36

i was reading in bed yesterday afternoon, dinah had brought me tea, toast, berocca & cake in bed and life was good...

i'm currently reading et tu, babe by mark leyner, and it pleased me no end when i read that he was 36 was he wrote it...

the night before i'd done my improvisation @ 2:34 am and i'd opened the card my brother sent me, telling me that 36 was a square number, a triangle number & a 13-gonal number...

sunday night i was in a pub with felinity & dinah & i arranged 36 mini-cheddars into 1st a triangle, then a square, but failed to arrange them in a 13-gonal shape...

this afternoon i took 36 pennies arranged them into a triangle, a square and a 13-gonal shape, although the 13-gonal is a bit rubbish...

Rotherwick birthday reading while cycling

as promised last tuesday, although it took a week rather than a couple of days, 21 miles SSE of my home village of blewbury lies Rotherwick...

and our 8888th visitor hails from this place, close to Hook in Hampshire, the village of Rotherwick:


it turns out that this person comes to see my blog every now and again, they were here this afternoon, then 3 fridays before that... and they were the 8888th since that counter began...

"Situated between the Whitewater and the Lyde, both tributaries of the Loddon, Rotherwick stands 300ft. above sea level."

so says this website devoted to Rotherwick... ok enough rotherwickness... thankyou sitemeter for providing me with this counter which feeds my obsession with numbers...

i'm currently reading the master & margarita, possibly for the 3rd time, finished the book thief last week which was wonderful...

note to self - don't try reading while cycling, even if you survive your journey you will find that you won't have been able to read very much...

coming back from a jaunt into woodgreen i was so taken with the book that i tried reading it while cycling and honestly... it's just not a good idea...

one of these days i'm going to get better acquainted with the journey from woodgreen to here, it goes via noel park and i'm forever getting confused... my local biking knowledge is very good up to about half way up woodgreen high street but to where the tube is...

D, along with John Sinclair when he's in london, have moved up to woodgreen, somewhere up there,

John who currently has dinah's memory stick, in detroit...

a journey up there to see those cats is definitely in order...

ok the birthday, it proved to be most lovely, T & M, the singers of the 2 bands i'm in, landlord E, felinity & dad, dinah & floopy, spski, guitarist O (from M's band) and old friend J, who i thought might have been the 8888th but i think he's living actually in reading, not south of it...

we had a great deal of fun,floopy & J accompanying us back home for more frivolity once the bar had shut...

a really nice birthday, somehow i often feel the lack of friends on birthdays, dating back to years ago when me & E stopped seeing each other and most of our mutual friends gravitated to her birthday which is 2 days before mine...

but this year i think i'm finally passed that... of course it might yet raise it's ugly head next year but this time it wasn't to be seen...

oh and i'm playing a song or two next tuesday @ CM, a smallish gig for people involved in the place, i'm getting T to come down and do one or two with me as well, to publicise our gig @ the clapham grand on august 1st, if your in east london on tueday night you're more than welcome to come along, i doubt it'll cost anything...

x

all the 8's

maybe tomorrow, (i'll try to sttle down...)

no, no,

maybe tomorrow it'll happen, 8867 right now, 21 visits away,

could be tomorrow, or thursday,

anyway the same deal as when i've noticed before, some facts about you 8888th visitor, as much as i can glean from sitemeter...

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anniversary

absolutely pig exhausted...

the birthday of this blog, (which turns 4 right now) falls close to the anniversary of someone else's bereavement...

my thought's are with her, just as i'm glad that my dad is still around, and his birthday will be in a week or so...

i was intending to do something to mark this blogday but i have nothing...

proust is by turns too much and just right...

i'm gigging on saturday night with one of the bands i'm in...

i've got another round of marking/paperwork to submit tomorrow and that's all ahead of me...

my hammond organ is sex on a stick...

x

8000th

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glenside, pennsylvania,

our 8000th visitor was looking for longcat encryption when they stumbled across this place...

well even though you're gone now mr/mrs/miss/ms 8000 i'm glad you passed by x

lost improvisation russian visitor

T came round yesterday to do probably my last session for the recordings, some piano, some clav, some hammond and also my voice...

