someone who's doing some things
In some ways I just can’t believe that The The have been around for 40 years. It’s strange, it’s bizarre, but it’s true.
Their music has been an important part of my life for a long time. Perhaps not 40 years, but probably for most of that. The most important album from my perspective being ‘Soul Mining’. I still listen to parts of that quite regularly.
I’m looking forward to new stuff from The The and hopefully some re-releases as well.
I updated my Blake’s 7 library after Christmas as Big Finish was having a sale on a range of titles. One that I bought was the Liberator Chronicles 8. As a collection of four stories it was fine. Nothing bad in there, nothing amazing. That is until the last story in the collection. The last story in this collection is called ‘Spoils’.
I’m not going to spoil the story in case you plan to listen to it, but, I have to say it was probably one of the most interesting and unusual stories in the Blake’s 7 range I’ve ever heard.
I’ll leave it there. If you do listen to it, I think you’ll be surprised.
Over Christmas I watched all of the Planet of the Apes movies again. To be clear it was the new movies and not the originals.
They are amazing films, and, as you progress through the trilogy, they just get better and better. With ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ being a true masterpiece.
I’m just hopeful that it doesn’t end there. There’s so much potential to take the series further and explore what happens next. Of course the original films start at a different point and move over a very long period of time.
In effect any new series could pick up where the original series started. That is of course just one possibility. The big question is what will happen with the astronauts who left the earth in the first of the new trilogy. That question was left open throughout the series.
However you look at it, there are countless ways the series could continue. I just hope that it does.
I visited the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum at the beginning of December last year. I’d never been before, but I do love to visit museums of this kind. Whilst for the most part it was largely concerned with traditional instruments, it did have a little corner tucked away for electronic instruments, and that was nice. Not huge by any means, but nice.
Overall it was a fun place to visit, although, unlike some similar museums, I probably wouldn’t go again.
Like I say, I’m not a massive fan of the 7th Doctor. Not of the TV show or indeed the audiobooks. However, I do like the 4th Doctor story “Robots of Death”, and some (but certainly not all) the spin off stories from it. The most recent of these was Sons of Kaldor. That was an excellent story and I really enjoyed it, and actually, it was where I found out about this one.
The worst was a BBC story called “Corpse Marker“, which simply didn’t deliver at all and was a real disappointment. This story wasn’t bad at all. Not the best, not the worst by any means.
So it seems that PocketCHIP, and CHIP has gone. What a shame! I still have mine, and I’ll be holding on to it for a while now as it seems that there will be no more of this nice little device.
Their site is gone. Their twitter appears to be abandoned too. It’s a shame.
I’ve been a fan of the Mute Synth from Dirty Electronics since the very first one. I’ve got 3 now, Mute Synth 1, Mute Synth 2.0, and now the 4.0. It’s certainly the most complex of the Mute range, and, after a very brief play I think it has some very interesting possibilities.
I’m also interested to see how it can work with Mute Synth 2.0. Hopefully I’ll get to experiment with that in the not too distant future.
I backed this device on Kickstarter a long time ago, I mean a really long time ago. It was really late, and, to be honest, I’d wondered if it would ever arrive, but it did, and here it is.
But it’s here, and it works. It is actually better sounding than I expected it be. The keys are actually velocity sensitive and the touch screen is huge. I’m still getting to grips with it, and I think that’ll probably take me some time.
In some ways it reminds me of an updated Yamaha QY type device, which is, in my opinion quite a good thing. The other really interesting thing about the KDJ-One is that it has a whole bunch of apps that go with it. There’s a macOS app, an iOS app, and an Android app too. So far I haven’t found a way to get everything working together, but that’s on my personal roadmap.
A couple of weeks before Christmas I picked up the entire Carry On movies collection for just £5. That’s 30 movies on DVD. Not a bad deal I thought. I bought it at a bric-a-brac stall at a local Christmas Tree Festival, so I felt I’d done a little for the community and got a bargain into the bag.
I’ve always like a few of the Carry On movies, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them all. However, I decided that now was the time to watch the entire collection in order.
It’s been fun and difficult at the same time. The early movies are much more like Ealing comedies, and it took a while for signature Carry On style to emerge. Some of those early movies are my favourites, especially “Carry On Cabby”, which has to be my all time favourite. It wasn’t originally supposed to be called “Carry On Cabby”, in fact its original title was “Call me a cab”, which you can clearly hear in the title music. For me it is by far the best.
As you progress through the movies chronologically the style develops and, sadly, the quality drops off. I knew this when I started, but, for £5 it seemed like an interesting experiment.
But there are a few greats in my opinion. “Carry on up the Khyber” for instance. That is still one of my favourites. There are others too, but that one, along with Cabby really stand out for me.
The box set doesn’t include the reboot “Carry on Columbus”, which was pretty poor in my opinion. There was a plan to restart around 10 years ago, but this never came to anything, and I think that’s probably a blessing too.
I am Ashley Elsdon 