2004/5/31
A Graun piece on Colin Wilson, the reclusive misfit who wrote the Great British Existentialist Novel and then squandered his newly acquired status putting out over 100 books on outré subjects such as serial killers, UFOs, cults and Atlantis, as well as the odd Lovecraftean horror story, who has just published his 110th book, his second autobiography:
His philosophy is basically existentialism with non-rational excrescences and characterised by bizarre nomenclature - Faculty X, Upside Downness, Peak Experiences, Right Men, The Dominant Five Per Cent, King Rats. It seems to constitute an attempt to classify human feelings and behaviour as written by a Martian who has never met an Earthling. This is, of course, Wilson's weakness and also, in a way, his charm - he has no understanding of other people whatever. When I ask if he would say he is low in emotional intelligence, he readily agrees: 'That is fair, yes.'
He is exceptionally tolerant of nutters and happy to engage in long correspondence with people who have theories about, say, alien abduction - or with Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, with whom he corresponded for 10 years till Brady dumped him. But ordinary social contact - apart from with his family - seems completely missing from his life. Missing, but not missed. He says that about 10 years ago Joy insisted on going out for a drink on New Year's Eve. 'We finished off drinking champagne at midnight in our local pub and it took me a year to shake off all the people that I'd met!'
I recently picked up three CDs from local artists and/or labels:
- Your Wedding Night, s/t -- new-garage-rock with a slutty-bogan-chick flavour. Songs about shagging in panelvans oral sex, and facial ejaculation, as well as mainstays such as crushes and thinking one is cool. The sound is somewhere between The Strokes and AC/DC, only on a garage-rock budget. One of the personnel is Kellie Sutherland, of sugary-twee-pop superstars Architecture In Helsinki; perhaps her next project will be blinged-out hip-hop or something? (Interesting to note that Clem Bastow, who previously took Architecture In Helsinki to task for being too bourgeois, gave this a bucketing in InPress; could that be a vendetta?)
- Baseball, Gods And Stars, Priests And Kings. This one is Cameron Potts' baby, and if you know anything about Mr. Potts, you'll know that it's rather weird. The booklet is filled with reliefs of Assyrian torture methods, each described in details; meanwhile, the record combines breakdance-electro-hip-hop drum machines, Middle Eastern scales played on punk violin, piano accordion and samples from Islamic prayer calls and a 1978 New York hip-hop radio show. Cameron's manic intensity has a way of not coming out without an audience, and his studio recordings are usually less energetic than his live performances; however, the layered spoken-word treatment on track 1 works quite reasonably, and Cameron's vocals in other places evoke John Lydon circa PIL. In parts of the CD, however, the elements don't so much come together as collide head-on; the dirty garage-punk bass sound doesn't sound quite funky enough for electro hip-hop, and one gets the impression that the elements don't quite jell.
- Various artists, Wild About You! A Tribute to the Australian Rock Underground 1963-1968. This is a book and CD, put out through 3CR, and co-edited by local troublemaker Iain McIntyre. The book consists of interviews with various people who were in bands at the time, recounting being inspired by hearing the Beatles on the radio, as well as the trials and tribulations of being in the Australian rock scene, which involved being harrassed by the police for having long hair, or beaten up by the local yobs because their girlfriends fancied you. (Australia was a rather rough place back then.) The CD consists of covers of 1960s Australian garage-rock standards by contemporary bands, such as The Drones, Pink Stainless Tail and Digger and the Pussycats. The music is, as you might expect, typically fairly straightforward 3-chord blues-based rock, though not far removed from the stuff that's fashionable now. Most bands play it fairly straight, though The Gruntled bring in a hurdy-gurdy and French bagpipes, whereas Ninetynine give their contribution the usual Casio-and-vibes treatment, making it sound almost like electro-pop. Oh, and the last track was recorded backwards (as was the original).
2004/5/30
The credits on dodgy Chinese DVDs (the ones found at computer swap meets) are very informative. Until today, I didn't know that Kill Bill was based on a book by Bryce Courtenay.
A fan site for Canadian children's/teen-splatter-fetishists' TV show You Can't Do That On Television. The presence of a "fan fiction" link is a little worrying...
Soy sauce manufacturers in China have developed an ingenious way of cutting costs, by substituting soy beans with human hair. Soy sauce technically consists of amino acids, with soy beans being merely the most common source, and other sources (such as, say, human hair) may be substituted whilst still producing something resembling soy sauce. (via Found)
(Which makes one wonder whether the kosher status of human hair sauce would be influenced by whether or not the hair came from a Hindu hair-cutting ceremony.)
A recollection of growing up as a heavy-metal fanatic in the British Midlands in the 1980s:
The drummer was called James and the singer was called Jez. We met at the Bavisters' a few weeks later and, as they got out of their car and started unloading their gear, I froze. They were both wearing spandex trousers and had long, impressive mullets. I'd never seen anyone as cool as them in real life before.
When we first saw Kurt Cobain, it wasn't clear that he was the assassin who'd come to slit our throats. He had long hair for a start, professed a love of Black Sabbath and, with his grubby bandmates, had made a snotty but hardly radical debut album called Bleach. That was OK; metal was assimilating the nascent grunge movement pretty well. There certainly weren't any lines in the sand - until Nevermind.
2004/5/29
In the US, it seems you can patent anything, including the secrets of successful relationships. And given that Australia has just committed itself to implementing a US-style patent system, and Europe is adopting US-style software patents, this sort of thing looks likely to be the case for all of McWorld soon. And then it will be legally impossible for anyone to do anything without the backing of a multinational corporation with a patent portfolio and cross-licensing agreements with other patentholders. (via Techdirt)
A 14-year-old boy in Manchester used internet chatrooms to arrange his own murder; masquerading as, among others, a 16-year-old girl, her step-brother, and a secret service agent named Janet, he managed to talk a 16-year-old boy he had never met into stabbing him. The other boy was told that it was an initiation into the secret services, and that the target was dying of cancer, which made him expendable; if successful, he was told he would get £500,000, a gun and a meeting with the Prime Minister. It apparently did not occur to him that there was anything unusual about this arrangement (persumably that's standard MI5 procedure for recruiting teenagers in chat rooms).
Update: more details have emerged, and it turns out that the stabbee had a hopeless crush on the boy who stabbed him, and instructed him (in secret-agent guise) to say the "codeword" "I love you, bro" as he did the deed. This is sounding more and more like a Smiths song.
