Well, apparently it's been over two months since I last did one of these roundups of what's been going on over on the dark side, so I'd better try to catch up.
Lots of good music lately: a couple of favourites from My Fair Lady, The Street Where You Live and Wouldn't It Be Loverly? (both songs I have been known to sing to myself when walking home slightly merry from the bar), a slooowed-down version of Motorhead's Ace of Spades, and THEN... a 'Blues Week', with selections from Cream, ZZ Top, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, Turley Richards (never heard of him? check it out!!), Led Zeppelin (a superb early TV appearance from 1969), and Otis Spann (with the great Peter Green, again). There's also been a roundup of some of the greatest rock guitar riffs, my pick of rock's finest rhythm section pairings, another of my 'Top Five' favourite basslines, and further entries in my series of 'Great Drinking Songs' (from Jimmy Buffett, Tom Waits, and Harry Belafonte) and 'Great Love Songs' (from Nina Simone, and from Richard and Linda Thompson). And last week, when I found myself marooned in a hotel room in Shanghai with nothing to do, I posted The Statler Brothers' classic, Flowers On The Wall. I am planning to have a whole week of music posts next week, to try to clear some of the backlog of things I've got planned (since I'm aiming to retire my blogs in just three weeks' time).
In other posts, we've had a discussion of an interesting word/concept we might borrow from another language (and more similar here), one of my more personal posts on depression, a self-administered questionnaire on my life of drinking, a reminiscence of one of my favourite haunts from my first year in Beijing, a haiku about the nostalgia-conjuring powers of whisky, a pretty photograph of my latest culinary experiment, a curious discovery of an unlikely campaign from the 1920s, an important rule-of-thumb for deciding where to eat (which I ignored to my cost), an account of some of the most unusual places I've had a drink during my years of globetrotting, a reflection on the musical influences around me when I was growing up (concluding with a gratuitous blast of Mud's silly-but-infectious Tiger Feet), a romantic anecdote from my first visit to Hong Kong (getting on for 20 years ago), my opinion on champagne (it's overrated!), a brief paean to the remarkable, inimitable Tallulah Bankhead, an explanation of why I choose to blog anonymously (something of a provocation to leading Beijing bar blogger Jim Boyce, who goes in the other direction - and brings a world of grief on himself as a result), and a couple of observations from my recent travels in the south - on the shortcomings of China's hotel bars and hotel breakfasts.
LOTS to enjoy there, if you missed it first time around.
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