Goodness me! Long gap

 Should I keep doing this? I did love it once, but I am not sure ... has video killed the radio star, or similar analogy? Hmmmm. 

Quiet round here

It's quiet, Captain ... too quiet ...

Please support Rex Richardson's lovely trumpet CD project

Dear All

I don't use this much nowadays (duh) and I'm sorry to just pop back in trying to raise funds … I promise to try and write something proper one day.

For now, though, please have a look at this fabulous CD project and consider helping it out. It's in its last two days and just a few hundred short - can you please find $10 or $25 to support something extremely worthwhile? More if you like!

Rex Richardson is a brilliant trumpet player and a genuinely nice person. If you help out here I promise you won't regret it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/171036757/cd-of-trumpet-concertos

Finishes very soon - before the end of 2014 - please please have a look now.

Thanks!

Back on the Boris Bikes

As the title might suggest, I'm back on the Boris Bikes again. Weather, health, depression etc all played their part in keeping me out of the saddle for a while. Grrrr.

Then in early April I suddenly realized that I really, really wanted to ride one, as I sometimes do, as the very first leg (aha) of my homeward commute. It was sunny but horribly cold and there were some bikes free, which there often are not. I bagsied one, inserted the Magic Boris Key: red light, b*gger off Vogel. Not pleased.

To truncate a long story they had some stupid computer glitch which prevented me from doing anything with it for weeks. I needed to update my payment card, but could get into my account to do so ... resets not working, endless calls to customer services not working either ... all a bit annoying. (Although I should add that the customer service people were lovely, and did try hard to help, eventually getting me in touch with the right people ... now read on ...)

In the end a nice IT person wrote to me directly - he had reset my password, here was a temporary one ... and off I went! Minutes later I was on my first bike of 2013 and loving it, again. 

Since then I have used the system a lot. I've done two 10 km round trips in the last week (which I know is nothing for some, but enough for me, as a start) and a myriad of little runs. I'm a bit peeved that the access charge has doubled, but I suppose on the bright side it makes me want to get value for money once I've taken a bike out. Today I did Clerkenwell to Charlotte St W1 (Phil Parker's since you ask!) to get a friend's birthday present - it was glorious sunny weather, the bike paths were good and the roads not too bad - a lovely little ride.

I could and should write more about the bike scheme but for now just let me say that, despite its faults, I do really love it!

Skyfall weeperoonie: a small but delicious wager

I will give a small but reasonably generous prize of chocolate (or fruit if you would prefer) to the first person who can correctly guess which one scene made me cry in Skyfall. 

Hints and clues an ting are not available. Multiple tries are allowed, up to some reasonable limit, which is unspecified but probably falls short of trying the entire script line by line. (Let's be realistic - it's not that much chocolate ...)

If you already know, because I already told you, then you are disqualified. Yeah, I might give you chocolate anyway, but please don't post the answer here.

Note: I'm using "scene" here in a broad sense of "something in the film" rather than some formal filmic/technical definition with a scene number in the  script or change of shot or whatever it takes - I really wouldn't know about that stuff. This probably doesn't matter but I didn't want to risk confusion.

Over to you. :)

Back at St Anne's

Hurrah! After a horribly long gap I'm back, to my huge delight, at London's Finest Lunchtime Gig Church™ for a guitar recital by Isabel Maria Martinez.

What with one thing and another it seems for some time to have been very difficult to get along here, which is bad, but I'm here now, which is good.

I love it here so much. It's not just the music, lovely though that is; it's the warmth, the peace, and the sense of community.

That said, Ms Martinez is as I write (tut!) giving us a gorgeous recital of Llobet, Rodrigo, Gerhard and Villa-Lobos. She's a wonderful player, of great subtlety, control and drama, and makes a beautiful, luscious sound.

I'm glad I came.

Location:Gresham Street,City of London,United Kingdom

Bliss

Bliss - I'm at a St Anne's concert - the very good Lawson trio doing an American programme. Lovely! The cellist is Becky Knight who did the Dvorak, very beautifully, with Haydn Chamber Orchestra recently. It's all good.

Turning anger round

... is the title of my next post. Jolly good - now all I have to do is write it.

Ros Asquith shortlisted for Dahl Prize

This is quite cool! The von Neustadt family's dear friend Ros Asquith has been shortlisted for the Roald Dahl funny prize with her book Letters From An Alien Schoolboy. Please read all about it at the Guardian's rather nice article with sample pics an ting.I'm like yeah baby.

