Rummaging around in that singles box again. There are a few 2 Tone singles in there and I forgot that the Beat were actually on Go Feet! Towards the back I found this little tune.
Singles always used to have the song time length stamped on the label.
Guess what the digits are on this disc?
Yep
(3.00)
(Such as Radio KEXP from Seattle for example.)
Well, it seems that all broadcast call signs in the United States begin with either “K” or “W”. The “K” usually west of the Mississippi River and “W” usually east of it, which of course makes perfect sense. Also the W and K rule is not always followed geographically, which adds to the confusion. The only thing that you can guarantee is that any radio station with a call sign beginning in a K or W is from the USA.
I am even boring myself now! Back to Radio KEXP and the joy of the internet. It is great to be able to listen to any radio station you want – it opens up so many new tunes at the click of a button. I really enjoyed the atmosphere in Seattle when I went there – it has a buzzing music scene and it has some great record stores. Hence I was drawn to Radio KEXP – They have a wonderful back catalogue of live sessions. Any radio station that asks The Hold Steady back to play again gets my respect.
A while back I was musing about spending a fair amount of my youth in record shops in Bristol and visiting these places involved a 30 minute bus ride from home or a 5 minute walk from school at lunchtimes. The speed at which new music came to my attention was slow. You might hear a new track on the John Peel show on Radio 1 one evening, read the review in the NME within a week and keep on asking if the EP had arrived yet at Revolver Records on a daily basis for what seemed an age.
Put it this way it represented an unacceptable download time.
It could take weeks for the music to get to you, but although it was a slow process there was something satisfying about getting back on the bus with your latest find and reading the sleeve notes before getting the record home with a certain amount of anticipation and then spinning the record. It was just a pleasant experience to buy a record; the whole process was quite exciting in a way and far more tangible than the modern way of getting hold of new music.
Now at home you can listen to radio stations around the world via media streaming, or use some clever sites like lastfm, spotify or Pandora as was and find music that you like instantly and zone in on a new tune, download the track and immediately store and catalogue it.
However it is not really all that good in the hood. Here for example I liked this song a lot and told my mate Baz about it. In fact a lot of these live sessions for Radio KEXP were really good, it is good to see bands playing sessions like this but there is a catch.
Yes, the problem was that this track was already on my ipod as I had ripped the whole album off Baz, but was totally oblivious to the fact.
Indeed I have collected so much material on my ipod that it will literally take almost a week to listen to each track stored on that gizmo. I never knew that I had discovered a ‘new’ track that was already in my possession until Baz told me.
Now how daft is that?
And the song………………
Still need to work on some of these
Kurt Vonnegut Jnr was inducted as the first member of this exclusive club. Really he is not weird, just a very clever bloke on a singular wavelength.
Now we are faced with a decision as to what constitutes ‘weird’ and who should be the sane judge who points the accusing finger at the social outcast and hence concludes as to what constitutes as the correct character traits required to gain membership of this club.
Well Steve Meyer has no need to be put on any waiting list.
Follow the link by clicking on the Picture
is my bike hero #3.
I have never seen anything like the way in which he finished up the Champs Elysees to win the final stage of the Tour de France in 2010.
I was lucky enough to be in France when I saw this finish on TF1, the French equivalent of BBC1.
Now back in his homeland you could only see this amazing finish to the world’s biggest bike race if you had satellite television. In France he would be treated like a God, a true hero, as cycling is in the French psyche and is part of the national culture. Whereas he could walk into any public place in the UK and be pretty sure that nobody would recognise him. Even if he wore a t-shirt printed with the phrase “I am Mark Cavendish” he is hardly going to get mobbed.
In cycling terms this man is a one off, so much so that he dictates the way the event organisers plan the route and finishes of stages in the Tour de France. The Tour de France is the World’s greatest cycling competition has been forced to consider how to set out the course that the race takes, as if the race stage is a flat one with a straight finish, there is only going to be one winner.
