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
There’s a new political party in the UK and it doesn’t have a name yet
I’m tempted to sign up and vote for it to be called Party McPartyface
Crucial Track for 23 July 2025 - The Wild Rover by the Pogues
What's your favorite song about second chances?
I was thinking about this song In a different context this week.
I listened to an excellent Lost Notes podcast on 'the True Story of Tainted Love'.
The show features a recording of Gloria Jones' version of the song being played in a Northern Soul club. You can hear the crowd's handclaps, which morphed into the blasts of synth on Soft Cell's hit.
This made me think, again, about things that have been added into songs by an audience.
So, there are extra handclaps for Whisky in The Jar, a rude chant in Living Next Door to Alice, clapping and a shout of 'Chelsea' for the Liquidator, and four claps, or at Pogues shows, 'God Bless the Pogues' for this song.
In each case it's a surprise the first time you hear the crowd-sourced addition, but it sounds integral thereafter
Anyway, coming back to the point, this song is a classic of second, or third, or umpteenth chances
"The Wild Rover" by The Pogues.I'll go home to my parents, confess what I've done
And I'll ask them to pardon their prodigal son
And when they've caressed me as oft' times before
Then I never will play the wild rover no more
Crucial Track for 23 July 2025 - The Walls of Jericho - The Virgin Prunes
What song makes you want to stay up all night?
At my age, nothing makes me want to stay up all night. Back in the olden days, though, I used to go to London for a show and get the mail train back, which was practically all night. This is one of the bands I saw at that time
Dripping with disdain, and as Alan Shearer would say, rightly so
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response, but these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
Fun at work #506
“When the first you hear of something is when you’re asked why you haven’t done it”
I’m a bit disappointed to discover that Donald Trump “writes pictures” better than I do
( The attached is by me, and it’s supposed to be a cow. I think )
Our local Wadworth’s pub hasn’t had any of their stout recently. I think it’s the finest beer in the world, but I assumed they’d stopped doing it
I was in the Town Mills in Andover yesterday, and it’s still there and it’s been re-branded
Joy was unconfined but today I wish I had drunk less of it
I did a company / volunteer litter picking yesterday
It was a great thing to do….but the downside is that I’m now noticing every bit of litter on the street, whereas I wasn’t before
I enjoyed this week’s Dave Squires cartoon, on the World Cup
David Squires on … trophy-loving Trump crashing Chelsea’s Club World Cup party
One morning the President (FDR) entered his guest’s suite to see Churchill emerge pink, glowing and completely naked from the bath. Embarrassed, Roosevelt started to leave but Churchill beckoned him into the room. Churchill declared, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”
My favourite Winston Churchill quote #503
Prime Ministers and Presidents: special relationships
There are some nice clips on the TMS (Test Match Special [the BBC’s cricket radio commentary]) page
This is the ‘leg over’ bit where Agnew and Johnson lose their composure after an unintended double entendre
The text of this should surely be part of the UK Citizenship Test?
Interesting bit in the lunchtime discussion of the cricket yesterday.
Aggers asked the panel of journalists what they thought of the argy-bargy and general bad temper of the latest Test.
They all said it was good for the Test Match. I think what they meant was that it was good for clicks.
There’s a gallery of 50 photos from our World Cup win on the official Chelsea app
Not one of them features either Donald Trump or Gianni Infantino….which is quite good
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
I’m going through my old tweets, loading them into a micro.blog and found this favourite, forgotten piece of music trivia
Steel Pulse were named after a racehorse
(From BBC Master tapes - Steel Pulse )
