Rant of the day

we see them all the time here when the weather is sunny and warm... up to 15 in a train of bikes sometimes racing up Weardale....embarrassingly in matching leathers helmets and gloves to their bike - which always looks like it has two or three outings a year....and all with the bike sense of a headless chicken

 

It's sold for £8218 WTF!!

 

I bet it'll be some Japanese businessman (Nutter) who wants to put it in his museum of Unusuarry Blight coroured reather jackets.

 

I'm going up in the loft to see if I can find any Unusuarry coroured leather jackets. I may be gone some time!

 

I blame spell check, its obviously got a foreign bias these days.

 

And the sellers name "wesricher" he ain't half, You see boy's and girls it pays not to throw that old stuff away there's always some mug [punter] who has too much cash in their hands.

 

Do we have an admin anymore?

 

Interesting......

 

Says it all really.......

 

Actually she was very good. Telling it like it is and pretty eloquently!

 

In case you misunderstood Callumnity........that is why I posted it.......yes, she is very good and we need more people like her.

 

I think you mean ‘more people to be like her’!?

 

That paper used a dodgy headline to print a big fat nothing burger.

 

I play 5-string banjo and know a wee bit about it's history and it's origins are not certain. It does appear in Africa modelled after a 'Banza' which is a Portuguese instrument.

The 5-string banjo of classic 'hillbilly sound' may have it's origins in the African instrument but in the 5-string, drum-head incarnation it's wholly an American creation as is the style of playing, Bluegrass, that is the 'classic' banjo sound and the music really has it's roots in Celtic music as played by the poor white folks of Virginia. The incarnation of the instrument is less than two hundred years old and the Bluegrass 5-string sound is the invention of Earl Scruggs in the 1940's.

Basically the banjo and it's music as we know it now has as much to do with Africa as the Great Highland Bagpipes of Scotland have to do with the early bag operated pipes brought to Scotland by the Romans or as the Guitar played by Jimi Hendrix has to the chordophones played by the ancient Hitites.

I know I should be ashamed but I have to admit that I haven't watched a single program from 'Black History Month'. Afraid I just can't get excited about it and don't see that it has any more relevance to my life than the History of Patagonians or Outer Mongolians, well actually, apparently I am more closely related to Outer Mongolians (About thirty thousand years ago) than I am to Africans.

 

You know that lad couldn't actually play the banjo There was a real banjo player behind him who played the music. Don't know why they didn't just have him mime it but apparently they wanted the playing to look correct.

 

It had naff all to do with grammar, punctuation or even syntax. It was about meaning.

Thripster was inadvertently welcoming mass immigration rather than applauding her words.

 

That's freaky . . .

 

Tell me you are not one of those shit kickers and have ginger hair

 

Afraid I don't have ginger hair @Don the Don, greyish blonde I guess describes my hair at least before it turned greyish white when I got married. Not a shit kicker, at least not deliberately although I have occasionally kicked the odd shit when not looking where I was going. I just love the sound of the Banjer the fifth string has a 'drone' characteristic that has a similar feel to the bagpipes and fiddle which I also play. I consider it an American made instrument for playing British (Scots English and Irish) based music no matter whether African Americans want to claim it's origins as part of their cultural history.

The lad certainly did Jez, but the producer must have been a stickler for accuracy as, apparently he wanted the hands seen in the film to really be playing the music heard. No idea how they did it but I was told by a well respected American Banjer player, who is sadly no longer with us, that the kid had his arms behind him or some other trick and the arms in his shirt were the real banjo players. He must have been good to play in the position he had to be in so he wasn't seen.