Hello…?

Hello Gentle Reader.

It’s been quite a while.

Basically, I kinda dug myself a deep mental pit, dived into it and pulled the roof in over my head. I retreated, both on and off line, into my own little world. It wasn’t a terrible world. No one should be applying words like "clinical" at this point. There were movies and books, and, as ever with me, there was music. But little, if any of it, was shared with others. Which, as anyone who’s been there can tell you, is not a good or a healthy thing.

And before I continue, please allow me to thank and to apologise to all those who sent emails asking where I was and if I was okay. Having cut myself off, I simply didn’t know how to reply and so, to my shame, I didn’t. That apology goes double for Diana Lesperance, who I let down when she asked for help, which is inexcusable, even if I did have problems of my own.

Anyways…

My gradual return to the land of the living began, ironically enough, with a funeral. An old friend from my music tribe, circle, subculture, whatever the hell you call it, died, and someone else managed to find me to let me know. Reconnecting with old friends as well as making some new ones at the "do" afterwards, virtually all of whom told me to buck myself up and start getting out there again, kinda gave me the kick in the nether regions which I most certainly needed. And so, at least on the music-scene side of things, I have done. Not at the gigging-every-weekend level that I once did, but enough. Good bands, good beer and good friends—the kind who don’t care where you’ve been so long as you’re back—have once again become a regular part of my life.

And, at first only because that’s how news of musical events gets passed around these days, I ended up joining Facebork. Mostly (I use the word advisedly) I don’t do much in the way of politics and religion on there, except well, you know; it’s hard to completely give up once you get the bug. For the most part my posts are the same silly worn-out jokes that ninety percent of the rest of the online world pass around, with the addition of a fair lump of music-related content. With that proviso, please feel free to "friend" me if you do the Facebork thing. (The only contact I have on there at present from my blogging days is Padre Steve because I ran across him on there purely by chance. I don’t think he’s regretted accepting my request. Though it could be he’s just too darn nice and polite to tell me to bugger off…)

And so to this. I don’t know if it’ll work or if it’ll last, but I kind of have an itch to revitalise this blog. I’m not sure what direction, if any, it’ll take. I’m certainly not sure I’m ready for the constantly argumentative religion and politics, but maybe just putting something out there will spark summat. I dunno. I think it’s worth trying at least.

For now though, and going back to the music thing, if you liked the musical side of the blog in days of yore, you might be interested to know that I have a weekly show all to meself on a proper licenced internet radio network. (Ooh! It’s almost professional!) Mondays at 7:00 PM (UK time) you can thrill to my dulcet tones as I introduce an hour’s (okay, 55 to 57 minutes’) worth of rockabilly, rhythm ‘n’ blues, rock ‘n’ roll, psychobilly etc on Rockabilly Radio. There’s a choice of web-players on the linked page, or you can paste http://lin3.ash.fast-serv.com:6026/ into the appropriate place in any desktop media player capable of handling streamed content.

And, for now, on that unashamedly self-promotional note, I think that’s me lot. Let us, Gentle Reader, see what the future brings.
—Daz

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La Vie Chez Daz

In which I gabble on about computer problems, steel-etching, broken parents, and radio shows…

I made a new year's resolution. I was gonna spend more time on the blog. Well, best end of two months later…

Ahem.

So, okay, back in mid-December-ish, I decided that enough was enough with the computer. It was nigh-on ten years old and in that time the hard drive was never once reformatted and the OS re-installed. Damn thing was beginning to make frozen treacle look like Usain Bolt. So I dug out the recovery discs which were made when the machine was new, backed up all the stuff I wanted to keep onto the secondary internal hard drive and went for it.

It half worked.

The part where it wiped the hard drive preparatory to installing the fresh OS worked like a dream.

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A Strange Quirk When Changing Fonts In M/S Word VBA

Oh, what an exciting life I lead. My first post, in the early AM of the first day of the year, and what is the topic? Coding. Woohoo! Happy New Year!

