Meatloaf Does Funk

I just heard this meatloaf track from the early seventies. He apparently did Who is the Leader of the People. If is awesome. It was released ten years after he recorded it because he had some kind of argument with mo town records. Meatloaf and mo town records wow those words in the same sentence. I suppose there has always been something just a bit funky about Meatloaf.


Well this is another song that i owe to Craig Charles and his Funk show on BBC 6. It just does not get better than this. If you have not listened to this show is is better than a bucket of cotton candy with a cherry cola. That is good by the way.

I do think my tastes are beging to shift again. Once upon a time I would listen to BBC 2 almost all the time. The BBC 1 started creeping in there. Then there was the jpop thing. Now I am onto BBC 1 and BBC 6 this is crazy stuff folks. I imagine the Brits that read this might understand why that is strange. Still it is a shift none the less.

Something that i have always thought about is a soundtrack for various things. My own personal sound track is messed up to say the least.

With the Brigade now on it's own I have been thinking about what kind of soundtrack they should have. We are going to have to retool the show. I must say my time at second Baptist has given me a new love of Gospel. Even so I am not sure Gospel is quite right for the way that things are with the show. I am thinking about writing a new show. That would leave it open for what ever kind of music we want to do. Still it is something that we really need to think about. With the Army there was a certain type of music. It felt right and it was always there. If anyone has some ideas I am open to them.

Something else that I am wondering about is the soundtrack of the various character in my books. Various Character already have a soundtrack.

Brigadier Mason is mix Speed Metal and British Rock. Even thogh she is one of the good guys you get the feeling that she is capible of unspeakable evil if the situation requires it.

The newer Character Yamato Yukawa is easy she is jpop and jrock. She is a Versailles and Gackt fan with some Morning Musume and Namie Amuro thrown in there. She is adorable but also you get the feeling that she does not understand the necessity for morality.

This has led me to ponder some characters that I had not thought about.

There is Evangeline Jefferson. Now she is a time traveler who is a baseball fan. She is a huge Roberto Clemente Fan. the time that she specialised in was the late 20th century. So she is an eighties pop fan. There is a point in the story when she is listening to Curel Summer from bannanaramma.

There is her father James Booth. I am all over the place on him. I have his character wlell defined. I am just having some trouble where he should be. At the moment I have him listening to Jazz. He is also a time traveler that one used hi abilities to see BB King in a crummy hole in the wall club before he was BB King. So I know there is Jazz.

He is an uncomprimising man that has unblemished character. he and Mason are often going round and round about tactics. He is the jimminy cricket of the book on occasion. So there is that one that end. I would like to fill out his musical background. Also being a Salvation Army Officer he must play and instrument. I have established that he cannot sing. i am not sure what he should play,

The takes me to John Jefferson. I have not a clue on him. He is a black man that was raised in the US Navy by a father that was into mo town. i do have him liking Ray Charles. Still there is something wrong with you if you do not like at leaste three Ray Charles Songs. i am serious if you do not like that many Ray Charles Songs you have a character defect. By the way Mason only like two Ray Charles Songs.

He has lost his faith in the church but not God. I am thinking that he likes funk and maybe some rock and roll. I am not sure about him. In most of the stories I have been working on he is a background character. In the current story he is a young man of nineteen and and older man.

Well if you have any ideas I am up for them. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Scottish People Can Cook

I am not much of a cook. I am certainly not trained in any way. i have never even taken a class at a community center for fun. There is a certain cultural bias that states that Scottish People cannot cook. Well It is a nation that has spend a great deal of it's history on the verge of starvation. that sort of heritage does not lend itself to being wonderful with food.

Something else that i do not get is cooking shows. My wife loves them. I have watched a couple of them if I know they are making something that I might want to make. I have had an interest in Asian food recently. So I have been watch clips from Yang can Cook on the youtube. I think I watched Jeff Smith make shepard's pie before he was pulled off the air. That is about the extent of it.

My wife can watch these shows all day. i cannot get it. It is like she is watching Law & Order.

Anyway i was watching BBC America while typing on the computer. I was not paying very much attention when the show went off. I heard that there was a guy named Gordon Ramsey that was going to tell people how to run a resteraunt. It sounded like Ghingus Kahn was going to give therapeutic advice to Sigmund Freud. So I watch the first few minutes of the show expecting some kind of train wreck. And certainly there was a train wreck.

The thing that i was not exspecting was that I was going to find the show interesting. i mean I have no desire or care about cooking in the way these people appear to. Still there is a fascinating amount of drama and passion that goes into.

i suppose I always had the idea it was some kind of art. Certainly i can tell that a steak is better from a five star resteraunt than from a Waffle house. The things you learn when you are stumbling through.

Be safe out there and keep your stick onthe ice.

There are Days

I sepnt a couple hour working on section 1 of the clown handbook. being that it is the basic clowning section i think i am obsessing over it. it is also the material we will be teaching in the march training session. So I would really like to have it perfect. In going through it today i found a couple picture in the balloon portion of the text that i do not like. I mean for crimeny sake I thought I was done with them. You just want to cry sometimes.

