So What

I've been working from home and when I'm not being distracted by "Spooks" boxsets and eating, I'm usually listening to Radio 4 rather than watching daytime TV.

Which is why I got to listen to the series "Soul Music" which collects together testimony from fans about how a particular piece of music "changed their life". Yes, it was a bit corny, but that didn't matter - today's piece was "So what" by Miles Davis.

The piece is half a century old now, and by all rights it should be Grandad Music, fit only to be played on TV drama soundtracks. It's also Jazz, which means it occupies a filing cabinet that is widely mistaken for a urinal these days.

(( Insert the usual Stan ravings here during which Stan will beg you to spend a tiny amount of your life listening to the piece that's got him excited. He's even likely to provide a link to YouTube to make it really easy for you. Stan will go on to deny he is a Jazzer, despite having posted on Humphrey Lyttleton and Nina Simone recently. He'll then change the subject to avoid alienating his long-suffering readership. ))

If Jazz isn't your thing, you might at least check out Elbow - one of the few worthy winners of the Mercury prize in recent memory. I saw them on "Later ... with Jools Holland" here and they blew the walls down. Big, noisy, daft Rock from some big, noisy, daft lads from Bury, Lancashire.

Stan Writes

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to all my readers for the lack of words lately. The fact is that I've started novel writing again and it tends to swallow spare time, motivation and, more relevantly, every spare well-turned phrase that passes through my head.

I've failed at this before, but this time will be totally different. Last time I shut out the world, climbed into my head and had a totally miserable time. This time I'm going to talk to people, try bits out and generally try to enjoy the experience.

The plot so far :-

"Hailey is a lady having a thoroughly miserable time. Her boyfriend dumped her for a lap-dancer, her accountant decamped to Peru and her grandfather died aged 95 while trying to goose his nurse.

It also turns out that Grandfather was totally broke when he died, so all she gets in his will is his dilapidated Tudor hall (complete with all-too-modern debts) and a decent bottle of whisky that he had managed to hide from the bailiffs.

Spending the night alone at the Hall, she wakes up in the morning with a half-empty bottle of whisky, a bad head and sees Gladys, the Sarcastic Ghost smiling sweetly at her across the table.

Hailey's mission is to restore the hall to a glory it never had, inventing a history for it that would attract legions of American tourists. This puts her in conflict with the dishy history-geek who runs the highly successful neighbouring Hall.

Will fighting turn to love ? What's it like to live with a ghost ? And is there another way of selling Historic Britain without resorting to scones, rose gardens and gift shops?"

Do let me know what you think. I'm certainly keen to see What-Happens-Next; it would be nice to know I'm not the only one.

Pour Encourager Les Autres

If your laptop is misbehaving - show this picture to it and say "Stop that, or I'll get Stan round to rip your screen off".

This is a previous laptop of mine which I dropped, busting up the screen. I've used it on my home network for a while to play around with Linux, but I didn't do anything about the screen, which lit up with an abstract tessellation of jagged shapes.

Yesterday I was running a huge fever from a bout of man-flu. I had a sudden crazy desire to remove the screen - after all, it was just wasting power lighting up a screen that wasn't being used. Sweat was dripping off me as my shaking hands levered up the keyboard cover, unscrewed the monitor retaining screws, removed the screen and relocated the bits-and-bobs that were attached to it. I felt like Doctor Frankenstein creating a monster.

So now I have a headless laptop that has been very well behaved. As have all the other electrical appliances in my house. I think they're scared that the same will happen to them : either that or they're plotting silent revenge for mutilating their comrade.

Ambient Kitchen

So what does Stan do when the girls are in the front room indulging in "Strictly Come Dancing" ?

Well, tonight he's at the kitchen table, drinking beer and listening to ambient music on Magnatunes while trying to brush up on his PHP and Perl programming.

My laptop now has a choice of Windoze XP and Linux Fedora 9, and I've got to say I'm spending increasingly more time in Linux. One of the main reasons I hadn't moved over before was that previous versions of Fedora didn't recognise my wi-fi card - Fedora 9 worked straight out of the box. Another reason was that Yahoo Music doesn't work with Firefox, but I've now found Magnatunes, so that's less of an issue.

The thing about the Magnatunes site is that they don't work with the major labels - it's a very direct way for independent musicians to get their music heard (and potentially sold). This is fine by me - if I wanted to listen to the current top 100, I'd put on some commercial radio station - personally I'd rather listen to something a bit off-centre - something that might actually surprise me.

Like "Requiem" by Robert Rich from the "Below Zero" album, which is described as "consisting of turbulent organic atmospheres". I don't know about that, but is very much worth a listen. He sounds an interesting guy - according to Wikipedia :-

At an early age he thought he disliked music. However, at age 11 or 12, he began growing succulents as a hobby. He would leave a radio tuned to static at a low volume for his plants. This experience influenced his interest in avant-garde and minimal composition....

... He began building his own synthesizer in 1976, when he was 13 years old ...

... around this time, he attended Stanford University. During his tenure there, Rich became well-known in the San Francisco Bay area for giving live night-time performances for somnolent or sleeping audiences. These were experiments to influence REM cycle sleep with auditory stimulus. They were usually nine hours long and lasted from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.. During these performances, he would generate abstract drones and atmospheres while the audience dozed in sleeping bags that they brought themselves. In the morning he would end the concert with piano solos. He would then serve tea to the audience.

You really couldn't make that stuff up !

Anyway, much more fun than reality celebrity dance contests - and perfect music to drink beer and cut code to.

You can listen to the whole album for free here - and if you think it sucks, then you've lost nothing.

Fuld's Gold

There are many appealing aspects to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The sight of braying City Boys on the pavement with their potplants and putters for one. For those of us with a pinko-commie-fag-subversive leaning, it would seem that justice is being finally done.

However, there is this guy called Richard S. Fuld Jr.

Let's call him" Dick".

Dick has been CEO of Lehman Brothers since it was spun-off from Amex in 1994. Dick has had a bad year - the value of his options have dropped by some $900 million since the stock peaked last year. However, it hasn't been all bad - he has "earned" (in the loosest possible sense) $466m during his CEO tenure, including a bonus of $22m in 2007. Also, in the (very likely) event that he'll be asked to leave by the new owners, he will be due a $64m leaving package.

Dick didn't see that his company balance sheet was shot to pieces due to the effect of toxic real estate loans. He twice turned down offers of a lifebelt, first from the Koreans, then from the Chinese. Either one of these deals would have refinanced the company and saved tens of thousands of jobs.

While his company has been in meltdown this week, he has reportedly been holed-up in his plush office suite saying nothing while his underlings have tried to save the company. Presumably he's been hiding under his desk, counting his money, crying and calling for his mummy.

He has finally surfaced, and is due to appear in Washington in front of Congress to

“examine the regulatory mistakes and financial excesses that led to the bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers,” and “explore the impacts of the bankruptcy on financial markets and the United States economy."

Dick will no doubt blame "short sellers" (as did the Bear Stearns guy before him) and then head off for a very comfortable retirement - he has after all done nothing illegal, and "stupidity" is unlikely to be a valid reason for his new bosses to kick him out of his job without a bean.

Tell me where the justice is in this case ? To me it's another indictment of Free Market theory where the assumption is that "Market Forces" will reward the good and punish the bad.

Buy shares in any company selling Red Tape - governments will soon be putting in panic bulk orders to help regulate their unregulated markets to avoid this happening again.

Oh, and vote Stan.