The Null Device
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.