Dreamer Easy

Cat 1, Dog 0

From the guy who brought us The Rings of Earth comes the genius of The Anti-Water Device.

How To Be Topp: Ding-dong Farely Merily For Xmas

Children's letters to God

Teaser trailer for Reign of Death avec le Noel Clarke.

2001: A Who Odyssey

Progressive Rock in 5 Minutes

Oh, that's weird. You know how falling in love makes pop lyrics suddenly seem meaningful? Apparently the same is true for Obama's victory. I'm just listening to Styx's Rockin' The Paradise, which might as well have been written about current events.

( The lyrics, for you uncultured types )

From May: Philip Glenister at the Genesis DVD premiere

From June: Facebook changes luck for lonely cat

Also from June: Opinion piece on the demise of the Australian Democrats

Also also from June: Escapee caught in air-con duct

From February 1940: Careless Talk Costs Lives posters

jb_wolfsies overhears a cheeky tram driver.

insidian is starstruck and tongue-tied.

Quotes about stupidity. (It was the first one that got me.)

A marvellous memorial to Grimmy, the departed Boston Terrier, in the form of a brilliant YouTube clip.

This bit was cut from Top Gear for reasons which rapidly become obvious.

Failure is just success rounded down.

When cakes go wrong

Behold ktelqueen's record collection. (We had Goofy Greats.)

Kitten vs air molecules

As a (not very much) younger woman, I would often assign wild SFnal meanings to quite straightforward song lyrics, simply because I'd missed the point. When I was fourteen, Pink Floyd's The Wall was a science fiction epic of mind control and secret police. Yes was particularly prone to this, as often their lyrics are incomprehensible - but not always. The "glass reality" of Into the Lens is simply a photograph, but it inspired the bizarre thoughts which led to the title The Mary-Sue Extrusion, which poor Dave Stone got stuck with at the last moment. In my teenaged mind, South Side of The Sky evoked all sorts of fantastical Ringworld-inspired imagery (somewhere I think there's a picture I drew in coloured markers of an immense fly standing inside a Dyson Sphere, which in turn is inside a children's party balloon). It is, of course, about the sorts of doomed expeditions I've been reading about all week - the climbing of mountains, the reaching of Poles.

"I was somewhat suspicious of the deliberate bad singing and out-of-tune stuff but in principle the idea of shaking the tree and getting rid of the dead wood was great because I didn't feel we were part of the dead wood! However, to them, we were, of course. [...] I still haven't heard [Never Mind the Bollocks], only the singles, which are fantastic, very well produced anger, attitude and energy. Genesis took punk as an opportunity to scale down, which we did on our next album, Abacab. Punk had settled in, and we even had our own 'homage' in a song called Whodunnit. Our audience hated it, but we loved playing it live. The effect of Bollocks was like a hurricane... we survived mainly because we were difficult to pin down. We weren't like ELP, overly tricky virtuoso stuff that didn't have any heart. We had songs."
- Mojo March 2007

I do wish I knew why, when I begin to type in the "Event" box for the first time for each posting, LJ refreshes the screen and erases my subject heading.

*ahem* What I was going to point out was that the calypso break in the middle of Sir Paul 'n' Wings' "Live and Let Die" is the ancestor of similar breaks in at least three further songs: "Let It Run" by Jeff Lynne from the "Electric Dreams" OST (which of course also contains references to a number of other songs); "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush; and "Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis. if you spot any more, let me know so I can add them to my collection.