Stoat bassplayer’s blog

Dropped my daughter to the creche yesterday and one of the teachers said “we’ve them outside this morning, it’ll be too hot to go out this afternoon”. Too hot? The weather forecast said a maximum of 22 degrees - did they think the kids wouldn’t be able handle those searing extremes of temperature? I suppose they did …

The summer before last I was paying the milkman one warmish sunny morning and he says to me “I suppose you like this kind of weather”. I said “Well, yeah - don’t you?”. “NO!”, was the response. “I’d like a good NORMAL day, not this mad heat”.

No wonder our summers are always so crap.

Went to see Delorentos in Drogheda on Sun night. Loads of people there, all dancing and singing along. It’s deadly - I don’t think I’ll ever get over seeing people I don’t know singing along to songs made up by people I do know. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face

Once upon a time, chocolate wasn’t the sinful adult indulgence we now know it as - it was just another sweet to be eaten by children , or grownups if it was Christmas. It only got to be the way it is during the tv advertising wars in the 80s - chocolate and toffee were both heavily advertised on the tv (remember those Toffo ads?), but Cadbury’s, with their flake ads, aimed their products at adults rather than kids. If only Toffo had hired the Cadbury’s ad agency toffee would be the sexy sweet

p.s. This post should perhaps have been prefixed with the phrase “I reckon …”. Too late now

Woohooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Another cracker from Niall and Aoife http://www.nialler9.com/blog/2008/04/29/nialler9-podcast-14-april-08/

My workmates are giving me funny looks cos I can’t sit still in my seat …

I looked up more on superheroes, and it turns out Superman first appeared in 1930s America, when the Common Man was pretty much fucked, and Germany was threatening everyone. Kinda explains my earlier wondering about how come superhero stories all imply that normal folk need some kind of protection from Bad Stuff

This is deadly

There was some show about “romance” on the radio a while ago, and the host was asking people to send in romantic stories. They all ended up being of the “he whisked me away to Paris and we had a candlelit dinner on the banks of the Seine …” and the host asked the (fair) question “is romance all about spending money?”

I’m not really a romantic type, not in the whisking-away sense anyway, but the question stayed with me and then all of a sudden I came up with an answer that I like - it’s a man acting like an alpha-male and treating his woman like an alpha-female. That’s why (in Ireland anyway) it involves spending money and arranging something to happen without the woman’s foreknowledge or consent, and why it makes the people involved feel good about themselves.

I wish I could think of an appropriate proverb now, something like “for to understand your brother look ye unto the coyotes in the hills”. Oh well

Superheroes are funny old things, been thinking about them lately. Someone finds he has extraordinary powers, so he thinks “I know, I’ll fight crime!”. Would you become a vigilante if you discovered you could fly? I don’t think I would.

The idea of the modern superhero (as opposed to the old style kind like Cuchlainn) seems to carry within it the implication that normal people need (and crave) some kind of protection from the forces of evil that are out to get us, whether these come in the form of “criminals” or intergalactic planet-eaters. Hmmm. The more I think about the institution of superheroes the less I like them

Got a first draft of a mix of Trampolina from our recording session in Feb today. It’s damn good for a first mix, I’m excited about it now - hopefully it’ll be done and mastered and on a radio near you in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed!

I’m half thinking of creating an area on the blog for rough mixes and early drafts of songs. Stoat songs can go through a zillion versions and mixes before finally being deemed to be playable to The Public - on the one hand I’m terrified of anyone hearing anything that’s unfinished, but on the other if someone was interested in the band they might enjoy it. Hmmm. I wonder. Maybe after a song is released I could put up a bunch of early versions. I’ve a real old version of Oh Happy Day on CD someplace with a totally different chorus, must dig it out

Stephen was telling me last night that the Nazis invented the Olympic torch relay thing in 1936 as a propaganda tool, and lo and behold he’s right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_torch

Bizarre.