For the next six days I’ll be releasing a short podcast. At the start of the year I broadcasted a show on
“”CVFM
in Middlesbrough which was a two-hour compilation show, featuring a selection of highlights from previous programmes.
The first podcast consists of the show’s introduction (surprisingly), some live Greek music recorded for a ‘Young’uns Podcast’
and a rant about another radio show.

You can download the first podcast
“”here,
or
“”Play the file in your default media player..

Back tomorrow with podcast two.

Well apart from posting about
“”this week’s Southside Podcast,
I haven’t blogged at all this week. As I wrote at the end of last year, one of my new year’s resolutions was to post more frequently. I’m not one of these people who fail their new year’s resolution in January and then give up bothering to start over again. “O well, I’ll have to wait till next year”. I’m convinced that some people deliberately set themselves up for a fall by using this logic. They don’t really want to stop smoking – They’re addicted to it for goodness sake. So they make a big thing of saying that starting January 1st, they won’t smoke again. They then spend the whole of New Year’s Eve chain smoking, while saying to themselves and those around them “only a few minutes to go till I stop smoking”. Then as midnight draws nearer, they frantically try to get as much smoking done as possible. Then midnight comes. They make a big thing about stopping smoking. Then it’s January 6th and they have one cigarette. Then it’s, “o well, there’s always next year”.

Anyway, enough of the elementary psychology lecture. I mean I don’t want to baffle you with my paradigm shifting revelations about the human psyche. My point simply is that just because I haven’t posted as much as I intended to this year, I’m not going to take the “o well there’s always next year” approach. So expect more revealing insights into the human psyche throughout the year, with a few fart jokes thrown in for good measure.

My excuse for not bloggin this week is because I’ve had a really busy week. I’ve just started working on a top-secret project that few people know about. No, it’s not a revolutionary breakthrough in human psychology, although you’d obviously be excused for thinking such a thing. I’m not going to reveal anything about this until it’s well under way, because I’ve learnt from experience not to get to enthusiastic and not to count your chickens before they’ve hatched. You learn these things after years living on a farm with an overly zealous mathematician. So you’ll just have to wait to find out, or try and work it out for yourself by any clues I might accidentally leave in my blog posts. I imagine this will start a huge debate on Internet forums across the world. what is David Eagle’s secret project? Thousands of people worldwide dissecting my blog posts for any clues as to what this project could be. Could it be a compendium of fart jokes? A thesis on human psychology? …

On Tuesday I attended a business course. I haven’t had a great wealth of experience of these kinds of course, but apparently (from talking with quite a few people) a lot of these courses are similar in terms of presentation style. The major thing that struck me as a little odd was that every time someone answered a question correctly, a sweet of some variety would be thrown to them. It seemed a little odd that a room full of professionals would be rewarded with candy chucked at their heads by a flamboient, camp course instructor. I was doing quite well answering the questions, but soon decided it was best to leave the answering to others when he moved on to hurling gobstoppers. I’m not sure how many people attending the course were actually interested in the subject being taught, or whether they simply attended these courses for the sweets. Anyway, thanks to this course I have since developed quite a sweet tooth. Granted I still know nothing about business but that’s hardly the point is it? I think I’m going to have to enroll on a few more courses simply to satisfy my newly developed addiction to confectionary. There’s a bookkeeping course in a couple of weeks. I’m not entirely sure what that’s all about. Perhaps they’ll teach me to develop strategies for successfully evading library fines. Actually, I wonder if there’s a joke-writing course. It could be very useful for improving the quality of this blog. Obviously I’ll only go if they’re giving out free sweets.

Anyway, my plan to blog more regularly will be successful as far as next week is concerned, because I’ll be issuing a new podcast everyday for six days starting this Monday. I’ll let you know what that’s all about on Monday. see you then.
There might even be free sweets.

