Why is this bunny tied to the lampost?

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Originally uploaded by tomreid

Funny things seen recently in San Francisco

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Originally uploaded by tomreid

A bread turtle in Macys.

What is this doing here?

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Originally uploaded by tomreid

Spotted in San Francisco today.

Golden Gate Park

Spent a very pleasant afternoon today in Golden Gate Park. My first introduction to Golden Gate Park was the 1986 Movie Star Trek 4 - the one where the save the Whales. They nick a Klingon spaceship that can make itself invisible and somehow fall back through time and end up in Golden Gate Park in 1986 - where they park the invisible Klingon spaceship. I always think of that invisible spaceship when I'm back there. When it landed in the movie you could only see the dents in the grass - so much for 1980's special effects.

This photo was taken in the Conservatory of Flowers, we thought it looked a bit rude!

We also spent a jolly time in that archetypal 'Frisco location - Height Ashbury. Amoeba Records on the Height must be the best record shop in the universe. I bought a ton of deleted Jazz Butcher CD's the last time I was there. Today I bought most of Robyn Hitchcock's latest works - and got talking to the guy on the till who was a big Robyn fan, although he wasn't into Syd Barrett - strange. He also thought he had all of Robin Hitchcock and the Softboys albums, but had never heard if the rare as hell "Live at the Potrtland Arms" album I have. I also bought an old favorite that I listened to incessantly in 1985 - The Violent Femmes Hallowed Ground Album. I have it on just now. Great.

I've been listening to Robyn's song - "A Man's got to know his limitations - Briggs" with it's classic 'Frisco lyrics - "You were driving in the streets of San Francisco, driving through the weather and the rain", etc. Great.

The Saddest Story from the days of the Kirkcaldy Bands

I'd held off writing this story for my website for years. I suppose writing about the death of one of your closest friends will always be difficult. I also was slightly concerned about my friends family coming over the page on my website and being upset. Ritchie's been gone now for fifteen years, so I feel, if nothing else, all the feelings I had at the time he died are a bit less raw now. At the time it seemed such an inexplicable event that I think a part of me couldn't take in that one of my contemporaries had died at the age of twenty five. I had re-occurring dreams where he would just show up somewhere like nothing had happened and not believe why we would think that he was dead. I think a part of my sub-conscious just couldn't believe it. More recently I had that dream that I think most people get, the dream that you go back in time, you look like you did at the time, but have the knowledge you have now. In the dream I went back in time to 1985 and was in my mate Mark Deas's room in Dunnikier Road in Kirkcaldy, where we spent loads of time that year. All of our circle of friends was there and I had the biggest dilemma of my life. How do you tell one of our closest friends that he'd better enjoy life as he only had seven more years to live? In the dream I held off telling him. Who could say what the best thing do do would be?

The rest of this blog post is a cut and paste from www.kirkcaldybands.com. I used to have the music file up on the old site, but I couldn't bring myself to write the story behind the song. I'm glad I did it now. Ritchie was such a great guy and a huge music fan, I'm sure if he could give an opinion, he'd have wanted his 1986 debut to be available to the world.

Of course, the actual MP3 file can only be downloaded from the page at Kirkcaldybands.com, which is: http://www.kirkcaldybands.com/HTML/workshop.html

"Bill Gimix used to organise Workshop evenings in the St Clair tavern in 1985 and 1986. These were a great idea. He'd do the disco and the idea was that new bands, that didn't have the money or the fan base or the contacts to get a gig of their own, could come to the the workshop and play a 10-15 minute set. It gave many of us, including me, our first taste of being on stage. Guys would really respect the timings, not play for too long, and you could see around four or five new bands in one evening - I think the Family Shampoo (who later became the Silent Falls) played their first gig at a workshop.

The ends of workshop evenings were often a bit special. Bill would run out of bands to put on, and often we'd improvise a jam from whoever was there. My first appearance on stage was at one evening like this, in the summer of 1985. My memory is a bit fuzzy about who was actually playing in our improvised band, but I recall Mark Deas was on the drums, Andy Carr on guitar and I think Mark Carr was involved somehow too, he was maybe singing, I was playing bass. We had no concept of what we would play and Mark Deas just said, "lets just make a racket for 10 minutes". It was great, I just played whatever I felt like. I have no clue what it sounded like to the audience, it seemed to go down quite well at the time, but this was the end of the night and everyone was probably quite drunk.

