Pig Sty Avenue

"...I doubt not but in time Ardrossan will become a grand emporium; but the people of Saltcoats, a sordid race, complain that it will be their ruin". ( Galt, p3 ). I know where you're coming from, Miss Pringle.   Mind you, it seems that everyone in the UK complains incessantly, although maybe that's just the impression you get if you watch too much rolling news from the BBC: mostly whinging about the weather, the resultant "travel misery", (where "misery" really means "inconvenience"), and, horror of horrors, Christmas presents bought online which might not be delivered on time.  Ffs.  But there I go, complaining about the complainers.   And it's cheap to be smug when you're in that serene state that travellers know, when the visa's in your passport and the flight's booked and you're wondering what books you'll buy at WH Smiths in Departures.   Wolf Hall 's in the frame, and so is Empire of the Sun , whi...

I still feel nauseous whenever I think about Newcastle's ownership.  The feelings don't diminish much when I read this sort of stuff .  Those people flog you if you're gay or drink Brown Ale, mind.  Couldn't be worse than Ashley, though, and as they'd be on a PR mission, they would necessarily not do stupid things...

Fucken Aye

Getting to grips with the shape of item characteristic curves in Baker, I came across the concept of a three parameter model, where the third parameter allows the fact that candidates will successfully guess the right answers to some items, per Birnbaum.  This is something I'll get around to researching some day.  My preliminary theory is that "guessing" is a fundamental part of candidate performance, not simply because, (say) when doing a multiple choice test I've a one-in-four (or five) chance of getting it right, but because it may not be pure guesswork, but what is usually called an "inspired" guess, the correct answer lurking in the candidate's subconscious and recalled at need.  In other words, in a real life language situation, they would recall the correct usage.  Most language learners will be able to provide anecdotes of situations where, say, they remembered a bit of vocabulary from God-knows-where, or were unexpectedly able to use the subjun...

Ah well .  Hughton and the players deserve the credit, no doubt, but it offers some hope for the future.  And of course, Ashley remains a twat and a shite, but, wtf.  I mean, just think about the kind of people who own English Premier League clubs.  Would you want to meet any of the bastards socially?  Sheik Mansour spends all that money, and doesn't even go to the games, (they'd let him in for nowt, and he'd get a good seat - does he watch it on telly, one wonders?); the Glazers, ffs, like that family out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre ; and don't even get me started on Abramovich.  So our own fat guy's in good company.  Put it another way, big capitalists have ugly souls.  For now, we're stuck with them, though.  For now.  

Having uncurled from my foetal ball position, and emerged from the cupboard I was hiding in, the only comfort I can offer is that it's no good crying over spilt milk.  My own feeling still is that Hughton would have gone on to become a great manager of Newcastle.  But what do I know?  The situation we're in is that the club we love is owned by a fat useless bastard, who may or may not have made a correct decision with the appointment of Pardew .  We shall see.  The result of today's game against Liverpool will speak volumes, unfairly perhaps as he's only had one full day in the job, but Chris Hughton got no mercy and Pardew should expect none.

With basic literacy students we do something called language experience where you negotiate a text with the student, and then type it up, print it, chop it around, get them to write it out...  One short text can produce hours of work, and is good for letter and word recognition and formation.  Well, the techniques seem to work with a five year old native speaker.  You can make a singing lesson of it, too From LYRICS MODE .COM lyrics archive Lyrics | Winx Club lyrics - We Are The Winx lyrics Close your eyes And open your heart. Believe in yourself, That's how it starts. Dreams will come true just wait and see, 'Cos the magic's in you and the magic's in me! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! Come join the club! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! Come join the club! We are the Winx! Magical flowers, Digital powers, Rhythmns and tunes, The sun and the moon, Magic shapes and shifting tides, And the fire burning deep inside, We...

You.  Fat.  Useless.  Fuck.

It's good to know I'm not the only one who assumed that Jeremy Hunt was worse than his famous brother, Warwick.

Time in Visa Limbo continues to be well used.  I need to get to grips with IRT, big time.  A good starting point is Baker's Basic Item Response Theory , and the software that goes with it, (you'll need Visual Basic 5.0 if you're running anything later than Windows 95, and I have no idea how to run it on a Mac or Linux or wtf). There are a lot of web resources on IRT and Rasch measurement, and I'll link to them in a new post when I'm a bit further down the road with this. I'm going to use the label IRT for posts connected with this, eschewing other terms such as CAT.

Talking of crazy fucktards, God Bless America , (scroll down to the last para of the main post for the best bit).  And how come Amazon got to be hosting the data , anyway?  Good excuse to go elsewhere for my books in future. It's classic case of stable doors and horses heading for the horizon.  You can get it here , and no doubt in 10,000 other links near you.

