Jay Reatard and Nu-Matic and Octopus Project and Matt and Kim and Jed Fair & Yo La Tengo.
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Click here to listen to Jon Ronson’s Radio 4 programme with Robbie Williams. It’s kind of a melancholy programme. One of the reasons I think Jon Ronson is so special is he lets subjects speak for themselves, unadorned. and respects his audience enough to let them make up their own minds. I agree with Brandon.
The situation with the BBC is not wholly of its own making. The corporation has been pressured to be popular, and, simultaneously, a public service broadcaster. And many people moaned when it was a public service broadcaster, during the patriarchal age of broadcasting. Now people are moaning that things have gone too far the other way. Quite correctly. My argument against popularity at the expense of quality is fairly simple: If the BBC makes programmes in popular formats, that are of the same quality as those available on commercial channels (or worse), there is nothing to distinguish it from the commercial channels. Making questions about the license fee inevitable. That is the situation today.
The assumption about an audience, needed to arrive at a conclusion of inaccessibility, is worrying. Accessibility is totally wrong. The most patriarchal thing since Abraham is that broadcasting needs to be accessible. I don’t necessarily think there’s an assumption people are stupid, but suspect there’s an assumption people are not interested in complexity. So, as a result, controversial issues turn into tabloid, bite size chunks, which alarm people irresponsibly, or presentation heavy documentaries, light on detail and low in accuracy. Maybe people being turned off by politics, science, the arts, and current affairs, is, in part, because they associate it with ‘accessible’ broadcasting. People sense that they’re being spoken down-to.
There should be an assumption that the majority of people are not stupid, and that complex subjects should be presented to inform. That is a different assumption from accessibility, because it assumes the viewers are intelligent and capable of learning. That not everything in a documentary needs to be so dumbed down it is accessible to the majority of viewers. People are capable of looking things up that interest them. The BBC used to produce decent fact sheets. As such there is zero replay value in many BBC current affairs programmes, and documentaries, because the information within them is so light very few people would have a problem with remembering their contents. Unless distracted by the special effects, and music track.
The BBC needs to compete to survive and in order to compete, with the other channels, many of whom are now producing documentaries of acceptable quality, the BBC needs to produce documentaries that are better. They desperately need to take a step-backwards. Until the late nineties BBC documentaries were the envy of the world. The BBC is the broadcaster best placed to attract the next David Attenborough(s) and needs to do that right away if it is to survive.
And the BBC could. Because the talent tucked away in places like BBC 4, a channel that receives a tiny fraction of the license fee and speaks for itself. Likewise Radio 4. Accessibility should be regarded as a failed experiment.
It virtually goes without saying that producing reality television, from talent shows to DIY, when everyone is doing it, makes the BBC less distinguishable from the commercial channels. Sacrificing long-term survival for short-term popularity. BBC 3 is, to my mind, schizophrenic, veering between sub-Channel 4 youth television, and, occasionally, decent drama/comedy. Half of what is on BBC 3 is done on commercial channels, and often better. I don’t think there is a dearth of talent - the talent is out there – the BBC needs to aggressively seek it out.
Someone needs a big brush to sweep away accessability and replace it with talent. Talent should reflect the subjects they’re involved in. There should be no more broadcasters covering subjects that leave them so out of their depth they look stupid.
Much of the above applies to the rest of the media but I don’t care about them as much as the BBC. I would like to be able to mock foreign friends about how much better BBC documentaries are than theirs. I felt smug when I could do that.
The recent stories in the press about high-tech dust that helped grow a severed finger back are nonsense. Furthermore they’re old nonsense. It will make you angry but today’s Bad Science column is essential reading and worth sharing. The stories of the ‘pixie dust’ were bad, in many ways, and on a very simple human level - there’s going to be people who, in desperation, will badger doctors for something that doesn’t work as well as the stories they’d seen in the press implied. When I saw the story this week I took a minute, and did a Google Archive search, it’s a little like LexisNexis (something many journalists have access to), and it turned up the following results:
Click here to lose a little more faith in humanity.
And, was somewhat perplexed that the story didn’t appear to be new, given the widespread coverage it was receiving, and that, furthermore, the finger didn’t appear to be severed in any sense of the word. I think Ben Goldacre is right to draw attention to such risible coverage from people we rely on for news. See also.
