Ah, I do love Mr. Tony Benn…
June 2005 Archives
I've found it hard to fully explain my uneasiness with the upcoming Live 8 concert. There's just something that bugs me about it all, from the inept mobile phone ticket lottery (making lots of money for O2), the ever-changing reasons why certain acts weren't invited to perform (and bands added to the bill without being informed), to Bob Geldof's rather lunatic ideas like Sail 8. They seem wedded to the history of Live Aid, yet insist that the new concert has nothing to do with it (lots of the same acts, similar name, very similar logo belie this somewhat). And it just seems…less, somehow. Sure, it'll will be the most-watched concert in history on Saturday. But that doesn't mean much any more; back in 1985, it was something special to be taken to a Russian studio, to peer behind the Iron Curtain using cutting edge satellite technology. Now, Russia is just another country, and the transmission probably won't trouble today's broadcast technology.
But what sums up the whole event for me is a news report from last night, where Richard Curtis and a host of assistants are busy at work creating a video to be broadcast on the night. Now, I don't now how much of the legend of the Drive video is true, but in that case, it seems that it was the work of a lone BBC engineer who stumbled upon the juxtaposition of The Cars and images from Africa. Sure, it was manipulative, but it was an amateur sort of manipulation; he overlaid the two, and that was it. Now, though, Curtis is going through music libraries to find the 'perfect' soundtrack (R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion' played throughout last night's report), in a calculated attempt to recreate the effect of Drive. It's Live Aid, but polished, airbrushed, and shined.
Sure, I'll probably be watching on Saturday. But with a sense of scepticism over the whole affair…
In this story about Peter Jackson suing New Line Cinema for underpaying him for his work on The Lord of The Rings trilogy (wherein the central part of the complaint is that New Line / Warner Brothers sold off rights to the spin-off materials to its subsidiary companies at lower-than-market value):
But Mr. Socarides said some lucrative rights did not go to Time Warner companies. The pay television deal went to Starz, not Time Warner's HBO. He added that the "Rings" book trilogy remains with Houghton Mifflin, which is not a Time Warner subsidiary.
Because obviously, New Line had the right to sell those rights on…I'm sure the Tolkien estate might have had a few words about that…
Guess who's rumoured to be the front-runner for the ID Card database contract? EDS! I will leave you to write your own jokes…
The summary of the LSE report is worth having a browse (the full report is even better, including pointing out that security services will be able to modify the database as they wish, creating new identities and being able to alter your details, which includes time / location of verification, so they can make you appear to be anywhere they want you to be…hurrah!)
Choice bits:
The technology envisioned for this scheme is, to a large extent, untested and unreliable. No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world. Smaller and less ambitious systems have encountered substantial technological and operational problems that are likely to be amplified in a large-scale, national system. The use of biometrics gives rise to particular concern because this technology has never been used at such a scale.
We also accept that the proposed scheme is likely to have an impact on false identity within the benefits sector. However, the government has already put in place vetting regimes that are rigorous and effective. Benefit fraud through false identity is relatively rare and we believe the cost of introducing an identity card in the benefits environment would far outweigh any savings that could be made.
The Government has consistently asserted that that biometrics proposals, both in the new UK passport format and in the identity cards legislation, is a harmonising measure required by international obligations, and is thus no different to the plans and intentions of the UK’s international partners. There is no evidence to support this assertion.
Identity Cards: Just Say No, MPs…(or more realistically, the House of Lords, which will throw it out again, thus raising the spectre of the Parliament Act once more)
Who brings an inflatable doll to Glastonbury?
(Although bonus points to Shirley for making the best of it)
Incidentally: should I make an effort to distinguish between Kaiser Chiefs and Kasabian, or, as evidenced by what I saw of them this weekend, is it not worth it?
When I woke up on Thursday morning, my feet announced that I would not be doing quite as much walking. Ow. Blisters.