You only have to watch the final 200m of this race and you can see that this man is head and shoulders above his peers, who themselves are at the pinnacle of their sport.
5 a- side was played at lunch in a sixth form/staff league, as well as after school on Fridays
There was an 11 a-side staff football team too that played other schools and the Year 12 & Year 13 teams. We used to play Year 11 at the end of the year only if they behaved themselves over the year. It was a good carrot to dangle in front of any meatheads that you taught that were in the Year 11 team – “behave yourself, or you won’t play in the Staff game”. The staff team had a bit of a reputation for being a bit ‘rough house’ and had difficulties at times in retaining fixtures against other staff teams in the Borough after some ding dongs with the opposition.
The team did about three weekend tours (in the school minibus) every year to play other schools around the country that we had contacts with – Bolton School for Boys/St Bedes Grammar Bradford was the big one. The nightclubs in both towns have to be seen to be believed. The team even had its own kit sponsored by Snickers. These shirts were supplied by the chocolate bar company after the school sold 50,000 units from its vending machines – the Healthy Schools programme was still to come!
The day before one tour away the bloke who normally played in nets on tour injured his hand. The only last minute replacement we could think of was the lad who played in goal for the sixth form team. He was in my Year 13 tutor group, so after an invite in Friday morning registration and the “what goes on tour…..” pledge he turned up next day with a note from his mum and was on the bus. He is in his 30’s now and still claims that was the best weekend of his life!
Another great sporting event was the renowned crazy golf tournament on the field which was organised by the PE department. You had to chip over benches, hack out of the long jump pit and lob the ball over hockey goals around an improvised course. Mr Old School himself, Matt Morse – a teacher that called girls by their Christian names and boys by their surnames, used to carry a 7 iron around along with a plastic carrier bag of 9 bottles of Beefeater G&T mixers. He would tee off and have a scoop on each hole. This was a man who had a set of optics bolted to his upright piano in his music practice room. He would regularly spike his tea with a shot of the good stuff from one of the bottles fixed in front of him whilst tinkling away on the piano as he accompanied a scratchy Year 7 violinist. A legend.
Form trips were all the rage then. I took some of my tutees ice skating, bowling and sailing, even down to Loftus Road to watch the football. I always had a form Christmas meal out when I had a sixth form tutor group. They were often more fun than the departmental meals out. Green forms had only just started to come in then and risk assessments were unheard of. One Year 13 tutor group night out bowling ended in Zenith’s nightclub in Park Royal and I only had two kids in registration the next day!
This stuff used to be banned. One reason in particular was that the organic solvent used to thin down the correction fluid was abused by kids. The situation got quite bad for a while where students would put a few drops of the solvent on their blazer sleeve and sit and sniff it during assemblies. It became the latest craze. One could argue that the assemblies were so bad that the kids got driven to solvent abuse in order to get through them. It is ironic that these days we bang on at kids to wear their blazers in assemblies, whilst then the students were told not to wear them for fear that they would be “on the sniff”.
Teacher Vices
Staff smoked in the staff room when I first started. When the smoking legislation came in and things tightened up my erstwhile mentor (Richard Michaels) would have a snout in my lab under the fume cupboard hood, whilst sat on a student stool. This saved the hassle of trapsing off to the smoking room.
Staff went to the pub at lunch. Some went every day – no joke! It was the norm for these teachers to have a liquid lunch. Mind you, lunch was an hour long break then, not these modern 40 minute “lunch hours”. In fact the local boozer used to take the TES on a Friday along with the regular order of tabloids for customers to read, as so many of us went down there on that day.
There was also an elite drinking fraternity, which was an off-shoot of the tea-club (see previous posts). “The 335 club” was as the name suggested based on a time of day when members had to be in the Black Bull by. This was the only rule of the 335 club. The “Bull” suffered at least one suspicious fire and had its windows shot out by one disgruntled patron. It has now become run down, but is still being used as a film set!
