Weed (Noak Bridge, Basildon) - about me page |
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books, collages, comix, fractals, go, guitar, herbs, jukeboxes, juggling, piano, poetry, ponds, rave flyers, stars, tree-houses, video games, writing |
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A FEW PERSONAL DETAILS born in Barnsley (Yorkshire, England) in May 1946, named Christopher John Whitehouse -- brought up in North Lincolnshire: Scunthorpe, Crowle and Louth -- moved back & forth between Leeds and London for several years, followed by a decade squatting in suburban Middlesex and Surrey (during which time the significance of the fact that cats like plain crisps became apparent) -- lived in North America and also in Ireland, but have been based in SE England for the last 30 years, and am currently living in Noak Bridge on the outskirts of Basildon. have one son, Sol, born in 1971, who was conceived on Eel Pie Island while i was living there with Sher, his mother -- Sol travelled up & down the country visiting pubs and clubs making a living playing quiz machines for several years, before ending up writing games for them -- he also played bass in the original line-up of Caned Unable most of my friends seem to live ever further away, and many of them i won't see again have had about 30 jobs*, including hod-carrying for the UK's biggest housing builder, contracting for an international banking corporation (there's a certain something about replying "012345678" when asked for your telephone number), tree-lopping in a royal park, educational research at a children's museum, applications programmer, inner city housing resettlement, driving & delivery, data processing, accounts clerk, experimental cybernetics, electronics purchasing, computer consultancy, laying asphalt, technical documentation, search engine optimisation & more, and have laboured in factories (lead refinery, lamination, food-processing) & fields (picking hops, beans, potatoes), helped write "The Golden Apples of Zeus" (an early VIC-20 text adventure)... and the highest status of all, spending a summer many years ago working on the dodgems at Mablethorpe 🙂 childhood memories are of ration cards, teddy boys, steam trains, and playing in the local woods -- grew up with the birth of rock 'n' roll and beatniks, donkey jackets and doss-bags -- the first time someone called me a "hippie", i had no idea what they were talking about -- wisdom peaked at twenty-one, since when knowledge, experience and a failing memory have pleasantly assisted its decline -- only event celebrated was the return of the house-martins, which journeyed three thousand miles from sub-Saharan Africa each spring to nest above my kitchen window (until Basildon Council refused to lop off a branch of a nearby tree which had grown out of a four-foot high hedge to over 40 feeet tall over the years, and is now blocking access to the nest - probably illegal as their nests are protected, but do i want to spend the rest of my life fighting a court case over it?) changed my name from Chris Whitehouse to 'Weed' in 1996, and this is now my full and legal name, which after all is what some of my friends have known me by for the last 50 years (and it was either that or 'Bowman Trunk Ovid') * companies & organisations worked for include - Springs (Brigg), Funland (Mablethorpe), Northray (Louth), Neville's Bakery (Acton), System Research (Richmond), George Wimpey (Leeds), William Moorhouse (Leeds), Regal Minicabs (Twickenham), Coombs Bakery (Twickenham), Bushy Park (Hampton), Brooklyn Children's Musueum (New York), Reliance Nameplates (Twickenham), Nackington Farm (Canterbury), Small Systems Engineering (London), 3D Digital Design & Development (London), National Telephone Systems (London), The Soft Option (Hampton Wick), Infocast (London), CLHAS Central London Housing Advisory Service (London), Avantel (Cambridge), OmegaFax (Spain), Venus Internet (London) non-profit organisations involved in over the years include - All London Squatters, Animal Aid, British Union Abolition Vivisection, Chickens Lib, non-profit organisations currently supported include - Amnesty International, Cruelty Free International, Compassion in World Farming, Erowid, League Against Cruel Sports, MAPS, Noak Bridge Nature Reserve, Sea Shepherd International, South West Essex Green Party, Suffolk and Essex Hunt Sabs, SETI (User of the Day, 8 August 2018), Tails, Wayback Machine, Wikipedia, XR SOME INFO ABOUT THE SITE the site started in 1996 with initial encouragement and support from Horse, Alan and Alex, and later from Robin and Bruce -- it was hosted by Venus Internet, who also generously provided the overflow space on a Verrio server for the bandwidth-hungry Animated Gifs Archive (not currently online, but still accessible for the most part via the Wayback machine) as the site grew, parts of it were split into their own domains, of which there are now about a dozen in Spring 2005, the majority of the pages were transferred to Hostgator and stayed there until April 2006, when a DoS attack led to the account being abruptly suspended -- the next hosting company used was GoDaddy, where again i had problems, so the individual sites were slowly transferred to DreamHost.com -- the last site to be moved was wussu.com in January 2013 -- Dreamhost is the best hosting company i've come across, and their technical support has been excellent the Rave Flyers Gallery, International Flyer Collectors and London Record Shops pages are part of the rave music section at hyperreal.org, but i no longer have access to them currently the most popular page i look after is the classical guitar tablature at classtab.org the wussu.com home page holds it all together -- Wussu ("The Wuss") was Mo's cat (RIP) a few of my favourite thingsARTISTS - Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Salvador Dali, Francisco Goya, Emil Krause, Martin Sharp, Jim Steranko, Johannes Vermeer AUTHORS - Jane Austen, Jamie Brindle, Philip K Dick, Annie Dillard, William Gibson, Winston Graham, Jack Kerouac, Laurie Lee, Terry Pratchett, Will Self, Alan