got me thinking of Chefs I knew moderately well and I could only dredge up two. The first was in a posh Restaurant/Hotel in Jesmond Dene, back in the mid 70s. My friend Keith had a casual job there dishwashing and I helped him out on a few occasions. Our dish washing station was in a corridor between the restaurant (which was in an old country house) and the actual kitchen so we could hear all of the chatter, shouting and tantrums. It was silver service and the serving platters came back with encrusted piped mash scorched onto the edges. We weren't supposed to put the cutlery through the dish washer because it wore out the silver plating but we did when there was nobody looking! For amusement, we used to throw carrots through the window Vent Axia fan and watch them come out the other side, sliced. (They were uneaten cooked ones, not raw!) The head chef was fairly young and used to be friendly but mischievous. He once said we could eat what we wanted and when we suggested chips he said "fine, get on with it". After we had peeled, chipped and fried a number of spuds he pointed out the buckets of ready peeled ones in water! He give us a lift home in the early hours and used to enjoy floorboarding the car, going round roundabouts the wrong way, squealing the wheels, going through red lights and so on. However, he did it very carefully as safely as possible, being fully aware of the road conditions. (This was in contrast to Keith who used to enjoy handbrake turns and got endorsements on his (not even issued) license when he was still fifteen!)

The second Chef was in complete contrast. He was called Colin, a bit of a miserable git and he worked in the Slough Golden Egg so production line worker might be a more apt job description. He was married to an equally curmudgeonly girl called Anne and they lived in Maidenhead. I met them at Maidenhead Eighteen Plus and it was the antitheses of the fun that 18+ was supposed to be. Aligned with another couple, they were caustic cold water to any fresh idea and took pleasure in upsetting others. They had an accidental catchphrase that we used to mock them mercilessly with behind their backs:

"What's the point of having kids if they're gonna get blown up?"

Of course, we all know and love a genuinely whacky fruitloop Chef but he is just a comic creation of Jim Henson. For your enjoyment, I give you (possibly Tom) the Swedish Chef.

Is the treaty/constitution anything to get bothered about?

I'm rather puzzled. Some people are telling me the Lisbon constitution treaty means the end of Britain as we know it, whilst others (including the Prime Minister) say it is nothing at all to worry about. It isn't entirely even on partisan lines; a large article in the Mail on Sunday denouncing it as a severe loss of sovereignty was written by a Labour MP and the all party European Scrutiny Committee say it is "substantially equivalent" to the Constitution we were promised a referendum on. Then again, we get Bob Piper laying in to Thunderdragon saying it cedes very little, whilst others say this will be the last treaty because it gives Brussels the power to amend it without ratification.

Some people are being economical with the truth here, but which ones?

If only we could be bothered to actually make the effort to read and understand it, along with all of the previous ones. A few do, but tend to cherry-pick the bits they want to comment on through rose (or steel) coloured specs. The rampantly Europhile (scornfully known as Federasts by Europhobes) appear to think that lack of sovereignty is a reasonable (nay welcome) price to pay and avert their gaze when the difficult issues of waste, corruption, patronage and cronyism repeatedly bob to the surface. Conversely, the rabid Europhobes often seem to hark back to some imaginary golden age when the sun never set on the British Empire.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm a Eurosceptic and think that on balance, we would probably be better off out- I was too young to vote in 1975 (just) and see no evidence whatsoever that the EU sees any benefits in small government. We pay lots of money to the behemoth and whilst we get lots of it back, it isn't for things we would necessarily want to fund from general taxation. Have you noticed that it is much easier to spend other people's money (badly) with impunity when there are more than two degrees of separation?

Last week's course of events certainly seemed to follow the course suggested by Civitas, in what they called The Illusionary EU Battle.

One thing is certain: this is...

The old and the new

David's favourite Blackpool attraction is the Noah's Ark, which can best be described as a walk-through fun house. My first Noah's Ark was in Battersea Gardens back in 1969 and it was fascinating, if somewhat run down. I then visited the Blackpool one a year later and found out what lots of the inside stuff was actually meant to do as it was in good order.

These wooden circular stepping stones wobble, and Karen avoids them by shuffling along the ledge to the left.
The original Blackpool Noah's Ark was a much bigger structure, although the majority of the innards were gutted in order to make a large ticket hall. Blackpool took care, however, to replace some of the more famous elements (if somewhat scaled down) such as the wobbly floors, cakewalk and air jets. (You can see a good history of Ark rides here and another feature here).

Nowadays, you enter the ride round the back, go up an outside staircase, over a wobbly bridge and across the roof of the rock structure towards the entrance ramp, navigating the stepping stones. You enter the rocking boat at the upper deck level and enter the cabin, weaving through narrow corridors and past a cow that salutes you with its tail. (There used to be metal strips on the handrail here that zapped you if you touched them). You circle the deck and go down a steep (rocking) staircase to the lower level.

Here you weave through even narrower passages, past a table that appears to go up and down whilst the boat rocks. There is also a large Ark model, a rocking horse pig and the equivalent of a kaleidoscope with this sign outside. I can also recall there used to be a spoof weighing machine (the sort with the large upright dial) which was made from a sand bag and would clout you on the head if you pulled a handle. There is another even steeper staircase to negotiate (which doesn't move but the upper walls do as it is in the exact centre of the boat) and then you are in the lower level weaving through corridors complete with wobbly floors, spongy floors, air jets and the like. (It is fairly gloomy down here and not to be rushed).
After an apparently endless corridor you enter a room with no surface actually horizontal or vertical. There is a contraption here made to look as though water can run uphill but I have not seen it work for years. After climbing the bouncing stairs you return to the roof level briefly before going back down into the cellar bit for spinning floors, collapsing floors, cakewalks, airjets and finally the exit.

There was another Noah's Ark in Morecambe until 1999 which was also ran by the Thompson Family (who own Blackpool Pleasure Beach and also a park in Southport until a couple of years ago, it had an Ark but never seen by me). This ark was similar to Blackpool and still had a couple of the original fittings in-situ, including a visible quarter of a turntable behind bars where animals hurried past.

Another old ride that has been spruced up is the Derby Racer. The huge platform thunders round (anti-clockwise, in American Carousel tradition) and the fifty or so horses bob up and down, four abreast. They also used to slowly canter back and forth within the confines of their long slot, now sadly disabled and the slot boarded over. An old style fairground Organ accompanies the gallop and you really need to hold on if you are on an outside horse.


