Teaser Tuesday - 30 August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

'Guido', she repeated, keeping her voice, her tone level, as if speaking to the dangerous or the mad. 'I told you last week. We've got woodworm in the table in the kitchen.

Acqua Alta by Donna Leon. A bit of detective fiction - it's the first of her Commissario Brunetti which I've read and I'm currently enjoying it!
If you've read my previous teasers on Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger and you've read the book - the Guardian's podcast of Waters talking about her book is strongly recommended - but do make sure you've read the book!

Mutterings - 28 August

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Bells :: Alarms
2. Germs :: Microbes
3. Athlete :: Track
4. Voice :: Sound
5. Diamonds :: ..are a girl's best friend
6. Hoarse :: Cough
7. Tempest :: Hurricane (and Shakespeare)
8. Hurricane :: ah! .. Spitfire (I'm having difficulty remembering the name of the hurricane currently troubling the US!)
9. Bumps :: in the night
10. Jazz :: All That

30 day song challenge

I found this meme here and have been working my way though it over the past month via my facebook statuses. If you're not a friend on facebook I'm afraid you'll have missed them together with an embedded youtube I included of each day's piece- if you want me to gradually repost them here (that'll bring up the posting count!) clamour for it in the comments(!) or send me an email. Added standard gripe about the term song when it doesn't cover music generally!

• Day 01 – Your favourite song - Surabaya Johnny by Kurt Weill
• Day 02 – Your least favourite song - Wagner Overture to Rienzi
• Day 03 – A song that makes you happy - Schubert Seligkeit (Schwartzkopf)
• Day 04 – A song that makes you sad - Slow movement of the Poulenc Clarinet Sonata
• Day 05 – A song that reminds you of someone - The Country Dance from Maxwell-Davies 8 Songs for a Mad King
• Day 06 – A song that reminds of you of somewhere - The Bladon Races
• Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event - Beethoven Piano Sonata Op 109 last movement (Brendel)
• Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to - Tom Lehrer The Vatican Rag
• Day 09 – A song that you can dance to - Strip the Willow
• Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep - Schubert Impromptu in F minor D935 No 1
• Day 11 – A song from your favourite band - Schubert slow movement from Bb sonata D960
• Day 12 – A song from a band you hate - Andrew Lloyd Webber and a video placing his songs alongside their..err.. inspirations
• Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure - Lefébure-Wély Sortie in Eb (and the Pet Shop Boys and Noel Coward's Sail Away)
• Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love - Emperor Waltz (arr Schönberg)
• Day 15 – A song that describes you - let's embed this one
  slightly confused/tangled with a great sense of fun
• Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate - Franz Liszt - Les Preludes
• Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio - oops I missed this one out, let me think..(later: I went for the Tom Robinson version of Jacques Brel's Les Bourgeois - Yuppie Scum the Brel is close to the top of my last.fm track list - I thought there was Brel elsewhere in the list but it looks as if I was wrong!
• Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio - Bernstein Chichester Psalms - I didn't know this until nearly into my 40's!
• Day 19 – A song from your favourite album - Francis Poulenc 'C'
• Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry - Hugo Wolf Abschied - Wolf mocking his critics with a small accident when heading downstairs!
• Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy - Richter playing Schubert Sonata in A D664
• Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad - Mahler Das Abschied (fom Das Lied von der Erde) - two Farewells (Abschied) in this list!
• Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding - Carillon Sortie by Henri Mulet
• Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral - All my hope on God is founded (Bridges/Howells)
• Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh - Franz Reizenstein - Concerto Popolare
• Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument - Love Walked in - George Gershwin, Percy Grainger
• Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play - the final trio from Strauss Der Rosenkavalier - there's no stipulation that it has to be possible!
• Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty - As Tears go by - sung by the older Marianne Faithfull (probably regret is better than guilty here)
• Day 29 – A song from your childhood - Chopin Waltz in A minor (Geza Anda) - I wrote:

  -well teenage years - no gramophone at home and I remember hearing this on an exchange trip to Paris (April 68..!) looking over the left bank boulevards as night fell - and music started to mean a lot more.