Tonight’s local election coverage on BBC News 24 is, aside from David Dimbleby, completely crap. I am currently watching Jeremy Vine do a really shit American accent, dressed as a cowboy, reading out truly woefully described statistics about the Liberal Democrats. It’s really difficult to watch. It’s as if someone has decided that local election coverage needs to be fun. Fun in the sense of BBC Children’s Television fun. My eyes feel soiled. I hope someone puts the Jeremy Vine clip on YouTube because I did not make this up but doubt anyone will believe me.
Ungdomskulen and Oxford Collapse and Bloodhound Gang and Immaculate Machine.
QBass ft Skeng Gee and Fujiya & Miyagi and Liars and Hutch & Kathy and Trans Am and Animal Collective.
It’s worth downloading the silly client to watch this documentary. The political background to the British nuclear program is an interesting glimpse of post-WW-II geopolitics.
Tokyo Police Club and (some very dark) Nirvana and Adam Green and Clinic.
Reality television, and derivatives, are mostly crap because they attract attention whores and drama-enhancing producers. It rarely documents.
I think I’m on safe ground saying shows about people with ugly and/or embarrassing medical conditions, are a modern freak-show. Especially reality television that deals with disfigurement. Such programmes often have fuck-all to do with the people they purport to document – I’m not being callous - it’s just that disfigured people are cheaper than actors and the make-up is better. Quite often they get paid peanuts in the process. The documenting comes second to the sights and sounds. But…
If people can be desensitised to disfigurement, is it a good thing for disfigured people? If viewers become desensitised to disfigurement, in real-life they will stare less, and, maybe, be less afraid. Which would be a good thing. However, given the tenuous and complex links between violent television and violent behaviour, it’s probably difficult to say that desentisation will lead to better treatment of disfigured people. In the same way that it can’t be said violent television is ever the primary factor contributing to violence. I don’t think freak-shows, aside from supplying an income to the performers, improved the lot of disfigured people. Still, I’m an optimist, I hope that there are positive side-effects to the modern freak-show.
A seriously negative side-effect of this, could be that in order to maintain viewers, medical reality TV will perpetually search for more extreme medical conditions. In order to maintain shock value. Like soap operas adding an explosion or violence. Reality TV will have to go to poor countries to find people shocking enough. Poor people with extreme medical conditions, on our screen, for titillation. Which, if it generates awareness of medical conditions in poor countries, isn’t such a bad thing. The next thing is people may empathise. Tourist destinations may be shamed into action. But..
It could still just be about titillation. I don’t, for a second, think that the majority of medical reality television is made for any altruistic reason at all. I don’t think it’s immoral and I’m not even sure it’s all that harmful, but I do think it amoral, in that it boils-down to viewing figures, and best commercial practice. Change will be in response to a changing audience. I hope people become so desensitised to disfigurement John Merrick could walk down the street naked and people would be more shocked by his penis than his elephantiasis.
Arcade Fire and Bluejuice and Automation and Future of the Left.
The food sections of broadsheet newspapers are annoying. The featured reciples are cooked by no-one but the authors, such people play boules and feel smug about it, and other such habits. And, worst of all, have witty, yet somehow tasteful, jumpers for informal situations. They are supernaturally smug toss-pots. The other bits of the food section are made up of critics - who think they’re interesting - and a smorgasbord, a panoply, of wanky narrative so refined it would make Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen swoon.
Give me recipes that are good but don’t require fucking around. When I say fucking around I mean by my standards of fucking around. Not some jumped up chef or foodie who hunts down fucking apples from farms that are, naturally (what else would they be?), rustic and genial. Or bits where it says the timing of something is essential. If I want to cook or buy things where the timing is essential I’ll go to a bit more effort than following a recipe from some broadsheet which is essentially toilet roll with print. Like buy a cook-book or get some training.
So. Down with the old media! Surf the net! Never click adverts! Stick it to Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall. Come on! The man’s a cock. Except buy the Guardian on Saturdays, because Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column is in it. Also buy it when Charlie Brooker, (sometimes) Polly Toynbee, or Jon Ronson have articles.
Alternatively, just be grown up, and buy loads of newspapers all of the time and don’t read the annoying bits.