From the old to the new- the newest ride is called Infusion and is a large steel suspended coaster, the sort that your feet dangle from. An added special feature is that the ride is totally above the lake, with lots of decorative fountains squirting near the riders. The queues were a bit too big to wait with two small boys in tow, so we stuck to things where the wait was moderate. (The ride has the blue track, the red track is the Pepsi Max Big One).

We didn't feel too hard done by though, we had ridden it before when it used to be at Southport and called the TraumaTIZER.

In a continent (not very) far, far away

I have a guest post over at Andrew Allison's Blog.

His is a political blog and I'm not massively political but I heard about a European Union cartoon Super Hero that was worthy of mention for the political overtones. Click on the link above to read more.

Wobbly stairs and sticky faces

We have been at Blackpool today for a birthday treat. I'm sure that when the Dentist said we needed to floss more this wasn't what she meant!

Every time I go in Noah's Ark, I expect to see more of the dead hand of the safety 'elf at work. In practice, it is often more a case of things packing in there and getting abandoned.

This bouncing staircase is great fun and long may it continue to pass the risk assessment.

Probably the best bedding on earth...

Our Guinea-Pig sitter advised us that wood shavings are not ideal for putting in small animal cages, even though it may be dust extracted, it can still make them cough. Instead, she suggested something called Megazorb, which is a type of horse bedding. Once a month or so, I take a trip over to an equestrian supplier in Cleckheaton to buy a sack. (There is a place in Morley but they have to order it in, the other one always has a pallet full).

Last time I was there, whilst I waited patiently in a large queue I noticed a leaflet extolling the virtues of Megazorb. It is a by-product of the pulp industry and a Company called Northern Crop Driers make it by high temperature kiln drying followed by a double dust extraction. It is five times more absorbent than straw, 2.5 times more bio-degradable than paper and only has half the waste volume of shavings.

The leaflet even tells you the best way to manage stable husbandry. I boggled at step two, the sacks are large and heavy, eight of them would be a chore!

# Start with a completely clean stable
# Place 8 or more bags of MEGAZORB in the stable (12ft x 10ft). Use less for rubber matting.
# During the first week add a further bag of MEGAZORB
# Every week thereafter add half to one bag of MEGAZORB
# Be prepared to remove solids daily (easily done using a shavings fork).
# Be prepared to remove very wet patches whilst leaving the base of the rest of the bed untouched. If needs be, replace the removed wet material with fresh MEGAZORB.

Megazorb appears to be a side-line for the York based Company, they also make three other grass based products, Graze-on, Graze-on gold blend and Grass Nuts.

One of their suppliers has registered the Megazorb domain and even has photos of how it is made.

Gizmo doesn't care about the process but appears to be a happy user. Happy pets mean happy owners.

Gizmo with David. Gizmo is the one on the left...

Footnote: When the sack is getting low, one of us says "We need some more Absorbaloff", a Dr. Who/Peter Kay reference.

Googlewhack!

I received an unsolicited email this morning telling me that my blog is a Googlewhack. I contrived to make it one once before but this is genuine and discovered by someone else.

I'm the only website in the world with an onomatapapaeic carpet.


Check it is still the case here

(It won't last for long- I'm trying out Wordpress and have imported my blog over there so Google will pick that up in due course.)

Two faced

Last week, I noticed that the Morley Town Hall clock was ten minutes fast. At the weekend, I heard it chiming correctly from inside and noticed that time was right from outside along Queen Street. Then on Tuesday, I saw it was fast again from the Car Park but I heard it chiming correctly shortly afterwards. This puzzled me slightly. Then, in the evening, I saw two faces from another vantage point and the mystery was solved;

Rolf: Can you tell what it is yet?







One of the four faces was ten minutes ahead of the other three.

This other clock I see in Leeds near the brewery was wrong at about 4pm coming back from the Playhouse and I imagine it has been stopped, ten minutes to two being the most aesthetic time to show on a clock face. (Check next time you are in a Jewellers, most of them will be ten minutes to two or ten minutes past ten. The digital clocks will probably just be flashing 00:00 though).

There is a UK campaign to get public timepieces working again at the Stopped Clocks website and I have sent them this. It is fascinating checking places you know and the state of the horology.

More bright sparks

I'd blogged previously about Spark*, a community arts programme for schools. On Tuesday afternoon, I was given the chance to go along to one of the post-course celebrations held at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
My role was to be an attendant in the main auditorium, which involved a small amount of training as to what to do in the event of a fire alarm. I was given my own special usherette seat at the back of the theatre, seen below.

From here it was possible to observe the audience and also notice if the fire alarm had gone off. In Britain, fire alarms are silent in theatres, being indicated by warning lights. A number of red strobe heads were pointed out to us near the doors and we were advised that the audience wouldn't be aware of them but we would. (This isn't strictly true as I always notice these things and have seen them go off during a show elsewhere, fortunately just a false alarm that didn't stop the show. Conversely, I have seen shows stopped at places like Butlins where evacuation messages have sounded triggered by stage Pyrotechnics and smoke machines).

Although it was a stage performance, we were being treated as a Conference so it was not necessary to follow the full procedures. (The emergency exit from my part of the theatre passed through a private area but it would be OK to direct them back to the foyer on this occasion).

When I arrived rehearsals were in progress and there were about 400 happy, noisy children in the theatre. (It holds 750 in a large fan shape). After they had been fed, they all came back for the show proper. Four schools each presented set pieces on the topics they had chosen from a range of puppetry, music, street dance, rap, banners and masks. This snap from my usherette position shows a shadow puppet show in progress with musicians behind.


The set is actually for Don Quixote (& not a windmill in sight) although the theme for the day was the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the theatre's Christmas show.

Here is an audience shot, hundreds of children with their spark* yellow T shirts on, having a great time. Long live live theatre!

Iwas surprised to notice that our "new" theatre had now been open seventeen years. Originally the Leeds Playhouse, it lived for twenty years in a temporary theatre constructed within the shell of a sports hall (originally on a ten year lease). It had a vestigial stage there but a very large thrust forestage into the audience on three sides. They liked the design so much that when the new building opened, the main house was designed in a very similar way, but with proper flying facilities on the regular stage behind.

