Planet Afterlife @ Seldo.Net

By at 05:45AM

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Ever since meeting Simon Hobart, getting involved with Ghetto and hearing his stories of the club scene of the 80s, I’ve had fascination with the decade. Ashes to Ashes helped bring that along even further and I’ve loved delving back in time and so far merely scraping the surface of all the brilliant electro pop that came out of that era. I always say that if I had a time machine I’d love to go back to 1980s London and see what it was like. I was here a hell of a lot, but as a child who didn’t really see much.

It’s very exciting to read then about the BBC’s 80s season which is the already made part of the now dropped Decades TV season the corp were planning. The first programme to be announced is 90 minute drama Worried About The Boy which revolves around the life of Boy George. He’ll be played by Douglas Booth who’s only really known at the moment for being the male face of Burbury. Joining him are Mark Gatiss as Malcolm McClaren, Marc Warren as Steve Strange, and Matthew Horne as Jon Moss. I’m a bit face scowly at the idea of Matthew Horne, but we shall see. Excitingly as Worrapolava noticed, it’s being made by Red Productions who are most famous for making Queer As Folk. The Blitz club will be central to the plot and who knows, maybe even Simon’s Kitkat club might get a mention. Boy George is a figure who has his own little role in my life who as a friend of my dad once showed up to my fifth birthday party and gave me a red soap in the shape of a heart. This was in 1987, hopefully it’ll play a central part in the programme.

By trixie at 17:56PM

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Sometimes you hear a song and you’re not entirely sure what it is. You’re aware it’s a classic and asking would make you look a bit daft. Shazam has gone some way to solve these issues and I have an almightily brilliant Spotify playlist that I keep up to date with everything I’ve shazam’d in the last year. It’s mainly populated by soul and jazz from many a Saturday night spent holding my phone up in the Dalston Jazz Bar.

I don’t actually care though, hence showing you that list. Yes I didn’t know for a fact what Bob Dylan ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was. Big deal. We all have different music specialities and learning about new stuff (even if it’s old) is brilliant. That’s part of the reason Absolute Radio is a preset on my car radio. I like listening to the station because it’ll play me some classic songs I’ve never heard before. It’s as much education as it is entertainment.

This is all a big preamble to me horrifying Jack by admitting to not really knowing what Jacques Brel – Ne Me Quitte Pas was before Christmas. As the Dusty greatest hits album is my standard ‘BOYS SUCK. I NEED TO WALLOW’ album, I must have heard Dusty’s version a billion times but never quite clocked it. The reason I’ve gone back and found Jacques though is because Barbra Streisand has covered the song on her latest album ‘Love Is The Answer’. Apart from the fact that it makes you want to tear your heart straight out of your chest I think I’m particularly into this song because of all the quiet then LOUD (probably a good technical term for this somewhere) bits.

Once upon I time I didn’t know much about Barbra. In fact I was once asked ‘Name three Barbra Streisand songs’ as the first question in a job interview last year. Way to throw me off. After this Christmas though I feel like I could go on Mastermind with her as my specialist subject. After Christmas I drove back down from the North to London and challenged myself to listen to Radio 2 all day. I would have listened most of the day anyway but for once I wanted to avoid me being flick happy when I don’t like a song. It was a very strange day on air. Cilla & Tony Blackburn presented the Great British Songbook and Dave Pearce brought Dance Anthems to the station. In between those two came an extremely intense interview with Babs presented by chart god Paul Gambaccinni that lasted for 2 hours and incorporated performances from her recent intimate show at New York’s ‘Village Vanguard’. I heard about 28 Streisand songs in a row and learnt everything from her relationship with the Academy to the lack of love in her life. Did you know that she’s never sung ‘Woman in Love’ live because she couldn’t relate to the lyrics? Did you know that she once went to see Jacques Brel in concert in France and he didn’t sing ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ even though he knew she was there? She even went backstage and begged. Now you do.

Anyway here is her version albeit a roping recording. Just buy it. Amazatronica. There are so many versions of this song out there though – which one is your favourite? I’d advise skipping the Belinda Carlise one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By trixie at 17:47PM

The US supreme court, in a split decision, has ruled that corporations are people, free to spend on political campaign advertising as a form of free speech. This is a terrible decision that threatens the foundation of democracy.

Corporations have different goals to people. They are about their own survival, and act in nobody's interests but their own. Customers? They're out to screw them for every cent the market will bear. Ditto suppliers. Employees? There to be used up and thrown away as soon as it's profitable to get rid of them. Executives? To be sacrificed every time the stock drops, or forced out as part of a merger or acquisition. Shareholders? Love them -- until things get tough. Then declare chapter 11, wipe them out, and find some new suckers.

By declaring corporations people, we have created a new species, parasitic upon our own, and significantly stronger. Corporations will suck us in, use us up, and spit us out, without regard for wealth or class. There will be no lucky ones: we will all be the losers. Once they are in control, the best efforts of humanity will be subjugated to the survival of the corporations. They will wreck our environment, because they do not need to breathe. They have no interest in our health or our life-spans. They don't care whether we're happy, and they don't care if we like them. They only care about other corporations.

Democracy is government by the people and for the people. By declaring corporations people we subvert democracy, pushing towards political goals that are dramatically contrary to our own interests as human beings. This is a genie that needs to be put back in its bottle, immediately, before it is too late.

By at 02:16AM

So the iTablet is coming, or so it seems, and everyone is reading tea-leaves, so here's my own swing:

I know this is ridiculous, but the moment I saw this invitation and this tweet from Ricky, I thought: what if the tablet isn't a device on its own? What if it is more like a Wacom tablet -- not a full device on its own, but more of a peripheral?

Imagine a device the size of a mousepad. It sits on your desk, replacing the mouse itself. It syncs to your mac, and displays a picture of the screen itself -- or a portion of the screen. It acts like a touch screen, or if you want it to, a drawing tablet (it would let you "zoom in" on the drawing area, like Mobile Safari does). In addition to ordinary clicks, you'd be able to use a variety of gestures to simplify various tasks. Applications that were compatible with the device could send dedicated UI to the tablet itself, giving you a range of buttons and tools within a fingertip's reach -- this would be pretty useful in Photoshop, for instance, but other apps as well.

So then you're done drawing your picture on your big screen, and you want to walk across the room and show it to somebody, or take it home with you to work on your home machine. You just pick it up, and walk away. Your tablet has a copy of the document. You can work on it, annotate it, mail it to people, and if you take it to another Mac, it can transfer it right across. Quickly, seamlessly, in the best Apple style. Of course, because it's sort of like an iPhone, it will also have apps and dedicated services, but where it will really shine is as an ultraportable extension of your existing system.

If it were true, this solves a couple of key questions surrounding the tablet:

1. Jobs has been delaying a tablet for years because it needs to be useful for more than "surfing the web in the bathroom". So if they do reveal a tablet, it's going to come with a use-case nobody's thought of so far. Sure, it might work as an eBook reader too, but Steve doesn't want to build one of those, so I doubt that will be the primary use-case.
2. There's been a lot of buzz about the fact that the tablet may be using gestures in some new way, since Apple recently took down the website of FingerWorks, a gestural-input startup they acquired five whole years ago. FingerWorks' primary product was called, coincidentally, the iGesture Pad, and (though I didn't know this when I started writing this) it has all the mouse-replacement features I talked about: clicking, scrolling, dragging, etc.
3. Finally, lots of people have asked: if I already have an iPhone and a Mac desktop or laptop, why do I need a tablet? Is there really a gap in the market there? And this answers the question: it doesn't replace your iMac or your Powerbook, it complements both -- hell, it might even sync with your iPhone too.

All of which leads me to say that if this isn't what the iTablet is, then they should get started on something like this right away. But maybe they had this idea five years ago, when they bought FingerWorks, and it's taken all this time to get it right. In which case, I expect to be very excited indeed when I see what they've come up with.

By at 08:45AM

A ridiculously misleading letter from Wells Fargo is trying to scam their own customers out of $156/year under the pretect of a "free" credit report. I expect better from a reputable national bank.

By at 15:02PM

First Alan Williamson asked if Amazon EC2 has become oversubscribed. Then Cloudkick jumped in with graphs illustrating the increased latency seen by spot instances. Amazon has denied there's any fundamental issue. But let's look at that graph:

Something struck me about the timing: the trouble all seems to kick off round the 12th of December: that's the day Amazon announced EC2 spot instances. The way spot instances work is simple: Amazon puts its spare capacity up for auction. Instead of paying a set price, you bid for an instance, and the highest bids that fill up available instances win. If more people turn up demanding instances, the price should rise.

But there's a side effect: assuming spot instances are popular, then we can assume that no matter what the price is, all of EC2 capacity is now being used. What would you expect to happen if that were the case? Well, you'd expect them to start hitting capacity limits -- which is what the ping times seem to suggest is happening.

At the moment this is just my theory. Anybody else got any evidence that might back it up? It would be really nice to see what's been happening to EC2 spot prices over the last month, for instance.

By at 02:30AM

And so Ellie Goulding is the Sound of 2010. I like Ellie but not enough to really care much at the moment – she seems nice enough. Both Ellie and Marina were always going to come at the top of the poll having been knocking about since the beginning of the year and taking time to leak songs, play gigs, in Ellie’s case play Jools, release limited edition singles and set the blogosphere all in a tizz while making sure they didn’t chart in the top 20 and break the conditions of being in the Sound of … poll. The model of the Little Boots winning path was watched and just repeated last year. My votes this year were for 1. Hurts 2. Dollface 3. Jessie Malakouti. I’d have voted for Marina as well but thought she would get enough.

Anyway a couple of the labels were less on the ball about the sound of and sent out I Blame Coco + Eliza Doolittle tracks the week after it shut. I’d have probably have voted for them both otherwise. Eliza was knocking about in development for a lot of 2009 but only released her first E.P. at the end of November. Let’s just hope that wasn’t the first in an attempt to be the Sound of 2011.

If you can get over the name confusion (people should really start thinking about google), Eliza makes toe-tappy jangle pop. It’s not big, bold with massive production; in fact it’s even a little Jack Johnson (wait… come back!) She looks like a more natural version of Miley Cyrus, lyrically there’s shades of Lily with her straight talking tales dresses her age and is distinctly Norf Laaandan. Her age seems to be a bit of a mystery. I think she looks about 17, but her label replied saying they weren’t sure but they thought about 22.

