The survey is being run by My Voice for Channel 4 Radio. The hyperlink in the publicity email that led me there does contain a long string of letters and digits, but since that was three lines long and no longer worked as a hyperlink, I used the alternative link. Maybe the identifier is in the unclickable link. Time to go cook supper then.

Go add a comment to Hanan Levin’s Grow A Brain – he’s aiming for 500 on this post and a commenter will be picked at random to win $100. Oh yes indeedy. Think how many plastic ducks that’ll buy! What on earth do you want rubber ducks for Daisy? Ah well, there be points. And what do points make? Prizes!

I’ve 318 rivals to the spondoolies to date but I just know I’m going to win that c-note, duck karma will intervene. Quack, quack.

Wait… let’s be certain that this is a real $100 bill we’re talking about and not a candy bar? Ah well, I could always dig out that dollar bill I have somewhere and try making a shirt.

While there I spotted a few juicy links. First up: if you enjoyed Mike’s recent YouTube nostalgia trip then you’ll definitely enjoy Vidéo Nostalgie pointing us to mostly French language YouTube clips such as Sylvie Vartin’s lovely ballad, Deux Mains (those dancers in the background might make this link NSFW). There are lots of archives too so I’ve bookmarked this one for the weekend.

I’d be paging Nancy in aisle 11 for that last one but she’s off to the beach. Harrumph. Oh well, you could instead read her excellent article at Flagpole on the wealth of Arabic words now in the English language:

Tabby (a striped cat) is from Arabic “’attabiya,” a striped silk cloth, originally manufactured in the ‘Attayib neighborhood of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, filed under the Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back? category, it’s official, Welsh accents are musical.

Take two students, one chalkboard and silly half hour and you get Dibujos animados en la pizzada. It’s in Spanish but you won’t need to speak a word to see the humour.

I’m off to get a sweater, the temperature plummeted overnight (hooray!) but is forecast to rise sharply again in the next few days and throughout August (boo!) so I’m going to enjoy the chill while it lasts.

But I’ve had a shower, slathered on some antisceptic cream and they’re just quietly throbbing. And I feel like such a crybaby.

So let’s move on to something I installed earlier, Roel Muerder’s WordPress plugin, WP-SingleMP3 for Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Single MP3 player.

Pete Seeger singing Little Boxes:

Now this is the hilarious Liverpool radio clip posted earlier this year. Either hamsters have invaded the studio or something’s happened to the playback speed… Is it something to do with compression of the original file? Enquiring minds wish to know. But not just yet. Let’s enjoy the hamsters.

* Finding that picture led me to the Humungu Tongue. Yes I will be searching for them in the UK and yes I will take pictures when found.

Louis Amrmstrong and Doris Day / Summertime [MP3, 4.5 mb].

Papa Wemba / Awa Y’ Okeyi (If You Go Away) [MP3, 1.7 mb].

Meanwhile, Troubled Diva has a brilliant collection of music videos from YouTube, everything from The Osmonds to The Sweet through to Leonard Cohen. Oh and this track from Claude François, Petite mèche de cheveux. I sent it to my 12 year old niece via msn last night and got lots of appreciative LOLs and ROFLs in return. Enjoy.

[Afterthought: She wouldn't believe my version of how he died until she read it on Wikipedia. I think I might have told one tall tale too many to that child.]

The 8 discs

Hallelujah, John Cale
Pearl’s a Singer, Elkie Brooks
Town Called Malice, The Jam
I heard it through the grapevine, Marvin Gaye
Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds
You are my sunshine, Elizabeth Mitchell and Daniel Littleton
Brezairola, Barbra Streisand
The Blower’s Daughter, Damien Rice

The 1 disc

I heard it through the grapevine, Marvin Gaye

The book

I’m not particularly struck on having the bible there waiting for me but you’re not allowed to swap. Still, the Complete Works of Shakespeare should be the ideal opportunity to study the bard at length so I think I’d request a scholarly but accessible critique of his work… or maybe Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches : An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age?