This week, Southside bring you a location report from the
“”London boat show.
Leisure and Marine PR person
“”Peta Stuart-hunt
along with actress Sarah Huntley hear emotional tails of perilous sailing exploits, and discover the joys of
“”microdiving.
“”C. R. Lindemer
explains all about her book ‘True Cow Tales’ featuring stories from and about farmers, ranchers and dairy princesses.
And the deputy director general of the
“”BBC,
Mark Byford, evaluates the relationship between the BBC and community radio stations, and comments on how radio has changed and how audiences engage with radio nowadays.

Plus presenter David Eagle ((with his sore behind) attempts to wean fellow Southside Podcast presenters off drugs, and offers some advice on conducting an interview.

All that and more when you
“”download this week’s Southside Podcast

The ‘southside Podcast’ returns, new and improved for 2010. We are new and improved in a number of ways – well, two ways. firstly, we say hello to our friends at
“”CVFM
in Middlesbrough, who’ve started providing our podcast on their FM service. The second way in which we could say to be new and improved came as a bit of a shock to me. When I logged into the service that has hosted our podcasts for the last 100 episodes, I was informed that the company would be disbanding their service and that new podcast episodes could no longer be added. We have therefore migrated over to
“”southsidepodcast.mypodcast.com
which will hopefully prove to be more than just a temporary home. OK, I suppose neither of those points indicated that the podcasts would be in anyway improved, but its a new year, a new decade, and people are prone to making these kinds of rash, unsubstantiated claims at this time of the year. Anyway, here is the description for this week’s podcast:

—

“This week,
“”Rosemary Conley
tells us about her new fitness DVD and makes an announcement about her career. Leisure and marine PR person
“”Peta Stuart-Hunt
talks about how both the weather and the economy have affected the leisure and marine industry,, and gives mention to the recent news story about the paraplegic yachtsman who sailed the Atlantic Ocean. One of our top sport correspondents, Jane Clarke, has worked as curator of the Aintree museum for thirty years. She shares with us some horse racing facts, and talks about some of the horse racing memorabilia she has collected for the museum. And, have you suffered an ice or snow related accident that wasn’t your fault? You could have a claim, or could you? Charles Atha and Martin Demoily from
“”Atha and Co solicitors,
explain how the weather conditions can affect compensation claims.

Plus, presenter
“David Eagle
devises a new, quality game show for 2010, and takes on the persona of a magician.

It’s the new and improved ‘Southside Podcast’, back for 2010.”

And the download link for podcast 101 is:“here.

I’ll be back with some more news very shortly.

Following on from my amazing fascinating and intellectually inquisitive blog post about the use of the word “hark” in modern day language, I started thinking about other words that are under used and really shouldn’t be. (Yes work is a bit scarce at the moment. How did you guess?) I was thinking about the use of the word “whelm”. People seem more than happy to bandy around the fact that they might be overwhelmed, the word “under whelmed” is used (though it seems to be less common). But what about “whelm”? Why does nobody feel the need to express a state of whelm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of the people who claim to be overwhelmed are in fact, in actuality only really whelmed. The word “whelm” means “overcome, as with emotions or perceptual stimuli”. I would therefore argue that most people are wrongly stating that they are overwhelmed, when a simple statement of being whelmed is most likely much more accurate. So why do people feel the need to be so histrionic about a simple case of the whelms? So maybe next time you recklessly go to bandy around the notion that you are overwhelmed, perhaps you should pause to think about whether a simple declaration of whelm will suffice in this instance. Maybe save the overwhelm statement to something more dramatic that deserves it. If we all made a conscious and concerted effort to be more sincere and truthful about expressing how whelmed we actually are, then maybe one day the word “overwhelm” will once more have an impact, rather than simply being a term we frivolously and thoughtlessly bandy around. OK?

Now, something that definitely will warrant the term “overwhelming” will be the first southside Podcast of 2010. I discovered today that the company that host the podcasts are disbanding their service so that we can’t upload any knew material. Fortunately, I may have found a better alternative and we’ll be launching a new series of podcasts very soon, along with a new exciting podcast that I’m planning on making. Prepare to have your whelm horizons well and truly broadened.