• Day 30 – Your favourite song at this time last year - Gilels playing Bach/Siloti - I blogged this in August last year

The SPCK case

OCICBW has just alerted me to the fact that the Brewers who asset stripped SPCK have just lost the unfair dismissal case that the staff of the Durham SPCK were taking against them, It seems the brewers were too cowardly to send anyone to the proceedings. Here's an extract from the Northern Echo's coverage of the case:

An employment tribunal held in Newcastle yesterday found the six, with 90 years’ service between them, were unfairly dismissed by American brothers Phil and Mark Brewer when they suddenly, and unexpectedly, closed the shop, in January last year.

Joan Cummins, one of the six, said: “I’m so delighted. It was never about the money.

We’ve got our justice.

And here's Phil Groom's coverage. A sad story but at least now some justice is being done against those asset-strippers.

Mutterings - 21 August

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Running :: Race
2. Hot :: Some like it..
3. Neighbor :: When I needed a neighbour were you there..
4. Reported :: Crime scene
5. Horrific :: Murder
6. Supplies :: Shop
7. Grammar :: Latin
8. Back to :: the Future
9. Righteous :: Brother
10. Next door :: Neighbour

It's getting a bit bare here, I need to breathe a bit of extra life here..!

Teaser Tuesday - 16 August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, "love..onsists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other." That is the kind of love my friend Bill offered.

From Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak - I'm re-reading this (having, at last, found my copy) and I thought I might have 'teased' it before - but apparently not - I have though quoted it on a few occasions here - lots of words to mull on and treasure.

Mutterings - 14 August

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Eating :: Disorder
2. Cowboys :: and Indians
3. Nightmare :: Waking
4. Impress :: Seal (started with something which indents paper couldn't get the word and then to indenting wax)
5. Year :: 2011
6. Kiss :: Affection
7. Corn :: Plaster
8. Humping :: Sex
9. Mirror :: Image
10. Brains :: Knowledge

Teaser Tuesday - 9 August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

And she reached and opened up a pocket in the dashboard and started feeling about inside, among the papers and spanners and empty cigarette packets.
I said, `Please don't do that.'

Like last week, another teaser from Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, the tension is ratcheting up - well maybe not in the teaser! I decided to stop reading last night (for that evening anyway) - reading this on the last train home late at night - with a solitary walk across town looming!

Mutterings - 7 August

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Injury :: Personal
2. Incentive :: Reward
3. Suitable :: Partner
4. Cheating :: Partner
5. Remembering :: Loss (of a person)
6. Nasty :: Nick (the tabloids appelation for an early Big Brother contender)
7. Games :: Mind
8. Wife :: Partner
9. Challenged :: Emotionally
10. Barbaric :: Treatment

I appear to have 'Partner' on the brain, but having thought of one word it's easy to se that 'yes that fits with that one too'!

Ubuntu - natty narwhal and plasma

Back in this post, I wrote:

kde/plasma did look very nice before the upgrade but at the moment whenever I run it from login the system locks up and I have to reboot - this is before I can interact with the GUI - I've looked through the system logs and as yet have not spotted the problem. When I find a resolution - I'll update this post.

I've eventually got around to researching this, hand editing the startup file ~/.kde/share/config/ksmserverrc and gradually removing startup applications - that previous blog entry led me to suspect some of the terms I was launching - I removed those and it still locked, eventually I removed emacs and I could get in, if I ran emacs with no startup file (-Q) it locked up, having also spotted a

NVRM: Xid (0000:07:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000100

message in the logs just before the crash, I googled the NVRM: Xid bit and found this bug, which gives the solution to update the nvidia drivers, rather than the ones mentioned there, I went for not being quite so bleeding edge and installed the ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates ppa, restarted the system and I'm now happily running in the kde/plasma desktop environment!

in bloom

in bloom, a photo by rajmarshall on Flickr.

The garden is currently in bloom - not my work!

Teaser Tuesday - 2 August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The floor above was dimly lit, the floor above that even dimmer, so the staircase ascended into shadows; the glass dome in the roof held the last of the evening twilight, and seemed suspended in the twilight, a great translucent disc. The silence was perfect.

And so the spookiness intensifies - early on in Sarah Waters The Little Stranger - very reminiscent of Henry James Turn of the Screw and I was also reminded of being taken - at the age of around 8 - to play the piano for an old lady - I've no idea who she was - and it was my piano teacher rather than my parents - living in a huge old house, or so it seemed to me, with servants. As a reward, I was given a set of bridge (the card game) score cards - nearly 10 years later I began to find them useful!
I enjoyed Waters' Night Watch so I'm looking forward to see how this develops.