The recording below was made at a workshop on March 28th 1986. There are MP3's of The Surgical Wars and Sphincter Control on this site from recordings that were made that night too. I only recorded the workshop from The Surgical Wars onwards, so I'm not sure who else played that night, maybe it was The Family Shampoo or Gene Regulation.

This is another jam, made out of members of other bands. Andy Carr (after he left Sacristy and before he formed the Summerfield Blues) is on bass (playing my bass in fact) and sings the first vocal, Davey Wallace from the Gimix is on guitar and sings the second vocal, Bill Gimix from the Gimix, Sphincter Control and The Surgical Wars is on the drums - making his third appearance on stage that night and Andy Carr, Mark Carr and I's old School friend, Ritchie Smith is on Harmonica.

This may have been Ritchie's first appearance on stage. He had been talking about learning to play the harmonica for a number of months, but I had never heard him play with a band before. Seeing him go up on stage that night, I was concerned that he may be no good - but I was blown away by his playing - he is by far the best thing about this recording. I was amazed by the volume too!

Ritchie went on in the late '80's and early 90's, to play with a number of local blues bands. I regret it now, but not being much of a blues fan myself, I only saw him play once or twice, and can't recall which bands he played in. He may have been the Tubesnakes amongst others - Robin Deas (Mark's brother) played with them too. Ritchie used to drag me along to see blues bands at places like the Preservation Hall in Edinburgh, but I could never completely get into it - I guess blues is something you either get or you don't.

Ritchie and I were close friends towards the end of high school, lost touch a bit in his first year of university, but met again in the glorious summer of 1985. He had taken on a "hippy" image at Edinburgh Uni and I can still picture him walking towards me wearing an afghan coat, hair all over the place, in the Bevie Park around July 1985. He was a big part of our little circle of friends in the mid to late '80's and he was one of the people who made that time so special.

As the '80's turned into the '90's Ritchie developed clinical depression. To my enormous regret, I think we were all too young at the time to really see how serious his condition was. He also began to slowly distance himself from our crowd, I learned later that this need to isolate yourself is a classic symptom of clinical depression.

Ritchie took his own life in October 1992. It was a huge shock, almost impossible to believe one of our circle of friends was gone. In all the confusion, I almost missed the funeral - but Dave Acari of the Summerfield Blues called Ian and we managed to make it over to the funeral on the day. Standing outside the crematorium was the last time most of our circle of friends from 1985/6 was all together in one place. It was so strange to see all the guys again and Ritchie not to be there.

Taking his own life seemed an almost inexplicable act to me at the time, we all seemed to have so much to live for in the early '90's. As I've got older, I've got more insight into depression and can see now how life can become unbearable for some people who's minds work in a certain way.

He'd have loved this website. Back in the day, we'd show up to any gig that was on in town, he'd have been at many of the late '80's gigs that have recordings on this website, I have happy memories of many conversations with him in the Wheatsheaf, the Heritage or the Harbour Bar on the relative merits of the Ghost Train and the Gimix. He was also a huge technology fan, although he didn't live long enough to experience the internet.

So this is the way I'd like to remember him, on stage for the first time, playing the blues, in his element.

If you turn up the volume at the end of the song, you can hear some classic Skittle atmosphere. Bouncer Neil McDougal (or big fat hairy Neil as we called him) asks the band to call last orders for him, Andy Carr and Davie Wallace shout "last orders at the bar please" together and Neil shout's back "stereo!". You can also hear some friendly banter with me shouting at Ritchie and some conflicting option expressed between my sister and I on Mark Deas's jumper!"

Simon Richard "Ritchie" Smith, December 14 1966 - October 1992

Pictured in Summer 1985

Strongman and my first reel of film

Strongman and my first reel of film
Originally uploaded by tomreid

I have been inspired by my sister to check out a Flickr group called Flashback Friday. You have to load a pre-1985 photo of yourself based on a certain theme every Friday. As I scanned 99% ish of my photos before I left the UK, I have many old photos easily accessible.