Yours whelmingly, David Eagle

The initial point of my last blog post was to wish you a happy new year and to write about some new year related shenanigans, but then I got sidetracked by my discovery that I was number one and two in Google search results for “David Eagle”. So I’ll attempt to post what I meant to post last time and we’ll see how it goes.

Firstly, let me wish you all a happy new year. (There. Good start.) I hope you all had really good New Year’s parties. I imagine many of you were holding David Eagle parties, with David Eagle blog posts projected on to a big screen and selections from the
””David Eagle Youtube channel
pumping loudly out of the sound system. I’m sure it was amazing and I wish I could have been there, but obviously I was hosting my own party for a select few lucky fans.

The party was being held at my house and to be honest, things didn’t get off to the best of starts as half an hour before the first guests arrived, my toilet broke. The toilet decided in its infinite wisdom (because everyone knows that toilets are infinitely wise. That’s why King Solomon hardly ever left his toilet) to not flush. (Check out my sentence structuring skills!) Anyway, try as I might, the toilet refused to flush. What to do? I couldn’t exactly postpone the New Year’s party till another day. It’s a new year’s party for goodness sake. It wasn’t really an option to cancel the party because people had obviously traveled far and wide to gather in the presence of the Eagle. I therefore sent texts out to all the people due to attend the party, warning them that any toilet activities must be only liquid based. If they think they might need to pass solids, then they may prefer to refrain from coming or to try and do the necessary before leaving their house. For the rest of the night, the toilet was out of bounds and people had to resort to buckets, plant pots and a whole array of interesting objects. I was moved by the camaraderie and resourcefulness among the guests that this situation induced. Some people were very creative with their choice of objects, and the creativity of the choices increased the more drunk people got. Unfortunately, one person (who will remain nameless) got a little too drunk and sadly forgot the toilet embargo. So much for “out with the old”.

The next morning I switched on my phone to find a number of voice mail messages. A few friends (who were at another party) had rang up to wish me a happy new year. Sadly for them, they must have been not quite sober enough to remember that they had rang my phone a few seconds ago, and so ended up leaving me numerous voice mail messages that relayed the happenings of the party. Let’s just say I have quite a lot of incriminating evidence on my phone. I’ll be seeing some of these friends tomorrow night and if they fail to buy me enough drinks, I might just post the messages on my blog – and everyone knows how popular that is. The funny thing about it is that I seem to know more about what happened at the party than some of my friends, who were obviously too drunk to realize. I’ve had great fun winding people up about this. In actuality, most of the things I heard weren’t incriminating at all, but it’s fun to get people all self-conscious and anxious. The most incriminating message consisted of a game of ‘I have never…’ which is were people have to mention something risqué or secret that they have done in their lives, and the rest of the room have to take a drink if they’ve done the same thing in their life. Thanks to this accidentally left voice mail message, I now know who has and who has not had sex in a field. Ironically, I always said she was a bit of a cow, turns out I wasn’t far wrong. Excellent blackmailing material!

Anyway, there’s a couple of jolly and inspirational New Year’s anecdotes for you. I’ll probably get a commission from radio 4 to be a regular speaker on ‘Thought for The day’ based on this blog post.

I’ve got a few new, exciting projects coming up in the next few weeks, plus the first
“”southside Podcast
of the New Year. I’ll give you more information on all that very soon, but that will do for now. I don’t want to overload you with too much quality in one sitting.

P.S. The toilet has been fixed. You can sleep soundly now.

You might think by the title of this post that I’m a bit too late to hark. Harking seems to be chiefly used at Christmas time. Personally I think that the word hark should be used more in everyday speech, and shouldn’t simply be wheeled out on one specific seasonal occasion. I see no reason why the herald angels should use the word “hark” and not I, therefore this is I David Eagle in 2010 harking with pride. I suppose people often “hark back”. The phrase “hark back” is used now and again, but did anyone never think to try harking forwards. Perhaps it’s quite painful to hark forwards. I’ll try a spot of forward harking over the next week and report back with my findings. O yes, I’m a pioneer, a trendsetter. This time next year we’ll be harking all over the place in any direction we jolly well please. I think 2010 should be the year of the hark.