After breakfast, I hobbled along to the Speakers meeting, where we met the moderators and had a chance to make sure that our laptop would work with the conference centre's projectors. Then a quick email check, a walk back to the train station to work out what train I should take to get back to Baden-Baden (I thought about going on the bus route again, but the timetable for that meant that if there were any problems, I'd miss the flight home, so I thought the train would be a little safer), and back to the hotel to checkout. A slight mix-up occurred, meaning that I had to pay for the room, but hopefully I'll get that sorted out soon.
Then, more wandering! Ate half a Bratwurst before I started to gag on it. I was trying for the authentic experience, but I really don't like sausage.
My talk suffered a little from me leaving my DV cable at home, so I couldn't use the footage of the conference that I shot on Wednesday afternoon, but I think it went okay for the most part, although I probably talked far too fast. There were a few questions afterwards, but that was it; done with LinuxTag 2005. I said goodbye to Torsten, the moderator (and co-editor of the Video Book), headed off back to the train station, the teeny-tiny Baden Airpark airport, and then back into Stansted Airport.
Now only three weeks to go until America…
Yes, Coldplay can make Can't Get You Out Of My Head boring. Congratulations!
*bashes head against a wall*
(can we have a temporary ban rock acts doing ironic pop covers? Please?)
Okay, this is awesome…More German appropriating American RnB please!
(actually, they're Belgian…but still!)
AHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAHA!
MARK! LAUREN!
ON! SCREEN! TOGETHER!
HAH!
Barney:
Will Tear Us Apart doesn't get more emotional or powerful with you yelling "COME ON!" into the chorus, you know (although it is charming that twenty-five years after the song's initial release, you still need an auto-cue to know the words).
Also, did anybody see the Slitheen unmasking in the Dance Tent during True Faith? (that joke courtesy of Bonnie, but good enough to repeat, I think)
Colin and Edith are now telling us about how we're not going to miss any of the Coldplay set, which is unfortunate. Time to switch off an hour or so, and come back later to see if Lauren and Phil team up for a late-night run again…
Poor fashion choices: One of Interpol sporting a red armband. Nice!
I'm not quite sure whether M.I.A.'s dancing is fashionably weird, or whether she's really really bad at it (was she doing the Kia-Ora walk just then?).
Stansted Airport is like all British airports I've been to; it looks lovely on the outside, but when you get inside, it instead looks half-finished, with flimsy wood panels and holes in the concrete walls (they might sever some purpose, but, with the cracked plaster around them, it didn't look like it).
Okay, a digression: Babyshambles. Why? From a rockist point of view, they can barely play, and their songs don't meet a Popist perspective at all. I suspect that fluoride in the water has addled people's brains.
Anyway, the flight to Germany was uneventful, aside from a discouraging moment on the ground where the pilot wiped the front cockpit window with his sleeve. Filled me with confidence, I can tell you.
I would, at this juncture, protest that the predicament that I found myself in was not entirely of my own making. I had done some planning, and a reasonably thorough investigation led me to believe that a bus on the 205 line would take me to Karlsruhe. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that there were two 205 lines, each going to different destinations. Adding to the mix was a coach that claimed it was part of the 140 line, which I ignored because it wasn't what I was looking for. So I waited. The coach drove off.
I waited.
The bus was now ten minutes late. While waiting, I wandered over to the 140 stop, discovering something curious. Its timetable was exactly the same as the 205 bus I was waiting for. Somehow, I knew that the bus I was waiting for was never going to appear. And the next coach wasn't coming for another two hours. Oh, and it was approaching 40˚C outside. Excellent.
But then! A 205 bus turned up. I hoped that it would be the right one. I would ask the driver.
Now, I was already feeling twinges of language guilt. I can understand a tiny, tiny bit of German, but not as much as I probably should. These feelings weren't helped by a guy coming up to me and asking for directions (in German, natch). Anyway, the driver and I struggled, eventually ending up embarrassingly pointing to slots on the timetable. We managed to work out that this wasn't the bus for where I wanted to go. He drove off, and I was left alone in the airport.