Leave the food bit and life-style section on the train. A foodie may pick it up, cook a recipe from it and choke on a bone, with hilarious consequences. Like they immediately cough up the bone, trip on a roller-skate, do all their own stunts and appear in Phantom of The Opera. Then get killed by a amorous moose while searching for maple fucking syrup.
Holy Fuck and Sons and Daughters and NRG and The Brunettes and Anat Ben-David.
It’s a sign of the fall of the West when people have time to sit in their underpants, and watch Fraggle Rock. The Wikipedia page is interesting and worth a read. Some Wikipedians know a great deal about Fraggle Rock. I find that amusing. Despite having read the page and remembered quite a bit. Watch a whole episode here (p1, p2, p3).
That show used to give me nightmares.
Times New Viking and The Noise of Art and The Cribs and Aphex Twin.
The video of the interview with ex-Scientologist and actor Jason Beghe is on the tubes. I’m finding it quite difficult to follow because a lot of the jargon is unfamiliar to me. But this segment is worth watching because by the end it has more occurences of the word fuck per minute than a Tarantino movie. It’s fascinating from the perspective of an insight into Scientology (albeit from a apostate’s perspective - but he’s still a primary source). I quite like Jason Beghe, and sort of recognise him from some US television shows, he’s a bit like Frank Costanza (example) but nicer and with more fucks. See here for the background to it.
At the start of the popularisation of the Internet there were a lot of people with dubious Tank-Girl haircuts, William Gibson novel in hand, making wild predictions about Virtual Reality and the like. Even William Shatner got in on the act with TekWar. The days of the two Williams. With the abundance of Internet mania it’s gotten a bit clichéd to go on about how the Internet is going to change things.
Adam Hart-Davis, if you can get over being spoken to like a 5 year old nephew, and his avuncular mien, made quite good documentary called “The Thinkynge Revolution” as part of his “What the Tudors Did For Us” series. You can watch it here. Although, of course, future historians may refer to the Internet Revolution as the Pornography Revolution and say things like “imagine if Caxton had done smut”.
Fonejacker is shit. I have heard funnier crank calls on the Internet. The pterodactyl crank call is a golden classic*, and it is better than the sum of crank calls in Fonejacker. It has the intelligence of a singular ant in the Arctic. It’s tired stereotypes and people that have guessed it’s a piss-take. It’s listening to slightly bemused/annoyed people deal with a moron. Borat without the brains behind Borat.
I do not approve of misoneism, they’re both fairly conventional shows, but out of the nominations The Armstrong and Miller Show or Ponderland should have won.
* Have a friend stand away from the phone, and initiate the phone call. Start a normal conversation, then cut the conversation by saying “shit! It’s a pterodactyl!” (or similar) while a friend squarks in the background like an angry pterodactyl, then fight said pterodactyl and politely hang up “gotta go, gotta fight me a pterodactyl! (click)” (or similar). Works best on live TV and radio phone-ins that don’t have a delay.
Boogie Times Tribe and Be Your Own Pet and The Levellers and ArthimotH.
Jon Ronson often respects the people he writes about and has empathy for the people he writes about. Here’s an article in today’s Guardian about Robbie Williams’ search for answers. I think that’s what it is. I suspect that Robbie Williams, given his experience with psychics, is on a road to scepticism, by a circuitous route. I think there’s a lot of people, like Robbie, who are intelligent, and looking for answers, and find out bit by bit that the paranormal does not stand up to scrutiny. People like Robbie are distinct from those who are deluded or refuse to hear counterarguments. He’s actively seeking answers and discarding things that he finds out are false. Given he was in Take That from aged 16, he’s probably playing catch-up. Robbie Williams is the kind of person that should be visiting websites like The Skeptics Dictionary and reading about critical thinking. To get both sides of the story, in a spirit of balance.
I’ve gotten into quite a few arguments about Scientology. Because, with a few caveats, I think adults should be able to spend their money on whatever they like and I think Scientology is a religion. As I outlined here. But now Scientology (or people acting in their name) have plumbed new depths of stupidity.
Do you remember the video of Tom Cruise (since hosted by Gawker here) that was removed from YouTube? The one that prompted global protests against Scientology?
A key point to remember here, the salient point, is that the removal of a newsworthy video sparked protest.