2004/5/28
2004/5/27
Gorgeous black-and-white photographs of abandoned buildings on Gunkanjima, an island used for coal mining, but completely abandoned since 1974.
An economic-rationalist arguments for why writing computer viruses should be punishable by death; it basically comes down to society getting more economic benefits from executing worm writers than from killing murderers. It reminds me a bit of the argument in K.W. Jeter's Noir about why copyright violation had to become punishable by death, and worse. (via Techdirt)
Cookie Mongoloid are a band who do speed-metal covers of Sesame Street songs. The singer sounds like Cookie Monster, though that could probably be said of many metal vocalists. (via bOING bOING)
I picked up a copy of Morrissey's new album, You Are The Quarry, last week. I rather like it.
You Are The Quarry was produced by Jerry Finn, best known for his work with mook bands like Blink 182 and Green Day. Perhaps Finn took this project up for the credibility (much as Trevor Horn is said to have done with the last Belle & Sebastian album); in any case, there are no big grinding nu-metal guitars, no shouted rap lyrics and no obscenities, save for the word "shit" appearing a few times. There are, however, electronics; drum machines, sampled loops, analogue synth burblings and filter sweeps, and even what sounds like a 303 squippling away under the guitars in one song. (A 303 in a Morrissey song? Surely the end times must be nigh.) The electronics are never obstrusive. Perhaps Morrissey's Smiths-era hard line against electronic music has softened over time, or possibly Finn, who, presumably, is more aware of commercial realities, persuaded him to allow them in. In any case, the decision works well, successfully maintaining the integrity of Morrissey's sound without sounding stale or rehashed.
The lyrical content is vintage Morrissey; opinionated, self-deprecating and archly humorous. He takes America to task for arrogance, prejudice and hamburgers in America Is Not The World, denounces the insipidness of mass culture in The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores, and defiantly asserts his vision for England in Irish Blood, English Heart ("I'm dreaming of a time when the English are sick to death of Labour and the Tories, and spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell, and denounce this royal line").
Those expecting Morrisseyisms won't be disappointed. I Have Forgiven Jesus is, thematically, Unloveable crossed with November Spawned A Monster ("I have forgiven Jesus, for all the love He has placed in me, when there's no-one I can turn to with this love"); How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel is a defiant, almost solipsistic assertion of alienation from the human race, preemptively writing off the possibility of any meaningful connection with a fellow human being ("She told me she loved me, which means she must be insane"), whereas, in I Like You, he sings "You're not right in the head, and nor am I, and this is why I like you". In the almost New Order-esque I'm Not Sorry, he teases the listener with another non-acknowledgment of any particular sexual orientation "The woman of my dreams, she never came along, the woman of my dreams, well, there never was one".
Other songs tell stories; The First Of The Gang To Die is presumably a Sweet and Tender Hooligan inspired by the Mexican gangbangers who have become Morrissey's biggest audience, and All The Lazy Dykes is addressed to a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. The last track, You Know I Couldn't Last, is a broadside aiming at everybody Morrissey ever was let down by: journalists, fickle fans, those who accused him of racism, and his former bandmates (described as "Northern leeches").
The US special edition of You Are The Quarry comes in a gatefold sleeve, much like a miniaturised LP sleeve, with a bonus DVD. The DVD contains the video for Irish Blood, English Heart, a handful of photographs and a copy of the lyrics which are also in the booklet. There's nothing truly essential there, though hardcore Morrissey fans will want it for the video.
For the most part, I am pleased with You Are The Quarry; it has lived up to the expectations I had from seeing him play in 2002. Though, if he really lives the life he sings about, it's a worry. Being an ungainly, lonely, misanthrope at 16 is almost normal, but if one hasn't snapped out of it by the age of 44, one is well on the way to being a cranky old curmudgeon. Listen and enjoy, but also let it be a warning: go out, make some friends, find somewhere where you belong, maybe meet a nice boy or girl and find some sort of contentment, or else you may end up like Morrissey, only without the fame and record royalties.
2004/5/26
Remember those reports, just after the conquest of Afghanistan and before the Iraqi débâcle, which said that al-Qaeda was a spent force, its support structures smashed and its key operatives dead or captured? Well, a new report from the International Institute of Strategic Studies says that now, thanks to the spectacular own-goal that was the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda is back with a vengeance, its ranks swollen with willing martyrs, and its sites set on high-profile US and Western targets for high-profile attacks, ideally with weapons of mass destruction.
2004/5/25
Teenagers in Britain are obsessively going to tanning salons in a quest to look like heroes/success symbols like "Posh and Becks".
Real Story features a 13-year-old girl from Liverpool, identified as a blackspot for tanorexics, who has been visiting tanning parlours up to five times a week for the past year. Hayley Barrow, whose grandmother has skin cancer, explained: "If I haven't been on one [a sunbed] for one day I feel white, I feel transparent."
(Interesting that she mentions feeling "white" as a negative consequence of not tanning enough; I wonder whether there is a racial-aspirational dimension to this; with black groups and artists dominating the charts in recent years and (if the BBC's quizzes are to be believed) British kids speaking fluent US Hip-Hop Ebonics amongst themselves, whether having heavily tanned skin makes today's kids feel more "ghetto" or at one with their adopted culture. Judging by young Hayley's photo (she looks more like a white actor from a less politically-correct decade in blackface than a suntanned celebrity), it doesn't seem too far-fetched.)
"They call it the Posh and Becks syndrome," said Andy Carr, organiser of the Elite Teens disco. They want the tans, they want the clothes, they want the money."
Climate-change disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, lauded by environmentally-conscious types across the US, has yet to be released here in Australia, but Ford are already running a Day After Tomorrow-inspired ad campaign to sell SUVs:
The message of the billboard seems to be that, when the Greenhouse Apocalypse comes and the cities are covered with snow, you can hop in your Ford Territory and go skiing.
2004/5/24
In case you thought Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't do anything about the Iraqi torture scandal, he has just banned digital cameras in US military facilities. The happy citizens of McWorld no longer have to be troubled by images of brutality, and can go back to believing that everything's going well.
Meanwhile, the US's immunity from international war crimes prosecution is about to expire; given the recent situation, they are more likely to have problems getting a renewal, and, not surprisingly, aggressively lobbying for a renewal. Chances are, if it is not renewed and US troops are arrested, some sort of behind-the-scenes deal will be done to keep them out of The Hague; given that the option is a US invasion of The Hague to liberate them, and a possible US-European war; though, if anything, the lack of an exemption will put pressure on the US to more aggressively prosecute any war criminals in their ranks, at least whilst the media are watching.
