How’s everybody holding up?

Yes, if you’re from the Western continent it’s easy to mistake our British d for a t (we pronounce both on the teeth as you’d expect, but with t emphatically unvoiced compared to our voiced d, except for the countless exceptions including the glottal stop (wha’onearf!) and the unvoiced trailing d (we’re fuckt.)

Alan is a great natural mimic. His good natured endurance of Stephen Fry’s endless barbs was a wonder to behold. He played the clown. I haven’t watched QI much in recent years but I gather that Fry has moved on.

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Fry actually took over “Gadget Man” now that Richard Ayoade has moved on from it. He’s grown a goatee, his hair’s grown out and he dresses in a barn coat. He did a bar games bit with Jeremy Clarkson among others that have made it to the youTubes.

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Jeremy Clarkson’s name is a far more damning insult than toilet traitor could ever be.

“Let us speak of more pleasant times. Entrate pure. I part my threshold.” -Andrew Wells

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And here is Neve (the greyhound in my avatar) doing one of the healthiest things you can do in Britain now: taking a stroll on the beach.

Good exercise for me, too. With Coronavirus, we’ll all need as much lung capacity as we can muster. The easterly wind today is icy cold but full of oxygen.

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I love me a greyhound!

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What I forgot to say is that I very nearly didn’t have a phone with which to take and post photos. Last night I began a regime of daily cleaning of high risk personal items, in order to minimise exposure to viruses. In my enthusiasm I managed to get water somewhere inside the case, whereupon it shut down and played dead for eight hours.

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30 day lockdown starts Tuesday here in Kansas City Missouri. Good luck everyone, if you get desperate watch Big Trouble in Little China.

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My glee is somewhat shared by the rest of my family. We’ve taken to referring to Coronavirus as The Event. The announcement of the mandatory closure of restaurants and pubs on Friday was greeted by the statement “pubs are now pre-Event.” We speculate about what future generations, solitary and subterranean, will make of pre-Event films.

We’re adjusting to the strong possibility that, for some of us advanced in years, however healthy and strong, death may be days away. Life is never more sweet than when it’s lived under such a dark shadow. Well, at least we worry less about cancer, heart disease and the terrifying decline of Alzheimer’s Disease.

A topical song for these times, about post-Event life, by David Bowie.

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“The Event” like Mitchell and Webb’s quiz show? That was classic. There was another of their animated red button shorts where they suggest that you “…remember, let your children die first. Your skills and knowledge will be valuable in the world to come. Children are stupid and have little to offer.” My wife and I took a lot of pleasure in that line.
EDIT: OMG this thread got so long I didn’t even remember that I’d posted that! I blame the circumstances. I can barely put two lines of code together in an hour at work lately.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSDuWytSPI

I have a 2 monitor setup in my studio at the house. I have had this live feed on one for a few days and I have to say its good for the mind to be distracted by such things. Really fun to just sit and play synths to them just swimming around, live improv soundtrack…enjoy.

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I work from home so no change on that front for me. It’s been interesting how slow Australia has been to take action but now the changes are coming fast. So many are acting like it’s someone else’s problem (the old, Chinese or its just a big over reaction). Our PM seems to have stopped dithering about now so maybe people will start to change.

Social media seems full of crazy ideas. I’m going to stop looking at it as discovering that people you know hold views or porport theories (I use the world loosely, “fiction” or “delusion” is more apt), is rather disheartening.

Anyway… plenty of little projects to do. Integrating the modular into my unfinished half recorded songs is the main one. I will need to start singing again too. Don’t know if I can still do it.

I’m thinking the main thing is take one day at a time. Enjoy the good things, watch the birds in the garden. Look out for your neighbors, especially the old ones. Not hanker after the end, it might be a while, not 2 weeks and then back to normal. You drive yourself mad if you live like that.

Hope everyone else is OK.

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Normaly on a sunday I would go to the “Car Boot Sales” at 7Am, buy interesting stuff to flog on and make a few £££… But that, like the local auction room have shut down. So that revenue stream has dried up but I still have my workshop to pay out on… But it’s just a Sideline…

I was going to get my Escort Cabriolet MOT’d and ready to sell at the first sign of a warm sunny day… But I think buyers priorities have changed. Same goes for my RS225 Megane…

I am picking up a couple of cheap synths on ebay though…

And in regards to the Auctions, well when they do open there will be lots of stock and some of the regular buyers may not be going anymore.

Spent the day trying to get DMX receiver working on a Duino… Frustratingly no success. Had it all working years ago… It’s for a project for my son.

And then we spent some time putting some electrics for lighting, winch, beacon, etc… On my van…

Off to work tomorow… I am working out of our Disaster Recovery Site… A basement in one of our other buildings. I think there is only 4-5 other staff going in to that site and there’s 10+ rooms so we won’t see each other…

Rob

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I am lucky in that regard too. one of the houses we are working on is empty [ 3 baths and kitchen, gut and replace ] so I will have work for a few weeks as long as I stay healthy. take care and be safe everyone and synth on…

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Bowie sounded like a great listen , so I put Ziggy Stardust . hhmmm kind of an apocalyptic album . maybe not the cheeriest album , but dam good I am going to listen to the whole thing anyways …

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Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too. The first Bowie apocalypse song I usually think of is “Five Years.” So that’s what I’m listening too now. It’s not all gloom and doom though. There are a couple right up tunes on there. Star, Star Man, Soul Love, Lady Stardust-none of those make you feel like taking a dirt nap, do they? They really oughtn’t.

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yeah I guess I did form that opinion on the first couple songs lol . now its time for future legend and diamond dogs !

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Coincidentally, I don’t listen to Bowie much, but did listen to covers of a couple of his songs, among others, today in this concert video:

Definitely not apocalyptic gloom and doom.

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Perhaps not apocalyptic, but in terms of isolation it’s hard to beat Space Oddity :rofl:

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Well after 3 days working out of our Disaster Recovery site, we “I.T.” were told to all work from home…

1St thing this morning I was working off the slab of hardwood worktop, on a keyboard stand.

After finding it a bit unstable I got some scrap CLS timbre and lashed together a better solution

We are basically just running essential work now, so it’s a little quite.

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Quite well at times… got sent over from Patreon, finally mostly got over my fear of social networking… except for Facebook…

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