| Everyone else is doing this |
[07 Jul 2009|01:18pm] |
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(1) Turn on your music player or computer
(2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode,
(3) Write down the first 30 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. ... 1. The Shamen - Progen 91
2. Peaches - Stuff Me Up
3. Pram - Narwhal
4. Saint Etienne - People Get Real
5. Depeche Mode - Blasphemous Rumours
6. Rush - Limelight
7. Sparklehorse - Saturday
8. Kaiser Chiefs - What Did I Ever Give You
9. The Yummy Fur - Deathclub
10. The Smiths - The Headmaster Ritual
11. Kraftwerk - The Man Machine
12. The Shamen - Possible Worlds (!)
13. Long Fin Killie - How I Blew It With Houdini
14. The Auteurs - Future Generation
15. Nick Drake - The Thoughts Of Mary Jane
16. Burial - U Hurt Me
17. REM - Drive
18. Japan - Despair
19. The Shamen - Lightspan Soundwave (what!)
20. Long Fin Killie - Gold Swinger
21. The Korgis - Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime
22. The Stranglers - Cruel Garden
23. Captain Beefheart - Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
24. Comus - Bitten
25. Aphex Twin - Come On You Slags
26. 808 State - Spanish Heart
27. Bizarre Inc - Playing With Knives
28. Momus - Last Of The Window Cleaners
29. Brian Eno & David Byrne - The Carrier
30. Craig Pulsar - The Things We Do I always have my mp3 player on random - I swear The Shamen hadn't come up at all for months. Ah well, at least it wasn't anything from "In Gorbachev We Trust". And no Fall, despite my having about 30 Fall albums on there. Overall, though, that selection isn't bad. There's more variety there than usual; it can go a whole day serving up nothing but Ladytron and Devo.
Other people are welcome to have a go. I'll be impressed to find out that you sometimes listen to Pere Ubu immediately followed by Freiheit.
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| Obligatory |
[26 Jun 2009|11:44am] |
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I think Michael Jackson was a fantastic singer (and dancer) and had some amazing songs. Obviously, he had serious mental health problems, which his position as a massive cash cow meant were undiagnosed and untreated. He jumped the shark majorly in the 90s ("what about the elephants?" indeed) and he became a weird recluse, a situation perhaps partially of his own making. Most pop legends become rubbish later; it's the nature of these things. You could argue that the news coverage of his death was excessive, but that's an argument against rolling news channels, not a reason to diss Jacko himself. Just a few days ago, the BBC gave an enormous amount of airtime to the election of a new speaker in the house of Commons, an event that, on that whole, won't make a huge difference to a lot of people (the Daily Mash summed up Bercow's election as "MAN YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF IS NOW THING YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT"). I presume the people making an enormous show out of being as dismissive and blasé as possible about it, taking great care to let everyone know that they don't care ("singer dies, so what?") and posting multiple blog entries or tweets just so everyone knows how not bovvered they are, have no more sophisticated motive than trying to look big and clever. How sad - affected shoulder shrugging makes you look like a bellend when you're 14; you've really no excuse as an adult. Ironically, in some cases, these are the same people who flooded the web with "oh noes!!!" on hearing that Steven Wells had died. Swells was a talented and inimitable writer, but hardly a household name (some people didn't spend their teens obsessing over indie bands, you know). Jackson, on the other hand, was one of the most famous people in the World, and his death was completely unexpected, so it's not that unreasonable to expect there to be a fair bit of coverage in the media. Related: Famous bender Uri Geller was interviewed last night about Jackson, and this led to some people informing the world that Geller is apparently some kind of illusionist and doesn't actually have ESP. To quote from an earlier post on this blog: "Professional skeptic James Randi has spent years telling the world that Uri Geller doesn't have psychic powers. WE KNOW, YOU TOOL. Do you think we're stupid? Any other mind-blowing revelations, you pompous old sack of shit? Are those not Bernie Clifton's real legs?" I'll be listening to some MJ later on today and I'll raise a glass to him - because I'm not a joyless, uncharitable arsehole.
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| Markets & Morals |
[14 Jun 2009|05:47pm] |
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This guy might be on to something: "Looking back over three decades of market triumphalism, the most fateful change was not an increase in the incidence of greed. It was the expansion of markets and of market values into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms."
