Tony Blews

I’m not overly impressed by the Olympic Games, nor by the World Cup. I’m even less impressed with our hosting of said Running About A Field Games and our national attempts to host the World Cup Of Kicking A Pig’s Bladder About.

Hence my creation of the Facebook group “We didn’t want to host the Olympics and we don’t want to host the World Cup”.

Well, actually, thats not the real reason I made it. Really, I want to see how many sheeple join it. Considering 387 people pledged this year to talk like Jeremy Clarkson for a day, I have high hopes for this one. (4000+ for the year before, but that event seems to have been deleted.)

Oh dear, The Sun must be at the barrel scraping stage if they fall for lame rubbish such as this:

(See the story at http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2960673/Ghostly-figure-of-a-weeping-girl-in-mirror-of-hotel-room.html)

This little girl gets about a bit. Sometimes she appears in kitchen door glass (http://www.ghostsandstories.com/little-girl-ghost.html).

But this is hardly surprising considering this iPhone App: http://www.appstorehq.com/ghostcapture-iphone-79452/app

But it isn’t just the outrageous fakery that annoys me. Just read the story for all the signs of Sun Bullshit:

• Unidentified guests
• Unidentified spokesman
• Random words in BOLD CAPITALS

Honestly, if they want some made-up bullshit they should contact me. A copy of my CV should proove fictional enough for them.

The time, as I type this, is 04:33 BST. The date is April 1st, 2010. I’ve just taken a look down my road in Streetview, and its all gone 3D. Viz:

Click for bigger

You can, of course, go and look on Google Maps.

I don’t have any 3D glasses to hand to check to see what the scene looks like through them, but it would be cool and not just an April Fool prank.

Of course Google have been known to release real things on April 1st, so i’ll not say any more on the matter until tomorrow. Or probably th 3rd, just to be safe.

Once again, I’ve bought a Ukulele. This one came from Amazon and cost me £13.95. Here it is sitting on the horrible sofa, next to one of my older ones. The new one is the purple one on the left.

And quite a lovely little thing it is too. Theres nary a blemish on it’s finish, and it has been holding it’s tuning. This is mainly due to having proper guitar heads with worm-screws, not just the usual tat you seem to find on ukuleles.

I recommend you go and buy one. Now!

Now this post is entitled “Adventures in Ukulele Tuning”, not “Buy this Ukulele and earn me a few pennies”, so what is this tuning business about?

Well, usually a ukulele is tuned GCEA (C tuning) or ADF#B (D tuning), and I already have one for each. This new little purple bugger was bought solely for the purpose of stringing it DGBE (G tuning), in a manner similar to the high four strings of a guitar (you know, the 4 closest to the ground, yet highest in pitch).

It would seem from the outset that new strings are in order, however this is my botch-job workaround:

Take the middle two strings of the current (GCEA) tuning, and re-use them as the top two strings of the new tuning (DGBE).  i.e. the C and E strings are now doing service as the B and E strings. The B is sounding a little dull, but it’ll do for now.

Get the old broken nylon-strung acoustic out of the wardrobe. The old G string from that will be pressed into service as the new G string. Sure it sounds a little dull, but it’ll do for now (again).

Finally, take the B string from the old acoustic and use that as the D string.

This will all do as a stop-gap measure until I can be bothered to get off my arse and down to the music shop to buy the proper strings. More to follow, at a later date…

I’ve said it before: “I do not own a television”. I have no need of one, I can watch DVDs on my computer. And, having recently bought and re-watched the 1985 BBC series Edge of Darkness,  I will probably never need to buy one again.

It seems to me that nothing as good will ever be made, and that our future TV viewing will consist of nothing but shite reality programmes and game shows.

So do yourself a favour and order it now. And do me a favour by earning me a few pennies by using this handy link: