Patience.org

The BBC is a wonderful thing and anybody who thinks otherwise is just plain wrong. So there.

Anyway it’s just unveiled a search engine called InFax that can search programme information going back to the 1920s about most programmes aired on the BBC. It doesn’t let you watch the programmes, it just shows you the metadata about them, for now at least.

It’s funny how some programmes stick in your mind when you least expect them to. For example, I have long remembed a programme with a title that ended “….loves Los Angeles,” about a British architecture professor driving around LA describing why he loved it so much. I remember it being aired because he had died recently. But I could never recall his name, or that of the programme.
But I recall watching it one early summer night and finding it so engrossing that I stayed in to watch it all, making myself late to go and meet my mate Geoff in Putney as a result – I even recall walking the couple of miles there to do so as it was such a nice evening, this making myself later still. Why I didn’t tape it, who knows?

Anyway, one search in the InFax thing reveals that programme to have been a 1972 documentary called “Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles”. It shows that it was aired on May 1 1988, and Wikipedia tells me that he did indeed die in 1988, along with a host of other things about him.

Makes me think, in the future are we going to (be able to) forget anything? Or will it just be a case of knowing how to ask the right question in the right place? Or, er, something.

Anyway, thanks BBC for ending that 18-year quest to find out what that programme was that so interested me that evening back in the ’80s.

Pictures from our recent trip to Lancaster, PA and a trip on the Strasburg railroad, an authentic steam railway dating from 1832 which was great fun and comes highly recommended.

I’ll put some more of the Lancaster area and the railroad up shortly. Away from the Amish cash-in – my favorite store was called ‘Amish Stuff Etc’ – the countryside is beautiful and unspoilt.
There’s also some of them on the roof of our building. All in the April 06 album here, and as usual if you need a password, email us.

While that title might sound like the name of a British pub, it’s more to do with what we saw in Florida last month.

We’ve seen snakes (well one at a time anyway) most times we’re down there on Longboat Key and this time we had quite a close run in with this fella. In fact it might be the same one each time as we usually see in him/her (who knows?) in roughly the same place.

And the eagle’s nest that’s been there a while yielded two offspring in January, which as of late March couldn’t yet fly, but could walk out of the nest onto a branch, usually under the watchful eye of Mum and/or Dad. My lack of ornothological smarts prevents me from determining which is which.

Two years on from his last effort, it’s time to dig up that old truism – there is nobody quite like Morrissey.

And he’s lost nothing and gained quite a lot in those two years judging from his latest effort, which is spectacularly good and nicely threaded through with references to Rome, where he recorded it.

I mean, from the mouth of anyone else, the following might sound crude:

There are explosive kegs
between my legs
dear God please help me