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| What a bunch of 30Cs |
[28 May 2009|12:40pm] |
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I have no interest in homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicine. If people believe jars of water or inert oily stuff lessens the symptoms of their illness, good for them. Whatever works for you. As far as I understand it, alternative medicine works by the placebo effect, a well-established scientific phenomenon for which bags of evidence exists. The Guardian, in a bit of ill-conceived comment-whorage, decided to have a Q&A with London-based yoghurt-weaving herbalists Neil's Yard. NY were perhaps a little daft to agree to it, but they presumably thought that at least some of the questions would be about their commitment to recycling, ethical sourcing, etc. Instead, a smugswarm of Badscience-reader types descended immediately, decrying the herbal healers by posting staggering insights along the lines of 'homeopathic remedies aren't much use in cases of blunt trauma'. Take that, apothecary! Up the Enlightenment! After scrolling down the first page of comments, I actually found myself siding with Neil's Yard. In the same way that the Dawkins-fanboys are "culturally Christian" C of E atheists with no desire to create a genuinely godless system of morality, motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies, the Ben Goldacre dittoheads are generally scientifically illiterate smartarses motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies. While I've no time for crystal healing fetishists or 'smell to get well' types, there's nothing more likely to earn them my sympathy than reams of self-congratulatory high-fiving from uppity little berks who bang on about "control groups", "empirical evidence" and "peer review" despite having never so much as seen a scientific paper in their life, much less read one. Just as the Dawkinsians ignore the damage done by the universally-believed (but non-theist) religion of "the free market", preferring the easy target of God-botherers, the Science Nerds have little to say about the dodgy stuff done by Big Pharma (pathologising ordinary human behaviour for profit, or manipulating the results of those precious peer-reviewed studies), preferring the easy target of essential oil hawkers. There's nothing so depressing as seeing people imagining they're speaking truth to power as they nobly stand up for the establishment against the totalitarian tyranny of... a few harmless loons. Maybe I have a natural tendency to side with the underdog, or I'm just a born contrarian, but - bloody hell. The first page of comments included Mr Logic-esque gems like "sounds like classic regression to the mean" (italics in original) and "ah, the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument from anecdote." Can you imagine someone coming out with noxious I-think-you'll-find-ery like that in the pub? I'd want to slam a fire door shut on their head repeatedly. I'm reminded of the time The Lancet published a study by Johns Hopkins University (peer reviewed and all the rest of it), estimating the casualties produced by the invasion of Iraq at 650000, ten times what the ultra-conservative figures produced by the likes of Iraq Body Count were giving at that point. Supporters of the war, faced with having to defend civilian deaths an order of magnitude higher than they'd previously thought, suddenly became experts on epidemiology, and bawbags who'd always imagined those Tefal adverts were an accurate portrayal of scientists were suddenly crowing about "flawed methodology" and "main street bias". The shitstorm in a test tube culminated in the invention of the phrase "rhetorical inflation" and the assertion that The Lancet was an agent of Islamofascism. In other words, the rule seems to be - science is great when you can use it to piss hippies off, but it's totally rubbish when it discovers we killed loads of brown people.
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| That was a Partly Political Broadcast |
[27 May 2009|01:56pm] |
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One of the best things about election season (even if it's a largely meaningless dud like the European Parliament) is watching the Election Broadcasts. The big parties usually put together something reassuringly expensive and thoroughly cheese & onion, so it's the stuff produced by smaller groups, who only just qualify for their five minutes of airtime, that make for more interesting viewing. All links below are Youtube, unless stated otherwise. The Libertas (Irish free-marketeers against labour laws) Party Election Broadcast is possibly the most boring 5 minutes of film ever recorded. Well done. What a waste of the World's time. Obviously, you'd expect Northern Ireland to have the most haun-knitted productions, especially from parties trying to win the farmer vote. The SDLP one is fairly soporific, although, given that they've no chance of being elected, you've got to appreciate their effort. The Prodiban (iPlayer - I can't find it on Youtube) managed to come across as a bit more lively, despite having an MEP with all the personality of an oven glove who attacks the DUP from the right and spouts 1980s vintage rhetoric about "ay-urr-ay tursts". Sinn Féin, meanwhile, have gone for some twee Irish music and a smattering of Gaelic (cos it winds up the other lot). Speaking of the 80s, Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour seems to be comprised of Ricky "up the werchers" Tomlinson (who was happy to advertise the privatised British Gas a few years ago) and some folk cryogenically frozen during the Miners' Strike. Meanwhile, with heartbreaking People's Front of Judea pointlessness, the No2EU - Yes To Democracy campaign offer an almost identical set of policies (if slightly better presented). North of the border, the Scottish Socialist Party have come up with a rather natty slogan - "make greed history", and enrolled the services of Tam Dean Burn. Didn't Peter Mullan do their last one? What's with the whole "big man" schtick? Maybe they should change tack and get Alan Cumming or Craig Hill next time. I'm not linking to UKIP or the BNP, but the former's message can be summed up as: "if we left the EU, it'd rain tits and champagne", while the latter evoke the spirit of WWII - rather hypocritically, given that Nick Griffin is a Nazi. There's also the Christian Party, who've made their message arrestingly literal - George "So Macho" Hargreaves talks about 'the elephant in the room' in front of a large model elephant while one of his fellow gay bashers Bible bashers encourage people to pull their heads from the sand - in front of some people pulling their heads from some sand. And check out the musak! The Green Party one is okay. I'd have liked a few more explosions and car chases, but you can't have everything. They've done just enough to reassure this tactical voter.
