in between

It feels as if it's time for a London picture, so here's part of the central tourist area, complete with a red bus and a few lights.

The barriers are already going up ready for New Years Eve, and Eros is completely boarded up. This year it is once more a tickets only event to get along the river for the fireworks.

mistletoe in Covent Garden

There's plenty of mistletoe hanging from the roof of Covent Garden. I recollect that Christian churches banned mistletoe because of its pagan connotations, but back in the days when I worked in a greengrocer's we used to freely give it away to customers at Christmas.

The Norse god Baldr is supposedly at the root of the mistletoe story, having been made invincible when his goddess mother made every living thing on earth swear not to harm him.

She somehow overlooked the mistletoe and in an Eastenders plot moment, trickster spirit Loki made a dagger from mistletoe wood, gave it to Baldr's blind brother and tricked him into stabbing Baldr, which killed him.

All the gods mourned Baldr the Beautiful's death and decided to make mistletoe a symbol of peace and friendship.

Festive Music Quiz

There's a chocolate yule log being mixed as I type this.

The festivities have arrived and we're fully moving into Yo-Ho-Ho.

Seasonal Greetings to all, and just for fun I have uploaded one of our Xmas music quizzes for anyone who wants to try to guess the tunes.

By way of a warning, there's probably about 50 tunes in the mix, sometimes as mash-ups. It starts slow and speeds up. The tunes and singers are mainly easy to guess and family audience friendly.

Spin that platter and pass the mince pies.

shopping reality fault

Inevitably this week has featured some grocery shopping.

The television adverts tell me how great it is all going to be, but there seemed to be a some sort of logistical glitch.

There seemed to be a surfeit of green pallets in my particular choice of vast food hall.

In fairness the staff did mainly wait quite courteously when they were pushing them around. Although it did seem surprising to need to completely re-arrange the Bucks Fizz along the underside of the freezer cabinets when the store was really quite busy. As Luther's sidekick might say "You're not just giving me busy work, are you?"

Altogether it wasn't a particularly fun experience having to dodge other shoppers, various sized trolleys and also the huge number of the wheeled green stacks.

I can understand that the brussels sprouts or glazed bombe possets needed to be replenished frequently, but it did seem odd that there were so many pallets in motion in the 'flagship' store that I visited.

We eventually ditched the expedition to this store and found another one with wider aisles and an altogether easier experience. I noticed they also had the green pallets, but theirs were collapsible when empty and seemed to need less staff to manoeuvre, despite a similarly rapid turnover of product.

And free coffee. Ahhh.

the Jessica Jones turbo sessions

My turbo cycling late this year seems to be consuming a vast quantity of TV box-sets. I've gone past my annual cycle miles target and am simply clocking a few low energy miles to keep the legs spinning. The theory goes that one should do interval training with peaks and troughs to get the most from the turbo, but I'm balancing the mince-pie season and have decided that a bit of telly may be a more sensible option. I looked today at my annual mileage which is now around 4,300 miles/6,900 kilometres so I'm not too worried about a few episodes of Jessica Jones whilst pedalling.

Marvel comics seem to be doing rather well since the Walt Disney takeover. They've taken residence in Hell's Kitchen and are pumping out some good television. The Jessica Jones series is a case in point, and one first brought to my attention by a fellow blogger trialling Netflix.

I don't know the Jessica Jones back-story and the series doesn't directly introduce it, to the extent that I watched the first episode wondering if I'd somehow missed a pilot episode. Actually, I sort of prefer that way of working nowadays. We, the viewers, have to piece things together as we go along, instead of having a long 'First Act' to explain everything.

It's a dark series, which embraces the private investigator genre, in this case with a hard-living, hard-drinking tough woman in the leading role. I think I'm supposed to also say hard-boiled when its a noir series, so there, I've done it.

This is a Netflix set, and all the episodes were issued simultaneously. I wasn't sure how many to expect, so when we got to around episode 8 I wondered how it would all end - with fortunately a further four to bring together a conclusion.

We get the dimly lit brown wood end of corridor office for Jessica. The office door is already broken at the start and although it gets fixed for a while, it's broken again by the end. Most other times it is open, in any case.

She befriends a bar owner who notices her penchant for bourbon. His bar is the kind you'd find Tom Waits sitting in with Jim Jarmusch talking about Tesla coils.