Her videos all have a strong visual identity. This is her first single proper ‘Skinny Genes’, joining the ranks of Ain’t What You Do, Young Folks and er, Blow My Whistle Bitch, as songs with a whistle designed to get inside your head.

Alternatively listen to her EP on Spotify which contains the furiously catchy Moneybox, the trippy Police Car and chirpy Rollerskates.

By trixie at 19:11PM

The details are fuzzy. I think I was about eight years old at the time. I was in the car with my mother, in Trinidad, driving from our house on the hill in Curepe towards the junction with the Eastern Main Road. We were just passing the corner where a hand-painted sign advertising "BROILERS $5.00"*. My mother had the radio tuned to the cricket. Somebody else was in the car -- I think it was my best friend at the time, Dari -- and he asked what the score was.

I'm not a fan of cricket, or indeed of any sport. Something fundamental about being a spectator to those sorts of activities escapes me. Coming from a family of sports fan, and already in possession of my gleeful contrarian streak, I quickly announced that I didn't know. In fact, I said, I didn't even understand what the scores meant -- runs and overs and wickets and things.

My mother told Dari the score, and then gave me a very mild rebuke for being so forcefully ignorant of the sport -- this was not the first time I'd done something like this. "It's never cool to not know something, Laurie," she said.

I doubt she even remembers making the comment. It wasn't an important "sit down and get this straight" moment. It was just something she said over her shoulder as she negotiated traffic. She meant that I shouldn't try to stand out from my peers by being deliberately ignorant about things (an emerging habit of mine at the time). She meant that there were better ways to define myself than by what I was not. But it hit home, in a way that things your parents say sometimes do, and it's stayed with me to this day. It's practically the defining tenet of my life.

Starting that day, I never turned down information. I can't say I eagerly sought out information on the byzantine rules of cricket, but I didn't ignore them when they came my way. Since then, when faced with anything new, I have tried to understand it, even if it doesn't interest me. The principle that became embedded in my brain was much broader, and it was that ignorance is uncool. As such I have tried very hard, ever since, to never be ignorant about anything, ever.

It created that infovore that I am today. I absorb anything and everything that falls into my path. One of my most-used phrases is "I once read an article about...". Pick a random topic and I'm not going to know much, but chances are I will have at least one random fact lying around, some connection I can make to my existing store of trivia.

Would I have been like that even if my mother had never said anything that day? Probably, I suppose. But probably not so soon, or so firmly. It's definitely one of those pivotal moments in my life, when a single remark shapes everything that happens afterwards. And I'm grateful for it.

By at 15:58PM

In my mind I’ve dramatically taken against Roisin Murphy for getting pregnant and having a baby. It just seemed like a weird thing to do at this time, but whatevs. Who cares when it’s made her throw out this banging new track. Previous leak ‘Orally Fixated’ was a bit rubbish but this is a full out dancefloor stomp complete with eurorave piano and drums from 1992. It’s so good probably because it’s just a big massive tune, the lyrics might be fancy but sonically it’s not trying to be cold and arty. It just likes going bang, bang, bang. BANG.

Listen on loop for an hour. Cry at being unable to scrobble it.

By trixie at 19:03PM

For web nerds, I have revived my long-defunct web development blog with a post about non-spammy website promotion that will hopefully be useful. It includes the phrase "Social Media Optimization" but other than that it is relatively free of douchebaggery.

By at 15:18PM

By trixie at 14:15PM

I’d love to have the energy to make end of year lists as wonderfully detailed as the mighty XO London. Unfortunately I’m full of a stinker of a cold and generally distracted by everything else. This year I’ve been a little rubbish at listening to as much music as I should do. There’s a whole back-up of albums in my LISTEN TO ME folder on spotify, so this may well be missing some corkers. Like I’m sure Fever Ray and Metric would be likely candidates for my favourite albums had I actually listened to them more than once or twice. I need to catch up pronto.

Anyway my favourite songs of the year:

1. Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
Simply for packing as much joy and celebration as possible into just under 5 minutes. It’s utterly infectious and I’m even more convinced this is my song of the year after feeling just how amazing it was to both play it and watch others enjoying it at Popstarz NYE last night.

2. Daniel Merriweather – Water & A Flame
I’m not entirely sure what I think about Daniel Merriweather but his album surprised me. Red grew on it to a manic extent but this later released single is without doubt the heart-achingly gorgeous highlight. It’s one of those moments that could make me cry so hard I start to feel sick (see De-lovely, last 10 minutes of ‘Doomsday’, Mr Shue & Emma on Glee etc.)

3. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
It was tough to choose between this and Pokerface, but again Popstarz last night tipped this one as best. It was as if I could have played it on repeat for 4 hours solid and no one would have minded. Paparazzi was my favourite video of hers this year, but the first 2 seconds even of Bad Romance absolutely smash it. The decade’s most exciting popstar.

4. Royksopp – The Girl and The Robot
A bleak surprise song from Robyn. I interviewed the band earlier say everything I could possibly need to (600 words worth) over here.

5. God Help The Girl – Musician Take Heed
I’d not heard of this album until Colin stuck his iPod on loudspeaker at a late summer BBQ and the brilliant God Help The Girl album came out. It’s a teaming up of Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian with various female vocalists. Just pipping Perfection As A Helper, this song showcases why I love the album, full of gorgeous, melancholic harmonies.

6. Cheryl Cole – Fight For This Love
I know some people (hello Naomi) fully despise Cheryl, but I’m happy to be swept away with the hype of loving her. Hooray for her pipping Nadine to a solo album. FFTL was unexpected and provided the opportunity for a wide range of new, fascinating dance with your fist type moves from the Talia camp.

Click here to view the embedded video.
7. Jack Penate – Be The One
When Jack released his first album I wasn’t particularly interested in the jingly-jangly nature of it all. Who knows what happened before the release of album #2 (a long holiday in Ibiza?) but it’s euphoric, Balearic sounds were the surprise of the year. A blissfully uplifting song that featured the best use of trumpets since Mark Ronson got his hands on the instrument, and provided a brilliant moment at Wireless in Hyde Park.

8. Shirley Bassey – Apartment
I have absolutely no idea what this song is about. Written by Rufus Wainwright for the latest Shirley Bassey album, it’s entirely nonsensical. That said, the spanish guitars and a roaring vocal make it a quirky and utterly memorable oddity.

9. Rumble Strips – Daniel
I think I should have listened to the latest Rumble Strips album more but this is the song that stuck with me the most. That’s probably because I have a friend called Daniel and when we’re talking about him I like to belt this out. I feel like I want to sing it while standing on a windswept bridge in the rain. Dramatic and dastardly.

10. Lily Allen – Not Fair
A funny, silly, even stupid little song that captures everything we first loved about Lils. It causes a regular barn dance each week at Popstarz and provided a very odd moment with a bride and groom dancing and singing it to each other when I, retrospectively inappropriately, played it at a friend’s wedding.

Special outside the top 10 loving goes to Never Forget You, Bulletproof, Flashback, Empire State of Mind, Battlefield, Warm in The Shadows & Heads Will Roll.

By trixie at 05:59AM

It's been one of my lightest years for blogging, with an average of around four posts per month. A lot of my short-form output has gone instead to Twitter and my longer-form comments have generally been on Hacker News. However, there were a few things I'd call out as being worth a second glance if you missed them:

• Web developers don't build websites; they develop the web
• I asserted that journalism is dead, not just newspapers. I'm not sticking to this 100%: far-away, high-risk, expensive professional journalism still has value, and people will pay for it. However, the vast majority of people who currently call themselves "journalists" are going to find themselves out of work as the cost of the equipment necessary for real-time observation continues to fall. Opinion columnists and critics are out of luck.
• I explained, in minute detail, why it takes me so long to have a shower.
• I listed ten things that Twitter is not and said that if anything, it is "what's going on". Five months later Twitter changed their opening question from "what are you doing?" to "what's happening?" which is sufficiently close that I feel vindicated.
• I wrote a short story in 8 parts called Pilots. It started off well but the ending was sloppy. However, it's one of my better efforts to date.
• Immigration is good for you. And here's why.
• Apple's App Store needs to be fixed and it will require a fundamental change to the iPhone platform if carriers are going to allow arbitrary software to run on their networks.
• I defended the UK Labour party but conceded that they will lose the next election anyway. Hopefully the conservatives will stay in for only one term.
• Avatar completely blew me away.

By at 06:00AM

One of the questions that has occurred to me more than once when I've seen things like a short film made for $300 that has better special effects than Independence Day is: where do movies go from here?

For the longest time, the difference between movies and television, for anything other than straight real-world drama, has been the quality of the special effects. Either just sets and props, or better lighting or sound, or in the case of science fiction and fantasy, whole characters and worlds. That's why it's been possible to endlessly re-make certain types of movies (like alien invasions), because every time you re-make one the effects have come so far that it's been another quantum leap in visuals.

For the last decade or so, the gap has been narrowing. For me it was particularly evident in the Star Wars movies, where episodes 1 through 3 came out in the mid-2000s, and then three years later random fan films came out with effects that, while visibly worse than the real thing, were not a million miles away, either. Big-budget TV shows like Battlestar Galactica had effects that were essentially of movie quality, without barely any quality gap. What would be the justification of a big-screen experience, a big-budget experience, when you could get the same thing at home? 3D was a gimmick, an expensive trick that added nothing to the film.

In Avatar, I have my answer. This is a game-changing film. In the same way that Toy Story ended the era of hand-drawn animation, all big-budget movies filmed in 2D will from now on look somehow dated and cheap. This movie is big, it's beautiful, and the depth of the field afforded by 3D is used consistently, frame-by-frame, with none of the overpowering, out-of-place 3D set-pieces that characterize older 3D films. This is how it's done, and anything not done this way from now on will look amateur.

From the amazing reviews, I was expecting a great movie, and I was still completely blown away. The plot is extremely simple, in a way that real-world conflict is not, but it is solid (unlike, say, 2012). The acting is excellent (Sigourney Weaver could carry the whole movie by herself if she needed to) and the dialogue, very surprisingly for a Cameron epic, mostly avoids cringe-worthy cheesy lines. But overriding all of that is that this movie is deeply, gloriously beautiful, and drove me almost to tears more than once, in the way that a symphony can for other people: not because anything sad is happening, but just sheer joy that anything so beautiful can exist.

By at 09:38AM

I’ve mentioned it before, but Bug is a brilliant event at the BFI Southbank every month which showcases the very best in music videos under the comedic gaze of Adam Buxton. This video for Cinnamon Chasers’ ‘Luv Deluxe’ was my favourite from the November event.

