Volume 42
5 Feb 2003
Budgieworld - says that the well-known story about how budgies got their name is a myth. A shame really as it ought to be true.
4 Feb 2003
A Timeline of Alabama's Artistic and Cultural Development - 1935: Blues pianist Frank "Springback" James records "Poor Coal Loader". Talk about revisionist. Nobody knows anything about this man's life. His last record sold exactly 19 copies before the record company went bust. Yes, he was a great bluesman, but I bet he didn't get treated particularly well by the Alabama of his time!
3 Feb 2003
Saturday night the police helicopter landed in the park immediatley behind my house after hovering low for ages. The park was full of police running about with torches. No idea what it was about, and we all slept through the whole thing anyway even though there was all the noise and searchlights and things.
Ahj yes, it is using google, and presumably a dictionary. Now I'm getting lots of bad searches instaed of sites.
Bounce Me (random websites - it seems to be finding them via some generated search pattern)
31 Jan 2003
News Flash: I have another definition of "Two Way" (thanks Keith) which sounds more likely in the context than Matt's. Interesting. (well, not very, in fact)
30 Jan 2003
Ah ha, Matt also comes up with a possible lead on the three way (and a definite sighting of a four way and a five way) This sounds like a definite possibility to me. Perhaps Black Boy Shine moved from Cincinnati to Houston? I can't find any biographical details on him at all.
Well, I know what a "two way" is now (Thanks Matt). Or at least I know what one definition of a "two way" is at least.
Amicide : The problem of friendly fire in modern warfare (Note the image on the page, which is in .bmp format, loads very slowly and from the bottom up!!)
I am disappointed. The other day I raised the question of what a "two way" is : a term used in the Bowling for Soup song "The girl all the bad guys want", and nobody has enlightened. Clearly you are not sure what it means either. So, today a further puzzle. What is a "three way"? I was listening to the Black Boy Shine's song "Doghouse Blues" and he sings of going down to the Doghouse and getting a "three way". Now, the Doghouse was a place where down on their luck piano players hung out on West Dallas St. in Houston, so I am guessing that it is some kind of food, but who can tell?
29 Jan 2003
Ah, Tom Tomorrow is available at Working for Change. I mailed Salon complaining about their new policy, pointing out that forcing me to do something I didn't want to do is not a good way to get me to subscribe. They replied saying "You can always subscribe". *sigh*
No mail this morning - something must be up somewhere, though more likely it's down.
28 Jan 2003
Jen has the Coyle and Sharpe site nearly ready. There is a program about them on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.30 AM so listen to it if you can. (A programme about your father on radio 4 is really pretty cool if I may say so)
Salon just tried to make me watch a 15 second commercial from Mercedes Benz so that I could read Tom Tomorrow. Amazingly the TT appears to be about dependence on oil. I really am not prepared to do that so Salon just lost yet another reader....
27 Jan 2003
I'm playing with Blogsnob at the moment, so please excuse the randomness at the top of the page. I'll get it right shortly....
24 Jan 2003
Why do smoke alarm batteries always run low in the middle of the night? (Presumably, before you all rush to point it out, because the temperature drops sufficiently that the battery power falls below the threshold that triggers the warning beep)
23 Jan 2003
22 Jan 2003
20 Jan 2003
Sick daughter today.....
17 Jan 2003
Thanks for all the useful messages about removing staples! Some useful tips.
16 Jan 2003
Kitchen nearly finished! Now I have to pull about 2000 staples out of the floor before we can lay some new flooring *sigh*
15 Jan 2003
14 Jan 2003
Gus Cannon as Banjo Joe plays Maddison Street Rag (just a selected highlight from the roots music page - there are no lowlights though)
It must be a sign of age, but I really can't stand these zoo format breakfast radio shows - all that talking, I just want music. I tried several this morning and ended up listening to a Jimmy Shand tape which was much more pleasant.
