Hamilton Saint

Well, I had the dubious "pleasure" of attending the Swindon Town game on August 11 '09 during my trip to the UK last summer. I took a good friend (an Everton supporter) to the game and was rather embarrased by the ensuing debacle: not only we were served up a crap performance on the pitch, we were forced to stand for the entire match because the row in front of us insisted on standing. No fun - after walking around Oxford for the whole afternoon.

Even with two and three games in hand over other teams, the gap is just a bit too much. It's possible for us to go on an extended winning streak; but we would also need one of the play-off contenders to have an extended slump. The likelihood of both things happening is low. Ergo, unfortunately, it's a pipe dream.

Brian Eno has created, and contributed to, many great albums. His peak was the middle 70s. I loved Another Green World and Before and After Science. And his mid-70s "ambient music" LPs were excellent: e.g., Discreet Music, Music For Airports, Music For Films, On Land. He's also done great stuff with others (as musician and/or producer): Talking Heads, Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell. Highly recommended!

The original album was great (I have it on vinyl), but the remastered, re-released version is very different - inferior, IMHO.

I watched The Filth and The Fury last night. It's a documentary by Julien Temple that tells the story of The Sex Pistols. I've always had an intense ambivalence about this band. The film does an excellent job of mixing great live performances with informative historical material. The emergence of the band is set in the wider context of the social and political conditions in Britain in the 70s. Malcolm McLaren comes across as a manipulative exploiter, Sid Vicious is a troubled loser, and Johnny Rotten provides honest, thoughtful reflections on the band's short, tumultous career. "It's better to burn out, 'cause rust never sleeps ..."

We have a metal birdfeeder that is set on top of an iron pole. There is a conical baffle under the feeder that keeps the grey squirrels from climbing the pole to the feeder. It works perfectly. We stock our feeder with black-oil sunflower seeds. In the winter we normally get house sparrows, house finches, black-capped chickadees, northern juncos, cardinals, downy woodpeckers and red-breasted nuthatches. Our feeder has a brilliant counterweight system. You set it so that when birds over a particular weight land on the perch, a barrier comes down and blocks access to the feed holes. This is important because we have pigeons ('rock doves") in the neighbourhood. Without this safeguard, we would have a flock of about a dozen of them in our garden - and they'd clean out the feeder in a day or two.

My father was in the Royal Engineers. He assembled lorries in the Iraqi desert. From there they were driven to the Eastern front - used by our Soviet allies in their push west towards Germany.

Obvious choice is the play-offs. Getting out of this division is the most important goal of the near future. To do it this year would be great.

What annoys me most about this sort of writing is that every sentence must be its own paragraph - as though the reader could not possibly cope with the density of a paragraph that is, heavens above, several sentences long. Actually, the reverse is true; if you put together thematically related sentences into proper paragraphs, the text is easier to read and doesn't seem like a stream of random, unconnected thoughts.

Oh, OK - but you didn't make that clear in your original post.

Try this. http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/FixturesResults/0,,10280,00.html

What team does this Knee Jerk play for? Any good? Expensive?

Yes, the first LP is my favourite, too. I've been listening to them a lot this past week. There is a deep melancholy running through much of their material, so listening to the LPs - as Over The Hill wrote - has been very moving. Matapedia, for example, came out after the death of their mother, and several songs are responses to that.

Perfect!

Yes, that was sad news. The McGarrigle sisters were brilliant. I saw them play live several times; I loved their laid-back performance style - completely devoid of show-biz bs. I suppose their most well-known song was Heart Like a Wheel, recorded by Linda Ronstadt. That was one of Anna's. Perhaps Kate's most exquisite song was Talk To Me of Mendicino from their first, eponymous album. They were well-known within the English folk-rock tradition and occasionally provided balk-up vocals for the likes of Richard and Linda Thompson. Kate and Anna were not that prolific (about 10 albums over the course of their career), so there were often long gaps between recordings. But every album had its hidden gems. They harmonised so beautifully together - like so many musical siblings. Kate will be sorely missed. R.I.P.

COYR!

"Deliberately throw away".

Good summary.

I heard an interesting interview (via a BBC Radio 4 podcast) with Andy Serkis about the work he did playing Ian Dury in a new film biography called Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Is it out yet over in the UK? Here's a trailer for the film. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/southeastwales/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8456000/8456814.stm

We had already made our three substitutions.

Let's go, Saints!

By the way, as Peter Guralnik points out in his New York Times article (cited in my previous post), "Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history".

That quote was "attributed" to Elvis but there is no good evidence that he ever said it. When Elvis was confronted with questions about it, he denied he ever said it, or even anything like it. In a previous post in this thread I mentioned Peter Guralnik, who wrote a comprehensive, two-volume biography of Elvis: Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. These are not hagiographies; they are even-handed portraits - warts and all - about his "rise and fall". He probably spent 10-15 years working on these books. There is nothing in Elvis's history that even suggests that he was a racist. Here's an article that Guralnik wrote about this issue for the New York Times back in 2007, when it was in the news. http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/peter_guralnick_elvis_racist.shtml Here's another article about that infamous quote; it provides evidence to show why he could not have uttered it. It's by Rob Rabiee: http://www.elvisinfonet.com/spotlight_racist.html Speaking of quotes, here's what James Brown said about Elvis: "I wasn’t just a fan, I was his brother. Last time I saw Elvis alive was at Graceland. We sang ‘Old Blind Barnabus’ together, a gospel song. I love him and hope to see him in heaven. There’ll never be another like that soul brother." And Little Richard: "Elvis was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let Black music through. He opened the door for Black music." And Sammy Davis Jr.: "On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elvis eleven." And Jackie Wilson: “A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis.” I want to make it clear that I'm not a big Elvis fan. I like a lot of his earlier stuff (1954-56), as I wrote previously, but I think the comments about him being racist are unfair, unhistorical and pernicious

This is a lie. Elvis was not a racist. Do some homework and you'll see why.

Not the early stuff. The recordings he did with Sam Phillips at Sun Records in 1954 and 1955 were important fusions of country and R & B. Elvis had significant creative input into those recordings. His first year at RCA (1956) was also marked by a lot of good material. But the significance of Elvis as a musical figure was pretty much over once Elvis did his two-year stint in the army and then gave up complete control of his career to the odious Tom Parker. Like many great figures in music history, Elvis was a synthesizer rather than an innovator. A great book about Elvis' early career is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnik.