Yesterday was May 4th - Star Wars Day. (Because: May The 4th Be With You. Don't blame me. I didn't come up with that.) Did you need The Force to crack these clues...?
12. Flaming satellite.
Named after a Russian street gang, the "sigue sigue" meaning "burn burn"...
6. Home security camera rotates more than half way.
I've got Blink security cameras on Top Ten Towers, in case you were thinking of coming round to steal my CD collection. If you rotate something through half a turn, that's 180 degrees. Just over that would be...
I googled this to see if it was an actual phobia, and
apparently it is, although all the literature (ha, like the internet contains
“literature”!) seemed to be about arriving late for appointments, social events
or parties. None of these things really causes me anxiety, yet making complete
strangers wait is becoming a thing. I write this down here, as always, in the
hope that it’ll help me process it. Don’t feel you have to read it.
Sam wanted me to show him how the ticket machine works in
the Co-op car park. Normally he waits in the car while I go and get a parking
ticket, but he’d built it up into the most exciting thing ever, so I let him
come with me. However, I didn’t have any coins (still the quickest way
to buy a ticket) and so had to use my card. Which takes ages as the machine has
to contact the bank and perform the complicated security checks which allows it
to take 40p from my account. Another example of technological progress slowing
us down.
Anyway, as I began to show Sam the arcane magic of the
ticket machine, someone else arrived behind us, waiting to get a ticket. And I
suddenly became so flustered that I pressed the wrong button on the machine,
meaning I’d have to start the whole procedure over again, thereby increasing
the amount of time they’d have to wait… and I just couldn’t cope. I walked
away, taking Sam with me, and waited till they’d got their ticket… by which
time someone else had joined the queue and Sam was cringing that I was
embarrassing him. Rightly so.
If I’m honest about it, I think I can trace my reaction back
to the fact that I don’t like having to wait myself. There’s nothing worse than
when you’re in the supermarket and you desperately want to buy a tin of beans,
but there’s someone stood there reading the ingredients on the label, blocking
your access to the beans, and making you wait while they read…
Beans (51%)
Tomatoes (34%)
Water
Sugar
Spirit Vinegar
Modified Corn Flour
Salt
Spice Extracts
Herb Extract
“Let me just check that one more time…”
Beans (51%)
Tomatoes (34%)
Water
Sugar…
Because I get so aggravated when this happens, I’ve
developed an irrational fear of causing it to happen to anyone else. So if
ever I’m looking at something in the supermarket and I can sense someone is
waiting to get to the same thing, I will move out of the way. Not without a bit
of grumbling, to be honest, which rather strips the gesture of any magnanimity.
I realise this doesn’t paint me in the best light: at best, I’m an over-anxious
freak, at worst: a petty misanthrope. At the root of it all is a serious
problem with my self-esteem which is goes way, way back...
All of which brings me back to the car park, and Sam’s
embarrassment. This is a side of his dad I don’t want him to know. He’s such a
confident boy, I don’t want to be a role model for a supreme lack of confidence. I’ve got to work harder to hide that side of me, to present a more positive
image when he’s with me, to learn to make people wait.
I'm pretty sure Tom Petty knew how I feel. Why else would he have written this...?
Thank you for sticking with this blog over the past 12 months, for reading and commenting and playing along with my silly quizzes. You kept me going through the dark days and helped me find a light at the end of the tunnel.
Here's wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a much better 2022.
Before you start Goblin up your Sunday dinner, there's the small matter of the answers to Saturday Snapshots to contend with. Here's a Lighthouse to shine on the... erm... darkness of your... erm...
Sorry, just not feeling the puns today. Great picture of Mr. WD though.
After three weeks of putting up shelves, assembling and disassembling furniture, and unpacking boxes... I'm back at work. No break for me this summer, then... and we're heading into the toughest few months of the year in the run up to Christmas.
I do intend to keep this blog afloat beyond Saturday Snapshots, but I also want to do some proper writing and maybe even start walking again... two things I've had precious little time for over the past 6 years.
So expect me when you see me. I hope you're all keeping well.
