Use of Tasers by US Police / Security

There have been a couple incidents recently in USA where police and security guards have used tasers to subdue people. This 17 year old kid in Jerseyville sounds a bit crazy, a bit of a nuisance, but nothing serious. He was tasered by police and later died. This argumentative bugger got the shock of his life when security guards at his university library wouldn't accept "No, I don't have my id card" for an answer. Interesting piece in the Register (looks like they're following this issue) about this. Later I found this clip from The Daily Nooz of some guys from the management at Taser International allowing themselves to be tasered; kind of sick.

Breathtaking ski-gliding, Interface Design

Whoooa! (video link) Breathtaking video of ski-gliding down the Eiger. This site called Joel on Software is cool. He wrote an article arguing about the "Off" button in Windows Vista. It's a good design argument.

TWBN#6: Novelty Records in the Charts

This may not be a great comparison because the nature of the charts has changed in the past few years; a lot of songs are downloaded rather than bought from record shops. Also I don't watch Top of The Pops as I used to, but there were lots of songs that were basically just jokes "sung" by crap groups or one-off gimmick records that sold on the basis of celebrity or I don't know what.

The Goodies "Do the Funky Gibbon"
The Wurzells "I've got a Brand New Combine Harvester"
Black Lace "Agadoo"
Rolf Harris "Two Little Boys"
Clive Dunn "Grandad"
Telly Savalas "If"

Groan groan. I used to watch the Goodies tv show and it was funny, sometimes hilarious, though I only remember one sketch that they would regularly repeat: A young boy was doing an advert or a piece to camera and fluffing it. The producer would let him get away with it a few times and then swat him round the head and shout "Get it right!". Not hugely funny in retrospect, you had to be there. I can't remember what episode this song came from (I think it came from a sketch), but there's an article here which purports to be from Bill Oddie, talking about listening at the time to Parliament (unbelieveably he means George Clinton's Parliament Funcadelic, or P-Funk and not this. I can't believe Bill Oddie was into that stuff!), Sly Stone and Miles Davis! Wha?

"I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester" was a hit by the Worzels. It was a dreadful rewrite / ripoff of the earlier and much better "I've Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates" by Melanie Safka. Actually her song was called "Brand New Key", but most people remember it by the first line I think.

Aaaaarghgadoo (my spelling) was unleashed on the nation by Black Lace. It was deliberately targetted at unwitting club and party goers, wholly innocent of the group's desire to take control of them by the means of making them learn a ridiculous dance, perform it in groups on the dance floor, in the process turning their minds to mush. Here is a link (follow with care) to a demo of the dance done by a pineapple no less, on the Black Lace website. Luckily their plan for World Domination via the drunken minds of UK youth failed.

Rolf Harris' "Two Little Boys" was just mush. Just enjoy your life and don't try to find it. Take my advice.

Clive Dunn was an actor in the popular comedy series "Dad's Army". His character, Corporal Jones, was a popular part of that show and he obviously capitalised on that when he released the shocker that became number one "Grandad". This one made me feel particularly queasy because it was basically a bunch of kids singing "Grandad, Grandad, we love you". On Top of The Pops they had him in a rocking chair surrounded by adoring schoolkids. He later went on to make a children's programme also called "Grandad".

Telly Savalas was the big bald cop in the American tv series "Kojak". He was known for sucking lollipops and saying "Who loves ya baby?" a lot. I guess someone told him he had a nice voice, so he spoke the words of that "if a picture paints a thousand words" thing. It was kind of like a car crash at number one. There's a picture of one of his records (called simply "Telly") here, and several fans defend the great man!

There's a sub-genre of revolting novelty for football records. Many people have moaned about this before, so I'll just briefly mention that my Dad once bought me "Blue is the Colour" by Chelsea Football Team. I think it's healthy if you face up to the difficult issues in your life.

TWBN#5: Bad British Food

We have a reputation in the UK for producing bad food and expecting people to eat it. Our rep is particularly bad with our european neighbour, France. Our food tends to be functional, as in "fill 'er up mate", and french people are more often brought up to treat food more seriously. Well all I can say is it's a bit better than it used to be! (Does that sound too enthusiastic?). Nowadays you can usually at least get a half decent meal in most places. The worst locations for food in the UK used to be motorway service stations and schools. Our own cheeky chirper Jamie Oliver has recently got stuck into school meals - I mean trying to help make them better - and good on him for having a go, even if some freedom fighters disagree. The Government are also talking about reintroducing cooking at school, which should also help, but I've heard that the current equivalent is more about planning a menu for people with special dietary requirements than learning how to cook something nice.