The storyline is of one utter force of evil, played by the 'British' David Tennant, who has obsessions, including one about Jessica. He starts as a shadowy form and is frequently offscreen or only partially in frame for the first part of the series, just like some of the best kinds of monsters. They've also let him sneak in a few 'Britlines' which made me chuckle because some might well be lost in translation.

There's a strong cast of characters too, including some that get 'parked' for parts of the story and then reactivated later. That's something of a soap-opera technique (the main series runner has Eastenders form) although it doesn't feel at all soapy the way it's been done, and the individuals all have sufficient characteristics that you regard them as known quantities as they re-appear.

Some could say that parts of the plot are conventional, but it's also good crowd-pleasing stuff as the nasty man does nasty things and the goodies have to figure out how to stop it. I'm tiring from the many UK procedural cop series that kill a woman in scene one so that an emotionally damaged detective and his hot female sidekick can sort it all out usually after a couple more gruesome deaths.

So I've reached the end of the Jessica Jones series. Because it is part of the Marvel galaxy (a.k.a The Marvel Cinematic Universe - really), it may mean that we don't get another one. Marvel's MCU has a road-map of their various characters and how they get together to become various supergroups like The New Avengers. I haven't watched Daredevil yet, but I assume that is also part of the same scheme - this time with a blind attorney ('Justice is blind', anyone?).

Of course, it may not go that way, with Jessica Jones acerbically rejecting a superhero costume during one of the episodes (I since learned it was the one that she was supposed to wear in later Marvel life).

So Marvel's plan is kind of working. I've watched enough to have bought into the current series and I'm going back to watch another one.

not the wrong kind of seed?

The birds around our way will treat any form of hanging feeder with disdain until this time of year.

Then, the memo arrives and they all go into holiday mode, seeking out the seeds and feeds made available in various gardens around the area.

These three goldfinches are clearly confused. They are supposed to go for the niger seeds which are in an adjacent feeder, but they've decided instead to opt for the sunflowers. The starlings, sparrows and dunnets will be most irritated.

Dun-Dun-Dun - I watch Beano Star Wars again

A few of us were chatting about the galactic movie franchise that has returned to the planet over the last few days. I'll have to quietly admit that I've struggled to watch the various Star Wars films.

I always liked the idea of the first one, with space ships a bit more grimy and used than, say, something from Kubrick's or even Star Trek's version of space. I remember Star Wars as largely a comedy and that as they added episodes they had to make up a longer back-story.

We seem to have the first 3 movies in the rashbre central on-line viewing library, although I can only really remember the first one featuring the princess with the Cinnabon hairstyle. I've probably seen the one with those big four-legged robot walking things but I mainly remember seeing them at MGM Studios in Florida.

I decided to take a quick look on-line to see what it said about the second tranche of movies (in case I wanted to complete our set and give it all a proper viewing).

They are confusingly called Episodes I-III and are the so-called Prequels. Weirdly, many of the fan comments seem to be somewhat negative...These were the first few reviews on Amazon.co.uk. I've shortened them but left in the positive bits.

• Great set to own: May the Force Be With You!! Bought the whole set - prequels and all - thought the "prequels" a bit long and sometimes boring, but the original films (i.e. 4,5,6) really great - as they always were.
• The Blu-rays are pretty good if you actually like the films though: I forgot how awful Episodes I-III really were and nostalgia made me want to watch them again. Oh God was that a mistake. The Blu-rays are pretty good if you actually like the films though. *shudder*
• A flawed attempt to rekindle the magic: George Lucas made several mistakes in filming these prequels. Firstly there is an over reliance on computer graphics. Sometimes, such as the battle at the start of Revenge Of The Sith or the factory chase in Attack Of The Clones, it feels like you are watching a computer game. The star destroyer at the star of the original Star Wars still looks like a real object, even now. The CGI is particularly dated in The Phantom Menace.
• Shocking: The few good points Darth Maul while he is in it, nice seeing the Jedi Council and more use of lightsabers but way too many bad points, wooden acting especially from a miscast Hayden Christensen, Jar Jar binks totally annoying every time he is on screen, way too much CGI and a flying R2D2 laugh out loud, roll on JJ Abrams and the force awakens.
• Moderately good action let down by some terrible script directions: i like star wars like most fans do, i have good points and one massively bad gripe which really throws the films out from episode 2 and part of 3. but right now however a small opinion is that its got good action sequences with a good plot but how they went about it is rather disappointing in some sense because i was hoping for a lot more.

