Tasteful Products for Halloween

On my american travels, I was impressed by the high quality of consumer goods, so well designed for every need, including all manner of things you will never need. Here's an item designed to cater for a need I can't imagine anybody ever having.

This was on sale in August. I think Halloween is at the far end of October.

Here in britain, I'm sad to report, our retailers are learning from their american counterparts, and selling utter crap too. When I was a kid, etc... the most we ever did was to carve turnip lanterns, and tell scary stories for halloween. Pumpkins are not widely grown in my part of the world, but, mysteriously, they're turning up in baskets in the supermarket about now.

Oh.- And Halloween was one night only.

Not a season.

Peter Green: Man of the World

(Updated edit: if you came by earlier, you might have noticed the first piece of music was missing. Oops. I blame it on posting too long after bedtime.)

I'm in a bluesy sort of mood, been listening to old blues, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan...
Peter Green  founded Fleetwood Mac. He wanted to start his own band , and recruited Mick Fleetwood and John MacVie, who he'd come to know when he took over Eric Clapton's place in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers.



However, this song was almost his last before he left his own band, which later became something else altogether.
The Fleetwood Mac of "Albatross" is Peter Green's, the Fleetwood Mac of "Rumours" is altogether a different creature. Peter Green, unfortunately, was shipwrecked by LSD, he became unreliable, disappeared for days at a time, tried to give all the band's money away, and at the height of his success, left the band, and music altogether.
Recently, he's returned. He doesn't want to be a star, but he still loves the music.

From Long Ago

Curved Air were a prog-rock band of the late sixties/early seventies.
Here's lead singer Sonja Kristina singing 'Melinda (More or Less)'.

"Come Back Later, the Ship's Still Asleep"

The ship in question, back in 1942, was the atlantic liner, SS Normandie, or by then, USS AP-53 Lafayette. When the war started, Normandie was docked in New York.  Her owners were scared of the german navy, so they just tied her up and transferred their passengers to the SS Aquitania, of the British Cunard Line, whose liners continued sailing.

Eventually, when America entered the war, she was requisitioned by the U.S Navy, and work commenced to turn her from being a luxurious ocean liner to a humble troopship.  It's generally agreed that a worker with a gas cutting torch failed to use an asbestos safety curtain, and fire broke out. 

Amidst arguments about who was in charge of fire-fighting, the fire got out of control. The ship's designer told the authorities that by opening the sea-cocks he could sink her safely upright onto the mud below, but he was ignored by the 'experts'.

As a result, the watertight bulkheads were sealed, thousands of tons of firefighting water were pumped into the upper decks, and the inevitable happened. The fastest steam-turbine-electric ship ever built rolled over into the icy dock.

By the time she was righted, she was only scrap-metal, too expensive to refit.

Where Next?

"But it says we have to go into THAT door next... or is it upside down?"

The tree which shades our intrepid explorer, is Lady Anne's Yew, planted here in Conduit Court,  Skipton Castle, in 1659, to shade future visitors, and allegedly, as a symbol of Lady Anne's belief in the longevity of her castle. Yews are sacred trees, from long before christianity, they're seen as protection, of the warding away of evil. 

Back in the 1600s,  there was a bloody civil war in England. 

Skipton castle, royalist, held out in a three-year siege by Cromwell's parliamentarian army.  There followed a negotiated surrender.

The garrison was allowed to surrender the castle, and march out in full military order, whilst retaining their arms. This was significant, the defenders were not to be taken prisoner, but to be allowed to march unhindered and unmolested, to another town of their choosing, which remained in the hands of the Royalists. Many, however, acknowledged that for them, the war was over, and returned to heir homes.

Skipton was the last great castle in the north to fall. Part of the surrender treaty agreed that the parliamentary army would respect and take care of the property of Lady Anne.

Cromwell ordered that all those castles which had stood against him should be 'slighted', that is, their walls should be broken down, their power destroyed. In Skipton, however, unlike in most other castles of the north, it seemed that respect for its countess, the only woman to have defied Cromwell for so long, protected it. the roofs and upper battlements were torn off, but much of the fabric remained. Lady Anne petitioned parliament for the right to restore her castle, and was granted it, with the proviso that the roofs were not to be remade strong enough to ever again support cannon.

Those interested in this history might find it here.

More on Lady Anne Clifford.

A thought crossed my mind. Well, sometimes it happens...
Then I discover I'm not the only one to be thinking it.

Steve Jobs.

There's a plethora of outpourings of grief, and some steps toward deification. There's no doubt he was an extraordinary man, a visionary. Amongst those who are protesting about the disproportionate distribution of wealth, in Wall St and numerous cities around the U.S, there will be many who carry their ipads and iphones, who are tapping away on iconic white keyboards, devotees of the apple brand, people who see Steve Jobs as the creator of all that is good, versus Bill Gates of the 'evil' microsoft.

Well, think, good people, as you scroll through your gigabytes of itunes, Steve Jobs is toward the top end of the 1% you're protesting about. Unlike Bill Gates, he eschewed charity, and delighted, it seems, in the accumulation of wealth. Well, lets be more pointed. He delighted in the accumulation of YOUR wealth.

Muse on that as you mourn his passing.


(p.s. me? I don't own a mac, or any i-things. I find myself drawn to their good design, but repulsed by their price, their monopolistic software etc.)

More Photographs of the Castle With the Wyverns

Wyverns!

At Skipton Castle, Yorkshire.