I came quite close to selling this theatre a new lighting control back in 1989 (an AVAB Expert, with the help of Ulf Sandström). They were really impressed with the system but the product was a little bit too new, had a few software bugs that could cause it to lock up at inopportune moments and what I described as occasional lumpy crossfades (when you worked the board hard, the transitions were not always entirely smooth). Had we made that sale, the fortunes of CCT Theatre Lighting (and my career path) might have been entirely different, but it was not to be.

This stage demands big sets, or minimalist ones. The best show I saw here was Little Shop of Horrors when they created a naturalistic "Skid Row" filling this vast space, complete with simulated passing elevated railway trains at the rear. At the Finale', electric drop boxes opened around the ceiling lighting catwalks, allowing dozens of huge green tentacles to fall down close to our heads. A dramatic finish!

Stopped in their tracks...

(Based on a two thirds majority vote from the commentariat in the previous blog entry)

I filled up at a different petrol station yesterday to my usual one in Bradford. Whilst pumping Gas, I noticed warning signs about a security system called Drivestop. In summary, if you drive off without paying, you may get your tyres spiked. This deterrent sign on the pump below explained it all- you can get a journalist explanation on the BBC (from April 2006) here or read a more technical summary and Police praise at the DriveStop website (or download the .pdf direct here).

The system has various safeguards to prevent accidental triggering and I'm amazed that I'd not heard or seen about it before now.

The first reaction I had was that I hoped they had good insurance as the implied contract is probably rather weak (and non-existent if you happen to be driving in at the time) but the manufacturers claim that there have been no accidental punctures.


I drove in entirely oblivious to the warning lights which are relatively small, although presumably if they are flashing like a North American railroad crossing it would have been much more obvious. By the way, it shows as red rather than green in this photo at the left as this is an entrance onto the forecourt rather than an exit from it.

Peering down into the slots, the short spikes can just about be seen, mounted on a rotating metal shaft. These ones didn't appear to have the high-visibility yellow plastic tips that appear in the manufacturer blurb.

So why don't Garages just fit credit card readers to the pumps? Well the margins aren't that big on fuel so footfall into the shop for sell-through makes the difference between a thriving petrol station and a closed one.

I once accidentally triggered a drive-off panic at my local Sainsburys forecourt. It was a busy one and it was quite common there for motorists to pull forward clear of the pumps after dispensing fuel so that other motorists could start to fill up. Rather than just pull up in front though, I put my car in the queue for the bagwash to the side (it was a fairly long cycle carwash so I knew I had plenty of time). I went and joined the queue, observing that the staff were huddled round screens whilst one kept going out and looking around. Eventually one of them had the gumption to ask the people waiting if anyone was from the pump I had used. (They had asked previously a few seconds before I arrived).

I've also left my watch at a garage as collateral when I nipped back to the hotel to rescue my wallet that I'd left in the room. The petrol was worth more than the watch but that was beside the point.

Decision time...

I won't have much time to post this evening as I have a Neighbourhood Watch meeting to go to. I've had an interesting day, I'll give any wanderers the chance to influence my follow-up post, please vote for:

a) Petrol Stations that can slash your tyres, or

b) Usherette for the afternoon.

Let me know via the comments.

A welcome return

Envirospin Watch was number nine in the most sadly missed category of the Blogpower Awards. From the pen of Professor Philip Stott, a "Humeian mitigated sceptic", it dried up last November and then suddenly sprang back into life yesterday, as Global Warming Politics.


He shares my and Andrew Allison's opinions on UHT milk.

Another couple of skeptic (or even climaphobe) blogs worth a look are Climate Audit and Global Warming Hysteria. If you are a climaphile, then I'd recommend The Conscious Earth

Totally InTOCZEKated

What do you do with a Degree in Industrial Metallurgy? Becoming a Poet is an unexpected career move, but Nick Toczek was at the Morley Literature Festival. It was a free session, billed as:


Nick Toczek and his Million Miles an Hour Show

Writer and entertainer, Nick Toczek, will entertain children and families with his wonderful one-man show. Nick chats, tells jokes, performs magic tricks introduces you to his puppets AND performs his snappy poems, all at break neck speed! A fun event for families of all ages.

Well, the show certainly did what it said on the tin. He promised Magic, Poems and Puppetry (and fortunately the latter not of the Penis variety).

His magic was fairly predictable (to adults) but well executed, with magic wands, coloured hankies and the like. A twist to the cube on the string trick was to introduce tiny dragons that responded to his orders. One unexpected treat was to produce a telegraph pole from a Netto Carrier bag- it seems a puppet dog was tinkling on it in the bag. (David managed to work out how the telegraph pole worked). There was a certain scatological theme to his routine but kids love that stuff, unfortunately.

His puppetry involved a big spider, the Netto-kennelled dog and an endearing puppet that was a little muppet-like. I don't recall his name but he lived in this cardboard box and was a little shy.

When it came to reading poems, however, he excelled. His use of alliteration, pace, rhyme, rhythm and onomatopoeia had the children bouncing along with his stories of schools being eaten by dragons, registers when no-one is there and other topics kids could relate to. There was a squeal of delight from one young Morley hardcase when he actually recognised one of the poems and enthusiastically joined in. (You can see a sample poem of his here)

Nick was rather anarchic, shouting at the kids saying how horrible they were then giving a big laugh and grin as well afterwards. It seems there is more to Nick than meets the eye, from his Facebook page (& Google) he writes football poetry and has a passion for Punk.


David voted Nick the best show at the Morley LitFest on the smiley sheet, not bad for a free event...

How big is your bunch?

When I was in my teens, my bunch of keys was very modest- a single tumbler lock key for the front door of our house, generally referred to as a Yale. When I was sixteen or so, I was given a school master key by the caretakers. It was one of three master keys (East, West & Lower School) and I was somewhat privileged to have one but it was to open a store cupboard where the Disco & lighting was stored. I was always a little envious of Colin at the City Hall, who had a building bunch to die for. I took great pleasure in clipping it onto by belt loops when I had just cause to borrow it (for relamping, providing access to hall hirers and being left in charge when he nipped out to Southern Fried Rat in the Haymarket). Bunch envy!

I was reminded of this last night, when I noticed the Town Hall Custodians with their big bunches clipped to their kecks. I imagine this won't be all the keys, just the ones needed on a regular basis. Anyway, I thought I'd share my bunch with the bloggersphere, currently ten keys and a trolley/locker coin on one of those rings you can split in two which was a slimmer of the month prize many years ago.

