Speying the dog

For some unknown reason, I haven't felt like updating this blog in the past few weeks. Too many days off work (for holidays) cause the mind to go mush-like, and blogs don't get written in this time.

A few weeks ago I took our young dog (Mocha) to be speyed. I should really call her a puppy as she's only six months old, but to me a puppy is a small dog, and this one is anything but small!

This picture was taken about two months ago and doesn't really give a good idea of her size, although some people who have seen it say that they can judge by the size of her feet. Anyway, this is a big dog who hasn't finished growing yet.

I stayed to watch the operation as I thought it would be interesting (I also didn't have anything else to do at the time). Anaesthetising the dog was amazing: after the vet managed to insert a cannula into Mocha's leg, she injected some liquid and in literally two seconds Mocha relaxed from heavy breathing into heavy sleep. The cut in the abdomen produced disappointingly little blood and in fact, no real bleeding could be observed at any time during the operation, although of course subcutaneous blood vessels were leaking all the time.

Again, to my disappointment, the vet didn't lay Mocha's abdomen open for me to see inside; instead, she reached inside the cut, felt around a bit and then brought out some filmy tissue which she said was the ovaries, Fallopian tubes and uterus. She carefully cut and stitched, and within about 40 minutes the entire operation was over: careful and slow.

The vet says that current thinking says that it is best to spey dogs prior to their coming on heat for the first time; this improves their hormonal balance (or prevents hormonal imbalance) and will lengthen their lifespan. I'm used to thinking about gynaecological details of women, and of course bitches are somewhat different!

It took Mocha a few days to recover her normally undending enthusiasm for life, a period longer than the vet had said, so much so that I was tempted to take Mocha back for a checkup. But soon her lethargy departed and she was back to her old tricks (chewing shoes, scratching the carpet and generally running around). I'm not too sure which behaviour I prefer; we are waiting for her to grow out of this phase.

Next time: thoughts about two new books.

An end to headaches?

I would like to claim that I've had difficulty logging into the blog (true) as a reason for not posting recently but that wouldn't be fair. As Robert Heinlein wrote, the best way to lie is to tell the truth ... just not all of it. So yes, I've been having difficulty logging into the blog.

I had my BCC removed surgically two weeks ago and a long row of stitches inserted, which were removed two days ago. Apparently the scar is 6mm in length, which is comparatively long for this sort of thing. Fortunately, it's on my back, so I don't have to look at it (neither does anyone else) and it also made the surgery easier. I have a checkup with my skin doctor in another few weeks and I am hoping that she won't find anything else to have extracted.

Whilst having the surgery, another piece of the headache issue fell into place. My blood pressure was measured before and after; before it was something like 145/90, whereas after it was 135/90. I had a slight headache at the time which intensified as the day went on, which leads me to the tentative conclusion that elevated blood pressure will give me a headache. I looked a little at the online literature, and whilst this observation has been made, it is generally accepted to be false. But the elevated bp can be a sign of something else which is causing the headaches.

Fortunately I've been headache free for almost the past month (except for the surgery day) which has been a blessing, so I haven't really had a chance to test this theory. Theoretically, I should be walking around with a mobile sphygmomanometer (don't you just love that word; I pasted it in directly from the Wikipedia) so that I can have advance warning of a headache but I can't really see that happening.

Something has happened to my sound card which is making recording vocals very difficult. I replaced the microphone with another which had been very 'live' in the past, but this too was hardly producing any output. After increasing volume levels by 25 and judicious silencing, I obtained a reasonable - if bassy - vocal for a song which I am currently recording. This silencing has happened before - last Summer, if I remember correctly - and mysteriously went away after a few days. Maybe the soundcard also suffers from high blood pressure or the equivalent.

Weekend migraines (part 2)

As my late mother used to ask, do you know the story of the three wells? No, I would answer. "Well, well, well".

No pain on Friday. Almost no pain on Saturday (I woke up with a slight headache which might have been caused by mild dehydration - my wife left the electric blanket on all night). No pain so far today.

Can it really be that going to bed frustrated and not sleeping well can cause migraines? There are people who would say definitely so, those who believe in a holistic approach.

I come from a scientific background, which means that the experiment has to be repeated several times in order to reach a conclusion. So: no basketball this Thursday night. Maybe I'll tape the game and watch it on Friday afternoon, depending on the result.

My clinical psychologist friend laid out some new exams which she wants me to computerise. Being in stout mind over the weekend, I completed one from scratch and I'll show her the results in the next few days. There's another exam which looks fairly easy to implement; the only decision which I have to make at the moment is whether the interface should be only keyboard or only mouse (I suppose I could do both). Sometimes the people being tested are not too familiar with a computer, although I imagine that this kind of person is disappearing, especially considering the nature of the exam. So it looks like I'll go with the mouse interface.

Weekend migraines

As I wrote previously, I went to see my doctor about migraines. First of all, he checked my symptoms to see that they are indeed included in the list which indicates migraine - not everybody has the same symptoms and even not every migraine which I suffer has the same symptoms. Then he gave me a neurological examination - checking reflexes, getting me to touch my nose with my arms outstretched and my eyes closed. After I passed this test, we talked a bit about causes.

Almost all of my migraines start on a Saturday morning, so the natural question is what is different about Friday night. Well, it's the only time of the week that I eat meat - roast chicken, in fact. Now, there are certain foods which are known to trigger migraines such as chocolate (which I rarely eat), but no one has yet indicated roast chicken! The doctor expressed surprise, and joked that if this is really the cause, then he can write an article about it and become famous. He advised me not to eat chicken that evening (the consultation was on Friday morning) to see whether that would have any effect. He considered prescribing me beta-blockers, specifically propranolol, but first wanted to see what my blood pressure was and whether there is any identifiable trigger.

My BP was measured three times, with an average value of 140/80, which is very high for me and hopefully unusual. I left the clinic at about 11:30am, and by about 3pm I already had a developing headache, obviously not due to the roast chicken which I was just about to start preparing. Then followed two and a half days of intermittent pain and nausea, a classic migraine for me.

Several people have mentioned to me that many people suffer from 'weekend migraines', which arise from a change in lifestyle. I was told about one person who normally drinks several cups of coffee a day but not at weekends and so suffers migraines as a result (caffeine withdrawal); as I drink herbal tea, this isn't a problem for me, but I understand the basic idea. Another person pointed out that we normally get up later at the weekend, which can upset the body rhythm.

So I started thinking: if I already had the headache by Friday afternoon, what is different about Thursday evening/Friday morning to the rest of the week? Well, for a start, I only work a few hours on Friday morning (my company officially works Sunday to Thursday, but I do a few extra hours on Friday when it's quiet and no one bothers me) and don't drink very much. I also watch frustrating basketball games on Thursday evening, don't shower and go to bed late, so I am often more tired on a Friday.

As it happens, Maccabi Tel Aviv played basketball on a Wednesday this week, the first time in several years, and as they were totally dominated by Tau Vittoria, I didn't bother watching the entire game. Instead I elected to shower and go to bed at a reasonable hour, unaffected emotionally by the game. Yesterday I had my blood pressure measured at a much more reasonable 119/75, today I've been drinking, and it will be interesting to see what happens this weekend.

I keep my fingers crossed.

Donating blood

Yesterday, the 'bloodmobile' made its semi-annual journey to the kibbutz so that people could donate blood. There's always a shortage of blood available for infusions, so Magen David Adom (the equivalent to Red Cross) are always trying to get people to donate. On the other hand, in the past few years, they have also tried to make things as hard as possible for people to donate, in order to ensure that they blood that they do get is of the highest quality. There is a questionnaire which one has to complete which asks all kinds of questions: does the donor suffer from epileptic fits? Is the donor an intravenous drug user? Has the donor undergone dental treatment in the past seven days? Has the donor lived abroad for a period of six months during the years ....? What medication has the donor taken in the past two weeks? Has the donor been feeling well in the past few days?