Glenn Bengry: nice man needs our help

Hi there ... please have a look at this:

http://glennsfriends.chipin.com/glenn-bengry

If you have a couple of quid, bucks, yen, zloty etc to spare please send a few in that direction. Matters arising:

• I promise you on my honour as a cavalry officer of the old school that it is real. 
• Glenn is far too nice and good a bloke to be in this bind. 
• Please help if you can. 
• Thanks!

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ - absolutely rubbish writing

Not funny. I've tried being polite and nice to Auntie about this and they can't even be bothered to respond, let alone fix their awful, amateurish writing. So I am just going to be rude about it, and hope that that annoys the fool who wrote it and the fool - perhaps the same fool? - who doesn't want to change it. That would at least give me some minor gratification.

Here we go.

There's a really lovely slideshow giving a timeline of the Shuttle here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14056002

- which features, in the first sentence of its first caption, this gem of moronic illiteracy and insensitivity:

• "The space shuttle was conceived as a concept long before man had even stepped on to the Moon."

CONCEIVED as a  CONCEPT?

CONCEIVED AS A CONCEPT?

I mean come on. What else does the person (= Year 10 Work Experience kid, presumably) who wrote this think happens to concepts? Did they actually manage the rather gifted trick of writing this without actually reading what they had written? Let's try some more excellent writing:

• "The space shuttle was conceived as a banana"
• "The space shuttle was bananaed as a concept" 

Both of these are just as good, and as meaningful, as the sentence currently in use. Moreover, they are less ugly. I recommend the BBC use more bananas.

Sheesh. Rubbish writing, Beeb: 2/10 for effort and 0/10 for your lousy manners. I diskard you.

Oh for goodness' sake ( … or, a Literary Expert writes… )

Now look. It's quite simple. I shall explain.

Novelists

• Not all Scottish novelists are the same person, though two of them are. (Or perhaps a single body with two heads, like Zaphod Beeblebrox. Maybe one head is called Iain and the other Iain M. I am perhaps a little unclear on the details.)
• Not all novelists called Ian or Iain are necessarily Scottish, though they may be.
• Not all novelists with Scottish-sounding names are necessarily Scottish, though they may be.
• Not all novelists who wrote quite odd first novels which I initially rather hated are necessarily in any of the above categories, though, again, it is not impossible that they are.
• Mainstream novelists and science-fiction writers are two entirely separate species, in fact they couldn't even interbreed in the unlikely event that they tried. What? No, be quiet, Tamsin, I am teaching.

I'm hardly confused about any of this.

A History of the World in 9½ Weeks and 10½ Chapters (parrot optional)

This is really the graduate-level stuff now so concentrate hard and try to stay with me.

• Right. The Wasp Factory and The Cement Garden are two different novels by, get this, two different novelists. Really.

My extensive experience in Thinking About Books And Stuff suggests that once you've got this one cracked, it's game over - you don't have to attend the rest of the course, and may print out your certificate at home.

Summary and conclusions

I trust that this is all now perfectly clear. I hope you have enjoyed having my literary expertise shared with you. Another time I shall explain sculpture to you, or perhaps opera. I have plenty more searing insights like those recorded above.

Bizarre-Connect-o-Fact-a-blog (Picard to Richard)

(No. 793 in an Occasional Series of, er, 42,452)

(Deep breath) Now pay attention: I shall only say this once. 

Captain Picard's nemesis Q was played by John de Lancie whose dad John de Lancie inspired Strauss to write his Oboe Concerto. 

Got it? Good, good. :)

Robert

This makes me very, very happy indeed. If you responded to this or this then that's what you did! Thanks a BIG lot. I am seriously chuffed to bits to see this update. Hats off to Robert and the Sassers and GSM and Know Think Act and Bringing Hope and Home Again and ... the whole thing! Just great. :)

Annoyed

I am post-surgical, grumpy, and annoyed at a surprisingly wide range of things and people! (This does not, however, include my wife, family or colleagues. Just in case you were wondering.)

But I should, really, try to write something a bit more constructive than this ... tsk. And grrrr.

Phew!

Delighted to find that despite age and weight I still have not entirely lost my touch (as it were) with gay waiters. :)

Hey ho tiddly pom blimey

Yes ladies and gentlemen, and others, that is the sound of me riding up to the Borisbike station by Moorgate tube, only to find it gone.

