Can the ends ever justify the means? Take lying, for example. Are little white lies sometimes the morally correct thing to do or is it always wrong to be untruthful? Should you tell a seriously injured woman that her new-born baby was killed in the car crash that put her broken body in a hospital…Read more End VII
Album
Afronaut
... there will be no opera, no Viennese waltzes, no country music, no hip-hop and nothing ponderously slow. - Crotchety Man Home Page Two of the blogs I follow have recently suggested that hip hop is a genre that can not be dismissed by any music fan who claims to have an open mind. One of those blogs…Read more Afronaut
Fire
The end of the year is a time for looking back. Today I'm going back 50 years, almost to the dawn of the Crotchety Man era. It's 1968, a time when experimentation in pop music was the order of the day and a slew of highly original acts flourished. One of the most flamboyant of…Read more Fire
Flow
By definition, fluids flow. Steam rises from a boiling kettle, spring water spontaneously cascades down the mountainside. And when you hear a particularly fluid jazz lick you can be sure the band has achieved that indefinable quality of musical 'flow'. It's what all musicians strive for, when the notes spill out without bidding, floating in…Read more Flow
Heterotopia
Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different ... - Walter Russell Mead Heterotopia is a difficult concept to define succinctly. The word comes from the Greek roots, heteros (other) and topos (place). So a heterotopia is an other place, somewhere that…Read more Heterotopia
Through the Windowpane
Sometimes it's good to wind back the tape and listen to an old favourite. Guillemots' first album, Through the Windowpane, has been mentioned, briefly, in these pages already in both Track of the Week and Band of the Year posts, but until now it hasn't featured as an Album of the Month. So let's press the…Read more Through the Windowpane
Far Skies Deep Time
When you look up into a clear night sky the more distant the star the farther back in time you are seeing it. This is a simple consequence of the finite speed of light but it has profound implications for astronomy. By studying far away galaxies we can look back almost to the dawn of…Read more Far Skies Deep Time