One gets the picture. Had the bloodmobile come a few days ago, there is no way that I would have gone as I had been feeling very unwell (probably migraines, although I'm going to the doctor tomorrow and may get a new diagnosis), and donating blood was completely out of the question. But I've been feeling much better and thought that there would be no problem this time.

After completing the questionnaire, one goes to a paramedic who checks the questionnaire, asks some more questions (some of which are covered in the questionnaire), checks pulse and blood pressure, and in the case of women and vegetarians, haemoglobin levels. During this chat, I mentioned that I had had an appointment with a skin doctor a few days ago for the removal of a small growth, but that nothing had happened as the growth was too big to be removed, considering the poor sterility conditions of her office (as the growth is on my back, I can't see it very well, but it's maybe two centimetres in diameter). I thought that I would be ok to donate as I hadn't had it removed, but it turns out the opposite. Once the paramedic heard this, he phoned a doctor in Jerusalem who asked me what the growth was. When I told her that it was BCC (basal cell carcinoma), she immediately said that I could not donate, but that I will be able to after it has been removed.

So: another visit of the bloodmobile goes by without me donating. Everyone thanked me for at least wanting to donate (most people don't even want to), but I was left with an obscure feeling of having been rejected

Another one bites the dust

Today I read about the death of Ian Wallace, drummer for the 'Islands' line up of King Crimson. Full details here .

Obviously Ian did a lot more than just play in that incarnation of KC; when I first found his website a few years ago, I was surprised at the names who had used his talents. I found his diary very amusing and informative, telling about his life as a LA musician.

God rest his soul.

Post Mortem

I promised a report on last week's cholent: it tasted fine, but there was far too much liquid in it. I'll have to take this into account the next time I make the dish, probably next week - my wife loved it and lobbied me all week to make it again.

When not battling with the report generator at work (the documentation turns out to be not too useful and totally lacking examples), I've been working on a song at home. This one contains quite a few musical surprises.

I spent today working on Word and Excel automation from within a Delphi program. Maybe for some people this is old hat, but the Word automation is new to me. I suppose that I've never needed it before because I've always maintained that the Delphi program should and can do anything which it needs to do. In this case, it's part of a pyschological testing progam, and we want to give the testee a report of how s/he did; there's some complex formatting to be done along with boilerplate text, and it does make sense to do this in Word - match the tool to the task.

I've also been battling with an unusual migraine all day, which is why I don't feel like elaborating very much on any of the above subjects.

Working hard (but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel)

Well, if I thought that I had been working hard during December, then that was nothing compared to what awaited me in January! Most working days lasted 12 hours, and there were even a few 16 hour days ... not surprisingly my private life was virtually non-existant during this time. It was like being in basic training in the army again - come home at weekends and sleep almost all the time.

The first two weeks in February were a bit easier, and I could definitely feel the pressure easing. For most of this time, I've been helping other people get to grips with the new ERP program (which I barely know myself) and trying to figure out how to get done what needs to be done. Now most of that is ... done, and I can start applying myself to the important work: writing reports with the report generator. This is my bread and butter, my speciality, and I imagine that quite a few people, myself included, have been waiting for the day that I can start writing reports.

Although to someone on the outside this may seem a trivial job, in fact it is quite crucial. The reason why we were able to get so much mileage out of our previous ERP program was that the reports which I wrote were extremely sophisticated and did all kinds of things which many people (maybe even the program's architects) might not have dreamed possible. The new ERP program seems to have sufficient built-in reports, but when one starts examining them, they suddenly seem not to be supplying the goods.

I was supposed to have gone on a three day course to learn the report generator; the day before the course started, I was sent a preparatory document which would hold me in good stead for the course. The document was like the first step in database design, something which was way, way, way beneath what I need to know. When I pointed this out to the course organiser, she suggested that I not bother going to the course and instead speak to the head of the technical team who might better be able to help me.

So speak I did. It transpires that they have an advanced db course, which is really a one on one session with a developer at the (ridiculous) cost of $1900 - the simple course would have cost $500. But, she said, download a certain document from our website; this will tell you all you need to know. If you manage with this, fine. If not, do the course.

I downloaded the document (it turned out that I had already downloaded it a few weeks previously but hadn't looked at it yet) and tried reading it. It was all gibberish. Another day passed, I tried looking at it again and some of it started making a little sense. I even tried a simple example, in order to get my feet wet, and this encouraged me. The next day I looked at it again, and realised that out of the six or seven chapters, there is only one chapter which interests me at the moment and that it would be worth my while to concentrate on this chapter. So concentrate I did and after an hour or so, I tried my hand at writing a simple report.

This turned out reasonably well (although there were several things which I wanted to improve but couldn't see how) so I tried another example. And suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel! I was understanding what I was doing! The next day (yesterday) I was very confident, figured out how to do some of the things which had stumped me before and wrote some more complicated reports. Today I continued the trend and figured out how to do something quite complicated. RTFM, of course.

These manuals only make sense after one has already figured out (with a great deal of mental sweat) how to do what is written there. Once it makes sense, then it's time to read the manual properly and thoroughly and suddenly all kinds of things make sense. I even discovered that I had inadvertedly started using material in one of the chapters which I hadn't looked at - to my pleasure.

One problem which remains unresolved is that the manual is written in English (obviously not a problem for me) whereas the program displays itself in Hebrew. The manual says "use the ___ option which is a secondary window of the ____ form", and I'm thinking, "yes, what's that in Hebrew?" Microsoft were well known for inventing their own variation of Hebrew, translating English concepts into words which weren't exactly the most obvious. So it is with this program - but that might be the least of my worries.

Having personal time means that I've been getting on with my music. I actually wrote a new song a few weeks ago (called "Everything reminds me of you") which then spent a week being arranged and recorded. Last week I did a new arrangement of a old song ("Chance encounter") and that too has been nailed. I'll be putting the songs up at SoundClick when I finish this entry.

It's now the weekend, so it's maximum cooking time. As always (for the past year) it's roast chicken and roast potato for dinner tonight, a remarkably easy dish which always tastes lovely. For lunch tomorrow I've decided to be adventurous (no doubt in due to a combination of buying a new cooking dish and my success with the report generator) and so I'm making cholent, as the East European Jews would call it, a mixture of beans, potatoes and meat which cooks slowly from Friday afternoon until Saturday lunchtime. This meal is popular with religious Jews as they can prepare it before the Sabbath comes in and yet serve it hot a day later (they don't turn on or off power sources - these days, electricity, in those days, candles or fire - during the Sabbath, although what is turned on beforehand will stay on during the day). Thus it's common to find a hotplate running all day which will have on it a large urn of water (a source for hot drinks) and a tureen of cholent.

I've never made this before, which makes me slightly nervous, although it's also fairly simple: just put all the ingredients in a pot and cook slowly for 15 hours. I'll let you know what it tasted like later....

January 1

As someone in the "William and Mary" tv series said, "I'm knackered with a capital N".

I don't normally like to write about my work in this blog, but the past month's activities have left me with little choice. In the real world, I am the IT manager for "one of Israel's leading office furniture manufacturers", or at least I was until yesterday. Now I am the IT manager for Israel's leading office furniture manufacturer.

Several years ago, a Canadian company bought one of Israel's furniture manufacturers and also bought a majority of the shares in the company for which I work(ed). About six months ago, they decided to buy out the minority partner and combine the two companies. Although a complete merger has not yet been obtained, due to legal reasons, the two companies as of today are one.

