The Null Device
2001/8/31
Neural implants are one small step closer, now that scientists in Germany have figured out how to interface silicon chips with brain cells.
Oh dear... now Aphex Twin is jumping on the all-Welsh-language album bandwagon. And I don't think he's even a Welsh nationalist or anything.
Poking fun at goths may be like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle, but when Pokey the Penguin does it , it's something special.
Still listening to Far and Wide; they just played Ali G interviewing Jarvis Cocker, and then toasting gangsta-style over Pulp's Help The Aged. Side-splittingly funny...
Listening the Far and Wide on 3RRR now; they just played a song from a new/upcoming Trembling Blue Stars album. Not bad; I may have to reassess my view of Bob Wratten's post-Field Mice solo career as mind-numbingly dull. At least it wasn't a weepy guitar-strumming come-back-to-me-I-still-love-you number like most of their first album.
Oh yes, and the Dot Allison song they played sounds interesting... I'll have to track that down; that and a CD copy of that King of Woolworths EP.
Oh, and I didn't get a copy of Björk's Vespertine, which they were giving away, despite having programmed 3RRR's number into the autodialer here.
My aging CD-R writer has started working again, after I power-cycled everything and fiddled with the power cable. It probably was a loose connection or something. I should probably put the computer somewhere where it doesn't get nudged quite so often though.
Werther Syndrome for the online age: In depressed parts of eastern Germany, online Satanic teen suicide pacts are all the rage, with kids staging black masses in cemeteries, decapitating goats and talking each other into offing themselves in chat rooms and with SMS messages:
The Blue Rose group encourages youngsters to talk in Internet chat rooms about the uselessness of their lives, the pointlessness of their existence and the glamour of death. In a region of high unemployment, where many towns have no cinemas or discotheques, the group has hit a deep nerve with disillusioned youth.
(So it's group anti-therapy; reminds me of a spoken-word track Boyd Rice. once did...)
This upsurge in the occult and satanic worship culminated in the region at Whitsun last year when 30,000 youths gathered near Leipzig to hear bands like Wolfsheim and Elegia sing morbid songs of suicide and depression.