July 2006 Archives

If nothing else, the final edition of TOTP showed that even at
the very end, the BBC didn't have a clue what to do with the show. It
was a very embarrassed affair, like the producers knew they should be
doing something special, but all they had to offer was a selection of
clips long worn-out by repeated showings on TOTP2 and the
increasingly-scary sight of Jimmy Saville. To fill in the gaps, the
horrors of the 1980s Radio 1 team were dug out of commercial radio hell,
making inane and self-satisfied comments until you were begging for
Matthew Bannister to make a surprise cameo and fire them all over again.

(some of the choices during the decade compilations were a little odd
too - why would you stick Prince in the 90s? Where were The Stone Roses
and Happy Mondays? The Reynolds Girls? Bis? etc.)

Could it have been better? Well, given ten minutes, anybody who'd
watched the show at any point during the last forty years could have
come up with somethign a little better than a documentary that ended
with Jamie Theakston saying "and Top of The Pops is going from strength
to strength", followed by a 10-minute "oops" coda.

2006, then. The death of Smash Hits and TOTP. A nation
weeps. Or shuffles its feet and gets on with things. But mourning for
TOTP seems a bit pointless. The brand is still alive, shows with its
name on are still being made, and I have no doubt that a BBC1 controller
will bring it back within the next ten years. It's just a little break
*sniffle*.

And the less said about the final episode of The West Wing, the better, really…

No Mark & Lard! A nation weeps. Or shrugs its shoulders and moves on…

First impressions are that it's quite nifty!

Given the 700-odd post thread currently active over at ILM, it appears that Lily Allen is this year's M.I.A., albeit this time around, people are actually buying records. Which, if you know your British music press well enough, is exactly when the backlash kicks in. Take this Stylus review, for instance, a near non-stop mass of invective that starts out with the familiar tactic of calling her authenticity into question, hurling insults left and right, before finally ending by accusing everybody who likes the record as being fake. Well. Indeed.

I've made no secret of being annoyed by the MySpace PR push that Allen has got through the press. She signed to Regal last year, and that album had to be recorded sometime, so it's obvious that her internet presence is only a little part of the story. Also, the MP3 blogger swipe is very misleading. MySpace seems to have a separate audience to the blogger crowd - ILM didn't start its Allen thread until March, for example, long after Lilly had started her site. The usual suspects like Fluxblog et al didn't pick up her like they did with Annie, Rachel Stevens and M.I.A. So why are we being accused of promoting her records because we fancy her?

The rather rockist cries of 'she's not REAL!' sound hollow, as even the end of the review makes clear when it castigates listeners for listening to her because they appreciate the indie-cred she has. Really, we went through this last year, didn't we? Does it matter if she eat spaghetti-on-toast in a council flat, got embarrassed at dinner parties, or that her father is a leader of the Tamil Tigers? Or responsible for Vindaloo, I forget which. Sure, she manipulates her image, sucking up to indie readers in the NME, and going for the pop angle elsewhere, but that's a prerequisite for pop stars, isn't it? Madonna, Boy George, The Sex Pistols, etc…all masters of manipulating the press to promote themselves. Is she real? Does it matter?

As for Alright, Still, it's a little like Bernard's summer girlfriends in Black Books. It's the sound of being outside and playing tennis in barefeet, and you'll stop listening to it in September. I don't think Smile is all that great, but the rest of the album is a curious mix of happiness and loneliness, mixed with humour and a vicious, cynical streak a mile wide. A perfect reflection of British life in 2006. It's not going to stand the test of time, she's not going to have a long and successful career, but for the here and now, it's a fine accompaniment to Rhianna, The Pipettes, and the new Xtina track.

And to think, in another episode of this series, Hugh was lamenting his pull in Hollywood.

Tomorrow, hopefully: More Lily. And this review.

Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop



Last month, I crowed about my shiny new MacBook. Somehow, I managed to avoid the excessive whining, the warping of the case, and the rather nasty-discolouration problem that plagued the first ones off the production line.

I thought that I had escaped the Revision A Curse.

I was wrong. Obviously.

When my machine switched itself off when ripping a CD at the start of the week, I was a little concerned, but thought it was just a kernel panic rather than a hardware problem. As the week progressed, though, it kept on turning itself off, leading up to a fun evening where it would start booting and then switch off repeatedly during the boot sequence. This was fixed by zapping the Power Management Unit, fixing the problem for a few hours, or until the morning.

