My Crucial Tracks this week - London You're A Lady, London Pride, I Dreamed a Dream, Mulder and Scully, Blackbird, Fester Skank, Skank in Bed, Street Tuff and Dusty
If I automated this a bit better then I wouldn’t need to worry about mis-spelling ‘Crucial’ every week.
Anyway, these are my Crucail Tracks for the last few days.
#TodayILearned that to substitute more than one thing at once in vim you can do this
4,40s/Arsenal/Chelsea/g | 4,40s/Tinpot/Champions of the World/g
You do seem to need the ‘/g’ (or presumably ‘/1’ or whatever)
I enjoyed this film’s footage of Old London, and Old Suburbia. The film maker is a bit down on the latter.
I think the film was made at around the time of the first 7 Up
Watched: A City Crowned with Green 🍿
Interesting bit on The Rest is Entertainment.
For someone to earn the UK minimum wage from Spotify they need to have 567,000 monthly streams. That is roughly the number of streams that Alison Moyet gets
Thankfully Ms Moyet will have other sources of income
Vim command to replace all your backslashes with forward slashes, on the current line
:.s/\\/\//g
🚌 #TodayILearned
Video Games are bad for you ☠️☠️
“In May 1981 Labour backbench MP George Foulkes proposed a bill for the ‘Control of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Games’. They were, he said, a ‘force for evil’, dependent on ‘blood money’ extracted from children:
I have seen reports from all over the country of young people becoming so addicted to these machines that they resort to theft, blackmail and vice to obtain money to satisfy their addiction …
That is what is happening to our young people. They play truant, miss meals, and give up other normal activity to play ‘space invaders’. They become crazed, with eyes glazed, oblivious to everything around them, as they play the machines. It is difficult to appreciate unless one has seen it for oneself. I suggest that right hon. and hon. Members who have not seen it should go incognito to an arcade or café in their own areas and see the effect that it is having on young people”
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚
Interesting read about Trump and NATO
I didn’t know this, about Tiger Man, one of my favourite Elvis songs. It references both Hound Dog, and an answer to Hound Dog.
[Sam] Phillips penned an answer song to Hound Dog that he dubbed Bear Cat in which the singer rebuts Big Mama’s bad-dog accusation from a male perspective. …The Bear Cat melody, though, sounded indistinguishable from that of Hound Dog, and so Bear Cat and Phillips infringed on the Hound Dog copyright.
Sam Phillips got sued, and had to give up the royalties. Phillips then produced the original of Tiger Man…
The lyric shares Sam’s sense of humor about his recent legal setback, as Thomas sings, “I get up on the mountain and I call my bear cat back. My bear cat comes a runnin’ and the hound dogs stand way back.” In his 1970s power and glory phase, Presley would perform Tiger Man in his live sets, in medley with Mystery Train.
From BEFORE ELVIS by Preston Lauterbach
There’s a new Cecil Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
Regular readers will probably be bored with me saying that my Granny was his cleaner
Pic: catalogue for Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World exhibition at the NPG. 9 October 2025 - 11 January 2026
I think many people will instead be comparing the duo to the Judean Peoples Front, and the Peoples Front of Judea
Zarah Sultana has said she and Jeremy Corbyn have patched up their combustible co-leadership of a new leftwing party, with the MP comparing the duo to Liam and Noel Gallagher. Zarah Sultana says she and Corbyn have reconciled and can co-lead new party
Retirement project #4 (possibly)
A psycho-geographic, hyper-local history of some runs I’ve done e.g.
The Big Half
- “The ship was named after Cutty-sark, the nickname of the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns’s 1791 poem Tam o' Shanter.”
- Ratcliff Highway murders - Wikipedia
- Cabot Square - John Cabot was actually Giovanni Caboto
I’ve still got no plans to retire though.
Pic: John Faed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I switched over for the last 10 minutes or so of the Scotland match.
One of my better recent decisions ⚽
Also trying out Micro.blog’s new movies thingy
Saw this again a couple of weeks ago….a candidate for my favourite ever film
Watched: Brief Encounter 🍿
Also trying out Micro.blog’s new movies thingy
Saw this again a couple of weeks ago….a candidate for my favourite ever film
Watched: Brief Encounter 🍿
A petition to stop the playing of music when Chelsea score at Stamford Bridge
The sound of the crowd is music enough!
Change.org - Stop Music Being Played After Chelsea Score At Stamford Bridge
The Labour Party wasn’t always entirely pro-business
Fifteen years earlier, having been invited to address the annual conference of Britain’s Advertising Association, the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan had told them that advertising was ‘one of the most evil consequences of a society which is itself evil’. They were, he said to a stunned silence, ‘harnessed to an evil machine which is doing great harm to society’, leaving the consumer ‘passive, besieged, assaulted, battered and robbed’.