It’s like (500) Days of Summer gone badly wrong, seen through the eyes of someone reading a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. The video is directed by 23 year old Saman Keshavarz and seems to be one of his first videos, having previously made a short film in 2006 called ‘Drug of Choice’. The music comes from Russ Davies, known in this instance as Cinnamon Chasers and is a a gorgeously dreamy sound-scape of a melody that gradually feels more urgent. It also appears Russ is a little randomly the son of Kinks’ founder Dave Davies which is a good pop fact. Best of all on Last.FM we have a high compatibility. It seems he likes Madonna, CSS, Ladytron, Little Boots and Roisin Murphy. Well done him.

By trixie at 11:38AM

(Is there a bit remix / cover (whatever it is) in the world than the Aeroplane remix of Friendly Fires ‘Paris’?)

I’ve been to Paris a couple of times most noticeably once to interview Daft Punk and then once to see them. The first of these was an 8 hour trip spent running round the capital trying to find the hotel basement we were meeting them and eating somewhere particularly gross. The second involved much more sight seeing but a disappointment in the hotel which I’d spent about 400 hours on trip advisor trying to choose.

The best part of that trip though was our night out in The Marais, Paris’ gay village. We discovered that clubs in Paris have volume monitors with the maximum volume being extremely quiet, danced to Sophie Ellis Bextor’s ‘Catch Me’ for the first time in a very odd house club, and went into the tiniest club we’ve ever found whereupon a gorgeous French boy called Guilleme became very attached to me because I was wearing a star of David and tried to get me to join some kind of French, jewish society.

I do think that I’ve never quite got Paris though. When I went last year with Tom & James it was better probably because we found nice food, but I think I’d pick everywhere over Paris. Maybe I just need to do the right things.

Anyway I’m writing this because last week I was asked to ponder what I would do with 1,000€ on a weekend in Paris thanks to a competition from Le Nouveau Paris. I do often think about just jumping on a train from Kings Cross as it’s so handy but the £££ element of it is off-putting. I know if I was given money for free though I’d spend the first £10 on a Chicken Caesar Salad on the Eurostar. I know that sounds utterly ridiculous but it was amazing when I had one on the way out last time and when told they didn’t have any on the return journey I actually nearly cried.

If I went again though, I’d make sure I took more time to explore and see things I’d like. I’ve never been up the Eiffel Tower or The Louvre. I’d return to the awesome Pompedieu Centre and drop into trendy cafe L’Autre that I clocked but didn’t have time to drop into and then head over to the other side of the city to the Dalston-like vibes of the fun, but cramped Pop Inn. If I had the confidence I’d hire a Vespa on the Left Bank and whizz through the city on a bike, making like VV Brown with less good hair.

As far as accommodation goes, I’ve always got lots of amazing, weird hotels bookmarked on delicious. I’m not sure I will ever stay in any of them though, but one of the most fun sounding is Hotel Everland which was a art installation style pod hanging on the edge of the River Seine. It’s been de-commissioned now though so instead I’d love to rock up to the ridiculously high end Angelina’s in Paris is a famous tea salon, and my new love of afternoon tea (acquired at the Dorchester with Golda) can be compared to the Parisian style. Alain Ducasse’s school of food has long been bookmarked on my computer and can you imagine how much fun it would be to be taught French cuisine. I’d feel like I was in Julie & Julia! Steak though has to be the big find and I’m yet to figure out the best steak in Paris. Le Relais de Venise didn’t impress me much with their London branch, but there are lots more to try.

(written in an attempt to win a holiday to Paris)

By trixie at 06:38AM

I had a conversation with Owen on his Facebook wall over the weekend about Tony Blair and the Labour party, spurred by an off-handed comment of his that Tony Blair had deliberately lied to the nation about Iraq.

I genuinely believe that Blair never intentionally lied about Iraq, and more generally that Labour has got a lot of mostly undeserved flak from a lot of ex-Labour supporters. Since the UK seems to be heading towards an inevitable victory by the Conservatives, a fact that deeply distresses me, I figured I'd make my own small case on their behalf.

Firstly, on the subject of Iraq, someone else chimed in:

But how was he [misled by US intelligence], when we went through the dossier and found it so full of holes it was like a macro of a tea bag? Either he knew it was a crock, and lied about that, or he lied about being competent to judge it.

I think he took the US at their word and didn't give a toss about the dossier. In fact, I'd be surprised if he even read it. The US are the UK's closest allies and the US military is the best in the world; when they tell you something you believe them -- or you did in 2001, at least. That was a gigantic mistake, so I'm not going to say he wasn't incompetent. But I don't think he's a liar.

Fundamentally I just don't see any upside for him in lying. Why would he do it? It destroyed his political career and ruined his public image, which was the thing he cared about most. He had no grudge against Iraq like Bush did; he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and he was terribly, terribly wrong.

At which point Owen broadened the argument to general disaffection with Labour, which I believe is what happened in the electorate at large. Iraq became the cause celebre for a large chunk of Labour supporters who were actually upset about a totally different issue -- or rather, a series of small issues that had built up over time. Iraq was just the straw that broke the camel's back. From Owen:

But the impression that always came across was that Blair was most concerned about his place in history and in sticking to Dubya like glue.

To me, it showed that, whilst Blair obviously had sincere principles, that those principles were less aligned to mine than I'd thought.

That and the other authoritarian securicracy measures (not all post-9/11, things like ID cards and the terrorism legislation) were the main things that lead me — and many left-wingers like me — to feel betrayed by the whole New Labour project.

In 1997, I genuinely believed that things could only get better. By 2003, I had become so disillusioned with New Labour (and British politics more generally) that I no longer believe we could have that Obama moment, promising genuine change we could genuinely believe in. After all, isn't that what the New Labour project was meant to be all about? Whereas, 12 years later, it seems more clearly to be the removal of socialism from the British political spectrum, signing up to "the power of the markets" and neoliberal economics, to authoritarianism and to a control-obssessed presidential style of government.

All of these are things for which I can't see myself ever being able to forgive Blair, Campbell and Mandelson.

There's a lot of truth in this. Fundamentally, Blair's candidacy and the entire New Labour project was about becoming electable by shifting the party dramatically toward the center, becoming a center-right party, while still giving lip service to the very strongly leftist party it had once been, so as to keep support of unions and other strong voting blocs of the left. It was an amazing confidence trick, but there was no way they could maintain the illusion for long. They simply did not vote for the party they thought they had; a sense betrayal was the only rational response.

That said, the center-right party called "New Labour" did a lot of good, spending the economic dividends from reforms enacted by (whisper it) Thatcher on things like education and health care. By moving to the center-right, Labour also forced the Conservatives to shift further right, producing extremism and defections that left them leaderless and rudderless for more than a decade. It was a brilliant move.

So of course Labour have signed up the the power of the markets and deregulation: they're a center-right party, that's what they believe in. The difference between me and a large group of UK voters is that I was quite happy to vote for a center-right party, while they still can't believe they did, and are very angry about it. But for the most part, the bulk of the electorate was okay with it, or at least liked it better than the alternative -- at least for a while.

The two places it broke down were Iraq -- again, no question, a horrible mistake on Blair's part -- and, as Owen mentioned, the system of targets and centralized measurement Labour tried to use to get value for the money they were pouring into social services.

Labour's mistake in the second was to believe (or hope) that anything measured would improve, instead of the much harder job of enacting real reform. But the reforms they needed would have been far too jarring for the left to handle -- shaking up the NHS and teaching would be political suicide -- so they had few other options. Essentially, it was to keep the support of people like Owen that the targets were invented, but it eventually failed because it meant the services produced very little value for all the new money spent on them.

So on Iraq, Britons are totally within their rights to feel angry -- but, again, I think it was incompetence rather than malice. The left can also feel like they were betrayed -- but, on actual issues of governance, did Labour really do that badly? What would they prefer Labour did that the Tories are now promising to do? It seems like even if they were tricked into voting for Labour, it worked out pretty well. A party that was actually as leftist as the loudest of Labour's current detractors would like has no hope of getting elected in Britain, where the population as a whole is very much center-right.

Labour are still being punished for Tony Blair's mistake, as well as Gordon Brown's charm-free personality and dissatisfaction with the general economic climate which can't really be laid at their feet -- in fact, the UK's response to the credit crisis is generally agreed to have been pretty competent, level-headed and as effective as possible in the circumstances.

Now the UK looks set to throw away a center-right party with a strong commitment to social services in favour of a party that, despite Cameron's mirroring of Blair's strategy with a strong push to the left, is still very much against them, and whose economic leanings are towards the kind of laissez-faire capitalism that gave birth to the credit crisis in the first place. Brown is a poor leader of the party and should be replaced, but the party as a whole is still the one that would be best for Britain. It's too late for this election, but I hope it only takes the UK one term of Conservative government to figure that out.

By at 00:46AM

From her website

10/10

By trixie at 12:59PM

I Blame Coco (dot coco dot coco dot com) is the daughter of Sting. She signed to Island Records around the same time as Tommy Sparks and VV Brown but save a few lo-fi reggae vibe-y tracks that have appeared on youtube, there’s been little heard of her. I thought the project had perhaps been abandoned. That is, until XO’s Middle Eight just found a clip of her new single ‘Caesar’ that’s been popped on her myspace page.

Not only does is it suddenly make her sound like a pop star, but Robyn is featured on the chorus, and ooh isn’t there something about that bassline that screams Teddybears. A quick google and yes it seems she’s been working with Klas and Joakim Ahlund from Teddybears who made one of my favourite albums of the naughties. As XO says, it’s also refreshing to hear a new female artist who, as much as I might love it, isn’t bringing out a banging electro-pop ditty. I want something new for 2010 instead of a continuation. And if it’s unpolished girls who hate wearing sequins, are a bit gruff and have some swagger about them – bring it on!

Consider my interest taken from not even worth a head-turn to manically excited (particularly thanks to this picture from her myspace).

By trixie at 12:38PM

The incredibly respected PPK has added his own thoughts to the debate on fixing the App Store problem (which I was talking about last week).

Initially he said that iPhone developers are idiots who should be building web apps instead, where Apple has no say over how their applications get delivered. He has subsequently recanted somewhat, given the lack of several key APIs and, even more importantly, a practical, easy mobile payments option beyond the app store.

This opens up the debate in a useful direction. I think some apps could be web apps that are currently not, but I still think native apps have the edge. However, this reiterates for me that half of the value of the App Store is that Apple have invented a simple, easy, secure mobile payment solution. They should open this up, entirely independently of the app process, and start raking in PayPal-sized dividends.