In September I was tapped to become the IT manager for the entire group, and in that guise I examined the IT setup in our sister company and compared it to ours; whilst our company might be well ahead in terms of exploiting the ERP program, our ERP is very old fashioned, and the full exploitation was mainly due to satellite programs which I had written. With a slightly heavy heart, I had to recommend that the program used by our sister company was more modern, and if we were going to combine forces, then we would have to use this other program.

Since October, I've been learning how to use this program; unfortunately progress was exceedingly slow until the end of November, when we established a direct telecommunications link between the two factories. Since then, I've been working hard, trying to implement all our data in the new program whilst carrying on with my normal full schedule. If there is anything which I regret doing, it was leaving the physical connection so late.

The last month has also been taken up with weekly meetings and all day training sessions which have been interesting but also time consuming, time which might have been used more constructively on implementing things.

Anyway, today the switch was thrown; from now on, we will work only with the new program, although the old ERP program will stay in use as the production module in my factory. Whilst we all know what we want to do with the program (create price quotations, place orders, make out invoices, etc), the problem - at least for now - is how to do it. The 'how' is probably easier for me than for most of our staff regarding these real jobs, but most of my time has been spent importing data, setting up privileges, setting report formats and so forth, which can be just as frustrating for me as trying to create a price quotation can be for a less computer literate fellow worker.

A new year and a new beginning.

Where have I been?

The last few weeks seem to have gone by very fast, but they also have been very intensive. All sorts of personal problems which I don't want to discuss here have occupied my time.

My father has just spent one week in hospital, and for someone who has always been healthy (he is 84), this comes as quite a surprise and quite a blow. As the diagnosis is not clear, everyone has been telling me stories about people going to doctors and not being diagnosed correctly. These days, so much depends on blood tests; it makes me wonder who devises these tests (how do they know what to test for, how do they actually perform the test, what do they mean) and how we managed say 20 years ago when there weren't such sophisticated tests.

I am trying to do an arrangement for an old song. I originally sequenced it in 1999 and sounded very good (in what I call a 'pointillist' style), but the transfer to Reason has changed everything. I get the feeling that by the time I finish, there will be only 25% of the original notes left; I've changed parts, thrown out a great deal and tried to make something new. At the moment, I am lucky if I can devote an hour a day to this - fortunately there is no rush.

Love

Is this an event which unites youth in a way that hasn't happened since June 1967? Is it an exercise in money grabbing?

I am referring to the "new" Beatles album entitled "Love". No doubt you've read about it elsewhere so I'm not going to delve into the background too much. I've known about the record for the past few weeks, a bit earlier than the general public here, who only became aware after last Saturday's tv weekly news roundup devoted a few minutes to the subject. By that time I had already downloaded a few songs which had been streamed by an Australian paper, and I was getting to know the material.

I thought that it would be instructive to see what other people had been writing about this album first before essaying my thoughts. I was really surprised: a large number of people were moaning about how the Beatles see this record as another way of milking the public; many were annoyed at how "new" tracks had been created and most of the opinions that I read were against the record.

I might have a few reservations, but I think that George Martin didn't go far enough in creating new tracks by mixing and mashing the old. One person was complaining that he bought the 45 rpm record of "Strawberry Fields" in 1967, and so he knows "what the correct version is". Is he unaware that the version to which he was referring was actually created from two different versions? For those who still don't know this, the invisible seam is at the 1:00 mark. Maybe it's because I spend much of my time creating music electronically, cutting and pasting bits and pieces from different songs and matching them up that I'm not horrified by this concept.

I may be a pathetic anorak, but one of my favourite Beatles cd contains only different versions and instrumental tracks of "Strawberry Fields". This was the first ever mash, and the "new" version revealed here is simply the "original" with yet another different first verse put on the front. To me, the differing versions reveal differing aspects of the music, and the new mixes enable one to hear things which were originally buried.

SFF was the first Beatles song which ever won sufficient respect to require a remake; often they were working to a schedule which didn't allow second thoughts. People have become so used to bands making a record once a year, or once every two years or even once every three years that they don't remember that in the sixties, bands were required to make two albums a year! Recording budgets were miniscule and recording techniques were caveman-like. For some reason, EMI issued an edict that the Beatles' tapes were never to be interfered with; as a result of George Martin's using two track recording to record two separate tracks as opposed to one stereo recording, recordings had been issued with all the instruments on one side and vocals on the other side - and he wasn't allowed to fix them! So even if there were no mashing done on "Love", the chance to remix the original recordings (as much as those recording allow remixing) is one not to be taken lightly.

These days, artists record a song. They make several mixes, maybe with different instrumentation, and have the time and luxury to choose the one which they think sounds best. Sometimes a mix will sound dated after a few years and sometimes the artists may choose to replace the original mix with a different version. Sometimes an artist will have second thoughts: I know that mentioning my music in the same breath as the Beatles' is pure sacrilege, but I'd like to give an example of my own.

As I've written before, I recorded The Band's "Whispering Pines" not so long ago. My original version had piano and organ on it, similar to The Band's version. After a while, I decided to remove the piano and organ, but kept the vocal. A few weeks later, I decided to change the music once again. Another week went by and I recorded a new vocal. I have four, maybe five, complete and different versions on my hard disk. Had I been pressed for time like the Beatles were, at least until "Sergeant Pepper", that first version would have been the one everyone would have heard. Now it's the fourth (or fifth) version that people can hear at The Band's site, the "Late October" mix.

Shouldn't The Beatles be awarded the chance to correct minor mistakes and have their music sound contemporary?

Regarding the mashing, some of it is amazing (especially "Drive my car" or "Within Without You"), some is interesting (SFF, "While my gently weeps") and some just is. But the "unadulturated" songs sound anaemic by comparion; one is always waiting for something new to happen and nothing does. But even a song which supposedly has been "left alone" can sound different - "I am the walrus" finally has a true stereo mix, and in the fadeout, the different vocal lines are much more apparent.

If anyone complains about the price - $18 list - I saw that Amazon were selling it at nearly 50% discount, but I imagine that most people will, ahem, acquire the album at no cost at all. It's not as if the Beatles need more money.....

Incidentally, if one studies their history, it wasn't until they broke up that they really started earning money (the story of many a band). Their original contract with EMI was miserly at best, and Brian Epstein let a lot of money slip through their fingers, not really because of mismanagement, but because they were the first and no one really knew how to handle their business. George Martin too had a raw deal with EMI and didn't make much money at the beginning, although by the time of "Abbey Road" he was probably getting a percentage.

I suppose that compared to most people, I am a Beatles freak, although I wouldn't consider myself a fanatic. I have studied their music both with my own ears and other people's commentary, and I've read their history. I did live through it, although I was too young at the time to go to their concerts. As a result, I hear this album in what is probably a completely different way from someone uneducated about the Beatles; but somehow I doubt that some unsuspecting purchaser is going to believe that these are the canonical versions.

The Band

I have a vague memory that in 1971 someone came in to the classroom with a couple of albums under his arm and tried to sell them at a low price. I think that they came without a sleeve, which would tend to imply that they fell off a lorry, as the euphemism puts it. I didn't succumb to temptation, although I did listen to a copy; the only song that I remember was an upbeat number called "Time To Kill".

Several years later, I buy a copy of "Mystery Train" by Greil Marcus (first edition); I bought the book for its chapter on Randy Newman, but of course read it from cover to cover. Whilst I wasn't too interested in Elvis or Sly Stone, the chapter on The Band caught my imagination (I should also note that the chapter on Randy Newman deepened my understanding immensely). I talked this over with a lecturer in the Arts department, and he was kind enough to give me a cassette copy of "The Band" (aka The Brown Album). I found this quite difficult to listen to, and couldn't reconcile easily what I was hearing with what Marcus wrote about.

