Doing The Rounds

The surfeit of posts in recent days can be easily explained away by the fact that I have one eye on my sitemeter, seeing it inch towards a certain round figure, and when that happens I have a tendency to churn out the posts to help shuffle it along. This post should be seen in that spirit. (That and of course me wishing to bring to people's attention some wonderous links that will gladden the heart, lighten the soul and enrich the brain.)

A Revolutionary Act finally got round to that post about a member of the master race and and an electrical appliance. If he looked at that piece in the old copy of Freedom once at the weekend, he looked at it a hundred times. I guess it should be filed under gallows humour.

The Man Who Fell Asleep is still a must read with his weekly snippet of Tube Gossip. Though he toys with the reader that it may all simply be the concoction of a "diseased mind", I want to believe that he has overheard all these gems on the Tube whilst the rest of us pretend to read yesterday's Metro for the fifth time and avoid eye contact in the same fashion as Perseus when confronted with Medusa. If it is his "feverished imaginings", then I'll be obliged to dislike him for being an overly talented swine. I prefer to think of him as some Zelig type character who just happens to be in the right place at the right time.

A thoughful post from John at Counago and Spaves in response to Will Hutton's piece in Sunday's Observer about the 84-85 Miner's Strike. I was too young at the time to understand fully the impact of the Miners Strike but there is no doubting the impact of it is still felt twenty years down the line. Only last Friday, the Guardian carried an article about the hidden legacy of the pit closures, and the cottage industry that has sprung up in the media in the form of documentaries, TV dramas and novels over the past year only serve to highlight that it is now seen as one of those symbolic fractures in the British polity on a par with Suez in '57 or the great Oasis versus Blur controversy of 1995.

I guess I gauge from John's post a similarity with the position that he held at the time about the Strike and the Strikers with that of many members of the Socialist Party of the time. He writes: "It was a commonplace that defeat was likely for the miners and that they were led by a pig-headed, stubborn, ignorant, and tactically clueless leadership . . ." Even twenty years on it's the case that Scargill is held in an esteem by many for reasons that I still can't fully understand. It's not even a case of it being a variation on the old saying: "He's a bastard, but he's one of our bastards." Delete the second part of the previous sentence.

Many happy returns to Paul Anderson for celebrating the second anniversary of his Gauche blog yesterday. As well as mentioning it for reasons of padding out this post (quick check of the sitemeter - how you doing?), my other selfish reasons for mentioning the Gauche blog in despatches is in the hope that he will finally reply to my email about his promised review of Socialism Or Your Money Back. Linking to his second ever post on his blog, it turns out he was writing about Our 'Arry. Glad to know that it's not just 'Keef' and me, then.

Though seven inches of joy has apparently now consigned itself to the bloggers yard*, I'm hoping that its death has been prematurely reported. Just looking at some of the past posts from the blog, I've encountered my 'obsessed by eighties music' doppleganger, except this guy seems to have the moxy to back it all up. It's like a Proustian moment of biting into an old copy of Record Mirror to read write ups of such half forgotten pop acts like Strawberry Switchblade, Scarlett Fantastic, Two People and Age of Chance.

A music blog dedicated purely to cover versions? Too cheesy or an ingenius niche spot in a crowded market? Well, accapella versions of old Joe Jackson classics sitting side by side with the Kronos Quartet covering Television's Marquee Moon, only to be followed by Sebadoh recording of Foreigner Cold As Ice suggests that Cover, Right? has an arched eyebrow permanently tattooed to its homepage.

I'm afraid the one downside of music blogs is their tantalus like nature. Finding a long lost track that you have always wanted to listen to, only to discover that the mp3 was taken down days before is an occupational hazard. The latest example of this is finding details of Seona Dancing at the Lost Bands of the New Wave music blog, and knowing that for the time being that I have to settle for the memory of that 15 second clip of Ricky Gervais singing his wee heart out as part of Seona Dancing on Razzmattazz as shown on an old episode of Before They Were Famous. You just know in his heart of hearts that he would give up his Golden Globes for that front cover of Smash Hits back in 1983.

*"Bloggers Yard" Copyright of Reasons To Be Impossible