Cancelling My Subscription to The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has put its online subscription price up by about £10 / month. Which means I have to do a whole lot of overthinking about whether I want to carry on with it. I subscribed to it back in 2020 because it was the only paper that had a remotely sensible attitude to the Lunacy of the Lockdowns. I needed to know what idiotic measures the Government were going to impose for the next twenty minutes, and what else was going on.

It gives me something to look at over breakfast, if I'm not watching a movie or a box-set episode. If WW3 breaks out (oh wait, it has, read this https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9914/ . £21.8bn nearly all 'gifted'? We're at war, we're just not sending our unemployed young men to be killed) I'm sure the Telegraph will let me know.

Increasingly, I am less and less interested in what it is telling me. Westminster in-fighting. Which incompetent and clueless person will be the next PM. The Trans toilet thing. A few days ago it did a piece of undercover reporting about people smugglers that I hope our Intelligence Services already knew but didn't want the targets to know they knew. But who knows, maybe our Intelligence Services are too busy with "right-wing extremists" (and how I wish that was a mis-direction, but I bet it isn't). Otherwise I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: And something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?

So there are two questions. First, how will I know that WW3 now involves the UK being bombed? I've just put a link to Reuters Europe (translations into English available) in my web browser. That should cover the news. I've also added the ONS front page https://www.ons.gov.uk/ to assuage my endless thirst for statistics.

Second, how will I know what is going on with the culture and trends in the UK and world? Now, see, this is the controversial part. I don't actually care. If I want to see what's new in books, I will browse round Foyles. Qubuz keeps me up with music, and the Curzon website with movies. I could care less about the commercial cinema. I still haven't entirely given up You Tube yet, even though the AI slop keeps on seeping in as fast as I can click Don't Recommend Channel.

Finally, what am I going to read at breakfast?

For the last week, it's been my art books. Much better for the soul.

And I cancelled my subscription.

Joni Mitchell's Blue

I have been converted to an artist on very few occasions. The John Peel Show in 1970 was one of them.

Oh yeah, I thought, she wrote Clouds. May as well give it a listen. Within half-an-hour I was a devoted follower of Joni Mitchell. I bought For The Roses when it came out, saw her at the Victoria Palace Theatre a couple of years later, and bought every album as it came out.

Blue is a Perfect Album. There isn't one note that could be changed, one word that could be improved, one inflection of her voice that might be different, or one note of the accompaniment that might be pepped-up. Every. Single. Song.

I was a sixteen year old OND Engineering student at the time. I was going to the local college of further education, when most of the boys I'd known at school had stayed on to the Sixth Form. Around the same time I had discovered Weather Report's first album in the a stall in the nearby market, and was grooving to Miles At The Fillmore and the subsequent albums.

Describing the mood of the 1970's is more or less impossible now. The media talked about a generation gap in attitudes between my generation and our parents: it felt real, but I have no idea what it consisted of. They could remember the war, and rationing, and really thought that nuclear war might break out as a result of the Seven Day's War. A lot of them had been in the Services. Rationing was over when we were born, and conscription was dropped before we were of age. Jobs were easy to get for school-leavers, and the best employers went round universities on what they called the Milk Round to interview and recruit graduates.

Life was simpler, but rougher, even in the cosseted streets of the south-west London suburbs. Mixed schools were pretty much for the low(er)-achievers: good grades needed single-sex schools. The girls in the posh schools were, I found out years later, actually quite wild. We had nothing like them in our boy's school. Boys pushed and shoved and formed cliques. I was one of those boys whose friends at school were all the other boys who didn't have any friends. I wasn't in the rowing team (my school had an ace rowing team, and the best rowers wound up in the Boat Race teams. Until the Americans came along and ruined it all), and I wasn't in the football team, and I couldn't make the chess club either... There were fewer divorces, but consequently more un-happy marriages and more drinking. GPs handed out Valium or speed like candy to anyone complaining that they were miserable or moody or whatever else. The well brought-up boys and girls of the suburban bourgeois started smoking and drinking when they were sixteen.

There were fewer cars, you could park almost anywhere in London any time you wanted, the trees were smaller and scraggly, shops closed at 1PM on a Wednesday and on Sunday the country was closed. It was pretty much closed by about six in the evening, except around the West End, and theatres and cinemas. Heck, the radio and TV stopped broadcasting about nine in the evening.

Joni Mitchell sung us songs from a different world. Her lyrics talked about Greek Islands and seedy bars in American towns, and made heartbreaking romance out of the mundane: but when he's gone / Me and them lonesome blues collide / the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide. It could be bathos, but he voice soars when she sings about the frying-pan and you can hear how much it hurts her to see the half-empty pan. Also, your unconscious notices that she has a fried breakfast, so you know she's one of us.

The darker days songs of For The Roses, and the grown-up disappointments of Court and Spark were yet to come. By the time she got to the mystery that is Hissing of Summer Lawns she was portraying the mood of the 1970's.