Ten keys? Front door/back door/front gate/back gate/garage/desk/UPS/car/steering lock/one I'm not certain about!


Update: I've remembered what the mystery key is- it is for network cabinets at work. I can't count either, there are ten (I had nine originally).

Blogger JMB has declared it a meme. Get your bunches out...

Walking the boards

David was surprised to be called up onstage this evening to be presented with his Scrabble book. (We were as well!) I mucked up the camera, so have it on extended video instead of a flash photo.

He also got to draw the raffle! No mention of the lack of junior competition in the competition.

On the left, Festival Director, Paula Truman. On the right, Cllr Judith Elliott, Festival Chairman. In the centre, David holding an improvised raffle drum: a Cadbury's Roses tin with some tinsel wrapped round that they rustled up during the interval.

We were delighted that David had the courage to go up, as he gets stage fright. Perhaps if he had been given time to think about it he might have done a Gordon Brown and Bottled it.

David the Wordsmith

We wandered in on the Morley Scrabble Club at the Town Hall today and were persuaded to enter a competition. The person with the highest score after five rounds won a scrabble related prize and the opponent did as much as possible tactically to help us. I scored 86 and David 66, David playing Junior Scrabble. (Neither of us are players, although David does have a set at home somewhere).

Anyway, we got a phone call advising us that David had won the junior prize, mainly because he was the only child to enter! We now have a Junior Scrabble Dictionary waiting for us at the Town Hall. At least he didn't come second, like this unfortunate cake baker.




(Scrabble Image from Wikipedia, Cake Lady from BBC).

Give him some Verbal

From Dictionary.com:

Verbal has had the meaning “spoken” since the late 16th century and is thus synonymous with oral: He wrote a memorandum to confirm the verbal agreement. Slightly earlier, verbal had developed the meaning “expressed in words, whether spoken or written (as opposed to actions)”: Verbal support is no help without money and supplies. Although some say that the use of verbal to mean “spoken” produces ambiguity, it rarely does so. Verbal is used in this sense in all varieties of speech and writing and is fully standard. The context usually makes the meaning clear: No documents are necessary; a verbal agreement (or contract or order) will suffice. Oral can be used instead of verbal if the context demands: My lawyer insists on a written contract because oral agreements are too difficult to enforce.

So, what to make of this?

(Seen in Morley Leisure Centre).

This weekend is the Morley Literacy Festival and we are going to several events, I'll be there with my camera and my photographic memory*

(*oops, the light has got in).

Create a crazy monster

David doodled this today. I wonder what inspired him?

Photo Hunt - SMELLY

PhotoHunt

SMELLY

You'll have to trust me on this...

They looked a lot better than they smelt!

(Somewhere abandoned in Morley Town Hall, the Robing Room WC).

Giving Mr. Bown a hard time

I couldn't resist this!

http://www.punishthepm.co.uk/


(Hat Tip- Guido.)

Written in the stars

Astrology is all pervasive throughout society, from those of us who always check one twelfth of the daily horoscope, to others who use birth dates as a suitability mechanism for dating. "What's your starsign?" is a bit of a cliché but an ice breaker for many.

In my youth, I could see a bit of a causal relationship with personality types; friends often aligned somewhat with their stereotypes. I knew that newspaper horoscopes were at best dubious (I've met at least two journalists from local papers who admitted to making them up) but back in the late 70s I even went so far as to buy a large coffee table book called, simply, ARIES. (One of a set, of course!) With hindsight, I think I had been influenced at the time by the need to impress someone of the fairer sex who was into this sort of thing. The large book explained the main character traits of the starsign, proceeded deeper to show the various planetary influences which explained the subtleties of why we Aerians aren't all the same, then had tables and charts to be able to plot a personal horoscope based on exact date/time and latitude/longitude of birth. Why the planetary influence of being squidged out screaming was so important wasn't entirely explained and I seem to remember there may have even been a school of thought that your starsign was based on when you would have been born if you were a premature baby, but I digress.

So, anyway, I went through life thinking that stars were a bit of fun but occasionally right and maybe there was something in that personality types business.
Then, many years later, I spent a week on a very intense (and expensive) Management Course at Cranfield University. We spent a lot of time talking about different personality types and how they worked together. Eventually, on the last but one day, someone piped up and asked the instructor if there was anything in astrology. He replied something to the effect of "The results are found to align within statistical distribution norms", i.e. it was bollocks.

So why do we see the traits we want to see and play down the ones we don't? I put it down to Cognitive Dissonance, the same syndrome that lets me see the spelling mistakes in everyone else's blog but not my own.

After that point, I lost interest in even having a crafty shufty of my horoscope and if asked my sign, replied that I was a Caesarian. (Or if I had used that line before, then I was on the cusp between a Libra and a Capricorn- a Leprechaun.

(Zodiac woodblock Public Domain, Attribution for colour woodblock under creative commons here)

I name this Ship...

I have a guest post about the tendency of naming things after people over at Sicily Scene.

Raw power

The last post interested Lord Uber-Blogger James Higham. Developing the theme, I mentioned that you can't just turn off high voltages. This very short clip demonstrates very vividly that this is really the case.


Also, when things go wrong, the larger sub-stations can be very dangerous indeed. This is apparently a fuse failing but rather too slowly for comfort. Note the hot metal dripping onto the ground.


...and this is a substation exploding due to sustained overload causing catastrophic failure.

I had seen the last video used as an argument against BT's new 21CN IP network handling telemetry for the Electricity Generating Companies- the additional delays introduced (only in the order of hundreds of Miliseconds) have potentially disastrous consequences in fault conditions.

You can find out more detail about these videos by following the YouTube links.
There are rather a lot of unpleasant high voltage accidents on YouTube, I wouldn't recommend rooting around too deeply.

Electrickery

I had a meeting in an Electricity Supply Sub-station a few weeks ago. I had been shown photos of it on the basis that I would never be likely to see inside in person. Then, surprisingly, I got too see inside whilst an electrical contractor assessed some work. It was warm in there, and it hummed. I don't mean that there was a smell (although there was a sort of musty, oily smell) but there was a very loud, deep, humming noise. In Britain the mains is delivered at 50 Hertz (cycles a second) and any large electrical installation will waste a small amount as sound (and rather more as heat).

The room itself was perfectly safe as all of the metal was earthed and no hazardous parts were exposed without opening covers. There was a rather hairy looking open fuse panel on one wall that looked straight out of Dr. Frankenstein but I was pleased to realise that it was disconnected long-obsolete equipment.