2004/5/23
Developing a computerised typesetting system that is adopted as a de facto standard by the world's scientific community can have its privileges; such as getting a planet named after you. (via gimbo)
2004/5/22
The h2g2 entry on cargo cults is fascinating, detailing this phenomenon's history, from its roots in the "big man" gift economies of Polynesia through to encounters with Christianity, WW2, the US military and disapproving Australian authorities in Papua New Guinea. (via MeFi)
In the native view, the Christians worshipped the god Anus. He created Adam and Eve and gave them cargo of canned meat, steel tools, rice in bags and matches. He took it all away when they discovered sex and he sent a flood to destroy them, but he gave Noah a big wooden steamboat and made him the captain so he would survive. When Ham disobeyed his father his cargo was taken away and he was sent to New Guinea. Now his descendants were being given a chance to reform and regain their cargo. All through the twenties the natives patiently worked hard, sang hymns and prayed to Anus. But by the thirties it became clear that the missionaries were lying; they had been good Christians and worked hard, but it was the foreign bosses who did no work that got all the cargo.
While in Brisbane, Yali made another startling discovery: the Australians kept hundreds of animals in the Brisbane Zoo, which they carefully fed and tended. He also noticed the large number of dogs and cats kept as pets in homes. It wasn't until a conference in Port Moresby5 that he was able to solve this puzzling behaviour. The solution came when he witnessed a book which showed a succession from monkeys into humans. It became clear the depth to which the missionaries had lied: they had claimed Adam and Eve were men's ancestors when they clearly believed that their ancestors were animals who needed to be treated with respect. It was obvious the missionaries had made up such lies in order to hide this truth from the New Guineans, who had held such beliefs before their arrival. Upon returning home, Yali was convinced by the prophet Gurek that the Queensland Museum was actually Rome, that the gods had been taken captive there, and that in order to lure them back the natives had to stop their foolish acceptance of the lies of Christianity.
When radically different cultures and belief systems intersect, the interference patterns can be quite strange.
2004/5/21
Remember that butt-kicking Ukrainian chick who rode through the Chernobyl zone of alienation on her motorbike taking photos? It has been claimed that much of her story is fake; she's not the daughter of a high-ranking official who pulled strings for her to ride her motorbike through the zone, but rather took the standard tour with her husband and a friend, took some photos (some posing with a motorcycle helmet), and made up a fantasy about riding alone through the radioactive wasteland. Or so someone says on a message board, anyway.
A new generation of road designers are taking a radical tack to making roads safer and more usable: getting rid of traffic signals, stop signs, lines, and even barriers between cars and pedestrians. Paradoxically, these anarchic, lawless spaces are said to be safer than heavily-regulated roads in more traditional engineering regimes:
"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads -- much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this approach can be."
Contrast this approach with that of the United Kingdom and the United States, where education campaigns from the 1960s onward were based on maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain of death, to stay out of the street. "But as soon as you emphasize separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment," says Hamilton-Baillie. "Because then the driver sees that he or she has priority. And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across the street is a child in the wrong place."
The new school of traffic engineering also draws on conclusions from evolutionary biology and psychology:
Subvert, don't attack, the dominant paradigm. Or, as David Engwicht, a shared-spaces proponent in Brisbane, Australia, has written: "Implicit in the whole notion of second-generation traffic calming is the idea that significant social change only happens when we amplify the paradoxical 'submerged voice' as opposed to tearing down the 'dominant voice.' Engwicht, a plenary speaker at the Walk 21 Cities for People Conference in Copenhagen this June, argues that controlling a driver's natural propensity for speed is futile. A more effective approach is to engage the driver by emphasizing "uncertainty and intrigue" in the street environment -- for example, planting a tree in the middle of the street instead of putting up a stop sign.
Safety analysts have known for several decades that the maximum vehicle speed at which pedestrians can escape severe injury upon impact is just under 20 miles per hour. Research also suggests that an individual's ability to interact and retain eye contact with other human beings diminishes rapidly at speeds greater than 20 miles per hour. One theory behind this magic bullet, says Hamilton-Baillie, is that 20 mph is the "maximum theoretical running speed" for human beings. (Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has drawn similar conclusions.) "This is of interest," he says, "because it suggests that our physiology and psychology has evolved based around the potential maximum impact on the speed of human beings." The ramifications go beyond safety, says Hamilton-Baillie, to bear directly on the interplay between speed, traffic controls and vehicle capacity. Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design speed of 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) -- as many of the European Union nations are doing -- shows that slower speeds improve traffic flow and reduce congestion.
2004/5/20
The Onion is eerily plausible when it reports Donald Rumsfeld announcing the US Government's new strategy of fighting terror with terror:
"It's vital to remember that these terrorists hate freedom," Rumsfeld said. "Well, guess what? From now on, we're going to hate it even more. Do you think terrorists care about due process and fair treatment of prisoners? Of course not. Why should we give them the upper hand? You fight fire with fire."
"Just wait and you'll see," Abrams said. "Martin Luther King said, 'Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.' Well, enemies of democracy and freedom around the world are going to find out just how right he was. They'll see just how dark it can get."
A film about Ian Curtis is being planned. Unfortunately, the producer (Amy Hobby, who did Secretary) is pitching it as the story of Curtis as a "tragic romantic", and, even worse, the musical advisor is that purveyor of bland yuppie dinner-party techno, Moby. (via xrrf)
With credentials such as these, you can't hold out much hope for it. Though wasn't there meant to be another Ian Curtis film, based on his widow's biography of him, Touching From A Distance, and produced with the involvement of the members of New Order?
Morrissey, who has just released an album, has been somewhat outspoken lately; among other things, he asserts that Britney Spears is the devil, and owns up to not understanding hip-hop, and not listening to the radio anymore because it is too painful.
The latest cult sensation from the Russian pirate DVD underground is Dmitri "the Goblin" Puchkov, a former cop who has gotten into satirically redubbing Hollywood films with "improved" dialogue. Puchkov's version of Lord of the Rings, for example, has become a Russian crime thriller, with the good guys as bumbling cops and the Orcs as mafiosi:
Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol. Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.