This is what happens when some people take five minutes out of looking at porn and downloading movies, I suppose.  Does Anonymous google its way to that particular two year old post?  It's a bit disappointing really: thousands of blog posts and the only one that attracts any crazies is (I've just re-read it) a rather restrained gripe about a dodgy scanner I was sold.  Not that I want to attract crazies.

...is the working title .  Though, mind, it's still at the foundation digging stage of being under construction.  The template wants tweaked, but the main thing is to get contributors, and I'm going to start on the tefl contacts tomorrow. Posts should be approximately 1000 - 2000 words, and they should be about the game itself, the context of the teams and their histories and places in their leagues, together with observations on the ground, talks with the fans and others, how you got there, how much to get in, what there is to eat and drink in the vicinity, any adventures...  Plus photos and other multimedia, if available.  I've opened a gmail account for it: asianfootballreports@gmail.com . I'll get the contributors to send me their text and multimedia there, and I'll edit it into the blog.

...Said the President of Montpellier when it was suggested that his club were top of Ligue 1 only because the rest of the league were crap.  It's a cracker.

Here's another article for the day when I get my Athens back.

Many thanks to Dolphin Hotel for blogging about his own contribution to European Football Weekends .  What a splendid idea.  It got me thinking that it might be a lot of fun to do something similar in Asia.

The last couple of mornings, at the same point on the High Road, Saltcoats, there's been a flock of Siskins, a dozen or more birds, feeding it looks like on the rosehips on the dog-roses planted by the council at the edge of the road.

During the last one , I was apparently craving all aspects of British culture, good and bad.  This time, I'm developing a worrying interest in afternoon TV, especially Doctors, and beginning to plan a sub-tropical monsoon climate balcony. Plans for the zero maintenance wildlife garden having now been abandoned, I can take the borage, evening primrose and tobacco plant seeds.  Teasel won't work in containers, I'm guessing, so I'll give them to The Old Man for the allotment.  I've also found a packet of lavender seeds.  I'll want culinary herbs, the Scarborough Four, plus basil, oregano and coriander. These seeds may all be available on the other side of Visa Limbo, I don't know.  There's a garden centre not far away, and here's a map:

SPSS v19 may indeed have better "functionality", (wtf?) and I'll bet that its graphics are indeed better, (PSPP's histograms and pie-charts are somewhat basic).   But for the moment it can do everything I need, which is crunching lists of test scores and establishing mean, mode, median, skewness, kurtosis, range, standard deviations, etc., and, most importantly, correlation co-efficients. But it's not perfect.  There is an occasional bug, the cause of which I haven't isolated yet, (though I probably can when I get time), and the basic graphics might be disadvantageous in non-academic, commercial situations.  The bottom line though, it's open source, free, and easy to use.  The latest version of SPSS can do more.  But it can't do enough to justify the cost - which is £200 for a student edition.

Because I'm planning to do a lot of on-the-balcony Chinese herbalism in the near future, I went this morning to PFAF and found that it's had a makeover.  Which is nice.

Nearly a year since the onset of serious photographic dysfunction, I waited until everyone was asleep tonight and got into the lobby press darkroom and put an exposed roll of HP5 into the dev tank.  It was a roll which had been sitting in the Holga since, I suppose, last Christmas or thereabouts.  I'll dev it in Beutler A+B tomorrow, (for 12mins, apparently ). The Holga and the dev tank will be the only photographic equipment being taken to the next level .  Because they're very light, and, anyway, a Holga, in China , what a rush.

Level 1 would actually be quite challenging, as you attempted to get through your Cert. course, (which I recall as like cramming a degree into four weeks, in Barcelona, with after-school refreshments in a bar called Antibiotica).  As you progressed through the levels you'd meet a whole range of bad guys, such as the chiselling school owners who'd do their damnedest each month to lighten your meagre wage packet of a few Euros or Turkish Lira.  There were the drunken DoSs.  And there'd be a whole level devoted to the residential school in Great Malvern owned and "run" by a family of psychopaths. I found that as I reached the 10th level it had all got a bit dull, the actual teaching had become like falling off a log, and the best amusement was found in the games additional features, academic research and teaching management.  But then I found a hidden level.  If, as you progress, you pick up enough materials and test writing skills, qualifications, and abilities ...

Looks like we were out-manoeuvred .  Buggeration.  Despite this, in the great scheme of things, who would you rather have as a manager, wor Chris or that whale-jawed loudmouth gum-chewing twat?