TWBN#4: The Berlin Wall and Other East European Monsters

I was lucky enough to visit Berlin before the Wall came down, so I got to see how strange it was to have that city (West Berlin) in the middle of East Germany, surrounded by a huge wall. Apparently the East German Government explained when they erected it that they had to protect East Berlin against the massive influx of West Germans that would happen when the wessies saw how well their neighbours were getting on. Nonetheless plenty of people tried to escape the other way (with often fatal consequences). There's a well-written book by an Australian woman about living in the East and some that tried to escape, called "Stasiland". Here's a link to an extract on the Guardian website. My partner lived in West Berlin for some time as an au pair when she was a teenager. When I first went there with her in 1987 (I think) to visit the family she had stayed with I thought it was fascinating, but now I think The Wall was desperate and quite ridiculous. The Wall allowed the close juxtaposition of these two opposed cultures and exacerbated their differences, which made for a great tourist attraction. I was struck by the playful response to it by people on the Western side See this site by Chris DeWitt for lots of pictures of the Wall and another for some more. A lot of it looks brutal and quite shocking. So a spectacle worth seeing, but a repressive experience for people in the East, I think, so I was very glad to see it come down; that was amazing to watch (that link goes to a story on the BBC site with testimonies from eye-witnesses).

The Fall of the Berlin Wall was part of a wider, very exciting breakdown of Soviet control over other Eastern European countries, starting in early 1989 with Poland, where the massive "Solidarnosc" (Solidarity) trade union, led by Lech Walesa, was able to defy General Jaruzelski and force free elections. That was a stunning victory and seemed to inspire people in other countries in the region to stand up to their governments. Previous protests had been crushed, but now somehow people seemed more powerful than the armies. The most memorable of that year were the Czech "Velvet Revolution", remarkable for the election of a Frank Zappa - loving playwright as president and the Romanian more violent one.

Brief Introduction to the Berlin Wall in English and German

Unique Surface Pattern of Paper

Sounds like an interesting discovery and it came about by accident. The scientist was trying to scan microchips with a laser beam and one fell off so that his laser scanner hit the paper below. He was surprised to see that his equipment gave a reading, so he did a bit of testing and found that all sorts of surfaces could be read for unique surface patterns at microscopic scale. He converts the pattern into a set of numbers that can be used as an id for that specific surface. They article says the reading survives damage to the surface, but I don't understand something - wouldn't you have a problem with registration? Wouldn't you have to be sure of scanning exactly the same part of the surface in order to get the same reading?

TWBN#3: Racism at Home and Away

There will be few people in future years who defend the South African State and its Apartheid laws of 1948-1990. The UN describes these laws as "Racist beliefs enshrined in law". Racist arguments in the UK have always focussed around immigration. I wasn't aware at the time (1968) of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, but it was certainly quoted often enough in the 70s and 80s as I grew up. I remember particularly the abuse that some people got as "niggers" or "pakis", though in my little rural town there were not many people of different ethnic origins around, so most of the abuse was in the press or at football matches. There was one particular television programme that makes me wince when I think about it - it was called "Love Thy Neighbour". I wonder whether black people complained about this programme when it was aired; perhaps this was in the days when complaints weren't taken so seriously. "Love Thy Neighbour" was written by a team with a record of ridiculing bigots, and the main white character in this was certainly a racist bigot, but the black characters suffered a lot of outrageous abuse in the name of ridiculing the bigot. It was apparently immensely popular though. Around that time I'm sure you would have heard a lot more racism in pubs and clubs; I think Bernard Manning's and Jim Davidson's heydays were back then. Davidson's act included a character called "Chalkie", which was basically a chance to take the piss out of West Indians. People complain about political correctness, but I think it's good that (video link) idiots don't get away with racist stuff so easily these days; I can't imagine many black people feeling comfortable going to see Manning or Davidson in the 70s


The Story of Apartheid in South Africa at the BBC World Service.
The UN web page about Apartheid with pictures
Informative article at InfoPlease

TWBN#2: The IRA Bombing Campaign Part 2

I wrote earlier about my memories of the IRA Bombing Campaign in the 80's. I also want to say something about how I think it affected people and the Government at the time, though as I said in the earlier post I accept that I'm not an expert, just someone who was around at the time. I'm surprised actually that people aren't talking about this more, because there are some obvious parallels with the current "War on Terror".