After emigrating to Israel in 1978, someone was kind enough to give me another cassette, this time with "Big Pink" on one side and "The Band" on the other. Maybe it was the clarity of the recording and maybe it was listening to an album without interruption (the previous cassette had the album spread over both sides of a C60, instead of one side of a C90), but suddenly The Band started to make sense. Around this time, the soundtrack to "The Last Waltz" came out, and I became captivated by some of the tracks, especially "It Makes No Difference".

When I moved from purchasing vinyl to purchasing cds, some of my earlier purchases were the early Band albums, along with a now not available compilation. When the Internet became popular, it didn't take long to find the excellent Band site, which again helped deepen my understanding.

A few days ago, I was looking at this site and noticed that a new page had been added: covers of Band songs by visitors to the site. As it happens, I had recorded a version of "Whispering Pines" a few months ago (several versions, to be accurate), but due to restrictions on the Soundclick site, I was unable to upload it there. So I took this opportunity to make one of my covers available, and one can hear it here. Hope that you enjoy it.

Shopping

My son has started keyboard lessons (not piano, but electric keyboard), and we promised him that if he makes a go of it, we will buy him an instrument. So on Friday, we found ourselves heading towards Tel Aviv, where the major musical instrument shops are to be found. After a bit of humming and hawwing, we chose the Yamaha PSR-E 303, which I discover afterwards is considered to have very good value for money. One thing which I was looking for was touch response; to quote, "On an acoustic piano, striking a key harder will produce a louder sound, striking it softer will produce a softer sound. With Yamaha's "Touch Response" the PSR-E303 keyboard responds like an acoustic piano."

All the time, my wife was saying that if the boy doesn't continue playing, then I can always use it (no doubt trying to play [no pun intended] on one's natural tendency to buy for oneself something better). Indeed, when we got home and set the keyboard up, it was mainly me playing selections from Van der Graaf Generator (a nice bossa version of 'Man Erg'), rather than my son playing the few simple tunes that he's learnt so far.

After this purchase, we had lunch and then split up for an hour, each person doing his/her own shopping or just wandering around. I was "just wandering around" until I found a shop selling cds - a selection which one could kill for. There aren't very many cds on my wish list anymore, and the few which I do buy normally come from esoteric outlets on the Internet; I find it frustrating to walk into a cd shop and come out empty handed. Not this time: the first thing which I noted were VdGG albums (although not the remasters); following this promising start, I then looked for Peter Hammill and found several of his discs, including the series of remasters, which have been available only for a week or so. I decided to buy 'Over', which is simultaneously one of his most extreme but listenable albums. The price was seventy shekels, which works out as slightly less than nine pounds and thus much cheaper than buying from Hammill directly.

Emboldened by this success, I then found "Walking wounded" by Everything But The Girl; Robin has mentioned them several times, but I've never heard anything by them. For forty shekels (less than five pounds), I didn't think that I was taking much of a risk. To round things out, I bought an old album by an Israeli singer, one which I bought on vinyl when it came out but haven't heard in twenty years. I'm more interested in the musician who wrote most of the songs, arranged and produced the album; this record is like a missing link between his earlier, more straightforward material and his later, more jazzy style.

Once home, I listened to all the discs in rotation. "Over" was definitely louder and clearer than the original; the bonus tracks don't do much for me, but I understand why they are there. I have on order from Amazon the remastered version of "Godbluff"; I feel that the original cd release was sorely lacking the power and clarity of the vinyl version, and judging from what's been done to "Over", the result should be good. "Walking wounded" was ok; I find the percussion too loud and distracting - but then, I'm listening to it in the comfort of my home and not on the dance floor. Maybe their earlier material would be more to my liking. The Israeli disc was a pleasure to listen to, although some of it sounds very dated (early 80s synth technology).

So: even if that day did cost us a lot of money, I think that it was very well spent. My left hand hurts from playing extended chords on the piano and my head is full of Peter Hammill songs.

Busy morning

Despite today being Saturday, and thus my one day off from work, I was up and awake at 6:45 am. The first item on my agenda was to watch something which I had taped yesterday on the video. During a few idle moments on Friday, I had turned on the tv and was pleasantly rewarded by the sight of Paul Simon; judging by the mustache and the song he sang ("Loves me like a rock"), I had tuned into a repeat of "Saturday Night Live" hosted by PS circa 1975.

After that song, there was a comic interlude with Simon playing one on one basketball with some pro from the NBA who was about two feet taller. Amusing but predictable. Then cut to Simon singing a song which seemed familiar but wasn't one of his ... wait a minute, it's "Marie", by Randy Newman. After one verse of this, Simon says that it is indeed "Marie", written by one of his favourite songwriters, and he so much liked Newman that he (PS) was able to persuade him (RN) to appear. Cue to Randy Newman playing "Sail away"!

Continuing this level of surprise, next on was Art Garfunkel for two duets, "The Boxer" and "Scarborough Fair". Simon put in a few "friendly jabs", like asking whether Garfunkel was done with his film career and whether he would be upto singing a few songs. I've never been too fond of "The Boxer", probably because of its over-dramatic arrangement, but with just the two of them and one acoustic guitar, the song was much better. It was very easy to hear what each was singing, which was a revelation as I've never heard the harmonies before.

The next item on the agenda was to master a live recording of Randy Newman made only a few days ago. RN is currently on tour in North America, featuring some new songs, and someone had uploaded a recording of his appearance in Toronto a week ago (14 Oct). I had downloaded it and intended to check volume levels before burning some audio copies. It's been my experience that such recordings, if not edited, tend to have very loud applause and very quiet music. This was indeed the case: the applause was approximately four times as loud as the music, and overloading the audio.

After a few experiments, I decided to boost the non-applause sections by 100% (ie make them twice as loud) and compress the applause sections to 50%. Whilst there are some small patches with audible volume changes, these are very short and don't distract from the performance.

New songs! One is called "I'll Never Get Over Losing You", which has nice lyrics but not an outstanding tune. The other is called "(A few words) In Defence of My Country", which is very topical and very funny. It accepts that America's current leaders may not be much, but they're nothing compared to some of the kings, dicatators and leaders that have existed over the past thousand years. Supposedly the new album will be released sometime during 2007, although no one knows quite when.

Finishing up an early morning full of activity, I set to work programming, adding a new feature/report to a program which I have developed to aid a clinical psychologist. This new report used some nice SQL features and looks very nifty! I imagine that the general public doesn't appreciate the niceties of programming, but I certainly enjoyed myself, and the results are pleasing.

That's enough for one day. Now I can rest and shore up some energy for the coming week.

Algorithms, part 2

My original idea didn't work too well, but I've thought of another way to solve the problem, which again divides the work into three:

first query: parts which have different values in both months

second query: for all parts which had a value in the first month, see whether they have a value in the second month

third query: for all parts which had a value in the second month, see whether they have a value in the first month

The second and third queries are similar in nature to my original method, but this way should be faster as the program is not iterating over all the parts, but merely a subset.

Last week was holiday week in Israel. I spent two days learning a new ERP program (and only scratching the surface), and not doing much else with the rest of the time. So there's nothing much to report here.

Strange dream leads to improved algorithm

People don't normally remember their dreams for long, so I'm setting this one down before I forget it.

