WordPress has a little stats doohickey which shows me what people have searched for to find this blog. It’s always interesting to see how people have stumbled across my little oasis of inconsequence. And today…

Um. Goodness. I can only imagine that was one disappointed browser.

A lesson for us all.

My favourite Pink Floyd song. And this performance is just… very emotional. There’s something about four old fellers, guitar, bass, keyboard and drums, ditching the backing singers, percussionists, saxophones and synthesisers, putting aside a lifetime’s worth of animosity*, and just playing the damned song. It was for a good cause, but you know, the music is cause enough sometimes.

It’s a song whose spirit transcends the actual lyrics, I think. I’ve never traded my heroes for ghosts, but it still feels like it’s for me and about me. That’s a kind of musical alchemy.

I was crying when I watched it on the telly in 2005, and… yeah. Wish you were here.

*although I do like to imagine the conversation when Roger decided he wanted to sing a verse: “but Roger, you… you know, you can’t really, uh, it’s maybe more suited to somebody who can, um… sing?” Can’t blame him though.

From The Armando Iannucci Shows, the oddly dreamlike sketch show, written and fronted by the small, hairy mastermind behind The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick of It.

The programme is a mix of sketches and monologues. It’s frequently surreal, but the show sets a tone in which everything has its own logic. It meanders along, and you get caught up in the slow-pulsing rhythm of it as much as anything else. The result is much like slowly drifting into somebody else’s anxious, paranoid daydream. But in a good way.

That’s Hale and Pace working in a shoe shop at the end, by the way. Of course it is.

Because it wouldn’t be Christmas without it. “I am playing all the right notes…”

1899: Thanks to limited diet and inadequate sanitary conditions, diseases were more virulent in Victorian times. They were also taller and had haircuts and shoes. Here we see a cluster of the highly contagious, and often lethal, smallpox virus trying to look innocent in a corner.

More Historicals.

So this is how I want my 2010 to look. How’s yours shaping up?

Mee mee mee mee mee. Meeeeee mee meee meee mee. Mee mee.

A proposed series of experiments designed to test the scientific validity of Britain’s songwriters.

Experiment 1.

THE HYPOTHESIS
That the lyric “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” is not only coke-addled, cod-psychedelic whimsy of the very worst kind, and so irritating that I’m still furious about it 14 years after I first heard it, but that it’s also unworkable in a universe of Newtonian physics.

MATERIALS
Noel Gallagher, 1 Cannon, 1 Cannonball.

METHOD
We set Noel Gallagher walking down a hall as slowly as he likes. We load the cannon with gunpowder and a cannonball. We aim the cannon at Noel Gallagher. We fire the cannon.

PROBABLE RESULTS
General fun and merriment at the very least.

CONCLUSION
Somebody really needs to fund this experiment, in the interests of expanding human knowledge, and in the interests of expanding Noel Gallagher’s surface area all over a corridor. Come on!

FOLLOW-UP EXPERIMENT:

HYPOTHESIS: “You and I are gonna live forever.” MATERIALS: Liam Gallagher, 1 Cannon, 1 Cannonball.

ps this was my 200th post. Glad I used it for something worthwhile.

Revenge. From the album of the year, Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch.