You are allowed to enjoy this…

About this time last year, I bought a Yamaha MT4X four-track tape recorder secondhand from eBay with the intention of transferring all my old recordings to the digital domain. Of course, other things distracted me from actually getting around to doing this, but the other night I thought I’d better get my house in order.
It was the early hours and I honestly thought I was having a heart attack and passing on. It was as if an invisible elephant was sitting on my chest and no matter what I did, I could not get relief. Thankfully, I worked through this strange incident and I am still here. It was probably just indigestion or trapped wind, but the cold sweats and the urge to defecate on the spot made my mortality even more tangible than usual – so I have set to work transferring all these old tapes onto my PC. The logic is that if I did suddenly die, the Missus wouldn’t have the first fucking clue on how to do any of this, so I’d better tidy up before I go.
So the last few evenings, after tales of Milly-Molly-Mandy and kisses goodnight to Verity, I have retreated to the mixing desk and having to relive every awful thing I’ve ever recorded. My goodness, I have recorded an awful lot of crap in my time. Unfortunately, washing out your ears doesn’t take away the pain of listening to my first early fumblings into recording.
Whereas other musicians have paid their dues by playing with other people and actually played gigs and practised, all my musical development has been committed to tape and hard disc. This is how I’ve paid my virtual dues – so I have to live with every shit idea, whereas proper musicians forget bad gigs and duff performances in a fug of booze and dubious white powder.
One of the first proper “songs” I ever recorded was something called “Electric God”. In those days, I was using four-track tape and bouncing down tracks, so it was really hard to edit stuff. Whereas now, editing music is a bit like blowing your nose. So my ideas in those days were usually presented “as is” with no way of editing out the bad bits (or maybe I just didn’t know how to) and then mixing down a stereo master to tape, rendering the dynamics to a pool of audio mush.
I’ve tinkered with this track and tarted up the audio somewhat. This isn’t very good – I’d only been messing around with guitar for a year or so, but my bass playing is solid. Always a better bass player. I’ll post both versions – the old 1992 master and the new tinkered version. The latter just sounds a bit fizzier.

I mean who wouldn’t want to dress up like Freddie Mercury for an entire day???

Of course, Carl Sagan is a personal hero of mine. The 80s TV series “Cosmos” left a deep impression on me when I viewed it as an eager, imaginative 10-year-old. I know that when God speaks to me, he speaks with the voice of Sagan. I mean, Kermit the Frog and Carl Sagan both share a similar vocal quality and this is probably another reason why I like Sagan so much.
Here’s a clever musical tribute I might have posted before:

And another by the same person:

Of course, the latter video illustrates that we are all related, every living thing on this planet shares a common ancestor, which is pretty mind-blowing. So when you kick the dog, you are kicking yourself. Then look up and see the stars, and the light that has travelled millions of years to your eyes, and you are both looking back in time and at your own origin. For we are all made of star stuff.
Have a great weekend thinking on that!

Of course, horoscopes are a load of balony. I know this because Carl Sagan told me. No, he did, via the wonderful TV show “Cosmos”.

However, I always read my horoscope to have a chuckle of how wrong it can be, but when a horoscope appears that chimes so much with your own life, it is hard not to ignore the truth contained within. Of course, it’s purely a subjective process, but today’s horoscope, courtesy of Russell Grant, hit me hard and gave me a lot to reflect upon:

“Unpaid debts are causing you trouble. If someone owes you money, it will be practically impossible to collect it. Be ready to cut ties and move on. Remaining friends with a deadbeat will only compound your problems. If you owe someone money, take steps to pay it back as quickly as possible, even if it means making financial sacrifices. After all, your creditor scrimped when you needed a loan. The sooner you fulfil this obligation, the happier you’ll be.”