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| I can't be arsed |
[06 May 2009|02:13pm] |
In a couple of months it'll be two years since I last recorded any music. I think my blogging is going the same way.
Having ideas is hard enough without going to all the extra effort of dressing them up for public consumption. I could finally write that post about how the USA is the new USSR, but I just can't find the motivation to put it down in well-formed sentences for the benefit of 6 or 7 largely uninterested readers. I'd rather just explain it to you in person, ideally in a rambling, disjointed way while slightly stoned. This happened with my tunes as well - I'd put together 8 bars of Martian-NRG and then just sit listening to it, thinking how much work for how little reward it'd be to arrange a whole track from it and add vocals.
So, that's where I'm at.
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| Money talks, ooh ooh, money talks. |
[20 Apr 2009|11:57am] |
UK residents - compare your spending
I spend 37% less than other people with my income!
Are you a spendthrift or a miser? FIND OUT HERE!
Things I spend more on than other people: fuel (ever tried to heat an uninsulated house?), smoking (cough) and going out (that'll be all those trips to Manchester). Alistair Darling won't find 30 billion in 'efficiency savings' round here.
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| The resentment of resentment |
[09 Apr 2009|10:23pm] |
You know those protests that happened in that London?
I like this:
"Some advice for letter writers... - avoid describing protesters as 'scroungers' when banks have just received the biggest injection of state largesse (or 'taxpayers' money') in world history; don't claim we 'don't understand economics' when it's clear, with your preposterous attempts to prop up an entire economy on finance and property, that you know even less; and don't sneer at the 'unemployed' when your own actions have created a rate of unemployment at 2 million and counting."
Not my words, this guy's
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| Down with the kids (as ever). |
[02 Apr 2009|02:46pm] |
Well, not so much "kids" as "Metro readers". This is what they're all doing this week. Although, who knows - maybe it'll take off hugely and Brian Eno will write the lyrics for his next album using it.
You: hello
Stranger: hello
You: nice day isn't it?
Stranger: [non-sequitur]
You: Lovely. I prefer pasta
Stranger: Pasta is [non-sequitur]
You: I know you don't mean that.
You: Or maybe you do?
Stranger: [non-sequitur]
Stranger: [non-sequitur]
You: Is this some kind of Turing test?
You: You've failed, obv - I'm just worried that I have as well.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.
I can't believe that I'm already coming across as a real-ale luddite for prefering Twitter. Pass me my pipe. Or an exhaust pipe.
EDIT: Btw, I didn't actually try Omegle - the above is a generalised example based on what I've seen from other people.
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| Raw Meat 3 |
[30 Mar 2009|01:51pm] |
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Does anyone else detect a whiff of Puritanism among the coverage of "Wacky" Jacqui Smith's dodgy expenses claim? Surely, the issue here is that she included a TV package as part of an expenses claim? Yet all the comment I've read has concentrated on the fact that the itemised bill included two 'adult' pay-per-view films at £5 each. So what? The bill also reveals that someone in the house watched bland Hollywood sequel "Ocean's 13" *twice*, which I find far stranger. Smith had also claimed £550 for a bathroom sink and £1,000 on an antique fireplace, yet the media decide the real story is the tenner spent on skin flicks. Soft pr0n films, of the kind you can buy via cable TV operators in the UK, are perfectly legal and fairly mild - not at all likely to "deprave or corrupt". Smith claiming back the cost of her cable TV from the public purse (presumably because it came bundled with the landline phone and she, accidentally or not, failed to separate them) is the issue here - it doesn't matter whether she or her husband were watching "Driving Miss Daisy" or "Bukkake Buttsluts 7". Smith wasn't present when the films were watched but if she had, she could have claimed it was 'research'. This kind of puritanical attitude seems to be as common on the left as it is on the right, with both Daily Mail readers and liberal blogger types lining up to first giggle like adolescents then turn into Mary f*cking Whitehouse. Topping the hypocrisy charts is the Daily Express, who are, predictably, demanding Smith "must quit now" - despite being owned by a leading pornographer. If Jacqui Smith's husband wants to borrow any of my pr0n collection (pictured here), he's more than welcome to.
