Author: David Bradley

Baskets of wild stone

UPDATE: The song got a new name – Turncoats

All along the North Norfolk coast you will come across galvanized baskets piled high and filled with great flint stones, such baskets of stones are known as gabions. Strategically placed, these are part of the sea defences. It’s fairly well known that Britain is tilting downward into the sea along what one might imagine is its north-south axis and so the east side. This tilt means the coastal margin of East Anglia is gradually dipping further and further into the North Sea with concomitant coastal erosion. If climate change leads to rising sea levels and worsening winter storms, then it is perhaps only a matter of decades before much of this marshy land and drained and reclaimed land is taken back by the beautiful briny.

On a recent trip to the poetically named Overstrand (a few photos here), we were all looking for inspiration. I had the phrase “give her all you take” in my head and was imagining the fishing boats and the sea, but as we contemplated the rising tide and the crashing waves and the previous night’s storm, one friend point to the baskets of stones. The same stones that are used in this part of the world to decorate the very homes that are so vulnerable to the whims of time and tide. It seemed like a good theme…baskets of stones, indeed, baskets of wild stones, as Rog had it…to save the land from the sea. A few local ales and a bit of a strum on my oldest acoustic guitar outside our tent and I had something of a chord progression, some words, and a basic tune. Recorded on a phone it was just enough to let me retain a post-camping demo to work on back in the home studio.

I’ve made a lyric video for this song, can you tell what album I’m spoofing on our record player?

Of course, the original demo is course and sweary as was a live rendering I attempted with other friends in a deconsecrated church at the weekend…it helped peg out how the song might work but I ended up with a half-decent studio demo that seemed to last far too long and didn’t get to the chorus anywhere nearly quick enough. So, despite a fairly positive response from the SoundCloud crowd, I ditched the original and started again, working up a much stronger vocal, re-ordering it from an unconventional verse-bridge-verse-refrain-chorus-verse-chorus-reprise-chorus to a more traditional structure. That coupled with a slightly higher tempo and no middle-8 meant it was about 4’30” rather than 5’30”. Not quite a radio mix, but closer. Since writing this blog post, I also whipped out my Tele and did some big shouty octaves for the later choruses. It’s all got a bit heavier…heavy rock stones you might say.

Turncoats

Baskets of wild stone to save the land from the seas
What would carry me home? Not the tide nor the breeze!
Give her all you take till she brings you to your knees
And the wind will catch your breath brace you for the peace

Fleshing out the rust that decays by the shore
Wonder if I’ll find the way home just a little bit raw
You face the pain, but it turned you pale
Your wounded sigh, You hide behind a veil

Storms and fights and endless bloody wars
Dreams of lights and turncoats on the shores
Screams at night are nothing but a bore
Then you turn away and ask for nothing more

Kicking up the sand by the shore
Picking at the strands a little bit more
But it all unravels when you sail against the wind
I’m a long way looking back, your blame is under my skin

Storms and fights and endless bloody wars
Dreams of lights and turncoats on the shores
Screams at night are nothing but a bore
Then you turn to me and ask for a little more

Storms and fights and endless bloody wars
Dreams of lights and turncoats on the shores
Screams at night are nothing but a bore
Then you turn to me and ask for nothing more

Baskets of wild stone to save the land from the seas
What would carry me home? Not the tide nor the breeze
Give her all you take and she’ll bring you to your knees
And the wind will catch your breath brace you for the peace

Storms and fights and endless bloody wars
Dreams of lights and turncoats on the shores
Screams at night are nothing but a bore
Then you turn away, then you turn away, then you turn away
And ask for nothing more

Baskets of wild stone to save the land

—-

Reviews just in:

You present great vocal dynamics in this one. It's sung boldly with energy. The narrative is crammed with powerful themed imagery which keeps the listener captive.
Nothing richer than a good acoustic/electric mix. Fantastic vocal work.
Fantastic singing
Brilliant rock!! So cool!
Great lyrics and a lovely melody to carry it all along. Guitar is beautifully bright and love the double tracked vocals. Excellent and nicely reminiscent of early Bowie.

Prisma – the goose that lays golden photos

I tried the Prisma app when it first launched, a year or so ago, but then quickly forgot about it. A few friends have been playing with the app recently though and producing some nice filtered photos, so I thought I’d have another play. I picked a recent closeup of a greylag gosling I snapped in Milton Country Park north of Cambridge.