By at 06:44AM

Last year Christian think-tank Theos argued that because most of us know the Easter story, therefore most of us literally believe in the Easter story.

From the same people who brought you this unfathomably crap interpretation of their own, agenda-ridden research, now comes a sparkly new survey on the public attitude to evolution.

Or so say rubbish science journalists who didn’t even bother to look at the research, blindly trotting out their own version of the Theos press release all round the internet today.  (You’d think science journalists would be the one kind of journalist most likely to do their fucking job and go and look at the so-called science, but no.)

The research never actually asked people a fair, balanced question about their belief in evolution, defined simply as a process of natural selection.  Oh no.  Do you want to know what it actually asked them?
What the actual survey actually asked about evolution was two separate questions, one on “theistic evolution” and one on “atheistic evolution”.  The latter definition and question read:

Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.  In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: [and then the choices]

Just confusing the two separate issues of a/theism and evolution was obviously going to result in weird answers from the start, especially since they don’t even bother to spell out simply what the actual theory of natural selection says or associate it with either view.

Moreover, when people were being asked to assent to “atheistic evolution” they weren’t just being asked to assent to evolution-minus-God, they were being asked to assent to the view that evolution necessarily implies that there was no God.

Now, I think that evolution is true and I think that belief in God is unnecessary and absurd, but I still might well have said that “Atheistic evolution” as defined in this survey was probably not true, because I don’t think that one does necessitate the other.  Evolution has nothing to say about the origin of the world, for example.

Answering this survey, I might well have been waiting for a third, good, neutral statement of evolution before I plumped for it.

Worse still is the interpretation which Theos then puts on this already flawed data.  Having found probably even lower levels of general assent to the theory of evolution than we should want and expect – and would get if we asked better questions – they go on to conclude (in their press release) that the hopeless confusion we’re all is the fault of atheists:

Unfortunately, he [Darwin] is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.

“Darwin has become caught up in the crossfire between creationists on one side and certain public atheists on the other. It’s a battle in which everybody suffers.”

That’s right.  Who’s to blame for Creationism and ID?  Is it the proponents of Creationism and ID?  No.  It’s atheists!  And why should we blame the atheists, Theos?  Well, because they conflate Darwinism and atheism giving people a false choice between the two, says Theos. Oh, right, I get it, exactly like your survey cleverly demonstrates by doing exactly that?  Um, yes, yes that’s what we, um, intended, says Theos.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of reasons why Darwinian evolution is associated with atheism.  This isn’t a story about evolution getting “caught in the crossfire” between warring fundamentalist theists on one hand and marauding atheists on the other, as if Richard Dawkins (doubtless the intended ring-leader of the “public atheists” mentioned) has single-handedly warped a theory which was otherwise neutral with regard to God.  The reason evolution is associated with atheism is because prior to Darwin the church said quite emphatically that God created the Earth and all living things in seven days.  During the bronze age!  Religion got caught with its panda’s thumb up its giant red arse on this issue, forcing them ever since to either dig in and become full blown fundamentalists, or to pass off centuries of previous heretic-burning as a crazy, mistaken, drunken game, because they didn’t really literally believe in Genesis, no, no, it was an allegory all along.  For something.

The dawn of evolutionary theory is the great naturalizing moment of the last two centuries.  It completely reversed the way we had to think when trying to explain the construction of living forms.  It blew away the need for design, and a designer, previously the greatest single argument for the existence of God, with an idea of simple beauty and devastating cogency.  Atheists didn’t manufacture a wargame here – if anything it was the vicious response of religionists in Darwin’s own time which show exactly why so many people regard evolution as literally bringing the riddle of life back “down to earth”.

But none of this means that when you ask people about evolution you should imply that they have a choice between “theistic evolution” and “atheistic evolution”.  That’s just bollocks.

Theos is basically attempting to do exactly what it pretends not to be doing.  They are accepting that it’s not okay to be a biblical literalist, but also trying to blame anyone who expresses both atheism and evolution for other people’s confusion and ignorance, thereby leaving “theistic evolution” as the only option on the table.

Well, no, damn it!  We must be free to express the fact that evolution leads us to thinking about life in a naturalistic way, without being branded some kind of intellectual warmongers.  Being free to say that evolution is part of our atheism is like saying that Galileon cosmology leads us to thinking less anthropocentrically about the nature of the universe; and like saying that Newton leads us to think that maybe there is a coherent underlying structure to the universe, which is not interfered with by capricious deities.

Theos point the finger.  But they are the ones shamelessly playing games with science.

By Bob at 16:17PM

So, I have now moved to London.  I started moving in a few weeks before Christmas, and now I live here in Highbury, just round the corner from Boris Johnson apparently, and right in the corner of Highbury Fields.  Which makes my flat sound grander than it is.  I live in just one room.  But it’s a nice room with wooden floors and I have a large kitchen (big enough to have a dining table and sofa in it) which I share with three friendly housemates.  My own room is too hot.  The stupid underfloor heating seems to be on all the time whatever I do with the thermostat.  There’s a door right onto the kitchen so I sometimes get disturbed at night if someone wants to make a curry at three o’clock in the morning.  And there’s something else.

There’s something else lurking.  Like a living thing.  But alien. There’s something else in the room.

It is electricity.  Static electricity everywhere.  Far, far too often I become a sort of involuntary, miniature Thor.  In a particularly powerful shock which I was half-prepared for I could actually see the white bolt of electrons discharging as I touched my chair leg.  I get shocked from the wardrobe door handles and the door into the room and from my chair.  The other day I somehow even took the charge with me all the way to work and electrocuted a colleague.  But by and large it only happens in the room, and only this side of Christmas, not before.
So I am trying to solve the puzzle like a sort of rubbish, less-motivated Columbo.  I have done careful research by reading the page “Static electricity?? HELP” – a veritable compedium of advice compiled by the delightful Mamasource.com (”Connecting  moms in your community”.  Don’t laugh. This is a valid source of scientific advice.  And getting electorcuted every five minutes isn’t unique to child-bearing women.)

Now, according to “Static electricity?? HELP”, multiple factors may come into play in the build up of electrons about my person. Footwear, synthetic clothing, synthetic carpets, dry air, dry skin…

The first thing I thought was that possibly the slippers I got for Christmas were causing the problem, perhaps rubbing on the carpet;, except that I don’t have a carpet, I have a wooden floor, and even when I remove the slippers and walk barefoot I still get shocked.  I thought perhaps that the wheels on my chair were generating static somehow as I slid about the room; but switching to a stationary chair has not helped – in fact I just seem to ground myself on its metal legs all the time.

I have not tried rubbing my clothes with a damp cloth ever half hour!  But then, I change my clothes on, well, almost a daily basis, and this seems to have no effect.  The fact that the heating is on all the time means the room is hot and therefore presumably too dry — and I’m sure this must be exacerbating the problem.  But I have tried drinking lots and lots of water to keep my skin hydrated, but this just means that I get shocked on my way to the bathroom.

I have been wracking my brains to think what else is new, what else could have started the static build-up since Christmas.  And only one thing remains.

Over the Christmas break I got lazy and let my facial hair grow.  My goatee has expanded into a face-girdling bear mask.  It’s still quite stubbley, but this means it’s all bristles and fur, not unlike a synthetic carpet!

Could it be that the furriness spreading outward from my chin is somehow rubbing on, like, the really dry air and generating all the static?  Every bristle a miniature lightning rod?

As Sherlock Holmes wrongly said, ”When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Anyway, I need to solve this riddle soon before I accidentally discharge my unwanted superpower into my computer and wipe out my harddisk.

By Bob at 11:01AM

The most amazing thing about the Atheist Bus Campaign is that, by and large, the internet has responded good-naturedly.  Obviously, there are lots of critical comments, and even outright nasty comments.  But given the topic (religion versus atheism) the ratio of good comments to bad comments is astoundingly positive.  You’d expect the nasty to comments overwhelm the pro comments, but they really don’t.

What is the case, though, is that – both back in October when the British Humanist Association re-launched the Atheist Bus fundraising appeal, and today now the buses have officially hit the roads – many, many people comment on use of the word ‘probably’ in the phrase “There’s probably no God”.

A few people comment that they like the ‘probably’, because it’s a bit funny-sounding and casual and not quite as churlish as the alternative: “Fuck off, there’s obviously no God”.  However, most of web 2.0 commenters are critically-thinking freethinkers and (god bless ‘em, I’m one of them) we’ll stick our two penneth in whether you like it or not, and there’s a valid philosophical point to be raised that since all knowledge is ultimately conjectural anyway, we shouldn’t have to qualify every metaphysical statement…  Yadda yadda yadda.
But there’s another category of ‘probably’ criticism, perhaps even the most dominant strain in the Atheist Bus-commenting culture-virus.

Numerous articles (just one example) are not merely offering a philosophical objection to ‘probably’, but outright crowing over it, implying that anyone who supports the campaign must be a wavering, quavering agnostic of the most wishy-washy variety.  Journo bloggers and commenters all over the place are writing to the effect that use of the word ‘probably’ beams a glaring light through the thin veil of our bravado; even as the slogan was concocted somewhere behind Ariane Sherine’s omni-smiling face, she must have been telepathically absorbing the doubt and existential angst of every hedging heretic and every iffy infidel up and down the land.  So the detractors argue.
This is of course tosh.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, if he uses language – with reference to religion – which is less harsh, less personal, less cutting, less rhetorical, than the kind of language you can read all the time in trashy magazines, restaurant critics’ reviews, political debates and so on, then he is nevertheless reprimanded for being a hateful miser who doesn’t understand basic human emotion. He regularly receives far harsher, more personal, more cutting, more rhetorical counter-attack against his relatively nuanced criticisms than his words could possibly deserve.  Religion engenders a peculiar kind of wailing pedantry against us (happy millions of) non-conformists.

Snide attacks against the word ‘probably’ in the Atheist Bus Campaign are another example of this language which – because it happens to be remotely critical of religion – is held to an absurd, pedantic standard, by people who know better under almost any other circumstances.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine, for example, an analogous criticism made against the Alpha Course’s latest adverts.  These were run all through 2008, at least across London, far more widely than the Atheist Bus Campaign will ever reach.  These adverts asked, “If God did exist what would you ask?”
Now, I can imagine lots of criticisms of these adverts.  Like “Why did you leave a big, white, empty space underneath which was ripe for hilarious graffiti, you muppets?”