Anyway I hope that Walt and I will have some time to take some pictures on tuesday. It would really be nice to make some progress on this bad boy at some point.

that leads us to some confusion on the juggling section tough. We are debating to some extent what should be the first thing that is juggled. My opinion is that it should always be balls. Sadly I think this opinion may be overshadowing what other people's ideas might be. a couple of the young sergeant have made a case for scarves. When they first suggested it I thought they were wrong. Still the more that i talk to other people there are many out there that like scarves. And to make it even more confusing there are those that say it should be rings.

To experiment with the ring thing I have tried team juggling rings with Sergeant Thurman. even though she had never team juggled before she almost has ring. Number one this completely shakes my faith in starting team juggling with clubs. It also give a strong argument for learning on rings. Yep I suppose this will have to seriously examined.

Well If anyone jugglers out there want to weigh in I am listening.

Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Snow

A couple of feet of snow fell on the city of Pittsburgh today. Today was mostly occupied with shoveling snow. The way that my yard is set up caused the snow to drift. So in my yard the snow was nearly waist deep. This was great fun for Sally who had never seen that much snow before.

The fall out from this much snow is that church has been consoled and the buses were not really running today. Also I lost power at my house. Well there is not much more to say about snow.

So be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

The New Flying Apparatus Bag

The Flying Apparatus bag continues to be the center of aggravation for my Universe. Sgt. Arrasin has an incredibly great idea for the Apparatus bag. Instead of having three seperate club pouches there should be one large single one. This of course required the complete redesign of the bag. It also meant that the handle had to connect with the bag at a place not on the outside edge of the bag.

On the old bag the bit of webbing that held the handle in place was simply sewn into the outside seam of the bag. This made it very strong. In the new design the handle is attached to the side wall of the interior ball pouch. With out going into diagrams in the old design all this part has to do was to keep the balls from getting into the main pocket. In the new design it has to hold half the weight of a rather heavy bag. So to make sure this worked out i doubled up the material on this price. If figured that would be enough. As you might imagine since I am writing about it I was wrong.


One bag has been made thus far to test the design. The new doubled up piece has held together alright. Sadly it is tearing away from the front and back of the bag. On the prototype bag this means that it had to be dramatically reinforced. currently I have attached a two inch ring of material around the outside of the ball pouch and another around the inside of the ball pouch. In the production models a piece of webbing will have to be sewn around this area to have the same effect without the less than elegant repair that i have made.

Well that is all the sewing related rambling that I have for the moment

On the knitting front I have been playing around with cables. Cables are something that I enjoy doing some of the time. If i have to do them for a project I find that i loose interest. I am making a green scarf for one of the church ladies. I will post a pciture when I am finished.

Well be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Demise of the Music

The Yahoo music people have been bought or taken over by someone else. In doing this they destroyed the personal radio stations that a person could set up. This has saddened my greatly.

For anyone that listened to my radio station they may have noted that I have very strange musical tastes. Actually my musical tastes are all over the place. Everything from bag rock to jpop to classica and American Rock and Roll. Heck I even like Grand Master Flash and Norman de la Joya. I bet you never thought you would see those two names in the same sentence.

And I am with the Israel Symphony in the belief that Wagner has no place in music. I mean good greif the ring operas are seventeen hour or something like that. In addition to that he kills all the characters in the first hour and they have to come back as ghosts to haunt a new batch of character. I think it was symbolic of his audiences that off themselves before the first intermission.

Well anyway I am looking for a place when I can select songs and create a new personal radio station. If anyone know of such a place please let me know. Perhaps that is something that i need to set up. If I had a mission dollars I would set up such a web site for myself. Actually I should probably buy a building for the Church that the Clown Brigade is starting. Well anyway that is another subject.

Anywho to fill the gap at the loss of my radio station I am listening to half a dozen or so other radio stations. Replacing the link to my radio station are the links to the radio stations and shows that i am listening to at the moment. I do apologies a couple of them are a bit on the glitchy side.

One of the Links is to the Charles Graig Radio show on BBC Radio. this is a great little radio show. For the sci fi junkies out there Charles Craig was Dave Lister on Red Dwarf. In his character he is a no talent hack that has no taste in music. On the BBC he has great taste in music. The other great think about his show is that he is ahead of the curve on much of the music that he plays. Some of the music that he plays never even gets a listen in the US. Well it is wonderful stuff.

Speaking of wonderful stuff there is of course BBC 1 the perennial pop music favorite. A I recall they were among the first to have online radio service. As with Charles Craig they are ahead of the curve in the new music area. Of course they also have the inside track on British rock and roll.

I have had less luck finding jpop and jrock radio stations. There was a hardcore jrock radio station that i used to listen to. They are now J1 which claims to be pure jpop music, what ever that is. Well I added them and will be giving them a listen in the next couple weeks. I have the on at the moment and I like what I am hearing thus far. If anyone know of a real jrock station let me know.

Well if anyone knows of a place that i can start a radio station like they used to had on the Yahoo Music let me know. In the mean time I will continued my search for the perfect online radio station for me.