It seemed to be the perfect sort of shot to apply the various mosaics and filters that go by the quite esoteric names of Thota Vaikuntam, Wave (Hokusai-like), Mononoke, Mondrian, Femme (Picasso-like), The Scream (Munch-like), Roy (Lichtenstein-like), Heisenberg (ink sketch) etc. Top left in the contact sheet is my original photo, the others are various Prisma treatments picked to taste from the first few and applied with 100% of the processed image showing rather than blending with the original

Although this is a mobile app I ran an Android emulator known as Blue Stacks on my Windows 10 desktop machine and loaded the app in that to make it easier to pick and choose and to save files rather than messing around with the tiny mobile phone screen and shuttling files using the cloud. Montage was made with “paint.net” and my “dB” logo applied, as ever with Paintshop Pro. having mentioned a hack for uploading photos to Instagram from a Windows desktop machine, Blue Stacks is another alternative, run Instagram as an app within BlueStacks.

The Heisenberg filter, emulates an ink pen sketch and is styled for that TV programme, Breaking Bad

Birds on a summer’s evening dog walk

Evening dog walk in and around Rampton Spinney, pair of bullfinches (only one photographed), willow warblers, long-tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, and robins, all with juveniles. Reed warblers, reed buntings and whitethroats on the Cottenham Lode. Song thrushes in song, wood pigeons (obvs), yaffles (heard not seen), great spotted woodpeckers (seen my Mrs Sciencebase), blackbirds seen and heard, but blackcaps (maybe not even heard)…

Green flash at sunset

If you’re watching a sunset or a sunrise, occasionally you might see a green flash or green rays from the edge of the sun just as it disappears from view or begins to peek over the horizon. This a purely atmospheric, optical phenomenon, nothing to do with surface activity on the sun. By pure chance I seem to have caught a bit whilst photographing a sunset on the North Norfolk coast recently (one of the only places in the UK where, in the middle of summer, the sun both rises and sets over the sea on the “east coast”. I don’t remember noticing the green flash whilst taking the photos, it’s only now in scanning through the files that I spotted it.

Earthsky has as interesting explanation of the phenomenon:

The green flash is the result of looking at the sun through a greater and greater thickness of atmosphere as you look lower and lower in the sky. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs the yellow and orange colors in white sunlight, and air molecules scatter the violet light. That leaves the red and blue-green light to travel directly toward you. Near the horizon, the sun's light is highly bent or refracted. It's as though there are two suns — a red one and a blue-green one — partially covering each other. The red one is always closest to the horizon, so when it sets or before it rises, you see only the blue-green disk — the green flash.

American migrant – Pectoral Sandpiper

The pectoral sandpiper (Calidris melanotos) is a migratory wading bird that breeds in North America and Asia, winters in South America and the South Pacific, but also spends time in Siberia. However, you can see them in the UK and Europe. They’re often caught on Westerly winds and hit the British Isles from North America and on Easterlies that bring them in from Siberia.

Most commonly, they’ll be seen in late summer and autumn. There were quite a few on the wetlands at RSPB Titchwell in North Norfolk when we visited in mid-July. According to the RSPB, “It is the most common North American wading bird to occur here and has even started to breed in Scotland very recently.”

The sandpiper name refers to its call and to its shoreline existence while the pectoral refers to the bird’s brown breast band. The scientific binomial is from ancient Greek: kalidris or skalidris was a term used by Aristotle to refer to some grey-coloured waterside birds while melanotos is from melas meaning black and notos meaning backed.

Originally, in this post, I’d displayed a photo I took of what I assumed was the Pec Sand, but on later inspection turned out to be a Ruff, so I’ve removed the photo.

Who is the thirteenth Doctor Who?

I am really pleased that Broadchurch actor Jodie Whittaker is to be the next regeneration of Doctor Who (I know it’s a kids programme, just to be clear). But, there’s a lot of talk about her being the 13th Doctor, I don’t think that’s even vaguely correct. Ignore Peter Cushing and Paul McGann who both played the Doctor in films and ignore the fact that Rowan Atkinson, Richard E Grant, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent and Joanna Lumley have all played the Doctor in TV comedy.

You still have John Hurt and my namesake David Bradley who have both played the Doctor in the TV series, albeit in parallel worlds/times rather than as regenerations. Still.

 

Cottenham War Memorial – A fishy tale

UPDATE: It’s definitely not a dolphin in Cottenham.

