The truth about the past is this: A day can only be perfect once it’s ended. - Ian Dunt

Nostalgia is a terrible drug - We’ve become obsessed with the past and fallen out of love with the present

My favourite book this year. I’m not always very receptive to comedy in books but this manages to extract humour from ISIS, Iraq, and people smuggling.

Finished reading: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis 📚

“When a business gets something wrong, the executives sometimes do the precise opposite just to show that they have learned their lesson”

I think Pat Nevin is quite right here, although I wish he wasn’t: BBC News - Welbeck and Henderson ‘might not have much time left at the top’

⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

What song makes you want to write a letter?

I’m answering a different question to the above, but the question above prompted the idea. The question I’m answering is:

What song makes you want to write a blog post?

There is, or there used to be, a Pogues website that was a kind of ‘annotated edition’ of the words to the Pogues songs. So it explained who McCormack, and Richard Tauber, and Mr Cohen were, and what the ICA is, and what KMRIA stands for, and so on.

I’d like one day to similarly explain the words to this. Being English rather than Irish I’d have to do a bit of research. I get some of the music references. I get:

And there’s Adam and Bono and Larry and The Edge Gettin' their photos taken with Naomi!

but I’m not sure about:

Finbarr, Charlie and Jim Hand And they’re drinkin' pints to bate the band

let alone “PLAC and SPUC and the FCA”

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For, I think, the fourth time in my life I saw a kingfisher this evening. Magical creatures.

What’s a song you associate with your favorite holiday?

Possibly my favourite holiday was a short family trip to Liverpool. To be truthful there’s no one song from the trip, but given some of our surnames this is the one I’m picking

BTW…if you go, you have to book visiting the Beatles' houses a few weeks in advance

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Share a song that feels like it has healing powers.

Dolores O’Riordan said

There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that’s why there’s that line in the song, ‘A child is slowly taken’. [ … ] We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.

Wikipedia

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I failed to get down to the river path last night so I ended up just plodding around the industrial estate. I thought this was weirdly picturesque anyway #salisbury 🏃

What song makes you think about the future?

I’ve been listening to Finbar Furey for more than 40 years. This song is about the future of the planet and the environment and such, so it’s appropriate that it’s got Finbar’s daughter Aine singing on it as well. Also, she’s got a great voice.

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“Consider Jerry Seinfeld’s famous routine about how bizarre sports fandom is. The players are constantly moving from team to team, so we’re basically rooting for the uniform. We’re cheering for laundry.”

The Benefits of Thinking Like an Alien - A.J. Jacobs

⚽

I realise I’ve posted something similar to this before, but…….I played football last night for the first time in weeks. I feel like I’ve fallen down a long flight if stairs, several times.

Pic: Steps to Castle Terrace by Richard Webb, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What’s a song you’d want your best friend to hear for the first time?

Three or four times a year I find a song I get a bit obsessed with. This is the current one, and I have sent to a couple of people. None of them seem quite as enthused as I am to be honest.

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That was fun. Some great football from both teams.

It’s obviously coming home next time! 😃⚽

Quite nice to be watching a football match that I’m not feeling nervous about tbh #EngFra ⚽

What’s your go-to song for getting ready in the morning?

I like something a bit stroppy-sounding in the morning.

I borrowed this LP from Salisbury library on vinyl…the librarians used to inspect the records for new scratches when you brought them back. It was always a nervous moment

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The few days between a semi-final loss and a third place playoff, that many people don’t care about must be a real drag. The players probably just want to get on home ⚽

#TodayILearned the word ouroboros

The ouroboros… is an ancient symbol depicting a snake or dragon[4] eating its own tail. Ouroboros - Wikipedia

via this bit:

And if LLMs end up training on blogs made by AI slop and having as their basis this ouroboros of generated text, then it’s possible that a Wikipedia-type thing — written and curated by a human — could become even more valuable. The Depths of Wikipedians—Asterisk

Pic: anonymous medieval illuminator; uploader Carlos adanero, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

England may be out of the World Cup, but Chelsea are still World Champions.

< takes cover…>

⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

Never mind..

Roll on 2030.. It will come one day. ⚽

I don’t know one end of a tennis racket from the other but it seems like the women’s game has longer rallies and fewer games in the match. More fun on both counts

I didn’t like Ann Widdecombe’s politics, but I am impressed that she visited every one of the UK’s 131 prisons in her two years as Prisons Minister.

Share a song that captures the moment when seasons change.

This popped up on my streamer this morning. It fits with the prompt a little in a ‘seasons of life’ way.

It’s on the same LP as ‘Hurt’ and tbh I haven’t really noticed it before. It’s a bit like a much lower key companion to Hurt in that it’s Johnny looking back on life through someone else’s song

It’s maybe my favourite Beatles song, as it happens. There’s some interesting stuff about the song on the Beatles Bible page

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I’ve been learning Brazilian Portuguese on a well-known language app for over a year now.

The fact that I often can’t tell whether a piece of text is in Portuguese or Spanish doesn’t reflect well on my language skills.

Pic: Tonyjeff, based on national symbol., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What song makes you feel like you’re floating?

Anything dub-by would perhaps work for this prompt.

As I said when I posted the non-dub version of the song, I’ve got a lot of affection for this song because it helped us get our eldest to sleep when she was little.

Our eldest features in other posts, including this one

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What’s your favorite song about growing up?

If you only know Soft Cell from ‘Tainted Love’, this song shows another side of them. I’ve seen Marc do this with just piano and voice - it was rather good.

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