Every now and then, I get down to the end of a day I have to stop, ask myself why I've done it It just seems so useless to have to work so hard And nothin' ever really seems to come from it
Not sure what my final verdict is on Dave Matthews... but he's no Eddie Cochran. He's not even Hootie & The Blowfish.
Onto those of you who accepted the inevitable but offered alternatives for variety, starting with Martin (who only owns one Bruce Springsteen album, so I might have to send him some more in the post)...
And I was born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus
Rollin' down Highway 41
All of which brings us to today's obvious choice, as identified by The Swede, Alyson, Lynchie and Martin. Inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, an innocent young black man who was mistaken for a rape suspect by plain clothes police officers in 1999 and shot dead.
In 1988, when I started worked in radio, there was a box of 45 singles in the studio that represented the current playlist. It was a selection of the latest hits and new releases which had been decided upon by committee (the programme controller, head of music and the jocks) and was updated weekly. Three or four times an hour, the on-air presenter would choose a disc from the front of the box (not necessarily the first one, they could flip through a handful and find the right one for right then), play it, then put it to the back of the box when they were done (to prevent the same tune being played in consecutive shows). Beyond that, presenters had free choice in the music they played. They were given a basic pattern to try to stick to - big hit at the start of the hour, 70s oldie, current, 80s, oldie, recurrent etc. - but they could mine the record library for whatever they wanted to fill those gaps. If they ran a music feature in their show, they could (with agreement from the boss) go off-piste completely, given the right justification.
The best DJs used this to make endlessly engaging radio - "Ooh, I haven't heard that in ages" moments followed by big, comfortable hits, followed by "What's this? Never heard that before, but I like the sound of it..."
(The laziest DJs grabbed a pile of old Now compilations and picked from those. But those guys were the exceptions rather than the rule.)
In the early 90s, with our first takeover (or the first one I'd experienced), all this changed. The new management decreed that listeners didn't want unpredictability from their radio shows - they wanted familiarity. DJ choice was almost completely gone, overnight, replaced by computer-generated playlists that rotated oldies, often with a frequency only marginally less than the rotation of current chart hits.
How were these songs selected for addition to the playlist? By audience testing. Someone would call up a random selection of people who were roughly the right age and socio-economic profile as the station's target audience and play them a bunch of 30 second song clips down the phone. Those that got the thumbs up went in the computer. Those that didn't get an immediately positive reaction were confined to the dustbin of history.
Now, apparently I'm in the minority, but even at a young age, I never listened to radio to hear the same old songs over and over again. Yes, I wanted to hear my favourites - new and old - but many of those favourites had only been discovered because some DJ with free choice and an extensive musical knowledge had ventured beyond the predictable. In short, I wanted a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar - where else would I discover my new favourites?
With the exception of new releases (and those were only selected based on their "heat" in industry mags like Music Week... and a little bit of playlist discussion, of which, more later), local radio listeners were deprived the joy of discovering something "new" (i.e. something they'd never heard before) sometime in the early 90s.
And radio would never be the same again.
There were two songs that cried out to be featured this week, although both of them have appeared in this series before...
Sometimes pop stars can be proper daft. Here's ten daft things famous people do in pop songs. Don't try these at home... 10. The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
I broke into the palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner
Take it from me, you don't want to do that, lads - Lego is bloody expensive! 4. Queen - Hammer To Fall
Lock your door
'Cos rain is falling
Through your window pane
Maybe shut the window before worrying about the door, Freddie? 3. Elton John - Your Song
I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss
Generally, a roof that's covered in moss is going to be pretty slippy. Look what happened to Rod Hull, Elton. Accident waiting to happen #1. 2. Van Morrison - Brown-Eyed Girl
Slipping and sliding, all along the waterfall with you
Accident waiting to happen #2, Van. Sir Thumbsaloft has some advice about that too. 1. Air Supply - All Out Of Love
I'm lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
Well, stop lying with your head on the blinking phone then! Particularly because, back when you muppets recorded this song, telephones looked like this...
