I watched George Osborne deliver the budget. He was better than I expected which isn't saying a lot. I thought Harriet Harman's reply was very good especially as she has to piece it together while the Chancellor is speaking. The really hard bit is going to be the imposition of the 25% cuts on all departmental budgets excluding health and overseas aid. Then there was the tennis which to my way of thinking dragged on rather. One of my potential links from Linkedin did link up which takes me up to twenty. There are four outstanding. I have arranged a link up for a drink in a couple of weeks' time.

The Pianobox arrived from Germany but it turns out I need an adapter for the mains lead which is a Continental standard. One is now ordered and according to Amazon on the way. I played a fair amount of guitar - the usual stuff. Well there's a new shape which starts with a minor 6 9 with a flat fifth at the bottom - it turns out to be a quartal version of a 7 b9.

I finished reading Kolakowski on Marcuse - he clearly hasn't got any time for M so it didn't take long to get the drift. Feenberg on the other hand is more sympathetic and thinks that subsequent ideas such as ANT theory can be read back into Marcuse. He also supports the ideas that he thinks M took from Heidi. The net effect is to make M seem much more modern not least because Heidi is so important to the new realists. I also have Feenberg's Questionning Technology and he brings some of those ideas into his discussion of H & M. He needs to work quite hard to bring M up to date.

The bear played Ricardo Villalobos who is pretty minimal then the Thievery Corporation who I'm inclined to like. Then Baxter - the Nordic one - and Luther Vandross. I switched to That Detroit Sh1t Radio which opened up with the mysterious Dopplereffekt. The track was Rocket Scientist from Gesamtkunstwerk - a term which dates from a German essay written in 1827, apparently - who would have thought there's so much early romanticism in techno? Another of theirs is called Pornoactress. The bear gave up at this point claiming there wasn't enough content - I would have thought there was too much.