The northlondonhippy

Archive for November, 2009

Memo to self: Must try harder!

I don’t really write myself memos, that would be stu­pid and prob­a­bly a bit too neu­rotic and tight-assed even for me, but that doesn’t take away from the message.

To be fair on myself, I had a very busy Octo­ber, work­ing more last month than I have in a very long time, nearly 18 months. That’s a year and half to nor­mal people.

This is going to be one of those ram­bling posts with no set agenda or dom­i­nant topic. Its the blog­ging equiv­a­lent of singing scat. Be bop be bop wow.

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t use the word “scat” on my web­site, as it does have other mean­ings out­side of the world of jizz, I mean jazz. Too late, so let’s just for­get about it.

I’ve got a few days off, which is always wel­come and I am hop­ing to receive my very own Eigen­harp Pico. When I ordered it a cou­ple of weeks ago, they said it should ship out today!

What’s an Eigen­harp? Its a brand new elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ment, its avail­able in 2 mod­els, the Alpha, which is the pro­fes­sional, full sized ver­sion which is pricey as fuck and the Pico, its more afford­able baby brother.

Rather than have me try to explain all this to you, why don’t you CLICK HERE and check it out for your­self. Once you get there, go to The Road­show sec­tion and watch the short You Tube video. But be care­ful, you will end up want­ing one yourself.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

I have no idea what exactly I am going to do with an Eigen­harp Pico, but I am plan­ning on using it when I finally record the northlon­don­hippy album. I know, I know, I’ve threat­ened to do this before, but I feel ready to invest the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to do it now.

I’ve upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio, I’ve updated the dri­vers for my Roland UA-25 inter­face, I’ve got a decent micro­phone, a midi key­board, a Fender Tele­caster and soon my Pico. Now, if I can find some tal­ent some­where inside me, I’ll be laughing.

And don’t worry, my plan remains the same…to record 10 songs which you can down­load for free, burn onto CD, put on your iPhone or iPod and just groove out with the hippy.

To give it the full title, it will be called:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins: 10 songs about sex & death”

The seven deadly sins are my make believe band. I don’t really have a band, but if I did that’s what they would be called. And they would rock hard and be tight as fuck, but mainly they would do every­thing they could to make me look good.

I’ll prob­a­bly never really have a band.

“10 songs about sex & death” is rather self-explanatory as ulti­mately they are the only 2 things in life that really mat­ter. All the rest is just to kill time in-between.

I reckon I’ve got at least one album in me, but then I think most peo­ple do if they knew how to tap into it. Its the same with nov­els, screen­plays, what­ever. If I can tap into it, it should be fun.

And I’ll say it again, if I get one mil­lion down­loads, I’m book­ing Wem­b­ley for a con­cert. Not the Sta­dium, but the Arena. I’m not com­pletely crazy.

I won’t get a mil­lion down­loads in a mil­lion years, so I think I’m safe. And let’s face it, if a com­plete nobody like me can rack up 1 mil­lion down­loads, then some­one will wanna spon­sor and pro­mote my big Wem­b­ley gig.

Tick­ets won’t be free, but they’ll be afford­able. The real money will come from the con­ces­sion stands, tee-shirts and northlon­don­hippy sou­venirs, as long as my fac­to­ries in China can keep up with demand. If they can’t, I’ll just have another school closed and bring in more chil­dren. They work for candy.

Do you keep up with my musi­cal tastes on Last.FM? You should, because every song I play, at home or on the move, is scrob­bled to my account there. User­name is: n_londonhippy

I used to have a Last.FM wid­get here on my web­site, but it broke after a recent Word­Press update. I will get it replaced as soon as there’s a work­ing ver­sion of the plug-in again.

You might have caught that cannabis has been back in the head­lines here in the UK as the government’s chief advi­sory on drugs pol­icy was sacked for telling the truth. Well, a truth that com­pletely con­tra­dicts the gov­ern­ments own policies.

I’m not going to re-hash (see what I did there?) the whole thing now, because it hasn’t reached its con­clu­sion yet. I expect there will be some move­ment tomor­row, as the Home Sec­re­tary who sacked the chief advi­sor is meet­ing with the rem­nants of the advi­sory board to dis­cuss its future.

In a nut­shell, since 1971, the Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs has been advis­ing the UK gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No sit­ting gov­ern­ment has ever ignored the ACMD’s advice, until a cou­ple of years ago when they returned weed to Class B from Class C, against the rec­om­men­da­tion of the panel.

The only thing that changed by rein­stat­ing cannabis’s Class B sta­tus is the penalty for pos­ses­sion, which at that level is 5 years in the slam­mer for even a small amount. That’s madcrazybatshitstupid.

Polls have shown that the major­ity of peo­ple think a 5 year sen­tence for sim­ple cannabis pos­ses­sion is too much, but the same polls also say the pub­lic wanted to see cannabis returned to Class B. Guess why? Because no one explained that Class B meant 5 years. If you don’t give them all the facts, then how can your poll be accurate?

The head of the ACMD, a smart and emi­nently qual­i­fied gen­tle­man by the name of Pro­fes­sor David Nutt has refused to par­rot the govt’s lies. He has also been quite vocal in point­ing out the many flaws in the cur­rent anti­quated drug laws. Since he was sacked, he went from vocal to angry and he’s been extremely forth­right in his rather accu­rate crit­i­cisms of the government.

Two other mem­bers of the ACMD quit in protest over Nutt’s sack­ing and the rest of the mem­bers may very well do the same, if the Home Sec­re­tary can’t sort this all out. My guess is he can’t, and the British government’s drug pol­icy will descend even fur­ther into chaos.

As you can imag­ine, I’ve been fol­low­ing this one quite closely and if you fol­low me on Twit­ter, I’ve tweeted dozens of links to news sto­ries per­tain­ing to all this.

Do I think this will lead to a break through in drugs pol­icy? Nope, but I’m usu­ally a pes­simist any­way. What I do think is its brought the debate back to the fore and that’s never a bad thing. And if more peo­ple in this coun­try wake up to the truth about weed, that’s not a bad thing either.

Even­tu­ally the drug laws will change, I just hope I live long enough to see it happen.

Like I said, I’m plan­ning to do a lot more on this rather com­plex story after tomor­row. I just want to see how it all plays out.

I think I’ve ram­bled enough now, if you’ve made it this far, well done you. You are clearly some­one of excel­lent taste, a supe­rior intel­lect and noth­ing bet­ter to do to do with your free time. I think I’ll join you on that third one, its time to go veg­e­tate in front of some fine tele­vi­sual enter­tain­ment. Fam­ily Guy here I come.