There’s been a lack of updates here because I’ve been on holiday: four days in France, followed by a few days visiting friends around the south coast of England. The first part of the holiday was in a little village just outside Toulouse. Recently I said that Belgium was my spiritual home (beer, chips, chocolate), but the Gascoigne region has to be a close second (duck, red wine, Armanac). I think I ate more duck and pate de foie gras than is quite sane, let alone healthy, and enough cheese to give a person bad dreams for seven years. Actually, between eating and lazing around by the pool, I did very little for the four days I was over there, which is unusually sedentary by the usual standards of my holidays.
After returning to England I visited Winchester, Fletching, Herne Bay and High Wycombe, so a bit of a tour. Of those, perhaps only Fletching is of interest to anyone else: Kyla and I stayed at a little pub called the Griffin Inn; terribly rah, if you know what I mean, but really really fantastic food and good rooms. There was a double bassist and pianist playing jazz in the bar in the evening, and they were joined by a local singer on a couple of numbers. Both Kyla and I thought his voice was more operatic than jazz in style, which turned out to be quite correct as he then sang a short aria from Tosca and O solo meo. As I was sat about two metres from the singer, and it being a fairly small pub, I thought my ears were going to implode he was so loud. Impressive.

A few days ago on my drive into work I spotted that an old Renault had been abandoned, buried bonnet-first in the hedge bordering the road. So commenced the usual path of degradation that abandoned cars follow. Within a couple of days a “Police Aware” sticker appeared on the rear window. The effect that this has is to attract people who love nothing more than to smash the car’s windows, remove the wheels and anything else they fancy, then finally set fire to whatever remains. Usually the process from sticker to burnt-out wreck takes on average five days. What I want to know is this: who are these mysterious breakers and burners? This particular car is quite a few miles from any reasonably-sized collections of dwellings, so are there teams of people roving the countryside searching for stickered cars to attack? Or is it just a happy co-incidence? “Oh darling do pull over, I think we just passed an abandoned car and we could do with a new stereo and spare tyre for our vehicle. And then there’s that gallon of petrol I’ve been trying to get rid of for absolutely months.” And as the process takes a number of days, are there seperate groups, each specialising in either smashing, parts removal, or burning? And as the sticker proclaims that it is the police who are aware of the situation, is it in fact the police who perform these services for us? I’ve always thought it would be a cheap way of avenging myself on people to put a “Police Aware” sticker on the back of their car and let nature take its course. It’d be quite a good slogan for a t-shirt, only I’d be worried about having my shoes stolen then being set on fire if I ever wore it.

Mr Fastfinger teaches transcendental meditation, tree hugging and advanced tapping techniques. Visit his island. Then compare him to Steve Vai. (Found via rfbooth.com.)

Like some sort of prodigal son, I tried out for the position of bassist for Casa del Funk last night. Their current bassist is going to America for six months next year, so I’ve offered to fill in while he’s away. Generally the rehearsal went well despite a rather dire solo I played in Boogie Oogie Oogie (my excuse is that I wasn’t really warmed up, bass seems to be a lot more physical to play than guitar). There’s someone else going for the post as well so my return is by no means set in stone, but even if I don’t get in it was fun to have to look at the music again and not just rely on the same old shit I normally play. I even had to read the dots for a few bits where a specific bassline had been transcribed. Crazy, maybe I will get into this “reading music” lark.