Tom Petty was cool. Effortlessly cool. He wasn't a pretty boy by any means, but he was the epitome of rock star chic, whatever he wore. The image above is one of my all-time favourite album covers... although sadly, the CD copy I own doesn't have the image on the front, just a rather bland black & white head and shoulders shot of a slightly younger Tom than the one pictured above. (He still looks cool on it.) He looked cool whether he wore leather, denim or a Mad Hatter's outfit. Whether he let his hair grow long or wore a hat because it was thinning away. The man was cool without ever having to try too hard. In that, he was destined to be a rock star.
I got my first Tom Petty album in 1993. I was working in the radio station record library, mainlining free CDs, and my slightly older & wiser friend, Dave, got very excited by the first ever Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Greatest Hits CD.
"I only really know a couple of his tunes," I told him. This was the cusp of Britpop, I was 21 years and though I'd grown up on Springsteen and Mellencamp, my tastes were turning back to spiky British indie. But Dave forced a copy into my hand and made me swear to take it home and listen to it.
I played that CD to death for years. It was the only Tom Petty album I needed. It was perfect. So many great singles, glorious 2 and 3 minute blasts of country-rock-pop with a slightly punky edge. (I'm not sure how many of the obit writers will credit Petty with any punk credentials, but for me, they were there. It was the cool, the attitude, the guitars. Particularly on those early albums with The Heartbreakers. There was a touch of the Ramones in there, I swear.)
It took me a long time to need anything else by Tom Petty, but eventually I started digging into his back catalogue too. There's not a bad record in there. They all had that voice (what a voice - like Dylan had inhaled a whole packet of Tunes), that guitar, that cool. I love a lot of those other songs now, but many of the choices below come straight from that first, peerless Greatest Hits album.
I mentioned here earlier this year how Tom Petty was top of my bucket list of artists I still hadn't seen live. He rarely played the UK though, and if he did, only that London. But one day... I mean, he was only 66.
Goodnight, Tom. Here's ten of your best. Thanks for being so cool.
Probably the only Tom Petty song I knew before I got that Greatest Hits album. It's the one everybody knows, especially Sam Smith, who ripped off the melody shamelessly... and ended up paying for it.
Somewhere, somehow somebody Must have kicked you around some Tell me why you want to lay there And revel in your abandon Honey, it don't make no difference to me baby Everybody's had to fight to be free You see you don't have to live like a refugee...
The Mad Hatter. Dave Stewart. Synths. Yet somehow, this has aged far better than most other records from 1985. And the video's so trippy, it could be from 1969.
See what I mean by punk rock? You try and tell me The Strokes didn't wear the grooves out of this night after night in their lonely teenage bedrooms...
And for one desperate moment there He crept back in her memory God it's so painful Something that's so close And still so far out of reach
I've played this one here before, I'm sure I'll play it again. Everything you need to know about the radio industry is contained in this song.
1. Into The Great Wide Open
One of the greatest story songs ever written. And I know a LOT of great story songs.
Oh, and just listen to that opening chord. Man, that cuts right through you, doesn't it? In the very best way...
Their A&R man said, "I don't hear a single"
Well, it's done, and now I have to sign my name to it. And as soon as I press 'publish', I'll be kicking myself for not finding room for Learning To Fly, I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better, Breakdown, Even The Losers, Joe, Stop Dragging My Heart Around and The Wild One, Forever. Among many more...
Buddy Holly. Chuck Berry. Gene Vincent. Eddie Cochran. Fats Domino. The Everly Brothers. Jerry Lee Lewis. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I love them all.
Never quite got Bill Haley though. He never felt rock 'n' roll enough for me. (Ironic, considering a lot of people call his biggest hit 'the first rock 'n' roll record'.)
Sounds a bit like a rejected Bond theme. Maybe Curve were thinking of remaking Live & Let Die? (i.e. The One With Alligators. Or Crocodiles. Don't be pedantic.)
Look, I know this particular Top Ten hasn't been my finest moment. There are some top notch artists on this countdown, but they've all done far better things in their careers, and none of the songs featured today can hold a candle to last week's Crocodile post. But I promised an alligator follow-up, and so I felt contractually obliged. Hence this two-fer-one Number One of 80s soul shudders which I'm sure will make most of you run for the hills, but I actually think are quite fun in a very much of-their-time sort of way.