I was with a group of people (I think that we were students on a course together) who had to run around a ship (some structure with at least two floors or decks) and improve our time for the course. Normally it was taking around five minutes, but I managed to run the course one time in four minutes. Speaking to the group (rather pompously, I admit), I started drawing parallels between how I had managed to improve my time by 20% and tuning computer algorithms. Small increases in performance can be achieved by looking at each part of the algorithm and applying local optimisation. In the dream, an example of local optimisation was the way I was descending a ladder between decks; normally I was climbing down the ladder 'properly', putting my foot on each rung. The local optimisation was to slide down the ladder, holding on with my hands but not using my feet.

The problem with local optimisation, I explained to the group, is that there is limited scope for improvement. True, it may be possible to end up with a time which is maybe five times as fast as the original, but in order to gain true improvement, one has to find a better algorithm. In computer terms, this is (for example) one which works in logarithmic relation instead of linear relation.

Then I woke up. Still thinking about changing algorithms, I started thinking about a problem at work. I started programming over twenty years ago, when computers were relatively slow, lack of memory was a major restraint, and it was very important to tune one's algorithms in order to obtain maximum performance. I don't work in a field which still requires high performance from the cpu, so these days, such matters seem unimportant. But I do know one report in one program which could do with some improvement, and not surprisingly I was working on it with no success the other day.

I have a database which maintains data about dead stock at work (defined as parts which haven't been bought for the last six months but the stock amount is more than twelve months usage), and one of the reports which I produce is a list of changes in the last month - what's been added (not good) and what's been used (good). At the moment, I'm using a simple, straight forward and brute strength approach to this problem: for every part in the database, I get the amount for one month and the amount for the previous month. If the amounts are different and not zero, I display the result.

This works, but it is incredibly slow. I've been trying to find a masterful SQL statement which will allow me to do what I want, but so far I've been unsuccessful. This morning I woke up with a new approach which involves three queries and may seem more complicated, but should be much faster than the simple approach, because the number of parts being looked at is much smaller. First of all, get data for the parts which had a value in both months where the values are not the same and not zero (I have a SQL query which will do this). Then get data for the parts which have a value for this month but not for the previous month. Finally get data for the parts which had a value last month but not this month. The resulting combined list will be the result set which I require.

Of course, I will check that the results which I get match the results which I was getting via the simple approach. I will also time both methods and see which one is faster, even though I'm sure that this new approach will be better. What might be construed as funny - or counter instructive - is that I am spending hours on finding a better approach for a report which will save maybe five minutes per month. Looked at in this light, it's not worth the bother to improve the time.

But it's an intellectual challenge, and that's what's important. Keep burning new synaptic connections in the brain. Thinking about thinking can sometimes be more valuable than simply thinking.

I was thinking about thinking, but it didn't really get me very far - Peter Hammill ("Black room")

Donwloading from YouTube

Another not exciting week has almost passed me by.

I have spent most of my out-of-work time this week downloading video clips from popular site YouTube, using the methods described in this article. Although the videos on YT are streamed and thus theoretically undownloadable, there are ways of getting around this. I use the Firefox browser at work, and once I had downloaded the VideoDownloader plug-in mentioned in the article, it was a breeze to get the videos onto my hard disk. I then used a program to convert the resulting .flv files (which can only be watched with an flv viewer) into avi files, and thence onto cd.

Technology aside, what of the videos? Most of the material which I downloaded are clips from the 'Beat Club' tv programme shown in Germany from the mid 60s until mid 70s; the videos uploaded to YouTube are clips which were shown on tv, possibly taped to video, and then digitalised. As a result of this analog/digital/analog/digital/conversion process, the final quality is not wonderful. Most of the videos came out looking ok, but some suffer from excessive pixelisation, especially the older BC videos which were shot in black and white.

A great number of videos show acts miming to their songs, and as their songs are available at higher quality elsewhere, the enjoyment lies in watching the musicians and identifying the instruments. Much of the tv direction is bizarre, focusing on meaningless visual elements (like the stage lighting) or on instruments which aren't the major contributors (eg The Kinks' "Lola", which has more shots of the pianist's hands than of Ray Davies singing). There are some excellent clips, such as Rod Stewart miming "Maggie May" whilst playing football and accompanied by the late John Peel 'playing' the mandolin. There are also some rare clips, such as King Crimson playing "Lark's tongue in aspic, part 1" (beware: there are two clips of this available, one just over seven minutes and one just under six minutes. Choose the shorter one: the longer one gets stuck at around the 2:30 mark). And there are some extremely weird clips, such as a Japanese trio who play a note-for-note rendition of Crimson's "Lark's tongue in aspic, part 2". I downloaded it without watching, so I was really surprised when I saw the result.

There is also a clip of Jimi Hendrix playing "All along the watchtower" as a RIGHT handed guitarist; if one watches closely, it becomes obvious that someone reversed the original film, as there are signs like "STAGE" which have been reversed as to be unreadable. I don't know what the novelty value of this is, but it's definitely worth finding the live clip of "Hey Joe", which has him playing normally (which means with his teeth as well as picking with his left hand).

Other live perfomances include Van der Graaf Generator playing "Whatever would Robert have said?", Roxy Music with "Virginia Plain", and concert footage of a supergroup comprising of (amongst others) Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman playing an excellent version of "Layla".

New song uploaded

I uploaded a new song to Soundclick today, called "You think that you know him". It's not a new song, but rather a new arrangement. I found an earlier version of this on my hard disk the other day which I had forgotten about, as for the last few months I've been working exclusively on a cd of cover versions (which I'm not allowed to upload to Soundclick for copyright reasons). Anyway, I listened to this version, was generally pleased by it but realised that there were bits and pieces which needed to be improved. A few hours later, I had the music finalised, mixed it with the vocal which I had recorded whenever, and hey presto! A new track.

Here's what I wrote to a friend about the genesis of the song (in February 2002):

On Thursday evening I had been asked to play the guitar at someone's 40th birthday party, and so I played all these old Israeli songs. Most of them seemed to be in the key of A minor, and a fair number were waltzes.

On Friday morning, I thought to myself that I too could put together a waltz in A minor without too much difficulty. I laid down a chord sequence, but it was very stiff. Later that evening I thought that if I change this chord to that, and that chord to this, then something interesting might emerge.

And what do you know? On Saturday morning, I already had a chord sequence and tune. I dug out the bits of paper [on which I had been writing notes to myself], tried fitting words to the tune, and suddenly I had a verse. I typed it into the computer, and off the cuff added a second. I tried singing it, made a few adjustments, and suddenly a third verse (the fourth in the song) appeared. After a bit more cogitation the final verse appeared as if by magic. To make things interesting, I changed the pronouns, so instead of me singing about someone else, I'm now giving advice to a friend about what to do (the title was originally "You think that you know me"). Thinking about it a little more, maybe I should change all the "she's" to "he", and the "her's" to "him" - that'll make it into me singing to a female friend.

The words themselves have very little basis in real life, so don't read to much into them.

It's been my experience that the arrangements which I did in pre-Reason days need to be thinned out in order to sound good in Reason: Reason instruments take up more audio space and so there should be fewer of them. For this new arrangement, I combined the parts of two instruments into one, which made the result less cluttered. To my ears, there's a nice reverby bounce to this tune which I like.

I remember that when I was working on the song, I wanted something different for the solo section in the middle. I was wandering around the Internet when I came upon a flamenco rhythm in 3/4; ideal, I thought, and incorporated this into the arrangement. The original MIDI sounded much more Spanish than this version does, but that doesn't bother me too much.

Anyway, please give it a listen and also give it a positive vote - I think that this song could do well in the Soundclick charts.

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Continuing the unfortunate sequence of rock musicians' deaths, today I read about Boz Burrell, one time bassist and singer for King Crimson and later to find fame with Bad Company. Although he was in KC for only a short time, I managed to see that line up three times in the space of six months. He was 60 when he died.

