January 2016

Fingerstyle guitarists changed guitar for me forever, before hearing them I used to work out solos and chords, in a standard way. And then I realised that's about 10% of the potential of the instrument. It's like a whole orchestra coming out of the guitar, and Adrian Legg in this piece is one of the best examples you could ever hear.

"...when you’re drinking too much, you probably don’t realise that you are." Peter Fitzsimons made a similar point this week. Would be interesting if they added 'number of drinks' to FitBit things.

3 pictures worth 3000 words? ;)

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/09/08/fans-arent-going-pay-music-anymore-thats-ok/ Steve Lukather (net worth about $40 million) was a good recent example of a muso without a clue, complaining about how real quality musicians aren't recognised any more and the world is being overrun by dumb pop. Firstly there were plenty of musos in Steve's heyday who were way more talented than him, who made almost nothing. So nothing has changed there. I'm amazed Lukather made $40 million, given the almost total absence of songwriting talent in Toto. The old business model is mostly kaputt. Journalists have had to deal with the same thing. Libraries too. Taxis. Education. Doctors with Dr Google. Politicians with FB. Music has been a relatively dumb industry for about 100 years, and nothing much has changed.

Happy Birthday :) 30-something.

The Big Cash :)

Don't usually do re-posts like this, bit this one is important. They'll do anything to try to get rid of Medicare. And none of these things were ever 'free' anyway, you paid for them out of your taxes.

I'm sick of attempts to undermine the principles of universal health care by stealth

Who's 'we'? Some of us wouldn't watch Sunrise if it was paid work, because of how stupid it is. There is a line between flirting and outright grubby sleaze. Gayle is a grub, and probably gave us a window into how dumb and sleazy and obsessed with money cricket has become.

The saying is true - it's not what you say (or think), it's what you do that defines you. Huge implications across life and work and dealing with people everywhere. "We should be very careful when taking any notice of what people say in any context. The chance of this being true is relatively small." "We are likely to think that much education, training and development are useful when they are not." "Any evidence is unlikely to be free from bias." "When faced with clearly contradictory evidence people are likely to reshape their biases, not reject them." "What we do has much greater importance than what we think. And to change thoughts, changing a related behavior will have much more power than putting effort into thinking differently."

"As we ourselves age, we shift our biases upwards with us, so that we are personally always in the "sweet spot" where people act reasonably, whereas those younger and older than us are flawed in myriad ways, which we hasten to point out at every opportunity." Except the boomers ;) http://gawker.com/study-every-generation-is-exactly-the-same-so-get-over-1440622570

Everybody starts somewhere. Long-haired lout ;)

Happy Birthday! May you get a cool change and some rain :)

Well this story ended the day a bit darker than it started.

"The opposite of truth is not necessarily the lie. It can also be another form of dishonesty, namely sentimentality. This takes the form of a mawkish oversimplification of the world in which reality is entirely lost." One of the defining characteristics of our time. Everything is the best thing ever, the most amazing, the saddest, the most outrageous etc. Either a standing ovation or a tragedy. The sentimentality machine in us processes all of our news, every day.

The bubble is still there, waiting to burst.

Twice in a few seconds, what are the odds. Almost felt sorry for him.

Is the Internet the greatest thing ever invented? I think so. If you worry your kids are online too much, watch this.

Happy birthday Katy, haven't seen you for a while!

Should be a bewdy.

So beautifully said. Terrible pain and chaos coming all of our way unless we get our heads out of our bums. "It’s clear what needs to happen. There needs to be wholesale change in economic thinking. Forces in world labour markets – new forms of 21st-century trade unionism – need to be strengthened. The power of financial markets needs to be constrained. Credit growth needs to be managed by direct controls on the growth of bank balance sheets and banks need to be weaned off the financial casino they have built. Great companies need to be allowed to purpose themselves around creating value rather than dancing to the interests of disengaged shareholders."

Can't really trust any pro sport, gambling has infected the world.

I'm sure a lot of husbands could say the same about their wives.

Substitute "Liberal" or "Tory" for "Republican" and you have a beautiful description of how conservative politics was hijacked by very rich extremists, across 3 continents. "What is the fundamental purpose of the Republican Party? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax bracket—the people whose interests are actually represented by elected officials—politics is an investment. It is no big deal to invest a million dollars in the presidential race if it ends up saving you ten million dollars on your tax."

Stunts growth in art too. When an artist becomes cool, people stop even noticing whether what they're doing is crap. "In other words, coolness is like a game you appear to have won (having skipped many messy stages of development), but will ultimately lose (emerging into adulthood without the coping skills you would have gained had you actually passed through those awkward stages of development). " https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/encountering-america/201407/what-s-wrong-being-cool

Publishing too. "Kids get what they need from Google..."

One of the great ads :)

Zzzzzzz. People also go to emergency rooms with their dangly bits stuck in vacuum cleaners. And the phone is better? Hate the phone.

This seems like a fun idea.

I'm not convinced about republicanism. What about others?

Is it you making the Earth move in Orange @[783412914:2048:Kyle]?

Happy Birthday!! See you later on. We plan on getting you drunk so we have a hope of winning snooker

Happy Birthday :)

Why do we have universities? For clever shit like this.

Wisdom of the crowd. Punters predicted India would make 184 in the 20-20 tonight, earlier in the innings. The Indian final score - 184.

Could professional sport get any more pathetic.

Can't remember much about the movie, but this was a beautiful piece of music.