(via bOING bOING)
Mashups of Iraq torture photos and iPod advertisements have started appearing in New York. The posters take off the iPod ads' distinctive silhouette format, and bear the subtitle "10,000 volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent". (via Gizmodo)
2004/5/18
A fascinating history of London's vice cards; the small printed cards used by the local prostitutes and dominatrices to advertise their services in phone booths, once whimsical and suggestive, but these days glossy, and about as subtle as internet porn banner ads: (via bOING bOING)
Although produced in the 1980s, the early cards were distinctly Fifties both in tone and design. Many still used foundry display types such as ATF's Brush, or Stephenson Blake's Chisel and Open Titling. Alternatively, they used Baskerville or Garamond, two of the most pervasive text typefaces of the 1950s; as a result they retained an old-world charm. The techniques behind their production were rudimentary: illustrations were hand-drawn, traced, or photocopied. Type was seldom set: it was either rubbed-down, cut out from magazines, or sometimes hand produced. Images and type were pasted together and handed to the printer.
Teachers and parents at one London school complained that pupils as young as five had invented their own version of the Pokémon card using prostitute cards that they collected, then swapped. There has been more than one model that has been alarmed to find her photograph used without permission on the cards.
Vice cards have become fascinating cultural icons. For some, the cards are interesting because they are trackers of technology: they show when specialised production equipment became available, quite literally, at street level. To others the cards are artistic or typographic curios with a unique linguistic and visual vocabulary. The cards are also sociological and cultural records of the late twentieth century, mirroring the changing sexual attitudes and practices of the past 20 years.
Orthodox Jews burn wigs after finding them made of Indian hair, cut during Hindu ceremonies. Orthodox Jewish women are prohibited from showing their hair in public once married; however, wigs containing human hair cut in Hindu ceremonies (from which much of the hair used for wigs comes) are considered idolatrous, because of the Hindu religion's polytheism. This is going to put a damper on the feted merger of Judaism and Hinduism to better compete on the global religious marketplace.
I just got an email from "Gino Guy" offering Help with Mortgage or Debt. Hang on; wasn't he an Italian disco one-hit-wonder from the late 1980s?
In John Howard's Australia, female nudity in video games is illegal; extreme, hardcore violence is OK, however:
In January 2003, the Office of Film and Literature Classification refused to classify a game called BMX XXX. The reason? It featured topless female bike riders. Yet games such as Grand Theft Auto and Manhunter -- in which the player in both games takes on the role of an amoral killer -- are widely available.
From a Slashdot interview with Jeremy White of the WINE Windows API emulator project and/or Crossover:
We also go to all kinds of interesting lengths to avoid problems with viruses and worms. For example, we have a hack in our flavor of Wine, in the CreateProcess call (the code to start an executable) that basically checks to see if the parent process is outlook.exe, and if it is, we crash and burn, preventing many of the worms and such from running.
Meanwhile, someone's porting WINE to MacOS X. It doesn't actually emulate an Intel CPU, so it won't run your Windows binaries, but you can recompile Windows programs from source code and get them to run, and look authentically Windowslike, on your Mac. Though you'll need to use X11 as well, as it doesn't speak directly to Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon (and there don't appear to be any plans to make it do so).
The latest salvos in the War on Intellectual Property Terrorism: Paypal have unilaterally suspended donations to Freenet, an underground crimeware project allowing data to be distributed anonymously with no provision for law enforcement monitoring, thus providing a safe haven for paedophiles, terrorists and dissidents living under oppressive regimes. Freenet is not technically illegal (except perhaps in Japan), though appears to be being de facto outlawed and driven further underground through third-party sanctions. You can still contribute to Freenet by using E-Gold, an alternative online currency favoured by heavily armed anarchist militia whackos and the tinfoil hat crowd.
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's web sites which use Javascript to disable the right-button menu. It's the web equivalent of copy-protected CDs; it doesn't stop people from downloading their images/content or stealing their HTML design secrets (if your browser can download it, you can grab it), but does prevent honest users from opening a link in another window/tab, should they so desire.
A quick review of various items which arrived at my PO box today:
- Various artists, "Romantic and Square is Hip and Aware": a Smiths tribute album featuring mostly guitar-based jangly indie-pop bands who can probably trace their lineage back to Manchester's Finest. They're not bad, though many of them don't add much in the way of new ideas to the originals; don't look for too many radical reinventions here. Brazilian band Pale Sunday's bossa-tinged take on I Know It's Over is quite good, Anglo-Spanish popsters Pipas do a slightly dubby take on This Night Has Opened My Eyes and Jason Sweeney does a good Morrissey impression over bedroom electronics. Meanwhile, Australia's national indie band The Lucksmiths' take on There Is A Light That Never Goes Out sounds much like the original, only as a duet, deviating from the master about as much as Neil Finn's version from some time ago, while The Guild League's take on Panic has a jaunty, slightly brass-bandish take on it. The liner, by someone from The Snowdrops (who cover Bigmouth Strikes Again) notes are much the usual autobiographical tale of growing up awkwardly in the bedsits of Thatcher's England with one's Smiths records. (via Traffic Sounds.)
- Harvey Williams, California: I had the MP3s for this, and decided to get the CD. In the decade or so between Another Sunny Day (who brought us bedsit anthems like Anorak City and the unforgettable You Should All Be Murdered; check the filesharing nets for them) and this 1999 release, Harvey Williams had mellowed somewhat, bringing a CD of piano ballads, both touching and satirical, with a wry, and very English, turn of phrase, about the usual boy/girl situations. In a parallel universe, some of these have probably been picked up by Working Title for a London-based Gwyneth Paltrow romcom and Harvey has become the next Badly Drawn Boy. But there are some nice tracks here; the Bacharachesque instrumental Introducing..., for one.
- The Autocollants, Why Can't Things Just Stay The Same?. Lo-fi sweet indie-pop which starts off OK, though sounds a bit samey in places. Perhaps it's the production (the guitars sound like they were recorded on a four-track in someone's bedroom), or perhaps Laura Watling's voice is just that much too breathy for prolonged listening.
- Stereolab, 2004 Tour CD: whilst the groop don't look like visiting Australia this year, a copy of this 3" disc has made it into my hands courtesy of an American source (ta, bfd!). Contains three tracks, with the exquisitely Labbish titles "Banana Monster Ne Répond plus", "Rose, My Rocket-Brain!" (subtitled "Rose, Le Cerveau Electronique De Ma Fusée!"), and "University Microfilms Limited". And, yes, it's quite good; this isn't mere filler. The first track has an epic, multipartite quality akin to the best of the Lab, in its 5 and a half minutes, the second one sounds like the output of an automatic Stereolab song generator (in a good way), and the third one's not bad either.