The power arrives on four wires at 11,000 volts (called Medium Voltage, or MV) and is connected to some large switchgear for isolation and changeover purposes. At higher voltages, you can't just switch electrical circuits off, as they will simply arc across between the contacts. Instead, elaborate mechanisms have to separate the contacts and then quench the arc. (That is why those huge electricity farms you see are so complex). The power then goes into a transformer (as pictured above, but without the big hole in) to be transformed to a more useful voltage, in Britain it is officially 230 Volts (but generally 240 Volts in practice). This is referred to as Low Voltage (LV) but it is the sort of low voltage that will happily kill you in an unguarded moment. Coming out of the transformer, the power goes through some protective fusing, measurement for charging purposes and a large isolation switch before being presented to the Consumer. To put these things in scale, you would need a crane to move the ironwork in these rooms, due to size and weight. (The transformer had enough capacity to light up 8,000 100W light bulbs and was comparable in size to a typical 12 person lift car.) Another analogy is of a 1,066 Horsepower engine!

The thing about sub-stations is that they are literally everywhere but generally un-noticed; it is very unlikely that anyone reading this is much more than a stone's throw away from one. They are also controversial and there are concerns that there are health risks due to long term exposure to the magnetic fields that concentrate in them.

Are there genuine health risks? Well, I wouldn't want to buy a house underneath a power pylon. When the West was in denial, the Ruskies were fitting Faraday Cages to their tractors where there was risk of exposure. You can now buy a book on the topic.

I've lost my Gromit

I had a routine hearing check at the hospital this morning but sadly I've lost my Gromit, it has come out of the eardrum and caused some irritation. I had a rather unpleasant session on a couch whilst the Doctor did a clean out of my ear canal, the gunk had apparently formed a mould of my eardrum and it was excruciating having it removed. It still hurts, hopefully I'll be able to sleep OK.

My hearing was fine though!

Help- do you recognise this song?

I've caught the audio of that PortAventura tune that I'm trying to identify. (People have had trouble getting on the site mentioned in this post)

If you can play MP3s, you can download it from my website at:

http://www.iangrey.org.uk/mystery.mp3

It is only 360k and lasts about 22 seconds before the screaming starts.(removed for brevity!)

If you can identify it, you'll make a middle aged man briefly happy...

UPDATE: Have you ever seen the rain- originally Creedence Clearwater Revival, covered by Rod, Smokie, et al.

Old photos

My Uncle left me three old photos of me as a nipper. I've seen them before and my Mum has copies but it gave David and Karen a smile.


Here I am in 1961, still in the terrible twos. Probably taken at Turners in Newcastle.


I think I was 4 or 5 when this one was taken, in our upstairs Flat in Farndale Road.


And finally, aged 7 or so, with my NHS specs and my teeth starting to come in. I can remember this, it was in our downstairs flat (underneath the old one) and it was taken by a Photographer called Larry Dee who lived in the next street.
David laughed at this one and keeps calling me Harry Potter. Karen says this is an early manifestation of my guilty face...

From Cyberspace to reality

I have put up a (very topical) post about cyberspace meet-ups over at Sicily Scene.

Peter Kay has one

...an Uncle Knobhead. Every family has one and mine is called Uncle Allen.

He is my Dad's big Brother and will shortly be approaching 79. He lives in Canada and is a "professional Geordie", having a stronger accent post- emigration than he did back in Newcastle.

He is as unlike my Dad ever was as anyone could ever be; a womaniser, a hard drinker, a gambler, a waster. He was a hard worker at work, but only when he turned up. He is tall but my Dad was short. He did share one character trait, he was a very generous man. He used to turn up at our house when I was a kid with a present for me, then scrounge the money off my Mum. He used to tell me to "keep watching the post" and my trusting innocence would gradually ebb away as the days passed.

I didn't really see him again after he emigrated in the early 70s although he did come and visit me in 1983 at my first owned house in Maidenhead, where he demonstrated his ignorance of house prices. ("You paid £30,000? You wuz robbed!")

Having a couple of stints in Canada in the mid-80s, I visited him whilst I was over and he came to visit me. I was really geared up to visiting my Auntie Brenda (Allen's sister) but couldn't have really done one without the other. Allen lived (and still lives) in a rented apartment and is a confirmed bachelor in his habits. (He did marry an old flame late in life who he met again in Canada but sadly she developed a wasting disease and died a few years ago). His home is a homage to old fashioned furniture, he has mothballs in his clothes drawers and Old Spice splashed all over. (I have previously blogged about his taste in furniture)

Every few years he comes over to the UK and does a grand tour of people he knows. The trouble is that he has a bachelor's attitude that the world revolves around him so our specific warning of imminent arrival is generally the evening before. He is a railway bore, a Freemasonry Bore, strongly opinionated on everything and refers to foreigners as "Coolies" so his company gets tiresome rather quickly. He often brings David presents, but railway related, so they aren't really appreciated.

Having said that, he loves David, takes us for a meal when he stays and we reminisce about the litle we have in common. He is living on borrowed time health-wise and there will come a time when he can't travel any more. We've just seen him off on the train back up to Newcastle and there is a fair chance that we might not see him again. He might be my Uncle Knobhead, but he's family and thats what counts.

Uncle Knobhead is the invention of Bolton Comedian Peter Kay who appears to be on myspace.

Nuts to Nutella

I've been suckered by marketing hype. I'd been advised that nuts were a good snack for diabetics, provided they weren't peanuts. Now Nutella is made from hazlenuts and I've found it a few times in hotels abroad at breakfast.

Now flash forwards to a week or two ago in ASDA, where Nutella was on 2 for 1. Picking up a jar, I was seduced by the packaging, which said

packed
with over
50 HAZLENUTS
A GLASS OF
SKIMMED MILK*
AND A LITTLE
COCOA**




On getting round to trying it on toast, however, I couldn't believe how syrupy it was. A look on the back explained all...

INGREDIENTS: SUGAR, VEGETABLE OIL, HAZLENUTS (13%), etc.

A slight mispritt

I slightly mistyped a hyperlink on Welshcakes' blog back to here as http://iangrey.bllogspot.com. I was amused to go to a site called Bllogspot. Most other .blogspot.com URLs seem to resolve to here as well.

The site asked me:-


Are you interested in:

Song
Vagina Tightening
Better Sex
How To Blog

Come on, what a silly question, are bears catholic?

