Went for a traipse round town this morning with a few errands to run; shoes, DAT tapes and compressed air all bought and paid for. Then popped into a big bookshop with a good record section, and was astounded by a neat piece of technology. Headphones with bar code scanners. So you slide the CD you want to hear under the scanner, and it plays you 30" snatches of each track. Very neat. We are now almost back to the good old days when a single cost 6/8 and an LP 32/6 and I cut my retail teeth at Hampstead Record Centre with the wonderful Dave Brodie. The hours I spent in the booth there, lined with holey hardboard and reeking of Embassies and No. 6. ¹

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Luigi -- who is presumably thinking a lot about career changes -- is taking pointers from a most unusual source. No. 99 is particularly sweet, and will doubtless form the basis for a PhD thesis in the not too distant future.

And then there’s this spooky cartoon from chez Pim, who blogs about f...

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fimoculous has three absolute gems this morning, to whit:

• Sexually active popes.
• Radio David Byrne.
• Things that make no sense.

Somehow I can't quite bring myself to work Stop Making Sense into this post.

24 March 2018: I wonder if those are still there. I didn't save the permalink...

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Sent by ongoing, I discover I may be the last person in the world to stumble into the Whiskey Bar. An excellent read.

But after a point, blogging without writing gets to be like the electronic equivalent of street miming, and we all know how lame and annoying street mimes can get.

That m...

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A story on BBC News caught my eye for two reasons. "The veterinary drug blamed for killing South Asia's vultures has been banned by the Indian government" said the headline. The drug was diclofenac, described as "a livestock painkiller".

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