There was a lot of pressure on the Police and this led I think to Police mistreatment of irish people, particularly men. Irish people were already somewhat stereotyped and the bombings (particularly the ones in the 70's I think, but also later) made it more likely that you would be stopped, searched and possibly harassed if you were Irish.

The mistreatment went further in the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, two groups of men who suffered appalling injustice at the hands of the Police and the justice system. I don't know enough detail to allow a comparison between the justice system then and now, but what seems obvious is that when the police are under great pressure they are more likely to cut corners and not pay enough attention to the rights and needs of their more vulnerable suspects (I think these cases happened before there was a lot of awareness of how seriously psychological pressure could affect the testimony of people).

It's apparent that stereotypes that were around at the time and had been around for a long time contributed to a dehumanising effect which was part of the environment in which it was seen as OK to mistreat Irish suspects by those in authority. Other aspects of this environment may have been lack of professional control and a general hysteria at certain times, reflected (or encouraged) by the press. You would hope that there should be more awareness of this nowadays, but Abu Ghraib still happens.

The other parallel that I see is that governments enact laws aimed at putting pressure on the terrorists, but the actual effect is to put further pressure on the wider group (i.e. Irish people in the UK, or Muslims in the UK). In 1971 Internment (indefinite detention without trial) was introduced in Northern Ireland. It was ended in 1975. In later years this policy was seen as a great recruiter for the IRA. We might see this as a parallel with the recent repeated demands for longer periods of detention without trial of terrorist suspects.

Animatee Fights Back Paranoia

The guy who does the animations of a stick character that fights the animator has put up (animated film) another one - great fun. Aaargh no, paranoia! There are (video link) secret pictures of the Twin Towers before and after the attack on the $5 and $20 notes and the word "Osama" even appears (well not actually, or even remotely).

pipes, aircraft carrier, dice, storms

Great picture of some pipes. This is an aircraft carrier in a pond in China. The World is revealed through Google Maps! Apparently "Dice Stacking" is a skill that requires some dexterity. Looks pretty difficult! Flickr gallery of storm shots. Very dramatic

TWBN#1: The IRA Bombing Campaign

This is the first in what might be a series of "Think the World is Bad Now?" (TWBN) posts, which I warned you about in an earlier post. People seem to think everything is worse than it used to be, but a lot of things that are going wrong now are not unprecedented and some things have actually got better. I'll start with a terrorist campaign that was "provoked", instigated and nurtured, then was relaxed, revived and finally (?) abandoned, all within the UK (although many would say it would never have got far without serious financial support from Irish Americans).

I only want to talk about what I remember of this with just a bit of prompting / help from other sources. I think it can teach us a lot about living with a terrorist threat and what mistakes it can push the Government into. I don't remember much about the first period in the early seventies, I don't think I paid much attention to the news in general at that point, but I did sort of know that some people were letting off car bombs and sending letter bombs. The main attacks in the early seventies were the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. The ones I remember are these (I had to look up the dates):

Car bomb kills Airey Neave (1979)
Hyde Park Bandstand Bombing (1982)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Grand Hotel Brighton blown up during the Conservative Party Conference (1984)
Manchester Arndale Centre (1996)
Mortars in Whitehall (1991)
Canary Wharf (1996)
Bus bomb near Waterloo Bridge (1996)

When Airey Neave was killed it was a big shock because it was a car bomb that went off in the House of Commons car park. The Hyde Park bandstand bombing stands out because the press made a big fuss about the horses that were killed and injured. I remember that being on the front pages. The Harrod's bomb apparently made some of my family worry for me because I lived in London at that point. This attack was apparently the model for a similar one in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" (good book by the way).

The biggest attack of the 80's was the Grand Hotel in Brighton which was blown up during the Conservative Party Conference. The Tories at that time were at the height of their powers, Thatcher particularly. I hated the Government and its policies at that time, but this attack was pretty shocking and the pictures made me queasy. The stand-out image was of Norman Tebbit (he was once paraphrased as telling unemployed people to "get on your bikes" to look for work) being lifted from the ruins in his pyjamas I think (the bomb went off in the middle of the night).

The Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996 is the one I remembered out of order. It actually came after Canary Wharf. I just read on the BBC site about this one that it went off while bomb disposal people were trying defuse it (or were about to) and that those injured were mostly outside the police cordon (hit by flying glass). Apparently the Centre has been rebuilt and is much better than it used to be.

The mortars that went off in Whitehall were fired from the back of a van. One exploded in the Garden of 10 Downing Street but no one was hurt.

Canary Wharf was hit by a large bomb in 1996. This marked the breaking of a ceasefire that had lasted over a year. The bomb that went off prematurely in Aldwych near the Strand killed a young man called Edawrd O'Brien, the bomber. This one brought home to me that the IRA frequently chose volunteers who were able to blend into their surroundings and seemed unremarkable.

In 1997 the IRA declared a new ceasefire that has remained in place since then, though there have been further attacks by splinter groups, notably the Real IRA.

Sources
Wikipedia
20th Century London
BBC News

Cat's Tongue Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Amazing picture of a cat's tongue. Slashdot programmers' slip-up which meant you couldn't post comments for a while. A contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" uses his Phd "Cognitive and Neuro-Science" (or Psychology) skills to help him win the $1 Million prize. Great invention but I don't want to talk about it!

Think the World's Bad Now? (TWBN)

Sometimes people seem to think things have never been worse; Iraq, Afghanistan, Climate Change, alright there's bad stuff around, but there was bad stuff before also:
The IRA Bombing Campaign
British Forces "Shoot to Kill Policy" in Northern Ireland
Single Party Dictatorships in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania...
The Berlin Wall
Apartheid South Africa
British Food Was Bad (no, really bad)
Joke Records in the Charts
Nuclear Arms Race
Chernobyl
Margaret Thatcher & Co.
Ronald Reagan & Co. (they put a dummy in charge of the World's greatest superpower!)

Perhaps I'll do a series; plenty of material.

Parallel Trousers and Bags

Clothes were never very important to me, but there was a time when I very much wanted to get specific styles in clothes. I was at school and must have been thirteen or so. Suddenly certain clothes were very attractive; I think it was all about being part of a gang. It started with parallel trousers and platform shoes. I don't know all the cultural history of these trousers, but a few of my mates wore them and they seemed the biz. This was around the time Slade were wearing their outlandish garb of high heeled boots and trousers that came just above their ankles. The best of the trousers were made of a shot cotton material that looked different colours in different lights. There's a good page here about 70s clothes, this guy seems to know his stuff - I remember Scratch 'n' Sniff t-shirts! We also liked shirts with round collars; nice deep colours they were. I think the shirts were called Brutus; they looked very good. I think a bit before that Ben Shermans were supposed to be very cool (worn a lot by skinheads; did mods wear them as well?) Later the trousers got wider and were called Bags or Oxford Bags and the shoes got fatter with less of a heel. That was round about when the Bay City Rollers took the nation's female youth by storm - 1974 apparently, though that seems very close now to the start of Punk; well I guess things were moving faster then. Anyway, the Rollers wore their bags high with tartan trim. I remember we asked each other a lot how wide each others bags were (! Idiots). Anyway I don't remember it lasting long, so that was my brief flirtation with fashion then.

Sculpture, Photoshop, Real Beauty

Cool (or not!) sculpture by the beach. This is a sculpture of a tree made from a book. Photoshop tutorial that goes through age-reducing techniques (not excercise and healthy eating!). That reminded me of this Flash Movie from the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty that I'd seen before but not bothered to share for some reason

Singing Drive Thru'

Funny set of pictures that are not what they seem. Some guys decide to do a special kind of order at a McDonalds drive thru. The Story of the Mac (Apple Mac) with accompanying posters

"Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond

I picked up Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" a few years ago because I liked the title and the cover and then I got interested in the blurb. It's basically about why advanced civilisations developed in certain areas of the world and not in others. I don't have the book with me now because I lent it to someone and they lent it on, but I've often thought about it since I read it and I think it's a great book.

