Senses working overtime #6

1 Clint Eastwood's Blues Piano 
This DVD has some brilliant moments - I love boogie piano. There's a great clip of Marcia Ball playing Red Beans and some older clips of my favourite - Pete Johnson with Albert Ammons



2  Presentation tips
This article gave me some great tips for a presentation I had to do for the staff. I was asked to share my thoughts on Twitter and Blogging at the next professional learning group meeting thing. Along the way the article led me to a fantastic Ted talk by...

3 Rory Sutherland
Rory is hilarious - if he wasn't an ad man he would have made an excellent stand up comedian. This Ted talk is well worth your time. I chortled away for a lot of the nearly 17 minutes. Aside from the jokes, he is really on the money with his thoughts on life and our perceptions.

4 San Francisco
I love San Francisco. One of our daughters lives there and our visit in 2013 for her wedding to a San Franciscan boy made all of us fall in love with SF's past charms. These photos from Life magazine are spectacular.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his iconic bookshop.

The Fabs arrive at SF airport.

5 The Arsenal

This weekend is the FA Cup final versus Aston Villa. A fitting time to remember this magic moment from the 1971 cup final win over Liverpool.

COME ON ARSENAL!!

Overtime 

Michelle Obama comes across as a very genuine person. Like the rest of the world I love how she conveys herself. This photo collection of her hugging people is awesome. I chose that one for the reactions. Sheer joy from such a simple human act. Well worth a visit!

Senses working overtimes #5

1 Paris then and now

Some stunning effects created here by juxtaposing old World War 2 photos with modern ones of Paris. Most definitely got my senses working overtime. I remember an open bus tour of Paris commentating at one stage on the bullet holes still visible in buildings. That really got me thinking! 

Again - a simple idea but very effective!

2 I love book stores

One of the best reads this week was this medium curated article on a bookstore in Japan (seen below). It made me exceedingly homesick for the Dubai Mall's Kinokuniya Book World.

Kinokuniya in the Dubai Mall

3 Eruption
These stunning photographs come from a visual essay on Volcano Fuego's eruption.

4  Everyone gotta be somewhere

This week the Stereophonic playlist has had me grooving. I love a good sinalong in the purdsmobile. Especially this one:



5 The Fabs

Anyone with a passing knowledge of me knows that when I wrote 'poster boy for Mojo's demographic' on my Twitter profile I wasn't kidding. Here's a hundred and one reasons why: the website has just launched this - The Beatles top 101 songs. They know what we like!

Overtime: I get vertigo quite easily in high buildings. The second video in this set of amazing videos of the week had my whole body churning. Watch it if you dare - you've been warned!

Peace out - Wozza

Senses working overtime #4

1 It's been another Murakami week: currently I'm in Book 3 of Murakami's 1Q84. Here's a great passage describing a peripheral character Ushikawa

The man's grey suit had countless tiny wrinkles, which made it look like an expanse of earth that had been ground down by a glacier. One flap of his white dress shirt's collar was sticking out, and the knot of his tie was contorted, as if it had twisted itself from the sheer discomfort of having to exist in that place. The suit, the shirt, and the tie were all slightly wrong in size. The pattern on his tie might have been an inept art student's impressionistic rendering of a bowl of tangled, soggy noodles. Each piece of clothing looked like something he had bought at a discount store to fill an immediate need...It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.

2 This is cool - Ed Sheeran is maybe...maybe the nicest guy in the world and he has created this video for Photograph. Tracing his evolution from his baby pictures to now is a great idea. I couldn't help think how much they reminded me of our kids videos. Nice one Ed!



3 Best read of the week outside of the wonderful 1Q84 has been an article I found on Medium about the latest Avengers movie from the Marvel comics people. I especially liked the discussion of story arcs and any article that references Joseph Campbell has got me salivating.

4/5 Been dipping into Spotify a lot this week but the Purdsmobile has also been rocking to Queen. The first two albums in particular have some wonderful prog exploration going on. Given they were finding their way there is a lot of wonderful stuff on those albums that never emerged from that point on. 

So here are two tracks - one from each album.





Overtime: Can't go past Blues Boy King this week. Let's celebrate a wonderful life with some of that sweet B.B. tone:

Senses working overtime #3

1 One of the funniest things I read this week was this article about reading and social media  

So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh,dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains. 

How can books compete?

2 Some stunning photography from Michael Shainblum

There's more to enjoy on that link if you like these.

3 If the whole world did a 5 things style post in the blogosphere, and the whole world had watched Barcelona play Bayern Munich during the week, then the whole world would have chosen the sight of Messi torturing the Germans as highlight number three in their highlights list. 

Here's some stunning description from the Guardian's Barney Ronay 

At the Camp Nou Messi scored two brilliant goals, made a third and at times yawned his way around champion opponents like a man tactfully avoiding a gaggle of overheated toddlers in a high street coffee shop. Often he took the ball and shimmied past two or three men, operating within a kind of fermata, events slowed and paused around him, and providing a reminder that he remains one of the great dribblers, master of the flip-flap, the surge, the amphetamine-crazed-millipede shift of feet.

Messi is a freak!

4 I'm a big sucker for the what if? There are a pile of them on line if you like this one at movie posters. I love the fact that they've re-imagined Zappa/ Bowie and Iggy in these roles.

5 Sounds. The thing I've had no luck shaking from my brain all week has been a track by Mumford and Sons, off Babel. Damn thing is so catchy!

Overtime: David Crosby posts some cool videos via his Twitter account. This one especially tickled my fancy: The Grateful Dead on Playboy After Dark. What a hoot!

Senses working overtime #2

1 Read this for a refreshing look at the impact of connecting with the world via the interwebs various social media outlets https://medium.com/message/nobody-famous-37790cb4d014?sectionName=suggested

"Once we realize that, a few unusual accidents aside, our social networks have the same foibles and biases as the rest of our culture, that leaves a basic question: Is there any value to any of this?
Yes. First, there is the privilege of getting to connect to an extraordinarily large group of people, and get a small window into their thoughts and desires. Hearing an unfiltered stream of people shouting their wishes into the vast expanses of the Internet has permanently made me more aware of the humanity of the strangers who tweet at me every day."

2 Sound At the moment we have Rialto channel on a special deal and I'm enjoying watching Jools Holland's Later again. Series 44! Heard this by Agnes Obell and loved it!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNsacakNkJ4




3 Sight We live in the Marvel universe. Okay - well I do anyway! My comic obsession started with a preteen attachment to The Fantastic Four, Thor, Spiderman, Sgt Fury and Tarzan. It still has its hooks in me.

All of which makes me a sucker for this mash up. Love it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXyGOecaaWg&list=PL8BDEC7368DD28E02

4 Read this - More from Murakami as he's building a picture of his character Aomame:

She had few possessions. She enjoyed reading books, but as soon as she was through with them, she would sell them to a used bookstore. She enjoyed listening to music, but was not a collector of records. She hated to see her belongings pile up. She felt guilty whenever she bought something. I don't really need this, she would tell herself... 

what did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

Sensing a theme?

5 Smell You're right - I haven't had an entry on this sense yet...but I love the smell of teen spirit and the whiff of right-here-right-now that comes from Ed Sheeran. Here he is in wondrous mode on Don't with another of my favs - John Mayer.




Overtime - For those with a mature attention span - I love Macca in this interview setting. Not your normal journalist questions and the old stories take on different twists.