Leamington Spa has a brand new live music venue called the Assembly. It’s a beautiful Art Deco building, and I try to go to as many concerts as possible. Recently I bought tickets for ‘Gong’. I had never heard of them before, but I liked their description as “Music for Pothead Pixies”.

Gong were great. The music was really spacey as promised, and the concert had a lovely feel-good party atmosphere. At one point the lead singer of Gong came on stage with a giant pixie hat on his head. It was very funny.
 
Gong reminded me of another ‘new group’ (they have actually been around since the 1970’s), I discovered at the Assembly; ‘Enid’, though Enid had a more classical music base, whereas Gong were firmly into progressive rock. 

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I go to the cinema regularly and one of the few adverts I enjoy are the series for Orange Wednesday. They involve famous actors/actresses being interviewed for a film role. The actors are always deadly serious and want high-profile Oscar winning roles.

The Interviewers are only interested in getting the word ‘Orange’ and ‘mobile phones’ into the script as often as possible, no matter how inappropriate or even historically inaccurate to the film. The advert usually ends with the actor storming out of the interview room. They are funny adverts.

My position on the Death Penalty is clear; I’m against it.

Although I’m an atheist, I believe all human life is ’sacred’, mainly on the atheistic belief that this life is all we have, so we should preserve it for as long as possible.

Interestingly in the UK ,whenever a poll is conducted on the reintroduction of the death penalty, a majority of the British public indicate they are in favour.

Last week I watched a fascinating TV ‘mockumentary’ on “The Execution of Gary Glitter”, where an alternative Britain has reintroduced the Death Penalty for paedophillia. In this parallel world, a referendum was held after the shocking Soham child murders by Ian Huntley in 2002.

The late Jack Kirby is an artist and writer who  has been associated with some of the best comics in the superhero genre, primarily with Marvel.

He was a loyal, and more importantly prolific, lieutenant to Marvel’s editor Stan Lee. Sometimes his artistic quality slipped when he was simply drawing too many comics, but he was always a superb draughtsman and had an excellent eye for dramatic action sequences.
 

When Kirby had the time he could come up with some stunning visuals. One of my favourite comic covers is Fantastic Four # 72 which introduces a new character ‘The Silver Surfer’ .

Last night I enjoyed the best film I have seen for a long time. The Fantastic Mr Fox is a kids film based on a Roald Dahl book.

I’m too old to have read Roald Dahl, and I have no children, (so I didn’t catch the book second time around). But I did get the film references that were littered thoughout.

The film’s main influence was Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’. It had the same titled episode format, and the same dramatic rapid drum music, for the action sequences.

I have been shortsighted since the age of 14. I knew I had a problem when I could no longer sit at the back of the class – I couldn’t see the blackboard.

When I was 17 I crashed my scooter twice. My Mother gave me two bits of advice, get some glasses and buy a car! She thought I might be safer on four wheels.

Wearing glasses made a big difference. When I walked out of the opticians with my first pair, I was amazed that the walls had a patterned wallpaper! I thought it was just a blurry plain colour.

John Lennon was always trying to capture the moment of artistic creation. His idea was to go into a studio with a song, rehearse it and record a final version, all within 24 hours.

This appealed to the lazy part of his nature, but it was also a reaction against the laborious studio work that the Beatles did with George Martin, after they finished live touring.

The first time Lennon tried this was during the recording of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. The Beatles had ignored this film project at first, but when they saw early rushes of the surreal cartoon, they realised how good it was and wanted to contribute some new songs.

Tempo runs are really simple speed workouts. Just warm-up, run at a challenging steady pace, and cool down. They are also called lactate, anaerobic, or fatigue threshold runs.

When you go above your threshold, lactic acid builds up, breathing becomes laboured, form gets ragged, and muscles tense and tighten as fatigue sets in. RESULT: You’re forced to slow down.

With tempo runs, you train close to your threshold without exceeding it. As a RESULT, you’ll raise it, enabling you to race faster and further before fatigue sets in. Tempo runs offer many advantages;

As if in answer to my last post about Blogs, I have just sold my first painting to a bloke in Los Angeles.

One slight problem is that I no longer have it! Mandy Allen has it in her Art Gallery. I didn’t realise Internet Marketing could be so powerful, and just assumed that hardly anyone was looking at the website. I have now taken all the Paypal buttons off www.popartoilpaintings.com

Changing the website instantly brings me back nicely to another blog post of mine….Web Design Made Easy. X-Site Pro has really transformed my business prospects. I can’t recommend it highly enough, it’s the best £150 I have spent in the whole field of Internet Marketing, (and I have spent around £7,000)!