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| The Pope schmokes dope... |
[24 Mar 2009|03:11pm] |
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Someone tell Ian Paisley - the Dutch have their own version of the Prodiban. A group of traditionalist Protestants has objected to the use of the European Union emblem on car registration plates in the Netherlands, on the grounds that the circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background symbolises the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It turns out that the Netherlands, a country known around the world for its liberal, permissive attitudes, has a bible belt ("Bijbelgordel"), where: Christian observance has been sufficiently strict for swearing to be banned and cash machines not to dispense money on Sundays. How come the Netherlands managed to get weed, prostitution, euthanasia and Dawkins-knows what else legalised, despite the presence of these nutters, while the UK, with no equivalent God squad (the Isle of Lewis hardly counts), remains solidly puritan? Imagine if anti-Catholicism was a Bad Thing, like anti-Semitism, rather than a harmless, family-friendly pastime?
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| Obligatory Google Street View post |
[23 Mar 2009|02:27pm] |
The face recognition software used by Google to blur people out has "produced some false positives", like this one in Béal Feirste. Google say they've fixed it, but it's only unblurred from certain angles.
Street View hasn't made it to Bootle yet (we only got electricity and running water a few years ago), so it'll be a while before you have to skip past my "ooh, look at my house" post. If I knew when they were coming, I'd tidy the place up.
You can, however, see some of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) giro_playgirl's dresses hanging in the window of her old house, which is quite cool.
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| No Surrender Value |
[16 Mar 2009|01:34pm] |
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Like, todally eidees! Whether it's the revival culture or the recession I dunno, but there's been an awful lot of eighties action of late. BBC4 talking about the Miners' strike (they were people who dug coal out of the ground in the olden days, dear) was fascinating, but the recrudescence of Irish Republican paramilitarism is just depressing. The footage I saw on the news the other night (it was either the "Real" IRA, or the "Continuity" IRA) looked like something from back in the day. The balaclavas, the camouflage jackets, the builders' blue jeans, the quaint, almost-vintage armaments (have you seen the kind of firepower the likes of the Taliban have nowadays?) - I wouldn't be surprised if they all had white socks and calculator watches on as well. They looked more like some kind of historical re-enactment society than a fearsome terrorist machine. It was like "Life On Mars" meets "Breakfast On Pluto". Pointless. Both Muslims and Jews in Britain are ay' complaining about an alleged rise in intolerance towards their respective religions, but I wonder how they'd react if the government of the country they were born and lived their entire life in had a policy in part of that country of collaborating with religiously-defined paramilitaries to murder civilian members of their faith?
[rant over]
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| Asking for it |
[13 Mar 2009|01:23pm] |
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Home Office stats tell us (summarised by Lenin): 16% of people in England and Wales think it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend if she nags; 13% think it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend if she flirts with other men; 20% think it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend if she dresses in sexy or revealing clothing in public; 11% think it okay to beat if the wife or girlfriend doesn't treat the man with respect; 8% think it okay to beat if she is caught cheating. Further, 36% think a woman should be held co-responsible for being raped if she is drunk; 26% if she is wearing revealing or sexy clothing; 43% if she flirts heavily beforehand; 49% if she does not clearly say 'no'; 42% if she is using drugs; 47% if she is a prostitute; 14% if she is out walking alone at night. That'll be those 'enlightened' Western values we keep trying to bomb and beat into less enlightened countries around the world.
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| Dirty Smuggers |
[04 Mar 2009|02:59pm] |
I've noticed recently that the meaning of 'smug' has changed. No longer an adjective describing someone "offensively self-satisfied or self-righteously complacent", it is now used to mean "unashamedly expressing a point of view opposed to my own".
Of course, resorting to dictionary definitions is, in itself, smug, innit?
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