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It was only while reading the morning paper that I remembered that tomorrow (Saturday 17th May) was the final of the FA Cup. “When I was a lad” (what is the typeface for nostalgia?) this was the major sporting event of the year. It would be preceded by two weeks of blanket coverage of the build-up, as the two sides prepared for the “Clash Of Titans” at “The Two Towers” (wem-ber-ley). There would be special TV programmes (center-piece of which would be a special recording of “A Question Of Sport”). Now, silence.
Partly this is due to the fact that the FA Cup final used to be one of the few football matches to be shown live on TV, partly due to the fact that the Premiership, and now the Champions League, are considered the pinnacle of soccer success, and only partly due to the fact that a knock-out competition can produce a final between Cardiff City and Portsmouth Town.
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In response to Amberfire, ilegirl and Sanityfound who have been posting lyrics of their favourite/most appropriate songs, here is a link to a song co-written and performed by a friend of mine, Paul Bryant, who deserves to be better known than he already is. It should be one of those big weepie “women’s songs” so [...]
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John Peel would hate this. However the bald facts are that history shows that “punk” was not the major sea-change in music that some people claim. It was just an invention of the media. The major acts that preceded punk went on to even greater success after Punk. U2, a band [...]
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It looks like the backlash against Phorm snooping on your web browsing activities is growing apace. Antiphormlite is a programme that runs on your PC and produces a whole lot of web surfing ‘white noise’ which is intended to obfuscate your actual web browsing. There are concerns however, that this programme may be [...]
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A couple of weeks ago BritInCalifornia was passing through, and apart from the excellent activities he mentioned on his blog post, we also, for old times sake, got geeky and assisted a friend who had fallen foul of one of the more pernicious and possibly immoral scams on the Internet.
This friend had found a website [...]
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The first time I heard a track from the Alison Krause/Robert Plant collaboration “Raising Sand” I was entranced. The interplay of their voices is sublime and the backing, perfect. Until I saw them perform on Jools Holland’s “Later” TV show, when they were even better, which followed on from one of the most [...]
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I was sitting in my garden the other day, watching a Firecrest take a shower in the waterfall beside the pond, when it occurred to me that despite seeing more species of avian wildlife in my locality than ever before, I hadn’t heard the sound of a cuckoo around here for more years than I [...]
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There is no doubt that if God existed he would be an Englishman, and the proof would be seen in a forest glade, in spring, in England.
Click on the slideshow to go to Picasa and see the large versions!
I spent Friday dodging showers with my tripod, camera and lenses, visiting a couple of my favourite [...]
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The last couple of weeks have seen a lot (!) of rain and quite a lot of warm sun. This has ignited the burgeoning vegetation into growth, with the result that the garden is a hazy shade of blue from the forget-me-nots and bluebells, punctuated by hotter colours from patches of wall flowers and [...]
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These days there’s a lot of bad sh1t coming at you down the Internet with viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, botnets and various hackers and script kiddies fiddling around. So anyone with a bit of knowledge is (I hope) sitting behind a nice firewall built into their router, with a software firewall as a [...]