Pig Sty Avenue

On Thursday I finished some work I was doing a wee bit earlier than expected and went on an unstructured two prong search for Wikis and file hosting.  The latter gave us the Mary Lee .wma link.  I'm not sure about that from a copyright point of view, and I actually want to be able to link to streaming rather than downloading sound files.  So I need to do some more work on that, but I got my fingers burned: somewhere I picked up a trojan which lost me most of yesterday.   As for the wikis. Butter Your Parsnip is to be the first stage in a long term scheme to produce unsafe teaching materials.  The rationale is that commercially produced materials studiously avoid the remotest possibilities of offending anyone and selling less copies.  PARSNIP is the publishers' mnemonic for a list of things they must avoid: Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, -Isms, Pork.  You can also add Death, Illness and Gender, (DIG - I've just coined that, I think)...

"We are just looking to give our all again when we go to Leicester." Fucking right, lad. The son-in-law supports Leicester. Don't let us down, eh?

Ms Taylor once again gives a marvellously unbiased bit of reporting . Gawd bless 'er!

I'm looking around for hassle free sound file hosting. This should be a link to Howdja Like To Love Me? from Roy Fox and His Orchestra, Mary Lee on voice . I just love that voice, and was pleasantly surprised to find this from her . She must have been around 16 or 17 when she made that recording, from the dates she gave - yet she has a very rich voice. I got the photo from here - there seems to be a lot of internet electrons devoted to British Dance Music from the Thirties.

During the 07-08 season at Deportivo, Coloccini appeared in every game the first team played . He is almost, though not quite, as regular for Newcastle, too. 

Herself loves carbonara sauce, but says that it's usually too rich when she gets it in restaurants. Google for recipes, and you get a lot of variety , (which is fine: it shows it's a real dish - you wouldn't get much consistency if you wanted a recipe for, say, "Irish stew"). Anyway, I more or less went with the one at the top of this page , except that I also chopped a wee bit of red pepper in, and used two cloves of garlic, used no salt and added some mixed herbs at the end. Most importantly, I used only half as much cream, and made it up with milk. It was delicious, the only criticism being that it was perhaps still a bit rich - so next time it'll be half a pint of milk, (a tablespoon of cream would be more than enough). I used supermarket sliced ham, but you could use tuna, salmon, bacon, chicken or go veggy. Ecco!

There's a lot of water running down through the allotment. This is a feature of the site - so much so that the digging of ditches is written into the agreement, and forms one of the tasks of the monthly communal work days which are also part of the deal. The previous occupant of my plot would seem to have attempted to dig all kind of wee trenches. I've discussed this with The Old Man and spent six weeks thinking about it. It needs a fairly deep (two spits) ditch just inside the perimeter. This should take the water away from where it is now - springing up in the middle of the plot. It's all very rocky, so I should have enough rocks to fill up the ditches in due course, so that they double as drainage and as a perimeter path. On the outside of the path I'm going to plant blackcurrant bushes. There's a bit of history to the particular plants: our garden in Hedworth had a blackcurrant bush growing by the front gate. One year, I took a lot of cuttings from it,...

First Leeds , and now City . Let's not get too carried away, they are still 2nd in the Premiership. But I have a feeling in my bones that 09/10 will go down in Man U's fans' memories as the point where it all started to go wrong. It's becoming clear that the Glazers "that orchestra of geeks" , are asset stripping quite ruthlessly. It would be ironic if the money which made the club seem so invincible proves to be the thing that brings them down. They might weather the Glazer storm, but just now they are vulnerable to bad luck - an injured Rooney, say. For the first time, I actually feel some sympathy for their fans, who are seem to be paying for their seats with their arses. There's a lesson here about the relationship between capitalism and football, but it's not a lesson that anyone in authority is likely to learn anything from.

This news "story", put out by the SNP Scottish Government, is giving me a bad head, nausea, depression and a general sensitivity to light. Because, everyone drinking FORTY SIX bottles of VODKA sounds like a lot. Until you break it down. That's less than a bottle a week, which is a couple of stiff V&Ts per evening. Probably more than your po-faced doctor would order, and it wouldn't leave you safe to drive, but it's not going to have you shitting on the carpet, and then rolling around in it, exactly. I usually get a bit of shopping at Sainsbury's when I go there to buy my paper of a morning. I usually get the makings of our dinner there, but not a bottle of wine to go with it, oh no, because that's not for sale until after 10am, 12.30pm on Sundays. Meanwhile in Dockhead St, the pubs are open at 9am. And I used to have a custom of getting a spiced rum (pay £1 extra for the double) whenever I passed through Glasgow Central Station, but that to...

I thought I had the link somewhere, but maybe not. Whatever. Here it is again, a guide in rangefinderforum to getting the top off the FED , giving it a clean and readjusting the rangefinder. I might also be able to sort out the flash synch.

This article by Maddy Costa in The Guardian was interesting.  The tracks linked to are all good, especially The Very Thought of You .  You could argue that British musicians had been borrowing and making black American music their own for thirty odd years before John Lennon met Paul McCartney. 

I read this article in the Guardian with interest.  Certainly, we've had a lot of fieldfares in our garden the last few weeks.  We had a thaw yesterday, and called the breakdown man to get the car started.  But last night it started to snow, and it's been snowing, lightly, ever since.  I need to get photos.  

It's so cold, the car seems to have frozen.  I doubt I can do anything with it until we get a bit of a thaw.  So I walked The Bairn to nursery this morning, and when I returned later to pick her up, a wobbly V of swans flew across my path, between me and the weak, low winter sun.  I counted them, and there were twelve. 

It's that time of the year when I really just want to get back to normal, which is a day bookended by Today and  Newsnight .  Meanwhilst, I got a chance last night to listen to those covers .  My favourite is this version of The Piano Has Been Drinking by Don Hicks.  I think that's a harmonium in there.  Splendid.  And I'll be keeping an eye on Cover Lay Down in future.  Happy New Year!