I crept out of the house today. First time in a week. I felt kinda funny, went all wibbly on Sidwell Street for a moment. Not nice. But I survived, and managed to mail off some things that needed shifting, plus I took two big bagfuls of CDs to charity shops. Sharing them out as I went along from store to store, I’m sure their collective indie obscurity will bemuse many charity shoppers. They might also intrigue a couple of students. Who knows…

I also picked up my mail from the central Post Office. This included the box of Plan B’s that I said I would try and shift in Exeter (Rupert, if you want a copy, there’s one here with your name on it). Tomorrow I will try and persuade someone at Solo to take a few copies.

The new issue of Plan B looks good. I had a quick peruse at the Jeff Lewis show last week in Bristol, and I admit that on first glance I was a little perturbed by the slightly glossy paper and all the short bursts of text. On closer inspection I kind of think those work better than I feared, although it does all seem to lurch rather abrubtly from the ‘old’ CTCL layout/style of the first few features to a more fragmented style. But that’s a teething issue I guess, and I’m sure they’ll solve it very soon. Overall, I think it’s great, and no I’m not just saying that for the obvious reasons. The expanded ‘media’ section at the back is very fine indeed, and I’m well chuffed to see David O MacGowan providing ace comics commentary. Go David!

C just emailed me this. It looks really cool. So all we need is someone with enough electronic know how to fiddle with an old digital camera and wire up a chip and uh, someone to fly a kite and we’re away. Maybe it’s time to learn new skills… Actually I flew stunt kites when I was a kid. It was great fun. I have never taken apart digital cameras though, and electronics do kind of confuse me, even though I always loved looking at all the tools in my dad’s tool kit (he fixed ATM’s and computers back in the day… You know, the company he worked for – large American multinational, not IBM - used to send him out to ‘install’ extra memory on computers and all he had to do was change a few jumpers on the boards. The memory was already installed! And for this the company charged a thousand quid… So my dad would make it look like he was actually installing something and take way longer than it needed so the customers wouldn’t feel conned. He always felt bad about doing that particular job. Well, wouldn’t you? Sheesh).

Comments

[David O]

Awww,shucks Al, you made me go red!

Your review of the Pipettes is now pasted into my scrapbook - wish they'd used one of your pics though (no offence to the guy whos pic they did use)

[me]

nice to have made someone's scrapbook! and to have made someone blush :-)

i thought Jonathan's photo looked fine, though i did much prefer it before it was photoshopped and had colour effects added.