I had an entertaining day out on Saturday at the wedding of Tim Horton and Zoe Norgate, the latter of whom used to play tenor sax in Casa. The whole day was had a pleasantly unorganised feel to it (though I’m sure that in reality it was planned with military precision), making the drizzle that fell throughout most of the afternoon seem like no problem at all. The evening’s entertainment was split between a ceilidh band and Casa del Funk. This was quite good for me, as I have a deeprooted dislike of barndances; we were made to do them at primary school for some God-forsaken reason, the phrase “do-si-do your partner” still strikes fear in my heart. I do realise however that it is impossible to get everyone dancing to any other form of music. (Actually that’s not really true, there was a Greek wedding I played at with Casa where the crowd went mental to the bouzouki band, then proceeded to ignore Casa as much as possible. Maybe it’s an ethnic music thing. Actually, that was an interesting wedding for another reason. I guess there is no wedding gift list for Greek weddings, as near the end of the day the happy couple stood in the centre of a ring of well-wishers who proceeded to pin bank notes to the pair of them. I’d not seen as many fifty pound notes in one place, and it was the only time the band was paid in cash pulled off the outside of the bride.) Anyway, it was good to have a little bit of Gay Gordoning and Willow Stripping etc., then Casa played out the rest of the night. It was at about that point that I realised I’d drifted past the point of “pleasantly tipsy” into “ham fisted idiot.” Being a bad workman I’m going to blame my below-par funking on the fact that I’d forgotten all my usual plectrums and ended up using a skinny one, but frankly more blame should lie with the few glasses of champagne I’d cosumed earlier in the evening. Still, it was nice champagne, and what else are you supposed to toast the bride and groom with?

I was just listening to the Maceo & All The King’s Men album, Doing Their Own Thing, on the computer. Win Media Player looks up the track titles in its big database in the sky, but someone seems to have been entering comedy data: the last track on the album is a cover of the Sly Stone tune Thank You (For Letting Me Be Myself Again), but WMP reckons that it’s Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin). How rare.

I’ve been fiddling about under the hood of funkysimon.com over the past day or so. If you happen to have clicked onto this site at just the right time you’re liable to have seen either me playing with the Meadow theme or a 500 internal server error due to a cocked up .htaccess file. The latter error has been caused by a couple of little tweaks: the more observant amongst my readers - err - reader, there’s probably only one of you may have noticed that I’m now using pretty permalinks rather than the index.php?p=4 php query style. This is all managed via the magic of the htaccess file, something I was aware of but hadn’t really played with much. The URL rewriting is performed using a kind of Perly regular expression matching, of which I had a bit of experience during my PhD as we worked on UNIX boxes. This tweak was essentially painless; after chmodding my htaccess file so wordpress could write to it, I simply clicked the button and lo, there were pretty URLs.
The second cause of various 500 errors was me setting up a seperate page to show my Flickr photos within the context of this site. I was thinking that the audioscrobbler plugin is just reading the relevant bits of an RSS feed and marking it up, so it shouldn’t be too tricky to do something similar for the RSS feed of my photos on flickr. Immediately after that thought it occurred to me that anything involving computers is usually twelve times trickier than you initially think, so I decided to use a plugin someone else had written rather than roll my own. The plugin I went with is Elijah Cornell’s FAlbum. I had a bit of a fight getting it to play nicely with the pretty URLs, but had the essential functionality of the plugin up and running almost immediately. The fixes I had to go through to get the pretty urls working were to essentially wipe the htaccess file and let wordpress and the FAlbum plugin recreate it, then create a page called photos with a new template that included the FAlbum php and javascript code. More detail can be read on the FAlbum forum over here. The net upshot of all this jiggery pokery is over here.
You, dear reader, might be wondering why the hell I bother with all this dicking about with computers. The basic answer, of course, is that I fucking love it. Actually I’m interested in re-jigging this site so that the blog isn’t the first page you reach when arriving at funkysimon.com, which is kind of a practice run for writing a new website for Alex. More generally, why even bother blogging at all? It’s not like my prose is a delicate play of double meanings and other wordplay; usually it consists of split infinitives and terribly mixed tenses. And my music is hardly the stuff of earth-shattering originality or talent that needs dissemination across the online world. Rather, I think it’s summed up better in this comment in the Guardian:

just another hopelessly narcissistic individual with too much time and technology.

Curry spice may protect against cancer. If I had any life insurance, I should now qualify for a discount. I should already qualify for a loyalty card from my local Indian take-away.