Photos's interest me - but the stories behind photos fascinate me even more - so here is the story I posted on Flickr:

I just love this photo. This is me at the age of 10 and a half in the summer of 1977. This photo was taken from the first reel of film I ever took. I spent the happiest days of my childhood spending long summer holidays with my Gran in Forfar (a little town near Dundee in Scotland). My Gran had given me a camera, she had got it free somehow, through some special offer or other, around 10 years previously. I still have it somewhere, it was sooo basic. It used 127 film (remember that) which took square photos. My Gran bought me a film and paid for the processing from Boots in Forfar East High Street. The film only had 12 exposures and I remember thinking long and hard before I pressed the button each time - this whole taking photos business seemed VERY expensive! I think about that these days when I continually click away with my digital cameras, what a contrast.

This is the only photo of the 12 exposures that I didn't take myself. My Gran took this one, at the bottom of the Boyle park in Forfar - oddly enough she would move to sheltered housing a few minutes walk from here around 11 years later. The T shirt is my "Strongman" T shirt. I would wear it to Physical Education at school - particularly the year previously, when we lived in Inverness. I think there was a certain irony involved in the purchase of this t shirt - I'm now blanking on who bought me it, but it seems to fit with my mother's sense of humour. I was always a complete disaster at PE and games at school and a strongman - I never was going to be. I remember having great laughs with my friends at school in Inverness with this T shirt.

When I had finished taking all of my 12 exposures of my first reel of film, and got them back from Forfar Boots, I remember being too excited to see them, opening them all on the bus, and dropping the lot on the floor. In those days people could smoke on the buses, and they'd use the floor as an ash tray, so all the photos got covered in fag ash - yuk.

I lost all my pre 1985 photos in 1985. I took my photo albums to my first student flat and left them there and never remembered to get them back. Fortunately I kept the negatives and, after a long search to find a negative scanner that could handle 127 negatives (most negative scanners have slots that are molded to handle 35mm only), I spent many happy hours in early 2002 seeing pictures that I hadn't seen since 1985 slowly emerge on the computer screen. I think I scanned the first reel of film I ever took first, it seemed kind of fitting. I was pretty surprised that the quality seemed to good. As well as the negatives surviving well for 25 years, the photos this funny little cheap 127 camera took were really quite good. My Gran thought you should only use the camera in the Sun, so the photos give the impression that summer was very sunny. The subject matter is sometimes funny. As I had to think so much before I took a photo, as they were expensive, and I only had 12, why did I take so many photos of the front and back of my Grans house?

Anyway this set of 12 photos is significant in so many ways. The birth of my interest in photography (I just noticed I have 9000 photos in my iPhoto), but most importantly, it's a little bit of time travel back to the golden days of my childhood, just before the horrors of High School, in 1978, and the onset of adolescence in 1980. The days of strawberry rolls with sugar on the top (the strawberries picked from my Grans own garden), coffee mornings with my Gran and her sisters, black and white TV and Jimmy Young on the radio. But the fondest memories are about spending summers with my favorite person - my Gran. Eleanor Allan Grieve, 1911 -1995, she's gone now, but lives on in my heart every day.

I shrunk my guitar

Before:



After:


I hope nothing else will suddenly get smaller.........

Satisfaction

After all the work, I'm happy to say that www.kirkcaldybands.com is up and running and better than ever - even if I say so myself. It's amazing how a tiny little thing can mess you up at the last minute though. After pretty much three days solid working on the site, I took the plunge and deleted the old and uploaded the new. Of course it didn't work the first time. I hadn't realised that the web server at the hosting company was case sensitive. Every website needs a page called index.html in its root directory, or it won't work. My "Index.html" was the reason I had to spend 40 minutes on hold with the customer support people and the world had to do without my main website for a day and a half. It shoud have been small case "index.html" - computers, eh?
There has been some, very tentative, but very interesting, excited talk over the Kirkcaldy Bands e-mail about a possible one off reunion of one or more bands next summer. As a few band members, like me, live abroad from Kirkcaldy (imagine anyone wanting to do that), this is being planned on a long time horizon - so we are talking about next Summer. But I suppose it's been 20 years, so what's another year. If the website results in even one genuine reunion of a great band from the past, to me that'd be success beyond my wildest dreams, when this website was just a funny little idea in my head in early 2000.