I also got a copy of that CD of HP Lovecraft-themed retro fonts. Had I paid any more for it, I'd be disappointed; some of the letter spacing is a bit inconsistent, and more annoyingly, all the fonts have "HPLHS" as the style (where "Bold", "Italic" and so on should be), with the different weights and slants in each family showing up as separate faces. I suspect that the designers are not professional typographers (btw, who would call a font "Italic"?)
2004/5/17
50 suspicious things about the Nick Berg killing; from Berg's unusual circumstances (what he was doing alone in Iraq with an Israeli stamp in his passport, why he was travelling at night, his stated intention to leave, the 3 FBI visits he received whilst in custody), what exactly happened between his release from custody and capture by the killers (if he was handed over, that would have saved Osama Bin Laden from having to procure an orange jumpsuit for him), the timing of the release of the tape (which mentions the prison torture photos apparently before they were released), the increasingly implausible "al-Qaeda" assassins' builds, accents and hands, and even questions of whether the decapitated man was, in fact, Berg. Something's not what it seems. (via jwz)
P-P-P-Powerbook: a true story. Briefly, guy in Seattle tries selling a new PowerBook on eBay, finds a scammer trying to con him out of it using a dodgy escrow service, and posts to Something Awful. The SA Goons then collaborate to play an expensive prank on the scammer, sending them the P-P-P-Powerbook, a hand-decorated ring binder, valued for Customs at US$2,000. Meanwhile, goons in the UK track the scammer's address to a dodgy-looking barber shop in North London, whose proprietor (one Jean Climax) presumably takes delivery of items for various slippery customers, and observe as the scammer (a Romanian chap, by all accounts) takes delivery of his new P-P-P-Powerbook.
Bad news for the neo-conservative pipe dream of making Iraq the start of a domino chain of neo-liberal democracies across the Middle East, too busy eating Big Macs, watching MTV and monitoring their Halliburton shares to consider annihilating Israel or supporting international terrorism, thus ushering in a new age of peace and contented consumerism across the entire Middle East. The US Government have indicated that they will accept a theocracy emerging in Iraq. I'm sure John Ashcroft wouldn't object.
Meanwhile, two cities in southern California are designating themselves no-communist zones; very retro.
In today's spam, "Kareem Presley", of Bulgaria, wants to sell me some stock which is "showing triple-digit earnings growth this year". The deal is apparently so good that he mailed it to me in triplicate.
SampleSwap is a new(ish) sample-sharing site by San Franciscan electronica d00d Canton Becker. It's the latest incarnation of his Ontology site, only rather than using a proprietary, Mac-only file-transfer system, everything's web based. Users can upload samples and unfinished songs, download others' contributions, and talk on the phpBB-based message boards. The categories under which the samples appear are interesting as well; for example, under "vocals and spoken word", you have entire subgenres like "male rastafarian", "robotic", "evangelists and preaching", and "female dirty german words" (and who doesn't need some of those for at least one musical project?).
2004/5/16
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, those two purveyors of feelgood fare, now have a daughter, and her name is... Apple. Is there some kind of law that says that celebrities must give their children ridiculous names? Chances are, her school years will be a misery, unless her parents send her to schools exclusively for celebrity spawn. (I'm sure the Church of Scientology and other similarly charitable organisations run such schools in Hollywood, Notting Hill and other such places, so that all the Apples and Moon Units and Jets and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lilies don't get the crap bullied out of them by more conventionally-named classmates.)
2004/5/14
Conspiracy theories about the Nick Berg killing. They come down to (a) where did the killers get the orange jumpsuit (though I'm sure al-Qaeda's budget would extend to those if they needed them), and more seriously (b) Berg's presence on an "enemies list" of treasonous liberals who opposed the war, and (c) the identities of the hooded killers, whose white hands, build and body language are allegedly inconsistent with them being Middle Easterners -- but consistent with them being US military/paramilitary personnel. (via tyrsalvia)
Two researchers at Berkeley have created a virus which fights AIDS. This virus is a modified version of HIV with the harmful parts replaced by a mechanism that inhibits HIV's ability to kill immune cells. The anti-AIDS virus is sexually transmissible, much as HIV is, which means that now it is hypothetically possible to screw a sick person healthy. (They may have to get rid of this if they ever market it, as not to lose revenue; otherwise they could sell multi-user site-licenses to sexually promiscuous patients, or put a celibacy clause in their licenses and prosecute violators under copyright laws.)
This just in: virus writers' people skills often leave a lot to be desired:
And in perhaps the most blatant case of ego among virus writers, the virus writer Michael Buen from the Philippines put a copy of his CV in his virus. When the virus became active on a PC, it would automatically print out the CV which contained his real name, job history and contact details and threatening to unleash further viruses unless he was given a job.
Presumably they did enough fact-checking to determine that the virus was written by Mr. Buen, and wasn't a joe-job by someone who disliked him for whatever reason.
2004/5/13
Convicted child murder accomplice Maxine Carr's new identity stolen one day before she was to be released. The documents are said to give her mobile phone, passport and social security numbers, though the British government denies that they would make it easier for her to be identified. Given the level of organisation required to obtain secret documents such as these (including the possibility of a collaborator within the civil service deliberately leaving them in an unsecured car), it's not unlikely that there is a well-organised vigilante conspiracy to ensure that the "justice" denied by the British legal system will be swift. (Don't bother checking the news for it, though; if it happens, it'll be just another anonymous murder, suicide, or accident; perhaps a drug overdose or a "mugging gone wrong" is in the works?)
(Not that an uncompromised fake identity would protect anyone who maintained contact with their friends and relatives from their former life. The names and identities of Carr's parents are known, and sufficiently driven vigilantes could watch them, in shifts if needed, and follow up on anybody matching Carr's description whom they meet with. Even if she broke off contact with them, there'd be something else to get her by. The Mossad nabbed Adolf Eichmann because he neglected to change his wedding anniversary after fleeing to Argentina, and he was an actual Nazi war criminal, and not a rank amateur.)
