Not content with controlling a large portion of Staffordshire’s tourist dollars, Alton Towers are now looking to control the weather too. Apparently they’re looking at a technique originally developed in Communist Russia that aims to prevent it raining.
Rain-seeding involves firing silver iodide into clouds in a bid to make them empty over an unimportant area (Stafford? ;-)).
In addition to Russia, China is a big fan of the process and are due to use it to ensure a dry and pollution free Olympic Games in Beijing next summer.
However, I doubt residents of Stoke-on-Trent will be so excited when their town gets turned into Soak-on-Trent.
Last night’s slot on Mainstage at Greenbelt was headlined by Delirious?, following on from the slightly wacky Duke Special who turned out to be quite good too.
It’s got to be at least a decade since I first saw Delirious? in concert and they can still hold a crowd. Quite a wide ranging crowd too age-wise - all the way from 14 year olds, through those who used to be 14 year olds when they first started, to those who you wouldn’t really think were still capable of jumping quite as high as they did!
Their set was largely stuff from World Service and The Mission Bell, but there was time for the classic History Maker - does it make me old that I remember that when it was new? Martin Smith proclaimed it as the song that has never died (or maybe the song they’ve failed to kill off). Hopefully that’s how it will remain for a while yet.
Even though they began with Rain Down, the clouds luckily didn’t play ball and the evening remained dry. Highlights for me included Now Is the Time and Majesty. There were also a couple of new songs and some of the trademark taking-it-wherever-it-goes moments.
It’s been a few years since I last saw them play live, but yesterday reminded me of how good they are … and how far they’ve come since the Cutting Edge days and Littlehampton beach. It may not quite have beaten Wembley Stadium (what could?) but it was a spectacular way to end our couple of evenings at Greenbelt.
Sunday evening teatime is when BBC ONE enters the God-slot with Songs of Praise. It’s certainly entertaining, with Aled Jones (the Walking in the Air guy, remember him?) or Pam Rhodes taking us around some parish church or great cathedral for a fantastic sing song by nicely dressed middle aged folk (almost certainly most of whom are not exactly what you might call regular attendees) with lips that don’t move in time with the lyrics.
Yet for all it is, there’s something missing … alcohol. Just imagine how much more lively the programme would be!
But imagine no longer friends, for the singing of ye ancient hymns and the drinking of ye ancient organic ales is a reality. At least, it was last night at Greenbelt’s beer tent (aptly named The Jesus Arms).
In true Songs of Praise style, you too can join in by watching my camera phone’s take on the event. Look out for the particularly raucous rendition of Jerusalem at the end of the evening! In the interests of decency, I’ve edited out the reaction of the, erm, congregation/customers, when they tried to make us sing Shine Jesus Shine. Oh, come on…
I’ve had a blog for a couple of years or so, but recently there’s been precious little activity on it. This was partly due to laziness/time issues, but to a much greater extent I was being hampered by the blog software. When I started using Ublog Reload in 2004 it was pretty much as good as I needed. However, as the blogging world has developed, Ublog got left behind through lack of continued development.
It was missing key features such as pings, comment spam protection and a nice WYSIWYG editor. I ended up writing a whole bunch of code simply to keep it ticking along, but that wasn’t really what I wanted to spend my time doing. So the blog thing just got tedious and became more hassle than it was worth.
Now all (some) of that has changed: I’ve moved over to WordPress which has become one of the stalwarts in the content management world. It’s well supported, driven by a large community and has oodles of plugins available.
Excuse the mess while I move all the content over and get it properly setup. I think I’ve successfully pulled across all the old posts but I haven’t updated all the out-of-date hyperlinks. Unfortunately I can’t find an easy way of bringing over the comments, so think of this as a fresh start.
The really observant amongst you will have noticed the new domain too. That’s purely for technical reasons and the non-blog content will be remaining on jamessalter.me.uk for the foreseeable future.
Fingers crossed for a return to regular blogging!
