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 📚
I’ve got The Hundred on the telly, and I can’t help thinking of Barney Ronay’s bit in the paper, and Bop-It
Stokes made a good point about the selflessness of the remaining England seamers, putting their bodies on the line to fill the breach left by Woakes. He talked about Siraj with genuine admiration, which will, you feel, mean a lot to the man himself. He said he would now be “knocking about” the Hundred, which is a bit like Odin announcing at the end of the Asgard‑Jotunheim War that he fancies a game of Bop-It now.
My last week's Crucial Tracks - Paul McCartney, the Ramones, Ike and Tina, the Wolfe Tones, the Blockheads, the Commodores and Oki with Umeko Ando
I’d like to end on a fun note: the Beatles or the Stones?
The Beatles, without a question. If they were two different restaurants, the Beatles are serving a huge eclectic variety of dishes, many things you’ve never eaten before. The Stones are really serving one thing they do very, very well, but they’re not the first ones to do it. The Beatles’s cultural imprint is so much deeper.
Dominic Sandbrook, being interviewed by Lauren Prastien
On “The Great British Dream Factory”: An Interview With Dominic Sandbrook
Arise, Sir Chris Woakes.
Surely?
🏏
CHRIS WOAKES WALKS OUT WITH HIS BAT IN ONE ARM AND HIS OTHER ARM IN A SLING.
The crowd stands to applaud this bravery.
Re-booting my laptop has got my HD webcam working again. Sadly this has coincided with me growing a horrible zit on the side of my nose
One of the things that I love about England, and the English climate, is that, just as you realise you’re past the height of summer, football starts up again ⚽
Retirement projects #1
Rewrite the words of Ian Dury’s Reasons to be Cheerful Part Three with my favourite sources of cheer
I’ve never been able to imagine Ian Dury singing along with Smokey. His voice seems too deep
My Crucial Track for 01 August 2025 - "Sun Arise" by Rolf Harris
What’s a song you’d want to hear while watching the sunrise?
“Sun Arise” by Rolf Harris
This is a great song. Rolf sadly wasn’t always the greatest of people.
“Sun Arise” by Rolf Harris on Apple Music
This is from Crucial Tracks. My profile is here.
Podcast episodes I've enjoyed over the last month - Joe Hart, ICE, Rod Stewart, Tainted Love, Victor Spinetti, Pata Pata, Stonehenge, Charles and Harry, Jamaica, Chelsea the Champions of the Universe, Robert Mueller, Katherine Ryan, Thomas Paine, Nig
Test Match Special - Joe Root goes second on the all-time list - the guest interviewee is goalkeeper Joe Hart. He’s interesting on choosing between football and cricket, and on saving penalties
Origin Story: ICE – How Trump built an American Gestapo - I didnt know that ICE agents are deliberately anonymous.They domt typically have ID numbers, and often use unmarked vehicles
Witness History - Inventing the black box Witness History - one of the management objections to the black box was that it would record ‘more expletives than explanations’
Word in your ear - Billy Sloan, the man who interviewed Grace Jones in a bath - before Covid, and PPE, and the whole story, Rod Stewart fell out with Baroness Mone
Lost Notes Returns with the True Story of ‘Tainted Love’ - I know a bit about the story of ‘Tainted Love’, but this is worth listening to anyway. There’s a great recording of the song played in a Northern Soul club….and also i never knew that Gloria Jones co-wrote ‘I havent stopped dancing yet’, with Marc Bolan
That remnds me - Victor Spinetti - Spinetti says that his grandfather walked from Italy to south Wales for work - there were no immigration controls. He also says he was only in the Beatles' films because George Harrison’s mum fancied him
Soul Music - Pata, pata - I very much like Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata, its a wonderful song. I didnt know Pata Pata means ‘Touch Touch’
After dark - murder at Stonehenge - like Marmite, some people ‘get’ Stonehenge and some don’t. There’s not many people in the middle. I very much ‘get’ it, but i enjoyed this podcast parttly because its a conversation between someone who dies and someone who doesn’t. There’s a nice bit about going to winter solstice….although imho the proper experience is to walk from Amesbury not from the visitor centre.
