Not to sound completely down though, I finally got to watch The Godfather on New Year's Day, and yesterday I built a bass fuzz pedal.

I walked passed my local independent record shop today, and there's a great big "closing down" sign in the window. That shop has been in the town for over 25 years; I worked there part-time as a teenager, my brother worked there full time, I've spent a stupid amount of money there, I lived above it for about 5 years - the owner helping me out by giving me the flat rent-free after I was made redundant. And now it's going, a victim of the internet and the UK supermarkets continually forcing down the selling price of CDs. Sucks.

drezdn, one of my cats has an irregular heartbeat too. My vet said that they're graded on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being the mildest. Ask the vet where on the scale your cat's heart murmur falls.

Heh, I just wondered to myself if anyone has ever joined MeFi or MeCha and actually admitted that they are a vet specialising in small animals. They would soon wish they hadn't, I bet.

My favorite local independent record shop closed a few months ago, so that the owner could take a quixotic, utterly-doomed run at the Arkansas governorship.

TheDonF - which one is it? (if have remembered where you live from the last London meetup but one correctly). Not the Longplayer? I too spent rather a lot there in my teenage years.

greycap - yep, that's the one :(

box - what a bizarre thing to do! I wonder why he even thought he had a chance? Also: quixotic is a fantastic word that I've wanted to use in conversation. That, and capricious. One day, I tells ya, one day...

I've got no idea why he did it, or why (or even if) he thought he had a chance. The whole situation really resists easy explanation. (As an aside, though, the consensus here seems to be that he mostly took votes away from the Green candidate for governor, a much more qualified (and equally unelectable) fellow who, as it turns out, didn't do nearly as well as some of his party's downticket candidates.

greycap - yep, that's the one :(

Oh bollocks. That's a real shame. I haven't lived in TW since 2002 but I'll always remember that place affectionately (eg for supplying me with most of my collection of early Belle and Sebastian EPs).

I have irregular heartbeats from time to time (SVTs) and I hardly ever die suddenly.

Your ex-bandmates are plum dumb. There, I said it.

Thanks danostuporstar!

Yeah, greycap. And who is going to break the next lot of good, new bands? Tesco? Sainsbury's? Where are people going to get the expert knowledge from? Someone only working in HMV over Christmas or the summer holidays? Longplayer turned me on to so many new bands, got me so much stuff, that my (reasonably large) CD collection would be nothing without them. Downloads (illegal or otherwise) have really hit them hard, as has the price war that the supermarkets brought on. It really doesn't help that people download stuff off the net, walk into Longplayer, steal the empty case thus leaving the shop with dead stock that they can only sell at way less than they bought it for.

Box
I read all about that windmill tilt in Oxford American magazine. Which is a good magazine.

I'm sorry about your year so far drezdn. I'm pulling for your cat not to suddenly die.

Oxford American is indeed a good magazine, and that recent crime/noir/whatnot issue is one of my favorites.

And Rod Bryan's a good guy (when I first moved to AR, I quickly bought up his entire stock of arty jazz and African music). Too bad for the AR Greens, though.