Well, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve probably managed to increase the likelihood of coming up in internet search results for the word “hark”. If I keep writing the word hark over and over again, perhaps I’ll usurp the herald angels in the google search rankings.

Anyway, after all that I expect you’re all wondering why I was actually requesting your harking in the first place. Well I have very good reason to do so. Once more, after a lapse of a few months, my blog has once more risen to the top of the google search charts for the search query “David Eagle”. What’s more, my myspace radio page is at number two. This happened once before and I wrote a huge blog about it, arrogantly gloating about how brilliant and popular I am, only to be ignominiously instantly way down the charts the next day. But this time I think it’s for real. I really do. However I’m not taking anything for granted, therefore I’m going to do my very best to stay at number one. I’m going to try every trick in the book, but Tolkien doesn’t seem to have written much on the subject of googgle rankings. Hahahaa, you see what I did there? So my intention is to try and write a blog about something nearly everyday. This is kind of good news in so much as I’ll be blogging a lot more, however it does mean that I’ll be churning out a lot of inane nonsense, simply in a bid to maintain my google search ranking.

Another trick to increase the likelihood of scoring higher in google searches is to include links to other pages on the Internet. This apparently makes your website look more active and involved. One of my recent Christmas blog posts contained a huge amount of links. Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned on linking to anything in this post as I haven’t really got any cause to, but if I’m serious about being number one then I’m going to have to play hardball. Therefore,
“”here is a dictionary definition of the word “hark” for your perusal.
Please click on the link. It will probably help to make Google think I’m really popular and that people pay attention or “hark” to what I actually write.

I was actually going to write some more for this post, but I think I’ll save that till tomorrow. I mean I don’t want to use all my material in one go, especially if I’ve got to blog everyday to keep at number one. I think you’ve had enough quality material for one post. I’ll let you hark off till tomorrow.

Before I go though I’d just like to say how intelligent and attractive all the people who work for Google are. (There, that should do the trick.)

O, happy New Year by the way!

Once more I return with another festive gift. The Christmas Southside Podcast has been released.
Here’s the dowload link
and here is the description:

The Southside Podcast returns with a rather festive feel – which is fortunate as it’s Christmas. Guests include top-class newsreader Angela Rippon, Rupert Adams from ‘William Hill The Buckeyes’, award winning television director Graeme Harper, and The Nolans. Plus: Christmas chemistry carrels; sing along to the classic carol ‘Away In A Spectrometer’, and traditional Christmas singing courtesy of the Stockton folk club, and there’s jingle bells as sang by a five-year-old child who gives us her interpretation of Christmas.

Merry Christmas from everyone at Southside.

—

And I’d like to again extend a merry christmas to you all. I’m making it my new year’s resolution to blog a lot more frequently.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and to be honest the Eagle will probably put on a bit too. Anyway, I come baring gifts. But first: A group of local scout members decided to go into business. Sticking to the scout ethos, they decided to set up a business that dealt with fixing broken car horns. What did they call the business? The answer to that shall be revealed at the end of this post. And that doesn’t even technically count as one of the gifts.

I’m sure you all know (unless your from another planet or something – perhaps a spaceman that came traveling) I perform in a folk group called
The Young’uns
and for two years we ran a podcast. My first two gifts to you, are the links to download those Christmas podcasts.
Here is the link to download:
2006 podcast
Which includes an improvised version of the nativity, lots of Christmas music and Christmas folky DJ mixes,
And the
2007 podcast.
which features an avant-garde interpretation of the nativity, more Christmas mixing, lots of live Christmas music, and lots more.

You can download last years Southside Podcast
here,
Which includes interviews with two actresses, an award winning Pianist, and a director of a pantomime, and of course me being hilarious.

