After all the soul-searching of late, I decided that I needed to get out and play more. What with one thing and another, though, getting out proved to be harder than anticipated so staying in and playing therefore became a slightly more viable option. Well, who would have thought that our friends at Blogger would be so helpful?

I was on my Dashboard yesterday (intending to try a template tweak or two) and stumbled across Blogger Play (in fact, that's quite an approriate expression because it's not dissimilar to StumbleUpon in concept). If I've got the tag right, clicking on the image below should take you straight there. The photos you'll see are uploaded by Blogger in real time - in other words, as they're posted to blogs you see them appear on the screen. And by clicking on them, you'll be taken straight to the blog post concerned.

Its intriguing. And its fun.




Musical Monday

For a while there I was stuck in a rut of my musical past, but you'll be impressed to learn that this week I'm not a great deal more than a decade from being up to date. And this track is one I heard a few weeks ago purely by chance, and I liked it so much that I did a Victor Kiam and bought the album. In fact, I bought two because it was 2 for 1 (give or take an extra 50p) on Amazon that day!

Anyway, a little about Fiona Apple, courtesy of Wikipedia... "Apple is a member of a family rich with roots in entertainment. Born in New York City, she is the daughter of singer Diane McAfee and actor Brandon Maggart. Her older sister, Amber Taleullah, sings cabaret under the stage name Maude Maggart. Her brother Spencer is a director and directed the video for her single "Parting Gift". Her half brother Garett Maggart starred in the TV series The Sentinel. In addition, her maternal grandparents were Millicent Green, a dancer with the George White's Scandals, a series of 1920s musical revues similar to the Ziegfeld Follies, and Johnny McAfee, a multireedist and vocalist of the big band era; her grandparents met while touring with Johnny Hamp and his Orchestra.

Hmmmm... quite the pedigree. In 1996 Apple's debut album, Tidal, was released by a subsidiary of Sony. The album went on to sell 2.7 million copies and was certified three times platinum in the U.S. My favourite track (and the one I was referring to earlier) is Shadowboxer, and that's what I give you today.



If you want join in with Musical Monday, just stick this in your sidebar or on your post (by the way, this is the code if you want the new image link, i.e. the colour version. Go on, you know you want to change it…):

<a href="http://wdkylondon.blogspot.com/2006/03/musical-monday.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y123/LightestTouch/mmwithcolour.jpg" border="0" height="160" width="120" /></a>