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THE PAST WEEK

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Sun 27th Feb 2011 Goodbye, The Past, for now:

Sun 27th Feb 2011

Sun 27th Feb 2011 Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began. He looked as a conjurer ought, with lacquered centre-parting, film-star moustache, top hat & magic wand. When he first offered to contribute his magical skills to the war effort he was dismissed as a showman (which he was) and put to work entertaining the troops. But eventually it was realised that his talents might be applied to the battlefield. He was sent to the Western Desert where he assembled The Magic Gang, possibly the most eccentric military unit ever formed, whose members included an analytical chemist, a cartoonist, a criminal, a stage-designer, a picture restorer, a carpenter & a lone professional soldier to fill out the military paperwork. The gang set about bamboozling the enemy. They built fake submarines & Spitfires, disguised tanks as trucks, and made Jeeps look like tanks. They successfully hid part of the Suez Canal using a system of revolving mirrors & searchlights that created a blinding vortex in the sky nine miles wide. Paraphrased primarily from non-fiction Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre.

Sat 26th Feb 2011 The much envied British WWII plane, the Mosquito, was made almost entirely out of wood:

Fri 25th Feb 2011 There are things I wanted to include in this weeks page that haven't been possible so far, but the past is always changing of course.. This week will be no exception. Mogwai were shit, by the way. People were yawning & saying how great they were. Possibly the worst, pointlessly meandering show I've seen for a long while.

Thu 24th Feb 2011

Wed 23rd Feb 2011 Sometimes when I tell people I'm from a punk background, I feel like they have a very different idea of what that means from me. This recording is from an England & The April performance at the Hope & Anchor, sometime around 2005:

Tue 22nd Feb 2011 Going to see Mogwai in a few days. I'm not such a fan of them anymore, but their early albums were a huge part of my spiritual education. Old songs stay 'til the end. Every aircraft, every camera, is a wish that wasn't granted.

Mon 21st Feb 2011 Theme this week is The Past.. let's see how we get on with that. Yesterday I went to Neil Johnson's wedding, and it was a wonderful occasion - congratulations to the happy couple! I filmed a little bit on my phone: Neil is a very old friend of mine, and he's the guy who organised many of the shows TheBed played in Cambridge back in the early naughties. There is video footage of these shows somewhere, and this week is a perfect opportunity to dig something out of the vault.

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