Did I say the balls were over? I just got back from playing a gig with Casa del Funk in Downing at their “mini ball.” I’ve never heard of such an event before, but the gig went down well, the dancefloor quickly filling with many slightly drunk and sweaty celebrants. I took to singing the rhythm part as I was playing it to make sure I was fully locking in with Steve and Dave on bass and drums, which seemed to help. I still can’t do what Derek suggested might help my 16ths when soloing, which is to keep repeating (mentally or vocally I guess) t-k-t-k-t-k-t-k- etc. to help focus on the semi-quavers. Still, I think I only really lost my rhythm a couple of times, which I’m happy with.

It was a long day yesterday: I went to a meeting in Copenhagen, which involved getting up at 4.30am to catch a 7am flight. (Oooo, hark at me, the international jet setter.) My usual excuse for being up at dawn is playing stupid 3am slots at the Cambridge college balls, so often these early morning vistas are populated by students in dinner jackets and bin men. Despite the students having gone home for the sumer there was still a good population of random people wandering around, sometimes looking like they’re still trying to get home. My new piece of advice is: don’t do a load of exercise before a night in which you know you won’t be getting much sleep, you’ll wake up utterly shattered.
On the way back we took the opportunity to pick up some foreign confectionary that our company loves to hate: salty liquorice. I’ve said before that nations should be divided along their confectionary, and this stuff is an easy way to split the Scandinavians off. The sweets are liquorice, but contain 7% ammonium cholride. It’s like chewing a chemical factory. It can result in three grown men sitting on a plane seeing how many they can stand to eat simultaneously, whilst giggling and dribbling like loons. Dangerous stuff.

I was messing about trying to record an idea I had come up with ages ago, a big chromatic rock riff. A bit more careful thought about the timing pointed out that for starters that tab of the guitar/bass part is wrong, it should be:

   3 & 4 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
RC ........x...x...x.......
SD ....xxx.x...x...x...xxx.
BD ...x...x.x.x.x.x.x.x...x

E  ........................
B  ........................
G  ........................
D  ...012345..........01234
A  ...........1.2.3.4......
E  .........3..............

The plain truth of the matter is that I still can’t get that drum beat working, even if I simplify the snare line. My 16ths wander all over the shop - well, perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but getting the kick drum exactly right each time is beyond my abilities at the moment. I’m quite pleased with the idea though, the way it immediately shifts off the beat by a 16th and the chromatic run up to the root made me think it was a little bit different. Last weekend I proved myself wrong about that.
I’ve always loved the first Rage Against the Machine album: Tom Morello’s shifts between hard rock riffing, crazy effects and jazz-influenced soloing immediately interested me, but the bass player is also fantasticly funky (as shown by how limp the second Rage album, recorded after he left, sounded), and the wonderfully sweary shouty lyrics. (As I’ve said before, swearing still amuses me.) I still remember spotting a friend from uni, Tim Grant, walking with a strange hitch in his stride, a kind of 1, 2, 3, and gait; I quizzed him on it and he replied, “Oh, I listened to Bullet in the Head earlier in the day and now I can’t get it out of my head.” Anyway, I spotted the album for a fiver in Fopp records, so thought I’d fill the gap in my music collection and spend the rest of the day shouting, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” at people. So I was listening to the album and found pretty much exactly the above riff: it’s the outro to Know Your Enemy. Sure, Rage’s version only has a three note chromatic run up to the root, but otherwise it’s pretty much identical. Arsebadgers! Frankly I’m still going to keep going with my idea though, as this kind of thing happens all the time: it’s not what you play, it’s how you play it that’s important.

I was looking for a plugin to tell me when new mail arrived in my yahoo account. I experimented with Yahoo’s own toolbar, but didn’t need any of the other functionality that provided, so I hunted around on Mozilla update and found A’s Yahoo! mail notifier. (Though actually I downloaded it from here.) Works well, has a little popup window similar to the “Download complete” that Firefox’s download manager uses.