Vestiges of advertisement painting on upper storey of building on London Road.
Birthday Breakfast, courtesy of the utterly incomparable notalwaysthequietone. Also featuring two beautiful handmade cards and lots and lots of Vaughan Williams. Marvellous!
In the spirit of Craig Brown’s One To One…
Paul McCartney made an album with his brother, Mike, who was in The Scaffold with John Gorman, whose nephew was in a band with me, who was in a band with Mathew Denley, who was in a band with Mel from Sidi Bou Said who spent some time as a member of Cardiacs.
Day Twenty Six. Be Here Now. Z.
Be Here Now is perhaps the least fondly remembered Oasis record. Not because the group didn’t make worse records – they did – but because this seems likely to have been the one that reached the greatest number of people.
Perhaps in time the album will be reappraised; indeed, there are ways of describing it even now which make it sound at least interesting: a band feted beyond any reasonable sense of realism, six minute long songs, hundreds of guitar overdubs, great arrays of instruments of all kinds. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a zither in oh shit.
Day Twenty Five. The Sumatran Rhinoceros. Y.
Total numbers of the Sumatran rhinoceros could be as low as two hundred. This would mean that if one had started 2013 with a vow to kill one of them each sunrise, the whole lot would be wiped out well before one got to August.
This would mean that for the remainder of the calendar’s run another species would have to be found. To give the plan a neatness, it would be best to find a species with 165 specimens remaining.
This would allow one to dispatch the final one on 31st December 2013, before entering 2014 refreshed and renewed.
Day Twenty Four. John Le Mesurier. X.
John Le Mesurier excelled at playing Sergeant Wilson, the ex-public school officer in BBC Television’s excellent Dad’s Army. Initially expected to last only six episodes, the series was born out of expediency; a hole had been left in the schedules by the cancellation of Dr X’s Admixtures of the Galaxy.
Given the role by an expectant Jimmy Perry, himself an ex-services man, Le Mesurier leapt at this chance to return from professional exile, foxing critics who adhered to the axiom about dogs and tricks.
An exultant viewing public welcomed Le Mesurier back onto the screens as the next big thing.
Day Twenty Three. The Birmingham Campaign. W.
The Birmingham Campaign launched on 19th November 2005 and had as its aim the notion of getting Birmingham recategorised as a lake rather than a city. The reasons for this remain unclear to this day. Being possessed of a cathedral, Birmingham is rightly recognised as a city, and a prominent one at that. Commentators have speculated that the cash-strapped burghers of Birmingham City Hall may have calculated that, as a lake, the city could access European fishing subsidies far greater than the funding it received as a metropolis. Alas, all records relating to the proposal became lost to the floods.
Day Twenty Two. Parks and Recreation. V.
Parks and Recreation premiered, as Wikipaedia points out, at 9pm (EST) on 4th August 1928, on the first day of America’s public radio network. Out of a total of fourteen wireless sets in the United States, it is estimated that a total of eight tuned in for the first episode.
That opening instalment was rather different from the Parks and Recreation we know today, with the cast consisting of wooden puppets. Additionally, while today’s show is renowned for its satirical humour, its 1928 iteration took a more tragic bent, centring on the woes of a farming family in the dustbowl.
