Sometimes you see a band’s publicity photo, and your first reaction is “You can’t have an entire Dungeons and Dragons party made up of Bards. Although it has been pointed out that the guy with the staff might be a Druid.
The band is Wytch Hazel, their album (which is extremely good) is out in April, and there will be a review on this site shortly.
Nothing on the band’s own website yet, but according to the Genting Arena website, Mostly Autumn will be the support for Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow in June.
Mostly Autumn have supported Ritchie Blackmore in the past, when Bryan, Heather and Angela played as an acoustic trio supporting Blackmore’s Night on a UK tour. But getting this prestigious arena gig is still a major coup.
Update: Now confirmed by the band:
We are very proud to announce that Mostly Autumn, as a four piece, have been invited and confirmed, to be the support for Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow on June 25th 2016 at the Birmingham Genting Arena.
Our most sincere and heartfelt thanks go to all in the Ritchie Blackmore camp for this incredible opportunity. Â As you may well know Ritchie Blackmore has been a major influence on me ever since I was a child, in fact, one of the main reasons I picked up a guitar in the first place all those years ago.
This will be very special for so many reasons.
Hope to see you there..
Bryan Josh
It appears that C P Snow’s Two Cultures is alive and well if this monumentally ignorant piece by The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is anything to go by.
We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance†school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?
Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mindâ€. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.
Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need†for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.
That attitude betrays quite heroic levels of igorance and prejudice, and it’s not much of a stretch to blame attitudes like his for Britain’s industrial decline. Does he really believe the nation’s economy needs anything like as many archeologists or experts on early literature as it does computer programmers or engineers?
Of course, it’s the programmers and engineers who built the internet infrastructure that enables his ridiculous drivel to reach an audience.
York’s finest hard rockers take to the road again with an extensive tour taking in the length and breadth of Britain.
Following last year’s successful tour co-headlining with an Iron Maiden tribute act, they doing something similar this time, sharing bills with a number of different tribute bands up and down the country. One exception is the opening night, when they’re sharing the bill with the violin-driven goth-metal of Symphony of Pain.
Robert John Godfrey has been ruffling feathers again. This time, as part of an announcement of his retirement from The Enid, he’s been dismissing Steve Wilson’s music. And parts of the prog interweb have imploded. He has been accused of “talking out of his arse”.
The world of grassroots prog is a small incestuous scene where everyone knows everyone else and the boundaries of artist, critic and fan are sometimes blurred. Over time every band will end up sharing the same festival bill as every other band at some point. It’s the reason we don’t have Oasis vs. Blur style feuds, and there isn’t room for professional gobshites like Noel Gallagher. Even when there is serious bad blood between musicians, they tend to avoid bad-mouthing each other or washing dirty linen in public; they will inevitably have fans in common that they can’t afford to alienate.
Robert John Godfrey is one person who pays no attention to this unwritten rule.
I remember his lofty dismissal of Mostly Autumn during a running order squabble fest over the Prog stage at High Voltage. “Can you imagine them performing with a full choir“, he said. Actually, I can imagine a Mostly Autumn gig backed by a large choir, and the idea has the potential to seriously awesome. I even once suggested that to a member of the band who has a lot of experience singing in choirs, who completely agreed with me.
Mostly Autumn and The Enid have shared the top spots on festival bills on several occasions in recent years, most recently at last year’s HRH Prog in Pwllheli, where both bands delivered superb performances. They are two very different kinds of band, who represent opposing corners of what Progressive Rock means in second decade of the 21st century. Both bands have devoted fanbases, and both bands have their detractors too, but both of them are very good at what they do.
Posted as a tribute to George Martin, who died today aged 90. As well as his universally-known work with The Beatles, he also produced this back in 1958.
This subversive classic was a big part of my childhood, the B-side of a single which also contained “Balham, Gateway to the South“. I wonder whether anyone would dare make a record like this nowadays.
Since my parents were from the pre rock’n'roll generation (Yes, I really am that old!), this was probably their equivalent to The Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind The Bollocks”.
Goot post by Stephen Tall on why he has given up on Channel 4’s ‘Spin’. It’s because it seems to ignore the existence of the internet and social media, and that absence breaks suspension of disbelief in what is supposed to be a present-day drama.
* News breaks of French presidential hopeful Anne Visage’s affair with the recently blown-up former President. Her campaign manager is issued with the urgent warning… “this story will hit the news-stands in just a few hours’ time!â€. Because, obviously, we’re all ignorant of what the newspapers are saying til we walk past les kiosques in the morning and Twitter stops at the white cliffs of Dover.