Sadly, once I have a travel plan, I tend to try and stick to it at all costs, preferring the known to the unknown. As the bus drove away, I realised that I could have got on that bus to the nearest town, Baden-Baden, and instead take a train to Karlsruhe. But no. However, checking the timetables again, I saw that another local 205 bus would be coming in an hour. So I had a choice: I could wait one hour and have an uncertain time at the station, or wait two and go straight to Karlsruhe.
I took the local bus. After a few adventures with the ticket machine, I managed to purchase a train ticket, and twenty minutes later, I came out of Karlsruhe station, right outside the zoo.
I eventually found my hotel, the Novatel, checked in (and played with the fancy radio keycard that you needed to operate the lifts), and then decided to register at the conference itself. Loads of different booths - even Microsoft made an appearance (and stranger still, there wasn't a group of people hissing at them either)! The Red Hat staff were all wearing red fedoras; initially I thought they were selling them too, but sadly I was wrong.
Wandering around, I bumped into the Open Source Press, and got to have a look at the book I'm in. Very nice, if completely incomprehensible to a non-German reader. I talked to Dr. Markus Wirtz, who was the person who asked me to write a chapter for the book; he said lots of complimentary things about my work, which was rather nice. After saying goodbye to him, I had another wander, and then decided to try and find the centre of the city to get something to eat (as my last meal was a bar of Cadbury's at twelve hours ago)
Karlsruhe has a quite large town centre, and for some reason, with all the trams rolling around, it reminded me of Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens, only considerably longer. I found an Asian café and managed to order a meal, only coming unstuck when asking for a drink. I though I could get away with 'ein Coca-Cola Light, bitte', but apparently not.
On the way back, I went past a cinema that was showing Episode III. I briefly thought about watching it to see if James Earl Jones would scream "NEEEEIIIIIIIINNN!" at the end, but thought that was quite sad, and so instead had a look around the city's castle before returning back to the hotel for a run-through of the next day's presentation, watching BBC World on the TV, and then bed…
Quick spoiler-free review of Batman Begins: not too bad, but still a fair way short of the Animated Series' Mask of The Phantasm. Still, worth seeing for Gary Oldman's fantastic portrayal of Jim Gordon; he should have been in it more (at the expense of Katie Holmes. No harm to her, but her character was superfluous to the film).
Anyway, off to Germany tonight. Not sure if I'll have an Internet connection, so I might be gone a few days. Talk amongst yourselves!
The Dini-Timm animated Batman is just perfect. Off to see Batman Begins…
...where we can all laugh at the US Grand Prix.
And Gavin, my opinion of Martin Brundle has improved a little...
Well, if nothing else, watching the BBC's retrospective has got me interested in an Annabel Giles/Bob Geldof cagematch. For the heart of Ure! To the death!
But...I think we should start a campaign here and now to prevent RTD from writing the second parts of any more episodes.
Okay, first ten minutes: AWESOME. The Emperor Dalek (thus dredging up old continuity but yet avoiding fun Davros scenes), "DO-NOT-BLAS-PHEME!", and so on. But as soon as the Doctor sent Rose back through time, the episode fell apart, flicking between present-day Earth and Captain Jack's team in the future, while the Doctor…fiddles with some wires for half-an-hour.
(anybody else think it amusing that the best special effect this series has had was a small child with a gas mask?)
Then there was the resolution, which, if you're kind, stole considerably from The Phoenix Saga, and if you're being cruelly honest, rewrote some portions of Buffy's dialogue in Season 4's Primeval episode and stuck it on-screen. And yes, completely wrong about Bad Wolf, although as soon as the Emperor said it wasn't him, I knew it was Rose. Perhaps next time, she could send herself something less oblique, like "Stick a recovery lorry on the TARDIS! And get some jellybabies!" Plus, given the choice between killing everybody left on Earth and destroying the Dalek fleet, or dying and letting the Daleks harvest Earth for a new army to conquer the universe, I would hope that he would have set the Delta-wave in motion (as Bonnie and I are at pains to point out - the Seventh Doctor would have done it in a heartbeat; or more accurately, make the Daleks think that it would be a great weapon for themselves to set off). I guess that we're supposed to think that he's already killed his own race to stop them once before, and that didn't work.