Well. The same thing has just happened to Mark Bunker of XenuTV fame (the guy that released the Jason Beghe video):
I didn’t photograph the last anonymous protests in London because I had bad guts and third demonstrations are less interesting than first and second demonstrations. People are usually bored by the third demonstration (see second London demonstration pics by me here).
Removing Mark Bunker’s videos is an almost guaranteed way to reinvigorate the protests and bring in even more protestors.
Heck, even I feel like protesting (rather than just taking pictures) and I don’t even feel that strongly about Scientology. As for YouTube: This is yet another example of how they’ll cave in at the first opportunity rather than give their users the respect they deserve.
Web 2.0 is about making money from the talent of your users and showing them little or no respect over profits.
If this sort of thing is tolerated it could happen to you next. Send Mark Bunker’s video, as linked above, to people. They should know.
John Maus and Cindy Payne/Ricky Wilson/Mark Ronson and Kid606 and Steely Dan.
D’Cruze and Born Ruffians and Ken Ishii and Adam Green and Thao and the Get Down Stay Down and QBASS.
Kevin Tihista and Shapes and Sizes and Future of the Left and Ennio Morricone.
I think there should be a general rule of blogging that when you’re depressed you shouldn’t blog. Almost universally it comes across as self-indulgent shit. Earlier today I posted a post that in retrospect was so mental it was potentially funny. In a laughing at a mental tramp bothering people outside of Boots kind of way. To give you a vague idea of what the post was like, at the end I compared the Conservative party and New Labour to a saggy pox afflicted arse. I had a mental picture of diseased cheeks belonging to the same arse. Thing is: I hate people that try to convince people of stuff. It’s not that I object to people expressing their opinions it’s just I think it’s possible that vehemence is a mask for ill-thought out ideas. With stuff I’m sure about if people agree that’s fine and if they don’t they don’t. I’m still right. If I’m being vehement it is a sign of not being sure I’m right. So the long-winded psychiatrists wet dream of a post had to go.
Octopus Project and Pink Reason and Jesus Jones and Handsome Furs and Spirit Level.
Matt and Kim (live) and The Fiery Furnaces (live - the bass guitar is missing in the recording, but kicks in at the end) and Satin Storm and Sue and the Unicorn.
I visited someone in hospital a couple of days ago, on a post-operative ward filled with people plumbed with tubes pumping poo and wee, and I think I’ve picked up the famous shitting lurgies. Whereby you don’t feel all that unwell but have got a bit of a sore throat and occasionally have cramps that precipitate running. So I will not be in London tomorrow. I intend to walk somewhere where there are nearby toilets or wooded cover. I’ll keep a bog-roll in my camera bag. The idea of shitting myself in central London terrifies me.
This is a shit post. Sometimes I think there’s a collusion between all of the atoms in the universe to smite me, like Job (the proto-Jesus), in the good book. Fnord.
Johnossi and These New Puritans (if this song is entirely serious it is even funnier) and GravenHurst and IamX.
I would never poach a quail egg. Quail eggs are OK. Nothing special. Small eggs. You eat them and think “hmm. That’s OK”. I won’t eat hem unless someone else is buying them and someone else is cooking it. This isn’t an issue of snobbery. I feel the same way about black pudding. And beer. And newspapers. You don’t have to prepare beer unless you are opening a can or pouring it yourself. That’s preparation of a sort.
You can prepare newspapers by finding discarded newspapers on the train, scrunching the pages into loose balls, and putting them in a big pile in your back garden. Then joyfully spunk methanol all over them (from a spare lens cleaning kit), and set fire to them. Shouting “I’m burning the media, man – and I didn’t even pay for it”. (I have no respect for people who burn flags because, often, they’ve bought the flag. It’s mental). Then read the websites of the newspapers you have burnt without ever, ever, clicking on the advertising links.
Even if they’ve got a potentially good deal on a camera advertised or a featured book written by the sub-editor’s wife’s nephew. Then, much later, when the awful realisation dawns on you that you’ve made a Jeremy Clarkson/K Foundation-like statement (I suspect they’re one and the same). Hang your head in shame and drink Ribena. To wash down a fish-finger sandwich. And have a good hard think.
Whitest Kids U Know on conspiracy theories and eating a burger through a straw.
Tom Green getting horrendously drunk in the name of comedy and doing some kind of obscure dance.