Sillitoe, John Steinbeck, B Traven, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe BOOKS (NON-FICTION) - A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (HW Fowler), Bessie (C Albertson), British Flora (G Bentham & J Hooker), Chaos (J Gleik), Constellations (J Klepesta & A Rukl), The Conquest of Gaul (J Caesar), First Footsteps in East Africa (R Burton), History of Western Philosophy (B Russell), Introduction to Zoology through Nature Study (R Lulham), The Joyous Cosmology (A Watts), Let My People Go (C Belfrage), Letters to Sophie L (R Luxemburg), The Life and Times of Akhnaton (A Weigall), The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (I & P Opie), Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), Mushrooms Russia And History (VP & RG Wasson), The Golden Bough (J Frazer), The Oxford English Dictionary, The Pursuit of the Millennium (N Cohn), Sundials (A Waugh), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius), The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (R Masters & J Houston), Victory‑in‑Defeat, Defeat‑in‑Victory (V Serge) COMPOSERS - Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, Philip Morris Glass, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Nikita Koshkin, Antonio Lauro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Niccolo Paganini, Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek, Sylvius Leopold Weiss FILMS & TV - Across The Universe (Julie Taymor), The Balcony (Joseph Strick), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), Boys From The Black Stuff (Philip Saville/Alan Bleasdale), Brazil (Terry Gilliam), Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz), Children Of Men (Alfonso Cuarón), Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman), Diary Of A Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel), Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee), Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrik), Duel (Steven Spielberg), Edge Of Darkness (Martin Campbell/Troy Kennedy‑Martin), Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (Russ Meyer), Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam), Going Places (Bertrand Blier), The Hill (Sidney Lumet), If (Lindsay Anderson), Inception (Christopher Nolan), King Of Hearts (Phillippe de Broca), The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson), Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler), My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears), The Name Of The Rose (Jean‑Jacques Annaud), The Prisoner (George Markstein/Patrick McGoohan), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino), Robin Of Sherwood (various/Richard Carpenter), Romance For Trumpet (Otakar Vávra), Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa), Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky), Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder), Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky), The System (Michael Winner), A Taste Of Honey (Tony Richardson), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi), The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi), The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy), Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo) GAMES & VIRTUAL WORLDS - Adventureland (Scott Adams), Bastion, Beat Saber, Bioshock, Clash of Clans, Genshin Impact, go (baduk, weiqi), Life is Strange (series), Mafia (Psycho), Owned, Planetarian, Second Life, The Witcher (series) HUMOUR - Billy Connolly (various), Flanders & Swann (music), Hancock's Half Hour (BBC Radio), Have I Got News For You (BBC TV), John Oliver (HBO TV), Julian Cleary (various), Just A Minute (BBC Radio), Mark Steel (various), Mark Thomas (various), Martin Rowson (The Guardian), Milton Jones (BBC Radio), Mitch Benn (music), Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC TV), Morten Morland (The Times), Patrick Blower (The Telegraph), Peter Brookes (The Times), Shujaat (Aljazeera), Simon Hoggart (various), Sorry I Haven't A Clue (radio), Stephen Fry (various), Ted Ray (various), The Magic Roundabout (BBC TV), The Goon Show (BBC Radio), The Hackers (PCWeekly), The News Quiz (BBC Radio), The Perishers (Daily Mirror), Tom Lehrer (music) MUSIC - Mose Allison, Laurindo Almeida, Altan, Artic Monkeys, Chet Baker, Sarah Bettens, BLΛϽKPIͶK, David Bowie, Dollar Brand, Alfred Brendel, Jackson Browne, Concha Buika, Charlie Byrd, Caned Unable, Leonard Cohen, Crass, Arthur Crudup, Nirmali Devi & Lakshmi Shankar, Dido, Fatoumata Diawara, Dixie Chicks, Eric Dolphy, Lonnie Donegan, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Dave Edmunds, Billie Eilish, Eurythmics, Everly Brothers, Gracie Fields, Béla Fleck, Jackson C Frank, Glenn Gould, Davy Graham, Guo Brothers, Hawkwind, Doris Henderson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Janis Ian, Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, KDA, Li Jie, Salif Keita, Marina Krupkina, Irina Kulikova, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Albert Lee, Brenda Lee, HJ Lim, Edson Lopes, Nellie Lutcher, George Malcolm, Yngwie Malmsteen, Malukah, Lata Mangeshkar, Evangelina Mascardi, Metallica, Midori, MJQ, Chiara Morandi, Dolly Parton, Eddie Peabody, Shawn Phillips, Jacqueline Du Pré, Elvis Presley, John Renbourn, Roselia, Buffy Sainte‑Marie, Earl Scruggs, Andrés Segovia, Lhasa de Sela, Sex Pistols, Showhawk Duo, Bessie Smith, Mercedes Sosa, Art Tatum, Salli Terri, Bobby Timmons, Ritchie Valens, Yuja Wang, Carlos Ward, Hank Williams, Amy Winehouse, Victor Wooten, Robert Wyatt, X‑Ray Spex, YUNGBLUD POETS, PLAYWRIGHTS & TROUBADOURS - John Cooper Clarke, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, James Saunders, William Shakespeare, Solomon, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde VLOGGERS & STREAMERS & CHANNELS - Anton Petrov, Bang Dream!, Cas and Chary, CodeMiko, gameranx, Isaac Arthur, Jason Garfield, lilypichu, Luke Stephens, Michael Redmond, MVPerry, Naysy, Pia Klaar, Sabine Hossenfelder, SciShow, Siccas Guitars, Sweet_Anita, Watch While High, xLetalis, YougYea 
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