Okay, I think all my problems with the episode can be summed up in one sentence: The Doctor did not save the day.
Also, hopefully, with the amount of technobabble in tonight's episode, the writers/producers will stop being all superior towards the previous incarnations next year as well.
Ehh. After spending the week looking forward to it, the episode was something of a let down. But I did like the Ninth Doctor's final words:
Rose, before I go, I just want to tell you, you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what? So was I.
The Christmas Invasion! Any bets on seeing the Paul McGann-Eccleston regeneration?
Firstly: a prize to Lush for naming their new shower gel Sonic Death Monkey. I don't know, or care what it is, all I know is that I need some Sonic Death Monkey shower gel in my life…
Secondly: people who are complaining about the harmonies in the new Saint Etienne album: You. Are. Wrong.
Thirdly, fun stuff with After Effects!
A slight change to the index page. Yes, it's a home page — party like it's 1997!
I'm sorry, Bob, but if you're going to hold a lottery for a big event like Live 8, then you should expect this sort of thing to happen. And I can't see the problem, really. Live 8 has got the money for the tickets, it's not supposed to be a fund-raiser anyway, and eBay has promised to give any profit to charity. As far as I can see, nobody loses out, except the person who pays £1,000 to see a Sting / Madonna duet…
(although, one thing: eBay say it's not illegal to resell charity tickets. Doesn't this also apply to normal concert tickets? In which case, why does eBay seek out and remove Glastonbury tickets, hmm?)
My current theory (note: I really don't want this to be true, but I have a bad feeling about some of the 'previously' scenes, and RTD's reluctance to use older continuity):
Adam is behind the new Dalek fleet. After the Doctor returned him to 2012, Adam still retained all the information that he downloaded from Space Station 5. Given that SS5 was in the planet's far future, it's quite feasible that the station contained information about the Daleks from other incursions (such as those in Remembrance and the invasion of the 22nd century). Using this, plus what he learnt from his time with van Statten, he turned himself into a proto-Dalek, making him immortal. He then hides out on Earth for the next 200,000 years, possibly in the Utah compound. When the news channels of Space Station 5 crash, he takes advantage of the confusion to buy SS5 (after 200,000 years and knowing how the stock market will turn out, I'm sure he could raise the funds). He converts it to The Gamestation, picking people off Earth at random. The losing contestants are not killed, but instead turned into Daleks. After 100 years, 400,000 people have been converted into Dalek soldiers.
Problems? Well, it doesn't explain Bad Wolf. Rose is told during The Unquiet Dead that she's met the Bad Wolf already, but that's before she meets Adam. Secondly, sure, Adam might be angry at being left on Earth, but enough to create a whole new race of Daleks? Seems a bit odd. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the voice belongs to him…
(still think it'd be great if it was Paul McGann though)
After five years of faithful service, one of my hard drives failed this week. Annoyingly, it was the drive that contained the operating systems, so when the replacement arrived, I had to re-install both Linux and Windows.
Linux has really come a long way. It detected everything (even the monitor!), and installed flawlessly. Windows XP, on the other hand, was a big pain. It seems that it really doesn't like playing with other operating systems. It threw a hissy fit and refused to install, but not before it overwrote the Master Boot Record of the drive, so that now Linux refused to boot as well. Grrr.
So, I had to format the whole thing, install Windows, correct a few hardware detection faults, and then install Fedora Core Linux again. Which didn't complain, installed as flawlessly as before, and set up the dual-boot system without a hitch. Yay Linux, Boo for XP!
I am still jumping for joy at the end of the Doctor Who episode. DALEKS!
The police think it was probably taken by kids or students, but there is also the idea that it could be heading to Edinburgh for the G8 protests.