13 Jan 2003
Exquisite Corpse - which has a nive feature on Bellocq, whose pictures are superb (I picked up a book of them remaindered somewhere). This one has been linked too by several others as well, but it really is good.
I'm sure everyone has linked to the customisable bush by now. I have been embroiled in kitchen rebuilding so have slipped off the bleeding edge. (ouch)
11 Jan 2003
10 Jan 2003
I definitely want one of these. (I've been listening to two Paul Glasse CDs I have and they are fantastic - he doesn't seem to have a web page though. And I can't find any more CDs that he has made either (other than as a sideman))
This is a nice gizmo. I have a wired pocket mouse and it is good, but this looks much neater.
Lovely piece of Japlish snapped by Ole.I must sit down with my dictionary and try and work out what it really says (it does refer to a pet's gondola, that I can tell)
Cooking in someone else's kitchen is really hard.
9 Jan 2003
Ugh, we are having our kitchen rebuilt rather comprehensively and the house is full of dust and dirt.
I love this. I just wish there was a web method of taking me to see all the events it finds.
RIP Gordon Cruikshank - no, you've probably never heard of him, but I used to know him when I lived in Edinburgh and he merited an obit in the Guardian.
8 Jan 2003
Listening to Steel Radio again - they're playing "Watching the bubbles in my beer", another of those great up-tempo sad songs : entirely depressing lyrics at about 140 BPM
RIP King Biscuit Boy
"Staff discuss the morning's frozen tuna auction around 6 a.m. at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo"
I was in Sheffield on Monday and Tuesday. Had a look at their new winter gardens which are nice, the Ruskin Gallery which is excellent and the Graves art gallery which has one of the nicest collections of early twentieth century art I've ever seen. Lots of British artists with a sprinkling of Europeans. No major works, but all of them good. Well worth a visit if you are there.
4 Jan 2003
I also need to listen to some Chris Thile and Old and in the Gray. No money though. I wonder how I get to be a reviewer for new William Gibson books and interesting records and stuff like that? The only things I get to review are textbooks (which is fine, but as not much fun in the big picture). The trouble is that writing reviews of stuff you like is really hard because they are just good. Writing about stuff you hate is much more fun as you can really have a go at it, but then you end up with stuff you don't like.
BUCK-TICK and LOLITA and SEXUAL STRAWBERRY WORLD. I have no idea. None. Not any. I assume that Buck-Tick is an anime cahracter but what sexual strawberry world is I cannot even imagine. Click on the picture (whihc vanishes when you move the mouse over it) and it gets even stranger - a sheep and the words "Sweetly bitter dense taste does"
Tokyo Dental Hygiene - in the drawing, the male appears to have a mouthful of blood and the two nurses are not revealing any of their teeth. Not reassuring.
Waseda Dental Hygienist School - I hope that pin thing is not one of the tools they train them to use!!
HMS Fisgard Series 10 Artificer Apprentices' Glossary of Slang, Jargon Words and Abbreviations
In fact that is one of the oddest collection of search results I have seen for ages (and you can be sure I have seen some odd ones!).
Check out the results for googling on "wine out of skulls" - some very odd stuff here indeed!
I'm reading Ashley Kahn's book about John Coltrane's A Love Supreme 
and so I have been listening to the new remastered CD Version of it too . It's funny to read about all the fuss about the music when it really doesn't sound at all odd now. (At least to me it doesn't) You should read the book, and also the book about the recording of Kind of Blue which is, on balance, a little more interesting.
There are some great songs around at the moment - I am very taken with Bowling for Soup's "Girl all the bad guys want" and Busted's "Year 3000". Well written, funny and memorable - perfect singles.
3 Jan 2003
I dropped all the instant messaging stuff at the top as I was never on!
Tapestry against polygamy (formerly known as Tapestry of polygamy - an equally weird name. I can't help thinking other names like 'Crochet against white slavery"...
