Placebo Reflections

The Mirror Trap provided very good support. Hope to see them in their own gig soon

See You Again Soon

The Mirror Trap provided very good support. Hope to see them in their own gig soon

Live music! Yeah! Following on from our trip to relive youth with James Heather and I headed for another old band, Placebo playing at the Eventum Apollo in Hammersmith. They were supported by The Mirror Trap, a band I’ve become a huge fan of since looking them up for this tour. They didn’t disappoint. Hopefully they’ll take themselves off on their own tour soon—go see them, they really can rock.

Placebo rocking the Apollo

Backlit

Placebo rocking the Apollo

I wasn’t entirely certain about Placebo before going to the gig. I’ve always been a fan, but not hugely so. I needn’t have worried, they were quite awesome, blowing the crowd away with the first few songs. And Loud Like Love is constantly getting stuck in my head.

Now the question is can we get more gigs in before Shed Seven/Inspiral Carpets in December?

Backlit

Placebo on Stage

See You Again Soon

The Mirror Trap Arrive

Placebo

Don’t Try This At Home

My parents, both physicians, were away, and, having the house to myself, I decided to explore the drug cabinet in their surgery on the ground floor for something special to celebrate my thirty-second birthday.

Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations

The wonderful Oliver Sacks basically talking about taking a shit load of drugs during the 1960s

If you must keep me on hold playing dreary music please don’t keep interrupting to play a recording saying how important my call is and apologise. Every time the music cuts out and I hear a voice I get excited I may be about to speak to a real human…

[Grrrr]

How Modern

If you hang around an industry long enough all sorts of fluff attaches. One bit of such fluff that dropped onto my desk earlier today was the latest issue of a free magazine that I’ve somehow ended up on the mailing list of. It’s the normal type of such fluffiness, filled with articles written to get a company name out there and thinly disguised adverts in between the real ads. What made me smile is given the name of the publication is “Modern Building Services” it seemed a bit of a strange choice for a cover:

A cover photograph from an issue of Modern Building Services

Cover of Modern Building Services

A cover photograph from an issue of Modern Building Services

That’s a picture of 35028 Merchant Navy Class Clan Line, preserved by the Merchant Navy Locomotive Preservation Society and frequently run as the Belmond British Pullman. It turns out, after flicking through twice to find a reference, it’s actually there as part of a small story ad for Ambirad’s Nor-ray-vac system. Cool train though.

What Colour The Sea

BBC News has a piece about railways running right next to the sea. All very fluffy and light but what really struck me were the maps. Here’s one:

A detail map from the BBC, showing sea as white and land as blue/green

What Colour The Sea?

A detail map from the BBC, showing sea as white and land as blue/green

Note how they have chosen to represent the sea as white and the land as a blue-green colour (an equal mix—a quick check gives the colour as RGB(191,222,222)). That had the effect I spent a moment or two wondering when Carlisle had been flooded! The detailed view of Carlisle to Barrow-in-Furness line actually sits alongside an image of the whole of the UK:

The UK is much easier to identify in this colour scheme than a close up detail

Green-Blue UK

The UK is much easier to identify in this colour scheme than a close up detail

In that image the familiar outline of the entire country immediately makes the land/sea divide obvious in a way which vanishes in the close up view. In short they’ve got consistency but no sense. Either that or there’s a tunnel going to Dawlish:

BBC map tricking the mind into thinking the railways have tunnelled to Dawlish

A Tunnel To Dawlish

BBC map tricking the mind into thinking the railways have tunnelled to Dawlish

A Not Very Surprising Hiccup Cure

There’s a Journal of Internal Medicine paper doing the rounds of the internet which describes the curing of hiccups using “digital rectal massage”. The thing is this shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone, even the internet. What sometimes seems another life time ago I accidentally collected hiccup cures beginning with my favourite, a spoon full of vinegar. The thing is back in 2006 that paper actually took a share of an Ig Nobel.

There’s nothing new really—we know, if you have persistent hiccups try sticking a finger up your arse; though I still think the alternative recommendation of an orgasm sounds better.