Blond Forever

Some small changes to the blog. The blogroll categorised and aphabeticised, and Stronger Medication added, as he was nice enough to add me to his.

Some headings changed, and a new picture added - a detail from Rene Magritte's "Son of Man". Hey, I've got two degrees in art theory, so there should be something art related.

Also, the first four entries were deleted - once I figured out how. Blogger doesn't let you list more than the most recent 300 entries in the edit/delete view, so to delete earlier posts, you have to view them, make a note of some key words, use the search facility in the edit/delete view to find them, and then delete.

I originally set up this blog as a place for philosophical musings, but it quickly became something less exhaunted but hopefully more readable. The first four posts were somewhat abstruse notes on formal and dialectical logic. They were unreadable to the novice and obvious to everyone else, plus they didn't fit with the rest of the blog.

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My hair grows pretty fast, and it's several weeks since I bleached it, so it's now dark brown with pale tips. Most bleached queens have the problem of dark roots - I have the exact opposite problem. So, I bought some cheap hair staining cream, to turn my pale bits dark again. And the result is...exactly as blond as before.

On a related note, mother doesn't like being grey and black, so got a peroxide and colourant kit to go a subdued red. The result was a wonderful firey orange. Very punky and visible a mile away. One more colourant later, and she's a kind of brown russet. Exactly the same colour as Dino, our dog.

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There's always something. Something that goes wrong just when you thought all the problems were ironed out and you really need everything, just this once, to go smoothly.

Apart from being a general description of life, that applies especially to making music with computers. Today I've had to rejuggle all the guitar sounds because, although individually they all sounded great, when played together they melted into audio sludge.

In the end, it wasn't just the guitar sounds that clashed - it was that there were too many guitars. By taking out the "supplementary" strummed rhythm altogether, the song became a good old fashioned ensemble of drums, bass, rhythm guitar, lead solo guitar and vocals.

And the moral of that story is: Just because you like to be adventurous and experimental, don't be different for the sake of it. There's a difference between using cliches because they're useful in the circumstance, and using cliches because you're so buttock clenchingly banal you can't think of anything else.

Later on, one of the very few plugins that I use on almost every track - a harmonic exciter for mastering - mysteriously stopped being recognised by the mixing program. After reinstalling it and the mixer a few times, it started working again equally mysteriously. I'm afraid to change anything else now, in case whatever I did to make it work gets undone.

Oh yes, and my singing was rubbish when I recorded it.

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One of the many reasons I want to lose weight and get healthy is I think it will improve my singing. Less fat taking up space inside the abdomen, so more space for the lungs to work, right? Not getting out of breath climbing stairs means better breath control, so better voice control. I suppose.

The most compelling reason though is that I want shallow people who only want to have sex with thin muscular types to have sex with me. There's the small detail that I only want to have sex with people who aren't shallow, but there's a saying about beggers and choosers. Or else I haven't quite thought it through.

However, I am losing weight! Partly as a result of intermittantly sticking to Peter Kitson's dietry advice of "Eat small meals, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y". And partly through being too broke to binge on chocolate.

Unless I'm just sweating it all out, of course.

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Yes, the weather is cooler - slightly. And less humid - slightly. And from what I hear, this is true of most of the western world. Attributing it to "global warming" is just as vacuous as saying it's "a blip". The former is simplistic, the latter meaningless.

I don't know what constellation of variables has given us temperatures elevated so much for so long over such a wide area. I just know it's a little bit freakish, and rather uncomfortable.