good session, closing with the 1st of my longcat collaborative improvisations, T on voice, me on voice & hammond...

and i half knew it would happen, but somehow i thought if i waited long enough it would right itself...

cubase freezing at the moment i pressed stop, we went out to the plough after to wait it out and when i came home much the worse for wear 4 or so hours later it was still frozen, so the improvisation is lost...

it's happened before and i really need to get into the habit of saving just before i press stop... or maybe set up auto saving... foolish, and it means this week's improvisation will be recorded later today on my own...

i did however meet a man in the pub who said steven seagal is a great blues musician... this is going to make me laugh for weeks...

and then also at roughly the same time i had my 6666th visitor, sadly @ 8:04pm on the 6th of the 7th 07 and not 4 hours later on 7/7/07 but it's still great...

and tonight i'm meeting with felinity to go the circus courtesy of spski which is lovely, i was meant to be going with my dinah but some work has come up and though i'm very sad not to have her on my arm it's great that felinity can come...

oh yes, and where did my 6666th visitor hail from?

well i'm glad you asked, they hail from the great city of st petersburg.

x

punctures & gothernberg

Continent : Europe
Country : Sweden
State/Region : Vastra Gotaland
City : Gteborg
Lat/Long : 57.7167, 11.9667


as promised... and gratifyingly pretty it is... Gteborg, or Göteborg, or Gothernburg...

Sweden...

no facts for you, just pleasingly a little like gotham... batman's home...

thankyou oh 6333rd visitor for drawing our attention to this beautiful place...

and now punctures...

3 of them, all on my back wheel which is a real pain...

my front wheel has teflon coating and seems relatively impervious to punctures, but my back wheel is imperial rather than metric so they don't do that kind of tire for it... and it does get punctures... oh yes it does...

so 1stly, a couple of weeks ago, i got a puncture when i still had money, i took it to cycle surgery... they fixed it... marvellous...

the 2nd one came right in my recent no money period and i tried to fix it but messed it up... i had to wait until i had money again to take it in to cycle surgery again, and while they were fixing it they reconnected my gears wrongly...

so on saturday when i picked the bike up the gears were wrong, and the gear lever was very resistant... which meant i pulled too hard on it and sheared the cable...

so i took it into cycle surgery on tuesday and they said - oh look, your cable is sheared, i said yes, but it's sheared because you reconnected my gears wrongly so are you going to pay for it to be fixed? and they said....

no.

so i'm never going there again, cycle surgery on holloway road ladies and gentlemen, bullshit service... (forgive my language)...

there's a bike shop just round the corner from where i work in shoreditch so i decided to go there this morning, drop it off before work and pick it up around now... get them to rectify cycle surgery's mistakes...

i grabbed my bike this morning and lo & behold... my 3rd puncture... back wheel... no time to fix it, public transport into work, no rectifying just yet for my little bike...

gigging tonight @ the metro with T's band...

x

dawn project non videoblog

the camera arrived last night from lovely E, i got up this morning, i cycled up there...

it all went fine except that i left my little camera @ home so no videoblog this week...

in it's place will be the little video i made while W(floopy)shaman was gallivanting about tying trees to other trees on sunday...

and while i'm here, i'd like to welcome our 6333rd visitor who will be along at some point today most likely...

a little view of where you live will adorn this blog good reader... all in good time...

x

Billy Childish is Dead

people come to this blog for the strangest things...

our 5555th visitor was searching the web for the above, the medway based punk influenced billy childish, from somewhere in london, sitemeter tells me it was bromley but i've learnt not to trust it's locations within london...

to my 5555th visitor on the night of the equinox... something kind of cool there...

i'm stuck @ work trawling through the mountain of paperwork i've been putting off, sadly it doesn't look like i'll get through it all tonight as i'm scooting up to W(floopy)shaman & T's for an equinox fire this evening and then it's early to bed so i can rise bright and madly early for the dawn project tomorrow...

so i've got to push on...

a good lesson today but then they almost always are on a wednesday this semester...

and i was playing the piano in the break and i had to keep reminding myself that nothing is wrong... this project to shift my sleep really messes with my emotional state...

strange days...

x

all the fives

welcome, oh welcome you...

oh 5555th visitor (since i started counting)

oh what a great number....

x

pre gig dundeeism

so it was 1:40 am, last night, searching the internet for the word "mellotron", some citizen of dundee using firefox on a PC became the 5000th person to visit this here blog...

