You Must Be From Away

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Germany’s politicians have finally seen the light and are actually going to introduce non-smoking legislation.

So it’s not a big surprise that British American Tobacco – around 25% of the market in Germany – had a full page advert in our (only) quality Sunday paper yesterday.

It’s a brilliant idea to save us from global warming.

Ventilation.

Yep, they’ve come up with the idea of pumping 1000 litres of fresh air per customer and minute into pubs/restaurants/bars.

That’ll reduce the CO2 concentration to 20% of the limit set by the Health and Safety people for working environments.

That must be good, then.

(Although I imagine it might be a bit like being stuck in a wind tunnel. Talk about blowing the froth off a wet one….)

So I called them up to congratulate them.

I also asked them about stuff like….

Carbon monoxide Hydrogen cyanide Formaldeyde Acrolein Acetaldehyde Hydrazine Vinyl chloride Urethane Quinoline Benzopyrene Methylfluoroanthene Dibenzacridine Chrysene

(Just some of the toxic and carcinogenic constituents of secondary cigarette smoke)

Hmmm. Didn’t have any information about that.

And why CO2 is such a bad thing in the first place.

Or are they just climbing on the global-warming-CO2-is-bad-for-you bandwagon?

I mean, it’s naturally present in air to the tune of 300-600 ppm and they’re planning on reducing it to… 300ppm.

So the air in a pub where people are smoking is going to be as good as (or better) than fresh air?

Hmmm. The chappy I talked to wasn’t too sure about that either

They’ve promised to call me back.

Just how stupid do they think we are?

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Kurt Beck never was the sharpest knife in the drawer.

How he made it to head honcho of Germany’s (SPD) Labour Party and to the exalted position of Premier of Rhineland-Palatinate is beyond me, but I don’t claim to be an expert in these matters.

It’s all too greasy for my liking.

But this is a classic.

Our friend Kurt got involved in the CO2 emissions discussion and it was all a little too much for him.

He said ” Nuclear power – if you look at the entire process, from ore extraction, purification, processing and power generation – generates more CO2 than burning coal”

And everyone said (or thought..) “WTF are you talking about, Kurt?”

So Klaus Kleber picked this up on the main news programme last night and demonstrated that – even if you took the ENTIRE process chain from construction to decommisioning of a nuclear power station and mining, purification, transport, operation etc – into account

Coal fired power stations generate ONE THOUSAND TIMES MORE CO2 per unit of energy than nuclear power stations do.

None of the scientists who provided the data could work out how Kurt came up with the idea.

Neither could his own party.

Neither could anyone…..

>Chuck Berry sang it first. Lyrics

The Beatles sang it second

The Beatles sang something else, too

Happy Birthday, Elise…!

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Music at home until I was 11 was radio.

1YA mostly – BBC World Service news, light classical, that sort of stuff – with a bit of Sunday Morning Requests as a treat.

Courtesy of the NZBC.

Then we got the radiogram.

And 4 free LPs.

Julie Andrews. Peter Sellars. The Edinburgh Tattoo. John Raitt. (Yep, Bonnie’s dad)

Assume correctly that I wasn’t involved in the selection.

I don’t think I was allowed even to touch it until I was 14 or so.

Then I monopolised it.

The Beatles were liked.

The Byrds were tolerated.

Larry’s Rebels were OK (but only because I went to school with Terry Rouse – keyboards)

The La De Das weren’t liked at all.

Right!

“On top of the world” went on on repeat…

Which still shows, despite careful restoration and digitalisation.

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Look.

I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by trying to review Paved Country (My man Jefito might be eavesdropping and a skill-set comparison would be mortifyingly embarrassing.)

I’ll just tell you how I got to like their music.

Or.

From country rock to roots rock/country to rootsy/Alt. country in 3 albums.

And if – after listening in – you find that my musical taste isn’t utterly shot, go over to CDBaby and support the starving artists.And CDBaby, too.

First off.

They’re not really my kind of band. – female singers, country. A bit lightweight, a bit harmless, but OK and if the other members of the team are enthused, that’s OK too.

That’s what I thought the first time.

Which was First Night in Boston at St Paul’s in 1998. I was so underwhelmed, I didn’t even spring $10 for the CD. I mean, it was nice enough – they had their kids in the audience and First Night atmosphere is always cool, but….

Pressure from the Team forced me to buy it from CDBaby later..

3 tracks

I could have done that
Dancing the blues
Starlight


Second time was better.

Plough and Stars in Cambridge, Mass, October 2000. Totally inappropriately dressed – I was a Suit, briefcase and all, back then and I flew in from a conference in Chicago, picked up the Team (which had just flown in from Frankfurt) at Waterstones in Newbury St and headed straight over to Porter Square.

And they were good. And they didn’t even give me funny looks. Which I thought very kind

Tight as tight, good guitarist, drumming that cracked like a whip, great new material, laser-sharp harmonies.

That’s where I first heard “Surprise surprise” and it stunned me for its deep, deep emotion. Still does.

And then the 2nd CD came out and Marjie sent it for free (I got some demo tapes before that) and it was getting close to where I like my music.

3 tracks. Prepare yourself.

Surprise surprise
Peace of mind
Too much fun

And then they disappeared.

Weed-infested website, no performances, no press. Nothing.

And then the new CD pops up, which poses a lot more questions than it answers. But I’m still really happy have it.

3 tracks. Choice tracks.

Snowing In Boston
Always fine
Names

And they’re very much where I like my music.

But the website’s still a bit weed-infested…..

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>Blogger tells me that I can zap them an email and it’ll appear on the
blog.

I’m not convinced

Comment: Well, I’ll be buggered…

>Frank Zappa gave us some useful stuff.

Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch

For example.

Or

“Let me sum it up for you. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best”

Or

Willin‘ (This one recorded on 19 July 1973 at Ebbet’s Field.)

Which would never had got made if Frank hadn’t slung* Lowell George out of the band. (The Mothers of Invention, if you have to ask…)

*
There are two stories. Take your pick.

Story 1 – Frank saw Lowell’s potential and encouraged him to “pursue other opportunities” as they say

Story 2 – Frank was more than underwhelmed by the drugs references in “Willin'” and encouraged him to “pursue other opportunities” as they say

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I bet there was…….!

>Back in the Dark Ages, I was involved in a Revenue Management development project. First of many, in fact

(It was about the time I bought my first PC – Intel 386 33kHz, 8MB RAM, 105MB hard drive. Bleeding edge stuff. Cost a fortune.)

Among the myriads of consultants these sort of projects tend to attract, we had one guy who was a real crack.

He could write macros in Microsoft Word 5 (right – the one that came on two 1.44MB floppies..), manipulate bits and bytes in hex right on the hard disk and do all sorts of wondrous things.

He had a body to match his brain. Huge.

And he used to talk about the amount of storage we’d need for the huge quantities of data we were processing.

Stuff like “Gigabytes”!

We had to look it up in the dictionary. A thousand megabytes, fer chrissake!

So that name stuck. Went with his body. And his brain.

“Where’s Giga?”

PS
I splurged on a Nikon D80 yesterday.

I bought 2GB storage on an SD card for the huge quantities of data I’ll be processing.

It weighs 2 grammes and cost €40 and a bit.

PPS
I just looked at my desk.
I’ve got half a terrabyte of external storage sitting there…..