Simon Amstell appropriately interviews people. A man that makes Never Mind The Buzzcocks bridge the gap between shit and and funny.
The Raid and The Passionistas and Enter Shikari and John + Julie and Shock Therapy.
would mean that I would wake up earlier on Sundays.*
* Realistically speaking, being honest with myself, I misspoke when I typed that. I’d almost certainly record it on Sky Plus or download it. Or watch the repeat.
Captain Beefheart and Meat Beat Manifesto and The Cribs and Tom Vek.
There are qualities that exist in all great film-drama characters that are hard to pin down. It is too simplistic to say that the characters have depth or complexity because some great film characters aren’t complex and don’t have depth. An element may be that while a part of a narrative, at some point in the film, (or even all of it) a great character’s motivations are not obvious to the viewer. So elements of the character are open to interpretation and the character is interesting as a result. Another factor may be the freshness of a role. As defined by the script and/or director and/or acting skills. A memorable character - because they’re novel and a benchmark by which others will be judged. And, I suppose, the pathos or revulsion the character can elicit from an audience.
All in varying proportions. Of course. One day a twat will paid peanuts to put together a shoddy equation for the benefit of a cinema chain. Who’ll pump out press releases on the unsuspecting public like bukkake. Mopped up by the news.
This post is defunct. The video in question has been removed. It was a Rolling Stones Cover so bad that comedy could not be derived from it. Deleting it was the right thing to do. I quite like Tay Zonday and all, he’s self aware - it’s a good act, but that was too much. He should stick to his own stuff, which is funnier, and tolerable to well adjusted ear drums. This post is not defunt. FFS x 100.
What follows this paragraph is yet another [1] reason [2] that copyright should be extended on music here in the UK. So pensioners like The Rolling Stones and The Who and Cliff Richard can maintain their royalties for stuff they did when they didn’t have bits of their bodies wearing out. Apparently they’ve “poured money into the British economy and enriched people’s lives” and “They are not asking for a handout, just a fair reward for their creative endeavours” according to Roger Daltrey. He has good hair. For an old guy. So he must be right. Plus, I like fishing.
One of the most excellent things were music copyright laws to be extended would be that bands like the Rolling Stones or their representatives or whoever handles that sort of thing can authorise things like this:
I think we can all agree that extending musical copyright is a good thing. Like fuck.
[1] Bullshit.
[2] Cos there are no reasons. What reasons do you need? Oh Oh Oh Oh.
Fiery Furnaces and LTJ Bukem and Bobby Conn and The Sword.
The Billionaires and M.A.N.I.C and The Faint and Midfield General.
Check this link out. Then check out the prices below.
I heard an impassioned debate about those lens in a shop today. I don’t quite get it.
Last few weeks I’ve been doing some reading about photography and have had the pleasure of consulting a few experts. Pro-photographers, by and large, have a few requirements that casual(ish) photographers don’t have: specifically lens build quality, auto-focus speed/accuracy, and lens speed. If they miss a shot it costs them money and they operate in environments like sports venues, or hanging around waiting for some female celebrity’s tit to pop out. Ergo there is sound economic value in professionals spending upwards of £1000 on a lens.
In the world of home audio there are a group of people commonly referred to as audiophiles. Some audiophiles think things like $7250 audio cables produce higher quality audio than cables costing a fraction of the price. Even though it is highly improbable they do. Lenses can’t be directly compared to that situation, but there’s a point to be made nonetheless. With lenses things can be measured (see here). However, the real-world differences, on a standard sized photographic print, or even on a standard LCD monitor, may be difficult to distinguish unless the viewer is a photographer or familiar with the lens. Unless it’s a truly terrible lens.
For instance certain types of lens tend to have greater variance across price brackets. Often, but not always, the differences among zoom lenses are more apparent than fixed focal length lenses. Although that is a bit misleading: as ever the biggest factor in any photograph is what you are photographing. An interesting photograph taken with a mediocre lens is still interesting, while a boring photograph taken with an excellent lens is still boring. Fixed length lenses are interesting in terms of cost/performance.
