Feet, breet & Matthew Gloag

Paraplexed trundles along happily, netting typically 150 page views per day and making no waves. Except for February 12th when, for no obvious reason we clocked up more than 10,000 views. These were fairly equally distributed over only three posts, one very old one about washing feet in the old Sofitel Club, one about the noise made by track pants worn outside-in (breet-breet) and one about railway platform signage in the (English) West Midlands (This Station is a No Smoking Station). Equally strange was that all 10,000 views were apparently from Israel. I have no idea why they happened. No comments were left. Possibly no human was involved, except indirectly, in programming a robot to behave totally irrationally. One of life's small mysteries, I suppose.

While My Renaissance Lute Gently Weeps

While My Renaissance Lute Gently Weeps. The title is shamelessly stolen from George Harrison and the lyrics are cobbled together by borrowing from no fewer than eight Renaisance songs, by Dowland and his peers. But the melody and lute accompaniment are my own. The lute is an unforgiving beast to play, not least because it keeps trying to escape when you're playing it.

paraplexed.com

It had to be done. For a long time now, the Paranormal Hotel blog (formerly Helga's Chickens) has been renamed to PARAPLEXED while being accessible only as paranormal-hotel.blogspot.com.  But today I have finally treated the blog to its own domain. We are now paraplexed.com (though the blogspot address will continue to work).

All that remains is a sense of purpose. And a feeling '21 is going to be a good year... 

The Centrifugal Governor

Balls! with which Stephenson has tamed the steam

and harnessed it to do the work of man,
small as you are, each flywheel, shaft and beam
is subject to your governance, your plan.

Some, in their innocence, were unimpressed.
'A top, a whirligig, a childish gift,
a bagatelle', they said, but little guessed:
the faster you revolve, the more you lift.

And even as you rise, you stem the flow
through cylinder and piston, ease the thrust
on cam and bearing, mollify the show
to dignified decorum, as needs must.