Nah! I’d take the collected works of Nevil Shute. Wait! No, make that George Orwell. And it must include A Clergyman’s Daughter. [Although the Schama book is excellent and highly recommended.]

The luxury

An iron and ironing board. I kid! No, I think I’d have to be fairly boring and plump for a large set of lovely, unopened Moleskin notebooks, lined and unlined, plus a wooden box of all sorts of pens and pencils, coloured inks. Oh hell, can I just have the contents of Brighton’s Pen to Paper tucked away in my cave? Thank ye kindly.

[BBC Radio 4's] Desert Island Discs’s antiquity is such that its first castaway, in 1942, was a Viennese comedian who had fought alongside his fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler in the first world war. Despite that uneasy conjunction — delicate in a country that at the time was fighting Hitler — the programme’s creator Roy Plomley was unperturbed.

He conversed in a bomb-damaged Maida Vale studio with the comedian Vic Oliver in the cosy and above all collaborative manner that became his hallmark for the next four decades, during which he sent Princess Margaret and 1,700 others off to his mythical isle and made it a national institution.

But I was intrigued to read the following:

Because Plomley was a freelance, Desert Island Discs became his copyright. After his death in 1985 it went to his wife, Diana Wong. She still owns it but is now in her eighties and their daughter, Almond, acts for her.

Mother and daughter and the BBC agree on the need to have Plomley mentioned in the credits and the corporation pays Diana an annual sum (£5,000 in 1996, so probably more now). However, the family and the BBC cannot agree on the availability of the show after its weekly broadcast. This is why it is not available to listen to via the BBC’s website. Anybody hoping for that is greeted with this terse message: “For rights reasons, Desert Island Discs is not available as a listen again item.”

I’d always assumed that the programme was not available for repeat because of the prohibitive cost of royalities to the artists of the 8 chosen tracks. How wrong I was. But I’m sure that this has been discussed on the BBC’s Feedback programme too? Well anyway.

Now it’s your turn

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to choose:

• Your 8 desert island discs.
• Your chosen book. The Bible [or The Koran or your religious text of choice] and the Complete Works of Shakespeare is waiting for you on the island.
• Your one luxury item [which must be "inanimate and have no practical use"].

Tip of the day: If you’re looking for inspiration on the luxury item it might interest you to know that Norman Mailer wanted marijuana, Oliver Reed wanted a blow-up woman and Princess Michael of Kent wanted a cat. George Clooney chose War and Peace (Zzzzzz) and an anchored yacht. I bet women across the country were swooning in delight at the thought of being anchored along with George when that programme was broadcast…

As for book choices, Engelbert Humperdinck requested one of his own recordings and his autobiography, What’s in a Name?. Egomaniacs are us. Ah no, that title should perhaps go to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, infamous for selecting 7 of her own recordings.

Postscript

The iPodically challenged amongst us will cheer at not being discriminated against for not owning one of these new-fangled magic music boxes required by the latest meme :-)

Continuing with the photography theme, here’s an idea stolen borrowed from MetaChat – you choose the best and the worst picture you’ve ever taken, upload them to your Flickr pages, website, etc. and we get to ooh, aah and admire then laugh at your efforts. Sound like a good idea? Over to you then. Leave a comment with a link if you’re not too chicken :-)

I’m digging deep (not too deep, hah! so many to chose from) for the worst picture category but my best picture is up on the wall, is from pre digital days and since the scanner decided to stop working and his lordship’s not home yet for me to take a picture of the picture with his camera you’ll have to take it on trust that it’s a reallly good picture. No, really!

Meme #2

All Nancy’s fault – the link I posted to the Adidas video reminded her of a video from her youth which in turn reminded me that I searched YouTube yesterday for Elkie Brooks and the one result that comes up is the lovely Video for the extraordinary Ann Andrews containing my favourite Elkie Brooks track of all time (and certainly in the top 3 of best songs ever recorded), Pearl’s a Singer.

So I’m tagging Croila and Stroppy cow to find a favourite video of their favourite childhood/teenage song, they in turn will (hopefully) tag someone for theirs and so it continues.

