It was all going so well and then it happened.
I woke up and quickly wrote my 750words.com and then headed out for the day.
I had therapy and then the dentist with the rest of the family and then went home.
Honestly, I just could not face walking across the wind and rain swept Olympic park, or getting the bus.
So this is why I missed a day yesterday…
#Supercoolwife and I dropped the boy back and nursery and sneaked off to our favourite Polish restaurant for some lunch before getting on with the rest of our afternoon.
Then I worked and then all was good. I thought I’d leave todays blog until later – that is fun and the work needed to be done.
I am sharpening my Mailchimp skills now, for selling tickets to events and engaging an email community better.
A notion I picked up from Blog Tyrant a few years ago – I also caught up on Jon’s blogging podcast – it is a luxury to listen to someone you work with talk – ideas just pop in!
Then dinner and then… I thought I’d get that blog done…mmmmmm…..
BUT
Working on anything at night is total suicide me and I knew it, even posting this now is stupid as I am holding back at looking anywhere else on-line. One hour in the morning is worth 4 hours of night ‘surfing’
Off we went…
I’d been working on my HootSuite shares in a Google Doc getting ready to send to Fancy Hands for checking.
So I already had a lot of links to click, and I should have checked them and seeing what I have read and what needed to be dumped.
I have a workflow for reading and sharing that links Pocket, Publicate, Hootsuite and Sound Gecko – this means that everything I post I read, I can read a a lot because I have learnt over the past decade to listen to audio books and Sound Gecko at double speed, also I am familiar with the voices, narrators and area of content so I am now ‘well trained’. Sometimes something slips through but is it more likely to be from one of the blogs I read every week than something dumb. Anyway…
Somehow I ended up on this trail….
The band Texas slipped onto my screen, then I clicked something and then I recalled the song ‘In Demand’ so looked it up, on Wikipedia – I was trying to think who the guy was in the video (see below) I recall seeing an interview with Sharleen Spiteri where she joked about the video and how she was amazed he agreed to do it.
The ‘he’ is ‘Alan Rickman‘ who grew up in South Hammersmith and his Dad’s name was Bernard and he went to a primary school in Acton that followed the Maria Montessori teaching method. Montessori is a firm favourite of mine, I did my dissertation at Uni on her, so of course I had to click the link to see how the Wikipedia page had changed since I last looked at it.
I then saw that Jeff from Amazon, Steve from Apple, Larry and Sergey from Google, Julia Child as well as Alan had a Montessori education under their belt.
Something I went back to Sharleen’s Wikipedia page and noticed there is another Sharleen Spiteri, but this one was an Australian sex worker (I am sure there is a rancid pun for a sex worker with that surname). Sharleen number two shot to a different kind of fame in 1989 after admitting in an Australian TV documentary that she had unprotected sex with some clients without letting them know she was HIV positive.
This led to a law dubbed ‘Sharleen’s Law’ being passed in NSW Australia that required a full disclosure of any HIV condition or history before intercourse. As with any position you apply for when you want to be hired there should be a health check – right?
Sharleen ‘two’ died in 2005 after 16 troubled years being ‘looked after’ by the authorities – just in case she had unprotected sex with anyone.I did wonder how attitudes to HIV were in early 90’s Australia, most of the dick heads and even the nice people I met around that time were still crying with laughter that AIDS was in fact an acronym for ‘arseholes in deep shit’ rather than more tragic ‘acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ – which is very hard to really joke about, especially if you are a child of parents who happen to have acquired it.
While I was online reading about people called Sharleen in Australia I had to stop myself from looking up Charleen from the TV soap Neighbours – I am not even going to look to put the link here – see what this does to you? What are Craig and Jason doing now? How many actors were in both Neighbours and Home and Away? Why do I need to know this shit?
After that I noticed the tango scene in the video was filmed in a Shell Petrol station in Bordon, Hampshire – I was born in Hampshire so I started to think if I knew the petrol station. Talking of petrol, I noticed that Bordon was named an Eco Town under the Labour Government, this also was met with some resistance by some local groups. When the ‘Coalition’ took over in 2010 (£uck me have they been here that long?) funding was cut and government support dwindled – probably redirected to restoring the Red Wine Cellar at Whites Club in London.
Then I discovered a photo Bowie and Spiteri from when Bowie was director of the Meltdown Festival on the South Bank.
This is something I have heard of many times and if asked would nod and say ‘Ah the Meltdown Festival on the Suuth Bank, I know it’ – actually I only really found out how it works last night.
So here is how it works: every year a really really cool person, Jarvis Cocker, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello (and on slow years Yoko Ono) gets invited to direct it and pick the line up. In 2002, where this picture was from, it was David Bowie.
Bowie’s line up was Asian Dub Foundation, Baby Zizanie, Badly Drawn Boy, Bobby Conn, Coldplay, Daniel Johnston, David Kitt, Fischerspooner, Gonzales,Harry Hill, Kimmo Pohjonen, Luke Haines, Mercury Rev, Peaches, Pete Yorn, Philip Glass, Senor Coconut Y Su Conjunto, Six by Seven,Stew, Suede, Supergrass, Television, The Dandy Warhols, The Divine Comedy, The International Noise Conspiracy, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, The Lonesome Organist, The Polyphonic Spree, The The, The Waterboys, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs so I will leave you with all those links to see what trouble you get into.
The above took you a minute or two to read and took me an hour or so of web surfing when I should have been asleep. Still it is not all wasted, I got this blog out of it.
Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow! – I think tomorrow is going to be ‘Blue Potatoes’
Sent from my mobile device – excuse any typos…..
