Waxing lyrical

A slight departure from the norm here…

In a long and roundabout way I’ve come to be listening to ‘Meet on the ledge’ by Fairport Convention a lot recently. It’s a great song, all about the death of friends and meeting them again in another life. Heavy.

Its theme is made all the more prescient by the fact the band were involved in a car accident in which the drummer died, aged 19, as did the girlfriend of Richard Thompson (who wrote the song) - this happened about a year after he wrote it. What’s more it was written by Thompson when he was just 19. To write something that is still musically and lyrically brilliant 40 years on is no mean feat and for a 19-year-old it’s something else.

I just felt like sharing this...

Link-a-holic

Good piece here on the BBC Sport website about the rivalry between Australia and UK at the Olympics. But it suffers from over-linking. If you read all those links you'd be reading this article for hours. The thing is you don't need to click on the links to understand the article, which is as it should be, but they are just there because they can be. With so many it makes the article feel like a join-the-dots piece of journalism, hiding the fact it's actually perfectly well written and interesting without having to point you in the direction of 'proof' of everything the journalist mentions.

No secrets

Ah the power of modern technology.

The Great Blog In The Sky

So the 'oldest blogger' has died. The idea that she was born in 1899, lived through two World Wars and the rest of the 20th Century and into an age where you can upload words to be read by people from as far apart as Russia or America (which for a great deal of her life were polar opposites), is somehow both sobering and uplifting.

The best technology assimilates itself into life so seamlessly you soon forgot how you lived without it, (mobiles, the internet, Ipods, toasters...), and it's easy to overlook the humble blog. But their power to entertain - both the writer and the reader, (when done well) - means that a 108-year-old woman was able to communicate to people across the globe how they used to wash clothes before washing machines in 1908- another invention those of a certain age can't imagine living without.

Magazines

The BBCs online magazine section had its fifth birthday the other day. It's an odd section of the BBC, far more opinionated than almost every other output they do and a real ‘community’ feel to it – as magazines are meant to have: caption comps, letters pages, roundup of the daily newspapers, (often very tongue in check), and interesting sideways looks at the issues around news stories. I hope it keeps going very much under-the-radar, left to follow its own agenda.

From one Worth to another (of sorts)

David Hepworth's blog is a good read and he's highlighted a truly bizarre piece of broadcasting in his latest post that I will merely pass you on to as it pretty much concurs with my thoughts on it. How does this stuff get made?

Bullocks

So was it £3,000, £5,000 or £10,000? Someone's got to be right.

Eh?

Something about this headline on the BBC News website is just wrong. The offending word doesn't even appear in the article either - surely the sub could have done a little better?

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Update - it did say 'sluts' it now says 'tarts'. I don't think I can take all the credit but...

A miss is as good as a mile

Another piece of childhood dies. I can still remember eagerly rushing to pick up my reserved copy at the local shop. Now it is no more.

Winner

Is this what they mean by 'giving 110%'?