Jenny Lally

Well it is nearly that time of year again - September the 19th is almost upon us so it is time to dust off your peg leg and polly the parrot while practicing looking scary.

Yep International Speak like a pirate day is only 1 week away. This year it co-insides with the chance of me having to do jury duty. This being the case I am hoping to return verdicts of walk the plank and send him to Davey Jones. I am not sure if that means that I will be excused but you never know!

Anyhow - if you need to practice you Piratease then you should check out the official site to prepare yourself properly. Generate your pirate name and find out your role on the ship. Thar she blows

Next year I am working towards being the Captain next year

You are The Quartermaster

What’s Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

Sounded like this…….

Well ok so there is not actually any sound here but that is not what I am actually making reference to. For those of you who are familiar with the tune you will recognize it a the title of a track by Dan le Sac v’s Scroobius Pip.

As bands go they are perhaps not what you would expect. There are only two members and one of them does not play any instruments and the other plays a mac book pro. That should not put you off of listening to them though. While the backing tracks are played from Garage Band their music style is definitely not techo, and while they definitely work with the spoken word you cannot pigeon hole them as producing ‘Rap’.

if you think of more beat-nic poetry readings and open mike shows then you will get more of a gauge as to what style you can expect. If you pay attention to the lyrics you will find that there is a lot of meaning there in terms of what people go through every day- but somehow they manage to do it without coming off as being self reverential tits.

Having seen these guys in concert I can honestly say that it was one of the most enjoyable shows that I have been to. They performed in King Tuts Wah Wah hut in Glasgow and the intimate setting worked really well with their style of music. The crowd seemed to be engaged throughout and the fact that they were happy to just chat with folks created a really positive atmosphere.

Initially we picked up their music off of myspace after seeing them on one of the free telly channels but found that it was pretty hard to buy their singles as there were only a couple available. On the back of this tour they have released an album (Angles) that you can pick up from Amazon or their site and I would definitely recommend it

Anyhow - thinking about it a wee bit more has brought to mind just how much things have changed for me in terms of the new music that I listen to. With the rise of the ’social networking’ sites there is now a great deal of opportunity for non mainstream artists to get their music/writing/other creative work brought to the attention of the general populous rather than being reliant on one of the bigger radio stations/tv channels putting their work out there. Now granted some of this new wave of information may well be a pile of old guff, but it does allow for greater choice for us all in terms of what we surround ourselves with.

So with all this choice will the way that we choose our entertainment change? I think that the answer to this is not just yes but yes, and it already is. Take a look at the packages that are offered by the likes of the satellite TV companies where by you can choose what you want to see and when, effectively creating your own television channel and the gradual rise of internet TV we can see people changing the way that they use technology.

Perhaps this will also have some effect on the production companies who cancel shows because they cannot hold the viewing figures for their shows at the X Million level or perhaps it will make them worse - but either way I guess it is fair to say the times they are a changing

Don’t remember if I said before but as one of my christmas gifs I received what may well be the hardest puzzle in the world - ever.

Now I am not renowned for my patience with things that annoy or frustrate me (other than my occasionally forgetful husband for whom I have indefinite patience - probably because he puts up with me and brings me lots of cups of tea) so this would not seem like a gift you would want to give me, but it has been strangely intriguing.

The puzzle is called the Isis and it works something like this. You get a wooden box which, when you open in contains a metal sphere about the size of softball (or a medium sized grapefruit). Thats it- no instructions or anything. If you look closely at the sphere you will see that there are a number of hieroglyphs it and that these seem to be arranged in rings. If you continue to look you will see that some of these rings look like they move.

You may have seen this advertised on a number of gizmo sites like firebox, or on the Dragons Den TV show where no one wanted to invest in them. I think that they may have made a mistake in choosing to not invest, but as I did not see the show (because it makes me cringe) I don’t know.

Your goal with the strange thing is to open it and get the key that is inside, which should then allow you to travel somewhere in the UK to find some treasure. You cannot force the puzzle to open - you need to work out how to dismantle the sphere in some way. If you get really stuck then you can access a set of clues after you have registered the puzzle. Of course in order to not make it too easy the clues are encoded - and you need to work out how to decode then before you can read them. Of course there are no clues as to how to do this either. If these are not enough then you can purchase additional ones at £5 each.

After guddling around with my Isis for a couple of days - not having the faintest idea as to what I was doing - I downloaded the clue book and managed to crack some of the clues. They are not straight forward (just like everything else thus far) and tend to be quite cryptic in nature. I think I am about half way through working out how to solve the first part of this puzzle, but I may be mistaken.

If you get one of these then, if you are like me, you will wonder why the box has a deliberate curve to the top that will hold your Isis - trust me you will need it.

So time will tell if I can solve the puzzle - you never know I may work it out before they bring out the new one - though at my current rate it is unlikely. If you are interested then you can check out the site of the makers Sonic Warp who have a heap of other equally infuriating puzzles - just incase Isis is not your cup of tea.

So what do you think it would be like to be a rock star I don’t mean like someone that has won X-Factor or one of these other make me famous shows - but a real rock star. What is a rock and roll life style like and how do you manage the fame and adoration that comes with it, and more to the point what do you do when it goes.

If most of us are honest we have all pondered what it would be like to be famous in some respect, it is why we are all so interested in what the rich and famous do. We want to live vicariously through them.