Case in point 50mm prime (=fixed focal length) lens for Canon and Nikon digital SLRs (DSLRs). As looked at in the forum post linked above. Here’s the Canon prices:
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 MK II < £75
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM ~ £250
Canon EF 50mm f/1L USM ~ £1000
Here’s the Nikon prices:
Nikon AF 50mm f/1.8D ~ £80
Nikon AF 50mm f/1.4D ~ £250
The build quality between the cheap lenses and more expensive lenses is quite pronounced. Particularly with Canon’s F/1 from their top of the line L range. I question how many casual DSLR users require that sort of build quality. Ardent casual photographers may benefit from the lenses in the £250 bracket. But I question whether that is clear cut. If, at a guestimate, the cheaper lenses break twice as often as the ~£250 lenses, and presuming it happens outside of warranty (making lenses that often break down during the warranty period makes no sense) , buying another cheap lens (or even having a spare or two) works out cheaper than the original cost of buying the ~£250 lens. That’s a scenario, quite frankly, pulled out of my arse, but a big question is how often the cheaper lenses break down under the usage of an average DSLR owner. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t place a bet either way whether the cumulative life of three cheap lenses (costing less in total) would outlast the ~£250 lenses or vice versa. MTBF info and the like is difficult to find.
There is a stop difference between the ~£250 lenses and the cheap lenses. In some situations that could be the difference between a sharp shot and blurred shots in low light conditions. On the other-hand it’s an issue somewhat mitigated by camera burst mode and acceptable ISO-300+ exposures on DSLRs. The +3 stop images stabilization of newer Canon (IS) and Nikon (VR) shake reduction is an indication of what is considered significant in terms of gaining stops in the age of DSLR/sensor based photography.
So I guess it’s nice if you’ve got the spare cash, but to hear the argument I overheard today you’d think a lens was the only factor in taking a photo. I’m no expert, or even a serious amateur, or even that good a photographer, I’m a hobby master, but I’ve listened to enough people to know that lens quality beyond ‘acceptable’ isn’t the most important thing about taking a picture. And that some pointless arguments go on in camera shops and that there’s a lot of unnecessary snobbery and lusting after lenses among amateur photographers. Check out this comparison with a $5000 vs. a $150 camera.
Animal Collective (the recent leak) and Turzi and D-M-S.
Earlimart and Clinic and Winson and Bob Dylan*.
* yeah, so?
Be Your Own Pet (note the “watch in higher quality link”, that’s new for Youtube, I think) and Mountain Goats and Signs of Chaos.
Never before has the mechanical action of the human heart been made to sound so wanky. Lol. Watch Hard ‘N Phirm here.
Octopus Project and Fiery Furnaces and ddd.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/lifestylenutritionists
It’s a fascinating history of lifestyle nutritionists - including funny fads that your great-great grandparents and grandparents may have known about.
You can comment to the host directly, not indirectly through forums or staff, but at his blog here.
Damien and Matt and Kim and The Knife and The Foo Fighters
Archie Bronson Outfit and Ezra Furman & the Harpoons (the person that shouts out yeah before the music starts was at every US concert I have ever been to or heard. Inluding bootleg Doors) and SDS.
I’m sitting, alone, in a cold room, in underpants, eating a microwave curry. A fairly posh one, lamb something or-other with apricots and a hot sauce. With whole seeds. The first problem only applies to this curry and cannot be generalised to all curries: Apricots. Apricots are foul. They add nothing to the world. Apricots could dissapear and people would move on pretty quickly. Elton John would not play at their funeral. Conspiracy theories would not be fomented. The second problem applies to all supermarket curries and can be generalised: Too much sauce. There are very few curries that benefit from too much sauce. Dansak benefits from an excess of sauce.
What I end up doing with a lot of supermarket curries is eating a third of the sauce with the meat and/or vegetables and tossing the rest in the bin. Which is wasteful. I think supermarkets put loads of sauce in their curries not because they think the public wants sauce but because it means less meat and/or vegetables. It’s akin to serving steak and chips with a big pile of chips and a piddly little steak next to it. Or a single asparagus in a bucket of sauce. The ratio is fucked. I feel like I’m being punished for being a lazy bastard, for not cooking, by supermarkets that have adverts that make projectile vomiting look pleasant. Less sauce please: Asda, Morrision’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose. Don’t be cunts.
Jim Noir and Fridge and Ragga Twins and Ragga Twins and Ragga Twins and British Sea Power.