Above is my favourite pic of me. It was taken during the happiest period of my life (so far, there may be another........) in late Summer 1985, in Oliver's in Kirkcaldy. My sister took this photo, I was 18 at the time. It was this jacket that I wore everywhere in 1985/6 and I wore this jacket and these sunglasses at out first gig. I still own the jacket, but didn't wear it much after 1986 and stuck it in a cupboard. In the early '90's I found it again and realised it's pockets were a funny little time capsule, stuffed with bus tickets, Bentley's party invites and other junk from the day. I think there may even be a little note that Pru, who I was secretly madly in love with in the summer of '85, wrote me.

If this one off gig comes off, I hope we can get our old band, The Surgical Wars, back together again. We'd have to be bottom of the bill, because were were shite - but it'd be fun to do it. I was just thinking that some of the children of the band members may be coming up to the ages were in the mid '80s. The jacket survives with it's time capsule pockets, contained in my Edinburgh storage locker - so I'll wear it again for the gig, if I can get into it. The sunglasses got nicked at out first gig. I think I must have taken them off between songs, so I could see the audience, put them on top of an amp, forgot about them, then of course they got nicked. The "battle of the bands" prize got nicked that day too. The 21st of February 1986 was an eventful day. Lets hope for another.

Tom the Website Hermit

Having finally got rid of my cold virus and had a relatively productive week at work last week, I have become a hermit this weekend. I tend to do these things. In the planning stage it seems like a good idea to tackle large website related tasks in one go. I re-created www.kirkcaldybands.com over a weekend or so in April. Having used the most crap website creation tool in the world (Rapidweaver) to do so, I now find I have to re-create the site for the third time.

Having toyed with writing my own code, and having been quite proud of myself that I managed to do a page or two, I decided that life was too short to spend it manually typing out XHTML every time I needed to add a image, etc. It's especially laborious for images, you have to type out the exact pixels you want the image to be, etc. I therefore spent the $400 that I've been putting off spending and have bought a "state of the art" GUI web creation tool, Deamweaver.

It's really not the easiest thing to use in the world either, being pretty complex and most of CSS (cascading style sheets) are still a mystery to me. But I'm delighted to say that, as of 10.30pm local time, the re-born site is happily uploading to the remote server, the result of a weekend and a half's work. There will be some loose ends, but it has been worth it. I think the site looks better, and most importantly, I can update it again without all the aggravation of the mind numbing slowness of Rapidweaver (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one!) and the frequent crashes whilst saving, resulting in lost work.

It's great timing, as the site has uncovered some very interesting finds in the last weeks which I've been able to upload to the new version. Julie Watt of The Amused, who now works for Telstra in Brisbane Australia, was in touch and she e-mailed me some very cool pics of the band, one is above.

My favorite find though, is Davie Brown from the Ghost Train's audio tape, which Ian enhanced, edited and transfered to the above CD, which I got on Saturday. It contains some absolutely cracking material, I now see that it is not just nostalgia, the Ghost Train were a tremendous band - shame they split 17 years ago. There is even a radio interview with some of the Ghost Train members, talking about the local scene and their plans to make it big - amazing.

But, of course you can only sit with an iBook for so long and I'm now going slowly mad and am desperate to do something that does not involve computers for a bit. Not an easy task in 2007! It's almost 11pm now, so time to go to bed. Then I'll get up on Monday morning, get dressed, have a shower, something to eat, then - guess what? Go to the computer to begin work! At least it'll be a different computer.

Back in the land of the living (almost)

Having managed to go to India and back in a week and covering three different Indian cities when I was there, I had quite a contrasting week last week, in that I only managed a brief and unmemorable trip to Menlo Park, but apart from that I didn't leave the apartment at all from Monday night to Friday night. I feel like the rest did me good, but still can't completely shrug off this bloody cold virus.