2 Jan 2003
OF BIG OIL, BY BIG OIL, FOR BIG OIL "The 10 Most Startling Speculations and "Conspiracy Theories" About September 11 and America's New War"
1 Jan 2003
Happy 2003 and may all your rivets be bifurcated!!!
31 Dec 2002
30 Dec 2002
When Augustus John and Dorelia made salad the final tossing of the leaves was done by the bare hands of the senior virgin present.
28 Dec 2002
And my new guitar looks just like the one he is playing in that drawing.
I'm listening to Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell. I didn't know that Scrapper Blackwell was not at all keen on this partnership. I also didn't know he was shot just before the blues revival was getting into its stride.
Check out the menu at the left hand side of Mystery of God - if you put "The onw with" in front of each item you have the running order for the next series of friends!
I just wandered on to a site that had the epigraph "Jesus....God's Unspeakable Gift".
Thanks for all the Flash MX tips - I am pondering them....
I was just invited to join the Mapua IT Center local user group. I wonder why? I wonder if they have interesting rituals and distinctive handshakes?
27 Dec 2002
I'm playing with Flash MX and, boy, is it hard to work with! I know what I want to achieve but getting it to do it is an uphill struggle. Not the most intuitive of interfaces I have ever come across.
Robotube
26 Dec 2002
Or experience Zetetic Success with Frank Finker (Time Line Therapy™ Master Practitioner!!!!)
There's the Zetetic Society (FRPG Alert!!!!) or find out about Zetetic Spaces - I didn't find out as I don't speak German, and I think the page is "under construction"
"zetetic" is another good word and it describes this log quite well I think (or maybe that should be hope). You could try zetetic.com and fill in surveys about rich media or try to explore lots of dead links. Ooops. You could try Strip from zetetic enterprises Or learn about Zetetic Realism
I got one of those weird word books for Xmas and it was a good one - watch out for some new epigraphs on the site! I thought I would check out zygology - the science of joining things with things like ....rivets!! I looked at Zygology Ltd, lots of rivets but not bifurcated. I wonder if zygology could be extended to the web since we join things with links.
As usual we had the street and others round for Christmas night which ended with us rushing one of the friends home because her house was on fire. Luckily not much damage done - lots of firemen, and damn good they were - came fast and did the job professionally.
It's Boxing Day so let's have something really tasteless to get you over all that rich food - Nipple Therapy!!!!
25 Dec 2002
Seasoned greetings! Hope you had good presents - I got a smashing Rodney Miller recording (Airplang II - an oldie but a goodie)
24 Dec 2002
Bunnies and Bees - "PAINTINGS CREATED TO ILLUSTRATE DIVINE TRUTH, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE SECRET PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE AND SOUL"
"And what did you do on Xmas eve, Dr Marshall?" "I defrosted my *&%!!* frost-free freezer"
23 Dec 2002
RIP Joe Strummer
22 Dec 2002
20 Dec 2002
Irregularity will be the rule over the festive (?) season. Bah, humbug!!
19 Dec 2002
Several Gig of brownie points to Ted in Leeds who solved the Keef Hartley problem! There will be happy people.
The new Opera Beta is very fast and it picks up the favicons, but the interface is nasty - icons too big and I cant work out how to stop it using tabbed windows which I really don't like.
OK, so I don't think that using flash to drive your site is a good idea, but this is really rather well done.
18 Dec 2002
Anyone with a copy of Keef Hartley's Half Breed, please get in touch!
Sorry about lack of links - full of busy again.
17 Dec 2002
16 Dec 2002
The real Adrian Mole (Some funny stuff if you can be bothered ploughing (or plowing if you are a USAian) through all the advertising links)
Hello and welcome to any Sunday Times Doors readers. (Yes, registration is needed, but the trusty name "foo", password "bar" works.... I wonder if there is a person called F. Bar who has the mail address foo@bar.com who is really, really hacked off)
Well, happy birthday to me. Fifty today. Nice presents: a steel-bodied guitar (something I have always wanted) and a floation tank session and lots of other stuff too. The party was fun. The only downside is that yesterday I sneezed and have done something to my back which means that I can hardly move without serious agony, which is not a nice present.
