It’s snow joke

Thanks a lot to our good mate Justin Patrick Moore for sending us some photographs of the extreme weather in Cincinnati at the moment, and we thought it was a bit cold here! Temperature is around -3 at the moment with -9 degrees C overnight with even -13 later on some nights this week. We are not going complain about the weather here any more, ever. Great pictures Justin. And here’s one of his back garden.

And if you fancy a great listen, below is the audio of Trash Flow Radio broadcast on WAIF 88.3 FM from Sat Dec 28 and as it says here:

“DJ Justin Patrick Moore returned to hold down the fort one more time. Hot on the heels of his outstanding recent book event in Cincinnati, Justin was joined in the studio by Slumdog Ethan and Old WAIFer Douglas.  Together, they provided more audio accompaniment to Justin‘s new book “The Radio Phonics Laboratory.”  They also spun choice esoteric tracks from all around the world, including tracks from: Tristwch Y Fenywod, Chelsea Wolfe, Tanya Tagaq, The Fauns, Melody’s Echo Chamber, The Skull Defekts, idialedyournumber, Alan Sparhawk, Josh Datko (Bitpunk.fm), An-Ting 安婷, Controlled Bleeding, Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang, The Limiñanas, Shilpa Ray, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, and more!” Tracklist here.

There’s an archive of the last 15 shows here if you fancy it too. Radio connects us all.

From the shipping forecast to the skinhead

Big shout to Gerry Hectic for letting us know about the Shipping Forecast all-day special  on Radio 4 yesterday celebrating 100 years of said forecast. All the programmes are now up online on BBC Sounds and all very well worth a listen but here’s one we caught last night about the forecast’s theme tune “Sailing By” here.

A classic tune wrote by a man called Ronald Binge at a room at the end of his garage that was thick with cigarette/cigar/pipe smoke. More on Sailing By here.

And by the powers of the internet we learned there’s a reggae connection too. From Ronald Binge’s wikipedia page here: “Best known today is probably Elizabethan Serenade. A reggae version of the tune, Elizabethan Reggae, was performed by Boris Gardiner in 1970.” Look at his writing credit under the song title.

Before the 40 mph wind came

It’s been a while since we’ve been out in the garden so we spent a couple of hours yesterday and today tidying up little areas rather than tackle the whole thing (and then possibly feel defeated). We found a giant garlic bulb (below) which was sprouting so we took the cloves apart and replanted them, fingers crossed!

We also had a go at the bed at the bottom of the garden (which has the wild bit behind it which is looking a bit messy at the the moment) which has been overrun with nasturtiums and weeds (below). We’ll be putting some vegetables in again we reckon. The cardoon on the right hand side is still going as well.

We also tidied up the bed by the garage, making it look a lot more tidier. The handful of hours we spent today will hopefully saving us a bit of work when spring finally comes around.

We’re supposedly getting 40 odd miles an hour winds later so it’s doubtful we’ll be sitting around the firepit watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks at midnight.

And talking of the new year, happy 2025 to all our readers and friends worldwide from us here at Weeds.

Oh to be by the sea!

A few days ago we heard from our good friend from Japan, Stevyn from the great Iron Feather Journal fanzine who is away on holiday at the moment. He said “Hokkaido is minus 10 and there’s tons of snow so we took a mini vacation and flew south to Okinawa (pic above) and now relaxing by the sea side”. He sent us this picture below from his holidays of part of a jungle with a genuine viper warning! That’s brilliant Stevyn. We hope you had a great Christmas and that you’re having a great holiday, cheers for the pics.

See you by the heel stone

Spotted in a charity shop in Lewisham this morning, this excellent solstice-related jigsaw puzzle. Let’s hope every piece is there or it may be a right pain in the neck when it comes to completing said ancient monument.

 

We thought of a daft thing, wouldn’t it be great to travel back in time and bring the game to a cave and see if stone-age man/women/kids would enjoy the game. We reckon they would be delighted with it especially knowing that it was on sale for the bargain price of 4 quid.

And on the subject of those sacred stones we just found this excellent film on youtube! We even spotted an example of the famous “Punk Kicking Dance” (that we’d never be able to do now) at 3.51 mins in. Happy belated Solstice.

More on the Stonehenge Festival Campaign here.

What have Jean-Michel Jarre, Ken Barlow and King Arthur all got in common?

Happy Winter Solstice! From tomorrow, days will be getting longer which is great news to us gardeners. If you want to celebrate the great day in style without having stayed up all night in the pouring rain and cold, shivering by the heel stone, why not tune in via youtube (above).

So turn up the heating, put on your best solstice suit, pour yourself a glass of warm mead and pretend you’re at Stonehenge with the best of them. Happy Solstice and a big shout to that yellow round thing we call the Sun.

Reggae is outernational

Big shout to Thomas from Dub Explorations for letting us know about this excellent tune by Professor Skank from Greece entitled Jah Jah Is Coming (The rootsman version). This has taken a couple of days to worm its way into our brain here at Weeds and now we can’t get it out of our heads. A must have tune!

Gardening in the echo chamber

A big thanks to our good friend across the pond Dr Strangedub for playing part 2 of One Deck Pete’s An introduction to Dub Gardening on last Wednesday’s Echo Chamber at 84.00 minutes in here.

The show is a excellent listen for a Wednesday morning from 8-12am UK time if you love all things dub, downbeat and everything related all played by the good Doctor Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss play all sorts of reggae annd downbeat related tunes on their 4 hour show. Live link to KFAI from the twin cities here.

A wonderful tune was played on the show from Femi Kuti with a song called Politics Don Expose Them, wonderful stuff! Thanks again Dr Strangedub!

Live good in your neighbourhood

Big shout to The Rhythm Doctor for playing this wonderful tune by Johnny Cool on his excellent IDA Radio show Waiting Room earlier this week (at 49 minutes in with extra dubbed out bits by RD himself) called Long Time Ago and what a great tune it is!

Also reggae related, by accident this evening we found two hours of The Rootsman talking to the late great Augustus Pablo. Welll worth listening to, all on pirate radio WKLR Radio in Bradford from 1992. Reggae (like radio) never disappoints. Ever.

We are not going to complain

We’ve just heard from our good friend Rich R in the Lake District about the weather tomorrow morning up there and it looks like it’s around minus 4. We will not complain about the supposed cold weather here in SE23!

Rich has just come back from a trip to Scotland around Oban and sent us some brilliant pictures from his highland adventure. The above makes of us think of what Mars would be like if it had water. Wonderful looking place.

And the above photographs too look like a special place even though we wouldn’t want to be doing any skinnydipping in the water there at this time of year. We’ve saved a great one until last, a majestic looking sheep from Kerrera. Wonderful stuff Rich and thanks again!

Scotland pics © Rich R 2024