MySpace a place for friends

Like everyone else I am influenced by absolutely everything I come into contact with. As for the music, high-profile culprits include; Ludwig Van Beethoven, Claude Debussy, Vaughan Williams, F Chopin, Franz Schubert, Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Holst, Prokofiev, Johann Sebastian Bach, The Beatles, Elton John - Gus Dudgeon (producer), David Bowie, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Chic Corea, King Crimson, Joni Mitchell, David Gilmour, Gentle Giant, Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Dave Grusin, Alphonse Mouzon, Fourplay, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Allan Holdsworth, Alan Parsons, Jean-Luc Ponty, Vinnie Colaiuta, John Scofield, Keith Emerson, Adam Holzman, Wishbone Ash, Yes, Bill Bruford, Brand X, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, Peter Bardens, Camel, Bruce Hornsby, Dudley Moore, Andre Previn, Oscar Peterson, Monty Alexander, Michel Camilo, Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Keith Jarrett, Steps Ahead, Sting, Yellowjackets, early Genesis, Peter Gabriel, John Bonham, Caravan, Gong, Pete Townsend's The Who, Weather Report, Jaco, Joe Zawinul, Frank Zappa etc. etc.

Films; I am also influenced by certain films, my favourites include; 'Great Expectations' (B&W David Lean version with John Mills and Alec Guiness) virtually all the Boulting brothers output such as 'I'm All Right Jack' with Peter Sellers. Anything with Alastair Sim; Scrooge, 'The Green Man' and 'The School for Scoundrels'. Most of Alfred Hitchcock's output; North By Northwest etc.. Genevieve, 'Hell Drivers' with Stanley Baker and Patrick McGoohan. Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'. More modern films would be: Withnail & I, Monty Python - Life of Brian, K-Pax with Kevin Spacey, 'Frequency' with Dennis Quaid, 'The Matrix' (first one), 'The 5th Element', 'The Limey' with Terence Stamp, Sexy Beast, Peter Weir's Master And Commander: The Far Side of the World with Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. Troy, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (extended version), The Lord of the Rings, David Lynch's 'The Straight Story' with Richard Farnsworth. 'About Schmidt' with Jack Nicholson, 'The Duellists', 'The Big Lebowsky' with Jeff Bridges. The Farelly brothers 'King Pin'. I am interested in various Japanese animations the most notable being 'Spirited Away' by Hayao Miyazaki. My baby/toddler daughters influence on me led to Toy Story 1 and 2.

Books; I have to confess I am not a particularly avid reader although I do enjoy anything that takes the piss out of the important, so The Letters of Henry Root is great fun and the various writings of Irish satirist Flann O'Brien. Charles Dickens as you know writes a good yarn and I also enjoy the poems of John Betjemin.

Television; mainly comedy, not that I need cheering up it's just that I don't much care for being completely pissed off with copious amounts of unnececary misery, unless it's funny. Anyway; Brass Eye, The IT Crowd, Monty Python Fawlty Towers, I'm Alan Partridge, Steptoe, Bill Bailey (best British comedian), Bill Hicks (best American comedian) Mock The Week, Not Only But Also (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore), Catherine Tate, The Fast Show (Ted and Ralph). 'Little Britain', Frost, Inspector Morse, I'll add to this a bit later....

Music inspired by the edges of science, where imagination starts to take over; the source being an imaginary sub-atomic particle associated with the beginning of time some 13.7 billion years ago when it is alleged by scientists the 'Big Bang' happened.

Mentions of the Higgs boson, which is affectionately known among scientists as the 'God particle', occur in some works of fiction. These references mostly imbue it with fantastic properties, and of the actual theory of the particle only its unknown mass is capitalized upon. For instance, Dr. Brian Cox, who works at the Centre for European Nuclear Research and is one of the scientists in pursuit of the Higgs boson, was the scientific adviser on Danny Boyle's metaphysical science-fiction film, Sunshine (2007).

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but plays a key role in explaining the origins of the mass of other elementary particles, in particular the difference between the massless photon and the very heavy W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us.

As of 2007, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson despite large efforts invested in accelerator experiments at CERN and Fermilab, but there is some indirect evidence for it. The Higgs boson was first theorized in 1964 by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, working from the ideas of Philip Anderson, and independently by others.

As a footnote, Higgs was recently contacted by Edinburgh University who wanted to present the Higgs Boson CD to Professor Higgs at a dinner to commemorate an anniversary of the particle accelerator at CERN. Apparently they handed him the CD and said that they had found the Higgs Boson after all! Because of an apparent spat between Prof Higgs and Stephen Hawking the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking was also sent a copy of the CD along with a little note from Higgs that said, "I hear reports of my non-existence are being greatly exaggerated!” Higgs has yet to hear back from Professor Hawking, but rumour has it that 'Step Out of Your Mind' (the CD's other title) has been heard floating among the hallowed spires…

WARNING: LARGE graphic images and multi-media i.e videos are not permitted in the comments section. This is because it ruins it for everyone else by over-powering the visual aspect of this site and by taking up precious bandwidth required for music playback