Minnie the Mix and Leo Baxendale

Today it was announced that Leo Baxendale, cartoonist at the Beano comic creator of Minnie The Minnie had died.

The Beano was something of institution, a handed down traditional rite of Britishers and for some from British families overseas too for its mixture of comics whose situations were truly only in your imaginations and some such as The Bash Street Kids and my heroine Minnie The Minx based upon our times at school and at home capturing just what it was our lives more more like as school children especially in the pre-internet era.

Minnie was very much the tomboy, not one for endless playing with toys and dolls but at the centre of all physical activities being very much the equal of any boy when it came to her strength, resourcefulness and daring-do being the Tam-o shantered and skirted equivalent of Dennis the Menace and just like him, running rings around Mom and Dad.

Here's a more recent strip, showing just how she plays pranks on girls the equal of what any boy would do.

Of course as in real life her pranks and at times outright naughtiness would catch up with her especially in pre 1990's editions as the authority figures in her life would discipline her.

This was something we'd all empathize with in an era would we'd get the same in our own lives and this interconnection between the lives we led and its portrayal in books, comics and other media was very strong which is why the death of the creator of big chunk of childhood leisure time is so keenly missed.
R.I.P Leo.

 Every Thursday come rain or shine there was one thing that British schoolchildren looked forward to and even though it is online only today, it is the same and that is the children's comic, the Beano that mirrored chunks of your world with stories about home and school life together with stories from far away lands.

This is a good example as any of a pre 1990's edition with Dennis the arch menace, his dog, Gnasher up to no good with 'soppy' Walter not that Dennis and his chums didn't get their come-comeuppance by "the powers that be" which you could say was the message although we all laughed at them.

This comic had a team of cartoonists of which one instrumental member Leo Baxendale died on Thursday April 27th, drew the Bash Street Kids and Minnie The Minx who remain even very popular characters.

The earliest of ideas

 

The earliest memory of when I realized I liked to be a boy as people said I was in a skirt was around the age of eight when I'd try sneaking the odd one one when nobody was around much as I wanted to see for myself just how it felt .

This is more how I'd of to dressed outside of school in that era, with a grey skirt and pastel top and tights to play to my hearts content.

Those were toys I played with then.

I resolved five years ago to do so on a daily basis because it was me and I felt I was beginning to understand the real me.

I am proud to be what I am.

Time together or time alone?

 Modern life is certainly very different  compared to that some of us can recall having had one form of entertainment cease to work properly and require replacement this week in this post done exclusively on the Chromebook.

I think one of the big factors has been that increasingly we are living separate lives even when we say we're living together say as partners  or with our families, often in isolation in not just our own mental space but actually increasingly our own physical ones.

It's by no means uncommon to hear of families may text members about either meal times although increasingly that's no longer shared or to have snacks fixed for them ready as they emerge briefly to return in minutes.

When I was growing up the television was seen by some as threat to their way of life, taking away from things people did together such as playing games or just talking to each other with us becoming just passive consumers of that coloured tube in the corner of the room.

People didn't anticipate we'd talk about what we were seeing to each other, on the subway or at school or work so in some way you can look at it as a 'golden era' like that family in the picture, that's how we lived including for some of us the wonders of colour that was like going to the movies, 'cept it came to you as huddled around it.

Today though we consume our YouTube, NetFlix an co wherever we happen to be and you may be watching that as someone's chatting away or playing a game which is really cool but as people we need some US time as well as ME time to catch up with each other, talk about what we've seen and done, maybe gain some perspective too.

I think it matters for all of us to try to get our modern lives into some kind of balance, sharing time with each other as well as with watching or keeping up with our friends online. Don't you?

Automaton

Some artists have a regular as clockwork schedule when it comes to their releases and others just don't.

It's been around six whole years since the British acid/jazz group Jamiroquai last released an album at least in part with leader singer Jay Kay, becoming a Dad so understandably wanting to be involved in those early years. On March 31, they delivered the much anticipated Automaton.

In the twenty-three years since "When You Gonna Learn" the strongly environmentally conscious   first single for Sony, much has changed and this album reflects a part of that bringing in digital drumming but it retains that commitment to real playing using instruments, analogue synthesizers rather than computers, singling even with odd rap in an old school soul style as if we're in the 1970's.

Telling it too was record mainly live to analogue tape so we have an update on that sound and if 1999's Synkronized was almost jazz funk by numbers, this is a return to the less formal looseness of the first two albums.

I bought this on lossless full cd quality download.

Recommended.

My original copies of Emergency on Planet  Earth, The Return Of The Space Cowboy, Travelling Without Moving and Synkronized were on 1990's MiniDiscs and while I did get the 2013 deluxe editions of the first three, I did find the sound a bit bloated in the bass and not properly expanding in an attempt to make it sound louder like so many current albums are so I tracked down original used cd copies to transfer for the Fiio music player.

