{Cheese and Beans}

THEY HAVE ALL GONE!

I have 15 invites left for Google Wave. The first 15 commenters to this post will get them (head to Cheese and Beans if you are reading this elsewhere).

Make sure you put your real email address against the comment – the invite will go to the email address on your comment (it will not be shown anywhere).

* Note – it usually takes 24 to 48 hours for the invites to arrive

As can be deduced from the photo above without too many Sherlock Holmesian skills, we have a lot of books in our house. While the photo doesn’t actually look that bad, you have to realise that it’s one corner of one room. I’m not saying any more because your mouth will gawp open, and your eyes will become circular as you realised the true extent of the problem.

Every fibre of our being tells us that we should look after, cherish, and covet the books we have read. It’s becoming a bit silly though – I fully anticipate at some point that they will start to cause the house to submerge into the ground. Books are heavy. We could quite feasibly think about writing the alternative screenplay to the new Pixar Movie “Up”, detailing the adventure of our descent.

With heavy hearts, we have begun to investigate Book Crossing. If you have not heard of it, book crossing is an idea where you register a book on the website (www.bookcrossing.com), and then release your book into the wild. Yes, that’s right – release it – off to have adventures all of it’s own. You might make this release in a coffee shop, in the window of a pub, on a park bench… anywhere really. The hope is that somebody else with a book problem (and lets face it, it IS a problem) will find the book, and discover the plate you have stuck inside the cover – requesting that they record the book’s ongoing journey on the internet, and re-release it when they have read it.

I think Book Crossing is a wonderful idea. Perhaps the best bit is that no money is changing hands; while we have spent quite a bit of money over the years on our books, it seems like a good thing to do – to afford those who might not be able to afford these books the chance of finding them. There’s the chance that somebody who doesn’t read might pick one of them up and start out on a journey of discovery.

Does Book Crossing turn us into some kind of “book pusher”? Perhaps. How about serial litterers ? I guess.

If you’re sat in a cafe, and spot a book on a shelf, or left on a chair, have a look inside the cover. You never know – it might be one of ours.

I know, I know… I changed the look of this blog again (if you’re reading this through an RSS reader, you’ll need to click on the title to see the wonderous boringness of the Wordpress stock theme I have chosen).

I got bored. I was going to wait until Wordpress released some more free themes, and while things looked hopeful earlier in the year (they released one), there has been nothing since. I’m resisting the temptation to compain too vociferously because I don’t exactly pay anything to have this blog sat here on the internet.

In other news, I already ate my lunch, and it’s only 11:40am. Also, if you were wondering – I’m having a coffee break from my work – hence the short/shallow/inconsequential nature of this post.

I considered buying a domain name yesterday to slap my own installation of Wordpress on, but resisted it at the 11th hour (actually it was more like 1am). I even found myself looking at Squarespace – where Lauren hosts her blog. Reality finally kicked in, and the same thoughts I wrote about earlier resurfaced – do I really have a single valid reason to pay for this blog to exist?

Once upon a time I would have just paid the money and spent all day playing with plugins, html, javascript, custom themes, and so on – I’m not quite sure when I changed – when I became the polar opposite – “do I really need this? is there a free option?“…

Perhaps it coincides with the arrival of children in our lives – a tightening of the purse strings. Perhaps the number of commitments laden upon me force a certain pragmatism in decisions of what I am willing to invest time, effort and money into.

Who knows. Coffee break over.

It’s Sunday evening – heading towards 10:30pm – and I’m sat listening to “Tiny Dancer” on the “Madman Across the Water” album by Elton John. There is an interesting story about Elton John that the newspapers never tell. Although he often behaves like a spoiled infant when television cameras are pointed in his direction, the truth is as far removed as you could possibly imagine.

It so happened that a group of students just down the road from his mansion (at the height of his fame) discovered they had no band booked for their end of year party. A couple of the more cheeky among them knew Elton lived nearby, and called on his gate buzzer. By pure luck of various staff either not being there, or Elton happening to be near the buzzer in the house, he answered.

A mad conversation ensued whereupon Elton agreed to play their party for nothing, on one condition – that they could provide a grand piano.

The scenes that ensued that evening became legend at a particular college in the UK – with all manner of health and safety regulations being broken as students packed the music rooms of the college, and stood in windows in order to witness one of the geniuses of the 20th century at work. For free.

If anybody knows more about this story (and it did happen, before you doubt – I read about it in Q magazine about 15 years ago), it deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. Perhaps the realisation that all electronic music is sliding towards “free” will make bands realise that garnering a following is dependent on performance – and that means getting up in front of real people.

With a little luck forcing musicians to perform instead of hiding behind auto tuners and samplers will force change – and destroy the idiotic studio bands built by layers of management who should not be there in the first place.

The first seven people to send me an email with a photo of themselves in it will get a drawing of the photo. If nothing else, it will force me to start drawing again.

Email – jonathan.beckett@gmail.com

There’s one catch – you have to agree to do the same in return – offer to make something for seven other people in the same manner.