See Ariel morph into Ariel laundry powder (mouse over)

Mike's Pith & Wind - Holler fer a Marshall
Jim Marshall, the founder of Marshall Amplifiers, died recently. Bill and I met him once. I don’t remember anything about the meeting other than it happened, but I do remember the circumstances that prompted the meeting and the rather bizarre consequences. So settle down, adjust your commode underwear and pay attention.
England in 1974. Ariel phase 2 was doing its best to survive in an indifferent, verging on hostile, swinging London. We were in London to record an album at Abbey Road Studios, but there’d been some complications along the way that ensured Ariel was getting only the most basic level of assistance from EMI and even that was dispensed grudgingly.
The main reason for this antipathy was that this version of Ariel wasn’t the band responsible for A Strange Fantastic Dream, the album that had originally caught the attention of the highly influential BBC DJ, John Peel. That line-up of Ariel had self-destructed spectacularly after travelling to Perth and back by train after barely twelve months in existence, but before it did that it managed to produce an album that still sounds quite breath-takingly adventurous today, chiefly due to the prodigious musicality of Tim Gaze and his foil on keyboards, (and Nigel Macara’s nemesis), the mercurial John Mills. Bill and I were just plodders by comparison and while that had clearly been our preference during the life of Spectrum, we had to admit that when.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - The driver
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a movie in possession of a good car chase must not be in want of an audience.
Additionally there is no doubt that many an otherwise lacklustre cinematic experience would be much improved by a large number of high powered automobiles, wreathed in tyre smoke, circulating around and into the scenery at unreasonably high speed. Instead of waiting interminably for the boat to sink in ‘Titanic’, the start of the movie would have been much enlivened with a race to the ship where Jack, now a recast slightly as a fugitive from justice for a crime he never committed, races to get to the doomed ship in time. Instead of steaming up the windows in the car in the hold, Jack could have been explaining the intricacies of the internal combustion engine to our buxom heroine. Or maybe that is what he was doing in manifold ways.
Even though at the moment I cannot.. read more