But imagine for a moment that someone, somewhere, made the following criticism of this advert.  Imagine (it will be difficult, but try) that they might mean this criticism seriously:

“Ooh, looks like they don’t really believe after all!  Ha ha, their faith must be fading away.  Look! – their slogan is in the interrogative form!  They must be seriously doubting themselves.  Ha ha… I am so clever.”

I think everyone – whether inclined toward being an atheist bus passenger or an Alpha Course attendee or anywhere in between – would recognise such a criticism, immediately, for the infantile, pointless pedantry that it was.

“If God did exist…” is conditional.  “There’s probably no God…” is qualified.  Other than this the entirely comparable in terms of being a kind of staged equivocation.  Given the context of mass-appeal marketing, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone why that is the case.  Only the latter slogan, though, is lumbered with the cuckcoo criticism that it is actually a signal of failing confidence.
Not that the bus campaign should really need defending from the rather sad, weird criticisms of ‘probably’ that have dogged it, nevertheless here’s the best statement I’ve seen – from Ariane Sherine herself – of why ‘probably’ makes sense, and what might be hoped for from greater public understanding of the humanist position.

By Bob at 18:16PM

My third blog at the Worcester News is all about how daft the annual spate of new stories on the topic of Christmas being banned is.  How this myth persists and gets re-invented every single December — despite the millions of fairy lights bedecking thousands of buildings, the tons of wrapping paper taped around billions of pounds worth of presents, the millions of Christmas turkeys consumed around most dinner tables in the UK — is beyond me.

By Bob at 08:14AM

America

Britain

In triumph, and redeemed, American has united behind a president whose race differs from the majority of Americans, a president who promises change, and who does not hide his intelligence or his power. Inspiring.

We, in Britain, have got behind an old man who can’t dance.

The legend that is John Sergeant rivals Robin Hood for his anti-authoritarian riposte to Aunty Beeb.  Armed only with his lack of coordination and an expression perpetually hovering between bemusement and curmudgeonliness, Sergeant has single-handedly (or two-left-footedly - haha) unmasked the charade that Strictly Come Dancing is strictly about dancing.

It has actually been quite a success story.  A warm story.  The public conspired, depending on your view, in order to support the weaker contestant, or because they recongised something of their own flawed dance steps in the old duffer, or even because they wanted to make a national TV program less saccharine by forcing upon it an arse-backwards plotline so surreal that Monty Python could have invented it.

But there are always left-fielders, and some commentators are just more lateral-thinking than others.  One in particular has been lateral-thinking about the John Sergeant voting pattern so long and hard, that his opinion now originates from somewhere near the planet Mercury.

According to Justin Thacker, “Head of Theology” at the Evangelical Alliance, if you voted for little Johnny, then you are a selfish egotistical relativist who hates God and rejects the whole concept of objective truth!

“How does Justin Thacker know my innermost secret motivations?”, I hear you ask.  Well, Justin Thacker has a very good argument.  First he asks why people would possibly vote for Sergeant.  Justin Thacker knows it can’t be because Sergeant is a “soap star” nor because he’s “good looking”, because Sergeant is neither. (Bloody nice of you, Justin.)  Justin Thacker rejects that it could be Sergeant’s “wry sense of humour” or his “certain charm” or even “the great British tradition of supporting the underdog”.  No.  It can’t be any of those things.  Justin Thacker knows the best theory is that people wanted to “spite the judges”.  Okay… And do they want to spite the judges because the judges were mean to people?  Or because it would be a bit of a joke to get one over on them?  Oh no, Joe-public, I’m afraid not.  Your spite runs much deeper than that, and you know it.  And Justin Thacker knows it.  Listen to Justin Thacker.  Justin Thacker has privileged access to what you were really thinking:

The reality is that in our individualistic, consumer-driven age, the reigning Zeitgeist loves individual autonomy over public authority. We can’t bear the notion that there exists some external, objective standard against which things should be measured – whether in respect of dancing or morality or anything really. Rather, we want to be King, and all authority must rest with us. So, we get to be the arbiters of what’s true or false, good or bad. The idea of being held to account by some absolute standard is one that rails deeply against our current mode of thinking. Hence, we reject it whenever we can. It’s not necessarily that we think the standard is a bad one, we just hate the idea of there being one at all.

Watching TV with Justin Thacker must be a really fun night in.

Sounds about right, though, doesn’t it. You probably didn’t realise at the time, but you voted for John Sergeant because you hate the concept of truth! It’s so obvious now.  When you picked up the phone you were thinking; “Objectivity? Correspondence theory of truth? Pah! I’m going to vote for John Sergeant.  That’ll show them theologians, trying to force their concept of a mind-independent external reality on me.”

Justin Thacker’s most wise inferences know no bounds.  Believe it or not, the following sentence directly follows the above quoted passage:

Given this, it’s no wonder that the Christian gospel has a hard time being heard.

Yep, God hates the nation getting together to watch people doing lovely dances, because it exacerbates their hatred of objective truth, and the Bible is objectively true, and if they stay in watching light entertainment together as a family then people will miss their Saturday night Bible classes, damn it.

If Bruce Forsyth would only lead us in prayers at the start of each episode that would be fine, I reckon - but every week Justin Thacker tunes in and… no, still no worshipful obedience to the Lord.  Who does Bruce Forsyth think he is, an entertainer?  All this light-hearted community of enjoyment is antithetical to Justin Thacker’s God.  God would rather you read Leviticus at the weekend. Because it’s objectively true. Justin Thacker knows.

There’s no build up to this next complete non sequitur by the way.  You might not be able to see how it follows from the previous statements, but Justin Thacker is better able to grasp the subtle logical connections between things than you are:

For whatever else it is, it [the gospel] involves humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe and acknowledging that he is Lord, not us, that he is the only Rightful Judge. The problem for us, though, is that on that day when we stand before him there won’t be any public popularity vote to rescue us. Simply the Judge and us.

Is it me, or does the leap from Stictly Come Dancing to the FEAR OF GOD THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL JUDGEMENT DAY BEFORE BEING CAST INTO THE FIRES OF HELL, imply that Justin Thacker might be taking it all a little bit seriously?

Justin Thacker obviously knows all about “public popularity contests”, of course.  Himself a true fisher of men, he insults pretty much the entire country. You don’t like Justin Thacker’s Truth? Then you must hate all truth! And this abstract philosophical hatred of truth controls you even when you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.  Next you’ll be telling Justin Thacker you liked Bagpuss when you were young!!!  Justin Thacker won’t like that.  Justin Thacker is horrified.  There were no cats in the Bible, you bloody infidel.  And that means that every time you watched Bagpuss, that was another nail in Baby Jesus’s crucifix.

This whole pile of crock, coming from the “Head of Theology” at anywhere, is insane.  I mean actually mad.  I mean, just for starters you have to admire the take-out-my-brain-and-mash-it-into-a-loaf-of-unleavened-bread craziness of the twin line of reasoning that Thacker’s argument is based on. Firstly, that the judges on Strictly Come Dancing are in themselves comparable to The Literal Arbiters of Objective Truth, and the British public (consciously or unconsciously) think of them exactly that way.  Secondly, that the Lord God is merely the divine analogue of a judge on a Saturday night entertainment show, basically just passing out aesthetic condemnations on the inhabitants of His universe (”Hmm, your day was quite productive, mortal, I really believed your heart was in it, but you only managed one small charitable act, and hardly a pirouette in sight the whole day. 3 out of 10.”)

Some people just hate a feel-good story — in this case about how the public can unite behind a bumbling old man — if that story doesn’t even remotely involve Baby Jesus.  Justin Thacker’s mind boggles; however comical or warm the story may be, if it doesn’t have Baby Jesus in it then how could it possibly not be EVIL?  (I wonder, by the way, how many of the Sergeant-voters were Christian?  On Thacker’s argument you’d expect the good Christians, who all value truth so much unlike the rest of us, to vote diligently only for the best dancer. Because of course it would be un-Christian to feel, you know, what’s that word, compassion, for the contestant who dances like someone’s inebriated granddad.)

Judgement Day:  For your atrocious theology, your plain bad manners, and for having no sense of rhythm, Justin Thacker you are awarded… 1 out of 10. You are the weakest theologian, now please leave the house.

By Bob at 08:12AM

So, I’m technically homeless.

Well that’s not quite true.  In fact, it’s even worse.

I am now “living with my parents”.  It’s just like Failure to Launch, except my version is called Limping Back to Port.

Actually that makes it sound much worse than it is.  Housemate Suzie and I were both looking to move out, so we ended the tenancy in Worcester and I simply haven’t found some place to actually go and live, yet, so I’m only temporarily at the ‘rents.  Also, when I’m at home, I’m cooked for and mum does all my laundry.  So it’s pretty nice really.  Well done, mum.

Anyway, I’ve been commuting from Worcester to London at the start of each working week for eleven months now.  So despite the return into my life of the pleasant homecooking and the big TV in the nice middleclass village, I’m still scrabbling through the online services looking for a livable-in room in London.  I’ve seen a place with a carpet so stained it looked like a colony of rabbits had been left to breed and urinate all over it, before being individually crushed, their corpses subseqently rubbed into the threadbare weave.

I also found another place which was lovely (no dead-rabbit carpets), occupied by the live-in landlady and her sixth former son, and I decided to accept it.  But then the live-in landlady said she had reconsidered the situation; I would have been their first male lodger and she felt anxious about it.  On hearing news of this disappointing retraction, my temporary housemate/mother tried to console me.  She said:  “Oh.  Never mind.  She was probably just worried about paedophiles.”

There are no words.

In other news… Shortly before all this, 10 days before our year one anniversary, in fact, the girlfriend and I broke up.  Not for any of the normal boring reasons (loss of love, irreconcilable future plans, having an affair with some other woman’s avatar in Second Life, etc etc) but because she went travelling, and — part of me still can’t believe this is even true — she is now somewhere in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.  A lot of friends have said how sad or difficult this must be and how they can’t even imagine how horrible and tragic it must be.  You know, helpful things like that.  But I think — I hope — that we both have something of a bit of a “humanist” attitude toward it.  We only have so much time on the earth and being oriented towards an impossible goal — trying to pretend that a relationship is a relationship when you’re thousands of miles apart for months on end — probably isn’t going to help anyone.  We were great.  Things were good.  And there is always change.

