Search for excellence. Success! and failure:(

I love piano bar! Good music, pleasant atmosphere, a smiling pianist/vocalist and a grand piano with seats around it, direct interaction with the customers, an inclusive civilised way to drink. I found an ad for a small Italian fish restaurant, "Piano bar on Thursdays". I went for dinner and the food and wine was great. So was the music, cool and jazzy. So why am I not going to hurry back?

Failure: Well, it wasn't a piano, it was a keyboard with rhythm machine built in and/or backing tracks. It might just as well have been a DJ. The guy may have been a great musician, but who can tell? Os it real or is it Memorex? I think he sang, there was a microphone there but there seemed to be more than one voice. Personality? Zilch. Sorry, but he never caught anyone's eye, never asked if anyone had a request, never spoke, never smiled. He disappeared on his breaks and left us with Diana Krall, Jobim and Stan Getz which is not all bad. But this is not piano bar. This is a keyboardist morphing into DJ.

Success! Where are the entertainers of today? Last night they were at Lula's Lounge in Toronto. The McFlies, a six-piece band playing acoustic instruments and packing the place solid with an enthusiastic young crowd. I had never seen a Cajon before. Its basically a wooden box and the musician sits on it and slaps the front of it, different sounds from different places. With a mic stuck in a hole in the back it's a hell of a drum set, this guy was driving the band. Individually the musicians were all extremely competent, as an ensemble they were fantastic. Tight arrangements, surprising repertoire including a Boy Gorge number and a song from Quiet Riot, "Come on feel the noise". I'll be at the next performance if I can find it.

Which brings me to today's grumble. Many bands and singles work in self-imposed anonymity. Three basic items to increase audience size and get more money, guys, the bottom line, listen, you need:

The band name displayed on or near the stage.
A guest book (or a groupy with a laptop) collecting names and email addresses.
A take-away piece with a photo, the website and contact info.

I am a time-traveller from the last century and I know.

In search of a piano bar

This afternoon I spotted a bar with a piano keyboard on the awning. I zoomed in, the keyboard logo was everywhere, even on the server. (I hate these PC words, so soulless. This server was in fact a lovely barmaid and the logo was beautifully displayed.) "Where's the piano?" I asked. "It will be here 9PM, tonight is jam night", she replied.

So I fancied a jam and came back in the evening. The band was on a break, I was invited to play when the band came back on. An hour and a quarter later the band was still on a break so I left. Bummer.

At the Barmaids Arms I remember working four hours a night with three twenty-minute breaks. The times are a-changing. I am a time-traveller from the previous century.

Nobody likes to be shown incompetent, especially generals

The US are going to the highest political levels to extradite a British computer geek, Gary McKinnon, who hacked his way into a number of US top-secret military computers, looking for proof of aliens. So why is the U.S. so eager to lock up the Asperger's Syndrome hacker?

The reason the US is so keen to punish McKinnon is because he made them look stupid. The fact that the US military computers were so weakly defended that a lone hacker in England could penetrate them is indefensible. Heads should roll, theirs, not his. They should formally thank McKinnon for pointing out how flimsy their security is and hire him to fix it.

Meantime, how much of that data was simultaneously being stolen by really sinister hackers, enemy intelligence operations with much more money, time, equipment and, presumably, finesse than McKinnon had at his disposal? That is the real worry and that is what the US should be concentrating on.

That's what I think. London Bobby