But on Blue she is still happy, still in love, travelling the world even if she wants to be back in California, which in 1970 was a paradise on earth - except for the bits in Dogtown and Z-Boys which weren't.

Keeping The Internet Safe For Children, The Easy, Free Speech, Privacy Preserving, Way

MPs don't not want to protect the children from dodgy content. They don't give a damn about children's welfare: if they did, they would make sure there were jobs for the kids to go to when they left school. Something that stopped happening in the 1980's.

The Treasury and the Cabinet want the money. Hence the focus on You Tube, TikTok and other companies with billions in the bank and business operations in the UK. If a website has no business presence in the UK, its owners can legally ignore Ofcom.

MPs, and civil servants, don't want the dodgy content, or at least, they don't want it so darn easily available. Far-left extremism literature is okay when it is only available in three specialist bookshops in the UK, but geez, when it's available by going the The Guardian's website... that's too easy. So they should like the first part of my solution.

The Children's White List. This is a list of sites where the Government deem children are allowed to go. What's on the White List? Not a lot. Wikipedia; the BBC; any .gov.uk website; You Tube for kids; online libraries; Child Helplines, that sort of thing. Like the Children's section in bookshops and libraries. Let's have an app that allows them access to their school's website and resources (left to the developers as an exercise), and university websites. Maybe it could be held on the device, maybe by ISPs. It's not permanent and can and should be updated frequently. Start small and add.

Age Verification by device. The OS by default is set to filter all internet traffic through the White List. In the OS Settings, there is an option to Age Verify. Take that, and a little app will ask for random digits from the user's NI number (in the UK), which will be sent to a Government database, which will answer YES or NO depending on how old it thinks the user is. The database will keep a record of the device IMEI, date and time of the request (to handle repeated requests that may be someone trying to guess). Nothing else. If the device gets a YES it will activate the option to remove the White List filter, which the user can select. There will also be an option to Impose White List, which will de-activate the option to remove the White List and revert to the filter. To remove the filter, use the Age Verify option again. Re-setting the device re-imposes the White List, but re-booting after an upgrade doesn't. You get the idea.

How do your kids now access You Tube? It's not on the White List, so they need a device that belongs to someone who is Age Verified. That would be the parents. The kids can't open a parental device. The parents aren't going to give away their NI numbers. Nor are they going to hand over their device to their kids.

The OS makers could sort this out in about, oh, five days or less. The Government could set up a basic White List and change it as time goes on. Free speech is for adults, not kids, and the White List does not affect kids.

So, done, modulo details.

(A prize for identifying that quote.)

No Fusion - A Couple of Sample Shots

 (Taken with NoFusion 56mm HEIF+ iPhone SE2)

I have whinged before about the iPhone's uncanny-valley computational photography. The over-sharp details, the over-defined skies. So I went looking for a camera app that avoids it, and isn't the subscription-based Leica one. After looking at some videos, NoFusion seemed to be a decent option, even with an annual subscription, so I downloaded it. You have to select the HEIF+ option to dodge the iPhone computational photography, and it adds a heartbeat to the save time, but it looks better. I know a perfectly blue sky with bright red cranes doesn't show it well, but the top photo does, and come on... who doesn't love a blue sky with bright red cranes?

Why Two Strats (Teles, Les Paul's) Sound So Different (It's NOT the Tonewood)

Why can two guitars from the same model range, allegedly with the same pickups, tuners and switches, sound just different enough so that you prefer one over the other? Shouldn't they be the same? Because modern manufacturing techniques? I watched a couple of videos on how guitar pots are constructed, and very enlightening it was.



There's a sweeper arm attached to the knob, which runs over a ring of resistive material. At both ends are bits of bare metal that the sweeper can reach. One of those ends is at 1 and the other is at 10. At those positions, there is no resistance. As soon as the sweeper gets wholly on to the resistive ring, there's resistance. (Half-on and half-off, the electricity sees the zero resistance half-off bit and goes down that path, so the sweeper is not on the ring until it's all on the ring.) This why there is the well-known leap in tone or volume change on reaching 0 or 10. Personally, I think that's bad design, but there it is masquerading as a feature.

It seems guitar manufacturers think that 10% variation on the resistance of the pots and the capacitance of the cap is acceptable. This means one guitar might have a 550k ohm pot and another a 450k ohm pot, which is more than 20% different, which you will be able to hear. A 0.022 microfarad capacitor (a popular choice for tone controls) would vary from 0.0198 to 0.0242 microfarads, and that makes a difference of e.g. 3,000 ohms (!) in the reactance to A440, which is 16%, and that will also be noticeable.

That's why one Fender or Gibson sounds better than another, because the components vary so widely. (Paul Reed Smith says we can go into any guitar store anywhere in the world, pick out the same make and model of his guitars, and it will sound the same. Which if it is true means his manufacturers are doing some wicked quality control. If so, how did they miss the dry solder joint in my 594?)

But here's the thing.