I have been busy re-creating www.kirkcaldybands.com using Dreameaver this weekend. Dreamweaver is a very complex web creation and site management tool and I've only mastered a tiny amount of its functionality. However, I think the new site is looking good. It'll probably be next weekend until I have it in a state to upload and replace the rather tatty looking Rapidweaver version (or rather, it looks tatty now compared the new version).

I was at the Ex - Pat European's club in San Francisco today, although it's now been re-branded "Bay Area Friends of Europe". It was good fun and I finally met someone from the same country as me, an Aberdonian no less. It was the very first time that, when I had that sinking feeling in my as I was asked one of the "stock" questions that I always get asked - "which part of Scotland are you from", that I had finally met someone who would know where Forfar was!

Geoff Lewis, who is the brains behind Bay Area Friends of Europe (or BAFoE), is pictured in the middle of the group above. Erdem from Turkey is on the right.

Double Yuk, Not Amused

I've taken a rare day off sick today. It's been a funny day at Sun. I just got my biggest bonus ever and the company also announced further job cuts on the same day. They are "targeted job reductions" so it's not across the board, but the hint is that it'll effect our group. I'm pretty sure I'll survive this as I have the five or six other layoffs I've survived since 2001, but it's a rough old corporate world out there. No wonder most people worry about being off sick in this country. Personally, I just think it's a toss up between being sick for a week and being ineffectual at work as a result, and taking a day off, completely relaxing and getting your energy back, in the hopes of a speedier recovery - which seems to be coming.

So I've been passing the time with mindless web surfing and I just watched 3 episodes of Heroes on my iPod. George Takei and Chris Eccleston in the same episodes - targeted guest stars for the sci fi fans, or what? Having said that both were pretty good, Chris Eccleston especially, though it was funny to hear Mr Sulu finally speaking Japanese.


I also got some nice mails today from Julie Watt who was the singer in the Amused, as featured on the Kirkcaldybands website. She lives in Australia but says she still has her Ghost Train badge. I didn't know they even had badges.

Tom's New Shoes - The Video

A taster for the forthcoming website: www.tomsnewshoes.com

Tom's New Shoes were a band from Edinburgh in Scotland. They were active in 1990 and 1991 and played a kind of catchy inde rock. They centered around the musically talented lead guitarist Andy Jeffries and Craig Smith on bass (later of the Joyriders). Craig wrote this song. Andy Tait was their singer and he had boyish good look s and all my female friends fancied him. They are shortly to be immortalised on a new tribute site.

Please look at my India Pics:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomreid/

I just added some informative captions to my 90 odd India pics at my above Flickr page. Please take a look. Maybe you can help me identify where this is and why there is a big pic like this in a Bangalore hotel. I think the building style looks just like Edinburgh. Or am I imagining things?

Yuk

Having spent loads of $ on "airbourne", that American preventative for getting germs off your fellow economy class travelers, I have come back from India with the thing I least expected - a cold!

I was thinking I got it when I was there, but maybe I got it on the flight. I always pride myself at having a really good immune system, when most people get viruses they normally seem to pass me by. I must not be immune to this virus as I probably got it off an India person, or maybe a German person on the Lufthansa flight.

Having struggled with it all day I went for a drugs shop at Safeway. This stuff is great, the effect was almost instantaneous. I had been sniffing and wiping my nose all day and it dried up almost immediately. Hope there are no nasty side effects.

So stuff Airbourne - does anyone believe it works?

Bangalore Traffic

You really have to experience the traffic issues in India to really believe it. Before I went there for the first time I couldn't grasp why the guys I worked with kept going on about it. Well, here is us trying to turn left at one of the busiest intersections in the country, the left turn into Electronics City in Bangalore. This car ride took 90 minutes to get from the airport to Electronics City. Our plane journey from Hyderabad to Bangalore only took 60 minutes!

New Shoes, New Website

My next web project is a tribute site to the band that was named after my shoes - Tom's New shoes.