Stevie Wonder

I wrote before that I found Tim Hughes' Ph.D. dissertation on Stevie Wonder; here's the link. There are two paragraphs which I want to write about here.

In the discussion of "Living in the city", Tim writes (page 29):

This motion in and out of phase by the right hand part occurs simultaneously in two other areas: harmony and register. When the two parts are metrically in phase, the right hand plays F# major triads. As the two parts move into metric opposition, the right hand moves up through a G# minor triad to an A major triad, higher and further away. The A major triad above the F# bass creates an F# min7 chord, blurring the harmony somewhat. As the two parts move back into metrical phase, the right hand moves back down through G# minor towards an F# major triad.

Although this made some sense to me, I didn't fully understand until I heard the part to which he is referring. It seems fairly clear to me that Hughes doesn't play the guitar, for otherwise he would have easily recognised what Wonder was playing. I don't think that Stevie Wonder plays the guitar, either, which is also surprising, considering. Guitarists, try the following exercise: play an E major chord in root position (022100); now slide the fingers up two frets and change the fingering on the G string (044200) - this is F#min7. Now move the fingers up another fret, again changing the fingering on the G string (055400) - this is G6 (or Em7). Play this in the correct rhythm and you have the vamp to "Living in the city".

I discovered this (or learnt it) sometime around May 1972, which coincidentally was about the time that Wonder was recording "Living in the city". My route to this vamp was interest in the differing sounds one could make by moving the E shape up the neck of the guitar without barring - ie just the three fingers - and moving between major and minor chords. This started from learning Simon Nicol's guitar part to Sandy Denny's "Who knows where the time goes", which is slightly different to the LITC vamp, being E/F#m7/G#m7 (or EMaj7)/F#m7.

This vamp forms the basis of my song, "Sunday rain", which was written at that time. I did a rollicking MIDI arrangement of this some years ago which maybe I ought to exhume.

The second discussion to which I want to refer is about "Higher ground":

The drums, bass and vocals sound much the same as they do on "Superstition", but the clavinet sound is quite different. First of all, there appear to be three different parts. Each seems to have been recorded similarly (perhaps in consecutive passes with a single setup, as on "I wish") but they are dispersed in the stereo mix: one to the left, one to the right and one in the center. As with the vocals at the end of "Living in the city", this dispersal seems to surround the listener, creating the effect of immersion in a polyrhythmic swirl of clavinet parts.

This caused a smile of recognition to appear on my face, as this is something which I've been trying to do in my own arrangements, although normally it's a split between two instruments panned left and right. Sometimes one echoes the first (maybe in a different octave), and sometimes they're playing split arpeggios. Wonder does something more complicated: he has three parts playing, each complementing each other and keeping a strong rhythm going. I've found someone's MIDI version of this song which displays the three clavinet parts, and it will be interesting to examine them and see what's going on.

Hughes has to write about Stevie Wonder's music from a musicologist's point of view, which can make it seem more complex than it need be. I think that quite a few players would have difficulty reading what he wrote but could assimilate the music quite easily. Also, I found the discussion about the structure of the songs (verse/chorus, etc) to be something which comes naturally, as a musician and songwriter. With these caveats in mind, I think that most people with an interest in music could learn from what Hughes writes.

Busy busy busy

I've been very busy lately, but not necessarily doing interesting things, which is why I haven't been updating.

At work, one person has been on sick leave for the last two weeks, so I've been having to cover for her, which means between two to four hours a day extra work. There are days when this isn't an imposition and there are days when it is extremely hard.

On top of this, I've been doing some computer consulancies: one is for a clinical psychologist here on the kibbutz, rewriting a set of programs which date from around ten years ago, and one - which is not definite - is advising someone in the north how to convert a program which uses the BDE and TTable component almost exclusively to using mySQL and the TQuery component. Last week we exchanged several emails and I updated one module of his program to show how it should be written, but since then I haven't heard from him.

And on top of that, I've had problems with my teeth. I'm having root canal work redone on one tooth: I had a marathon one and a half hour appointment of Friday which left me very weak for the next 24 hours, and another one hour appointment yesterday. All the root canal work has been done, and now I need the tooth to be crowned. The best part of this treatment is that it doesn't hurt - because I have no nerves in the tooth - but it's mildly unpleasant.

Virtually nothing to report on the music front. Yesterday I stumbled across a Ph.D. dissertation of the music of Stevie Wonder (specifically six songs from 1972-4), which would be fascinating material if I were even slightly acquainted with the songs discussed. Unfortunately, I am not. This isn't meant to be a racist comment, but I think that my entire record collection contains maybe one disc made by a black artist (Miles Davis). Is it my fault that I don't like rap, reggae, funk, r&b and other similar styles whilst liking progressive rock and folk music?

More about Pip

One of the things on my unwritten "to do" list was to burn a DVD from a downloaded session of "Canterbury" bands: two tracks from Caravan, one long Hatfield medley and one National Health appearance. The drummer in the last two segments was none other than Pip Pyle, RIP. Today I found the time to create the dvd, and I've watched the whole thing (about 25 minutes) twice.

I don't know whether it's the quality of the captured picture or whether the original video was trying to be "far out", but the first Caravan song, "Magic Man", is simply weird, visually. Audio is fine. Very youthful and innocent psychodelia. The second song, "Golf girl", is much better, featuring a Richard Sinclair vocal (very straight, showing none of the vocal mannerisms that were yet to come) and Dave Sinclair on Hammond. Pye Hastings looks bored out of his mind. Richard makes an interesting lyrical change towards the end -

And later on the golf course

After drinking tea

It started raining H-bombs

She protected me

The Hatfield medley apparently comes from the late Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park; the footage comes from Japanese TV, complete with announcer. This includes part of "Somewhere between Heaven and Hell", "The yes/no interlude", "Fitter Stokes" and "Didn't matter anywhere". Classic material from "The Rotters' club" album. Dave Stewart is hirstute and rocking about on his chair, fingers moving from keyboard to keyboard. Phil Miller is hiding at the back, playing somewhat normal guitar (although he is always out of focus and smudged in the video - poor lighting resolution), Richard looks a bit older than the Caravan video, and Pip is ... Pip. Very strange watching him; he looks pudgier than his photos. He's also playing quite a bit with his eyes closed - surely an unusual thing to do.

The National Health performance is of "The Collapso", sourced from The Old Grey Whistle Test. This starts off exceedingly strange - part of the "Weird Musician of the month" competition, which John Greaves steals without competition. He is very much the star of the visual performance, whereas Phil Miller - who plays the tune - is hiding at the back again. Dave Stewart is shorn of his long hair and looks even weirder in his movements. Pip is still Pip, plumper than I thought, tapping his cymbals and playing with his eyes closed.

After 30 years of only hearing this music, it's fascinating to watch it being made. And of course, it is a fitting memorial for The Man Of Zinc (as DS's sleeve notes to "The Complete National Health") refer to him.

I've been thinking of recording one of Pip's songs: it's either "Share it" (music by Richard Sinclair), "Fitter Stokes" or "Binoculars". I would most like to do FS, but it sounds like I'm going to have problems singing it as it requires a huge range. I've worked out most of the music (quite weird, but what would you expect from a drummer?) and it would be fun to play. "Share it" also has quite a range, somewhere around 15 semitones, but that's just about manageable. The chords were very easy to pin down; they play it in B, but that's going to be too high for me. "Binoculars" can wait as a third option, if I even decide to go through with this. Of course, I'm so used to hearing the original of SI that it's going to be difficult at first to find a new musical approach, although I know that once I decide on a basic feel, the arrangement will turn out to be quite different from the original.

