…I was once interviewed for BBC TV who were doing a series called “I love the 70s“. The particular episode was 1978 and they had tracked me down from a Web posting I had made on a Fan site.

Thus is revealed my dark secret, I am a Dean Friedman fan.

Actually, Fan is not strictly true, as I find his voice _almost_ unpleasant, lots of his lyrics rather twee (with some really atrocious rhyming) & dislike his use of Harmonica. Having said that, I’m a sucker for electric pianos, love songs & thoughtful intelligent introspection to a nice tune. I particularly liked “Lucky Stars” which while widely loathed (being neither Disco nor Punk, the two battling chart styles of the time)replayed a typical pillow conversation of martital discord followed by a serious session of Mr. Wobbly hides his Helmet.

Back in 1978, I was twenty, did a bit of DJing, had a great social life (despite living in Coventry) & was also discovering the joys of Mr. Wobbly so the year and music are particularly poigniant.

Back to the late 90s, I’d been to see Deano play a gig in Yorkshire on somewhat of a whim & I can honestly say it was the most surreal gig I have ever been to (& I have previously worked in a #1 touring rock venue for two or three years so I have been to a lot of gigs). It is worth a blog entry in itself (if I can be arsed or anyone else was even remotely interested).

Anyway, I wrote quite a lengthly piece on it online (now lost to Google or a determined sort through my backup tape library) & a BBC researcher picked up on it.

I’d had a bit of a two way e-discussion & phone chat and had agreed to attend BBC-TV in Manchester some time in August 2000. (Which struck me as cutting it a bit fine as they were already up to 1973 on-air). She sounded somewhat like the Chaletmaid out of Hi De Hi but I take as I find…

On arrival I was treated well, they let me park within their private pound (rather than brave Oxford Road Scratters) and I met the researcher who was the Director’s assistant. I was rather surprised that she actually looked like Sue Pollard as well as sounding like her, but there again, she was surprised that I had turned up in a suit (having a business meeting in the afternoon). She was also slightly disappointed that I hadn’t brought my Wife (who is a Deanophobe) however whilst it had been suggested in passing at an early stage that Karen might want to get involved she had never subsequently mentioned it in the further arrangements so we had been talking at cross-purposes. Actually, it turned out she may have been as scatter-brained as the Chalet Maid…

She took me up to their canteen & furnished me with coffee & toast then bustled off to sort things out. I then noticed two other blokes in the canteen who kept looking at me and conferring conspiratorially, which I found a smidge off putting as I had no idea who they were.

Anyway, I was collected after having indulged the budget “hostility” & taken downstairs- to a dressing room set up as an ad-hoc studio. There I met the Director (who was an earnest arty type aged about Thirty) & the crew: the two blokes who had been giving me furtive looks. They were the freelance lighting cameraman and the sound engineer, who had mistaken me for a Regional News presenter…

This post has been truncated (& the rest lost) due to Blogger throwing a wobbly so I’ll finish it another time (& maybe type the body text first rather than trust the online tools).

Take a look at this site which gives crime statistics in Morley. Work your way down the Which crime type would you like to see? drop-down bar, observing the little blue dots on the map. Choose the last one and watch it get festooned with a set of blue ASBO fairy lights.

My oh my, at first glance, we are an anti-social Town. Although, if you compare us with others in West yorkshire, particularly the City Centres (by zooming out on the big +/- bar) the pattern is more evident.

Last night, a new Yahoo Group appeared, called LS27 Group. (LS27 is the postcode for Morley). It was announced via the Town Council Group & I want and had a look.

There were three postings in it, or there would have been if two hadn’t been deleted. The remaining posting said it was set up by a small number of Councillors, although that posting has now been deleted.

There are photo folders for heros (& villains), which originally contained five Councillor mugshots, including myself (lifted from the Town Council Website). This has now risen to eight, although I appear to have been dropped, as has Cllr Teale, the leader of the Labour group. There are no villains yet.

Several links have been set up, all legitimate ones. The home page greeted you at first with a photo of Cllr Welham, now it is the photogenic poise of Cllr Beevers (who takes photos the same way as rabbits do when caught in the headlights…)

My first impression was that it may have been set up for the purposes of urine extraction as someone passing off as a local trader had posted some offensive wind-ups on the Town Council List last year. There had been no mention of who is behind the list until this morning.

The latest posting is about the state of Morley Bottoms and is signed Paul Cockcroft (admin), the well known Butlins memorabilia collecting, jogging troll from Tingley. It may well be his list but he has previously told me he is a well known Internet technophobe so it seems a little unlikely…

The list can be found here.

…Chlodosind the Belligerent,

and the blog Childebert the Short.

Her ‘indoors is Aregund the Impure and the fruit of our loins is Chlodosind the Belligerent or Chlodosind the Woman with his full name.

(With my full name, I got Chlodosind the bald).

Hmm, perhaps I’ll stick to the ones on the birth certificate.

The Merovingian name generator awaits…

Thanks to Dodgeblogium for the link.

Merovingian

I noticed a snippet in the paper the other day about Amarillo, made famous by Tony Christie & recently revitalised by Peter Kay miming for Comic Relief (Red Nose day). Apparantly 90% of world helium reserves are within 250 miles of Amarillo.

This got me thinking. From what I remembered of A level chemistry, it is a gaseous element and a finite resource. It is lighter than air so probably mostly ends up in the atmosphere. It is inert ( a noble gas) so doesn’t really react with anything which means it would be difficult to extract from compounds unlike, say, hydrogen & oxygen (you just pass electricity through water to do that). So what is it all doing in Amarillo? Does sweet Marie talk in a squeaky voice?

A trip to Wikipedia reveals all. It is the second most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen, of course) but most of the earth stuff left is in gas fields and derived from from radioactive decay. Amarillo is in Texas and there is a lot of oil there, and where there is oil there is also gas. It is also home to Cadillac Ranch.

I’ll remember that next time I buy a balloon on a string.