Andy J, guitarist of the band, has been sending me images, most of which I haven't seen before, and has sent me most of the bands recorded material. It's been hugely enjoyable hearing the band again and I have loads of ideas for their website.

Another Tag

Owing to only being able to dive into the blogosphere every so often over the last two weeks, I only just noticed that my sister (magnusmog.blogspot.com) had tagged me with this new task. So I will try to dig out some ideas out of my miasma of jetlag.


What were you doing 10 years ago?

Working very hard to get out of Swindon, where I throughly hated living. I had moved there as it was the only way to get my much deserved promotion from BT. This working very hard involved much traveling back to Scotland for job interviews and also much traveling to Ireland for job interviews too - Ireland being my other Celtic country I fancied living in. Goodness knows how I managed to take so much time out of what was not an easy job I was doing at the time. It eventually paid off with a move to West of Scotland Water in Glasgow in 1998. Just goes to show you that if you work hard enough at something for long enough that things tend to work out.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Getting acclimatised to a new life in California, beginning to get used to the place and to quite like it. Probably spending a load of time driving between San Jose and San Francisco, to do loads of events with www.bayarealinkup.com in 'Frisco.

Five snacks you enjoy:

I'm not tremendously interested in snacks, much to the mystification of other people I spend time with. I think not eating between meals was pretty much drummed into me when I was young, so I never got into the habit. But here are a few things from the top of my head.

1. Cheese biscuits

2. Chocolate digestive biscuits, especially the chocolate orange ones

3. Crisps

4. Black olives

5. Cheese

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to:

I don't think I can answer this one, as remembering song lyrics is one of my special powers and there are probably around 5000 songs that I know all the lyrics of. OK, instead I'll do five songs that have the lyrics that are most likely to pop into my head at any given moment. These pop into my head either because they express a thought that I have often, or are just soooo good:

1. Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World

2. The Only Ones - Oh Lucinda (Love Becomes a Habit)

3. Van Der Graaf Generator - Lemmings

4. Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett) - Mathilda Mother

5. The Beatles (John Lennon) - I'm So Tired

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

I'm not really a very materialistic person. I think the bulk of consumption, especially in this country, is a capitalist con. I've probably got enough money just now to have most things I actually want, which is not much really, but if we are in fantasy land, then:

1. Donate to KALX. They can be found at kalx.berkeley.edu and are by far the best student / volenteer run college radio station in this area. They are on just now and are normally the soundtrack of my Sunday mornings.



2. I was always very sad that I never got to know my grandmother on my fathers side. She was born within a year or two of my grandmother on my mothers side who I was very close to until her death at the age of 84 in 1995. My grandmother on my fathers side died of cancer in the 1950's. It seemed so unfair that one grandmother had half the lifespan of the other, so I'd donate a ton of money to cancer research and hope that one day we can find a cure and /or better treatments. I also had a friend who died of a brain tumor at the age of 35 in 2002. What a waste.

3. I'd buy a house overlooking a loch in Sutherland and have a spare room full of recording equipment. I'd quit my job, move there and finally have enough time to play instruments properly and write and record all the songs that are just ideas in my head at the moment.

4. I'd donate money to help people with depression. One of my best friends died through suicide caused by depression in 1992. I think of him a lot and it's still impossible for me to really understand how he could find life so unbearable at the age of 26 that he was driven to end his own life. I've had such a great life and want it to go on and on and I think what he could have done and achieved from the age of 26 onwards. He should have had the chance. He was one of the guys who I had the best time of my life with in the summer of 1985, which was the time in my life that inspired me to create by creating www.kirkcaldybands.com. It seemed that by 1992 the party was truly over.

5. I'd have a big party and form a band with my mates and play a long set of my own songs. I think I would only have an audience for a live set if I bought people free drink to watch it!

Five bad habits:

1. Starting books and never finishing them. My sister had much better reading habits than me when we were growing up and I think I never got into the habit.

2. Not answering the phone, I hate the phone.

3. Not cleaning the bathroom often enough.

4. Being nasty to the cold calling people when I do answer the phone. It's annoying have someone try to sell you something when you are not at work and you are a professional Buyer, but I'm sure no one is a cold calling professional out of choice.