Pip Pyle, RIP

There are probably quite a few blogs this week bearing the above title. Let me (belatedly) join them.

For those that don't know, Pip Pyle was the drummer in "Hatfield and the North", a combo from the mid-70s - see my early blogs about Hatfield and "The Rotters Club".

Of the tributes which I've just read, maybe the best was from Jakko, who played with Pip in REM (not the famous one) in the early 80s. There is a recording of theirs circulating around the 'net which I downloaded months ago but have never heard. Maybe it's about time.

As the tributes make clear, Pip was more than just a drummer. He wrote very amusing lyrics for the Hatfields as well as contributing some ace tunes, all of which hint at the fact that "he was a character", as Jakko recalls.

Looks like there'll be a Pyle binge on the stereo this weekend.

Toothache and detectives

It's funny how things can turn around in a moment. This time last week I was feeling very sorry for myself, as I had a mysterious toothache which got worse and worse as the week wore on. The toothache was accompanied by general malaise, and I was getting fairly irritated by Thursday. Friday morning I woke up with a distinct lack of pain. I had arranged a visit to the dentist for the morning in an attempt to discover the source of the pain (I have a distant appointment for redoing root canal work on one tooth, so the pain wasn't too unexpected), but the dentist was unable to ascertain exactly where the pain had come from. Following the prime directive of doctors ("Above all, do no harm"), she elected not to do anything and wait for developments.

Anyway, after being in a terrible state on Thursday afternoon (forgetting all manner of things, including yoghurt in the fridge at work, and not filling my moped with petrol), Friday saw me as a different person, a new man. Isn't it wonderful when one isn't feeling pain and anguish.

Today two books which I had ordered arrived in the post, both written by Peter Robinson and in the DCI Banks series. One book was a collection of the first three Banks novels, and the other was the latest installment in the ongoing series. So far, I've only read the first book in the collection, "Gallows View". Judging by the amount of time which it took me to read the story, it's neither long nor deep. In fact, it's very much the first book in the series, and shows how much Robinson and his stories have improved and deepened over the years. The book introduces some of the characters which are still there, fourteen books on, and it's interesting to read how they started out, somewhat younger than how they are at the moment.

Whilst "Gallows View" is well-written, it's also lacking depth and length. Somehow I doubt that I would have been interested enough to carry on reading the series had this been the first Banks book that I read. For what it's worth, the first book which I did read was the tenth in the series, "In a dry season", which was very much a pivotal book in terms of both its plot and its characters. Since then I've been going both forwards and backwards in the series, and definitely prefer everything which has come after IADS to what had gone before.

I've also found a few mistakes in the books, something which has never happened before. When I pointed them out in emails to the author, he complained about his copy editors. As one of the mistakes required familiar knowledge with the series' back story, no off-the-shelf copy editor would have noticed; I'd be pleased to do the job for him.

Reading crime novels is only a comparatively recent trend for me; it probably started with the conjunction of two events - watching "Morse" on television, and the dearth of science fiction books which I liked. Whilst I bought most of the Morse canon, I was never too happy with the books. Apart from the similarity of some of them (Morse always got ill and frequently was hospitalised), I didn't like the patronising tone of the author. When I discovered Ian Rankin (by virtue of his mentioning Richard Thompson and Van der Graaf Generator songs in his books), I felt that I was much more at home with John Rebus. But after ten or twelve Rebus books, I realised that the crime part was taking second place to the social milieu of the stories; I wasn't complaining, but I did prefer that my detectives do a bit of detection instead of letting things happen to them. I should point out that Rebus' colleague, Siobhean Clarke, is a much better detective than Rebus is, and it will be interesting to see when Rankin takes the hint and phases Rebus out in favour of Clarke.

So it was somewhat fortuitous that I came across Peter Robinson and DCI Alan Banks.

Rare "Liege and Lief" outtakes

Someone turned up on the Sandy Denny mailing list a few days ago with a pointer to "rare L&L outtakes", such as this one ("Crazy Man Michael").

As I wrote there,

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Once I heard CMM, then I knew what I was listening to. These 'outtakes' were passed around several years ago, but as far as my ears can tell, they're not really outtakes, but rather early mixes of the final versions. For example, CMM is missing Richard's Leslie'd guitar but otherwise is the released version. I'm not too sure about "Farewell, farewell"; it sounds like a slightly different mix, but it does contain all the component parts of the version we know.

One interesting thing: the disc which I have runs a bit faster and Sandy's voice is a bit higher than the versions recently posted. Whilst this can be done digitally, I sorely doubt that anyone would actually do so. I think that someone had a reel-to-reel which was running a bit fast, and that this was the source of the disc which I have, whereas the versions which have just turned up came from someone with a reel-to-reel running at the correct speed.

I don't think that anyone is trying to impress us with long lost alternate takes; neither do I think that someone has created these with studio trickery. It's similar to many of the Beatles' bootlegs with alternate versions: they're simply the final versions missing one or more instruments which were overdubbed at the end.

It actually says a lot about Joe Boyd's production techniques: it sounds like he would record the whole band at once - including vocals - and then add on whatever instruments needed to be added, normally Richard. The 'genuine alternative' takes of 'Quiet Joys of Brotherhood' on the remastered L&L show that Sandy would be recorded along with everyone else. Check out Richard's playing on 'Million Dollar Bash': he contributes wonderful runs when everybody else is singing, but when it's his verse, he only plays a simple rhythm part.

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How I enjoy playing the part of the musical detective! I bought Joe Boyd's autobiography, "White Bicycles" some months ago, but refrained from commenting about it. I was quite disappointed by the book, as I expected to read more about Boyd's studio technique and what is was like working with Fairport/Sandy/Nick Drake. Instead I got to read more that I will ever want to read about the Incredible String Band. The early part (Boyd in America) was interesting, both in the information itself and its novelty to me, whereas the second half (Boyd in Britain) could have been better. I imagine that a fair number of people who bought the book were also looking for more information on the young Richard Thompson or Nick Drake than they actually received.

Graduation show

Exactly one calendar month after the Bar Mitzva show, it was the turn of the elder brothers and sisters to celebrate: last night, the high schoolers put on their traditional show to celebrate the graduation of yet another class. My daughter is one of the graduating youngsters.

The basis of the show is always the same: each child (sorry, young adult) in the graduating class is played/imitated by one of the high schoolers in a lower class (in other words, a 16-17 year old will play the part of the 18 year old); the plot is normally non-existent, but the text is full of jokes about the most obvious characteristics of the graduates. These characteristics are normally the more negative ones. Only the graduates themselves understand all of the jokes; we, as parents, might understand upto 75%, and the general audience's understanding varies on a scale of 0-50%. Oh yes, and there's always at least one dance scene which has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but enables all the high school children to participate.

Even though understanding the jokes may be limited, everybody enjoys themselves, and I do think that the technical level of these shows is improving yearly.

Each class spends a vast amount of time together, maybe not as much as a corresponding class would have done thirty or forty years ago, but more so than say my class at grammar school. What is a class? It's all the children that are born on the kibbutz during one calendar year. Last year's graduating class was 20, which is very large for Tzora; this year's class numbers 14, and next year's is about the same number. My son's class numbers 15, but this is the last of the big classes.

When a child enters first grade, he spends his afterschool hours in a clubroom. The way that things are organised here, the first three grades constitute one group and the second three grades constitute another group. Grade seven is the bar mitzva year, which of course is the crucible for forging a class's identity: they take a name for themselves (normally an animal - for example, my daughter's class is named "the owl group" and my son's "the deer group) and undergo many joint experiences. During the next few years after the bar mitzva, the group's identity tends to fade, although they have one joint activity a week. The group gets resurrected when some of them move out of their parents' houses and live in a communal setting at the beginning of eleventh grade, and to complete things, there is the trip to Poland, exams and the culminating graduation show.