Anyway, this all adds to an overriding feeling of the surreal I have at the moment.  Two weeks ago I was personally ranted at by a B-list celebrity (a household name) who said some awful things I can’t repeat.  It wasn’t a nice experience, but it was a fairly unique experience!  Yesterday I gave a talk to the South Place Ethical Society telling them rationalism isn’t what they think it is.  It felt great to dig out some of my Karl Popper, and tell them that in trying to justify what they believe they were actually terrible rationalists.  I love confronting people with the counter-intuitive consequences of Popperian rationalism.  And I’ve been living on couches and in “pods” half the week for nearly a year.  I’m more comfortable living out of my rucksack than most people are sitting in their front rooms.

Life is strange, is what I think I’m saying.  But I’m sure it will settle down a bit once I find a place to live down here and actually go back to the same place in the evening once in a while.  I love change, but if everything changes all the time it’s very difficult to focus on anything.

By Bob at 13:25PM

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about the title above, but probably a lot of people would interpret it somewhat negatively.  It illustrates the point that too much fear can make harmless situations overly suspect.

Last week a self-described “old man” wrote a letter to the Worcester News about how he felt about being suspicious in the park.

When my wife Joan died in the spring of 2006 we had been together for more than 62 years. One of our joys since moving to Barbourne was a stroll in Ghelevelt Park looking at wildlife and children playing on swings or splashing around in the paddling pool enjoying innocent fun.However, since becoming a widower, the park has now become out of bounds for old men like me. Why?

It has become very uncomfortable to sit in the park and enjoy the ambience of the place, owing to the weird knowing looks I get from young mothers with children.

I wrote back.

H A Kendall’s story is very sad (September 29) and he is honest and brave for speaking out.

Obviously, we must accept that diligence is due whenever we consider adults with responsibilities over children, and anyone taking advantage of any vulnerable person is to be abhorred.

But due diligence has been greatly over-inflated if a widower cannot sit in a park without receiving accusing looks. If the parents Mr Kendall mentions cannot imagine any reason beside sexual predation for why an old man might want to sit in a park, then their imaginations have been horribly warped. There is a climate of fear which affects not just old men in parks, but younger men, teachers, passers-by, even relatives of young people.

On a train last week a girl of about five started talking to me. I think the presence of my Nintendo DS broke down the social barrier!

Perhaps some of the looks we received across the carriage were, in part, due to surprise that two strangers should hold an open conversation on the tube at all, let alone an adult male returning polite enquiries from a child who is unknown to him. But that doesn’t fully explain the prolonged glares and my own absurd, fleeting sensations of danger.

Parents should worry about their children, yes.  Concern is understandable, yes, especially in a climate where sexual predation and sexual abuse are discussed more openly.

But people should realise that, in a sense, nothing sexualises children more than if we are constantly thinking of them as the potential victims of sexual predation.

Also… the music debate rumbles on, in the hideous form it has reached.

By Bob at 08:41AM

This increasingly unfocused, largely-syndicated-from-the-Worcester-News, hotchpotch mind-dump of a blog that I call Bob: Popper’s Troll-man Thing, now has a little brother over at — you guessed it — the Worcester News website.

See Bob’s Worcester News profile which should come complete with a short bio some time soon. My first post is “At Somerset House” and here’s a short extract:

I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

I had wanted to coin the term ‘celebrillectual’ for the end of that sentence but it didn’t quite fit.  There were no other hits on google for it though, so I really did invent it.  So I’ll coin it here instead: ‘Celebrillectual’. There, I just coined it.  It means anyone a bit famous for being at least a bit clever, but how famous/clever are two cumulative factors so that if you were really clever but only a celebrity to a particular niche then you could still be a celebrillectual, while if you were very famous but not really very clever then that could count, too.  But obviously some times these thigns go up and down together, where people are only a bit famous (for exampel if they’re only famous in the UK but not the US then that’s rubbish) and also they’re only clever in a narrow or not very academic way.  So at one end of the scale you’d have, like, Carol Voderman, Trevor McDonald, and Johnny Ball. Then up the top there’s folks like Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky.

It will probably be quite a long time before my Worcester News blog has anyone classify me as a celebrillectual.  In fact it probably disqualifies me because even if I was really, really famous in Worcester, I’d have to be very, very clever to compensate for my relative lack of fame.

By Bob at 08:10AM

By M at 21:11PM

The vivisection debate rumbles on.

Obviously, in between trying to develop medical technology via vivisection, scientists should wherever possible work toward replacement development processes.  There is a complex cost-benefit equation, here.  How much time can we spend speculatively developing new ways of testing and developing medicines without non-human animal test subjects, when any such effort may be at the cost of actually developing cures right here and now?  Assuming that greater and greater theoretical understanding, computer modelling and so on, could eventually replace all animal testing, that’s great.  But right now that’s not the reality, and I don’t want to die of something potentially curable, because rather than using vivisection now we held off in order to develop a theoretical model, when actually tests which killed some mice might have achieved the same results.

I don’t get how people who are against vivisection can cite, as someone in this ongoing newspaper debate has cited, the study of human corpses as one of the viable alternatives to testing on animals.  I’m not denying that autopsy is sometimes a good way of understanding a disease.  But the point is that there would be many more human corpses to study if animal testing was stopped today.

Anyway, here’s today’s letter in the Worcester News, unedited text below.

Apparently, despite being subject to continual assessments of efficacy and benefit, and despite being conducted under multifarious laws and codes of ethics ensuring rigorous review, the truth is obvious to H Handy (Letters, 8th September).  Vivisection is “archaic” and completely unnecessary.

In saying so, Handy contradicts three independent enquiries in the last five years (the House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics) which all found that animal testing was scientifically sound and worthwhile.  (Despite this, anti-vivisectionists continue to call for “an independent enquiry” as if none had ever taken place.)

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to researchers who used animals 71 times in the last 103 years.  Is the Nobel Prize committee hellbent on rewarding fruitless and unethical research?  H Handy must think that they are.

Handy asks us to imagine all the pain that laboratory research animals endure.  And allow me to agree that we must indeed accept this.  Just as surely as we should thank the veterans of just wars, just as we should be aware that each turn of the ignition key brings flooding and destruction ever closer, we should be aware that many of our medicines and medical procedures come to us at a terrible price.

But if H Handy can ask us to imagine the animal suffering again, I must ask one more time that we summon in our minds the would-have-been suffering and deaths of millions of people from, for example, smallpox if it had not been eradicated by 1979 (300-500 million died before 1979 in the 20th century alone).  Multiply out that hypothetical unnecessary suffering by the numerous other diseases and conditions cured or alleviated through animal research, far sooner than they could have been by conducting all research via human autopsy and the like.

No one said animal research was an intrinsic good in its own right.  No one said it was flawless (no research is). But vivisection is, by far, the lesser of two evils.  And that makes its pursuit an ethical imperative.

One final point.  H Handy is right that research animals themselves never (or only very rarely) benefit by the research.  However, it is worth pointing out that animal testing has resulted in numerous drugs and procedures which are used routinely by veterinary surgeons, day in and day out, to the benefit of pets, farm stock and wild animals the world over.

By Bob at 07:24AM

Remember the Bishop of Worcester basically saying that music pretty much gets its power from his favourite god?

Apparently, “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

Which is of course true - he is entitled to say that.  But that’s completely besides the point, isn’t it.

Some people can’t stand any criticism [Worcester News, 3 September 2008, unedited version]

At the moment it seems like every time someone hears a criticism they don’t like, rather than either taking it on board or offering a counter-argument, they instead react as if someone is trying to actually ban them from holding their view.  It seems to be a defence mechanism.  People would rather say, “Hey, I have every right to my opinion,” than to actually think about the criticism offered against their opinion.

John E Iebole (August 22) notes that “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

I didn’t say the Bishop wasn’t “entitled” to say anything he likes.  I’m not a censor.

But there is a world of difference between having the right to say something on the one hand, and being right in saying it on the other!

The Bishop had said (August 13) that “music has the power to move human beings deeply because it speaks … of the God who created us.”  I expressed that his statement felt to me like an over-confident gardener erecting a fence across a public footpath.  Music is a near-universal aspect of the human condition and associating it with monotheistic beliefs which we do not all share is a kind of metaphysical territorialism.  In other words, I said I didn’t like what the Bishop said.  In didn’t say he wasn’t “entitled” to say it.  Basically, Mr Iebole simply failed to address my points in any way.  Rather (probably without realising it) he simply threw up a completely irrelevant decoy about “entitlement”.

One further point, Iebole says he sensed “some anti-Christian barbs” in my letter, then he points me at the Bible!  Again, this kind of attitude seems to be nothing more than an attempt to shut down honest debate.  Just because I make a criticism of something a Bishop said, does not mean I’m “anti-Christian” in some kind of prejudicial way.  We hear much worse, much more personal criticisms than mine made in other domains (politics, theatre reviews, school playgrounds) all the time.  It is only the domain of religion which is so protected from debate that even a mild rejoinder is insinuated as a kind of hate speech.

That’s one thing I’m afraid you’re really not entitled to: you have no right to be protected from perfectly legitimate criticism.

This prompted a reply from one Linda Roberts who, frankly, I think just didn’t really read what I said.  So I wrote back again, published today.

Misunderstood for the second time [Worcester News, 15 September 2008, unedited version]

For the second time I am misrepresented with reference to the Bishop of Worcester’s comments on music.

Linda Roberts (10 September) believes “the Bishop of Worcester is correct in saying the playing of sacred music in church brings us closer to God.”  Well, okay, but this was very clearly not the part I objected to.

What I objected to was the further implication that all music, whether designated “sacred” or otherwise, derived its power from God.

Roberts also says I should “temper my views” and my “ways of expressing them”.  This is unfair.  Yes I was voicing a criticism (a mild philosophical criticism at that!) but unless you think religious representatives are exempt from criticism this shouldn’t be a problem in itself.  And if my words seem harsh, it’s probably just that religion is so often protected from normal standards of commentary.

Finally, Roberts expresses sadness that I “cannot experience” mystical feelings induced by church music.  Ms Roberts, there’s really no need to feel sad for me. Different musical genres appeal to different people, and there is probably plenty of music that I appreciate, even profoundly, which you would appreciate less.

By Bob at 13:15PM

Various reasons. I’ve been busy at work, busy at Glastonbury, busy flying around various European countries. The usual. My absence from the blogosphere has not helped by the fact that Facebook has recently been giving me that quick fix of Internet-based broadcast expression but with a lot less effort than is required to actually sit down and write something. But it’s time to stop the rot.

