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Once I get back to wordpress I find that every single plugin I use is also out of date and must all be manually updated.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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recently however, I’ve found myself listening to rather a lot of radio (for me, anyway), not through choice but because it’s on where I work. Now, it’s not local or national radio like you’d typically listen to, but actually it’s very similar in style, it just has adverts for products from the store rather than from other companies.

Listening to it more and more has really brought me to realise just why DJs let down their audience time and time again. Indeed, it’s such a deep betrayal that no one even knows it’s happening. Every day I find myself hearing the same songs. The same bland, un-musical pieces of factory made pop music.

I’m not about to suggest that DJs not play chart music, as much as I would like that. No, instead all I ask is that DJs do what I percieve their job to be. Not everyone has time to seek out music, to dig and listen and cast away and listen and love and seek and find and pour themselves into.  It’s their job to not just play what people already know they like, but to play them stuff that they may find they like. To open new doors, to new and interesting places.  To introduce people to worlds they never thought existed.

Music has incredible power. You ask almost anyone and they’re likely to say they like music. As a species, we are built to enjoy music. But some of us more than like music. Taking my average tracks per day (from my pretty damn accurate last.fm profile) and the median (since the mean would take a ridiculous amount of time to find) length of songs in my music library we can calculate that on average I spend 4.725 hours a day listening to music. Ish. Of course, that’s not exclusive (and doesn’t include when I’m at work, or when someone else is playing the music). Doesn’t sound like the hugest portion, but bare in mind that’s over 4 years that average, and includes times when I’ve been working or at school full time. It’s been slowly rising over the past year as well.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of people more obsessed with music than I am but I’m pretty deep in at this point. Most of me is focused around it. And it’s damn important to me. Because of the effect it’s had on me, I want to share that effect. I want others to feel it and to know it. That’s why it annoys me so much that DJs are always playing the same songs, they never give your average every day music liker to become a full blown music lover because they limit them to the top 40, or even smaller groups of songs.

I think that’s fundamentally wrong, and something of a moral injustice. There’s a further element that I’ve become more and more receptive to further reaches of music and I want to have another source to say “Hey, listen to this, see what you think”. I want to be able to trust that DJs are playing music because they think it’s interesting and good, not because it’s what’s been handed to them by their major record label funded bosses, not because it’s what we’re being told to like.

I do have a big problem with pop music, I hate about 99% of it. Mainly because it’s pretty much all the same. Doesn’t matter what genre it claims to be. If you think of all music as coming from a centre and spreading out in different directions all around as different genres then what’s played on the radio accounts for the tiniest spec in the middle. Yes, some of those bits are on the bit that starts to be come Electronic, or Blues, or Rock or Punk but ultimately it’s so close to the middle that it shares almost nothing in common with the further reaches of the genre.

And that’s my problem. A lack of variety. Currently all we get is a tiny spec of all the music out there and that’s not fair on anyone. Not fair on the listeners who never have the chance to discover music that could change the way they see the world. Not fair on the artists that work so hard to produce original and interesting and likable music that goes entirely ignored by the mainstream population. And more importantly, not fair on me for having to listen to all the shit they do play.

No one likes minestrone (Source: me and 4 of my friends). Or at the very least, everyone likes all the rest of the better. So why do they keep appearing? Surely there isn’t a big difference in cup soup production costs, I can’t imagine that chicken and vegetable, mushroom or tomato are more expensive to produce than minestrone.

I’m not asking for much here, just some variety packs that don’t include minestrone, cause I’ve got about 5 packets still left to get through, and they’ve been there for as long as I can remember. Many people are left enraged and frustrated by looking to a relaxing cup a soup after a long day at work and only finding minestrone. This plague upon our land must stop, for the sake of all our sanity.

I was perusing the wikipedia article on this abnormal winter. It’s pretty interesting. The bit that caught my eye however was down at the bottom. So as it turns out (source: BBC) most shops have been suffering from people not wanting to go outside. No surprise there. The fun part is that sales in contraception have risen. So everyone has definitely gotten their priorities straight. Right on, humanity.

As you can guess from my title, I find the celebration of new year a bit puzzling. A good excuse for a party to be sure, but I don’t really understand why everyone gets so happy and hugs and kisses everyone around. Really every day is a new year, a new year from the same day the year before. I call bullshit on new years resolutions too, if you wanna make a change fucking make a change, don’t wait for some arbitrary date to do it.

Anyways, have fun wherever you are.