These children have been together in one form or another since they were born, and of course the ties are very strong. A few years ago, they were even stronger, but adolescence does funny things to one's allegiances, and yesterday's friend can be today's stranger, or even enemy.

Unlike the rest of the graduating class, my daughter decided that the army is not for her. Unfortunately, the army was less decided about that, and so it took a vast amount of to-ing and fro-ing until she was able to get a release (a few days ago). Instead, she intends to do a year of national service (for example, volunteering in a hospital), but she has missed the deadline for this year's allocation, so she will be at a loose end for several months.

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On a completely different subject, I just checked the Bill Bruford DVD site, and all the copies have now been sold. That didn't take too long.

Fairport Convention presumably played a marathon set last night to close this year's "Fairport's Cropredy Convention". There have been virtually no postings of the FC mailing list the past few days, but no doubt from today onwards I will start to read how wonderful it was. I went to Cropredy five times, including a three year consecutive run (1996-1998); whilst I very much enjoyed those years, I didn't like my final year (2000) so much. My disenchantment is as much to do with my increasing distance from the current Fairport style as it is with the physical arrangements. Actually, it's probably much more to do with the music than anything else; if I were totally gung ho about 75% of the acts appearing, then I could put up with all the inconveniences, but as these days I would probably be interested in maybe 5% of the acts, it's clear that I have nothing to look for at the festival.

What surprises me is how much correspondents seem to enjoy themselves, even though they admit that they don't like some of the acts. Is it so much fun sitting in a field for three days and listening to not always good music? Eating peculiar food? Weather either too hot or too cold? Camping at night and being disturbed by all night sing-a-longs or motorcycle gangs? Maybe it's part of the British experience which I have long left behind.

Bruford live DVD from 1979

Wandering around the Internet (as one does), I discovered yesterday that Bill Bruford and his eponymous group from 1979 have a dvd of one of their concerts about to be released. More details are available here . The dvd will be signed by all the participants (Annette Peacock - vocals; Alan Holdsworth - guitar; Dave Stewart - keyboards; Jeff Berlin - bass; Bill Bruford - drums, percussion), and is limited to 500 copies. When I ordered my copy, there were 172 left; checking the page today, I see that only 53 copies are left, so obviously the word is getting around.

I bought their "Feels good to me" album whilst on a trip to Britain in 1982 and very much liked most of the album. The tracks which I didn't like so much are the speedy vibraphone tunes of Bruford, like "Beelzebub" and "Sample and hold"; naturally these are on the dvd. I preferred the slower, dreamier tracks which of course aren't necessarily good concert material. On most of my preferred tracks, Kenny Wheeler played flugelhorn, adding a lovely tone to an exciting base. Wheeler doesn't appear on the dvd, which is probably why the selection is what it is. Incidentally, anybody who wants a transcription of the metrically diverse "Either end of summer" can find it here, along with transcriptions of "Beelzebub" and "Hells Bells".

At the time, I was in mail contact with Dave Stewart, mainly because of his work with Hatfield and then National Health. Since his excellent "Spin" from 1991, he's completely disappeared off the radar, although he was involved with the "new" Hatfield disc from about two years ago which contained live performances from 1973/4. His website hasn't been updated for a long time, and I always wonder what such a talented musician and performer is doing these days to make a living. Hopefully it's not by giving piano lessons (not that this is such a bad thing, but Dave deserves more). It's almost certainly not from royalties.

I have just checked that site's visitors book, and people are still posting entries (the latest is from three days ago), saying how wonderful DS was and why has it been so long since "Spin". DS himself replies to one query (dated 7 April 2006), but limits himself to explaining a "C major 7 over D bass" chord (wouldn't that be an inversion of CMaj9? I like playing such a chord, but with the D on top, not at the bottom). It's fascinating reading that address book - plenty of people write and say how wonderful the music was from the 70s (I quite agree) - but not a peep from Dave himself.

Other than this, not much has been happening in my neck of the woods. It's still very hot and I come home very tired each day from work, even though I haven't necessarily been doing very much.

Eilat activities

We've been home for a few days now, which means that it's about time to update the blog with some of our Eilat activities. It was nearly impossible to write at the hotel; the few computers there were staked out by children early in the morning, and even when I did get the chance to use one, it was impossible to concentrate. Thus my use was mainly confined to seeing what would be broadcast on tv - including the 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

Hiding amongst the foliage

On Sunday, we went to the "Kings' City", an activities centre which apparently cost $70 million. The entrance fee went a long way to recovering this investment. The advance publicity had us understanding that caves had been dug deep under Eilat, and that in these caves the story of the bible was told. Well, as Robert Heinlein once wrote, the best way to lie is to tell the truth ... just not all of the truth. Yes, the exhibit did take place in caves dug under the city, but the story was told in several friezes, which ended abruptly with the building of the pyramids (in other words, not much of the bible).

Other than that, there was a "hall of mirrors" exhibit which was very entertaining (albeit crowded) and one about optical illusions (ditto) - although I may have confused them slightly. The trip normally ends with a boat ride apparently around more biblical exhibits followed by a fifty (sixty? forty?) foot drop; as I have problems with my inner ear and balance, I never go on such circus rides, so I can't say anything about it.

Interesting? Yes. Worth the money? Definitely not.

The next day my son and I went sea diving, not with a snorkel but real diving with air tanks strapped on our backs. The diving centre was about 200 metres from the hotel which of course made access easy. The famous coral reef of Eilat lies just across the road from the hotel and the diving centre, so after receiving instruction and crossing the road, we saw coral and multicolour fish immediately upon entering the water.

This is really two experiences at once: diving and observing the fish. The latter experience was spectacular, although we had seen a 3D film of coral reefs and fish the previous day at the Eilat IMax cinema so it wasn't unexpected. But really being there, watching the fish swim around one's head whilst kneeling on the sea floor is definitely something else. The diving, on the other hand, was definitely unusual and unexpected. I don't know how far down we went - the instructor said that we might go down to 6 metres below sea level - but my ears definitely popped on the way down. There wasn't an airtight seal on my mask because of my moustache, so water frequently trickled in. After maybe 20 minutes I was quite tired of the experience, and my mouth was exceedingly dry, so I was quite pleased when the instructor signalled that it was time to rise to the surface and be unflippered. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of us dressed for the sea.

On Tuesday afternoon we went on a trip to the Eilat hills, driven by a very competent guide in an open jeep. On the way we saw a certain amount of desert fauna and flora, each adapting to the very special conditions that exist (like rainfall once every six years, in which 700 mm rain could fall in two hours - that's about our average annual rainfall). The guide showed us a shrub which basically hibernates all the time until it senses that there is water, whereupon pods open and expose seeds. The guide put one seed on my son's finger and poured a few drops onto the seed. Within seconds, the seed sprouted and began to germinate! This has to be seen to be believed. Talk about making hay while the sun shines - this is one of the most extreme cases of adaptation that I have ever seen.

We ascended a hill which is 750 metres above sea level; from this spot one can see four different countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel - der). The guide might have said that this is the only place in the world from which four countries can be seen - anyone care to contradict him?

Desert animal enjoying the view

The trip ended by the guide taking wood from the jeep and making two fires; on one he boiled tea in a kettle, and on the other he baked pita bread which was then consumed with olive oil, zatar and cream cheese. This also has to be experienced to be believed!

This was definitely worth the money!