13 Dec 2002
Hmm, I wonder how I go about embedding something in a perspex cube?
busy, busy, busy, busy........
12 Dec 2002
11 Dec 2002
10 Dec 2002
I was going to take this page down today and just have a link to a page that said "DEBBIE HARRY" in big flashing letters. But good taste overcame that idea. However, I am sure that you will already have gleaned the idea that Blondie were the best thing I have seen in years, in particular Ms Harry (the drummer is also incredible, but only for his drumming). Of course I've always thought that Debbie Harry was rather special. INXS were pretty good too. Suffice to say that I would actually have paid to see this concert
9 Dec 2002
Hmm, we've got free tickets for the Blondie and INXS concert tonight.
I removed this one
Have I mentioned the tip king before? Possibly, but there's lots of useful stuff there - these kinds of sites can seem trite, but when you actually want, for example, to remove blood stains from an orange or other citrus fruit, then they are exactly what you need. And of course, clean your home with vinegar - and have it smell like a chip shop!!
7 Dec 2002
The Hobby Electronics from Japan "The English edition pages have been translated from the Japanese edition with the translation software. Therefore, the nuances of the explanations may sometimes be lost or inappropriate in terms of English language or culture." Many, many gems here - including a collection of datasheets
6 Dec 2002
5 Dec 2002
4 Dec 2002
Nigel Gatherer's Scottish Mandolin pages (amongst other good stuff). A man of eclectic and catholic taste, who I don't think that I have actually met which seems surprising - we know several people in common.
What you have heard about the Dvorak keyboard is not true! Another treasured gem shattered.
These people spammed me, but it is an interesting idea, sadly to find out if it is any good you have to pay, so yah, boo, sucks to them then!
3 Dec 2002
Veg blog - I have to make this one a regular. (I found this because I was looking up tofurky and veat as mentioned by Misterpants. I have not seen either of these products over here)
Hmm, the icon ought to look better now.
Thanks to everyone who said they could see the little red icon. I still can't see it though. (The icon will get better I promise - that one was just a first cut, but 16x16 and 16 colours is definitely a challenge!)
2 Dec 2002
I wonder of anyone is seeing a little rivet favicon for this page? The output file has the requisite HTML for it in it but I haven't been able to get any of my browsers to show it yet. *sigh* (I did have some small success with another site but that didn't give me any useful information as to how to deal with this one.)
1 Dec 2002
White Rabbits
30 Nov 2002
I keep trying to get favicons to work across the various sites on catless but so far have not had any success. Very annoying indeed.
The Japan Driftological Society seems only to be mentioned twice on the net. Once here and the other here. Seems like a perfect candidate for a webpage. Maybe I just haven't found it yet.
29 Nov 2002
The BBC phoned me at 7.30 this morning asking me to be on the radio at 8.45. Luckily it was something I could talk about!
28 Nov 2002
Went to see Dr Feelgood and the Mick Taylor Blues Band last night. The Feelgoods were superb - completely brilliant. Mick Taylor was, on the other hand, pretty crap really. Apart from appearing to be wearing three of Elton John's wigs and he struck me as being well out of it and he was fluffing runs and singing very, very badly. The numbers were all medium tempo and entirely self indulgent - long meandering lick based solos which didn't gel with what the rest of the band were playing. No passion of any kind. Snowy White was much better when he got the chance to solo, though he was also self indulgent and meandering to a certain extent. The piano player played some very odd stuff too - again didn't quite fit. Very disappointing indeed, especially when you consider how much the tickets were!
Kissinger?!?!?!? Can you impeach presidents on the basis of insanity?