I though I'd start a thread where we might share music of interest that most people probably aren't aware of.

I was fortunate in that I had a brother ten years older than myself who let me play his records, and at the age of 8 I was very fond of this tune. Credited to 'Earl Vince and the Valiants', it was actually Fleetwood Mac, with guitar player Jeremy Spencer on vocals. Jeremy wrote this tune.

I will say though that my mum hated it, and she used to tell my brother off when she caught me listening to it.

Jeremy is from West Hartlepool. I'm proud to say that my home town has contributed guitar players to two of the most successful bands in recording history, the other one being Iron Maiden.

Anyway. I hope you like this more than my mum did.

It's only a couple of years since he was a regular on 5 Live's Monday Night Club. Often made a game more interesting than it really was.



Just read on his wiki entry that he finished his career at Dulwich Hamlet FC, which was a five minute walk from my old flat in London. Used to pass the ground on my walk to and from Sainsburys.

Can anyone recommend a good USB power bank? I have this AA battery powered one from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B074VYYTDV/

The nice thing about it is that it will take standard or rechargeable AAs which might be useful in an emergency, but it's slow and it won't charge my phone completely.

Nice article on the PDP-11 here. My own career since 1990 has been based on the descendants of this machine and its operating system.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/a-brief-tour-of-the-pdp-11-the-most-influential-minicomputer-of-all-time/

Sad to hear that Raquel Welch has passed away, apparently at the age of 82. Had no idea she was as old as that.

I can remember being aware of her work when I was still at junior school. There were numerous jokes about her that used to go round, based mainly on the observation that she had unusually big tits.

Fantastic Voyage is probably my favourite of the films in which she appeared.

Sad to hear that Burt Bacharach had died, yesterday. Such a prolific songwriter; a prominent part of the cultural fabric of the 20th century.

I thought I'd post a few of his tunes that I'm especially fond of. This one for me was his absolute masterpiece, and Cilla sings out of her skin here. That's Burt tinkling the ivories.

Dionne Warwick was touted for it - she was the singer most associated with Burt's stuff. But the producers of the film wanted an English singer, to tie in with the theme.

I'm not against it really - if he can bring a different, older perspective to it. Pink Floyd was more than Roger Waters but at least - unlike his old bandmates in the past - he won't be pretending to make a Pink Floyd record. I'm already fascinated to hear it.

I'll be taking the site down for 30 mins (max) from 11:30pm tonight, so I can run some OS updates and take a disk image snapshot.

[edit: all done now]

So: the Church of England is considering using gender-neutral pronouns for "God".

I think this makes sense, quite honestly. Why would the fictional Higher Consciousness responsible for the Universe and Everything have a gender? Why would it have a penis? Does it have enormous testicles, filled with divine sperm?

I already use gender-neutral terms for "God" and always have done. I call it "it".

https://www.rushbackstage.com/product/6XAMRU257/rush-golden-ale-mustard

The future is a bit odder than I thought it would be.

The Space Shuttle Columbia broke up during reentry twenty years ago yesterday. I was watching coverage of it coming in on News 24 as it happened, and I'll never forget the disquiet when it went off the air unexpectedly. I remember writing about it on TNMS.

Very good overview of what happened here by Scott Manley - including photos taken on the flight that were recovered from the debris, which I hadn't seen before. Very sad to see those poor, doomed souls enjoying themselves in space, never to return home.

I wasn't a big fan of Television, they were just one of those bands I always liked. To me the cover of Marquee Moon is a small but critical part of a particular Zeitgiest; I remember seeing it often in album reviews and ads in the music papers and of course in the record shops. I always wanted it but there was always something else I wanted first and I didn't actually shell out for it until the '90s.

They were way ahead of their time.

Between the Wheels started one year ago today, and we passed the 10,000 post milestone a few days ago (although admittedly, I'd typed nearly a quarter of them myself).

It's certainly been a year of change, hasn't it? We lost our reigning monarch, we lost a Prime Minister, or two, and of course we lost what was to some of us our Internet home-from-home when the good ship T-N-M-S disappeared beneath the waves.

I started this site as a sort of escape pod of course, and I'm very happy that we have some of the same sense of community that prevailed in the old place.

Thanks to all of you who have contributed, and if you've merely lurked, thanks for your interest.