The basic thesis of the book I think is that there were specific circumstances which led to advances which people were able to build on and which created the environment for future opportunities. One crucial point that I remember was the development of hunter-gatherer societies into farming societies. Once that has happened a society has a chance of producing a surplus food supply and will be able to devote time to other needs. A hunter-gatherer society is more fragile (more likely to suffer shortages, less likely to be able to store food to tide them over lean times).

Diamond proposes (as I remember) that the necessary conditions for the development of wide scale farming were domesticated crops and animals that could be used for farming (i.e. for work and for food). Horses and cows lived in Africa, Europe and Asia, but not America. Another very interesting point he makes is that the general orientation of continental land masses made it more possible to transfer crops and animals across Europe, Middle East and Asia (because they exist at similar latitudes and therefore have somewhat similar climates) than from North to South America and vice versa, so that the number of crops and animals domesticated in one part of Middle East - Europe - Asia and transferred to another is much higher than what could be transferred up / down the American continent. Another crucial difference arose from the domestication of animals, because close contact with those animals exposed the people from Europe and Asia to new diseases to which they developed some immunity. When these diseases were transported to new countries by the people and animals, the indiginous people of the new countries were suddenly exposed to the diseases with dire effects.

I think Diamond sees the main purpose of his book as being to counter the racist argument that the reason for the disparity in development between the Eurasian-originating peoples and the African and American - originating peoples is genetic; that you can account for the differences using IQ comparisons. Diamond says there are other reasons for the disparities, which he describes in his book.

Mash It Up

"Mashups" are a new development on the web where some of the major sites (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Flickr) have opened up the api (application programming interface) of their own applications, like Google Maps, so that people can create combinations that make something new. Developers get to use the ready-made tool and the api supplier gets to harness a lot of creativity and energy to do new stuff they might never have thought of. Google / Yahoo Maps can be combined with all sorts of things to make information regionalised, so you can combine Google Maps with restaurant reviews and get a site which can recommend a good restaurant wherever you are. This is a site which records what mashups have been built and there are already 1148 that it knows about. You can of course get some strange ideas, like this site that tracks school shootings. I thought it was just the US, but then I saw the title was "Recent World Wide School Shootings" and panned out. The great majority are of course in America. Kind of ghoulish though. This site would be more interesting to go back to; it's a Google Maps mashup blog.

King Of Comedy

This is a Martin Scorcese film that I really enjoyed when it came out. Here's a link on IMDB. Scorcese's films have sometimes been violent, in fact some of his best ones (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) have been very violent, but this one was more of a black farce and I thought it was great. I've seen it again since and I wasn't so impressed, I think because it was very much of its time and it struck a chord with me at the time. It has a very obvious point - the corrupting influence of media and celebrity; but I thought it was hilarious that the Robert De Niro character (Rupert Pupkin) kidnaps Jerry Lewis and holds him hostage, the ransom being a spot on Lewis's show. He gets sent to prison, but when he gets out he's famous and people love him. So it's not very subtle. Sandra Bernhardt plays a wonderfully hysterical fan obsessed with Jerry Lewis. Every time I think about it I want to see it again, but the last time I did I just didn't think it was as good as I had remembered. Probably that inditement of celebrity and fame is not shocking to me now. You don't often see something so unrestrained though, just in some of the other best Scorcese films.

Budgie Rage IPod Compensation Unfair but Funny

Try this 20 Questions site, it's fun. I tried a budgie and the site got it in 18, even when I gave some (apparently) wrong answers. Green Rage is coming. The Seven Stages of Owning an IPod are explained in cartoon form here. If you're an Apple fan, here's a compensatory (video link) Apple ad on YouTube. But then I want to just add this other (video link) anti-Mac rant. This guy's funny.

Victorian Google Discovery

Review of an interesting - sounding book by Steven Johnson about two men trying to piece together information about the spread of cholera through part of London in Victorian times. This Steven Johnson looks an interesting guy. Here's a fascinating idea about how to gather meaning from word groupings in Google Page Ranks. The authors call it "Automatic Meaning Discovery".