2004/5/12
Meanwhile, Guardian readers debate vital issues, such as whether Narnia and Middle Earth should be permitted to join the EU:
Everyone seems to be forgetting just how inefficient farmers Hobbits are. I can't see them agree to reasonable deal on CAP.
They're not ready for entry. The regulations on wardrobes alone should give them pause and the prospect of being overrun by asylum seekers from Sunderland will undoubtedly sway the vote in favour of 'No'.
Guardian readers would undoubtedly support The evil queen
In China, where minors are prohibited from entering internet cafes, gangs of net-starved teenagers are assaulting attendants who dare to kick them out.
(The article was published on the website of the Chinese government-controlled newspaper/agency Xinhua; the headlines at the bottom of the page are interesting; a lot of them are scathing, almost al-Qaeda-level criticism of the US in Iraq ("Images that shame US", "Iraq abuse exposes US double standards in human rights"-- ouch!), though between them is "Celine Dion cancels shows due to sprained neck". Is Celine Dion to China what David Hasselhoff was to Germany or something? She seems to be huge over there.
Another reason to avoid Microsoft operating systems: if your Windows PC gets infected with malware and you're unlucky, you may lose your job, your relationships, or even be convicted as a paedophile, on the strength of pornographic images downloaded into your cache, as happened to one man in the US (or so he claims).
Fact 1: If you write a CD-RW in packet mode (i.e., if you set it up so that you can write files to it one at a time, rather than burn disc images to it), it is formatted as one long track, and data is somehow written into the middle of this track. Which means that if you put it into a CD player or other device, it sees a disc with one data track of 74 or so minutes' length.
Fact 2: computer-based CD playing/ripping software recognises track titles by matching a profile of track lengths against a large database of titles, artists and track listings. This occasionally comes up with collisions, especially for singles or 1-track CDs. Which can be briefly amusing when it mistakes your favourite band's latest single for a European boy band or a rap-metal action-movie tie-in from 5 years ago or something odd like that.
Conclusion: When it looks at FreeDB, Grip recognises a formatted Verbatim CDRW as "Mi maletn", by the well-known artist "Windows XP".
Oddly enough, one can imagine that in a decade or two's time, there may well be a European retro-pop band named Windows XP. Whether their albums clock in at one 74-minute track is another question altogether.
2004/5/11
A mostly comprehensive database of indie pop bands, divided into 15 categories ("60s influenced pop", "twee pop", "lo-fi", "jangle pop", "C-86", and so on). Some of the categorisations seem a bit off (I'd have classified Broadcast as "60s", or perhaps "international pop", rather than "synthpop", and as for the Field Mice being "slowcore"...); this is the sort of document that could spark hours of debates between record shop clerks and people in button-badged trucker caps, about issues such as whether Saint Etienne are "Polished/International/Euro Pop" or "Club Pop". Anyway, it's full of leads I'm going to have to follow up...
Recently, claims have been coming to light that a lot of exotic inventions really came from Britain; first we had the mediæval English origins of curry, and the Scottish origins of the Afro-American musical tradition. And now a popular history author wants to add the boomerang to the list of British inventions, on the strength of rock carvings in the West Yorkshire moors depicting four-armed boomerangs. (Mainstream archæologists, however, believe that the swastika-like design was merely a common motif in Greek and Roman mythology.) Do you suppose that the contemporary two-armed design came about to make them more compact and easier to ship from England to Australia?
(Hmmm; someone should do up "historical" boomerangs made of brass or porcelain or somesuch and adorned with British imperial designs; lions, cannon, Union Flags, and such, which, in this alternate universe, could have been issued to British explorers.)
Two villages in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu are the scene for a war between a Christian sect and a cargo cult.
The John Frum movement first emerged in Vanuatu in the 1930s when the islands were jointly ruled by Britain and France as the New Hebrides. Rebelling against the aggressive proselytising of Presbyterian missionaries, dozens of villages on the island of Tanna put their faith in a mysterious outsider called John Frum. They believed he would drive out their colonial masters and re-establish their traditional ways.
On Tanna, islanders became convinced that John Frum was an American. They have spent the past 60 years dressing up in home-made US army uniforms, drilling with bamboo rifles and parading beneath the Stars and Stripes in the hope of enticing a delivery of "cargo" again.
"In the past we believed in John Frum, but now we believe in Jesus," said Alfred Wako, 49. "The John Frum people don't go to church and they don't send their children to school. They believe in the old rituals. They are heathens."
Tonight I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I really enjoyed it. The writing was by Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), though he wasn't being as much of a clever-dick as he usually was (though the somewhat self-absorbedly neurotic voice-over at the start had me worried for a while). The direction was by Michel Gondry (who did a number of other films with Kaufman, as well as videos for Björk and French TV commercials), and makes the most of the visual idiom.
I'd classify the film as speculative fiction (one could have called it "science fiction", only this term has been hijacked to mean action movies with dark metallic corridors lit by strips of neon, 1-piece jumpsuits, futuristic gadgets and lots of blinking lights). Basically, the story is this: neurotic boy (Jim Carrey, who's not at all the buffoon he's best known as) meets psycho hairdye girl (Kate Winslet, looking like too many cute-but-insane punk/goth/raver chicks you've probably met), and they hook up; then, sometime later, their relationship falls apart, and she goes to a clinic to have all memories of him eradicated from her mind. He runs into her, she doesn't recognise him then goes to the same clinic to do the same. Only as it's happening, he suddenly has a change of heart and races around the landscape of his mind, trying to save the memories of her from the erasure technicians. There's more to the story, such as one of the technicians (played by Elijah "Frodo" Wood, only looking like a member of a nu-metal boy-band) hitting on a way of using attractive female patients' erased memories to hook up with them, and the issue of whether erasing all memories of a failed relationship would be mostly good or mostly bad.
The gist of the film seems to be that erasing a memory is not the same as preventing an event from recurring; in the film, characters whose memories of their relationships with each other have been erased hook up again and repeat their connections. If you're a sentimentalist or wish to consider the film as a romantic comedy, it could be about the power of destiny and true love and soulmates being brought together by powerful forces beyond their control, like the angels people talk about on American daytime TV talk shows or something. If you're more of a skeptic or a cynic, it's more about one being destined to repeat mistakes if one doesn't remember them. On a deeper level, I thought it was about how the dynamic workings of the human mind are composed not so much of things (such as memories of moments and people) as of processes; you can lose your memories, but if you're still the same person you were before (and if you have lost learnings since, you may be more likely to be), the internal processes of your mind will guide you into repeating what you have forgotten, or at least riffing off it. (Maybe if one was to start a real-life Lacuna Inc., one would combine aversion conditioning with memory erasure, to make the patients avoid their problem exes, but I digress.)