The gifts continue a coming, because I also want to provide you with links to some Christmas material I’ve produced over the years.
my Christmas song parody
about Jesus – I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not.
I also did a project as part of my Creative Music Technology university course in 2005. It’s a short Christmas radio drama called ‘The Return Of The Real Farther Christmas’. I thought I’d include it in my list of gift to you because I do still actually think it’s quite good, although that’s probably got something to do with my ego than anything else.
Here it is.

And now moving away from me and my ego, here are a couple of random Christmas rap songs that I found on an excellent website
sweetthunder.org/tapes
which archives random tape recordings that someone collects, by purchasing old cassette tapes from charity shops and car boot sales etc. There’s a lot of interesting stuff on there, including people’s diaries, and crazy home recordings. Here are a couple of Christmas rap songs that I downloaded from the site. I don’t know much about the artists or anything, but these songs really have to be heard to be believed. No words can do them justice, so I recommend you just listen and be moved in a way you never thought possible.
The first is a version of the Twelve days Of Christmas, which consists of twelve rappers rapping.
Here’s the download link.
The second is a song called the Santa Rap, which is a work of genius.
Here’s the link.

And there’s more. I’ll be back tomorrow with 2009’s Christmas Southside Podcast. And there’s even more. It’s time for the reveal to what the scouts called their car horn fixing business. The name of the business was: ‘Beep Repaired’.

I bet you there’s a cracker joke writer out there reading this, envious of my comedy genius.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Coming soon: What do you think I might have said to the arrogant jockey who was bragging about making his horse race faster by feeding him ecstasy? But first …

As you probably know, I am part of a folk group calledThe Young’unsAnd for the last three years I have performed at a Maritime festival in a small Dutch town named Appingendam. We stopped doing ‘The Young’uns Podcast’ but we did say we would feature a few specials. Well it’s taken over a year to do our first special, but then doesn’t that only make it so much more special?

You can follow The Young’uns’ adventures in Holland in this documentary, which features recordings from 2008/2009’s festivals. There are live sea shanties, random interviews with Dutch people, comprehensive Dutch language training courtesy of ‘The Young’uns’ language school, plus we venture into the Dutch ghetto to experience Dutch gangster rap.

I was wondering whether it would be best to split it into a few parts, but in the end just decided to lump it altogether. You can download the lump
“”here.
Of if you prefer to stream the lump (if that’s not too oximoronic a concept)
“”here.

I feel I should personally apologise to the BBC and everyone involved at ‘children in need’ which is being televised tonight. I expect that you will have significantly less viewers now, due to the fact that they will all be listening to the Young’uns in Holland. I assure you that I did not intentionally usurp ‘children in need’, although the BBc might want to consider asking me to present the programme next time, to avoid this kind of thing in the future.

And now: What do you think I said to the very arrogant jockey who was bragging about making his horse run faster by giving him ecstasy?

I told him to get off his high horse. (yes it really is that simple. Perhaps I should start writing the jokes in Christmas crackers. Well my jokes are just as unfunny, although they are a little bit on the lengthy side, as the set-up to the joke goes for a whole paragraph. We might have to invest in bigger crackers, or maybe put the punchline in another box of crackers. We could sell the punchline crackers separately. What a great money making opportunity. People would have to buy the punchline crackers to get the end of the joke. I could take this a step further. I could make a really long joke with a number of punchlines and twists, so that people have to buy cracker after cracker. I would sell the crackers individually, and people would get addicted to the story of the joke, and keep buying and buying until the end of the joke was reached. Except, the joke never ends, and hapless, helpless cracker addicts are forced to buy Christmas crackers all the way through the year, long beyond Christmas time. Right I’m going to work on this idea right now! But as an extra treat for reading, I’ll leave you with one final joke/question that didn’t quite meet the cracker standard – in other words, it’s not lengthy enough.

A group of local scout members decided to go into business. Sticking to the scout ethos, they decided to set up a business that dealt with fixing broken car horns. What did they call the business?

I will of course provide you with the answer the next time I make a post, but in the meantime, enjoy the Holland documentary.