Anyways…

Following a Computer Cock-Up Of Monumental Proportions, which I might or might not expand—or, indeed, expound—upon in a later post, I ended up upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2010 a couple of weeks back. Anyone who remembers the experience of changing from the menu-based to the ribbon-based interface will, I hope, understand and sympathise with my profound sense of, erm, call it culture shock. Not only that, but I lost not only all the customisations and macros I'd made to Word over the years, but also the back-ups of same, which were on a USB hard-drive which got wiped during the course of the CCUOMP. (It's pronounced "queue-omp.")

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Walking To New Orleans: Goodbye, Fats Domino

I can't remember if it was a birthday or a Christmas present, but the first brand-spanking-new LP I ever owned was a compilation album with a decidedly cheesy cover, but an absolutely brilliant selection of tracks, entitled Let The Good Times Roll.

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FNIMN: Moustache

Several months ago, this, erm, thing colonised my upper lip and I didn't have the heart to send it packing. I'm still not completely convinced it should be given a permanent home, but it's been long enough that I can hardly claim it's temporary any more.

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Owa Taphoo Lamai

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
—Psalm 14:1

As many a wit has told me over the years, my birthday being on the first day of April means that I must be a fool. Ho ho. As you might imagine, Gentle Reader, constant repetition by people who never stopped to think that I just might have heard it a few hundred times before has made the "joke" something of a sore point.

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The War On Christmas: The Postage Stamp Campaign

Well it's an even-numbered year, which means only one thing. The Post Office's Christmas stamps are on a secular theme, and a thousand and one blithering idiots with too much time on their hands and persecution complexes bigger than a very big mountain of very big things, will be whining and moaning that the Post Office, for some vague reason probably connected to Militant Secularism™, are trying to ban Christianity. Because that's what post offices do. Obviously.

This post began life as an attempt to put that straight by listing the basic theme of every set of Christmas stamps since 1966, when the tradition began. And that would have been as boring as hell. But along the way, it kind of grew into a collection of digressions loosely held together by a list of stamps. We have Joyce Grenfell in there, and a short discussion of the slang pertaining to British coinage, and many other brief but, I hope, interesting and amusing snippets of trivia, reminiscence and opinion.

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Some Answers I’m Really Tired Of Having To Repeat

This isn't a blog-post, per se. I merely want to gather together several answers that I've had to give over and over again in discussions elsewhere during the last few months, so I can just provide a link instead of retyping the damn things, as I say, over and over again.

So, okay, here goes…

No, the court decision was not an attempt to subvert democracy, or to block brexit. The court merely pointed out that article fifty cannot be invoked unless it be by a decision of Parliament. Not the Prime Minister, not the governing party. Parliament. You know, the body you allegedly voted to return power to, thus wresting it from the grasping hands of the Evil EU™. If anyone is currently holding up the process, it is May's government, who are refusing to obey the law of the land in this matter, by not allowing Parliament to act. (This is not new behaviour for May, she having, as Home Secretary, been found to be in contempt of court for refusing to release a time-served prisoner after being expressly instructed by the court to do so.) Talking of which…

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On Glamour Magazine & Bono

"Bono Just Became Glamour's First Man of the Year," exclaims the headline at Glamour Magazine. Note that it does not say, contra to the claims of reporters and commentators seemingly everywhere, that he's been named Woman of the Year, and most definitely not the Woman of the Year.

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How Many Days In A Month?

Mother very thoughtfully made a jam sandwich under no protest.

That, Gentle Reader, is a now-outdated mnemonic for the order of the planets going outwards from the sun. (The T is for Terra, an alternative name for the Earth.) The suggestions for non-Plutonian versions given on The Fount Of All Knowledge™ seem lacking to me in that, unlike the above, they omit the asteroid belt; but I must admit I do quite like "Mary's 'virgin' explanation made Joseph suspect upstairs neighbour."

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