Maybe the Dark Side got at the Amazon reviews? The newest movie still has masterful marketing however. I saw the original cinema sting for it back in early 2014, when it already announced December 2015 as the release date. Altogether a great ramp up time for the merchandise. This week the supermarket is loaded with Star Wars products and some of last century's space toys seem to be making a comeback. Here's the Beano Part 2.

typical midwinter scene of bumble bees and blossom

I glanced out of the window yesterday and saw bumble bees buzzing around the cherry tree and collecting nectar.

No, I thought, I'm imagining it. So today I took a picture. Look carefully and you can see the tree lights.

the weather strikes back

And far, far away on Channel 5, Luke out for a really stellar weather report.

spaced

I didn't see the televised live launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday, although I watched the docking of the capsule with the International Space Station at around 8pm UK time - at which point there were also various replays of the day's events.

The starmen then had a photo opportunity and phone calls home.

You could sense they were both exuberant but also shattered, having just done what used to be a two or three day sequence compressed into around six hours, culminating with the manual (instead of automated) docking of their capsule with the space station.

I guess this mission has better UK media coverage because of Tim Peake (pictured above), the British astronaut/cosmonaut on the journey. The sight of a Soyuz rocket at take off is striking if somehow retro - I think the original design is from the 1960s and it still somehow looks like 60's futurism. The American rocket designs are more like utility vehicles whilst the Russian designs are more sports-car.

I've been to NASA at Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and the various UK-based space exhibits. It was striking how some of the components looked so primitive, with mechanical relays and switch controls that look like they were repurposed from old gas cookers. That's not to say that systems like the Soyuz aren't reliable. Soyuz has been launching rockets at the rate of 12 per year every year since 1997.

It's interesting to note that there's another two space launches today, PSLV - TeLEOS 1 at 1230 GMT from Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, India carrying five satellites. Then there's Long March 2D - DAMPE from Jiuquan, China which is launching the Dark Matter Particle Explorer, a satellite designed to measure high-energy particles in space.

Then on the 17th December there's another Soyuz, this time from the Guiana Space Center in South America and carrying two satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation constellation. After that there's a couple of days gap before a SpaceX Falcon 9 carries Orbcomm OG2 on the 20th December at 0125-0425 GMT launched from Cape Canaveral.

Then it's back to Baikonor Cosmodrome for another Soyuz - Progress 62P which lifts off at 0844 GMT carrying the 62nd cargo delivery ship to the International Space Station.

There's another 4 launches after that before the end of December, so I guess it's a busy month. That's before another 14 launches in January and February 2016. So, even if it doesn't always feel like it, we really are in the early space age.

No, not to scale

random music predictions?

I decided to try that 'Year in Music' thing to see what it reckoned I'd been listening to this year.

Very strange.

It picked my summer season favourite as 'The Beach Boys', which seems to me to be a wild and inaccurate guess rather than anything I'd play in quantity. Then it picked my top artist as James Bay (nice enough bloke but not sure I'd put him 'top') and my top track as Dreamer by Isbells. I can't say that I recollect that last track.

At all.

So I've just listened to it on youtube, to check. I still don't remember it, even if shows as part of the soundtrack of 2007's 'Into the Wild', which was that true story movie about a guy road-tripping to the Yukon, where he accidentally ate poisoned seeds.

I usually play my 'owned' tracks with iTunes so that explains some of the skew in the results. Plus the car, which has its own iPod, which I hardly ever re-dock with the main system. 6,000 minutes a year hardly supports needing a Spotify subscription, so that's a bit of a blooper too.

Although, for part of the year, I tried that Apple Music thing before abandoning it. I still prefer Spotify for discovering new tracks and setting a mood.

Just not the one that 'year in music' has illustrated.

ableton push button delivery of alligators into swamp

Another test track (Alligators) created using the Push 2. This one is a slide guitar, drums, bass and some horns. Theoretically it is clickable on Splice, but I'm not sure if you need to be a member or if I need to release it (which I haven't). Anyway, I've included a click-through link in the picture above.

Below is another short video of me creating it, using a few quick samples dropped into the Push 2 and then played back live. The samples are all warped loops on Ableton Live 9.5 and I'm just using the keys on Push to trigger the relevant pieces, which are set to around 120 beats per minutes.

I know it doesn't sound much like a normal synth session, but it's sometimes fun to just mess around. The video is a few of the worst clips from the camera on my phone.

Next I'll have to try something that sounds more like a synthesiser.