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚
Neil Hannon on why having all the stats can be a mixed blessing
“On Spotify it gives you all your demographics, and that’s fascinating and also quite disheartening,” Hannon says. “The vast majority, I mean 80 per cent, of listeners are between 35 and 55, basically my age or a bit younger. We also have a lovely 10 per cent of over-65s and then I love the plucky little three per cent of under 18s. Well, good on you. I mean, you must get ridiculed at school!”
From Classic Pop magazine
Podcast episodes I liked over the last month - Bonnie and Clyde, 60 songs that explain the 90s, 9/11 and Gander, the Pyramids, Nile Rodgers, the Panama Canal, Susannah Hoffs, Vlad the Impaler, Llareggub, Thonis-Heracleion, pilot's voices, Saint Cris
This was stuff I found interesting in various podcasts over the last month
There more at the links below
Short History of…… Bonnie and Clyde - W.D. Jones, a member of the gang who lived long enoughto see the 1967 film, said it “made it all look sort of glamorous, but like I told them teenaged boys sitting near me at the drive-in showing: ‘Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell.'” It’s interesting to me that he saw the film at a drive-in.
Rolling stone podcast - ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’ - there are mentions of the Prodigy, KLF, Radiohead and the Spice Girls but none of Oasis, Blur or Pulp. Made me realise how ‘Brit’ Britpop really was
Witness History - 9/11 The generosity of Gander - about the true story behind the musical Come From Away. The ‘witness’ here is Beverley Bass, who is represented in the show. I think she says that pharmacists in Gander prepared 2000+ prescriptions in one night for people who were stuck on the planes on the runway
Short History of……the Pyramds - the year that Cleopatra was born is closer to the completion of the Empire State Building than it is to the completion of the first pyramid
Bullseye - Nile Rodgers - “the song is just an excuse to get to the chorus, the chorus is just an excuse to get to the breakdown”
Short History of….The Panama Canal - there was a lot of sickness amoung the builders of the canal. There was a problem with ants in the hospitals. To stop the ants getting onto the patients’ beds, they stood the legs of the beds in bowls of water. This fixed that problem, but, sadly, the bowls of stagnant water were a bredding environment for mosquitos
Broken record - Susannah Hoffs - I did know that the Bangles hit Eternal Flame was inspired by the eternal flame memorializing Elvis at Graceland. I didnt know it was specifically inspired by the Bangles visiting Graceland at a time when the Eternal Flame had gone out.
A short history of….. Vlad the Impaler - an account of Vlad Dracula’s life said that he dipped his fingers in the blood of his executed enemies. This was mistranslated as dipping his bread into their blood, which gave rise to the idea that he consumed blood
The Rest is Entertainment - The Real Rich List - Marina says that the cosmetics industry got a boost during the pandemic from people seeing their own faces on Zoom and thinking they needed more cosmetics
That Reminds Me - Nerys Hughes - Nerys Hughes says that she’s played every female role in Under Milk Wood bar one. The play is set in a Welsh village called Llareggub, which is slightly rude backwards
History Extra - The Princes in the Tower: has the mystery been solved? - Philippa Langley, whose work helped to locate the bones of Richard III under a Leicester car park, discusses whether he had the Princes murdered
Witness History - Discovering the ancient city of Thonis-Heracleion - I’d not heard of this - a lost city, mentioned by Herodotus, that has been found 7km off the coast of Egypt
Revisionist History - This Is Your Captain Speaking - podcast about why all pilots sound similar. This reminded me of a relative who did announcements on the railways - his normal voice was completely different from his railway voice. More significantly, the podcast includes the original audio from the aeroplane that landed in the Hudson
The Rest is Entertainment - South Park vs Trump - I didn’t know that the CEO of Paramount was the son of Larry Ellison, who was CEO of Oracle
Shakespeare: Past Master | 1. Henry V History Extra podcast - Jerry Brotton says that the repeated references to Saint Crispen’s Day in the famous speech are an invocation of the working classes, Saint Crispen being the patron saint of shoemakers
How tickled I am - Arthur Askey - Askey was a scouser but had to get rid of his accent to get on in show business. He popularized the idea of Diddy Men, and jam butty mines before Ken Dodd picked them up. I’m not sure whether Askey invented these things, or whether they were part of Liverpool culture.
Talk ’90s to me: Friends! Could a TV show be any more influential? - ‘Friends’ was originally going to be called ‘Couples’
The Rest Is Politics: Leading: 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) - during the referendum campaign the ‘No’ campaign argued that Scots would no longer be able to watch EastEnders if they left the UK, and that they would not be able to be part of the European Union
KKPCW, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve started to get into the habit of shutting down my laptop properly when I finish for the day.
I didn’t do that last night, and coming back to it this morning felt vaguely grubby…like getting into an unmade bed
Pic by maxronnersjo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