They sounded much better.

Clues from the past

 

Time was both girls and boys did wear dresses at least until the age of five because it was easier to change babies and infants in dresses before boys would be "breeched" aka put into trousers and treated more as males.

It didn't always run to that model with boys remaining in dresses for longer as this picture shows but he looks so good  in it and yet it's not "soppy" nor are his toys as he is  just a boy in a dress.

I just love it.

Portable music redux

Not everything lasts forever and unfortunately my clip on portable music player died last week after a few years of life.

This Sandisk Clip Zip  music player developed a couple of faults one being being unable to recharge the internal battery from a charger and the second being over 70% of the time it would not be recognized by my Windows Laptop so I could neither charge it from that nor add music to it. 😒

Bit of a problem, what?

I was looking at possible replacements as that manufacture has in many ways lost real interest in new players plus as no longer use exclusively Windows computers (Up with Linux!) something that doesn't reply on a Windows or Apple program to use it.

Recently the Chinese company Fiio discontinued its 2014 X1 player for the X1 Mark ii with blue tooth and a different round scrolling wheel which meant there were  number of the older players on the market both new and some used  and I was able to find one used in excellent condition  for little more than what I paid for the Clip Zip in late December 2012 which is quite a step up from that model.

Removed from its rubberized protective jacket, you can see a bigish 2.4 inch screen showing the menus you navigate using a scrolling wheel, an okay/confirm button in the centre and a back key on the top right. It may be a little old-fashioned in an age of touch screens but hey! it works and is easy to understand.

The bigger screen helps with album art often included in commercial downloads or those you might have added on anything you've copied from cd yourself without the size and format restrictions that were trying on the Clip Zip.

Talking of formats without getting super technical, it'll play Mp3's from the likes of Amazon, AAC files as loved by iTunes and also used by 7digital and lossless "full cd quality" ones in Flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and Alac (the same thing but by Apple) other stores supply.

It also includes the ability to play 24 bit so-called High Resolution audio files some stores and artists offer should you have any which as it happens I do as they can sound better than regular cds even.

The headphone output is noticeably better, able to go louder easily when the music requires it without sounding strained and will drive most headphones very well as is.

The real beauty of this is by selecting it on the menu, it can output a very high quality 'line level output' to connect to a stereo system as if it was a audio component so you could use this like cd player except for playing your music files you might of bought from iTunes from instead without having your computer on.

On the right side of the case is a Micro SD card slot because this play has no internal memory but uses these popular and ever cheaper memory cards which means you can make a series of cards up by music types for example and just swap them over.

In Fiio's players you insert the card writing side toward the back of the player rather than the front. Presently it can take upto 128gb cards although cards over 32gb need to be 'formatted' using the formatting tool in the player before first using them to put your music on by just dragging and dropping the folders to the card which I was doing this weekend.

Although it lacks a FM radio, something I do like for listening to shows like BBC Radio 4's "The World at One", this is a really good replacement for that no longer working Sandisk player.

Am I too old to play with toys?

Today I'm going to be talking about something that you might be going through or maybe it happened to you in your childhood that I think matters.

Most of us grew up with our parent(s) or a very close relative rather than say being with foster parents, in care or adopted and generally they oversaw how we grew up including the things we did or played with.

Every so often there was this talk about  the toys we had like if we still wanted them, could a sibling or cousin have them and sometimes they might of said something like "You no longer need Millie, Chris. You're a big grown up boy now and you don't play with dolls."

Not a few boys get told even they shouldn't and are not to play with dolls too which is sad.

If you were really unlucky, you'd come home from school and just find your toys decimated and probing why would produce the answer "You're too big for them now so I took them away"   which tended to be what happened with mine. That sucks!

Actually they could well be wrong especially as it applies to younger teens and a few months back a girl wrote in to the American Girl dolls magazine with the following question to which they wrote this reply: 

This is actually pretty interesting and I have little doubt influenced by children's welfare 'experts' who see so much pressure on acting more sophisticated, in many ways trying too hard at being grown up, being too serious for our own good.

Writing this as someone who is legally an adult I like what they have to say about maturity a  lot which is really what we mean by  being grown up which is more about how we treat others and how we  run our lives. In a word, being responsible which we can struggle with and I won't lie to my younger readers that I haven't had this  too but that is all it is.

Growing up and even being Grown Up doesn't mean we should not enjoy play or doing something creative, indeed only this week gone, someone who isn't an age regressor like me just came out and said they were going to make a Lego model and did, showing pictures to our circle of plain adult  friends.

I said life's too short not to do the things we enjoy and they agreed.

If you feel like it, then don't be afraid to especially if you are feeling stressed.