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Entries from December 28th, 2016

The good side of 2016

December 28th, 2016 · Comments Off on The good side of 2016 · Life

This year is generally reckoned to be a bit of a stinker, but it wasn’t all bad from where I am sitting.

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Swearing an oath

December 19th, 2016 · Comments Off on Swearing an oath · Politics

I am in equal parts baffled and irritated by this business about public servants swearing an oath to British values, not least because nobody seems to be able to say what they are. Are they the values that most people hold or the ones that people in the Westminster bubble think that most people hold, […]

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Big in the 70s

December 19th, 2016 · Comments Off on Big in the 70s · Music

I have just been looking at a list of the best-selling albums of the 1970s. It was a bit of a surprise because if I was a contestant on Pointless and was asked to name a best-selling album of the 70s I would probably have thought that Framptom Comes alive or Bat out of Hell […]

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Inflation madness

December 14th, 2016 · Comments Off on Inflation madness · Technology

I had an email from Virgin Media the other day. Remember how we used to just have razor blades? And then we started to have razors with two blades? They were advertised by an animation showing how the first blade left a bit of stubble and the second blade caught that? And then it turned […]

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Eric Johnson

December 14th, 2016 · Comments Off on Eric Johnson · Music

Tonight I turned on Vintage TV and there was some virtuoso guitarist playing. It was a bit like Jeff Beck in places or Steve Vai in others, but I didn’t recognise him, so waited for the caption at the end to find it was somebody called Eric Johnson. The name didn’t even ring a bell, […]

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Dirk Gently

December 12th, 2016 · Comments Off on Dirk Gently · Life

I see that Netflix now has a US-made version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic detective Agency available. I saw some odd bits of it while Jayne was watching it on her PC and although there were a few good gags I can’t say that I was tempted to watch it myself, despite (or maybe because of?) […]

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Time lapse

December 7th, 2016 · Comments Off on Time lapse · Technology

Well this is fun! But also frustrating because we are now used to quite high resolution satellite imagery and obviously the whole time lapse thing can only be done to the resolution of the worst  in the dataset. If you zoom in to Crawley you can see the major changes, like Maidenbower springing up, but […]

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The Oxygène of publicity

December 7th, 2016 · Comments Off on The Oxygène of publicity · Music

I see Jean-Michel Jarre has a new album out, a second follow-up to his 1976 breakthrough album Oxygène, called Oxygène 3. The tracks are called Oxygène Pt 14, Oxygène Pt 15, and so on up to Oxygène Pt 20. Jean-Michel is not someone to waste a lot of time thinking about titles for things. I […]

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Stop the year, I want to get off

December 2nd, 2016 · Comments Off on Stop the year, I want to get off · Life

As if the whole Trump/Brexit thing wasn’t bad enough, this year has seen a lot of celebrity deaths, the latest being Andrew Sachs. Of course this happens every year so I am not sure why it feels worse this year. Possibly because a few of them were absolute A+ list celebrities like Bowie, Prince, Ali, […]

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