My First Visit to New York

The first time I went to New York, in 1985, I had to get a visa from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London. I turned up in Manhattan without anywhere to stay and walked around a bit and found a little place that rented rooms in Chelsea (that's around where the Empire State Building and the Chelsea Hotel are). The owner was a middle-aged guy called Art who was a bit eccentric (sorry Art). He was involved in a local cable television channel, and I did see a bit of one programme that was a discussion, but I don't remember what it was about, and I don't remember watching anything else. He had a set-top decoder that allowed him to receive loads of channels, but when I tried to look at some of the programmes he got mad because I left it set wrong. Art let me do a couple of odd jobs in return for free rent. I painted his shopfront and rearranged a big load of books for him, but I'm sure I didn't do a very good job. Art had a good heart, but he was a little paranoid - he thought people in a garage next door were trying to get rid of him in order to expand their property; he said he's found a gas cannister on his roof and he took this as a threat or a sign that they could blow him up. They had offered him money for his house at some point but he'd refused and now he thought they wanted to get rid of him by other means. He put a sign up in his window with some kind of demand or accusation that I'm sure no one would understand (probably not even the people in the garage). His place was decrepit and the rooms were tiny, but I stayed there for several weeks and walked around Manhattan (my idea of New York was Manhattan). I walked south to the World Trade Centre and Battery Park and Fort Tryon Park in the north. I saw free dance at the Lincoln Centre and I walked around the Metropolitan Museum several times, not forgetting the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection and the Guggenheim Museum. At the Met I thought the Persian miniatures were lovely and I was blown away by the tribal carvings of the pre-Columbian section, particularly the fertility totems and canoes with wonderful carvings on the prows. I don't remember what I saw at the Guggenheim, the building itself is what makes the impression. The Frick Collection is a smaller gallery based on a private collection of old masters. It had some masterpieces that floored me.

Colbert resigns and traffic lights abandoned

Steve Colbert resigns in (video link) disgusted response to the American Public's appalling desertion of the Republican party. Then he gets into his car and is inspired by his driver to get back into the fight "The Democrats have only been in power for a few minutes and they've already got us stuck in this unwinnable war!" Here's another contribution to an argument I've heard before, which is basically that if you make motorists feel more vulnerable they will drive more carefully. There's a dutch traffic planner who says that getting rid of traffic lights has made his town safer. An older Wired article about this here.

Storm Beautiful Advertisements

Amazing storm chaser pictures Beautiful shot of a snowflake Story of Friendster, the social networking site that was overtaken by MySpace. Creative Advertisements from different countries.

Music Players Through the Years in my Family

Writing about "the family stereogram" earlier started me thinking about the different things we played music on in our family. We weren't musicians, except for the obligatory recorders soon given up on and my sister's piano similarly foresaken, but we certainly loved music, well I did anyway; I won't speak for the others except to say Dad had a Roger Whittaker cassette with RW singing, playing his flute (he did play a flute didn't he?) and whistling. By the way, don't click on the link for Roger's fan site if you don't like his music, you'll get an earful (I suppose you could turn your speakers down) and Mum only really listened to music when she did the ironing - she liked Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. No, I mean the music machines we used, as in:

The first I remember was a light blue transistor radio with an extendable aerial. It had a plastic case with holes and my memory of it now is as a dinky little thing, like something you'd see in the Design Museum. I had a quick look for some pictures but I don't see anything like it and having looked I think our radio must have been mid-sixties, because the early sixties models look much bigger and older. I remember hearing "She's Got a Ticket to Ride" on this one. That link goes to an interesting story about how John Lennon got the idea for the song, but I'm not sure I believe it (also, check out the small gold heads of the Fab Foursome in the top left gif). So I guess the design of transistor radios went through quite a revolution in the first half of the sixties, Japanese designers at the top of their game I guess.

We also had an old record player. It was the property of one of my parents, can't remember which, and I can't reliably remember when my brother and I started playing records on it. My parents had some old 45s, including Tommy Steele's "Little White Bull". The player was red and cream and had a stacker pole where you could pile several records and lift an arm across the top of them to hold them in place. If you piled up too many though, they would start to skate and slip.

The next thing I remember was called a "stereogram". It was a kind of sideboard record player that you could also keep records in and I think ours was a kind of teak colour. No idea what we played on that, perhaps Dad upgraded the player to the stereogram and my brother and I got the old player.

There was a small radio that I got for Christmas because I wanted to listen to pop music. I think it was a Ferguson. My memories of it are of lying in bed listening to John Peel's Radio One show.

Dad replaced the stereogram with a Sony music centre. I think that was the start of his love affair with Sony, because since then he's always regarded their stuff as likely to be good quality. I listened to my Christmas present for 1973 ("Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd) on that.