The difference between any two guitars played through the same amp with the same settings is most noticeable when playing clean, and with either wide-open or mid-point dial settings. Reverb and delay blur the details, as does modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, univibe), and once the distortion goes beyond edge-of-breakup, no-one can tell the difference between a £100 Harley Benton S-style and a £6,000 Les Paul. Add enough effects and no-one can tell if you are playing a Custom Shop Jazzmaster or a Squire 335. A few dozen kilo-ohms difference between the pot values will vanish in the noise.

So that, I think, is why guitar-makers feel they can get away with what hi-fi manufacturers would blanche at. Anyway, this is about tradition, and traditional construction was even more erratic. Manufacturing has come a very long way since 1980 and even 1990, but guitar electrics did not seem to join the ride.

If Fender is prepared to use skanky (because that's what taking kit from the 10% bin is) guitar pots, why wouldn't they do the same for their amp pots? Makes a mockery of all those settings for this and that tone (you know, "to get that so-and-so sound, use 5 on the treble, 6 on the mid-range and 3 on the bass") because the writer's 5 may well be my 6 or 4. It really amounts to no more than "keep twiddling, it's around there somewhere".

90mm Prime Photos

So I have been out and about with the 90mm prime, and liking the results. This one is an official London Street Photography shot, for which I get 50 points,

and this one demonstrates why taking photos in London when Spring has sprung is so difficult. Everywhere you turn there's a big splotch of green blocking the details. It doesn't go away until autumn.

And it is great for getting close-ups of dogs who just love going for a walk in the Thames.

How To Overthink A New Guitar

The Les Paul and Flying V are religious icons. If you want to drop a Flying V at my place, I will not turn it away. The SG looks like Batman's ears. The 3XX-series look like workmanlike hollow-bodies for session players. The Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Explorer, and others, look quirky and interesting. We will pass over those Ibanez with long curly horns, Strandbergs, Mayones, headless guitars, and other weird modern stuff. Also 7-strings. Gretsch's and the like are too big and hefty for my old shoulders. Anything with a Bigsby is just... why?

There are two basic electric guitar sounds: humbuckers (Gibson) and single-coils (Fender). There are variations of single-coils - Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster, P90 - and each has a slightly different clean tone, but sound very similar when going into distortion, as this shows...



Humbuckers are the same: a common characteristic sound with differences around the edges which fade when going into distortion. Watch this...



Can split humbuckers can get close enough to a single-coil sound? Well, watch this...



Three things from this. The Strat was always identifiable, but only just; in the final section, all of them could have been Les Pauls, because that's what distortion does; otherwise split-coil is more or less the same as single-coil (because that's what coil splits do, only take output from one of the humbucker coils).

Turns out the PRS McCarty's have coil taps, not splits. Here's the difference...



My PRS McCarty 594 SE ticks the double-humbucker and coil tap boxes. The Paranormal Tele kinda ticks the offset look and Tele / Jazzmaster pickups. In theory that leaves P90's, about which someone said...

When compared to Fender-style single-coils, P90s are noticeably fatter and warmer. They don't have quite the same sparkling top end or quack, but they compensate with a more substantial midrange and beefier low end

Okay, so given the range of tones I have recently understood I can get by making the 594 and Princeton do tone acrobatics, I'm not sure this is going to fill any gaps. P90 guitars are expensive unless it's a Yamaha Revstar, weighing around 9lb, or a Sire L7V New Gen which is a Les Paul shape and maybe heavy as well.

I would like a Jaguar or a Mustang (who wouldn't)? But. The affordable ones do not have the original toggle switches and circuitry. Guitars with the original circuitry cost over £2,000 even in the second-hand market. Without the extra switching, it is not quite the real deal. I'm not a collector.

So to fill what I'm missing in the sounds I have, I need a Strat. So, now, uh, this is where it gets awkward.

The Fender Stratocaster is the most played electric guitar in music history. Yet 1) the whammy bar is in the wrong place; 2) the tremolo goes out of tune too easily; and 3) the controls are in the wrong place; 4) Fender's quality control is erratic, on a wall of the same model Strat, no two will sound the same; 5) it does not look cool. Yes, you read that right. It's too long in the waist. Those horns are disconcertingly thick close up. Some of the headstocks can be over-large. It’s a bloke’s guitar, and I’m not a bloke.

By contrast the Telecaster is discreetly, unutterably, cool. Zippo lighter cool. Ray-Ban cool. Lou Reed played one for years. The Boss plays one. Julian Lage plays one. The Tele came in a vision from God to Leo Fender. It is the guitar that shows up and plays. Hell, Mike Bloomfield played one at that notorious Dylan Newport gig. Ralph Macchio uses one in the duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads. What more do you want?

Well, those position 2 and 4 Strat tones for one thing.

The Player II series offers chambered Strats and Teles, putting them within my weight requirement, so a visit to Epsom or Guildford is in the offing.

There's birthdays, and un-birthdays, and Christmas and un-Christmas. Plenty of occasions.