Forget the Spice Girls! Let's have a Timelords reunion for Live 8!
It's not often that I get to come over all Warren Ellis (not enough goth camgirls or being a bitter, smoking, wise-cracking cynic with an optimistic heart, for a start), but just to announce to the world, or about ten people:
I will be attending LinuxTag 2005 on June 22 and 23, giving a talk on making DVDs with Linux at 1700 on the 23rd. There's a book you can buy as well! But it's in German. My final proof looks pretty, but they could have replaced all my text with traffic directions and I'd be none the wiser (unless they went over crossroads, as it's one of the few German words I remember).
So yes. Me. Germany. Later this month. Stammering my way through a lecture. Woo-hoo!
They didn't get there in time to stop the beginnings of Elvis from falling into the public's hands, but it looks like the record companies are going to get their way in the UK, according to The Times. Ninety-year copyright terms, then, propping up the giants of the music industry, because fifty years of living off The Beatles has left them poor. Corporate Welfare is fun!
In other "I hate the music industry so much I want to feed it to woolly mammoths" news, EMI and Warners are sniffing after Sanctuary Records, the indie-label success of recent years. This makes no sense whatsoever; Sanctuary is mainly made up of bands that were dropped by the majors, so why bother buying them back? Are they just jealous of a small company making a success with the bands they considered also-rans?
Of course, we'll know what'll happen if Sanctuary is bought. There'll be a brief fanfare of publicity about how the label will continue to be a showcase for bright musical talent. Behind the scenes, they'll quietly knife the management, introduce a new regime that will put an end to the more esoteric output of the label, drop a few of the less well-performing bands, citing "amicable differences", and then in five years' time, the label will be little more than an EMI or Warner shell, at which point it will be wound up; the highest-selling bands moving to the major label, and all the others chucked out into the street.
Cynical? Me?
You have to hand it to the Government. Not satisfied with one huge, highly-volatile database, the likes of which the world has never seen before, they want another one! Only this time, little black boxes in Britain's 30m cars will be talking to satellites, keeping track of us wherever we go (unless, er, you drive a car that doesn't have a box inside. I'm guessing that the Transport Secretary has a plan for that. Although I'm not optimistic).
Good evening, London. It's nine o'clock and this is the Voice of Fate broadcasting on 275 and 285 metres in the medium wave.
Meanwhile, from the "juxtaposition that makes you laugh and despair at the same time"-department:
No better soundtrack to this weekend, I think (This Is The Ice Age and Danseparc are also well worth tracking down, but sadly, all three are a little hard to find on CD, although at least they're in print in the UK).
Live 8's response to recent criticism: Stereophonics drafted in to play London. And if you don't pipe down, they'll do a Phil Collins with them…
Oh, goodness, and the zombified remains of Queen as well!
If we have a Spice Girls reunion, Geri is non-negotiable. All five, throwing evil glances at each other, and an evil Simon Fuller laughing maniacally in the background. We might as well get some entertainment from the night…because it's not going to come from Sting and Madonna's duet of Imagine (which may be the moment where the G8 will finally cave, if only to end the hideous nightmare).
Sasha Frere-Jones (a critic for the New Yorker) announces that he will no longer review music that is only available through listening sessions, and EMI announces that their secrecy protocols for the new Coldplay album have been so successful that X&Y only leaked a week before the UK release date. Before going on to say that they don't think pre-release leaking harms music sales, but they'll spend all the money on trying to prevent it anyway.
(Incidentally, how did EMI get to be so dependent on Coldplay, anyway? I remember buying Shiver five (six?) years ago, and thinking that it was okay for a Jeff Buckley impression, but nothing all that special. And now they're the biggest band in Britain. Yes, my music prediction skills are almost as good as my political ones)
Everybody needs one of these! Secure that ice-cream, soldier!
The secret themes within Revenge of The Sith (warning: is completely nuts).
And finally, Jamie Hewlett's comic adaptation of Pulp's Common People!
