Hurricane Ophelia vs. the Great Storm of 1987

It's 30 years since the Great Storm of 1987, which took place on the night of 15-16th October. It's uncanny that the first hurricane to reach Category 3 so far east is about to hit Ireland on the anniversary of the Great Storm.

I was living in a tower block in East London at the time and I remember the wind whipping up during the evening and the subsequent rather sickening and anxiety-producing *swaying* of the tower block as the wind hit it. Even so I managed to sleep and awoke in the morning to find every fence and billboard down and strewn across the streets. All over southern England, trees were down, including famous and ancient oaks such as six of the seven at Sevenoaks in Kent.  Specimens of rare and exotic trees in Kew Gardens were lost along with thousands of more prosaic town trees lining streets.  Gales reached 115 mph. It was not, however, a hurricane, as its formation didn't meet the criteria for such a thing.

I hadn't prepared for it, partly because the weathermen on the telly famously didn't warn us, and partly because you don't get hurricanes in the UK, so I had no idea wind could be so destructive.  Waking up to feel the astonishingly clean air (it had, after all, been completely refreshed over night) and see the devastation, I was taught a salutary lesson.

Now, exactly 30 years later, Storm Ophelia is about to make landfall in Ireland, and ready to go on over Northern Ireland, Scotland and Northern England. It will be weaker - a tropical storm rather than a hurrican - by the time it hits, but winds of 100 mph are expected. One hopes people have heeded the warnings because these things are destructive.

Housekeeping: All pictures on this blog now reinstated...

Well, every one I could find, anyway.

A couple months ago Photobucket decided overnight to charge $399 a year for hosting photographs for blogs and message boards. All pictures on affected sites disappeared and were replaced with an ugly black square demanding money to have the picture restored.  It would have been much better to simply have the pictures disappear, rather than have ransom demands appear all over the blog. The black squares didn't contain any useful information, like which Photobucket folder the original picture was in, for example. This meant that the only way to patch up the blog was to read every entry, decide which photo had been between which paragraph, find it in a sea of unsorted downloaded photos and replace the black square with the correct photograph.

I had about 1100 to find and replace over 1600 blog entries.  It's taken so long that if I'd paid myself minimum wage to work on it, I would have spent more than the $400. But that would only have solved the problem for a few months, before the next year's fees were due. I found all but 30 or 40.  In some of those posts I've left a note that the link died and there is no picture, and in some cases I deleted the post entirely.

Additionally, more than 500 YouTube links had broken in the past ten years, just due to the natural turnover on YouTube. I've found almost all of them on another uploader's channel and relinked. More than nine or ten years back, I didn't spend any time on this, so the very early posts on the blog have those empty video containers. If you come across one and you can't find a re-upped version, let me know in comments and I'll see what I can do.

I didn't check very many of the text hyperlinks. Where I had time, I fixed broken ones or linked to the Wayback Machine where I could. If I couldn't relink, I left a note. However, there are literally thousands of links that I didn't check. There's probably an app that will point them all out to me. If you know of an app, let me know.

In some cases where there's a sequence of pictures, I made an effort to put them in the right order but there may be errors. For example, I have a fairly long analysis of Jimmy Page's eyes in the movie The Song Remains The Same.  Thumbnails (not Jimmy's thumbnails, the pictorial ones) were linked to larger versions and to gifs or clips. I hadn't annotated any of them. I had to simplify those, and one hopes I got the right screen cap with the right description. If anything's unclear, once again, let me know in comments.

Another thing I found was that, over the years, I've written some thoroughly goofy stuff. The temptation to just delete them (especially some of the early ones which have had literally less than 20 views) was almost overwhelming but I just let them be. Just as retweets are not endorsements, my patching up a four-line post about some minor long-forgotten online battle is not an indication I'm still carrying that grudge.

Here's to the next 1600 and obstacle course of platform changes!

Cymatics - music visualization by Nigel Stanford

Cymatics - visualizing music using Chladni's figures, that standing wave pipe with the flames coming out of it whose name escapes me and the ever-fresh High Ball Stepper-ish Putting Stuff on Speaker Cones So It Leaps Up.

All accompanied by real music that sounds a bit like Jean Michel Jarre's famous Anodyne played in a Chicago House Style.



Won't catch me walking around a Tesla Coil in chain mail I can tell you that!

Josh Homme and Dean Fertita on Jools Holland

It's nice to see Dean Fertita become a star after his stint with the Dead Weather. To be honest I could do with more Dead Weather instead but them's the breaks.

This clip from Jools Holland is only available for 29 days from October 4th, 2017. It is, however, viewable internationally, unlike the show itself on iPlayer.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05hznkt

Men for the Debs' Delight

Growing up in England, I was always acutely aware of the class divide - that people from working class families in the north were not expected to make anything of themselves, and, in order to prove the point, were mostly not allowed to make anything of themselves.

I can well remember visiting the home of a college-mate boy from Beaconsfield, who told me afterwards, with little to no regret in his voice, "Mummy told me not the bring the girl with the awful accent to her house again." This wasn't Lord Beaconsfield's house, or Sir Baron Smugly of Beaconsfield's house, it was the house of the class that's normally called "middle" in England. (Though in the US it would be "upper".) I remember him once boasting that the house had "half an acre" which was admittedly more than my parents' council maisonette had, but wasn't exactly impressive landholder level. Nevertheless, they were better than me, and not only knew it but were happy to tell me so.

There was a time in the late sixties and early seventies when it seemed this sort of thing was dying out.  People with accents were allowed on the BBC, a few working class people got rich, entrepreneurs were encouraged, Mick Jagger hung out with posh birds and so forth. I held a semi-firm belief that a meritocracy might blossom. No such luck; though I don't live there anymore, the word I hear is that the Establishment is not only back in force, it never really went away. It just pretended for a while, until people like Boris Johnson could walk the streets safely.

This pictured Guardian article contains the passage: Peter [Townend, of Tatler] is widely credited as being the man who single-handedly kept the debutante “season” going for decades; he would suggest to parents that their daughters should be debs that year, and wouldn’t they like to host a party? I was what was called a “debs’ delight” – one of the men chosen by Peter to attend all these balls and dances.There would be two or three a week for the three months of the season, in London or at someone’s house in the country. All the men and girls were supposed to be available. It was a bit like the Young Conservatives used to be 20 years ago, a bit of a matchmaking thing.

The pictured event is from 1982, when Kitchen Sink writers and rock stars living in Cheyne Walk were a thing of the past.