Man, that is such a cheesy photo. Anyway, the Alex Harris Band played our first two gigs this Sunday (well, discounting the one we played at the Living Room last October). Both went well, and though we didn’t have a rapt audience for either we did receive compliments on both. I dragged my big amp along, but used it at neither gig. I guess it didn’t affect the sound, but I think I’m going to have to up my tone snobbishness and insist on using it in future, just to fit in with a few other bassists I know ;). One thing you will notice from the photo is that there is a microphone dangerously close to my mouth. Yes, I ended up doing backing vocals. Well, I say vocals, more like backing shouting. I shall be doing more vocal exercises (singing along when I practice scales, for instance) to try and train my voice a bit, though I think this may be a case of trying to polish a turd :|. Roll on Thursday at the Portland!

I have a startling hangover today, most of which I’m blaming on a concoction of my own creation. When we were in Meribel earlier in the year, our chalet rep said that you could make toffee vodka using a bottle of cheap vodka and six bags of Werther’s Originals. (If you’re not familiar with these sweets, they’re just a hard toffee with an annoying advertisment involving a kid who replies “a!” in response to being offered one by $elderrelative.) We had a few half bottles of cheap vodka knocking around the house, so I thought I’d give it a go. I couldn’t find the hard Werther’s at our local shop, only the new chewy variety, but thought this shouldn’t alter the flavour too much so bought four packs anyway. I combined all the vodka into one bottle, then passed it through one of those jug water filters to try and take the edge off it. No idea if it helped, but hey, why not. While the voddy was filtering, I started popping the toffees directly into one of the empty bottles. I’d considered chopping them up to increase their surface area and hence speed the toffee flavour’s progress into the vodka, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered to stand there trying to chop the little brown suckers in half. After putting in two and a half packs the bottle looked around half full of toffees. As I didn’t want to reduce the percentage of alcohol too significantly, I decided to stop there and pour the vodka back into the bottle. The sweets started to dissolve pretty much instantaneously, as can be seen in the following photo.

I’d guess this is because I used the chewy toffees rather than the hard ones. I kept inverting it once a day for the next few days, as the mixture would seperate slightly then semi-solidify. We left it for a couple of weeks, then a few friends dropped by last night and we gave it a go; here’s what it ended up looking like.

Verdict? Not bad, it’s still got a couple of lumps in, but the flavour of the toffee definitely over-rides that of the vodka, which was the main aim really.
And now, I think I might go back to bed…

This is our office right now: it’s 25 degrees Celsius outside but the radiators are still on (and we can’t turn them off), so we turned the air con on but it pumps out smelly sock flavoured air, so we opened some windows. Letting in hot air from outside. The environmentalist in me is weeping.

UK ID scheme biggest ID fraud of them all, from The Register. This is one issue that really gets on my goat. Sod the ID card, put more police on the streets! At least we got a nice Lib Dem in as our MP, but on the flip side who can I write to now to express my aggravation about this.
Update: and we get to pay £100 for the pleasure of it! Grrrrrrrrreat!

Ah poo, (drummer) Paul’s had to leave the Alex Harris band due to being busier than a Frenchman living next to a whorehouse, mainly with the band Mojo Pin. Good luck to them, and all who sail in them! Or something. Still, Paul’s covering us for the next couple of months, so with luck we’ll be able to find a new person before he spontaneously combusts due to lack of sleep.

The Alex Harris Band will be playing at Royston Town football ground, this Sunday. The event is a beerfest, entry is £1, doors open at 2pm and we’re on between 2 and 3 pm. This will be our first gig, and I for one am rather excited! Come down, see us, and enjoy some ale. We won’t be hanging around for too long though, as we’re then off to play a private gig in Stevenage, we’re trying to get on some entertainment company’s lists.
We’ll also be playing at the Portland Arms on Thursday June 2nd (doors open at 8pm, we’re supporting The Riptons and Tern, apparently, though I’m not sure this gig is confirmed yet), and at the Bombora Bar in Hitchin on June 9th. So we’re plenty busy!
I bet if I was suitably motivated, I could make a page on this site that would display a calendar of my upcoming gigs, along with information about them. Hmmm, I’ll have to think about it, but I suspect I can do it by creating a post and setting the date to be that of the future gig, then using something like the view future posts plugin, or a bit of hackery… or, of course, I could find that someone’s done it already. As ever: how handeh.

Nah, not the old Octosound tune; this photo was taken last Friday whilst on a tour of Milton Brewery. Well, I say tour, it was more of an extended sampling session; there are only a couple of rooms to Milton Brewery so it didn’t take long to see it all. These webs were made by the spiders that the brewers leave around to eat the flys that would otherwise burrow into the malt to lay eggs, or whatever flys do in malt. A pleasant evening, but I think I overindulged in the stout they had on. Saturday was… difficult.

No, he’s not Marvel’s latest superhero. For those who’ve been blessed by no contact with the mass media for the past week, an unidentified person was found on a Kent beach back in April, unable to communicate but able to play the piano to a virtuosic level. It does sound like the plot of a film, and that’s becuase it’s already been done. What bugs me is this: what if he’d been a bagpipes player? Bet the media wouldn’t have crowded around then. I’m not sure I’d be able to spot a virtuoso bagpipes performance anyway. Or as we’ve been joking at work,

… the story of a man washed up on a Norfolk beach who is unable to communicate verbally, but when presented with presented with pen and paper can draw an series of 2,5,7-subsituted benzimidazoles that scientists say recreate a number of important patents. The identity of “Medchem Man,” as locals have christened him, is currently unknown, but a nation-wide appeal…

Hmmm, think I’d better learn to play the piano, as that wouldn’t even make the Fortean Times.

I’ve banged on about this before, but now it looks like a team has managed to extract stem cells from a cloned human embryo. As discussed in the New Scientist article, it doesn’t bring reproductive cloning any closer, just the potential for new therapies for e.g. Parkinson’s and diabetes (no idea about why NS have listed autism as a potential benefitor of this research, I thought that didn’t involve tissue destruction, just genetics and developmental environment). I can feel the fight between the religious right and scientists in America brewing now.
Also from New Scientist: great news! New monkeys. Though from discovered to the endangered list in one day isn’t so good.

In preparation for Tom’s Funk Garden I’ve been listening to lots of 60s and 70s jazz, funk and soul, e.g. Roy Ayers, Weldon Irvine, Wood Brass and Steel, and of course Herbie Hancock. I have to say, there is a lot of tripped out weird stuff on these albums, along with some really wicked grooves. In particular I was listening to HH’s album Thrust, which kicks of with the worryingly titled “Palm Grease,” the drum line to which is something like

   1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
hh xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.......o--...
sd ....x.......x.........x.......x.
bd x.......x.......x.x.............

It’s not that complicated a line, but there’s so much space in the second bar it’s easy to get lost and loose where the beat is, particularly as that snare hit on 4& is quite emphasised. (Well, ok it’s easy to get lost if you’re shit like me.)

To get a Flickr pro account, or not to get a Flickr pro account, that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the mind to have a seperate web space for my photos and share in that community,
Or take Gallery and make it play nicely with Wordpress,
And by doing so end up running out of host space and so paying for it anyway?

I bet Hamlet never worried about this kind of crap.

This guy is on something strong. I want some.