I’m going to try to do monthly blog posts this year. Here’s the first – my annual round-up of the best popular music tracks of the year just ended.
You can also check this new list out on Apple Music or Spotify. And, check out the Apoplexy Tiny Letter for a bonus track.
Continue reading Eight Tracks VI
Earlier this week, a friend who makes a brief cameo appearance in my survival memoir, Stroke: A 5% chance of survival, sent me a link to this recent article celebrating the original release of Pavement’s album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Here’s the tl;dr take:
I mean, I was there. Not James Murphy. Though he probably was, too. I saw Pavement touring their first album, the epochal Slanted and Enchanted, at Edinburgh’s late and legendary venue, The, er, Venue.
That’s quite enough sub-muso-journo dross from me. Get to the human reflection below.
And in the Apoplectic Tiny Letter.
Long-suffering readers of the blog may recall that a couple of years ago I went through a bit of an obsession with the moon. (1, 2)
Yeah. Not Mark Kozelek’s Sun Kil Moon, messiah claimant Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, or even Ban Ki-moon, eighth Secretary General of the United Nations.
[More, occasionally stroke-related, whimsy here.] Continue reading Moonage Daydream
Well, nobody found the Birds Fate Ruins Xmas EP during the past week. Which is hardly surprising, given the story of its creation and deletion. Besides, Prof Paul, Mouthsounds Steph and I have made a point of scouring car boot and stoop sales, second-hand record stores, and record fairs for Birds Fate material for more years than I think any of us care to remember.
But you know how it is with your favourite bands – you don’t listen to them for ages, and then you put ’em on and remember why you loved them in the first place. So it was that the Prof went back to his Birds Fate archive after reading last weeks post.
[More whimsy, more material, more secrets at the Apoplexy Tiny Letter.]
Continue reading Our Christmas Gift to You
I’ve just opened the doors on my advent calendars for the sixth of December. “Tobacco” beard oil, a jasmine green tea light ale, and a piece of chocolate bearing the countenance of an appropriately sceptical elf, since you ask.
I swear, I’m not making this up!
[For more festive good cheer, sign up for the Apoplectic newsletter.]
Continue reading Birds Fate Ruins Xmas
Tiny Letter readers will know that Mrs Stroke Bloke and I visited Cairnpapple Hill in central Scotland last weekend. It was an enlightening trip, in light of last week’s post on ’80s movies. Like Withnail and Marwood, we came across a bull in a field. And turning to an obvious omission pointed out by Atletico Marcelo in the comments, Cairnpapple was the site of a little henge.
Continue reading Cairnpapple Hill
It’s the Early May Bank Holiday in Scotland today. Ian Wiki confirms that May Day is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival.
The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the Floralia, festival of Flora.
In explaining the origins of May Day, Ian comes up with all sort of specifics, but kind of slides over the idea that – as Longsufferingreaderoftheblogpaul wrote in a comment to a particularly off-the-wall post – time is social. Harvests. Day and night. Diurnal clocks. Biorhythms and cycles. All that mushy wetware bio stuff I never learned but is real.
Cornwall in England definitely gets into that side of things:
[On May Day,] Padstow holds its annual Hobby Horse day of festivities, believed to be one of the oldest fertility rites in the UK.
As (kind of) trailed by yesterday’s post, apoplectic.me is simulcasting with nerdbaitband.com this week, where Longsufferingreaderoftheblogpaul writes…
Hi, Friends of NerdBait!
Our new piece, The Gospel of the Unicerosaur, is our most exciting and ambitious work to date. We are really excited to share it with you.
So, let’s just cut to the chase… Continue reading The Gospel of the Unicerosaur
Today’s post goes up tomorrow. But here’s a teaser:
Yep, right about now the next Nerd Bait – creators of The Treacherous Brain and The Wee Mermannie – happening is happening. Or about to happen.
We all look forward to sharing it with you – stay tuned.
APOPLECTIC.ME – TOMORROW: YESTERDAY’S NEWS, TODAY!
Mrs Stroke Bloke and I spent this past weekend in the Highlands. More precisely, we were visiting family in Strontian, on the banks of Loch Sunart. One of my cousins asked if I would be writing about our trip in the blog this week. And since she took me to see David Bowie’s Sound and Vision tour stop in Ingliston in 1990, I could hardly say “No.”