2004/5/10
According to the staff at JB HiFi, Morrissey's You Are The Quarry comes out here next week, and is distributed by BMG. I wonder whether it'll have a bonus DVD, as the US gatefold version does.
Bulgarian tries to change his name to "Manchester United". The Bulgarian authorities allowed Marin Zdrakov to change his name to Manchester Zdrakov, but apparently didn't let him change his surname to United. (via The English Manager)
Interestingly enough, Pravda (aka the Russian equivalent of either Ananova or the Weekly World News, depending on when you look at it) have now added a Portuguese translation to the English and Russian. Could this be an acknowledgement of the rising power and influence of the Portuguese blogosphere?
2004/5/9
It looks like there's a new Slowdive CD release coming out on the 24th; titled Catch the Breeze it's presumably a best-of/retrospective, though details are scant. Oddly enough, it's not being released by Sony but by some outfit named Castle.
Strange Horizons Magazine has published a list of scifi plot submissions it sees too many of; these range from generic poor writing (boringly linear plots, deus ex machina plot twists and vaguely Mary Sue-ish pieces about writer's-blocked creatives) to clichés (AIs loose on the net, dystopian futures, cultural misunderstandings with aliens leading to interplanetary incidents) and terribly clever things which everybody else has thought of, like tech support calls for magical items or humans described from alien perspectives as vermin or monsters. (via bOING bOING)
And here's the one for horror stories. Not surprisingly, serial killers feature several times in the list.
John Harris (who wrote The Last Party) on how popular music has been subsumed by corporate globalisation:
For musicians whose sensitivity to such chicanery places them a few notches up the evolutionary chain from Busted and Avril Lavigne, the implied contradictions can be pretty hard to swallow. Put bluntly, Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation's most useful props. Never mind the nitpicking fixations with interview rhetoric and stylistic nuance that concern its hardcore enthusiasts - away from its home turf, mainstream music, whether it's metal, rap, teen-pop or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.
As the record industry's corporate structure has hardened into an immovable oligarchy - EMI, Time-Warner, BMG, Sony and Universal - so the range of musical options on offer has been dramatically scythed down. In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars: Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay. To characterise the process behind their global success as top-down is something of an understatement. MTV may have initially been marketed with the superficially empowering slogan, "I want my MTV"; more recently, with billions gladly hooked up, it has used the flatly sinister, "One planet, one music". Those four words beg one question: who decides?
Such, to use a phrase beloved of the Bush White House, is the cultural aspect of the New American Century. How long, I wonder, before Halliburton and Exxon start sponsoring festivals?
A gang of drag queens goes on a car theft spree across the US South, stealing prestigious cars from dealerships to get to drag beauty pageants in grand style. One queen would distract the dealer with questions, while others would grab the keys from the office and make off with the most fabulous set of wheels in the place. (via Die Puny Humans)
One hapless salesman couldn't believe the beautiful woman who kept him busy was actually a man. "God, I feel so foolish," the man, who asked that his name not be used told 365Gay.com. "I mean she, he, was gorgeous. I was trying to get enough nerve to ask her for a date."
There has to be a movie in this. Though, on second thoughts, it'd probably be a gross-out Hollywood comedy, starring some MTV-generation teen-comedy/dumb-stunt-show stars and packed out with bodily-function gags.
2004/5/7
The clown prince of the American Left, Michael Moore, claimed a few days ago that Disney killed the distribution of his most recent film, Fahrenheit 911, to preserve tax breaks in Florida; a classic case of corruption, cronyism and corporate power suppressing free speech. Or it would be, if it wasn't an outright publicity stunt. Moore, it seems, knew all along that Disney had no intention of distributing his film, though found it more advantageous to strategically misrepresent the situation as Disney doing the Bush Junta's dirty work. The existence of the alleged tax breaks is also up for some debate. Then again, as Mel Gibson discovered, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
How much is your life worth? Well, if you're American or British (what, no Australians?), Al-Qaeda have allegedly offered to pay 1kg of gold to whoever kills you. I wonder what restrictions there are on claiming this; i.e., if you're suicidally despondent over your family's financial problems, could you off yourself and claim the gold for your next of kin? (Be sure to thank your political leaders in your suicide note for making it possible.)
Out of work? Got a Top Secret clearance and a sadistic streak? US military contractors are looking for an Interrogator/Intel Analyst Team Lead in Baghdad, to assist in interrogating recalcitrant Iraqis, under minimal supervision. Since the applicant will not be a US military officer, military codes of conduct do not apply.
Meanwhile, how much do you want to bet that Arab-torturing good-ol'-girl Lynndie England will be getting lots of marriage proposals from Little Green Footballs readers and the like? Step aside Lara Croft and Sigourney Weaver; there's a butt-kicking heroine for the Bush Era.
"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."
And Charlie Stross has weighed in on the Iraqi torture controversy. (Sorry, did I say torture? I meant abuse. Torture, like terrorism, is something only the bad guys can do.) Apparently the British did similar things in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and the results weren't pretty.
Which is to say: I think the torture is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise at the heart of the neoconservative program to restructure the Middle East. It's the same disease that enabled another cultured, well-educated western society two thirds of a century ago to efficiently and systematically brutalize half a continent: the conviction that the Other is backward, ill-educated, unworthy of tolerance, brutish, must needs be governed for their own good and punished for rebellion against the self-evidently correct policies of the superpower ... you can't justify the invasion and occupation of other nations these days without espousing a belief that their citizens are morally, intellectually, or ideologically inferior. To view someone as inferior in one of these ways is to dehumanize them. And, once dehumanized, they become fair game for the most odious of practices: collective punishment, suspension of civil rights, torture, and finally mass murder of civilians -- whether by gas chamber or cluster bomb makes no difference.
This is a wake-up call. We aren't just on the slippery slope, we're two-thirds of the way down it and trying on the jackboots for fit.
Gee, it's a lucky thing that the US isn't bound by the Geneva convention; otherwise they may be guilty of war crimes.
Some time around 1980, Californian prankster John Trubee took some LSD, wrote some whacked out lyrics and sent them to one of those Nashville-based song recording companies, who sent him back a record of a country-and-western version of his opus, which became the "Blind Man's Penis" song, and a favourite on college radio. Now, someone has done a Flash-animated video for it.
