The Null Device
2002/6/19
Upon being told that a mandatory cat registration programme was too expensive, a New Zealand councillor has suggested that the council encourage people to eat cats to save the native bird population.
Mike Cotton told the meeting that while living in East Borneo he experienced what they called a "dog day" when locals went round shooting all the strays. "Maybe we could look at a cat day here," he said.
Following EMI's purchase of once-credible postpunk indie Mute, the Big Mean German has stepped into the fray and bought Zomba, the world's largest "independent" record label and premier purveyor of booty music and bubblegum pop.
(It's funny how everybody smaller than the Big 5 was considered technically an "independent" label, regardless of how they operated; as such, this lead to anomalies such as well-known indie-pop artists NSync and Britney Spears dominating the NME "indie" charts. On one extreme you have people who say that EMI is an indie label as they're not part of a zaibatsu, and at the other there are the indiekid snobs who would classify labels such as Matador as not being real indies because they're not run out of a bedroom.)
I just picked up the CD of Mali Music, Damon Albarn's project with musicians from Mali. It's pretty good in places (especially the opening track). For some reason, though, it fails to rip on the PC I tried it on (which plays it fine, but fails to extract data from it). It rips OK on a PowerBook though. The booklet says nothing about any copy-denial technology being used. Has anybody else had any such issues with this disc?
A forensic audio expert believes he can recover the erased 18 1/2 minutes of the Richard Nixon tapes. Using computer analysis of minute fragments of leftover sound, it is believed that any erased audio recording can be reconstructed.