Look, it was either this or Paul McCartney and Mark Ronson. Believe me, you got off lightly.
Maybe I missed the lost classic alligator song that's lurking in your swamp. If so, do tell...
Saw my old gigging mate Dave at the weekend, for the first time in about 18 months. Yes, we went to a gig. Probably my only one for this year. More on that soon. Anyway, he was telling me how he's taken the plunge and booked a ticket for Tom Petty's only UK date this year: Hyde Park in July. With Stevie Nicks in support. (What are the chances they'll do Stop Dragging My Heart Around?) I'm jealous, because Petty is pretty much top of my wishlist for artists I still haven't seen, but there's no way I could get to that gig. Even if I could afford it, I'm on holiday that week.
Maybe next tour, Tom, you won't just do one UK gig...
After the video, there's a silly little story I wrote a long, long time ago based on one of Tom's biggest hits...
1. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Learning To Fly
Learning
To Fly
Jonathan started flying to work the
day after the M62 pile-up. Two lorries, five vans and fourteen cars, three of
which were indisputably Audis. He didn’t get home ‘til after nine. Missed
Property Ladder with Sarah Beeney, which Jess had asked him to video because
they were doing Sheffield, so he caught hell from his girlfriend on top of
everything else.
He was sick of
it. The delays. The queues. The road rage. The utter lack of… civility. The
vanity plates with their 4’s that were supposed to be A’s and 7’s straightened
into T’s. The off-white vans with ‘I wish my wife was as dirty as this’ and
‘She is, mate’ finger-written on the back. The way that whenever you left a
decent stopping distance on the motorway, some arsehole always pulled into it.
The taxi drivers. The skip wagon drivers. The motorcyclists. And, yeah, the
Audi drivers. Eight years he’d been doing this journey now, to and from a job
that wasn’t worth half as much effort, and he couldn’t take it anymore. So the
next day, he left his car at home and flew. It took him just over quarter of an
hour, from Huddersfield to Leeds, as the crow flies. After that, he was kicking
himself – why hadn’t he ever thought of this before?
He
tried to calculate his average speed by putting a ruler on his Big AA Road
Atlas of Britain (pages 64 & 65 – rather annoyingly, his exact destination
lay smack in the centre binding), but got pissed off because he couldn’t figure
out the simple mental arithmetic that’d allow him to work out miles per hour. Throwing
the Atlas across the living room, he knocked over the Aloe Vera plant on the
windowsill, spilling soil down the back of the radiator. Genius! Similarly, he
struggled to estimate the average height of his flight-path – high enough to be
mistaken for a bird from the ground, he reckoned, but not so high he was in any
danger of headlonging the jumbos circling for Manchester Airport. He half
expected to be spotted lifting off, exiting every morning through the dormer
window in the attic (riddled though it was with bastard woodworm) but he soon
gave up worrying. People round here, they kept their eyes to the ground. Nobody
looked up, not in this street. As for his landing, he touched down as a rule on
the multi-storey carpark across from work. It rarely got so busy that anyone
was parking on the top floor before nine.
Bad
weather could be a problem – but it had been when he was driving too. He didn’t
get any wetter than if he were riding a bike to work, and he carried dry office
clothes in his backpack, arriving in plenty of time to change in the Gents,
even after that glorious extra half hour in bed. The rain didn’t bother him so
much – OK, it bothered him shitloads, but he kept trying to tell himself it was
invigorating. He thought about those crazy octogenarian Norwegians he’d seen in
that documentary on Channel 5, starting each day with a naked dip in the icy
fjord. They said it was good for you!
Low cloud was a
pain though – not only was it like flying through a sauna (except one where the
steam was freezing), but sometimes he ended up heading in the wrong direction
entirely. One time he was halfway to Burnley, and only a near-collision with
the Stoodley Pike monument set him right. Having broken a bone in his toe
kicking the top of the monument in one hundred feet high dudgeon, he couldn’t
put weight on that foot for a month, and really had to watch his landings.
