His name was always Buddy

Be in no doubt, I do not want to pull the shutters down on 'Are We There Yet?', but as you can see here, the glitches at New Blogger haven't gone away - and they probably never will. The last drop of gas in my tank will probably take me to sometime in September, after which they turn the Legacy Blogger life support off and it's, well, Goodnight Vienna.
As you know, much of my output over the last 10 years has comprised pieces littered with hyper-links, photographs and imported videos, and generally having fun with fonts, layouts and colours: all tasks which were once easy (HTML code made it so), but now rendered overly time consuming if not virtually impossible. And, as you'll have read in the above link, HTML has been consigned to the glue factory.
For me to continue I can either pack up my things and move to Wordpress. Or throw myself in the Trent; non-starters both. Or I stay here and become a more essay based site (Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, anyone?), but if I'd wanted to do that I'd be in that market already. And I'm not. Nor do I particularly want to be. Aaaaagh!

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Buddy Rich was a great drummer, but not a very nice person. He would sack members of his band for growing beards, be abusive to fellow band leaders and was genuinely hostile to anyone who had the audacity to ask him for his autograph. And what he had to say about country and, indeed, rock music really isn't fit to print. 
His daughter had a good voice though. Here is Cathy - aged just 13 - with her father.
I was able to download and share this video in seconds flat - just one of the many reasons why I love the immediacy of blogging. It suits how I think; it suits how I write. Or at least it did.

Buddy Rich (featuring Cathy Rich) - The Beat Goes On (1967)

Buddy Rich (1917-1987)

Ch-Ch-Changes

Looking out of my window this morning and the first signs of the changing seasons are apparent. I'm typing this in a long sleeved shirt: my own personal barometer telling me that Autumn, whilst not yet knocking at the door, can only be a couple of streets away. A metaphor maybe for where this blog is going. Are We There Yet? still wakes up every morning and reaches for the pile of tee shirts in the top drawer; reaching for the woolly jumpers hibernating in the bottom drawer is not a natural manoeuvre. I'm kinda clinging to Legacy Blogger like a man on a sinking ship refusing to jump in the lifeboats. To be continued...

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Gillian Anderson: Bidialectic

So this week I've mostly been watching The Fall. I'm half way thru Season 2 and still no sign of Mark E. Smith. Gillian Anderson may well be keeping him chained under the bed; it really wouldn't surprise me.
And that was going to be the nub of today's blog - I'm fascinated with Anderson's accent: I thought she was channelling her inner Emma Thompson with her clipped received pronunciation. That was until I found out that the American actress best known for X-Files is actually bidialectal. As is Linda Thorson (such was her British accent in The Avengers I didn't realise Thorson wasn't English and actually hails from Canada) who, like Anderson, can slip in and out of accents depending on which side of the Atlantic she finds herself on.

But as much as I wanted to write 500 words on Bidialectals, I'm afriad, not for the first time, I got sidetracked. If you knew me you'd know that happens more often than not.
On weekday mornings, despite the annoying adverts, I listen regularly to James O'Brien on LBC - in my opinion the best broadcaster currently working in this country. Bar none. If this blog does indeed continue I'd love James to do a Q&A for me. Maybe that would be the kickstart I need to push my ten year project into its next phase.
One of those pesky adverts has got one of the catchiest riffs these ears have heard in a long while. I'm sure many of you out there will know it already but it's new to me. And it's already been elevated to Banger status. In fact so good is it I shall have to buy a vinyl copy of it. High praise indeed.

SOFI TUKKER - Drinkee (2016)