Mort Subite

Kyla and I went to Brussels on the weekend; a cheap hotel + train ticket offer on the Eurostar proved too tempting to resist. Plus Brussels is my spiritual home, being packed with beer, chips and chocolate. Of course travelling on the Eurostar meant we passed through London on the Friday. The tube lines in London’s centre were mainly closed following Thursday’s attacks, and the station concourses were either empty or packed with silent people awaiting delayed trains. One we’d safely negotiated the capital the rest of the journey went quite smoothly. Our hotel was La Plaza, chosen mainly for the fact that it offers free draft beer. It became obvious upon our arrival why it needs this carrot: the surrounding streets are the red light district. Still, free beer is not to be sniffed at. Our weekend was mainly spent wandering around the city looking in churches and at the art nouveau facades that many of the buildings have, and when not being culture vulture we were making a concerted effort to work through the ~200 different varieties of beer that are available. A fact that I wasn’t previously aware of is that Lambic beer, one of the local methods of brewing, does not involve the addition of any yeast to the brew, it simply ferments with whatever yeast falls into mix. That’s my kind of city: leave water around and it turns into beer.
The locals speak French or Flemish, though the majority speak English, which is lucky as my French is more than a little rusty. One particular bit of trouble that this got me into was while ordering dinner on Friday night: we were in a Vietnamese restaurant, and surprised that I couldn’t see any chicken curries on the menu, I asked what the cuisses de la grenouille were. We gleaned from the waitress that they weren’t a bird, nor were they meat. When we asked what they were, she made a short waving motion at waist height that did nothing to narrow the possibilities. I ordered them, curried spicily. The dish arrived, and I gained a new phrase for my French vocabulary: it was frog’s legs. I’ve had them before, many years ago and probably following a similar number of beers. And yes, as everyone no doubt says, they taste just like chicken.
One extra point: I was watching BBC World whilst in the hotel, when all of a sudden on comes Top Gear. BBC World, the international mouthpiece of a highly respected journalistic institution, and it’s used to pump that odious twit Clarkson around the planet. What made it worse was that I spotted that there was a repeat showing of the same episode later in the day in case anyone missed it. Insult, meet injury.

A bit flashy

A big hello and welcome to my new sidebar addition: a little flash doobrie that shows some of my flickr photos. Soon my sidebar will be longer than the main “content” (ha) part of the site. And now I have some flash, it’s a slippery slope down to a little flash mp3 player to annoy y’all with… or some pointless java to make the site take ages to load… I may be turning to the dark side of web design.
Edit: I now realise that the flash thingy means that this page no longer validates as proper XHTML. Pah, maybe I’ll finally get around to rearranging this site to use a seperate page for my photos and music and other such stuff.

Dizzy

I know retro games are shit, but it’s time to drop everything and download Treasure Island Dizzy. I’ve got a score to settle with this game, I don’t think I ever finished it back in my Spectrum days, but this time it will be pwned. And after I’ve kicked Dizzy’s arse, I shall move onto Magic Pockets. Ah, geek nostalgia.

Google Moon

Now this is just silly. The mere existence of Google Moon is bad enough, but then zoom in as far as you can to confirm just what we’ve always known.

Amps

Well, The Alex Harris Band has now done about 6 gigs, the most recent being in the Silver Moon pub in Hitchin on Thursday night. I’ve taken my Trace amp to two of them, and used it at exactly none. Hrumph. Still, I guess we’re yet to take a headline slot, so generally we’ve ended up using the headline band’s gear to make it easy for the soundguys (or gals, in Thursday’s case). We were supporting St Elmo’s Fire, who sounded pretty damn rocking in soundcheck, but I didn’t stick around for their set as I was knackered post-circus on Wednesday night. Interestingly their rhythm guitarist uses a JJ retro, as famously advertised by Adrian Clark. I’d not seen one in the flesh (err, wood) before: it’s a pretty guitar, and combined with a Line6 Flextone amp, gave a fat rock sound. I’d still like a guitar with P90s, and this has revived my interest… but I think I’ve got enough guitars at the mo, and should, as ever, learn to play better with what I’ve got. Ooo-err, missus.

Nofit State Circus

I went to see the Nofit State Circus perform their ImMortal2 show on Wednesday. Frankly, this was one of the most jaw-dropping things I’ve seen in quite some time, a mix of incredible aerial gymnastics and a surreal 1920s/30s Eastern European-influenced stage and costume design. Apparently it’s based on ideas from novels by Kurt Vonnegut, though I’ve never read anything by him so can’t comment. The plot, such as it is, involves the arrival of a group of souls at some sort of waiting room, referred to as “The Slaughterhouse,” where they are looked after by an angel who helps them revisit happy moments from their recently finished lives before they move on. For example, one of the pieces in the show describe a wedding, with a lady suspended high in the roof with a white dress stretching all the way to the floor, while another is a day at the beach, with four people performing on silks dressed in 20s/30s style bathing costumes. In some ways it reminded me of what I think of as “websites as art”, perhaps the best example of which is the 99 Rooms site. There’s a better review from someone who knows more about circus stuff over here on cam.misc. It’s whetted my appetite for this kind of thing, so I think Kyla and I shall be going to the Cirque du Soleil when the opportunity next arises.

The Big Day Out

The weekend that just passed was the annual Pop in the Park/ Big Day Out, where Cambridge City Council + sponsors put on a load of bands, fairground rides, a French market and other entertainment. I try and make as much use of these freebies as I can, as my council tax helps to pay for it, after all. Friday night we saw Desmond Dekker play, who was fantastic: Shanty Town and My Israelite stood out for me. He did do a few crappy covers (Hey Baby? WTF?) but I’ll forgive him, just this once.
Saturday we sat around drinking beer in the brilliant sunshine and saw the last two songs of Lounge’s set, who were sounding good, then Afro Tema, Bump, and Horace X. I really liked the tone the guitarist of Afro Tema was using: strat into Vox from the looks of things, a very snappy African jazz sound. Bump are the Haymaker’s jazz funk jam session’s house band: the singer’s voice is at least a match for Joss Stone’s, and their set included a cover of her’s. Stand out track for me was It’s Your Thang, but only because it reminded me of how wrong Steve and I used to get the rhythm part in Casa. Horace X were really good and got the crowd jumping around like loons. All in all a good day out, even if we didn’t get around to trying the huge inverse bungie thingy.

Bass project stage 1

The reason I had to buy a new bass earlier in the year was due to my breaking the old one; more specifically, one of the machine heads gave up the ghost, and simultaneously the GAS fairy struck and I became enamoured of a five string. This left me with a slightly broken short scale bass lying around the house: my evil plan was to replace the machine heads, find some proper short (30″) scale strings (the shops in town only carry normal scale), and finally maybe take the frets off. Kyla informs me that there’s an important part of this plan that I keep missing, which is sell the damn thing, but I’m sure I’ll get around to that once the earlier stages are complete
Anyway, the initial parts of this plan are now complete. I bought a set of Rotosound Tru Bass short scale from Strings Direct, and they fit perfectly, no worries about the taper going over the nut. What’s unusual about them is that they’re nylon wound rather than steel, in an effort to simulate the sound of a double bass. The next missing piece was a replacement machine head. The drill holes in the headstock were ~11mm across, and I emailed Brandoni to see if they had anything that matched. They told me that the Grover USA minis had a diameter of ~12mm, so I bought a set of them (£25). They have a thick flange that looks like it should be put in a counter sunk hole, rather than the straight sided drill holes I’ve got. I fitted them regardless as the fit is quite tight, so it doesn’t look like they’re going to move around. However, it does mean that the bushings (the collar of metal that sits on the strings side of the headstock) are loose, but I can’t see why this should cause a problem, I’ll just use a spot of superglue to fix them in place. It took half an hour to sand the drill holes out to size, ten minutes drilling new screw holes for the Grovers, five minutes fitting them and the job’s done, quick and easy.
Next, on went the new Rotos. They sound quite good, certainly closer to an upright bass than standard metal-wound strings. Also, because the nylon the strings are wrapped with is black, they look pretty damn cool too. Here’s a little sample (including a bit of rubbish drum and bass backing, as I was in the mood for playing with Hammerhead).
So just the final stage of my plan remains, to remove the frets! Oh yeah, and to sell it after, heh heh.

PlanetFargo: Earth Pwns Comet

GameSpy: PlanetFargo: Earth Pwns Comet. I’d get back into online gaming but I don’t think I can speak the lingo anymore.

Neil’s Etape

A friend is doing something incredible, and certainly incredibly painful: he’s cycling a stage of the tour de France for charity. As Neil says on his site:

In the Tour, then the riders must finish each day within a certain time of the stage winner, or be eliminated. To make the Etape more challenging, the same principle is applied. A minimum average speed is set for the race (19km) and if you fall behind that, then you are eliminated. They stop you, take your bike away, and you have to board the ‘broom wagon’!

Good luck to him!