I don’t give a flying fuck about David Cameron flaunting the rules of the road on a bicycle. The thing with Cameron is; he started off OK, but got pulled in all kinds of directions by the interests surrounding him, and when elected he’ll swing further to the right and will tolerate/exploit stuff he knows to be wrong. He’ll excuse it by deferring to ‘people being concerned about N‘ and he’ll ride them like a donkey rather than tell anybody they’re wrong, like a grown-up, with a grown-up face. See Broken Britain. In The Sun. As PM he”ll paint his bike black, get mudguards , and go out hunting peasants with his fox-gun. Probably.
If I were David Cameron post-bike scoop I’d market myself as a maverick prepared to bend the rules to get the job done. Dr House MD, on a bicycle. Minus the Vicodin. With legs that work. David Cameron with a Vicodin habit would break Broken Britain’s broken back. The Vicodin straw. The kids look up to Cameron - the street youth. Hipsters, fidget godivas, and Vicodin, all being David Cameron’s fault. Prompting apocalyptic headlines in The Daily Mail, Armageddon in The Sun, and wanky, serious discussion, with mostly idiots, in The Broadsheets. Fuck them! What does David Cameron want with them anyway? Dr House MD wouldn’t give a fuck. Oh, and The Mirror are a bunch of twats too. Just to be even handed and all. The newspapers are crap by-and-large because a great deal of the people that read them are idiots.
An excellent documentary about Richard Feynman.
I have nicked this link from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog.
Beck and Tiga and Stereo Total.
Bluejuice and Menomina and Fiery Furnaces and Moby.
Heh. Russell Brand can sing, a bit, contrary to conventional wisdom. Shame about the fan vid. It’s like watching a peacock fidget around shrubbery. Hopefully someone will rip the scene from a pirated DVD screener. See also this Trey Parker/Alfred Packer classic, along similar lines.
Be Your Own Pet and Bomb the Bass and Jane’s Addiction and Cansei De Ser Sexy.
Kahimi Kari and Secret Society of the Sonic Six and The Pussywarmers and Acen.
Nico Vega and Deerhoof and Mouse on Mars and Adult and SubCulture(3).
Certain Nasdaq tech stocks have, in my opinion, been unfairly tarnished by the fuckwitted problems in the financial sector. They are bargains and had I the cash between one and two years time I’d be laughing. During the dot-com bust it was horrible to watch loads of companies that were fundamentally sound dragged down with idiotic companies. The stock for companies that survived could have been picked up dirt cheap. Had I the foresight to invest, which is easy in retrospect.
The market hasn’t bottomed by any means, but here’s my theory, pulled out of my arse: 1) The tech sector is going to reach a bottom faster than other sectors, not quite as fast as Eliot Spitzer reaching a bottom via an escort service, but within two months. 2) The exact time a bottom is going to be reached is difficult to predict, but less so in the tech sector (there’s unlikely to be bad news to come) than other sectors. But a short loss is worth swallowing for the long term gains. 3) The risk in much of the tech sector is different from other sectors because of transnational assets and sales. It’s diverse rather than localised risk.
With regards of everything other than tech - it’s not bottomed yet because there’s more bad news to come. Anyone that thinks that isn’t the case is being naïve. The Fed does not make moves of the magnitude made over the weekend without reason. History will tell. What I hope is that rationality wins the day, everyone calms down, stops thinking in the short term, and most markets bottom in the next few weeks. But what I hope, indeed, what I say, is pulled from my arse, and is a poor excuse for a blog entry. And could be bollocks.
Here’s what I’d buy, in my imaginary bet:
Intel (Nasdaq symbol INTC) - $20 is not a fuckload off it’s 8 year low and is a bargain. Intel is going to dominate the chip market for the imminent future. Hasn’t been hit by stocking up on a twit load of flash memory.
Nvidia (Nasdaq symbol NVDA) - $20 is nowhere near Nvidia’s lows, but Nvidia has shown surprising resilience in the face of competition from AMD (inc. ATI) and Intel, in both the on-board graphics/motherboard market at the graphics card market. Huge global sales/assets.
Sun (Nasdaq symbol JAVA) - $16 - post acquisition of the ubiquitous MySQL, is a bargain. There will be more webservers and more MySQL. Doesn’t matter which Linux distribution a webhost runs, they still need MySQL.
In two years time I’ll find out if I’m right or not.