In a few weeks I'm going to have access to more language testing data that you can shake a whole copse full of sticks at, so I'm sharpening the number crunching skills with Bachman (2004) and its companion workbook .  The latter relies on SPSS, so I went in search and downloaded a 21 day version of PASW v18.  When the 21 days ran out, I thought, well, it's a fair cop, and prepared to put my hand in my pocket.  FFS.  I spent an entire morning in a vicious IBM loop, credit card in hand, looking for an licence authorization code.  Forget about it.  It was like trying to find a shop located 1000 feet underground, with no access from the surface. Fortunately, an old chum  had put me in the direction of comparable open-source software.  This morning I've downloaded and installed (in about 2 minutes) PSPP  .  I haven't worked with it yet, but it looks like it does everything that PASW v18 does - everything that a language tester wants of it, ...

This looks like as good a place as any.

Maybe it won't last, and we'll become becalmed in mid-table, or even have to fight for survival.  But this looks nice just now.  

With a whole new definition of the word "unlucky" .

These four exercises are all good, even though they appear to have child-learners in mind, they still work.   Stretches is a good one to warm up with, especially if you do it two hands.

Whereby I mean a re-established relationship with the keyboard, and the absent boxers being those pesky wee note letters, which I've covered over with a strip of electricians' tape.  And that seems to be a good thing.  I had a good hour's practice tonight with the right hand bit of that waltz, and it worked out as thought , inasmuch as I had to work on the pattern relationship between the staff and the keyboard, using the C as a reference point.  For example, there's B, right down the middle of the staff, and there it is, tucked in below C on the keyboard. Incidentally, I also learned that evening piano practice is utterly fucking futile after the 2nd glass of wine, though blogging is more forgiving vis-a-vis alcohol consumption.  Or something.

I am ashamed to say that I abandoned Maria back in September .  I'll catch up with her later as bass clef practice.  I literally dusted off the keyboard yesterday and got back to working through the PSP software, picking up on the theory lessons, and working with 3/4 time, practising a waltz.  It was gratifying to see that there was, after two months, an intuitive connexion between the note values and their places on the staff - some of them, anyway.  It is like riding a bike, forsooth. There's a whole load of mental processing involved here. There's the note's position on the staff, which relates to its position on the keyboard. That note has its letter-value, within its octave.  And then there's the length.  And the wee number to signify a finger.   The keyboard has the letter-values for each note, and I've been getting my head into cross-referencing them with the notes on the staff.  And I'm getting quite good at finding the notes whils...

The deconstruction of Whistle Down The Wind continues: this is the junction of Mercy Drive, a small-ish cul-de-sac, which you can see heading off to the right there, and Rte 31.  "Mercy" as a thoroughfare name isn't all that common in the US, and as this is in McHenry, it's almost certainly the place, on some level. And Mercy and Grand was also the title of a show involving covers of 12 Tom Waits songs, which appears to have toured provincial venues in 2007.   Gavin Bryars was on bass.

Tom Waits'  Whistle Down The Wind has been one of those songs today, lodged in the brain, singing odd lines from it at inappropriate moments, irritating those in the vicinity.  Like a lot of Tom, it would work as poetry.  And I'm jolly grateful to this blogger who explains in some detail the meaning of "Marylebone coach ".   The best guess on "Mercy and Grand" is that it might be a real street corner , somewhere.  There's a Mercy Drive, which adjoins Illinois 31 , (which I suppose might be called Grand, locally), in McHenry, Illinois, which of course features in the lyrics of Johnsburg Illinois.  

...Going to the neo-liberal scam party?

Woohoo!

...is also trending on Twatter.

Go on lad, get a hat trick.  Plenty of time left.  And could you get a more poetic red card than Tightarse Bumble?

Surely, a parcel posted in Yemen, and addressed to a Chicago synagogue , would be liable to draw attention to itself?  Why address it there if it was designed to explode in mid-air, surely somewhere anonymous, a New Jersey pork butchers, for example would be better?  Or were they thinking, "Well, if it doesn't go off in the plane, maybe we'll get a few American Zionists as a consolation prize"?  Reasoning that a Chicago based rabbi would be dopey enough to eagerly open the unexpected package from a Muslim country, where murderous Islamists are known to hang out.  Halibut, forsooth.

Who started all this bullshit ?  Ms Malignant C must be strongly implicated, of course, as her team (who, we learn, have a   polymath captain ), square up in a match which apart from the colossal derby rivalry, is in any case offering three very valuable mid table points.  Win or lose, I can't wait to see what she manages to write in tomorrow's Guardian, another nuanced approach to the beleaguered Hughton theme, I'll bet. And now, as if in a sports' reporters lager fuelled dream, Maradonna appears on the scene .  Could you imagine him at St James?  Plenty of entertainment for the supporters of every other team, it would be another nightmare for us.  So, Ashley, you fat fuck, put pen to paper on a new contract for our Chris.  Now.

