Unable
Greetings,
New Year, new sletter.
I am especially motivated by the fact that Jan 1 fell on a Monday this year. New beginnings! I love all that stuff. I am easily fooled by ceremony.
Dame Caroline Harriet Haslett was the only woman on the twenty-person committee that created the specification for the uniquely solid and brilliant British plug. Her wikipedia entry is full of resoundingly named organisations like the Womanpower Committee and the British Electricity Authority. The latter named one of it ships after her. She "took a personal interest in the collier and its crew and her photograph hung in the officers' mess. For her Christmas card in 1952 she commissioned a drawing of the ship lying at the wharf off Battersea Power Station by Mrs JP Gibson whose drawing was so good that it was remarked that 'you could almost smell the mud!'"
Listen to this. Form an album called Ulaan by Enji. Jazz meets Mongolian folk with gorgeous bass clarinet. Fantastic. (Youtube, bandcamp) Also, good top. Miyake?
There's audio of the radio conversation with air traffic control when Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III was forced to land his plane in the Hudson river. At one point, when asked if he can make the runway, he just says 'unable'. It's so efficient, phlegmatic and yet polite, that I can't get it out of my head. Where it sits on a shelf not far from 'I would prefer not to'.
PROMOTIONAL NEWS
Interesting returns. Wednesday 15th of May. Tickets. More details soon.
Oh, also, because Denise said she liked it, 41233 is back.
SELF-PROMOTIONAL NEWS
I ended the year mildly depressed about my musical career. I've been releasing a track a month for more than two years now and have only managed to attract about 60 streams on Spotify. But then I remembered that I'm doing it for me, not you, so if you don't listen, so be it. And then I did a new track, inspired by my favourite lunar phenomenon. Full Cold Moon. (Spotify. Jam.coop.)
2024! Here we go again.
(There are 940 of you. Ashmolean Parchment AN 1981.940 contains a Coptic male homosexual love spell written in Hermopolitan dialect. It is held and preserved at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.)