The final episode of the first (and as it turns out, probably only) series of Invasion aired over the weekend.  Plenty of loose ends requiring a second series and a modicum of closure, but frankly it was all a bit underwhelming.  There’s a petition to ABC to continue the series, but it’s hardly a work of genius that has been discontinued.  However, my lack of excitement could be attributed to the fact that, thanks to a free introductory DVD rental offer from Amazon, I also finished the first series of 24 this weekend.  Damn, didn’t see that last twist coming!  However, both Invasion and 24 seem to opt for a rather extreme form of contraception; there probably needs to be a new “Rules of the Movies“: don’t get pregnant in a TV mini-series, Bad Things will befall you.

Just spotted an article in the BBC magazine about the tritone, or Devil’s Music, as they call it.  I play flat fives in lots of my solos, and they regularly get called diabolical, so it must be true!  Also there’s tritone substitution in jazz, which can get diabolically complicated.  I think the church is right, this kind of thing should be banned.

Not my pain, of course; as previously discussed my guilt is assuaged by direct debit.  No, I have another mad cycling friend who is busting a gut in aid of Macmillan cancer support:

On the 8^th July this year I will be attempting to ride ‘La Marmotte’ an amateur cycle race that takes place every July, in the French Alps. The course is always the same and replicates a high mountain stage of the Tour de France. It starts in Bourg D’Oisans, which is the town at the base of the Alpe d’Huez. It then travels over the Croix de Fer, Telegraph, Galibier, and then finally finishes on the top of Alpe d’Huez. The race totals 174 kilometres (about 110 miles) and climbs 5000 metres. I will be joined by about 5000 other cyclists, some racing, some going for a gold, silver or bronze medal; and some including me, just trying to get round.

If you’re feeling flush, sponsor Giles here.

In the past Derek has talked of mic’ing up various everyday items(woks and sinks to name two) in the process of recording for both Weedmeter and Stryngs.  This video is how I imagine those sessions looked.

Drunk, in other words.

Music is organised noise, and noise is poison to the mind.  Well, at least this is.

Just found a handy wordpress plugin: the Anarchy Media player.  Takes a minute to set up and activate, after which it turns all those pesky media download links into little professional-looking flash media players.  Seems to work ok on this site (example), and I’ve also slotted it into the Acuphuncture listenables page.  Works for quicktime and flash movies just as well as mp3s, so should I ever make something worthy of visual as well as audio content I’ve now got a nice way of showing it.  Which reminds me, I must get the video of the bungee jump I did in New Zealand turned into some format more permanent than a video cassette.

I’ve managed to pick up a cheap fretless bass: a Yamaha RBX200F. Very simple guitar with minimal features, but importantly it still has lines where the frets should be. Hopefully this will allow me to get used to the whole fretless thing yet maintain some element of tunefulness (well, as tuneful as my bass playing usually isn’t, at least). I must admit that I’m still spending a lot of time doing the “rising harmonic” trick, where you play a harmonic then press the string down onto the fretboard, where you can “push” it higher or lower in tone. Hopefully I’ll get it out of my system before I take this bass to a gig. I took both the fretless and fretted basses to a Casa rehearsal, where I played fretless for the first half. Of course after an hour or so of playing without frets, after the change-over I kept pressing down onto the frets, hence fluffing a few notes. I found it funny how quickly the different technique had become automatic.

So, now I have a suitable ax to let my Jaco pretensions run riot on. One five string and one fretless: one day I’ll buy a “real” bass.  But hey, at least I’m showing my loyalty: two Yamaha basses and two Trace Elliot amps.  I should get sponsorship, or something.

Our office gets a lot of junk faxes.  We’ve put the number on the Fax Preference Service, but a lot of the junk comes in from abroad and hence isn’t subject to the FPS, even if we could be bothered to write and complain.  Most irritating of all the faxed spam are the offers from companies selling cheap fax ink, which usually seem to be white text on black.  Cheeky fucks.  Anyway, vitriol aside, my new idea is a fax that has a built in screen and doesn’t automatically print incoming faxes, instead it would queue them up on a hard-drive so you can review them on screen, choosing the ones you wish to print.  A thirty second scout around online doesn’t turn up any current makes that do this; a few HP faxes will block incoming faxes based on caller ID, but I think my method is far better.  Prior art this, patent lawers!  That said, fax machines must be on the way out, I can’t believe some people we work with think they’re a more secure method of communication than encrypted email.

OK, I’ve mentioned the newts living in our pond. Now, despite the small size of our backgarden water feature, we’re attracting bigger visitors:

The duck picked its way around the pond a few times, then decided to get out and chase Kyla and I around the garden:

Seconds after this photo was taken, the little feathered psycho nipped me on the arm.  If life was more like a Marvel comic, I’d now have the dabbling powers of ten men.

The Cambridge City local election results are in.  Lib Dems retain control of the council, but it looks like very few people actually bothered to vote this time around.  Ming not pressing people’s buttons?  Recent Labour tribulations putting off grassroots support?  Or was everyone mowing their lawn on a pleasant spring evening?

After a brief discussion over lunch about what’s denser than lead (yes, we are scientists; sometimes we talk about football, but often we slip and end up talking about geeky stuff), I turned to my favourite source of background information, Wikipedia. Yes I know it can often be badly written or just plain wrong, but I have found it a useful source of historical information, e.g. on the break-up of Yugoslavia or the formation of the state of Israel. In addition it’s fun to follow links around with no real idea of where you’re going to end up. So this lunchtime I started with depleted uranium, which I knew was denser than lead, moved on to Tsar Bomba, the most powerful bomb ever tested by man (with an output at detonation 1% that of the sun), which was designed in part by Andrei Sakharov, whose name was familiar to me for some reason, perhaps because he was one of the people who first came up with the idea of a tokamak design of fusion reactor. It was there that I learned that the reason a tokamak is toroidal is because this shape facilitates the creation of an irregularity-free magnetic field, for reasons explained by a mathematical problem referred to as hairy ball theorem. It is this theorem that gives us a wonderful truth: you can’t comb a tennis ball. From depleted uranium to combing hairy balls in one glorious info trawl. Time-wasting has never been so educational.