Every day hurts/Love is in the air

Looking back at a five things post, I mentioned that I knew all the words to this song by Sad Cafe. I suspect I know most of the words to the entire Album, Misplaced Ideals, it really made my 1979 when I got round to buying it on the strength of the single.



Paul Young was in Sad Cafe, not to be confused with John Paul Young who did this ephemeral pop hit from the year before.

Photo hunt ---- CURVY

PhotoHunt

CURVY

I never quite seem to get round to joining in with photo hunt. To make up for it, here are three photos, all Gaudi. The first two are from the Reus Museum, the third is the undulating bench at Parc Guell in Barcelona.

As prompted by photohunters at Finding Life Hard? and Nobody Important

A new knob

Our downstairs WC door has been randomly locking itself over the last six months or so. At first I thought it was young David accidentally doing it but it turns out that the mechanism has gone faulty. When it happens, it is necessary to unscrew the outside handle and wiggle it. (There is a release hole in the centre of the outside knob but that is the bit that has gone wrong).

Having done it twice this week, I nipped out to the hardware store to get a replacement. It is of a very similar design but a slightly larger diameter. Unfortunately, the securing screws are on the inside, but the release mechanism is much more sturdy.

Mrs. Grey advises me that even though I came back with a bigger knob, the size isn't important...

I have another guest post up at Sicily Scene- about homesickness.

Mistaken identity

Someone asked me at work today whether that was me on the Telly last night. On looking blank, he said- "On Calendar, In Morley, in the Bear Suit..."

(He had seen it, remembered I was out yesterday afternoon and put two and two together to get five).

The story (& photo) is here.

Fabulous Fjords

I have a guest post up at Sicily Scene.

Give a little bit...

I was over in Manchester today for a business event and to see Roger Hodgson of Supertramp in the evening.
The Lowry hotel (*****) overlooks this stretch of water with a graceful pedestrian suspension bridge leading across to the City Centre. The area is full of developments with very expensive apartments. That building with the sticky-out cubes is some sort of Court Complex at street level.

Inside the hotel, the Atrium has these two large suspended mesh figures.

Roger is the one in white on this blurry sneaky photo I took. Yes, the stage set does consist of shrubs! Note that the house lights are on low- Roger likes to see his audience. Playing Electric Piano, Grand Piano, and two guitars (one a 12 string) he went down very well to the (mostly aged 50+) audience although I was surprised to see in the interval that the upper Circle wasn't in use. Unsurprisingly he was note perfect, although a couple of the songs were weakened by the lack of expected drums & bass and would have otherwise soared. Most of the solo woodwind was provided by another musician, Aaron MacDonald, who was remarkably versatile and had the ability to stroll onto the stage at the last moment and be on the spot ready to play exactly when needed (although the lighting man was a few seconds behind him!). Aaron also provided harmonies when it was right to do so and even had a Swanee Whistle portamento horn (made up name) for that bit in the Logical Song when it goes a bit noisy.

One song I didn't expect in the set and was delighted to hear performed live- Rosie had everything planned from their second (& not too hot) album, Indelibly stamped.

One other treat for me- I found a staircase in the Theatre I hadn't seen before with some splendid tilework.

School Dinners

Healthy school meals have been only a partial success*, it seems. Even David calls Jamie Oliver for doing away with tasty food and flavoured drinks at his school, even sugar free ones.

When I went to Kenton school, there was a meal choice which you decided by picking which dining hall to go into. (We had a choice of two, there were five in total with three kitchens, after all there were 1,500 kids to feed). The daily dish was chalked up on a blackboard in the corridor. One day, a new word appeared- Macedoine. It turns out this meant diced veg (generally carrots & suede or turnip) but we didn't know how to pronounce it- instead of May-say-dwan we said Mack-ee-doyne.

I now see that it originated in Macedonia, hence the name. Ahh, isn't the internet wonderful?

*Partial success- euthemism for an almost but not quite total failure where something minor went right in amongst the train wreck. As used on an Army Telecoms project I worked on in the mid-90s.

and by the way, which one is Pink?

An interesting where are they now? story on the BBC here.

I've mentioned it before, but this reminds me of my upstairs Flat in Stavanger back in 1981, the Landlady's Son liked playing it LOUD.

I was disappointed to find that the kids in the vid were stage school. They scrub down well! (They make an appearance when the clock has counted down to 1'58").


(The title is a Pink Floyd pop at the record business).

The summer of '76

This song reminds me of my old mate Colin from the long hot 1976 Summer between leaving school and (not) going to Newcastle Poly. He had a new live-in Girlfriend who was (just) 16 and I helped decorate their Flat in Jesmond. (Lime green walls and light chocolate brown woodwork). I don't recall her name but she worked at the huge Civil Service complex at Long Benton, trying to decode scribbles on prescriptions for correct apportionment. (She said it was very boring).
Colin really liked the Gallagher & Lyle Breakaway Album that had been released the year before and so did I, although side one was better than side two. I bought their follow-up Love on the Airwaves in Coventry the following year but it wasn't quite as good overall, although with some excellent songs on it (I particularly like the track Runaway). If you don't know them but their voices sound familiar they used to be in McGuinness-Flint with "when I'm dead and gone".

In praise of "The Glums"

Les Miserables is the longest running Musical in London's West End. It opened in 1985 at the Barbican (based on a simpler 1982 Paris Production) and was severely panned by the critics. However, the audiences loved it and after trimming the show a bit so that it wasn't overly long, it transferred to the Palace on Shaftesbury Avenue. A few years ago, it moved down the road to the slightly smaller Queens theatre and it is still there, having celebrated over 9000 performances!

I first saw it in 1988 when I worked in technical marketing. I was asked at very short notice to entertain a couple of Danes from a Telco, picking up the bar bill beforehand and the Restaurant meal afterwards. I knew them slightly so it wasn't an ordeal and the tickets were biked down to us in Maidenhead from one of those last minute ticket agencies that charge such silly prices that only the Corporates can afford them.

We were sat centre stalls in row C, an excellent place to see the show. Not too close that you are having to look up, close enough that the stage fills your field of vision and you can see the detail of facial expressions.

Les Mis the Musical is based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name and charts the post-prison life of a convict (prisoner 24601) who was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, serving nineteen years overall as he tried to escape. In it there are barricades, gunfights, deaths and sorrow, counterbalanced with love and a couple of comic characters. It is wrongly assumed to be about the French Revolution although it does include a student insurrection.