It's worth looking at this report for the photo at the head of it.  Listen to Mick and you will see that Barnsley and Sheffield, where John Shuttleworth comes from, have similar accents.

Given that it's a filthy night in south west Scotland, this topic may seem like wishful thinking, or something, but watch this space, we are TEFL teachers, and some corners of the world seem to be recession- and cuts-proof. Bougainvillea .  I've always liked the name when I've encountered it in novels, but never grown it, or known anything about it.  Nor in my times in hot places have I consciously noticed it. Getting to grips with the manifold varieties looks like a whole wee world, unto itself . I like the idea of growing succulents, too, especially aloe vera, which would grow lovely and big in a hot dry climate.  And cacti, of course, big time.  Also drought resistant culinary herbs - sage for starters.  Man, I'm telling you, I need a hoe in my hands and earth under my nails, this weather.

Pah!

I need to get a look at this article in full, when I've got an Athens log in. Yan Jin  The place of language testing and assessment in the professional preparation of foreign language teachers in China.  Language Testing , Vol. 27, No. 4.  2010 pp. 555-584.

Well, that was a very handy three points.  I did like the idea of Carroll and Nolan as a comedy duo, too , with Scouse v Geordie domestic humour, burning cars and rude graffitti.  Was it rude, though, does anyone know?

If you were going to think about learning Chinese, this would be a plausible starting point .

It feels like we're at an important stage in the season, when we need a bit of consistency.  A couple of wins would push us back into mid-table, which, let's be honest, has been our statistically mean home in the last fifty odd years.  This article in the Telegraph is interesting.

The English Premier League: soap opera for blokes.  And it was thoughtful of Rooney to hog the headlines, and divert attention from Andy Carroll's latest antics .

...ace."   That is the lyric, isn't it?

For the gravy, stock from your meat, whatever it is, skimming off most of the fat, (depends how greasy you like the end product); simmer it with a finely chopped onion and maybe a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed or chopped or wtf.  One beef oxo cube.  A forkful of plain flower, left to settle for 20 mins or so in a large glass of wine, (you can be sure it won't go lumpy if you stir that straight in), and then a bit more wine and/or a bit of the stock off your veg, according to how wine-ish you like it, and how thick.   Add herbs to taste. For the yorkshires, three heaped forkfuls of plain four (in a pint jug, is what I use), two eggs, and a bit of milk, and mix it all up.  If you do this a few hours before it's wanted and leave it in the fridge, and give it a wee beating with a fork every hour or so, then you won't get any lumps - which only applies if you don't have a food processor.  Pour about 1/4 inch of the batter into a well pre-heated yorkshire pudd...

Which is one person's view of that (ex) Liverpool owning Hicks.  It's a fair point, and could serve as a handy description of most of those who own or have owned big football clubs, including Newcastle down the years, (and I'm talking as a man whose great grandma was once engaged to Stan Seymour , forsooth).   The Liverpool saga this week has been great fun for all of us who aren't Liverpool supporters, and were secretly hoping they might end up doing a Leeds. Not that anyone can afford to be too smug.  Newcastle, like everyone else's club, is owned by someone for whom silverware only means a better bottom line.  It's all about bucks, kid.  And I just don't know how we can get from this plutocratic situation to a more equitable one, where big chunks, if not most, if not all, of a club is owned by its supporters, like Barcelona or Real Madrid.  Who seem to do all right, btw.

Teaching exam classes is theoretically straightforward.  There should be motivated students, and a common goal, namely an exam to pass.  Naturally, human nature intervenes and it's not so simple.  For example, a class of Libyan middle managers would frequently complain to me "we're not just here to pass [the exam], we're here to learn English."  Which was a reasonable observation, though you would need to qualify it if you knew that this class complained about everything from the perceived shortness of their prayer breaks, to the sugar in their tea. But this got me thinking about possible research parameters around a real life testing and SLA situation.  Say there's a commercial motive, in enabling students to pass a high stakes pen-and-paper test.  One can of course provide classroom tuition for this, and no doubt would.  But bearing in mind that most of this exam's candidates are teenagers, it would be useful in motivational terms to give them prac...

The significant development is Unified State Exam , which became compulsory just last year.  There are a bank of past test papers, here .  There's an early (2006) article from Avanesov .  I also need to spend some time with this Council of Europe document .  There's a lot more.

This is a note-to-self to research this next week.  I'll consult Prof Wikipedia first.