For once, I’ve had a weekend that I actually want to pen something about - and enough time on a slightly grey-looking Sunday evening to do so. Last weekend was all about G’s birthday weekend, too much Pimms and recovering from the effects whilst paddling around Chichester harbour and beyond in a vessel clearly not designed for such purposes but which worked surprisingly well.

This weekend has been similar, but with the Saturday festivities and socialising having been moved 40 miles south down to Brighton and the Sunday paddle consisting of the slightly more challenging 18 mile Maidstone to Tonbridge marathon, the latter having been completed in 2 hours, 48 minutes and 26 seconds (though estimated to be some three and a half minutes short due to the closure of the river at the last portage ).

Brighton was good. Sufficiently different from the last time round, a scary five years ago. There was still plenty of Park-based fun, the rather gusty yet still utterly fantastic beach - where fish and chips were eaten - a little bit of drinking, and plenty of meeting new people. My pictures are about to go on FB, which though no doubt missing a large part of the evening after I trundled back off to London I must say I’m still rather happy with.

Next time it won’t be so long

By Will at 12:51PM

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

By will at 10:58AM

People often ask me: "Rik, why on earth do you buy all that rubbish from the Oxfam bargain bin?" But that's another story.

What I want to talk about is when people ask me "Rik, where does a guy like you listen to music from these days?" After all, when you're an ex-teenage rave freak, used to work as a student DJ, have more than a passing interest in all things synth, and own a Jive Bunny album without shame, where do you go to satisfy that nagging urge for new music?

Well, the answer is that for a while, I didn't. Instead, I revelled in the warm neon glow of Radio Nigel. With the help of Nigel (run by a bloke called - wait for it - Steve), I rediscovered the 80s.  Contrary to those "party classics" that immediately spring to mind, there's actually a lot of "forgotten" 80s music out there that's actually not terrible. Martika, anyone? The Other Ones, New Order, Wang Chung, Murray Head, The Assembly? I could go on, but I'd rather you tune in.

And slowly but surely, you make your way back into the land of the living, to find artists like Rex The Dog, Tepr, datA and Trademark keeping the dream alive, albeit with a 21st Century twist. (Who knew that the Human League were still touring, by the way? Blimey.) But where can you, the poor impoverished reader, find and listen to all these people before buying an album or three? Simple. Pig Radio is your friend. Merely visiting their website will guarantee your face is flushed magenta with excitement, and that's even before you wrap your ears around the eclectic mix of new new things that burst forth from their playlist.

Finally, I know I'm about a year late, but this has been making me smile all week. Whatever happened to the Hardcore Cleaning Sensation?

By at 18:24PM

(This isn't the blog post I was planning to post, but I thought I'd throw this up while it was fresh in my brain.)

This is the second time recently that someone I know has remarked about how Thunderbird is worse than Outlook Express. It was an odd enough coincidence that I thought it worth a quick mention.

Now, I've used a fair few mail clients in the past - Pine (mmmm) and Netsc(r)ape Messenger, for example - and I used to be an Outlook user, of both the Express and "proper" flavours,. Conversely, I was glad to see the back of it. The Express version felt fragile and flaky (not to mention its Swiss cheese-like nature), and the full version was too enterprisey. I just wanted to do email - surely it's not too much to ask! (Eudora at the time wasn't free.)

Mozilla Mail was my next stop of choice, and it struck the balance far better for me. It was, however - like the Mozilla Suite in general - suffering a bit from the all-in-one clunkathon syndrome, and you did get the impression that it could have been more, well, alert, and generally a bit better than Netscape Messenger. Mozilla had the same idea, and smashed it all into bits, which brings us circuitously to Thunderbird.

I like Thunderbird mainly due to it's Ronseal-like qualities. Simply, it's a solid, no-nonsense mail client. It reads mail and newsgroups*, and it does it well. Since version 2 in particular, it's had decent filtering and search capabilities, and it's uncluttered and responsive. It even integrates with Google Mail so you can avoid using their hideous web interface.

What is Thunderbird "actually quite poor" at, then? Well, it's not crap at reading mail, that's for sure. It is quite poor at having flowery email templates. (As a rule, I don't use HTML email, so that's fine by me.) Against Outlook, integration with other services is poor. There is an integrated Calendar plugin, but it's not finished yet. But then again, the same goes for the free version of Outlook, and there's no changing that at all.

Steve mentions a "memory leak" which I thought sounded interesting, so I left my copy of Thunderbird running for a while. It's been sitting there for quite some time at around 82MB (I've got some big .msf files), and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Thunderbird for sure has a larger memory footprint than Outlook Express, but I'm not yet convinced it leaks memory in the same sieve-like fashion that Firefox does**.

So... thoughts? What else is Thunderbird rubbish at? No doubt there's more, but I'm not awake enough to remember. Comments appreciated!

*If anyone does that any more, that is.

**Yes, I know that's not really a memory leak; it's the tab caching being enthusiastic.

By at 22:31PM

It's going to be a busy month, really. Turnmills is closing down, so I'm off to see Mr Ferry Corsten play there in a couple of weekends time, accompanied by a plethora of people named Steve. It should be pretty good, but there's always the problem that the headliner DJ is always on at about 4am, by which time you're invariably too shagged out to stay awake, let alone dance enthusiastically like a loon.

Also, I'm going to be leaving these urban shores to head back to the balmy rural paradise of home during the Easter weekend, which should make for a nice break. I have a fair inkling that what I'll be doing will include at least this:

Mix in some Six Nations matches, a birthday lunch or two and some mates visiting from back home, and suddenly the old Moleskine is practically brimming with appointments.

Right, I'm off to do some late-night flat-scrubbing. If I get back in time, I'll blog about some of the software stuff that I've been looking/hacking/swearing at recently.

By at 19:32PM

I'm writing this blog entry from something really quite shiny. Yes, after all this time, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a new home PC. A completely new one, rather than my usual tactic of cobbling together any old electronics to produce some semblance of a working system, replacing any item that's completely knackered with one that's merely slightly broken.

Now, for the first time in a long while, I'm the proud owner of a PC that:

• Has a PS/2 keyboard socket that's not inexplicably broken and doesn't prevent the mouse from working when anything's plugged into it
  
• Has a soundcard that doesn't arbitrarily stop playing sound and crash the whole system
  
• Is running an Operating System that doesn't date from 1999
• Doesn't have all of its drives held upside-down in using gaffer tape
• Can reboot without randomly losing at least one harddrive when starting back up
• Doesn't have a non-working floppy drive stuck in it because it won't come out
• Has a proper case that's not fallen to pieces, or been dropped countless times
  
• Doesn't have the speed and urgency of a snail in treacle
  

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

By at 13:52PM

After all this time, I've finally got past the stage of just thinking about blogging something here to actually doing it. Quite an achievement, considering the size of the interim period in which I've done, frankly, bugger all.

For the first time ever since this site started, for example, I didn't wish all my friends Merry Christmas from here on Shinypixel. So for that I apologise, but then again given the amount of texts that I sent out over Xmas and New Year, I don't think I missed many people. (If I did, then... bugger.)

To continue in the usual vein of posting stuff that I've knocked up, here's an extremely rushed flyer for something that I produced in December:

Now, the more astute among you might have noticed that the 14th December wasn't on a Saturday, nor the 15th on a Sunday. How could a stickler for perfection such as myself make such a stupidly obvious mistake (and not notice until a whole day afterwards, no less)? Cast your eyes toward the right-hand side of the flyer, and squint a bit. If you still can't read it, then here's a translation: Flyer whipped up the morning after the office party by a seriously hungover DJHC.

And damn, was it a good party.

Before I bid you adieu, with fleeting yet teasing promises about exciting events to write about in future - that flashy-looking CD compilation in the top-right corner of the page, for example - here's an excerpt from some code which I'd written last week late at night, forgotten, and found again just moments ago before deciding to write this blog:

// Any one X needs at least 7 Ys to work as my extremely
// dodgy code doesn't seem to work with less. No idea why.
// Maybe it's because I'm coding it at 2 in the morning while
// listening to Phil Collins.

// *sigh*

See ya around!

By at 17:20PM

I've finally managed to get some free time. Well, free enough to start blogging again anyway. As luck would have it, there's another Hardcore Lives! day-long online beats-fest on to keep me company. I'd recommend that you tune in too if breakbeats are anywhere near your cup of tea.

The pbligatory lovely flyer - as designed by PennyCrayon alter-ego - is spammed below.

Click for a larger flyer, and here's that link to tune in again, just to rub it in a bit.

By at 08:13AM

Am I the only person not to have picked up on this already? Suddenly half of that last book makes a lot more sense.

JK - you’ve surprised me. And I certainly don’t agree that Harry Potter is “ruined forever”. What terrible views to have.

By Will at 11:20AM

Found on the bottom of a pack of Salmon fillets this evening:

Allergy advice: Contains fish

Sometimes I wonder what the world is coming to…

By Will at 14:58PM

This is a great example of why I love free software - with the latest version of GNOME out the door, Evolution now helpfully warns you if you try to send an e-mail containing the word “attached” or similar but neglect to actually attach a file to the message.

Is that not the kind of simple, yet brilliant feature that when you hear about it makes you wonder why nobody’s thought of it before? Amazing.

By Will at 16:22PM

The irony that when you have lots of blog-worthy things to write about you never seem to find time to do just that has been commented on many times before in conversations with friends. More worrying though is when you don’t even seem to be able to find the time to read other peoples’ musings anymore. And I guess I’ve kinda got out of the habit of doing both of those lately.

So yesterday I invested some of my remaining time off in setting up a whole bunch of subscriptions on my Google account. Their Reader has a few too many bevels and waaay too much baby blue for my liking, but at least I can access it from any of the three computer accounts I regularly use and should I get that fed up of it I figure I can always export the feed list list to something else - so long as it can read an OPML file.

I haven’t even added half the feeds I want to yet (since the process is a little cubersome in Firefox), but I’ve already managed to get back into quite a few blogs that I haven’t read regularly in a little while.

It’s nice to catch up. So today I’ve discovered (via John Dale) that Warwick’s new VC seems much more down-to-earth that the last guy, and that Amazon’s MP3 download service is apparently open for business - with pricing particularly attractive to those of us lucky enough to be living in a country that’s not headed straight for a recession ;-).

Who knows - at this rate I might even have Planet Afterlife working again soon. But don’t hold your breath.

By Will at 16:39PM

I read this evening that Apple have once again resorted to blocking third party software from accessing the song databases build into every iPod.