The show is entirely "sung through", i.e. there is no spoken dialogue at all, every line is set to a melody. The main set consists of a large revolving stage surrounded by French looking 18th Century tenements and two large piles of what look like junk either side. These junk heaps move onstage, mesh together and transform into the barricade at a key point in the show. The revolve is frequently on the move as it is acted upon and the cast make it look easy to step onto and off (it isn't.)

The show is lit by David Hersey and has many of his trademark lighting styles, especially light curtains (narrow vertical or rear angled tight beams in a continuous row). Of particular note is the follow-spotting- it uses low voltage narrow beam projectors for very tight subtle following with a very soft edge to the beam, such that it is hardly obvious that the actors are being followed at all. It is a visual device that when an actor dies, they are briefly bathed in a brilliant white light, readily achievable by the follow-spots that are otherwise running at about one third intensity the rest of the time.

I got to see Les Mis again circa 1990, buying a Gallery tout ticket for a mid-week Matinee when I happened to be passing. (£25, face value £6.50).You feel very remote up there (particularly in the Palace which is vertigo inducing) but I was able to appreciate the gobo effects projected onto the revolve, particularly the sewer and river scenes.

Since then, we have seen it in London again, New York (when we went there via Concorde) and in Manchester (another Palace). In Manchester, the stage is so wide there that the Barricade looked less substantial. A joke was made of it on the UK Soap Coronation Street when two of the actors supposedly went to see it and they kept pronouncing it in all seriousness as "Lez Mizzer-a-Baalls"

A couple of years back, my Mum and I visited the touring set onstage at the Bradford Alhambra. She remembers it better than me and recalls being surprised when a little concealed door opened on the barricade and the driver got out! She also recalls us being let loose onto the revolve, it being set at full speed and then being encouraged to sing whilst we stepped off and back on again. It is hard to do it with full concentration so they must hold training courses for the actors. (They really are the "turns" in that show).

We have the various CDs, DVDs and making of stuff. (Stage by Stage is particularly good, only on VHS though).

Anyway, seeing it in the MAOS show has whetted our appetites and we have booked to see it again in London. The Orchestra is smaller in the Queens show, partially because the Pit is smaller, partially to save money. (The Musicians Union were not happy at the time). I imagine there is another omission- the radio controlled rectangular truck used as the Cafe in the Palace staging that occasionally had a mind of its own- some bricks at the downstage edge were actually girders preventing the truck ending up in the Pit. It was omitted in other stagings as it was troublesome and I imagine it was restaged when it moved.

It isn't the most hi-tech musical and doesn't have the best songs but it remains my favourite for its theatricality, staging, flow and level of emotional involvement. I still get a tear in my eye when little Cosette sweeps the floor and yearns for a Castle in a Cloud.

Name that tune

I received an email from Portaventura theme park today, promoting Halloween at the theme park. They also had a link to an Internet enabled visitor scarer.

Anyway, seeing no punters to scare, I dipped in to their video archive and found someone singing a song.

Now I heard this song at the theme park and couldn't place it, although it seemed that the whole crowd could and were singing along as we exited the park after their fireworks spectacular. (It turned out that the crowd were singing along on the actual recording, as I discovered the day after when I heard it again in a quieter bit of the park.

Anyway, randomly dipping in to the archived video scare footage, I was delighted to hear the song again and indeed see someone singing along to it.

Now, all I need is to get others to go to the archive bit again, and hope a regular recognises it!

To join in the challenge, go to http://www.portaventurawatchingyou.com/, after the intro, choose Videos of Victims (third choice along the bottom), put in September 30th, 13:09 and hear the tune that goes:

Da Da Da de doo de dah,
Da Da Da de doo de dah,
Hello!
do de do de doo de dah...

It sounds rather C&W-ish and is probably really well known (except in Chez Grey).

(The bloke wasn't overly frightened but did flinch slightly.)

Answers on a postcard, or preferably in the comments section.

(Don't say "The Zombies Band", that is probably being a smartarse!

UPDATE: Have you ever seen the rain- originally Creedence Clearwater Revival, covered by Rod, Smokie, et al.

Bastard Prompt

I received the following comment to my Musical Spectacular Post.

"At first I had concerns that the musicians may have drowned out the singers

Now that's close! Love the Witches song".

It occurs to me it is worthy of further explanation because it is not something you always anticipate on an expensive trip to the Theatre. I went to see the Musical South Pacific in London many years ago and was sitting in the front row towards the right. However, all of the Brass instruments were directly in front of us, giving a somewhat unnatural boost to the mix and rather swamping the strings & woodwind. Theatre sound people often get round this by entombing the musicians in the Pit (or sometimes putting them somewhere else entirely) and having a lot of small fill-in speakers along the proscenium edge to counteract the effect of the sound coming from the side.

Now in the days before technology, it was common to put the Stage Manager in the Stage Right corner rather than the normal Stage Left corner for this very reason- so that the act could be heard rather than the Brass. (Possibly there was the need for the Stage Manager to say something to the Musical Director in the event of something going wrong, the standard response was for the MD to say "Shipwreck Chorus Lads" and they would play a holding tune until further notice.) In Theatres, Stage (Actor's) Left Wing is always known as Prompt Side and Stage Right Opposite Prompt, even if the Prompt Corner is in the Opposite Prompt Corner. Many theatres have P.S. and O.P. directional signs backstage, although the less traditional ones have S.L. and S.R.

Now what do you call a Prompt Side that is on Opposite Prompt? Bastard Prompt. I wonder who made that up? Probably a very confused architect. (Some theatres have Bastard Prompts for architectural reasons rather than historic variety house reasons, the usual one being sod all room offstage downstage left).

A memory of a real shipwreck chorus just sprang into my head, from a 18+ Easter Holiday at Caister talent show many years ago when I was acting as Stage Manager. An appalling "Comedy" act was dying on his feet and was insulting the audience in between momentary flashes of potentially getting it together. Eventually the crowd had had enough and so had I. I said Shipwreck Chorus Lads to the Band and closed the Curtains. They knew exactly what I meant and played him off with... The Winker's song (Misprint) by Ivor Biggun. An excellent and inspired choice!

Plodging in the clarts

We went to Saltburn Pier yesterday with the intention of doing some fishing or crabbing. Unfortunately, the tide was out!