There's a patch at the bottom of the garden had been used as a rubbish dump when the flat was let.  A feral privet and a couple of elders had overgrown the rubbish, so I chopped them right back, got rid of the rubbish and old bricks lying around, (there were the remains of an ash-paling fence, the wood badly rotted, but the galvanised wire in perfect nick after what must be at least forty years; I remember those fences being ubiquitous in the 60s), and heaped up the cuttings from the trees.  I'll have a bonfire, probably on Bonfire Night, glyosphate the very coarse grass that's growing along the path edge, and then turn it over.    I've got four gorse plants, the only survivors, I think, from the seeds I blogged about here  which are therefore nearly five years old. I'll plant them there.  I've also got a jam jar full of poppy seeds.  They're at least two years old, but they've been in a cool dark cupboard, and there are a lot, so hopefully if I...

Did I really just hear  Thatcher's ET refer to Ed Milliband on the Today programme as "Mr Bean"?  Bit rich. In other news, why have all my blog posts become Tweet-sized?  And mostly about football?  I need to find an activity which will rescue the attention span from its current miniature state, something like Alice's cake.  Was it a cake?

It's classical, man, the way this certain line just hits you.  One may be due to bore it out of one, soon, or something.

It's a measure of how things are that I didn't hear this news on Radio 5  just now and say, "Oh, fucking hell!" but instead thought, "Hmm, juicy."

I really am trying not to swear, but, fucking hell!

He gets the top-o-the-page at the Grauniad's Chalkboard for the weekend .  Fucking hell.

Ooyah .

...but fucking hell .

Who cuts your hair, anyway?  Classic.

I had a mad idea about making wine from wormwood, and distilling it.  But a wee bit of googling revealed that absinthe is actually made by mascerating the wormwood and other herbs in alcohol, and the distilling it again, and then mascerating more herbs.  (Never mind absinthe, and miss out the distillation bit, just making tinctures from cheap vodka and any number and combination of herbs sounds like a lot of fun).   A wikipedia article seems to suggest that the thujon  levels of James-Joyce-in-Paris era absinthe were not necessarily that high.   (I remember reading somewhere a theory that Joyce got some of his inspiration for Finnegans Wake through absinthe enhanced dream recall).  This study   (the abstract anyway, I'd like to see the whole study and see what the "other mood state dimensions examined "are;  I do miss my Athens account this weather), shows an effect on attention.  I once smoked sage, which also contains thujon, with...

Here.  

Nice.

Here's a pic to put the fear of God into you, of a Sunday.  I'm still on for the notes to Canto 1, by the way, with little time to read as I think about catching up on household chores neglected during a summer away.

The brilliance of The Smiths, of course, was not in Morrisey's singing or his lyrics, (they were always meant ironically... weren't they?) but in the relationship between the singing and the music, and especially Johnny Marr's genius guitar work.  Which is another way of saying that, whilst I was once a fan of The Smiths, went to see them on the Meat Is Murder tour, (at Newcastle), and still occasionally listen to Hatful of Hollows, I've never had much time for Morrisey. So to answer the question above, no he's not a pop genius, (he's done nothing of note since The Smiths split up), he is a twat, obviously, and he's also a racist twat .  It won't do to make comments about the gates of England being flooded and then say, oh, I abhor racism.  And now he makes a blanket labelling of the whole Chinese race as a "subspecies", (one presumes pejorative intent in use of the prefix), because of Chinese culture's attitude to animals. I could say ...

To check out later .

I'm still a very long way from being able instantly to know what note is represented on the treble clef, and I'm even further away from doing so on the bass.  And I really struggle with 8th notes, still, (never mind those pesky 'teenths).   And my left hand is naturally less able than the right.  So I can try to get three learning outcomes from the left hand part of Ave Maria.  I'm blogging it here so I can have it on the screen and work from the Live! software, which is much easier on the ear than PSP.

At the end of a summer spent working with Italians, I've decided to re-read La Commedia .  I read the Dorothy L Sayers translation when I was a teenager, and loved it, (though I gave up very early in  Paradise).  Probably, I'll get a lot more out of in now than I did then. This time I'm going with the Hollander , which is starting with promise: I read the Introduction last night, which managed to deal with complicated ideas regarding allegory and hold my attention, and I read the 1st Canto this morning, and it works as poetry. The Princeton Dante Project is a useful resource.  And I especially like the Italian audio , so that I can hear it as well as read it in the original.

This is something I need to spend some time with.  I got to it after a bit of googling having read this article about Nick Franglen and his theremin under London Bridge.  How splendid it all is.  What I most like about the London Bridge thing is, he doesn't know how it's all going to pan out.

No 4th form jokes, please. I've been thinking about this.  In a few months I'll be moving beyond the instructive but rather cloying environment of PSP, where all the notes have finger numbers on them; (some of which don't make much sense, incidentally: the music I posted yesterday , for example, had me playing  that B flat with my thumb). This is a good starting point , with some helpful advice.  There aren't any books devoted specifically to the subject, that I can find.  So, just use the loaf and practise . Another thing, having the midi keyboard which has the names of the notes next to the naturals might be making me lazy, preventing connexion of the position of the key with the note.

