Sky Q News

We finally upgraded to Sky Q, after what seemed like an eternity on Sky SD.  This means I can finally watch NHK world again after it went to HD back around 8 years ago. We may even get back Fox news even though it was nixed for even longer.  France24 will of course be back then and I'll no longer have to rely on scrolling through what was left on SD before eventually settling on al onion (Jazeera,)

If you want to know what that was like and a brief bit of the news and views of Qatars premier news outlet, read on.  But first the reason why we did, what we did and why we got rid of a near 20 year old sky box.

Not only did channels migrate to HD and their SD equivalents get shut down but, every time it updated it would either whistle (a high pitched tone don't know if it was interference or just aging hardware, it would whistle all the time until it rebooted) or go mute. It also started to crash and had to be rebooted in a similar fashion, i.e unplugged and plugged back in, the old turn it off and on again. 

EDIT, It is to do with Thomson boxes only which ours was. Our other box was an Amstrad and used to go silent when updating.

Finally back to the news, if you'd like to hear news with a slight middle eastern bent to @l Jizz isn't that bad.  Watching them cover Jamal Khashoggi or The Yemen crisis first hand as well as a few other bits and pieces from round the world and most crucially enough though precious little brexit news, which seems to infest twitter and other sources.

Mostly though on their scrolling news ticker they have a story about a journalist in an Egyptian jail for almost 1000 days. He appears nowhere else and isn't deemed news worthy by any other outlet.

This should occur sometime in the week if my calculations are correct. I wonder what will happen if he gets released.

Stella Creasy and the Golden Shower

God knows who this will bring in, for the curious, though, this is two different topics, none of them relate to any extreme sex acts.  TLDR we saw an MP and found some obscure indie in a charity shop that is all.

We went to Walthamstow, again for the first time after their devastating fire that damaged the mall. Indeed six weeks on and one side of shops has been completely damaged including WH Smiths, which has closed for good it seems.

We saw the local MP, Stella Creasy, holding an local surgery, in the place that's normally reserved for the stalls selling chinese toys and paintball experiences. I can only imagine that her regular meeting room was damaged by the fire.  It's quite a come down.

She reminded me a lot of an old boss of mine, also blonde, and she also came across as faintly wet and useless, too. I don't normally see "celebrities" apart from Girls Allowed at Oxford Street HMV, and Bill Oddie, that is the extent of my celeb meeting. My parents have seen Boris Johnson out the front of Wimbledon tube, kinda puts my influence into a cocked hat.

Anyway if you're here for the whole golden shower bit. We picked up a bunch of records from the Sue Ryder shop. Including this, weird record.

It's either T.G.S. the golden shower or that is both the name and the record label. It turns out its the sort of indie rock that sounds a little bit like the Farm or The Happy Mondays. Basically that whole era of guitar dance crossover from the early 90's that is long gone now. 

Spent a good deal of time trying to find out anything about it, all the searches I put in, came back as german porn (i.e. piss fetish stuff, not really my scene to be honest.) Same with Vibe Tribe management, and the ambiguous names created as well as Drive Fever / Freaks demo the names of the tracks.  Putting QPR won't help either as I'll just get results back for Queens Park Rangers football club.

Best I can do is put a draft up in discogs, and a video up on my alt channel on Youtube to see if anyone has any ideas.

555 Junk Tour

Went to Peckham Saturday, and instantly regretted it. Croydon is rightly thought of as the arsehole of south London but Peckham is this minus the trams. 

Can remember going there with my Nan for a good few years as an uncle lived up in the flats there. Can remember taking a dislike to the town hall clock as I remember it being remarkably ugly. Also I was possibly eating cold chips then as we had stopped off for fish and chips at another Aunts in Kennington.

As its been, what 30 odd years and there is a direct bus there, thought, well, lets see if  it's not absolutely awful.  Guess what, it's awful. 

I judge a place on whether it has:

A W H Smiths.

Or failing that any Charity shops. 

Peckham does not have a Smiths but does have a few charity shops. We picked up a few Reggae CD's which is kind of apt seeing its up there with Brixton for having a large and diverse community. Which is probably why it looks so run down, plenty of barbers, butcher shops,graffiti and fly posters everywhere. 

One redeeming feature is that after accepting a leaflet that I thought was from the Mormons but later found it to be Baptist shit and worse co opting anti SJW views to reel in the suckers. We found a poster hidden alluding to a record fair off Blenheim Road. Wondering where the hell it could be we found that by aimless wandering down the High street we had come to the exact street we needed.

Indeed the fair itself was under the arches and I nearly chickened out, but glad I stuck with it.  There is a few good things there including some disco Black Ark reissues for a tenner and a bunch of Dance records for around £8. We grabbed a bootleg of an old Reese track and a Jared Wilson stuff on Dixon Avenue Basement Jams. 

To top it off we were stuck with some fidgeting little black kids and their mum, visiting dad in jail at Belmarsh, so stuck with them for the remainder of the ride back home. 

Adam and Steve and the tree of knowledge.

I've never really thought about this until recently. Its about god and stuff and more specifically the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  More specifically Genesis and the whole forbidden tree of the garden of Eden (Genesis Beginning bits).

More specifically what is it and does it have to even be edible.

A quick skim of Genesis seems that god made everything to be both vegan and every vegetation wise, to be edible in some way, rather than to be useful such as for timber or medicine and that. 

There is a pretty good video I found from Darkmatter 2525  on the subject, but more likely a TMM video debunking original sin. Basically original sin seems to be Scrumping but with a snake egging you on to do it. Not something typically that gets you thrown out of heaven, normally a clip round the ear from a parent and maybe grounding if found out.

