Observations from a Hill

Pictured, a rather old set of dominoes, still housed in their tinplate box, in lovely nick. I really can't remember how I came to have them, but there you go. As far as I can tell - knowing full well that the brand pre-dates my seventy-plus years - that this was a cheap line of cigarettes by W.D & H.O Wills sometime around the 1930s. That's as much as I know. What I do know, though, is that dominoes, like darts, bar billiards and cribbage, used to be the staples of pub games when I started frequenting the many ale-houses of Birmingham and the Black Country back in my youth.Though I almost never play any of these games any more - no-one else seems particularly interested to partake of these pastimes - I always liked a game of crib, darts or dommies, back in the day. In fact, one of the few things - alongside jazz - that my late father-in-law and I bonded over was a game of dominoes whilst consuming a pint or three of decent ale. It's a deceptively simple game that many w...

Reading a short piece in the latest US edition of Wired that dropped in the mail today, about COBOL [the ancient programming language that still occupies the bulk of extant working computer code on planet earth], I was struck by the tone of the argument - echoing a not particularly recent sentiment, either - that COBOL is essentially the spawn of the devil. The analogy used is with asbestos: at once ubiquitous and as dangerous as hell and difficult to eradicate, to boot. Well, yes, this is indeed the case: COBOL is pretty much still at the heart of mainframe business, banking and government administration computer systems to this day, and yes, the numbers of competent individuals left to deal with its many-fold exigencies [blog posts passim] are few and far between. However, whilst the piece outlines the historical and pragmatic expediencies that led to its widespread adoption by governments and agencies worldwide in the first place, its demonising of the COBOL language itself [and in ...

I caught a glimpse of some [YouTube?] short that Jane was watching this morning which was about how the political left - in this case particularly The Labour Party in government - needs to double down on its historically traditional socialist roots and address the fundamental inequalities in our society. No argument there as far as I'm concerned: we have gone so far down the rabbit hole of Neo-Narcissist economic theories that a good dose of plain old socialist thinking would definitely not go amiss. Class inequality is still unfortunately a very real thing, albeit cast from a much different mould than it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when notions of land ownership inherited via the 'divine right of Kings'; the 'gifts' of monarchs to their faithful of great swathes of the commons, held sway. A system of divided heritage between the 'great & the good' and the hoi polloi, where land ownership lorded it over the general population...

... the Mercury Arc Rectifier. Logically I should be posting a foodie piece as I've just been binge-watching some YouTube of some pretty impressive cooks making some equally impressive food. If you've been cooking as long as I have - nearly half-a-bloody-century [where does the time go?] - you know instinctively when someone is cooking up a culinary storm even on video. But I won't post cooking stuff until I've tried some of these recipes for myself: then I'll put something up. So, apropos of something I came across earlier today - on Pinterest [groan, I know...] - I decided that my topic for tonight's short [I'm hungry now] post would be the extraordinary if almost completely obsolete Mercury Arc Rectifier. Interesting, no? To most people I guess most definitely no, as I would figure that most people would not know what any sort of 'rectifier' was in the first place, let alone the decidedly spooky and slightly scary looking piece of apparatus pictur...

I've mentioned before how, as a Brummie growing up in the sixties and seventies, I came to grow fond of Brutalist and functionalist architecture in most of its forms - the now listed New Street Station signal box is still moot as far as I'm concerned, but I think that is more a question of location and context rather architectural quality, and as it and I have aged together, I'm more inclined to look at it in a more favourable light these days. I was inordinately fond of the [old] New Library which sadly met its demise a few years ago to be replaced by what strikes me as a slightly fussy building, at least from the exterior. Having said that, I really loved the Victorian library that the [old] New Library replaced: it was truly the absolute exemplar of "library-ness", and everything a card catalogue-loving geek such as myself ever wanted, with its multiple levels of shelves interconnected by cast iron walkways, accessed by beautiful, ornate cast iron spiral stairc...

There's a piece in this weekend's FT 'Opinion' which caught my eye just now, about that very modern phenomenon of not owning one's music collection any more. And by that I mean streaming: as with all other subscription-based listen or watch on demand services, you only get access to the stuff you curate into your playlist for as long as your direct debit holds good. As soon as you default on that payment, for whatever reason, you lose your stuff to back whence it came. As James Max observes in his piece, '... when it comes to the music that actually matters to me, the albums I return to, the ones that reward proper listening, I want something permanent. Something that doesn't disappear because a licensing deal in California wobbled... ' He has now set about capitalising on the resurgence of vinyl record popularity and production by buying up a new collection to fill the void left by the vacuum of streaming non-ownership. I have to say I concur and wholeh...