Yes, gone. In fact not just gone but gorn. Absent. Removed. Away. Weg. Gorn. The place has been scraped clean, like the pavement's been shaved in one of those ludicrous ads where our new seven-blade system gives you the smoothest shave yet, because it stretches as it smoothes as it slices - or whateverthehell. Gorn. Or perhaps it's more as if the Black Helicopters and their sinister operatives came in overnight and whisked away the whole kit and caboodle, leaving only the row of suspiciously-neat patches where the bike docks and console thingy had stood.

Nooooooooooooooo, I went, somewhat filmistically I hope. But then a nice chap stopped and directed me to the next one, just round the corner. So it's fine. Put the kettle on please Colin. Thank you.

The sheer bliss of being normal

I got home last night to find that Mrs von Neustadt has bought a lovely new long-arm stapler to enable her - and me, if I'm good - to staple music together for Stringwise and other fine musical type thingies. This is good. I like staplers.

To my horror the stapler, perhaps because it's a cheapo own-brand Ryman job rather than one with a proper maker's name on, does not appear to have printed or stamped on it the type of staples it needs. I thought this was absolutely standard practice, and to not do it seems … foolish … at best.

Naturally Mrs von Neustadt, before I'd got my hands on the new stapler, had thrown away the box, and compounded her sin by filling the device with staples that she thought seemed to fit OK. Seemed to fit OK? Seemed to fit OK?? Reader, do you not now begin to see the searing pain at the very heart of my existence? (No? Oh well, never mind, have a cuppa.)

In all honesty but through gritted teeth I'm forced to pause and admit that, by the purest fluke and not (of course) because 98.3% of all staples in the Cosmos are the same, Mrs von Neustadt did just happen to have filled it with the right staples. Absolute coincidence, mind, and clearly it does not in any way affect the purity of my argument. Ahem no indeed.

Anyway, I did what any red-blooded officer of my regiment (yes, thank you Tamsin, the ladies and gentlemen do, I suspect, know full well exactly which regiment we mean here) would have done, and retrieved the box from the recycling. I then tore off the little corner of cardboard which records the stapler's preferred diet and concealed it about my person before rerecycling its parent-box. Well I mean you would, wouldn't you? (No? Gosh. We should talk.)

Travelling to work this morning I was delighted to find the said insignificant-looking, but information-rich, fragment in my pocket.

Naturally I have now transcribed all of this crucial staple data into a small but strangely effective information system which lives on my portable wireless telephonic device, and which, entirely gorgeously, synchronizes silently and without fuss with its online webitty-web-access version - so if the information is here, it's also there, and, y'know, over there too. This I like, a lot.

So now I have this vital and very interesting data safely stashed away for all eternity or at least until a large systems failure of some kind. Empires may fall and rise, new elements emerge, Earth's orbital wobble may subtly change but I will always be able to tell you which staples you'll need.

I can't tell you how happy and fulfilled this little information handling and storage excursion has made me feel. I'm just glad I'm so normal. It's great.

Please don’t let the Year 10 Work Experience Kid write the press releases. Really.

A couple of corkers from the press release for the Grand Opening (yay woo) of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London.

The infamous sweeping forecourt, unique to a London hotel in its size and presence, provides a fitting entrance for the new hotel that will also showcase restored gold-leaf ceilings, ornate wall murals and the spectacular grand staircase.

The famous staircase, widely revered as the most majestic in England with windows measuring over 50 feet and crowned by an elaborate vaulted ceiling, has been featured in many films and music videos most notably Batman and the Spice Girl’s video for their debut single ‘Wannabe’.

Come on, toughen up, girls! Get out a dictionary and a grammar primer and do some not-very intensive study on one or two very easy topics. Either that, or give the work to – or at least, please please please, have it checked by – someone who actually uses English carefully. Or, y’know – just read it through before you publish it. That would be good too.

It’s been done by a professional PR company and, whilst I don’t want to sound too much like my own grandmother, it’s just plain sloppy.

I have wroted to them with my boring, smallminded, anal-retentive curmudgeonly complaints because hey, that’s the kind of relaxed dude I am. I even sent them, in the spirit of being lovely and nice, a bijou linkette. (Sadly, I was too lazy and/or narked to even try to sort out their Scary Batman And Singular Spice problem. But ho hum.) Will I, do you think, get a lovely, nice and helpful reply and some lovely and nice chocolate bunnies to thank me for my trouble? Dear Reader, watch this space.

Oh dear

I very nearly broke my rule on trying to avoid writing in this blog about my work. Well actually I did, then thought better of it. This replaces the previous attempt.

Hmmm.

Maybe I should write about puppies instead. Puppies are nice.

Yes.