Pete Ashton’s Blog

Heritage Corner

I’m a bit ambivalent about the Blue Plaque scheme whereby buildings are marked according to what notable person from history lived in them. There’s something rather superficial about them, especially when the original building has long been demolished. That said, some nice patterns do emerge, even if they don’t really mean anything. Take for instance William Hutton’s plaque. He opened a bookshop in Birmingham in 1750. Where his house stood is now the location of High Street Waterstone’s branch. Which is, y’know, interesting in a psycho-geographical echoey kinda way.

Still, it’s no doubt a good thing to bring the history of the city to the surface and even if these plaques don’t say much on their own they do build an awareness of what has been. For more information the Birmingham Civic Society runs the local scheme and has a big list while BirminghamNet has a photo gallery.

Also noted: In a Previous Life is a neat thread that’s developed on the Birmingham Flickr group where members research the history of buildings in the city.

Wheel News

According to icBirmingham the recently departed wheel of Broad Street is now overlooking the amusingly similarly named Broad Beach in Brisbane, Australia. Here’s a photo:

Also of note from that article is that Broad Street is know as “Birmingham’s Golden Mile” which will come as news to those who call it a “Boschian Fleshpot of Despair”.

BiNS Orgy

Jon Bounds of Birmingham: It’s Not Shit has had a productive couple of weeks. His review of the year is a must read and the Brummie of the Year award went to Jason Furnell, a cricketer by all accounts, with Danny Reddington of the recently closed Reddington Rare Records came in second.

Brum Blogwatch

Some local blogs new on my radar:

Pete Lewis “a research student, photographer, skier, free software advocate, balti-eater and aiming-to-be all-round friendly guy, living in Harborne”

Brum Project isn’t about the city per se but stands for Birmingham Re-Usable Materials and is connected with Birmingham Uni’s Information Services department. So pretty niche then.

The Wireless is Andrew Dubber’s (of New Music Strategies) music blog. Currently he’s running down his top 30 albums of the year.

Antonio Gould is a new media consultant pushing the Long Tail ethos and social software usage in that area.

The Deplorable Word is Tom Martin’s blog that I’ve been following for a while so it’s not really new to me. Might be new to you though. Primary focus is interactive media stuff but strays into other things, as you do.

News News

Trinity Mirror are trying to sell all their Midlands-based titles including local behemoths the Post and Mail. A leakage of revenue to online advertising is blamed. The fact that they’re shit newspapers isn’t mentioned. I’ve got a case of the schadenfreudes.

This has been an edition of the Brum Blog. Click on that link for the archives.

If you have news, links or whathaveyou that might be relevant for this blog, email me using the address in the top corner of this page.

This morning, as we surveyed the start of what looks to be a significantly extended period of fog, Andy asked me if I knew what the difference was between fog and mist was. Pausing for a moment I had to conclude that I didn’t and had never really considered the possibility that they were distinct things. After some random speculation that fog was very low clouds while mist, um, probably wasn’t wasn’t I said I’d look it up and get back to him.

In a satisfyingly long entry Wikipedia confirms that fog is “a cloud in contact with the ground”. However, the entry for mist is somewhat on the scrappy side and, alongside defining it as “a phenomenon of small droplets suspended in air”, states that “the only difference between mist and fog is visibility”. The implication is that mist can be created from a number of sources, such as a fine spray of water from a hose or steam from a sauna whereas fog can only be formed as clouds are formed, in other words by the weather.

So, to summarise…

If it’s a real pea souper and you can’t see shit, it’s foggy.

If there’s a lot of moisture in the air but you can still see a reasonable distance, it’s misty.

It can be misty if there aren’t any clouds in the air should you be in an environment where cold air is warming up, ie at dawn. Or standing next to a boiling kettle in a cold room.

Mist can be caused by low hanging clouds but they’ll be really wimpy ones. If they’ve got any substance to them of worth then it’ll be fog.

You’re welcome.

Bournville, December 17th

Cotteridge, 16th December

Digbeth, December 9th

I’ve been letting Last.FM track my music habits since October 2004 which is a hell of a long time in internet years. (Actually, thinking about it, you don’t see people making that net-time-compression comment much these days. Maybe things have stabilized. Or maybe the real world just caught up.)

I never really used the service but I figured it might come in useful one day and the wonderfully names Scrobbler wasn’t intrusive as it sat there feeding the stats. Now Last.FM is getting more useful and might have reached some kind of tipping point thanks, no doubt, to having this incredibly rich data set to play with. Their new Events recommendation service, based on your listening habits and those of your friends, is really impressive. This is the sort of thing web services should be doing once they’ve gathered a bunch of user data - Amazon do it well but where’s the recommendation stuff on Flickr or MySpace? It should be a no-brainer.