Last time it was over Real cracking their DRM and I didn’t care so much given that I can’t use most of their proprietary-ware anyway, but now Apple have completely broken the main Linux-based library used by the fabulous Rhythmbox and Banshee, amongst others.

What I find most sad is the fact that the changes they’ve made - involving some kind of checksumming built into the latest iPod firmware - serve no useful purpose whatsoever other than to limit the ways in which consumers can use their own players.

That Apple would spend engineering dollars in order to make iPods less useful - arguably completely useless to anyone using Linux - is appalling. But not surprising to anyone who’s followed their moves in recent years.

I was seriously considering buying an iPod up until yesterday. I’m certainly not any more.

By Will at 17:55PM

Keeping the Photoshop fingers in business in my spare time, here's the latest Hardcore Breaks/Old Skool/Jungle night I've done a flyer for:

By at 10:03AM

Like the infamous Norwegian Blue, I'm only sleeping.   Summer's traditionally that time where you're meant to be outside enjoying things rather than sitting inside plumbing the depths, pouring your innermost thoughts into some tiny text box and its perpetually blinking cursor.

So yeah, maybe next week when I've got some free time I'll wipe off the dust and clear out that backlog of blog drafts I've got lying around.  

In the meantime, these guys are great. 

By at 05:37AM

I'm going to be spending some time listening to this all-day old-skool and nu-skool extravaganza today. It features some of the most popular DJs from the new hardcore breaks underground scene that I've mentioned before, and is likelt to be more exciting than most Sunday afternoons, for sure.

If any like-minded individuals fancy stopping by and joining me on IRC or just the stream, please do!

(Click image for a bigger version)

By at 08:14AM

Glastonbury flew by. I have to go to work tomorrow but my mind is still stuck there in that rain-soaked field. I can’t describe what happened there in words - it was just magic.

Specific Things That Were Good included:

• The rain - I’ve not seen that much water drop out of the sky in a very long time. It really started teeming down as The Who played last night, but I don’t think anybody really cared
• The wonderful Dame Shirley Bassey - proving that she very much still has what it takes.
• Making a flag! And making sure that Ricky from the Kaisers noticed it when he came down to meet-and-greet the crowd. That’s mine in the middle of the shot!
• The food - we’re not talking gourmet by any stretch, but all things considered I’ve not eaten badly at all over the last five days.
• Cider, beer, vodka and coke and G&Ts. Not that pear cider though - I’m staying away from that one in future.
• The people. And their unrelenting determination to keep on going despite everything.

I am officially no longer a music festival virgin. Go me.

By Will at 15:27PM

On Apple.com’s new look-and-feel, discovered via Laurie.

First thoughts: it looks like someone’s just found the Colors > Invert menu item in Photoshop. Is black really back in again? I thought we’d seen the end of back of white-on-black text, banished along with circa-1998 websites and MS-DOS windows. Sure, it looks different from the old design, but not vastly so and I’d actually say it’s a step back in terms of the nice minimalistic look they previously had going on.

Their news ticker is neat, although it looks rather similar to our own.

Overall I give them seven out of ten - but only because it was so good before, they haven’t changed it that much and their small army of graphic designers seem to be able to make anything look good. Even if it is in black.

By Will at 18:35PM

As Seldo noted last night (and I was too tired to blog about), Safari has been released for WIndows. Shame it doesn't work - it does this on both of the PCs I've tested it on...

Ideas? 

By at 04:59AM

Well done Mr. Eavis - this year’s line-up looks amazing. Now can I have my tickets please?

By Will at 02:34AM

I hate having colds. That is all.

By at 06:09AM

By at 07:12AM

Today we posted the details of two new openings that we have at Alfresco up on the web site. We’re looking for a web manager to take over my current role managing the main site and associated infrastructure, and other person to look after our various internal systems. Both great opportunities, but admittedly I’m kinda biased there.

If you’re interested, send us a copy of your CV and a short blurb to careers at alfresco dot com.

By Will at 12:29PM

By at 08:18AM

Here's a little something that I've had a small hand in (full credits are here, though I'm not on them). It's a fanzine that's currently being distributed with new releases and orders being taken in the burgeoning Hardcore Breaks music scene.

"Hardcore Breaks? Whazzat?" I hear you cry. Basically, it's a revival of the breakbeat-lead hardcore sound of '93-'95 (before it went all 4-to-the-floor and descended into shitness), except with 21st Century production values, a huge sack full of Old Skool samples and a friendly scene attitude.

Apologies for image size, but as a bonus you can read it straight from the blog.

Some related links if the idea of nu-old-skool gets you pumped:

• Hardcore Lives!
• hardcorebreaks.com
• nu-rave.com (yes, I know... but it's not that nu-rave... don't mention it)

By at 09:10AM

Last night I dreamt that I was singing All Around My Hat with Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) while chasing her runaway shopping trolley around a Sainsbury's car park.

Just as the shopping trolley disappeared under a car (!), Cliff Richard appeared from the sidelines and began singing a song entitled Knickers Between Us. It's probably just as well that I woke up as he started.

What could it all mean?

By at 08:33AM

On the front cover of his recent, bringing-sexy-back album, Justin Timberlake is pictured, foot through mirrorball. On Sunday morning, I went one better, actually discovering parts of such a mirrorball implanted in my forehead.

It was Will’s birthday this weekend, and it all started with the vodka soup. Vodka soup is what happens when you don’t leave vodka jelly long enough for it to actually become, well, jelly, and when said soup is additionally approaching 50% proof. Anyway, it started there, and continued with the cheap wine, and the Bacardi, and gin. But despite at one point there being nearly every conceivable alcohol type in attendance - we managed to spot Baileys as being absent - this wasn’t one of those get-mashed-and-fall-in-a-ditch parties so beloved of students and tramps everywhere. This was much more classy: there was granny racing and impromptu karaoke.

It was excellent to see everyone, and on Sunday, there were bacon sandwiches and a walk in the park. But not before the glitterball / forehead incident: I dimly remember a game of gay disco catch, before falling asleep surrounded by vodka soup.

By Matt Elton at 10:15AM

I haven’t written about music for a long time, but not because I’ve stopped liking it or stopped listening to it or whatever (although my boss did take the stereo away from my office, the fiend.) I’ve become addicted to a number of new and exciting things instead.

Firstly, David Bowie. No, seriously, David Bowie. Despite growing up around a lot of 1970s music - parents’ generation, natch - it all tends towards the classic / prog rock end of the spectrum, which I always found kind of clunky. So I’ve always wanted to get into Bowie, because it’s one of those things I was sure I’d like. Y’know, all artful and electronic and atmospheric.

The one Bowie song that I’d heard - other than the obvious standards - was a bizarre, downbeat number called “Art Decade”. It was a track on a magazine covermount around the time ‘chill-out’ music was the new black, and I remember it standing out (along with “Solid Air” by John Martyn). It’s entirely instrumental, and pretty much all in a single key. But it’s incredibly atmospheric - nocturnal and brooding with just the right amount of creepiness. Inevitably, because I love my music to be both atmospheric and creepy, it stuck with me, so last month I finally got around to buying “Low“, the album it was taken from.

The album itself is intentionally this huge dichotomy - the first half’s a series of perky, succinct rock numbers, which whilst I’m sure sounded cutting edge at the time, now sound dated. (Still, some are still pretty striking - “Sound and Vision” is one of the most catchy songs I’ve heard for a long time.)

The second half consists of four pretty much entirely instrumental songs, including “Art Decade”. What’s really interesting about this ’side’ of the album is that you can really hear the origins of a lot of contemporary electronic music - particularly bands like Goldfrapp. And I don’t know whether it’s because I knew Bowie recorded them in East Germany before I heard them, but they are definitely evocative of some kind of grinding, impoverished state. Hurrah. Now I can go to art school.

The second thing I’ve really got into recently is The Flaming Lips. I already owned Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, but if possible I like the follow-up, At War With The Mystics, more. Initially, I wasn’t sure - it seemed a little less tuneful, and kind of all over the place - but the more you listen to it, the more you get out of it. There’s actually a whole load going on you don’t realise at first, and once you make sense of that, it all starts to blossom and expand in your head. The album contains a staggering amount of memorable tunes - often one after another in the same song. I also bought an earlier album, “The Soft Bulletin” which, whilst not quite in the same league, does have “Waitin’ For A Superman”, possibly one of my favourite songs ever. This month.

In the next month: John Mayer, Justin Timberlake, and the Scissor Sisters. Hurrah!

By Matt Elton at 11:16AM

Today, brain empty, stomach full, has been a lot like many other days in the past.

If a day is so similar to another that it’s just a Xerox, that you’re just circling, is there any point it having existed? Else you’re just filling time. Wasting heartbeats.

A clever man recently told me to get a pen, write on the nearest available surface where you want to be. I mean, really really want to be. Less physically than emotionally, though I’ve seen no evidence to say that the two aren’t intricately linked. This man went on to say that you have to write that at the top of the surface and then, very near down the bottom, you write where you are today.

Today I’m just circling. Today, I worry that people think I have lost direction.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to draw in the stages from the bottom to the top. Work out conceptual ladders. Move from point A to point B. Connectthedots.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to stop your life sliding into shit. You have to provide yourself with structure, and discipline. You have to forget the past and reason with the future.

By Matt Elton at 08:29AM

So here’s what’s scaring me this week.

The way I see it, the gap between how we see the world and what it’s really like is getting wider all the time. All the people that predicted the world would carry getting on ever smaller as people talked on mobile phones, watched each other over the internet and then flew out for visits, well, they were only part right.

Thing is, I know a lot about the world. I only have to turn on the TV or look at a newspaper and it’s right there, all the poverty and the fundamentalism and the madness. I know it exists, and I know what my opinion of it is. But my ability to interact with any of it - to do something about it - well, that hasn’t got any greater. So I have a good deal of theory, but very little practice.

So there’s other things I turn to. There’s the lifestyles of the rich and famous to keep me occupied, to keep my mind busy. I’m every bit as much a noise-aholic as the next person: fill my brain with static, white noise, and hopefully it’ll shut out the other stuff that’s going on. We make our own celebrities for sport: we entertain them just as they entertain us. When we’re done with them, we discard them. Pete and Nikki on chatshows, talking about their relationship: aaw, that’s sweet. They’re part of our little media-generated society — and bored now.

So stuck in the void between not being able to help and aware that much of the rest of it is inconsequential distraction, what’s the best thing to do? Buy into the entertainment, or go mad feeling inconsequential outside of it?

By Matt Elton at 11:05AM