Via the Viridian mailing list, of all places, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft prop fonts; or, more precisely, a handful of 1920s-vintage American typefaces with authentically rough edges, a few old blackletter faces, and some of Lovecraft's handwriting. These fonts are sold on a CD for role-players and the like to make game props with, and licensed for private use only (not including theatrical productions), though may be useful things to have around. Even if not, the type samples on the page are certainly entertaining.
Staplerfahrer Klaus, a German factory safety video that seems to have been inspired by Peter Jackson's early works, or possibly a comic splatter-horror film masquerading as a factory safety film. Includes forklifts, chainsaws and the sort of daggy/groovy incidental music that they seem to make only in Germany. If your browser doesn't play Windows Media inline, you can grab the WMV file here.
2004/5/6
The latest mobile phone approved in the US is shaped like a Coca-Cola can, and has three buttons. One connects the caller, who has just found the device in a 12-pack, to a Coca-Cola representative who explains that they have won that most American of aspirational lifestyle symbols, a SUV; another sends the caller's whereabouts, picked up by a GPS receiver built into the device, to the company so that the lucky Coke drinker's SUV can be delivered. The device was developed by a Sydney company, Momentum Worldwide. This looks simultaneously nifty and obscene (disposable single-use electronic devices used for promoting junk food and giving away SUVs and then destined to leach toxins into the water table).
This lends itself to speculation about risks, and ways in which the street may find its own uses for these. The devices would probably cost a few hundred dollars to manufacture, and Coca-Cola would probably collect them for destruction upon delivery of the SUV. Though if one got one and didn't want to own a truck, I wonder how easy it would be to remove the SIM card and fit it to a different phone. Unless SIM cards can be configured, at the network level, to only call one number, an aspiring terrorist or troublemaker could have in their hands a completely anonymous SIM card, courtesy of Coca-Cola. Chances are it'd only be good for one call and one SMS message, though; I wonder whether it could receive calls.
Found on Adrian Talkshow Boy's LiveJournal:
Mother's Day is 9 months after Fathers Day. This means that Father's Day is a celebration of getting laid whereas Mothers Day commemorates the physical pain of childbirth. ANALYSE THE SUBTEXT. What a skewed coincidence. Or is it!?
Weren't there two alternative dates for Father's Day a while ago; one in the first half of the year and the other in the second; I seem to recall that Australia went from celebrating it on one date to the other, with possibly one year in which both were, confusingly, celebrated. I'm guessing that the old date is the traditional colonial one, dating back to the greeting-card fads of Victorian England or somesuch, whereas the new one is the American date, set by Hallmark Corp. or someone, and harmonised on in the interest of globalisation, or something like that.
Someone just arrived at this blog by searching on Google for "pigs suck,they're not kosher!!!". Umm...
The meetup.com database of venues is getting progressively more bizarre. One of the three choices for the Melbourne bOING bOING Meetup* was "Putters Adventure Golf, 10 Main Rd, Hobart". Compared to this, the network deathmatch centre in Lilydale or wherever that kept cropping up is almost sensible.
* Not that it matters; it's unlikely that there'll be a quorum for this one any time soon.
2004/5/5
Right-wing religious crackpot/media magnate Rev. Sun Myung Moon crowned as king/messiah in US Congress. At the ceremony were Moon's tame representatives of various religions (Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims); a rabbi blew a shofar, and a congressman presented Moon with his golden crown; Moon then allegedly announced that it was time for him to be recognised as the Messiah. Apparently Moon has a thing about all religions coming together under him. (via substitute)
Chances are the coronation was a boon extracted by Moon from conservatives he has helped put in power, and a publicity stunt for his Korean constituency, and probably doesn't make the US a monarchy. Still, it's quite a leap from renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors.
2004/5/4
British authorities are recruiting aviation buffs to look out for terrorists and other suspicious activities. Under the scheme, "plane spotters", one of Britain's indigenous eccentric subcultures, will be issued with identity cards and a code of conduct. Plans to use Britain's vast armies of trainspotters to guard against terrorism on the railways and station platforms have not yet been announced.
The soundtrack to Bush's New World Order will be provided by the likes of Wumpscut and VNV Nation. (via Adbusting)
2004/5/3
A Break In The Road is a fairly nifty Flash game. It involves going around an urban street scene (somewhere in south/east London, by the look of it) with a MiniDisc recorder, recording various sounds (which include the Mike Skinner-esque cadences of a geezer talking with his china in a pub, soulful scat vocals from a girl at a railway station, electronic melody lines from video-game arcade machines and a klezmer loop filtering from the window of a kosher deli, amongst the usual percussive noises and urban sound effects) and then assembling them into a track in a vaguely Garageband-esque timeline to play at a club. If your track is good, the crowd will go wild. (via MeFi)
From today's Odd Spot:
A survey in a German car magazine has found that male BMW drivers have sex more often than owners of any other car - 2.2 times a week. Porsche owners have sex the least - 1.4 times.
...meanwhile, low-status individuals who don't own cars have little or no sex. Or perhaps, to quote Alex Torres, "Snazzy cars. Helping losers have sex since 1895."
On a tangent, a professor of creative writing recounts evading the seductive wiles of hordes of young, flirtatious female students, either after a good grade or, allegedly, the coming-of-age ritual of "doing the prof". For some reason, this doesn't seem to happen very much in computer-science institutions.
Band name of the day: Knorkator. They appear to be some kind of German industrial/metal/mook outfit...
Some guy named Sean O'Hagan (I wonder if he's the Sean O'Hagan from the High Llamas, or a different one) has written a timeline of pop music since the birth of rock'n'roll, or, at least, the rise of Elvis Presley. The timeline includes key points such as Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Beatlemania, Altamont, punk, MTV, Live Aid, Madchester, the Britpop wars and Napster, key releases by artists such as The Stooges, David Bowie, Kraftwerk, The Smiths, New Order, NWA, Nirvana and the Spice Girls, and the geneses of entire genres such as heavy metal, soul, dub and hip-hop. It ends in October of 2003, with the triumph of rap and booty music.
2004/5/2
A German "electropunk"/"disco-pop" band best known for wearing giant panda heads are releasing their new album exclusively in mobile phone ringtone format. A copy of Super Smart's "Panda Babies" will set you back €1.99.
2004/5/1