Spotify was in a contemplative mood this week. My favourite streaming service served up track after track of melodious keyboards and laid-back beats. It was all very pleasant but Spring is a time of vitality and vigour and the Crotchety sinews were in longbow tension, as if waiting for Diana to release her hunting arrow.…Read more Beyond Illumination
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End VII
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
How Bright Is The Sun?
Can a machine be lonely? You might say 'No' because a machine, by its very nature, can't have feelings. Or you could take the view that human beings are just rather complex machines and we all know what it's like to be lonely, so the answer must be 'Yes'. It sounds like a deep philosophical…Read more How Bright Is The Sun?
Exits
My Release Radar playlist on Spotify was rubbish this week. It gave me: a cathedral choir that didn't chime with my mood; mediocre songs best hidden in the middle of a long album; remixes that belong on the cutting room floor; tedious ambient tracks; and some unpleasantly grating noises. The few good tracks were by artists I've…Read more Exits
Craobhacha
It was St. Patrick's Day last week and a number of online commemorations passed across the Crotchety Computer Screen. Beyond rumours of partial Irish ancestry two or three generations back I have no connection with the Emerald Isle so, on the whole, they held only a passing interest. Indeed, those tributes to the people and…Read more Craobhacha
Everything Is Broken
The world is broken. It is broken in so many ways. There are inexcusable wars; there is unconscionable famine. Schoolchildren have to go on strike to tell the politicians that they are not doing enough to combat climate change. Gunmen kill our brothers and sisters just because they follow a different religion. And even the…Read more Everything Is Broken
Mexicola
Spring has arrived in Crotchety Village. The snowdrops have come and gone, the daffodils are blooming, catkins are on the trees ... and when I got up this morning it was snowing. Yes, Spring is a season of contrasts in the UK. After last month's record high temperatures Winter has returned with a vengeance, foisting…Read more Mexicola
Fractured and Dazed
We apologise for the late running of the 3/3/19 Track of the Week service. This was due to a collision between an elderly pedestrian and a cyclist in central London at about 8:30 pm on Friday night. The pedestrian was 89 year old Crotchety Man senior, who had to spend a few days in hospital…Read more Fractured and Dazed
Chalk and Coal
Here in the UK when we want to emphasise that two things are very different we might say, "They are like chalk and cheese". It's a snappy phrase but are chalk and cheese really so different? Wouldn't "chalk and coal" turn up the contrast in our mental imagery more effectively? Perhaps that's what they say…Read more Chalk and Coal
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
Crotchety Man 