I've been listening to Elliott Smith's album XO since it first came out in 1998. I bought it as a CD on Amazon in the days when folks bought CD's.
I've always adored XO. I used to play it most on the stereo in the kitchen diner we have, as I wrapped items for Ebay buyers during the winters of the new Millennium, along with other albums from indie artists and from my new musical love at the time, Grunge.
XO was and is a sparkling thing, like a glass herald walking in and starting to sing jewels. I was and still am entranced by the lush folds and beautiful layering that Elliott created as the century closed. Every song is special, sweet, unusual and mesmerising, like when you first heard Lionheart by Kate Bush 20 years earlier or the Beatle's White Album 10 years before that. Fresh, haunting, meaningful.
Listening again to it now in a format Elliott could never have experienced, on my laptop via You Tube with earphones, I'm taken back to those winter nights when I'd play XO, Natalie Marchant's Ophelia, Embrace's The Good Will Out and Pearl Jam's Ten one after the other, as I folded brown paper and bit sellotape into pieces and stuck them on the chair spindle. I was in my early Forties and really enjoyed my music again like I had in the early Seventies. XO holds a special place in that memory.
Five years after I bought XO Elliott Smith was dead. He died of stab wounds in his LA home in 2003 aged just 34. Somewhere I hope he lies dreaming looking at the brilliant sun he sung about.
You can listen to XO on You Tube if you want to too.
Do you have problems finding stuff at home?
I do. I've been in the attic twice this week to look for two things, a box of vintage toy magazines and a spare C21 Tank turret. Can I find them? Can I chuff!
The magazines are a large set of the old fab American magazine Collectable Toys and Values, some of which I've never even read.
However there's one I remember reading all the time. It was one of the first vintage toy magazines I ever bought, the brilliant Batman issue.
I'll let you know when I find it but in the meantime here's the cover. Is this a magazine you've read?
Wotan spoke about the possible S.W.O.R.D Moonbase LEM.
Can't find footage of the one Wote mentioned.
This one is interesting I saw on You Tube. It rises but doesn't rotate.
I've just refunded my second UK Ebay buyer this summer/ autumn. The items, vintage toys all rooted out of car boot rummage boxes with care and attention by myself, were lost in the post and never arrived at their UK destinations.
I am getting pretty damn tired of it.
Just how many parcels do the Royal mail lose? Where the hell do they go?
I have learnt my lesson and will now have to charge extra for tracked mail every time.
What's your experience of your postal service as sellers or buyers readers?
I adore this old NASA technical model of the Moon Prospector.
I assume the device on the wheel was simply to allow the model to be stood up for display purposes as shown above. Would you agree?
A trip into the Moonbase attic found two abandoned bases.
These two Moonbases were built in 2009 as part of a the blog's look at the fabled Project SWORD Moonbase toy, of which only two possible examples have ever been seen we think.
This large scratch built model was my own effort to capture the SWORD Base. It could do with another outing.