Who else has noticed the large “fish” leaning head down against the back of the legs of the serviceman featured in Cottenham’s War Memorial? Friend of the blog Patrick Coughlan certainly has and he wonders what it’s all about..

According to one web site it perhaps alludes to the designer’s naval past. However, another suggests that it’s not a fish, but a dolphin, a mammal frequently associated with the Grey Funnel Line (the Royal Navy) and marine regiments. Indeed, Cottenham’s war memorial is similar to the one in St John’s Churchyard, Stokesay, Shropshire, which has a large dolphin at the serviceman’s back. Locals there say it is indeed an allusion to the sea but perhaps also to the mythology of dolphins bearing dead heroes in the afterlife.

Classic Chords #23 Rush Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer is perhaps the best known Rush song. It was the Canadian power trio’s breakthrough hit in terms of sales and popular appeal and was the opener on their 1981 album Moving Pictures. I remember listening to it on vinyl the day it came out and wondering how on earth I was going to work out what Lifeson was playing in terms of chords.

Lyrically, the song strikes out as the eponymous rebel with words by Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart and Pye Dubois who wrote lyrics for fellow Canadian rockers Max Webster. The opening power chords that share Le Studio space with Geddy Lee’s Moog synths and a spaced out backbeat from Peart are not your common or garden no-third power chords as you’d imagine, nor were they anything like the open, up-the-neck chords he’d been using in the previous decade (cf The Hemispheres chord).

If they were standard power chords, it would probably just be a big E-major followed by a D and an A and then jumping down to the C. But, Lifeson, who pleads ignorance of most of the chord names in the video tutorial he recorded for the song in 2007, is playing some interesting variations on the power chord idea. In them, an open top E string rings out in the intro on three of four chord variations that give us the progression.

There is (admittedly) a massive E-major power chord at the seventh fret (although by definition because it’s got the third note of the scale of E major (G#) it’s not really a proper power chord). Open bottom E string leads the riff into the sustained power chord. The second chord is an Asus4 (but with the open top E string to add chorus-like resonance to the E fretted on the B string, that too kicks off with an open E string for the riff. The third chord starts with the open A string instead and sustains an A7sus4, which lifts that almost jazzy-sounding second chord, the As4. And, finally kicking with the bass E string open again we move two frets down from the second chord shape to give us a hybrid chord a Cadd2 (basically a C major chord with the second note of the scale of C major, the D, added, you might also called it a Cadd9).

I remember the chords in the Rush music book I had as a kid, they had it as E, Dsus4, A, and then C. It was wrong…well…it was simplifed if not wrong. Any tab and chord sites that talk of E, D, A and C major power chords as being the chords in Tom Sawyer are just plain wrong too. Some seem to get it half right, but Alex himself shows you exactly what he plays here and that’s how I’m playing it on this snippet:

Just caught this thieving young magpie

Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) obviously have a special place in the heart of any Geordie, their black and white plumage with a hint of blue being the football strip colours of Newcastle United, obviously.

The birds’ reputation as thieving magpies is misplaced, although like most corvids (crows), the bird is attracted to objects such as coins and buttons which it might use to decorate its nest or simply collect because they imagine such objects are seeds.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, corvid cognition is much higher than one might anticipate based on brain structure of these descendents of the dinosaurs. Crows seem to be far more intelligent than our understanding of the brain based on mammalian biology (think clever rats and monkeys) suggests. The same also applies to parrots and related species and perhaps all birds.

These photos were snapped of a juvenile on one of the jetties overlooking an old gravel pit pond at Milton Country Park north of Cambridge. The bird was stood on the fence and started doing his song and dance routine when he saw us and the dog. It was a bright, but fairly grey day and his bright white and deep black means getting light readings and setting bracketing for a decent shot before he flew off was next to impossible. I quickly fired off as he squealed and flapped and then nudged the levels in the photos to get the most dramatic tones.

Incidentally, my reference to them being shy is that usually adults out in the countryside will take to the air and head for the middle distance or the nearest trees almost as soon as they see you, which is often before you see them. This youngster was in a relatively busy area and maybe hadn’t yet learned to recognise the risk of dogs and humans.

Another pause for thought

I’ve mentioned the comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album) previously on Sciencebase, but at the time didn’t have a photo of the underwing marking which gives it its name. Well, I do now, after a visit to RSPB Ouse Fen Reserve (spotted it resting on a bush just as I was heading back to the car park). You can see the white “comma” very easily, there’s one on each wing. Also, note the curled up proboscis which butterflies all use to get to the nectar in flowers.