However, there is a quirk in my Last.fm stuff. I listen to music on random (or as we now call it “shuffle”) most of the time. This is drawn from a relatively small playlist containing a little under 4,000 tracks that I built for the 20 Gig iPod I’ve been borrowing this year. (If you’re interested my audio library has 16,533 items that will play for 54 days weighing 84.25 GB. And I thinned it down recently…) So when I play an album by a single artist a few times it really spikes on Last.fm.

Here are my “Top Artists” at the time of writing with the number of times I’ve listened to them in brackets:

1: The Magnetic Fields (926)
2: The Flaming Lips (666)
3: The Mountain Goats (642)
4: Pixies (603)
5: Misty’s Big Adventure (552)
6: The Kleptones (501)
7: Bright Eyes (489)
8: The Beatles (347)
9: Jeffrey Lewis (316)
10: The Decemberists (269)

That’s pretty representative of my music tastes, although I kinda got over my Magnetic Fields obsession a while back now and haven’t listened to 69 Love Songs on its own for ages.

However, Last.fm says I’ve played 27,821 tracks in the last two years which means those Magnetic Fields songs constitute a mere 3.3% of my listening. Number 20 (Freezepop) is 0.7%, Number 100 (ew, Snow Patrol) is 0.2% and then it plateaus into statistical irrelevance. Suddenly that top ten doesn’t seem so representative.

What can we conclude from this?

I’m so Long Tail it hurts.

(Can I get a t-shirt with that on?)

Gig news

Since I’m not planning another Brum Blog for a few days I feel I ought to point to the just posted Silver Footed Gig Slut issue 10 in which our host goes through all the gig listings, links to all the bands and adds commentary and recommendations to each evening’s choice. And there was me worried that I hadn’t done any gig stuff this week. Distributed blog networks are great!

Today’s Photo

Matt Murtagh at the Pantomime Horse Grand National

Narrowcast News

Podnosh is a podcast station based in Birmingham that I stumbled across recently. I like that this pretty established outfit with high aims exists outside of my awareness - it implies there’s even more happening online in the city for me to discover. I’m particularly taken with the Grassroots Channel which “is here to provoke and inspire anyone who thinks they just might want to change the world around them”. For a quality sample check out this interview with Soweto Kinch, a jazz saxophonist and rapper from Handsworth who recently released an CD set in a tower block in B19, samples of which can be found on his MySpace page. Given what he says in that interview I intend to investigate Mr Kinch further.

Legacy News

Over at the music blog The Art of Noise they’re running a series of debates on whether some aspect of music is deserving of praise or whether it really a bit shit. This week it’s Birmingham’s Musical Legacy and my opinion might surprise you. All votes are valid and will count towards the final verdict so get over there.

Sports News

Congratulations to Birmingham: It’s Not Shit’s Airbiscuit which won this year’s Pantomime Horse Grand National. I didn’t make it on the day but by all accounts it was fucking mental. B:INS has a good report with many photos.

New Blog News

The Hearing Aid is a relatively new blog from Daron (who, as it happens, formed the basis of this post) which concentrates on gig reviews in Birmingham at the smaller venues. Needless to say this is right up my alley but I’m delighted to add the writing is really good. Now, if we had another, say, 20 blogs of this quality…

Things to Do department

Speaking of people who review too many gigs for their own health, Russ L’s Lots Of Things To See And Do In The West Midlands In December post appeared over the weekend and it’s frightening in it’s hugeness, though there is a lot of boxing in there. Actually, the boxing stuff has me intrigued. Perhaps I should tag along with Russ to one of them.

I’ve no idea how I got on the mailing list but every month Birmingham City Council send me a What’s On email. It’s very mainstream not really straying from the big ticket stuff but worth a scan I find. I see that there’s a Christmas Craft Market on at the moment in Chamberlain Square (that’s the one by the library if, like me, you tend to get your squares confused) which is notable for only having stuff that’s produced locally. Might be worth a shufty just to see what’s actually being done in the area as much as to buy “handmade soaps”.

Choir Correction Corner

Andy Pryke emailed to point out that the Complaints Choir of Birmingham, as featured in the last Brum Blog, was actually the first one. There’s now an international Complaints Choir website which has a good history of the project and BBC Birmingham ran a feature where it’s revealed they’re going to do a second one.

This has been a link-heavy edition of Brum Blog.