(since july 23rd 2005)


dundee...

in the east of scotland on the firth of tay... known as the city of discovery due to it's scientific background and also... but look, there's no point me just repeating information i read moments ago on this page about dundee...

suffice it to say that i hereby recognise dundee as the place of residence of my 5000th visitor and let's be done with it...

it was very nearly going to be finsbury park, london but my beautiful girlfriend did in the end agree to let someone else be the 5000th... she is after all far more special than a mere number...

we're going out in about an hour or so to my gig @ the metro club, oxford street, i've had a mad day of it... teaching this morning, racing over to kennington to run through the set one more time then back on the bike to soho square to load the gear in for the gig, soundcheck... before cycling home through strangely empty cycle lanes ...

i'm pretty knackered but a good dinner will sort me out... then tart myself up and take dinah by the arm and lead her through the bowels of the underground to tottenham court road where we'll probably catch the band on before us (the unready) before i get up there with T's band and rock the place out...

very slight nerves but they've got time to arrive in more numbers as 10 o'clock looms nearer and nearer...

x

welcome 5000th visitor

...(since july 23rd 2005)

which was roughly a year? i think since i started blogging...

was it really 2004 when i started this thing...? yes indeed, june 2004...

anyway, as i did almost a thousands visits ago i will bestow upon my 5000th visitor some kind of geographical reference...

there, now that's an incentive if ever i offered one...

long day of travelling by public transport today, gigging tomorrow and my keyboard has to be where we're rehearsing so that i can cycle from my work in the morning...

so it meant that i strapped it to my back and braved the tube down to kennington this morning, dropping it off and getting straight back on the tube to go to hammersmith, where i stayed an extra hour beyond my regular classes (but why?) which put me right in the rushhour as i caught the tube home again...

were those mad storms last thursday? yes i believe so... so that's two thursday's in a row that i've been tubing it to hammersmith... last week because of aforementioned storm and wind... i remember getting off the tube @ finsbury park to a veritable wall of commuters... fighting my way out of the tube doors, more fighting just to make my way off the platform...

dismembered limbs and blood all around me and i had to wash my sword on the...

hang on...

no, no, no...

so why did i stay an extra hour at hammersmith?

because my boss turned down my idea for splitting up my two classes over there into those who find it easier and those who find it harder, as recompense she offered me an extra hour or perhaps two if there was interest from the students, a space where select students could get more attention from me... and this week 5/6 students took up that offer... more hourage for me and also potentially a good learning situation, early days thereof today but hopeful...

you know, i think the mad storms were two weeks ago... can't be sure...

what all this tubing did for me today was give me an opportunity to read from 2012 the year of the mayan prophesy by daniel pinchbeck that Wfloopy(shaman) & T have leant me... it's turning out to be very good... (set me up for a satisfying fantasy the other day where i was somehow the chosen one writhing in spiritual agony while a blinding light created a crop circle around me)...

oh... and i've had a notion about my weekly improvisations... i don't know if there's interest enough for this, but i thought i could offer for sale a cd of whichever improvisations people wish... each one typically 15 minutes long, so you could fit 5 on a cd...

but how to make them nice not just the usual burnt cd's i can do myself... hmmm... cdbaby?

anyway, i'm rambling...

welcome oh 5000th visitor, your presence is a present...

x

welcome

4000th browser (since july 23rd 2005)

i love numbers... & i love that counter over there on the right... i started it over a year after i started the blog, over a year ago now...

and in the last week it's given me pleasure watching it count from 3980 to where it's @ right now 3999....

so i have nothing else to say but welcome... oh 4000th browsing person...

welcome...

x



and you were browsing from the city of Nagoya in Japan where it was 2.22 am 15 minutes ago (6.22 pm here) and it gave me the opportunity to check out what Nagoya looks like (bless google earth)

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