National Public Radio



© Andy Burnham www.megalithic.co.uk

Time to scan in some of my own pictures of Callanish.

I have just listened to "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" for about the fifth time in three days. I used to get a record and play it out within days but that doesn't seem to happen often these days because I don't have the time. I've had this record for ages but it has been hidden at the bottom of the CD box since the move. I often wanted to drag it out but it's only recently that I managed to get at the box itself. How can anyone so young have a voice like that? I suppose if you grow up listening to Captain Beefheart and being generally hippyish then it is a possibility but there is something deeply English about PJ Harvey.

I have started to listen to more CDs here because there has been a ban on the use of Streaming Video/Audio because of the World Cup. (Not that it was officially broadcast over the Internet but that is a fact among many which escapes the men in charge). As a result I have been good and stopped listening to WGUC, a classical station from Cincinnati. I was fed up with our own Classic FM which is full of advertising more suited to a Rock station and had been dumbing down for years. The station idents removed all "white space" so that every sentence overlapped the previous one to the point where they were obviously using this as a trademark. "Look what we can do with all our fancy boxes". Radio 3 from the BBC is very good especially early in the morning but during the day it gets a bit heavy. Sometime I listen to WPRB from Princeton with Marvin Rosen who is excellent (he reminds me of Ian McDonald who was the British Government spokesman during the Falklands War and spoke in a terribly slow and deliberate manner to make sure that the press got exactly what he said). But the best of the Classical stations is WGUC. Listen to it and save me talking it up here. I became a member by pledgng $40 and they seemed really happy. I had heard someone from Oxford become a member but they meant Oxford just up the road from Cincinnati so I think I may be their most distant member. Their web-site is down at the moment.

There is so much to do, so much to see and record and not enough words in my head or minutes in the day. How do we live inside these minds without exploding? I curse Aphasia. What if I forgot every Noun? There is so much to see and record and not enough ..... in my .... or ....... in the .... And then when we do have time to do all these we just collapse and turn into vegetables in front of the TV. I don't think my daughter would sit still for an hour but we need to allocate an hour for reading each day of the weekend. I know I read a lot but it's always just before I go to sleep.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters / Seymour: an Introduction
Alan Turing : The Enigma
George Orwell : a Life
Seahenge

and many more. You too can finish these books if you retire or win the lottery. I think I need a specification for my life but as I work in computers I have no idea what a specification actually looks like as I have NEVER SEEN ONE. Well I do write them occasionally but here Specs are things to be changed and then ignored.

I have no immediate colleagues here today; they have gone on holiday. Well at least I can trek further and get decaff coffee instead of the dissolved uppers which passes for real coffee. I still have plenty of time before work proper starts and all this stuff to write about.

Stone Circles! I want to write about Stone Circles. They don't move. They just are! The whole reason for their existence eludes us and therefore they are interesting. If they were just houses, The National Trust would start selling "Authentic Bronze Age Facial Scrub". Come to think of it they probably do already. This is noise and not much else. It is as much as I can take for one early morning.