How many pickers does it take to change a light bulb? Five.  One to change it and four to shake their heads and mumble, “that ain’t the way Earl woulda done it.” Here’s an obit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/9172830/Country-singer-Earl-Scruggs-dies-aged-88.html I’m going some place like THIS to mourn and drink some whiskey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZp0UjL_Xhs    

Listen up Athens, GA and Austin, TX peeps: you have a challenger for the Surreal Rock Bar in a Backwater of the Year Award.  I was 9.5 miles into a Sunday run and spotted Riff’s down the road toward Wootton Bassett and, although I was fairly certain it only opened at night, I decided to [...]

In Oxford awaiting clearance to re-enter the labs and start bringing the mass spectrometers online, I had anywhere from one-half to three hours to kill.  I wandered up Cowley Road to see about some food but the doors to the Bullingdon were open and I was drawn inside.  Oh well, a Brains S.A. couldn’t hurt, [...]

The Town Gardens is my favourite park in Swindon and it gets used frequently for festivals.  This weekend it hosted the Swindon Mela, billed as a celebration of all things asian.  This was an awful lot of fun although far too crowded for my taste;  still, if moved to a larger park it might lose [...]

Two nights ago, the circus next door spilled out onto the streets with some yelling and screaming followed by a visit from one cop who hauled away a girl when another cop showed up and went into chat with the neighbours for an hour and a half…we poured a couple of drinks and, like many [...]

I mentioned the listings when I wrote about the Vic this morning, and I’ve been keeping a list of clever band names for bands that do their OWN music (my personal fave right now is Four Floors of Whores); there is a thriving music scene in Swindon and for such a small municipality there is [...]

Swindon has a St George Day festival with a couple of stages set up around the Parade and the Brunel.  Mostly, the holiday just stirs up anti-immigrant and/or anti-skintone sentiments and most English folk don’t even know when it is.  The funniest description of St George and the Dragon I heard was, “yeah, we’ve all [...]