It's the one nice (near perfect!) day in November and I'm out in Stoke Park with my much beloved grey and orange Gemini. It's starting to look rather tatty by now, having been flown to oblivion and back over the past few months, but the great natural lighting hides the blemishes well.

Despite the shoddy looks, it still flies like a dream and I really locked into it on this particular day, pulling off a string of complex combinations, with the wrapped 540 crazy susan, aka "Airburst", featuring heavily. Hopefully it demonstrates how you can take a basic trick combination like this, and extend it in all sorts of different ways: by adding extra wraps or extra spins, by combining it with other tricks (e.g. backspins, flic-flacs, etc) to make more complex combinations, and so on.

The other trick worth mentioning is a few years old, but it's one that I've recently started to deconstruct and integrate into other complex combos. The basic move is the transition to and from a spin trick (e.g. backspin, flat spin, etc.) into and out of the flare/fade combination that constitutes the flic-flac. When repeated, this forms a mutex combination (e.g. flat spin mutex, backspin mutex, etc), but what if you do it just once? Well, given that it's a mutex without the repetition, I'm going to call it a "mute". So one part of a backspin mutex (i.e. from fade, backspin back around to fade then flare out and pop back up into a fade), is a "backspin mute" or "muted backspin", and one part of a flat spin mutex (i.e. pop up into fade, then flare back out to flat spin) is a "flat spin mute", "muted flat spin", or perhaps even "mute spin". There are examples of both in this month's video, and also a muted barrel roll. This is very similar to the muted backspin, the difference being that the nose tends to stay pointing towards you in a barrel roll with the kite rotating around the axis of the spines. In a backspin, the kite tends to spin flat, with the nose rotating away from you as it turns. Whatever you call them, the basic transitions between spin and flip tricks are worth identifying and mastering. They give you the freedom to smoothly combine different tricks into seamless combinations.

The music is another original composition of mine. It is entitled "Keep Sending the Message" for no other reason than the fact that it's loosely based around the same melodic theme as previous works (heard in the August and September movies by those brave enough to listen with the volume turned up). This one sounds like the bastard love child of Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher" and "Soul Limbo" by Booker T and the MGs (i.e. the cricket music), but it's not even half as good as either of them :-). It's a lazy, laid back number, dragged down to a dirge by the walking bass line, but spiced up with a cutting beat and oh-so-funky wah-wah clav. On top of that, it's piled thick with three layers of organ: one creamy, one cheesy, and one frosted ice cold. Hmmm... sounds good enough to eat!

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