5. Being grumpy with the flight attendants on long flights when I feel like shit.

Five things you like doing:

1. Writing my blog


2. Listening to loads of good music on Mr Pod when going down to the Mission Ale house on the little train and then having a beer at the Mission.

3. Writing songs

4. Taking photos



5. Watching Doctor Who

Five things you would never wear again:

1. Black raincoat. There were many clothes in my late teens and early 20's that I wore and wore and wore as I had no money to buy any more.

2. Knackered old shoes. I wore the same shoes for so long between 1989 and 1990 that when I got new ones, my mate Andy named his band after my new shoes.

I can't think of anything else here. I don't think that much about clothes. Is this survey designed for girls?

Five favorite toys:

1. Lieca D-Lux 3 digital camera

2. Video iPod

3. Sony Ericsson camera phone

4. Apple iBook. Its so well used that it's track pad is getting shiny. Its batteries go on forever on long airplane journeys and it is so rugged that it seems unbreakable.

5. 20" iMac, lovely big screen, I'm using it right now!

Is blog writing a cure for jetlag? Maybe!

ZZZZZZZ and Mr Pod's Movies

After traveling for over 20 hours yesterday, I have now managed to sleep for 15 hours. I think that may be the longest ever sleep. I now have this loud buzzing in my head that I think must be a reaction to the roar of the 'plane's engines for all that time.

Especially as the entertainment was so bad on Lufthansa, I was so grateful or the miracle of technology that is the video iPod.

The films I can remember watching were -

Notes on a Scandal - Wonderful performances by Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and especially Bill Nighy.
Touching the Void - Great scenery, amazing story, but I was tempted to wonder why anyone would be so keen to volunteer to put themselves in so much danger. I'm not a risk taker in that way myself.
Holywood Ending - Poor Woody Allen having temporarily run out of ideas and, very unusually for Woody, it was too long.
Bullets over Broadway - I thought I hadn't seen this before , but as I got into this I realised I had. Some predictable ideas from Woody Allen but very enjoyable.
Orphans - Very bleak, but great all the same. The ripper had managed to get the subtitles stuck on the "on" position, so I had to have the subtitles that were put on the movie so the Americans could understand Glaswegian switched on all the time. They kept translating "fag" as "smoke".
Heartlands - No subtitles, despite the weird northern english accents. I only wanted to see this one as Mark Kermode said that this was one of the best uses of one of my favorite songs, Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World, in a movie. It was a nice little low budget UK movie.


New York Doll (the Arthur Kane movie) - The only film I watched on the plane that I was knowingly watching for the second time. One of the saddest, most uplifting, most touching and most bizarre stories in the history of rock and roll. Arthur was a true gent and a much better bass player than he was ever given credit for. I'm still so sad he is no longer with us.
New York Dolls (the reunion gig) - Amazing they could be so good after not playing together for 29 years, only having a week of rehearsal and Arthur's bass only removed from a pawn shop a month before. Good old Morrisey for being the guy who got the Dolls back together again.

The Longest Day

I was sitting here in the departure lounge of Bangalore airport when Saturday August 4th began. I'm now sitting back in my normal living room at 4.11pm on the same Saturday after flying for 18 hours. As we had to connect to our flight in Germany, I've been in three continents in one day.

It's a small world after all and I'm very tired, trying to stay awake until a roughly normal bedtime so I don't mess up my body clock more than it has to be.

Back to Bangalore

I've now been from Chennai to Bangalore, then from Bangalore to Hyderabad, then back to Bangalore again. Hyderabad was incredibly rainy so we got stuck in traffic for ages last night trying to get to a very nice local restaurant. The Hyderabad area is famous for nice food, I didn't know that before, the restaurant last night was very good.

Back to Bangalore again today and did the normal game of trying to find our driver amongst all the other scrum of drivers, porters and beggars.

A final supplier visit here in Electronics city tomorrow then some shopping, then off back to SFO on Lufthansa again.

With all the travel and jet lag and work I can't remember ever being so tired, but at least no stomach trouble yet.