After
a while, he started to take it for granted. Discovering he could fly had been
an incredible moment (tapered by the irritating idea that if it’d always been
possible, only he’d just never tried it before… he’d wasted so many unnecessary
years walking, driving, and catching the bus), but that was as far as it went,
and soon Jonathan wanted more. He tried out a few other incredible capabilities
– breathing underwater, shooting laser-beams from his eyes, sending horny
messages to Jess via telepathy – but nothing else took. It was the lack of
physical strength that niggled him most, and not just because he should have
been able to boot the top off that fucking monument… but because Jess wanted a
lift.
“Go
on then, Storkman – take me for a fly!”
But
he couldn’t get off the ground with Jess in his arms, couldn’t even feel the
boost from the soles of his feet.
“You
saying I’m too heavy?”
“No…
not at all. I couldn’t lift a skinny lass either…”
So
there was another argument. She wanted him to fly her to Paris. But even if he
had been able to lift her, he didn’t think he could fly that far in one journey.
He’d had to stop and rest for an hour in Kettering on his way to see Eric
Clapton at Alexandra Palace (saved fifty quid on the train fare though!).
What’d happen if he ran out of propulsion halfway across the Channel? Not that
it really mattered, he had very little desire to go to Paris without Jess
anyway (actually, he had very little desire to go with her, other than
to stop her moaning about all the blasted romance – and was that any reason to
do anything?) Anyway, after that, the flying really became an issue between
them.
“Maybe
if you worked out – developed some kind of upper body strength – the stork
could become an eagle…”
But
he wasn’t going to join a gym for anybody. And when Jess bought him the
dumbbells from Argos, he lost it completely.
“If
you’re not happy with me physically, then sod off and find somebody else!”
So
she did. And two nights later, the police were at his door, with a warrantfor his arrest. His solicitor told him not to
worry; the CPS couldn’t even decide what to charge him with. Public nuisance?
Flying without a pilot’s license? Common assault was suggested, but no-one
could take that very seriously. There was absolutely no precedent.
“I
haven’t assaulted anyone!” Jonathan protested.
“They
could try and argue,” his solicitor explained, in a drab, windowless office
that really needed a good dusting, “that you’re putting anyone who witnesses
you in the act of… ahem, ‘flying’… in direct fear of imminent force or criminal
attack… though first the prosecution would have to demonstrate malicious intent
on your part, or a propensity for violence which…”
Jonathan
hoped nobody had seen him booting the top of the Stoodley Pike monument; or
kicking hell out of his neighbour’s dustbin that time it’d blown over, spilling
yoghurt pots and teabags (how many teabags did that tosspot get through in one
week anyway?) all over their shared back yard; or putting a brick through the
windscreen of the green Audi with the ever-shrieking car alarm that was always
parked on the end of their street, but didn’t seem to belong to any of his
neighbours; or knocking over the temporary traffic lights up Scapegoat Hill
that’d been stuck on red three nights running; or…
In
the end, he struck a deal. No more flying to work, and no charges would be
pressed. MI5 wouldn’t be informed and The Sun wouldn’t be given his home
address. Jonathan was resigned to the outcome; he’d always known it was too
good to last. But he couldn’t go back to queueing on the M62 every morning, so
he quit his job and went on the dole, supplementing his income while he waited
for the first benefits payment to come through with various activities that he
refused to feel any shame about. They’d driven him to it, after all, the
bird-burglary (as opposed, you see, to cat-). Well, if they had him down as a
bad guy anyway – why not?
He was cautious
now though, taking care only to pursue such activities on dry nights, with no
moon, so nobody would see him entering via the unlocked skylights, bedroom
windows, and twelfth floor flat balconies that led to his loot. Wet nights, he
stayed in and watched stolen DVDs.
As
for Jess, apart from the time she had to call out the chimney sweep to extract
the dead stork from her flue, she never heard from Jonathan again. No great
loss there. Her new bloke worked for Ryan Air, and flew her anywhere she
wanted.
