I’ve been to Maldon in Essex, to visit an aged P.
Maldon is most famous for salt, and for being the place where George Washington’s great-great grandfather is buried 🧂🇺🇸
My surname ‘Penny’….it means ‘hill’ in Brythonic.
“Sixpenny was first recorded in 932 as Seaxpenn, and means “hill of the Saxons” (from Old English Seaxe and Brythonic penn). The reference is to the hill now known as Pen Hill east of the modern farm, and probably marks an ancient boundary.”
Other derivations of ‘Penny’ are that it’s do with money, or it derives from the Welsh ‘son of’, as in Pendragon or Penhaligon….but I hadn’t heard of this Brythonic derivation before. To be fair, I hadn’t heard of Brythonic before either.
I was looking up Sixpenny Handley, which is close to the Ancestral Home of Broadchalke
I did once look up the distribution of Pennys across the UK and found that we are concentrated in Wiltshire, and more famously, around Liverpool.
Proposed entry for a future edition of The Meaning of Liff - crudwell noun, when reading a book, the uneasy feeling that you’ve read it before
Currently reading: Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz 📚
Last week's Crucial Tracks: Public Image, The Outcasts, The Highwomen, Blondie, Scaffold, The Heptones, and, obviously, The Macarena
Nicky Manic-Street-Preacher on TV chefs
I’m editing my old tweets in mattypenny-tweets.micro.blog , and I quite like this one
Nicky Manic-Street-Preacher in @SylvPatterson’s ace book, I’m Not with the Band, is quoted as saying this
Saturday morning kids TV has been ruined by pious -pontificating - revolting chefs. We used to have the Banana Splits, Tiswas, Swap Shop - Tarzan - Robinson Crusoe - The Singing Ringing Tree, we had imagination. Now we have these grotesque vain people lecturing us on how to live - it’s sick.
A bit harsh on the TV cooks…but he has a point
I didn’t know the word pareidolia. It means “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”.
I think it’s appropriate that, to me , the word looks like a random jumble of letters
Retirement project #4 - resurrect and finish off the Salisbury’s roadnames website
(I should say I’ve got no intention of retiring….I’m clearly far too young)
I’m not comfortable with comparing anything to 1930s Germany, for both historical and political reasons…..but ‘The Nerd Reich’ is a great pun
I didn’t realise you could pile up cimsessions like this
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkConnection -cimsession $(new-cimsession -computername myserver,yourserver,hisserver,herserver)
The automated loading of my twitter archive into micro.blog didn’t quite work, so I’m loading it in with powershell and manually adding pics and editing
That guy that wrote all those tweets is a lot like me….but I don’t know if we’d get on
Back in the ’90s, before kids, and moving back to the Shire etc, we used to go to a thing called Club Montepulciano. They used to play groovy but ancient music by the likes of Andy Williams, Perez Prado, and Herb Alpert
Went to an ’80s thing yesterday and realized that that music is now older than the sounds at Club M were at the time
Feeling really old now….. nostalgia is indeed not what it used to be.
I had a fantasy that Mr Trump had orchestrated an uprising in Moscow and the arrest of Putin in Alaska.
I don’t think it’s happening.
My Crucial Tracks over the last week or so - Kraftwerk, Jaz Elise, Suggs, The Beatles, Elvis, Bethany Eve, and Dickie Goodman
I really enjoy Crucial Tracks. Something about it chimes with the way my brain works, or something
These are the Crucial Tracks for the last few days…..it’s a fairly mainstream set of songs, but none the worse for that !
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.”
I like this quote. It’s from Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal. He regrets that now.
The Guardian is asking the really big question today
I’m #TeamLampsOn, obviously
Vimrc lines to get my ongoing-notes-type file to autosave
autocmd BufWriteCmd HighlightsNow.md setlocal autowrite
autocmd InsertLeave,TextChanged * if expand('%:t') ==# 'HighlightsNow.md' | silent! write | endif
I’m too lazy to go to the Edinburgh Festival, but I always enjoy the collection of one-liners. It’s almost like being there.
“These people have no ear, either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for piano playing and singing is thus all the more repulsive,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine after touring Britain in 1840. ‘Nothing on Earth is more terrible than English music, save English painting.’ At least he had the courtesy not to mention English cooking”
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚
Worked out how list my favourite Crucial Tracks artists
get-content C:\Users\matty\Downloads\crucial-tracks-export-2025-08-11.json | convertfrom-json | select -expand items | select -expand _song_details | group-object artist | sort-object -property count -descending | select count,name
Count Name
----- ----
6 Elvis Presley
4 The Pogues
4 Bethany Eve
3 Johnny Cash
3 Toots & The Maytals
2 The Cramps
2 Joey Ramone
2 Bob Marley & The Wailers
2 Christy Moore
2 The Wolfe Tones
2 ABBA
1 Ritchie Valens
1 The BeerMats
1 The Beatles
1 Television Personalities
1 Ramones
I’ve been working with the Bourn shell, the Korn Shell, the Born Again Shell, or Powershell since the early 1990s….and I just found this mistake in a script I wrote last week (you have to use ‘-eq’ for equality comparisons).
if ($ScriptDebugPreference = 'Continue') {
write-host $Message
}
Will I ever learn? I fear the answer is ‘no’
“Black Sabbath’s drummer, Bill Ward, told an interviewer that he used to lie awake at night listening to the rhythmical pounding of the machines in a nearby factory and drumming with his fingers on the headboard.”
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚
Although rock and pop have been dominated by people born during and after the Second World War, many of the writers who inhabit our collective imagination were much older. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859, Beatrix Potter in 1866, Agatha Christie in 1890, J. R. R. Tolkien in 1892, Enid Blyton in 1897, Ian Fleming in 1908 and Roald Dahl in 1916. As a result, much of our imaginative life is still rooted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