More music related stuff

• I jumped for joy on seeing this link to some Bill Evans music (Bill Evans Trio – Waltz For Debby) but have had to give up after half a dozen attempts. Anyone else able to download it? Which reminds me, I miss Huwge.
• File under cute ‘n’ catchy – Fleur de vanille.
• You must go visit the Scopitones website. Watch Beatles wannabes Les Baronets singing C’est fou mais c’est tout, Jacques Brel singing Madeleine and the scarily squeaky clean Les Barclays singing Pour ton amour. Brilliant.

  What’s a Scopitone? Here’s a MetaFilter thread from 2003:

The Scopitone
was a French video jukebox that made its debut in 1960 and was imported into the US in 1964. Although they usually featured high production values, catchy melodies, and lots of gratuitous cheesecake, the singers were often relative unknowns and the music was square even by the standards of the day. Consequently, they never caught on in a big way outside of Europe, and many of the original Scopitone jukeboxes and films were destroyed. Fortunately for us, a few Scopitone enthusiasts have catalogued the songs, scanned the advertisements, and even preserved a few Quicktime clips of the original French and American Scopitone films.

Last Christmas I spent a rather enjoyable day downloading lots of children’s music, burned them to cd, made personalised sleeves with PhotoShop and gave them to the children. And yes, they were more delighted with those than the expensive clothes and toys also on offer.

Mind you, people in glass houses and all that. To this day my mother has not forgiven me for an incident that happened in 1968. She’d scrimped and saved the whole year to buy a beautiful pram from the posh toy shop in the high street. My grandmother made blankets and a quilt while my father made a beautiful wooden crib, painted in the same racing green to match. On Christmas Eve my grandmother suggested that they ought to put a doll in the pram to set it off so my poor mother hotfooted it down to the market, bought the cheapest doll she could find and late that night they laid everything out under the tree, bursting with excitement at seeing my face the following morning.

Allegedly I came down the stairs, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, went to the pram, pulled the doll out, exclaiming “Dolly!” and played with her for the rest of the day, ignoring the pram and crib. Sorry mam.

But I digress. The Amazon downloads are just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many excellent, free resources out there on ‘t net. I keep bookmarking them but it’s about time I got my arse in gear and shared them so as of today there’s a new category, imaginatively entitled “Freebies” and to kick it off we have the Amazon link above plus:

The amazing Aurgasm. From hip hop to ballad, from indie to jazz, Aurgasm has an excellent record (pun intended) of giving us reviews and tracks from artists you’d never have come across otherwise.

I’m sure I’ve linked to 3hive before but it’s an excellent blog so merits a second mention. Here’s a recent post:

Available in its entirety for free download from Bipolar Productions, Bill Patton‘s cleverly fragile debut album Gets It On is looking for a good home. Part Neal Young from the “Sugar Mountain” days, part Dashiell Hammet meets Nick Drake (the title “A Crimefighter Who Pities Fools” should say enough), Patton’s sparse arrangements, with mumbled vocals and piercing pedal steel guitar, are about as emotive as you can get. Try two originals (especially “Dirty Woman”) and two covers — yes, from the Beatles and Prince — to get a handle on his unique sound and, of course, to enjoy.

The only trouble is that both sites introduce you to such good music it’s almost impossible not to go looking to buy the cd and you’ll need plenty of self discipline to resist. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Moving into a greyer area, have you come across g2p? It’s the lazy (wo)man’s way of finding mp3s (and ebooks/pdfs) via google. I’ve used it a couple of times to locate deleted jazz tracks and it’s a bit hit n miss but worth a try if you have the patience.

(Yet another) digression: Is anyone else getting a huge increase in spam mail? I’m getting hammered at the minute. Should we coin a new term for being hammered by spammers? Spammered?

Later that same night… I should have googled that first.

Paul Weller and Ocean Colour Scene guitarist Steve Craddock. Beautiful.

The Specials: A Message to you, Rudy

And then I go and spoil it all by clicking on Kelly Marie singing Feels like I’m in love and guess which tune I can’t get out of my head?