* A key witness — the one person who can testify to the motives of the President’s assassin — is being hunted by the French authorities desperate to ensure their state-sanctioned lie of terrorism isn’t challenged. Tensely, he hunkers down for a couple of days until a journalist with a TV camera can arrive and film his evidence. On tape. Seriously. No suggestion is made that he might tell his story using the smart-phone he’s carrying and post it to the Internet. Or even tweet his testimony.
If somebody had written that twenty years ago, not a word of it would have made any sense. We are indeed living in a science-fiction future, just not quite the science-fiction future we were promised.
There was a blog post a while ago that declared that NULL was the worst ever mistake in history of computer science. The fact that nulls existed meant that code always has to be written to handle them, otherwise programmes would crash with Null Pointer Exceptions or their Windows equivalent Object Reference Not Set To An Instance Of This Object. Life would be easier and less error-prone if there was no such thing as NULL.
It may have a point when it comes to object-orientated programming languages, but when comes to databases, the suggestion that the concept of NULL is a dangerous bad idea is nonsense. The fact that some common beginners’ mistakes involve a lack of understanding over how to use NULL does not change this.
NULL has meaning.
Precisely what it means is dependent on the context, but it still has meaning. Consider an End Date. What does it mean if you have no End Date? It means, perhaps, that you are still employed, or maybe even still alive. Defaulting to some arbitrary date far, far into the future in this context is nothing but an ugly kludge. You still have to write code to handle that value, and you’ve probably got a greater potential for error than if you’d just used NULL.
NULL has meaning.
Another example. Imagine a stock control system. Each stock item has a re-order level. When the stock level reaches this point it will trigger an automated re-order process.
Now imagine there are some stock items where you want to keep track of how many you purchase and use, but you don’t want to hold them in stock; perhaps the value is high and lead time is low, and you don’t use them frequently enough to want that much capital tied up in inventory. You will only raise purchase orders manually when you know you’re going to need the thing.
So most of the time the stock level is going to be zero. But you don’t want that automated re-order process to touch it. What value do you give the re-order level?
Now, you could set it to -1, and one stock control system I know did precisely that. But that’s still a kludge, and there are scenarios that will break it.
What if the stock transactions are transmitted via a mobile network that’s not 100% reliable, which means they’re not guaranteed to be real-time and may be received out of sequence? Again, I know a system that works like this. For one thing you can’t enforce a database constraint that makes sure the stock quantity never goes negative. It’s possible that you might end up with a stock level of -1 for a short period because a receipt transaction has been delayed by an electronic sargasso. Then there’s a window in which that pesky re-order process could turn up and do mischief.
If you’d just let the re-order level be NULL for those items you only want to re-order manually, you would not have that potential bug.
This is why we have NULL.
The European Union in deeply flawed, and structured in a way that makes it difficult to reform. It has a very bad democratic deficit. It’s handling the Syrian refugee crisis very, very badly. And the implementation of the Euro was an ill-conceived mess that we were right to have kept out of.
But for all its flaws, I’m voting Remain in the referendum in June. Because remaining in Europe is still far better than the alternative. What the EU does will continue to effect the UK whether we’re still in it or not, and we cannot influence or reform something if we’re we’re no longer a member. Love it or loathe it, the EU matters.
At best, voting to leave the European Union is a reckless gamble.
At worst, it’s a decisive move towards a meaner, nastier vision of Britain that will be a worse place to live in for everyone other than the wealthy elites. Look at some of Tory Brexiter Priti Patel’s comments about British workers being the laziest in the world and her demands that the life of the young must be all work and no play so that Britain can compete with the sweatshops of the far east. That’s the vision of the people who want us to leave.
Looking at the faces of the “Out” campaign; it’s like a rogues gallery of the worst people in British politics. Almost all of them are those who believe that the Social Democratic values at the heart of the European project are an anathema. There are a few leftist troglodytes who still believe in a Soviet-style command economy, but the majority are ideologues who have read far too much Ayn Rand, or the out-of-touch nostalgic for the days of Empire.
We’ve got Nigel Farage, about whom more than enough has been said. We’ve got the loathsome and repellent George Galloway. We’ve got new-age conspiracy moonbat David Icke. We’ve got the utterly cynical opportunist Boris Johnson. The bulk of them are the worst half of the Tory party, typified by Iain Duncan-Smith, one of the few people I’m willing to use the word “Evil” to describe. There is a Labour Out campaign, but it’s a motley assortment of has-beens and B-listers; all the big hitters of the party are on the “In” side.
And what about the rest of the world? Paddy Ashdown stated today that all of Britain’s NATO allies want us to remain. Who wants us to leave? French neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen for one. And Vladimir Putin.
If you vote to leave the EU, those are the people you are siding with.
A question for readers of this blog, whether you’re one of the few that regularly comments or not. What would encourage you to leave more comemnts? Or, indeed, any comments?