When it hits the fan - a Right Royal Whodunnit - a tabloid photographer was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to capture a brief meeting between Charles' representative and Harry’s representative. How did that happen, and why?
History Extra - The history of Jamaica: everything you wanted to know - the words ‘canoe’ and ‘hammock’ both come from indigenous Jamaican words
Straight Outta Cobham: The Athletic FC’s Chelsea show: Champions of the world! Chelsea stun PSG to bring home Club World Cup - worth listening to, especially for the bits of commentary at the start 😀
The Hated and the Dead - Robert Mueller - Tom talks to Devlin Barrett, author of ‘October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election’
Desert Island Discs - Katherine Ryan - Katherine Ryan was sent to an entirely French-speaking school as a child, despite not knowing any French
The Rest is Entertainment - the longest running show in the world is The Shipping Forecast, which has been running for 167 years and started via telegraph
HIST 116: The American Revolution Lecture 10 - Common Sense - Joanna Freeman - Thomas Paine says that the person supporting the crown “ought to be considered as one who hath not only given up the proper dignity of man, but sunk himself beneath the rank of animals, and contemptibly crawls through the world like a worm.”
Private Eye podcast - Nigel Farage spends 22 hours per week on jobs other than being an MP
History Extra - Killers of the Flower Moon - the history behind the film
Round Britain Quiz - features a great music question. I recognised the songs - Mother and Child Reunion, Dream Lover, and Hong Kong Garden - but had no idea about the connection
BBC World Service - Witness History, Osmondmania, When Donny Osmond fans collapsed Heathrow balcony - The Osmonds were banned from Heathrow airport after a balcony collapsed when fans came to meet them
BBC Radio 5 Live - Midnight Meets With Colin Murray, Martin Fry - ABC’s first promo for their single When Smokey Sings was on Dutch TV. On the same show, and in the next-door dressing room, was Smokey Robinson
I ran this:
az keyvault secret set-attributes --Vault-Name myvault --Name mysecret --expires somewhenorother
and got
Got unrecognized arguments: --Vault-Name myvault --Name mysecret-Username
…because az commands are all lower case. I’ve been using the az cli for a few months, but hadn’t twigged.
I really enjoyed Dept. Q. The main guy is likeably unpleasant - he’d be horrible to work with, but he’s great fun as a TV detective.
There are a couple of wrong notes right at the end, imho, but it doesn’t spoil it.
I’d recommend it if you liked Line of Duty
#TodayILearned that to exclude stuff from a github code search you can use a NOT keyword:
org:someorg "-password" NOT "--password" NOT " -password" NOT "--vault-password"
“What with all this daylight-saving stuff, we had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night. There was a fag-end of sunset still functioning. Stars were beginning to peep out, bats were fooling round, the garden was full of the aroma of those niffy white flowers which only start to put in their heavy work at the end of the day–in short, the glimmering landscape was fading on the sight and all the air held a solemn stillness” - PGW
I posted a punk song by the Outcasts for #JukeboxFridayNight on Mastodon. I hadn't seen the video for 40 years and, in my ignorance I was a bit curious about, or maybe worried by, something that looked a bit sectarian
I searched a bit and found this
Petesey Burns, from punk band The Outcasts, added to the research, explaining that before joining the punk scene, he would have never met Protestants.
“Didn’t happen, there were none near me, didn’t go to my school - we were in our ghetto,” he said.
“And you knew what they were, and they were supposed to be the enemy and that, but you know, whatever, you never met a real one.
“Until I started playing in the bands, and you came into the centre of Belfast, and I was meeting guys from the Newtownards Road, meeting guys from other parts of Belfast.
“And how could we support things like Rock Against Racism if you’re having sectarian thoughts? You can’t say, ‘well racism is wrong but sectarianism is OK’, you can’t do that. So it was really refreshing.”
Northern Ireland Troubles: How punk music created its own riot - BBC News
Here’s the video