I watched Tom Waits' Big Time tonight, for the first time in... fifteen years? I remembered the gag about the films with seven Xs, and half remembered the one about Wigs and Novelty Items, but had forgotten the one about the shop selling Used Erotica, and the questions that arose:  Had it been cleaned?  Who cleaned it?  Did they have a licence?  How 'used' was it?   Who used it? There's no one quite like Tom when you're feeling a bit blue.  

Here's the bit of Ode to Joy in B flat major that I'm practising just now:  See, on the treble staff, the Es and the Bs are going to be flat.  And I was thinking, wtf, there aren't any notes on those ledger lines.  On the bass staff, it's fair enough, where the Es and the Bs are marked as flats, you've got them on the ledger lines.  But playing those two Bs in the third bar of the treble staff, for example, as naturals sounded wrong...  Until I twigged that the notation applies to all Bs, not just those on the ledger line, but those outside the staff, an octave below. Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs.  I said "until I twigged" but it was actually quite a eureka moment.  Or, if I was being pedantic, a measurable learning outcome. I know I blogged this earlier , but Os didn't get it, so maybe I hadn't explained it properly, (people sometimes read my posts after all), and anyhow I wanted to get the music up on the monitor for practisi...

Here's what I've learned today: if a key signature tells you a certain note is sharp or flat, then the wee bugger's still sharp or flat an octave away.  It only took me half an hour of scowling and saying wtf? until I got this.  In this respect, at least, today has been a good day.

There was the hope, which lasted as long as a match struck on the deck of a container ship in a gale, that the Tories + the Liberals might produce some kind of weird libertarian one-nation essentially decent kind of Government.  Until you look at who's financing them . The fact is, they're shaping up to be another gang of Thatcherite neo-liberal cultural rapists, wild-eyed dismantlers of the state, giving it all away to their "pro-growth" "pro-market" pals.  New Labour were shit, but just wait and see what these bastards get up to. It's all beginning to feel horribly like 1980 felt, being told you're going to be beaten, and waiting for the beating to really start.  

It was as one-sided as any of the 6-0 routs in the Premier League this weekend

...by Ms Malignant C.  And, here it is!   Well done, Louise!  What happened to your team this weekend?   I see...

The Eldest said this afternoon that she's addicted to it, so I had another go this evening, inadvisably, probably, as I'm seven sheets to the wind in Copenhagen after this afternoon's football and the permission six goals gives to a chap to hit the vino in no uncertain terms.  It might be a better environment than Flickr to upload photos away from the eyes of weirdoes, I thought. And then I got involved with this Family Tree thing, which turned out to be rather too laden with ads for my liking... But, well, if I've gotten into touch with anyone who didn't want to hear from me, or put anyone in touch with anyone who was happy in their lack of contact with that person, well, fuck you. Only connect, as The Man said. Or hit the Ignore button.

Like we used to sing in the Leazes End, back in the 70s, "Ooh! Look behind ye! Ooh, look behind ye!" Let's see how Ms Malignant C manages to sneer tomorrow. Mind you, I think Waddler's comment on ESPN might have had some force about them playing to "a high line", which means vulnerability to a counter-attack... though the result suggests otherwise against Villa. No doubt Comrade C has more than one barricade up his sleeve. And even if this is all a flash in the pan, ffs, let's enjoy it, lads and lasses, eh? But something about their body language, never mind this scoreline, tells me we won't be battling relegation this season. Howay the fucking lads.

Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head!

Comment on ESPN: 'Andy Carroll? It's more like Lewis Carroll!' No it's not: we're winning a football game, not off our heads on drugs. I hope.

Pig Sty Avenue , originally uploaded by Mawhrin Skel . ...they pull me back in. Today I met Andy , in Northampton. He's got a homemade lens on a D80, which is how he took this. It's a glass element, and the base of a Nikon bayonet lens, joined together with a bicycle inner tube. I've got to give this a go with the Chinon, and the EFKE film. He was inspired by Susan Burnstein who uses similar techniques to represent dreams. Oh aye.

It has to be Celtic. I toyed with the idea of Kilmarnock, a local bus ride away, but... Their website isn't well maintained, which would have made getting tickets a pain in the arse. And, anyway, do I really want to follow an English AND a Scottish side who may have relegation battles this season? I briefly looked at St Mirren, but, Paisley? And being a member of a certain sub-culture, Rangers were out of the question. Not that I wouldn't go to see any of those easy-travelling-distance teams, including Jags, as a neutral, especially if they're having a European run, (unlikely in most cases, right enough). Regularity of attendance at Parkhead will, however, depend on the work situation.

