Airforce 2

Spent the weekend in London and managed to visit a couple of record shops in Berwick Street. In Sister Ray I managed to pick up Ginger Baker’s Airforce 2 which I have been looking for for about 30 years!

Top Album Covers – King Crimson, In The Wake of Poseidon

Courtesy of Wikipedia

The work is called The 12 Archetypes or The 12 Faces of Humankind. The colour pictures were painted by Tammo De Jongh in 1967.[1][2]

The twelve faces in the picture are as follows:

The Fool (Fire and Water): The laughing man with a wispy beard.
The Actress (Water and Fire): The Egyptian girl with long pearl earrings and many pearl necklaces around her neck, she has tears in her eyes.
The Observer (Air and Earth): A scientist type person with round spectacles pushed up above his brow, mostly bald head with white hair at the sides; his left hand is held up to his chin, he looks thoughtful.
The Old Woman (Earth and Air): A woman with much wrinkled face wrapped up against the cold.
The Warrior (Fire and Earth): A dark and powerful warrior’s face in blacks and reds. He wears a steel helmet, broad square face, open mouth with square teeth and a full black beard.
The Slave (Earth and Fire): A black African with large gold earrings and a ring through her nose; the lips are full and pink, the eyes half-closed, sultry and sensuous; the expression is warm and friendly.
The Child (Water and Air): a picture of innocence; a girl with delicate sweet smile and butterfly shaped bows at each side in her long golden hair; her eyes are large and watery and she has a delicate sweet smile on her mouth. She wears a gold chain, on the end of which is a small golden key.
The Patriarch (Air and Water): An old philosopher, with a long face and long white hair and long white beard and moustache; white bushy eyebrows; all around are shapes like flowers or snowflakes; the brow is furrowed upwards from the nose in a fan-like fashion.
The Logician (Air and Fire): A scientist or wizard type man with long face, dark hair and long dark beard; he appears to hold a long stick or wand with his right hand and his left is held aloft and surrounded by stars.
The Joker (Fire and Air): Picture in bright reds and yellows is of a smiling twinkle-eyed Harlequin with his typical gold-stuccoed, triangular hat.
The Enchantress (Water and Earth): A sad girl with watery eyes ; her long dark hair is blown sideways across her face and brow from right to left.
Mother Nature (Earth and Water): Lying asleep in the long grass; their face in silhouette is viewed from the left side and all around are the flowers and butterflies.

Cover - King Crimson In The Wake of Poseidon

Internet Radio & Stuff

Over the years I have acquired quite a few Internet Radio type devices.

One of the earliest that I bought was a Freecom Musicpal – a good bit of kit but they ceased developing the platform and although it still works it is hampered by the lack of development and also its rather poor built in speaker – to get it to work properly it really needs to be hooked up to an amplifier.

The ones that I still use are a Revo Mondo Wi-fi Internet Radio Adapter and my Squeezeboxes.

touch

The Revo Mondo Wi-fi Internet Radio Adapter (above) is plugged in to my Hi-Fi in the office and I often use it to listen to BBC 6 Music. I also have a Squeezebox Classic plugged in to the same Hi-Fi but for some reason I use that predominantly for streaming my own music and not for Radio even though it is more than capable.

Amazon’s Autorip

Amazon who are a regular recipient of my Credit Card details have recently introduced Autorip to their sales of Music CD’s. Basically you buy the CD, usually at the same price, or for less than the price, of the MP3 download and you get a FREE MP3 download of the album encoded in highish quality 256Kbps VBR MP3 format.

I bought this album yesterday and although its not due for delivery for some days I already have the full album loaded onto my QNAP TS-419P and ready to play via my Squeezeboxes.

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Amazon Autorip

The screenshot (23rd July 2013) above shows the situation. The CD is £5.41 whereas as the MP3 download is £7.49. So best to buy the CD and get the FREE Autorip for £5.41. No brainer really.