However, walking below the pier in search of a good shot, I didn't notice an extra large wave sweep in and swamp my shoes. Having Crocs on, the water went in the sides and top holes so I immediately had very soggy socks.

We did find some small crabs in the water pools beneath the pier. We made sure we put them back though.

English <-> Geordie

Plodging- Paddling in the sea, generally barefoot with trousers rolled up
Clarts- Mud, e.g. as found at Byker Sands, Jarrow Slacks.

"Only dead fish swim with the stream"

When we were at the Alnwick Garden last week, we noticed a new book available about the making of the Garden. Karen balked at the £25 cover price but I noticed it was only £17.50 on Amazon. (I've read it now and posted a four star review).

Not only does it have a photo of the Pump room, but it reveals a cheeky secret.

At the start of the bamboo maze is the phrase at the top of the blogpost, representing the Duchess' struggle with unhelpful conservatism that seriously got in the way of making the garden what it is today.

When you complete the maze, there is a Latin inscription in the centre. It reads:

Omnia, hospites, vidistis.
Vobis gratias agimus.
Nunc, fortuito mingite.

The real translation is NOT what is officially on their website podcast. This schools teacher guide PDF is closer...

I anticipate one of the highly educated Blogpower people with a classical education may be able to get close. (Or Colin Campbell will find an English <-> Latin translator online).

Postscript: The translators I have tried are Cak at it.

Put another nickel in...

The singing talent of Morley Operatic managed to excel recently when they staged their Musical Extravaganza 2 which was even better than the Musical Extravaganza back in 2005. We had pre-arranged to get tickets for Saturday night in the first allocation, mainly by recognising the man who played Wishee Washee back at the Mayor's Ball. On turning up on the night, we were surprised to find ourselves in the front row, from seats where we could have readily conducted being sat directly behind the Musical Director. At first I had concerns that the musicians may have drowned out the singers but there were enough radio mics in use that we could hear from the nearby PA speaker without a problem.

The show was staged in Morley Town Hall using their standard fit-up stage (the Proscenium of which stays there semi-permanently these days, the bracing of which gave me something to hang the Dean Friedman stage lighting on back in July). They had flats and borders with a fairly neutral green leaf pattern, otherwise known as "another part of the forest" and a large screen at the rear for projected words and images.

Just before the show started, the Tabs were closed (the stage front curtains) in order for the beginners to take their positions. At this point, my Mum said "Oh Dear" as the drapes do look rather sad when closed, being a little threadbare and with insufficient fullness. (Fullness is the amount of additional material pleated into the width to give them a visual richness when hung. 50% is minimum you can get away with for decorative Tabs and 100% is better).

The show was fast paced and very song intensive, apparently 79 songs in total. The first half included songs from Phantom of the Opera and finished before the interval with a set piece from Les Miserables, with one of David's school Staff playing the foul mouthed Innkeeper's Wife, Mme Thenardier. (She said three rude words and was chastised for it by david on Monday at School!). They finished with One Day More which also leads up to the Interval in the West End show (although their arrangement seemed slightly adrift with men singing women's parts and vica versa).

After ASDA Choc Ices, it was back to the second half. The best set in this half to my mind was the Hans Christian Andersen one, excellently sung by the lead and with lively dance by youngsters, including one of David's friends who played a cute ugly duckling (who turned into a very fine Swan indeed). Special mention must also go to the Singing in the Rain number with excellent Tap dancing . It was odd, though, that the song was repeated with full supporting cast a couple of songs later without any obvious (to me) causal link.

The strangest song had to be the one from Wicked featuring a green faced Wizard of Oz style witch and a woman in a baby doll outfit singing how she was going to make the witch beautiful.

The grand Finale' was the Joseph megamix, but to my mind it didn't quite come off and felt slightly stilted at times. Too many glitter wigs & random togs so it looked a bit too much like a (mature) Student party rather than a riot of colour. Sometimes the music soars above what can be squeezed out of a drummer and two keyboard players and it can start to sound a little bit John Shuttleworth-like. Similarly, the lights can sometimes be too revealing/flattening and what really would have worked well was strong cross-lighting from the wings. (Not that there was anywhere to put them in the horribly cramped confines of the platform. The other thing is that most of the principals are very good singers and a few are genuinely excellent ones so it can be easy to forget it isn't a pro show and then be reminded of it when someone or something is only 90%. Having said that, the Joseph Coat was superb, as was the coloured cape. It must have taken an age to make, I wonder if they can be hired from others via the National Operatic and Drama Association (NODA), the Amateur Theatre UK body? (It is possible to hire other Props and Costumes on a pro or amateur basis, such as Audrey II, the metamorphosising monster from Little Shop of Horrors).

David's friend has been trying to persuade him to take part but David doesn't like performing to an audience, getting huge stage fright. (Ironically, though, if he is not the centre of attention, he can quite happily make himself one, such as when he joined me onstage for speeches at Karen's 40th a couple of years back. Karen seems to think that I harbour a secret desire to get involved, although I tend to constrain myself to a semi-pro basis, preferring to do things professionally and generally get paid for it, where possible).

The Morley Operatic is 80 years old this year, and the programme has a number of long serving members and patrons with NODA long service awards. However, it would take so little to scupper the society, such as poor sales for a run, a key individual losing interest or the price of insurance becoming prohibitive. (Just involving youngsters means chaperones and criminal records checks, neither of which come cheap). Being a Charity, their finances are in the public domain and they seem to be sending accounts again (after some missing years) so it is interesting to see that they pay their musicians (but not very much). I can recall Karen and I going to see an amateur "The Sound of Music" at Batley Town Hall (BD- Before David) and being amused to see the handing out of brown envelopes to the musicians in the interval. However, on reflection, it makes sense to pay professional musicians as there is nothing as uncomfortable (or worthy of sniggering) as the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra.

An amateur practices until (s)he gets it right. A Professional practices until (s)he cannot get it wrong.

Famous for fifteen seconds

(In very small writing at the back)

& he has got me down as a Tory Boy, the cheeky monkey.

Oi!

Dale!


No!


Libertarian!

Hunk of the month

This is Simon, a young prospective Round Table member and Mr. October 2003. He wasn't quite brave enough to take his trolleys off and it amused us that they had his name on!

The trophy was celebrating his first trip to Wales and meeting his first girlfriend. (ONLY JOKING!)

#7 in a series of 12 (& I'm #11).