Art Kavanagh

I can no longer claim never to have heard any of Taylor Swift’s music. A song that I now know to be “Cardigan” was playing in the supermarket earlier and I incautiously Googled the lyrics (which is how I now know it was “Cardigan”). Oh well, I always knew my innocence couldn’t last 🎶

It depends on my mood. In the past I’ve (very) occasionally loved them. More recently, I’ve done my best to avoid them. (Now that I think about it, a lot depends on the workplace.)

Roy Wood’s 20 best songs — ranked. I loved “Brontosaurus” when I was just discovering pop music; also “Fire Brigade” and “Blackberry Way”. Then “See My Baby Jive” a few years later made my schooldays more bearable. 🎶

They have a total value of plus or minus €220 million and we’re in the process now of receiving the offers on those properties.

Plus or minus €220 million is a very big range. Couldn’t he narrow it down a bit? Investors blocked from withdrawing cash from German retail property fund

GHT1CD 💿

(Small things come in big boxes)

I’ve had the cd of Herbie Hancock’s The Piano, an improvised solo piano album recorded “direct to disc” in the early 80s, for more than 20 years now and I think I’m just beginning to appreciate it 🎶 🎹

Pleased and a little surprised to see Law & Order’s Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) included in The Guardian’s list of characters whose late arrival lifted tv shows. His is the first name I thought of when I saw the headline 📺

Once again getting great enjoyment from reading Sarah Ditum’s writing about music I’m not familiar with (though in this case have at least heard of): Neil Hannon is one of the true greats of songwriting 🎶

Popular though they were as a live act, I have to say that I think Esbjörn Svensson Trio were better in the studio. I’ve been listening a lot to Live in London recently but I just played “Eighty-eight Days in My Veins” from Viaticum and it’s very nearly perfect 🎶 🎹

Yesterday’s newsletter post, mainly about Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), took me nearly all day to write, so I ended up having lunch at 8:15 pm and my “afternoon” coffee at 9:45 pm. Luckily, late coffee doesn’t seem to interfere with my sleep 📖 ☕️

An educationalist who really wanted to encourage his or her charges to read would simply allocate one afternoon a week to “reading”, offering a wide selection of titles from every age and genre, and leave the children to get on with it, having first placed them in a technology-free environment.

I never saw that BBC Panorama programme and I still somehow managed to get the impression that Trump had urged his supporters to overthrow the 2020 election result. How did that happen? It can’t have been all the BBC’s fault.

The Overspill’s Charles Arthur can’t remember how he learned to read but knows it can’t have been the “three cues” method. I’m sure I was taught using phonics. I’m lucky the school didn’t use the “whole word” approach, as I can’t, and couldn’t then, mentally store visual images of words.

Further down that same post from Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History: Cognitive dissonance tests fail to replicate!

According to the Doomsday Scoreboard, there have been over 200 failed apocalypse predictions and, uh, zero successful ones.

So far. From Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History

Squeaky shoes are so “embarrassing” that wearers have filed a lawsuit (FT so probably paywalled.) My mother used to say that if shoes squeaked it meant you hadn’t paid for them yet.

I’ve been buying pitta bread in Aldi rather than Lidl because the Aldi ones are labelled “Wholemeal” while the Lidl ones are just “Brown”. I read the ingredients list now and they’re basically the same: Aldi ones have a mixture of wholemeal and other flour. So, back to the more convenient Lidl.

I’ve just noticed that En Attendant, the 2021 album by Marcin Wasilewski Trio, was recorded in the same place (France), same month (Aug 2019) and by the same team as the Joe Lovano/Wasilewski Trio Arctic Riff (2020). So I’m guessing they recorded the trio album while waiting for JL to turn up 🎶

I was on my way into Westport for Nils Kavanagh’s album launch but turned back after 2½ Km. It’s been 10 years since I rode a bike at night. I bought new lights yesterday (€40) but the front one is meant to make me visible to others, not to illuminate the path. Too many unlit obstacles. Tant pis.

Zoë lacks [Jackson] Lamb’s physical repulsiveness, however, and she has an active sex life — though, unfortunately, not with her husband.

Unfortunately for whom, I wonder? Laura Miller, who of course has read the Zoë Boehm books, on Apple tv’s Down Cemetery Road 📺

Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History) on the decline of deviance. Why people are less weird than they (we) used to be, and why that isn’t always a good thing.

Why dating feels so uniquely hard in your forties it says here. Uniquely hard? I can’t say I’ve noticed it getting appreciably easier in the almost 20 years since I left my 40s behind.