I suspect most people will have heard of ChatGPT by now. If not - I'm not sure how to describe it really. It's like a chat bot in that it converses with you in English, but it doesn't do anything frivolous like roleplaying as your online girlfriend or anything like that - rather, it's like a sort of helper for information and tasks across a wide range of topics.

https://chat.openai.com/

Last night, I asked it to analyse a BASH script (simple computer program) that I'd written. It explained how the program worked, very clearly. So I gave it a Python 2 script that I wrote a few years ago, and asked it to convert it to Python 3. It did. And it worked perfectly.

I was very, very impressed by that. And actually it was highly useful because Python 2 is no longer supported on modern Linux distros, and I don't know Python 3. Artificial Intelligence got my code working again.

So I thought I'd try a different topic this morning.







That it has this information available to it is impressive, but what really surprises me is the way it hangs onto the context of a conversation and responds naturally.

This is the future. It's in its infancy now, but in 20 years time with more developed methods and faster hardware, you won't be able to tell the difference between talking to an AI program and a human being.

Prompted by Nick's comment about a period of abstinence in another thread and especially perhaps for those of us who may not have a straightforward relationship with alcohol, including myself, I thought I'd start a discussion here.

I started drinking occasionally very young - my parents were very liberal about it and perhaps naive about the possible adverse effects of drinking on children, although I don't seem to have been harmed personally. Even at eight or nine years old I'd get my own glass of wine in a restaurant, and my dad would give me small glasses of beer every now and then at home.

I can say with certainty that I was accustomed to drinking wine at the age of eight, because I remember being at a restaurant in France with my family on our holiday in 1968. My dad asked for a glass of wine for me, the waiter looked a little uncertain and asked "shall ah give 'eem just a leetle bit in case he don' like eet?" And my dad proudly replied "no, he definitely likes it".

Despite being an early starter though I don't think I drank any more or less than my sixth-form contemporaries typically did once I was in my late teens. I made the same stupid mistakes as anyone else, making myself sick, going to bed with the room spinning round and all that.

It wasn't until I was in my '20s and my taste for whisky developed that I started, as a mature adult, to binge drink quite regularly.

Anyway - to be continued, but please do share your own experiences / thoughts if you'd like to share.

Should be a good one, nice clear skies here. 6:20pm for about three minutes (in the Midlands). Visible to the south so - the further north you are, the less the visible duration.

But it should be visible for about a minute at least as long as the sky's clear, wherever you are in Europe I think.

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/index.cfm

https://outsider.com/outdoors/news-outdoors/comet-that-only-orbits-the-sun-every-50000-years-expected-to-be-visible-from-earth/

https://www.space.com/comet-c2022-e3-ztf-january-06-gallery

https://www.space.com/comet-c2022-e3-ztf-messenger-from-outer-solar-system

The Comet C/2022 E3 (ZFT) could put on an amazing show for skywatchers January and February 2023, when it could become visible to the unaided eye in the night sky.

I've just read that it comes around every 50,000 years or so, which means that it was probably seen by our Neanderthal cousins last time it was visible in the night sky (and of course light pollution wasn't a thing in those days). I wonder what life on Earth will look like next time it comes around?

One of the pantheon of British guitar greats from the '60s, with Clapton, Page and Peter Green. And Ronnie Wood IMO but that's another discussion possibly.

Saying that the word "genius" is overused is overused, but I don't think I'm overusing it here if I mention that it definitely wasn't overused in Jeff's case. He had a control of his instrument that few other players have come close to. Made his name as a rocker but absolutely brilliant at modal jazz / fusion from the mid '70s on, after being inspired by John McLaughlin.

A massive influence on other players as well; you'd be hard pushed to find a rock player from the '70s who didn't cite him as an influence. Alex Lifeson did.

I was listening to Scatterbrain and a couple of other tunes from Blow by Blow only on Sunday. That one and Wired are the essential Beck for me.

Awful loss.

This is the show with I Think I'm Going Bald as posted a couple of weeks ago, but more of it. Supporting Kansas apparently although the audience seem well up for it, so perhaps a double bill.

Very nice to hear a recording from the same tour that gave birth to ATWAS.

Ana Montes was released from prison today. As the headline in this Washington Post piece alludes, I hadn't heard of her. This was written ten years ago. It's a remarkable story, would make a decent film.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/04/18/ana-montes-did-much-harm-spying-for-cuba-chances-are-you-havent-heard-of-her/