But the best thing I ever had to play music on (after the radio) was a turntable, amp and speakers that Dad bought me for my eighteenth and yes it was a Sony machine. I loved that thing.

Remember Remember the Fifth of November

I remember this rhyme from my youth:

Remember Remember
The Fifth of November
Gunpowder Treason and Plot

But I can't remember the next bit! I searched and I found this (watch out for the annoying animated ads in the left sidebar; the mosquito one is particularly irritating), so I can now remember the rest of the rhyme:

I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

We used to have great Bonfire Nights round us ("are you comin round us?", I just remembered is what we said, not even "Are you comin round to our house?"). I thought the bonfire in our back garden was really big, but our back garden wasn't that big, so it can't have been so massive. Just a big pile of wood probably made a big impression on the young me. Dad got some fireworks and Mum baked and cooked (sausage rolls, baked potatoes, wellington squares, soup in mugs). I don't think we did much in the way of a guy, that was supposed to be the kids' thing, make a figure using newspaper and tights and an old coat and a painted face (ten or fifteen years later when I was just out of college we made a "Maggie" guy), rather we found the wood and rubbish and Dad built the bonfire out of it. Fireworks are a lot louder and flashier now, I think the bonfire was more of a deal then. The extended family would come round and join in; my favourite cousin / uncle was called Michael, he was a cool guy and he was into Art and rock music. Yeah it was good.

I don't remember anyone I knew getting hurt from using fireworks then, but since then I have heard of some, mostly from being drunk and messing around. The fireworks we had were pretty much the same as today; rockets, roman candles, catherine wheels, bangers and sparklers. Everybody said "Oooooh" when the rockets went up. Our bonfire was quite an event in our little bit of the estate.

"At Least Dogs Are Not Pigs Like Cats Are"

One night in the pub discussing the old question "Cats or Dogs", my friend Heather came up with this priceless gem. Actually now she has a cat. But what is this dog thinking?

Blimey haha hmm eh?

Very confident (video link) guy gets his dad on the phone for the million dollar question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Hilarious (audio link) prank played on a telemarketing cold caller. Article about the history of the PC market and the struggle between Microsoft and its competitors. This woman says she doesn't know who Bob Dylan is.

The first single I bought was Telegram Sam

I started buying records when I was about 10 in 1971. I got 50 pence pocket money and that was enough for a single. Singles were more important than they are now and being able to buy one per week was great. I don't remember the first one I bought, I think I might be romanticising to say it was "Telegram Sam" by T-Rex, but that was probably the coolest thing I bought around that time; brilliant song, very slick and sexy (probably as much to do with Tony Visconti's production as Marc Bolan's lyrics and looks). Heh, I just found a lyrics website with Telegram Sam on it. Reminds me of Disco 45, this raggedy mag I used to get around the time I'm talking about. I wrote about it here. So Telegram Sam was ace. I also remember something by Chicory Tip called "Son Of My Father" - here's a site with all the UK number ones (they claim) since it started. That's enough lyrics sites. Like I say, it's probably romanticising to say the first was "Telegram Sam", because I also bought lots of rubbish.

The group I really got into at that point was Slade. Noddy, Dave, Don and Jim had a lot of energy and made a lot of noise but the only song of their's I still like much is "Goodbye to Jane". There's a blog by Fury Animal called Musicnews with a piece about Slade featuring the cover of "Slayed", an album of their's I bought later. I did buy Jean Genie by David Bowie but I can't remember much else.

As for albums, the first one I bought was "A Nod's as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse" by The Faces, who later became Rod Stewart and the Faces. I still play this, usually just for one track called "That's All You Need", as much for Ron Wood's guitar as Rod's voice. When I bought it there was a poster inside and this site has a copy of it. The album cost £2.50 and I still love it for "That's All You Need", though at the time I probably bought it on the strength of "Stay With Me", a classic v. sexist Rod Stewart rocker. I bought other albums as well, but I haven't played "Slayed" or Gary Glitter's album for ages now. The only other album I bought around that time that is still worth playing is "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" by Bowie. It's even possible that I didn't get that until later, when I was at Secondary School (the equivalent in those days of high school). I do remember getting "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd one Christmas and playing it on the family stereogram.