Doing the Spotty Dog

Watching the David Byrne dance routine in today’s Open Culture post reminded me that what he describes as Puppet Leg, where an imagined puppet string is pulled to raise the leg,

was part of a ‘dance‘ (I use the word in its loosest interpretation) routine known as the Spotty Dog that we did in the 1960s resulting in much merriment.

Upon a search for a Spotty Dog clip I discovered that it is, bizarrely, an actual exercise these days. But as Miss Cox confesses she, and I suspect many others, has no idea why it is called the Spotty Dog.

Well let me enlighten you.

Jettisoning Jetpack

So farewell Jetpack. I subscribed from the early days when you offered some useful tools at a reasonable price. Over the years the price increased and the tools became less useful. So some of this blog will probably stop working. On departing you warn that I will no longer be able to use WordAds – whatever they are 🤷‍♂️.

I am sure it will be a great loss to both of us. Who does not enjoy websites littered with junk advertising? I know I do. But it is indicative of how the mercantile has subsumed the personal on the web these days. Having no need for an audience and no desire to build one I shall continue, regardless, with what interests/amuses/educates me.

Similarly I have closed my Bandcamp account. They seem to have become the type of people I try to avoid. I should also cancel my Apple Music subscription since they deemed Taylor Swift to be their artist of the year and their general uselessness…. but I have yet to find anything better and do not want to return to collecting records. It seems to be a service for people who neither like nor have any interest in music. In the days of yore if I ventured in to a record shop and was confronted by a Classical department filled with the non-classical titles available in Apple’s Classical app I would walk out as they clearly had no idea what they are doing. But on the other hand it does pass the Memphis Minnie test – if the record shop had something by Memphis Minnie that was easily findable it may be worth my time perusing their racks.

Similar artists to Edward Elgar???

From Towrags to sideburns

After the towrag nonsense, in a piece about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the BBC spews forth this:

We can give you Flash in the pan and Half cocked but Sideburns did not appear until almost 100 years later when they arrived from America; derived from General Ambrose Burnside who sported a fine pair of side whiskers – as they were previously known.

Background image not appearing on mobile devices

Spent some time trying to figure out why the background image on my site’s home page was not being displayed on mobile devices although it was appearing in a desktop browser. There are, of course, endless solutions that may or may not have worked for someone in the past. They suggested tweaking your CSS coding or adjusting the size of the image or some other voodoo. None of these worked for me.

What worked for me was simply ensuring that the image’s colour profile was set to sRGB. Once that was changed everything worked as expected.