A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
Another Myspace inanity: somebody posted a comment on one of my pictures. I’d like to reply to their post. Makes sense to post it as a comment on the same picture. So I try that. “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Well, yes, I am my own friend, but if you want me to formalise it… fair enough. I go to my home page and click “Add to Friends”. And am told “You cannot add yourself as a friend.”
Grrrr!
I’ve been having fun fiddling with Myspace these last few weeks, finding friends and musical heroes. But constantly amazed at the shoddy system and crap coding that the site runs on.
Today, while editing my Myspace profile, I spotted a new an interesting crapness about the site. I was entering my old schools, which I hadn’t managed to find before because I’d searched under London. This time I looked under “Home Counties” and there they were. But I was quite confused as to why my respective schools were listed as being in “Richmond, HC” and “Twickenham, HC” when one was actually in Surrey and the other in Middlesex. I was stumped as to what HC actually stood for until I saw it staring me in the face: of course, “Home Counties”. This is some bizarre American bastardisation related to the obsession with making every “State” into a two-letter abbreviation. And they hadn’t even got the right “State”. And this from the newly improved and supposedly localised “Myspace UK”!
As I’ve been getting in touch with lots of bands recently, through my gig photography and just the fact that I’m getting into a lot more new music, I finally took the plunge and signed up with Myspace. Actually I have two accounts: my own personal homepage and a music page for my old band, Cathy Ray.
Any readers of this blog who are also on Myspace, please add me.
Five years ago, I wrote a piece called Does Music Have a Future, which I’ve always been rather proud of.
Yesterday, a comment piece in the Guardian echoed much of what I said back then. The future has arrived!
By the way, most of the comments following that article seem to confuse the use of the term “boy band”, meaning mass-market manufactured all-encompasing pop, with “boy band” meaning either a band with boys in it, or a band making bland pop music. I don’t deny that both of the latter will continue, perhaps even thrive, but I don’t think we’ll again see a day when they dominate the music charts and push everything else to the periphery as they did for much of the 80s and 90s.
PS, another year gone and I still didn’t get around to playing my April Fool joke.
This was the “random text” part of a spam email I got today:
betray caustic wolves
brownian remittance dessert
Makes me think of my old band. Partly of course because we were once called Caustic, but also because before that we were called Gulch, and Gulch was derived from “Bromide Gulch”, a name which Ed came up with for the darkest techno act you could imagine, and bromide always makes me think of Brownian motion (no idea why), hence Brownian Desert = Bromide Gulch.
It’s funny the way the human brain works sometimes.
I never did get around to writing up my stay at the Buddhist Centre, but in summary, although I met some great people there and was glad of the break, I didn’t really take to Buddhism, or at least their take on it. For now I’m sticking with this one piece of wisdom:
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha (563BC-483BC)
Now, it is quite obvious that Microsoft Office are trying to piggyback on the new markanddan website and marketing strategy. So, what do you think… should we sue them?
Can it really be five years today since I started blogging? Seems like a lifetime longer.