Personally I have always had a real interest in the biographies of some of the well known folks that we may see on stage, on the telly or on the big screen. The things that they have done, and the people that they have worked for just intrigue me. The strange worlds that they live in are so removed from the way we real folks live, that is in some cases it is as food as reading any fantasy novel.

So anyway a colleague at work lent me a copy of the Motely Crue book Dirt. This book charts he rise and fall of one of the biggest 80’s Rock bands with a vert frank look at the way the guys lives and the things that they put themselves through.

As with all of these types of books you find out a bit about the background of all of the members of the band and what drove them to be who they are now and indeed who they were then, but rather than have this laid out neatly for each person, you get the information throughout the book. Each chapter of the book is written by a different member of the group and provides their view on what happened in any given situation. This causes some interesting conflicts for some of the tales that are told as you are presented with 2 or more completely different versions which just don’t marry up.

I have to admit that I spent a lot of the book thinking - just how are these guys still alive. When you look at all of the things they did to themselves, they really should be dead somewhere, yet they made it out. This really is a tale of egos and excess and you get to see how the band destroyed it’s self.

While you get the tales that make you go, man they were just dreadful to be around you also get the ones that make you go - how could someone survive being treated like that. There are bits of the this book that just made me laugh out loud (esp the story of Mick thinking he was dead and walking into a door), and bits that made me want to cry (the chapter Vince wrote about his daughter is one of the most awful things I have read in a long time) and you really feel like you have a better understanding of why these guys were and indeed are, the way they are.

Perhaps one of the things that stays with you in this book is a line from Tommy Lee where he talks about not being able to stand silence, and I think this is the case for a lot of the guys. When there is no one there and the fans went home - the guys did not know how to cope and found ways to numb the pain.

In a way this is a story not just of the rise and fall of a band but rather the tale of a group of young men who eventually grew up to realize that the world owed them nothing and they had to be responsible, but did it in the public eye.

If you are easily offended or shocked then this may not be the book for you as it really is no holds barred, but if you want to see how some guys, who in the end loved music managed to conquer the world for a short time while not quite killing themselves then give this a shot. Hell it’s only rock and roll but I like it!

Names are funny old things, and not just in the sense of the Billy Connolly ditty I stole the name of this post from. We all have them (names that is, not Billy Connolly) and all take them for granted. As a kid I remember that I would ponder whether it would be better to have a cool name rather than an ordinary one, and then later as I got older what would a nice second name be, if I were going to change it when I got married. These ponderings are just that, simple musings about the future.

You see names are actually pretty important. They allow us to define ourselves and link us to our family. They can provide a sense of identity and history that can be really hard to escape from. Hell when people want a new start, or want to distance themselves from their family they often change their names. Names have been used in the past to define what your job or role. Names like Butcher and Taylor were used by people who carried out those jobs (aka Jones the steam from Ivor the Engine). In the Celtic regions names were used to signify who was your sire (MacLeod meant son of Ugly - but you get the idea). In a lot of ways names are who we are, and when people were disowned a lot of the time they would loose the right to use that name.

So back to there here and now - there may come a time when you meet someone and decide that you are going to get married, and then the name question comes up again - will you or won’t you change it. This is not something that is specific to being female, I have known guys that have changed their name after they got hitched as well. Suddenly when it comes time to think about the name change, now suddenly it becomes more real - do you really want to be known as something else when you have spent x number of years being known as one thing. After all our name is something that we use to define who we are. Especially when it has been yours for all of your life.

When it came time for me to change my name I thought I would be fine with it- if for no other reason that it would be easier for other people to spell and it would be the end of the Highlander quotes from people (really there are only so many times that you can hear quotes about there being only 1). I had spent 25 years spelling out my surname to everyone who needed to write it down, and I was kinda sick of doing it. Part of the annoyance came from the fact that, no matter what I said, or how I said it; they would write down something different. I tried pretty much everything including spelling out each letter as it were some kind of code (M for mother, a for apple) and still they got it wrong. Despite all of this I felt a little separation anxiety about the whole change of name business and decided that rather than getting rid of my old name I would just add in my new surname and keep my old one as a middle name.

So anyway, all went well and I changed my name thinking that it would be nice to have a name that I would not need to spell out to everyone - I mean while MacLeod was not the easiest name for folks to spell (based on past experience) how hard could Lally be. I mean there are only 5 letters in it and three of them are L!

Guess what - it turns out that I was wrong - no one can spell Lally either - damn it!. I am still spending all my time spelling my surname out to people who seem determined to write down something that bears no resemblance to the words I am saying. This weekend was no exception - while trying to arrange an appointment it took us 3 attempts to get someone to write down our name correctly. We ended up discussing this in the car later on in the day and Rob said that this had always been an issue - folks just can’t spell it. That got us both to thinking was there a way that we could make it easier for folks to get it - other than us bellowing it’s Lally, L-A-L-L-Y you diddy.

Eventually we came up with a work around - there is a site that produces mini card call moo. Mini cards are like business cards but about half the size. You can order a box of 100 for £10 design the image you want on them and then add any text you want. If you have any images you want to put on - then they can be uploaded and used, or you can use images that they have on the site to customize the cards, and, if you really cannot be bothered you can just ask them to send you a pack of mixed designs. So now we have both ordered some of these and when someone asks me my name I can just give them one. Hell it has to be easier than the spelling process just now. Now I just need to ponder how to get it to work on the phone.