That title made you look, didn’t it? No, no, dear reader. I am not going regale you with tales of my younger days as pornographer. Those stories are between me and my lawyer. But despite the headline being salacious, I have a story that fits it quite nicely.
In the thrusting, pumping world of newspaper delivery, one has to keep an eye on your customers. It is a sales technique based solely on trust, in that you give (and I really mean do “give”) them them the product and they pay some weeks later. It’s a bit like ordering a sofa from DFS and paying them when you felt like it.
However, some folks don’t like paying their bills. No, siree. They just disappear and ignore the fact that they owe you a some of money for product that’s been delivered. It’s worse than musicians whinging about illegal music downloading, it is a theft that actually happens!
Well being a studious and anal cunt, I keep lists of people who have defaulted – and believe me there have been many – and I am very careful to monitor addresses and names and numbers etc. Yesterday, a lady came in and wanted a newspaper delivery started. However, being a strictly “hands off” businessman these days, it wasn’t until I was doing the paperwork and maintaining our daily database of deliveries that I noticed the name.
This person had stuffed me for £50+ in 2008 – had basically ignored all the bills I sent her and then disappeared. But she hadn’t, she has just moved to another property in the village and two years later wanders in hoping that we might have forgotten. She got a letter this morning explaining exactly why I won’t start delivering to her (pay us the cash, buster!).
But it transpires that this person is a “semi-regular” customer and is well-known to my staff. So all the time this person has been coming into the shop, despite knowing that she owes us money. I cannot believe the brass neck of these people.
To bring this story back to its natural conclusion, this lady is a well-known porn star and has appeared in the usual rags as well as Playboy. But while she finds it no problem sharing her gynaecalogical details with the world and his wife, she cannot find it in her being to pay her debts.
Well that’s another story for the book.
(PS – If anyone wants her name, address, telephone number – it will cost you £50 – enough to clear her debt!)
(PPS – I was joking about the PS – I might be bad, but I am not evil.)
(PPPS – I think that title is going to sent the Googlebots into meltdown – I can imagine lots of traffic from men with their trousers around their ankles and one hand off the keyboard!)

I finally got around to writing the final bits of my script for “Melvin”. You could call it polishing a turd: I know I do. That’s it. It’s done. 100 pages of sparkling, fizzy shit. It didn’t quite turn out how I expected. It went darker than I wanted. I wanted light and fluffy and it went dark, too dark perhaps?
On reflection, I think I’ve just wasted my time. Ahhh well, nuffink new there, is there?

I know, I know – two entries in one day, but this one warrants it as it relates to a phonecall I took this afternoon. For reasons too complicated to go into, we decided to put our property on sale with a residential agent rather than a commercial agent to see if we could stir up some interest in a sale. The assessment of the property was good, but the valuer suggestion we drop our price so that it fell below the Stamp Duty bracket and would give us better leverage.
Well, we had an offer a while back but for whatever reasons it fell through. No big deal, there are plenty of fish in the sea, but the little turd I’m dealing with at the estate agents said to me at the end of the call back then that we should drop our price significantly to generate more interest. I politely said I wasn’t interested and terminated the call in a hurry.
Today, the little turd called again and began his gambit like this:
Mr X: Hi, it’s Mr X from the agency. How are you today?
Me: I’m fine thanks. Yourself?
Mr X: You’re not bored?
Me: No? Why would I be?
Mr X: I am, anyway…
So already the little shit had already put me in a slightly wary mood. There’s something I don’t trust about the guy and my instincts are usually right. So he says:
Mr X: What if I say I’ve got an offer of (insert stupidly low figure here)?
Me: I’d want £10k more than that
Mr X: So you’d be willing to accept (stupidy low figure + 10K)?
Me: No. I want more money than that.
You see, I’ve dealt with enough estate agents in the past to know that you set your price and if anyone is interested you negotiated downwards to a figure acceptable to both parties – not start at your absolutely minimum base figure because the only point from there is further down.
The little shit starts bending my ear about this that and the other and I tell him to stop talking, and to start doing his job and to bring people to my door who actually have the money, rather than the jokers who came along before who didn’t have their finance in place and took six fucking long weeks to realise that they are broke. But the turd keeps on jabbering about lowering my price and whatever bollocks justification he has.
Eventually, I tell him to stop talking to me in such a fashion otherwise I’ll take my business elsewhere. I mean this is the first time I’ve ever been brow-beaten by a fucking shitty little estate agent. The conversation ends along the lines of:
Mr X: Do you want my professional opinion?
Me: Not now…now let’s stop this conversation here while I can still be civil and polite to you and let’s leave it there.
Then I hung up on him. But the turd really tried my patience and I remember why I used to get chosen to field all the crank calls in one of my old jobs, because it seems I am very good at talking to complete fucking tools without swearing at them.
The jumped up little cunt…