Also what if the tree of overall good and evil and life and death, wasn't an edible species but one of those trees that self seed everywhere such as an Ash tree or for tropical folks the Tree of Heaven.

Mostly it came from an idea I had walking around and thinking back to those old Darkmatter shorts, and thinking what if it was a species inedible to us or if anything else can eat from the tree of knowledge, in our stead.  Basic ecology would have it that, if the fruit was good to eat as Genesis says then really everything should have made a beeline for it to eat it. 

Look at rainforest figs when they are in season, they are a main draw to everything fruit eating, parrots, monkeys and other fruit eating animals and insects.  And seeing as everything was vegan then if the bible is right, then surely the tree of the fruits of the king of caractacus, instead of being forbidden to us, unless we were quick would have been stripped and spread around Eden as many small seedlings through pooping animals.

Some might say it has special requirements, and I can gather certain stuff does such as Proteaceae requiring bush / veldt fire to germinate, but those aren't edible to us and tend to be cones and the like.

So either god made it so we should have our own downfall. or if he really didn't want us to eat it, he should have made it a Maple (which kinda implies gods Canadian.)

At Long Last... Lamb!

Remember how I found a tape all about Lamb and how to cook it, a few years ago. Also that  they taped over a portion of it to record Watchdog.

If you don't this post will jog your memory.

I managed to hook our tape deck up to a audio grabber we got from TV Quick and have managed to capture the whole thing. I shall be putting the audio bits on Youtube so look out for them there. If you are curious about lamb or Woman's Own magazine then I've added all the audio as one big wav file to Archive.org here.

In other news it seems my CD Drive is on its way out as its captured my Andreas Gehm CD. A weird promo of Black Pukee. Hopefully restarting windows will sort it. If not I'll look into getting an external CD Drive.

Edit now this is weird rebooting Windows let me gain control of the drive itself, and it seems fine but the overall disc isn't. The disc itself is a promo and doesn't play in anything I own. I can read it fine and it comes up with the overall time but does not play.

The only other disc I have like this is a promo mix from Death In Vegas which also is a cunt to play on anything. Hopefully I find something to drag this off with.

Round up.

We haven't had one of these in awhile so here goes.

Coro Coro Comic update.

Been looking into the few manga that are suitably bizarre to warrant this blog.  No, not the Bomberman  4 Koma. but Himitsu Keisatsu Holmes (aka Secret Agent Holmes)a sort of kid detective that investigates murders and such, and harukanaru Koshien Kakero! Ozora, a baseball manga who's hero seems to be a reporter and such.  Thought it was about a deaf school team that he was leading, but that turned out to be by a different author.  Be cool if  it was though.

BTW, when has it been acceptable that kids can be a hard boiled detective and poke around in corpses and such. See also Detective Conan and the like, there are quite a few murder mystery manga for kids that really to my western eyes, pull no punches.

Succulent News.

Had a brief look for Trichodiademia a shrubby mesemb species, that has a few cactus like spines at the end of its leaves, and we stumbled across Howstuffworks.com. Needless to say they need the talk about what is succulent and what is cactus. Although they seem to be fine on some stuff, lets put it this way not everything with spines is a cactus.  Especially not Asparagus Ferns which despite some pretty thick roots. It's not a fern either as it has flowers and seeds too, which you can see on that wiki link.

Finally a big shout out to Cambridge University Botanic Garden for flowering their Agave, after 57 years. It'll flower and die, but not without it doing this if you're lucky.

Not Cambridge but Cyprus, but you get the idea.

That's also a pretty good article explaining Agaves to the non cactus / succulent growers out there. So once again good luck and hope you finally find out what you have there.

Edit It's flowered now and is apparently narrowed down to Agave Vivipara but are waiting till it sets seed or does what the picture above is doing and throws out offsets.  Further info here, and yes it's still an excellent article of information on Agave.

House on the Cliff.

Here is an anomaly for all you Hardy boys fans. Not including the 100 or so books that came out after Armada folded, what two books didn't they pick up and release from the original print run, here in the UK?

The answer is, the Hidden Harbour mystery and the House on the Cliff, which is today's topic.

I've recently read through a reprint from Applewood books, picked up cheap from Ebay, of the original story, and I've dug out the hard-back I got from a boot sale at Southwold years back.

Americans of a certain age will be familiar with the iconic blue covers. the reprints came in, but to me, it was only later stories like The Apeman's secret and Cave In came in hard-back. Also as I knew number 2 was the Arctic Patrol Mystery here, I knew I had to get this.

Reading it then from a British perspective, with the NHS and such, it made no sense to have a smuggling plot dealing in rare drugs and such from a hidden base deep in the cliff under an abandoned house.  Even if they came from India, which was unlikely, it still made no sense to me.

Then we did some research online on what it was, which led to us grabbing the original text. And wow it was originally Opium, from China, along with silk too. Which makes a heck of a lot more sense.

The actual text doesn't really change much between the two stories, the titular abandoned house changes name from Polucca to Politt, and a lot of the violence is toned down which makes for a weaker ending in my eyes.

I'm also pretty sure the original riffs on a Yellow Peril plot line with its Chinese based plot and smuggling contact pushing dope to middle America. Its lessened in the remake with its generic rare drugs spin. Also in the remake, Frank Hardy loses his N Word pass, as his Nigger in the woodpile remark is of course excised completely.

As a bonus there was a sort of remake by Benjamin Hoff called the House on the Point, which I've not read, but is from the same guy who did the Tao Of Pooh and other train wrecks which doesn't bode well. In fact it's reminded me of this which was one of my favourite sites back when I first got internet. A collection of bad NES games and that Spartacus cartoon from SKY TV where the end credits never seemed to end.

Any way in short if you can read the original text and I might pop it up here when I get round to it, do so, its a much better read.