Back to the booze……..We used to knock back a wine box at every Science Department meeting, regular. The booze and nibbles were supplied by our HOD, who would always bring a decent red and high end bar snacks. Wine was also served with a hot meal on all INSET days and some of the hard core drinkers would regard it as a personal challenge to make sure the wine was all consumed before going back to their work, even if it meant minesweeping the unfinished bottles from other tables.
Smoking Room
When I first started teaching the smoking regulations had yet to be introduced and staff were allowed to smoke in the staff room. Members of the tea-club would not think twice about smoking in the workshop where the club members met. When smoking in the workplace became more restricted a smoking room was set up. This room changed location over the years. It eventually ended up being put in the office space between two mobile class rooms. This mobile hut sat in one of the school carparks detached from the rest of the school. The smokers were a tight bunch who always made the room as homely as possible. It had a TV, fridge and microwave and some comfy chairs to sit in.
One day a Year 11 class was waiting for a cover teacher to turn up for their lesson in one of the classrooms next to the smoking room. The teacher had not arrived and the hut was empty so the class let themselves in. After 10 minutes or so an impromptu game of football broke out amongst some of the lads who were clearly getting bored. Things got more organised, chairs and desks were cleared and the boys started playing “headers and volleys” using the whiteboard as the goal. One stray shot got belted too hard and it burst a hole in the flimsy plywood wall between the smoking room and the classroom. A head got poked in by a student to investigate, the hole was made bigger and a lad shoved through to open up. By the time a teacher eventually got there the tea had been brewed, the fridge had been raided and the fags had been smoked!
Surf’s up Dude…..
BASE jumping looks so slow and calm……
Watch the video and towards the end there is a clip where the long haired lout has a jump off what is essentially the top of a mountain. At 2:36 on the video if you look carefully you can see a road on the left hand side of the shot.
What has this got to do with the price of fish? I hear you ask. Watch the last video and you will see why!
Till you see this…
The video has three jumps on it and on the third clip has a little boy in shot. Watch that little lad’s reaction….
Hmmmm. Rap or Hip Hop label it as you will, it is still a bit of a marmite jobbie really. You either love or hate it.
Now I have a few bits and bobs of hip hop on my ipod and it has its merits. However there is a point somewhere that even I draw the line.
Portuguese it goes ok:
French is sort of soothing and I love MC Solaar…..
But in German? Nope. It just does not go.
When I first started teaching SATS had not been invented, whiteboards (the ones with dry wipe markers) were considered to be truly cutting edge and nearly everybody still had blackboards. There was an art to writing with chalk, you used to get a callous on the tip of your index finger from writing with it – your fingertip used to hurt at the start of term, but hardened up in time. Also the dust chalk made was murder, it got everywhere.
Reporting
This is a direct quote from the company that has spawned the favourite friend of all teachers these days – SIMS. But what are they on about and what have we come to? Equally are there two words in that statement that could be removed and all of a sudden it makes so much more sense!
It is all about SIMS these days, but back in the day reports were hand written once a year by subject teachers on carbon paper, no crossings out or tippex corrections were allowed; statement banks and ctrl C ctrl V were things of the future. The reports themselves were really short – not even A5 in size. The form tutor report was shared with the Head teacher’s comments on the last page.
Yes – he wrote a brief report by hand on every kid in the school after reading all of the subject report pages and checking them for errors. He actually read all of the reports over a weekend and flagged up any errors that he found. This was incentive in itself not to stuff up. I used to sweat bullets writing the form tutor report, as if you buggered it up after the Head had done his bit, you would have to go to his office, cap in hand, and ask for him to write it out again.
The Head always used to teach a foundation English GCSE class and follow them through the two year course. No quibbling, nor favour asked for, the Boss got what he was given when groups were allocated. He rarely missed a class for a “meeting” – just chalked and talked and got the kids through their exams. Old school!
Next goal wins laaaaaaads! 