I notice that Wyn Davies left Newcastle in 1971, so I must have seen my first game before that date, because I remember him.  I remember Derek Dougan playing against us for Wolves, and Billy Bremner for Leeds.  I went to a lot of games during that era, and stopped going after the 1975/76 season, when I started A levels and my football going mates started apprenticeships, and we lost touch.  I went again a few times as an undergraduate, during the time of Jackie Charlton's management.  So the last Newcastle game that I went to see would have probably been around 1984/85. In the 90s I lived in Carlisle, and would sometimes go to see them play.  My mate Mike Broadis was a journalist and I'd accompany him into the press box.  Frankly, watching Carlisle was not an experience for which you would easily part with hard cash.  That was the last contact I had with real football, though, at least thirteen years ago.  Until this year, I didn't really follow...

Tasty.   But the Guardian hasn't got it all.  The National Jazz Museum in Harlem's own site warns that there are legal problems, and there's the "restoration work" to be done.  Still, that's one worth bookmarking.  Nice.

This was splendid tonight from the Proms on Radio 3 .  You can get it conducted by Bernstein on YouTube, starting here . Oh Aye. NB.  That Bernstein is a dead end, sorry.  You get nine minutes or so.  Nothing else.  I'll do the proms link when I can. NB2: Here's the link to the BBC iPlayer - only good until 24th August, mind.   And... NB3: The first nine minutes or so of that iPlayer link is taken up with the interval, a short documentary about guys collecting dead horses' tails, I think it was. NB4: That figure of nine minutes has occurred twice in this post for different reasons.  I don't know what to say.

Whilst waiting for my own tin whistle to arrive, this song, which I've loved since I heard The Silly Sisters at The Tavern in South Shields in 1976, came back this week into my head and wouldn't go away.  I learned to sing it really quickly.  It's said to be one of Flora McDonald's songs, translated from Gaelic of course, but with a fairly modern tune composed by Johnny Moynihan . There are words, here , but I prefer the slightly different version that Maddy and June did , thirty odd years ago: O who will play the silver whistle When my king's son to sea is going? To Scotland prepares, prepares his coming Upon a large ship o'er the ocean The ship it has three masts of silver With ropes so light of french silk woven Upon each end are fixed golden pulleys To bring my king's son ashore and landed. When my king's son he comes back home No girdle scones will food be for him But loaves of bread, bread will be baking For Charles with blue eyes s...

This somehow passed me by at the time .  Though it does seem that he wrote the football column for the WRP paper, (what the hell was it called?  I can't remember now...), that doesn't necessarily mean he was a steely eyed, would-be  barricade climber like some of us, back in the day.  Still, it's only added to his reputation, in our house.

Here's a funny thing. A couple of weeks ago Boy was telling me that he'd been given his grandparents' old hi fi cabinet, which had a turntable, and he'd discovered his mother's vinyl copy of Big Science. He was impressed.  I asked him when he'd first played the album and he told me it was around 7.30, a couple of nights before, a Tuesday. Anyway, where I was in South East London, 300 miles away, at about 9.30 that same Tuesday evening, Laurie Anderson came up in conversation where I was working, and I was thinking, I really must get a copy of Big Science and Mister Heartbreak again. Anyway, I've now got my copy of Big Science on CD, the remastered version, (in the sleeve notes Ms Anderson herself is quoted as saying the first CD had lost "a lot of low end and much of its character").   And it has Walking the Dog, the B Side to the single of Big Science, which I must have had back in the day, because I remembered it straightaway, though I h...

With their ability to resign in untimely and mysterious circumstances, maybe Martin O'Neill and now Steve Coppell are seeking career changes, and moving into TEFL, where such flounces are par for the course. I've been thinking of putting together a football themed set of materials for a while now, maybe they'd be interested?  

The thing is, there are Snappy Snaps, and there are Snappy Snaps.  Some of them will sell you a wide variety of 120 roll film, and develop and actually cross process the same. You might even get a genuine film-geek to film-geek discussion with the manager about the effect of cross processing on their dev mix.  Those Snappy Snaps are great.  Unfortunately, some of the smaller Snappy Snaps are staffed by twats and can only dev 35mm, but really only specialize in printing digital.  Like a one I went to in London, looking for a roll of ANY b&w film, only to be told in the tones of timeshare salesman, "you don't need black and white now, with digital!"  I didn't tell him to shut the fuck up, though it took a will of iron. Anyway, long story short, perhaps George was taking out his frustration on his inability to get xpro done on his doorstep, or perhaps there'd been a fatal encounter with some bastard who really thought digital offered a brave new world of pho...

He's The Man.

''I don't know what we have to do to improve the minds of these players.'' And he gets £6 million a year? Fuck off. Try managing the fucktards, you cheeky fucking bastard.

I'm stumbling onto a whole new world, here .

... From the keyboard of Ms Malignant C .  Worth clicking the link for the photo of The Moustache.

Probably the best internet craic on the subject of the whistle .

What a load of old toot.  The fact is, I embarked on Learning to Play the Piano with a vague notion that I'd be playing a piano in a pub one day, and five years from now was the time scale I had from looking around usenet groups and doing some quick calculations.  What I didn't realize then was that I would learn to read music much more quickly than that - I'm probably half way there already, and would expect to get through the theory part of PSP by Christmas, or thereabouts.  But that'll mostly be a hand-eye thing, I won't have it in my ear for a while. And then this morning I woke up and said out loud, "tin whistle". I've been online this evening and bought a Clarks Sweetone D.  And this book .  The whistle's got a notation system all its own, and lots of the older songs here have it alongside a conventional staff.  So that should be good learning for the ear. The taking five years to get good may not even start until I fall in luerve with...

As much as I dislike gambling, (apart from the odd fiver on a nag with a funny name, and a lucky dip on the lottery), it being a bottomless pit of a vice, I do like the hard-eyed objectivity of betting odds.  Which means this is rather uncomfortable reading , though I was glad of more talk about Barton's moustache.  You could challenge the reasoning, though.  Ashley has surely learned that he made an arse of things, he's said as much (succesful capitalists usually learn from their blunders), and the team that won the Championship are utterly unlike the one that was relegated in 2009. Yet more Joey "Dirty Sanchez" Barton blether here .

...proper teachers go on their hols, whilst we tefl bums slave away, milking meagre cash whilst the summer school or presessional cow's in town. It' a funny job. My mam keeps asking me when I'm going to be a proper teacher, and maybe the time is approaching to make her happy and to work for yet another set of letters after my name. Tefl management is losing its attractiveness, too, the more I do of it. It feels like less work than teaching, but it's long days and a lot of hassle. There's no room for initiative, either, always some arsehole up the ladder cramping your style. Mind you, half the fucking country will be scrambling for training and career changes in the next year or so. All this ducking and diving is undignified, but what you gonna do to put mince and tatties on the table?

Hello?

Oh aye very good. I need to check out birdingbob when I have time. Thanks to Khadija Teri for putting me on to him.  Memories of shrikes in Janzur and nightjars in Crimea.

Due to the current economic uncertainty, all this talk of a double dip recession, diggity, an inability to be arsed, and a few other reasons, Pig Sty Avenue Corporation is to reduce activity in several of its non-blog peripherals forthwith...  In other words, I can't be fucking bothered with Flickr, Facebook, fucking Twitter, and Blip fucking FM.  (FM?  You're not even on the wireless, you daft cunts.)  And all other wikis and wtfs.  Facebook messages and flickrmails will usually get a response.

...Or maybe not.   It's a conundrum.  On the one hand, it's a marvellous form of expression, lending, (when well used) marvellous shades of strength and humour to a text.  On the other, as Charmaine Bucco observed, you lose the moral high ground as soon as you curse.  Indeed.  And what sounds funny in The Sopranos can fall flat on its face in the staff room, (though the person referred to was a far worse case than Minnie Matrone).

The trousers on the suits I bought in Libya, a couple of years ago, are now far too big.  Which is nice, as I'm not ill or anything.  The plan has been, for the last year or so, to lose about three stone very slowly, over two or three years.  It's going to plan.  Christmas 2011, if I'm spared, and I should be about 12 stone. It's a bit like when you stop smoking though, (which, as it goes, is why I put on weight in the first place), and you begin to notice the fatties, as I used to notice the smokers.  Not-fat people sometimes seem to be the oddities, almost everyone's overweight.  Just eat less, people.  Fucking fad diets.  And these "pro-biotic" drinks and yoghurts, punted out for people who are feeling bloated.  "Bloated?  Buy this shit!"  No, just don't eat anything for a few hours, you fat twat, and you won't feel bloated.  Easy.

What?

I was thinking of a piano accordion because I'm initially learning to play a standard keyboard.  But I'm learning that it's not that straightforward.  The PSP software is teaching me to read music.  Once I get to the end of that course, (probably in another few months), the real practising can begin.  That's when I need to decide on an  instrument.  I'm 50, and therefore a music learner in a bit of a hurry.   I don't want to spend a couple of years getting to be not-bad at something, and then deciding to try something else. It's this laddo that's got me thinking about it.  What a great party instrument this could be.  But just as good for the blues, jazz and folk harmonies...  Everything I want to do.  AND, we wouldn't have to lose the sideboard out of the sitting room to find room for it.  Here's an excellent-looking starting point for the theory of it all .  It's written by a guy called Jax and it has the wo...