Somewhat worried, I had a look at the Apple Discussion Forums to see if anybody had been experiencing similar problems. And it seems to be plaguing a lot of people. Even more worryingly, Apple don't really have a fix yet. Still, I called AppleCare, spent an hour on an 0870 number, and eventually managed to get them to admit that they'll need to take it in for repair.

It's back to the G4 for the next couple of weeks, while they replace the logic board or the entire machine. *sigh* I had quite settled into Tiger and Intel…

Let the anvils ring!

Yes, I'm scared.

We're redecorating. No internet for the next 24 hours.

But! A promotional video for Opera DS (out in Japan on Monday; my copy is ordered)

Okay, so it didn't take too long for me to be swayed over to Ms. Allen's side.

And my face is burnt. Hurrah!

$3,000 for a hideous-looking Drag Strip? Even if there's only five or so in the world, I still don't think it's worth that much, do you?

I am positively giddy.

A word from the man himself:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

When I started work last December, there were no Linux machines anywhere on campus. Now, there's four servers, eight client machines installed this morning, and at least three more servers on the way! Muahahahahaha.

As a follow-up to Saturday's post, I have to recommend HMV.co.jp. I ordered on Saturday, it was shipped Monday, and it arrived here this morning! And, to add to the recommendation, it came with a Johnny Boy badge and, yes, a lyric booklet. In English and Japanese! Some things are a little clearer now…

Today, Microsoft finally plunged the stake through the heart of a most-likely illegal tying of two products designed to kill off superior competitors, at last killing the DOS bloodline. It took four months to write, but the terrible legacy of QDOS has hung over the personal computer industry ever since. It may be fifteen years too late, but Microsoft has realised that a security model is actually quite useful. And hey, they've also remembered that they have a web browser! And they're going to fix it! You'd think Firefox might have a 15% share of the browser market in America or something.

Let's not celebrate too soon, though. There's still millions of copies of Windows 98 and the horrific Windows Me (even Microsoft disowns that mess) out there on the Internet, ready to become zombies in the botnets that circle the globe. Thanks, Microsoft. Really.

Moving on? Why not skip off the Microsoft treadmill? Apple's treadmill is shinier, but they make you pay for it, while Ubuntu is not quite as flash, but costs as much as a blank CD…

A détente, then. My sister came to terms with it a long time before I did, but Who is never going to resemble what I want it to be: an imaginative, tightly-scripted and plotted telefantasy show. Like its previous incarnation, you have to accept that it's often going to be inconsistent, often incoherent, and plotted like a monkey on a sugar high.

The opening thirty minutes? Teh awesome. The Cybermen / Dalek bitchfest was simply wonderful. The Daleks backing off when Rose mentioned the Doctor. The Doctor and his sonic screwdriver - a cheer. The secret of the Genesis Ark? Genius (Although I was screaming 'it's the Hand of Omega!' just before the prison TARDIS was opened). Lady Torchwood overriding CyberControl? A good stiff upper lip, just like the Brigadier.

The final emo ten minutes? Funnily enough, I think that one of RTD's weak points is that his Who scripts just never pack the emotional punch that he aims for; there's always a repeated joke that he uses to lighten the mood, and then run that joke into the ground for two minutes to make sure we get it (most obviously in Love And Monsters, but shown here in Jackie's "how rich?" routine), and he never manages to capture emotions in the way that Sorkin, Whedon, Sherman-Palladino, McGovern, or a host of other writers do. But, it's adequate, it's not going to change, and the last bit of the Rose/Doctor exchange was good. So I'll take the flashes of greatness and try not to get annoyed at the dumb bits in the future.

(also? His Dark Materials?)

Having said that, the final thirty seconds made me want to rip off his arms and beat him to death with them, but hey, I guess that was his intention.

Number 19 with a bullet!

(If you're torn, then I'd suggest picking the Japanese copy over the Swedish issue - it contains the remix of You Are The Generation… and the probably quite rare Johnny Boy Dub, previously only available on their Boobytrap single (but don't bother ordering it from Boobytrap, because despite what their store pages say, they don't have any copies left. Can you tell I speak from bitter experience? I knew you could. Aha, they've updated it now. Well, I'm still sulking). £17 from Japan isn't too bad for an import. Oh, and it has the video for You Are The Generation… as well!

The reason why Courtney Love won't be invited back to Glastonbury any time soon. But boy, did I wish I was closer to the stage at that point.

(Later on, she appeared in a heat-induced vision I had between The Other Stage and The Main Stage. Which was interesting)

Jarvis Cocker is back! Back! BACK!

You know I love you, but you are a little bit strange and freaky and disturbing sometimes…

(Mini-muffins?)

Contains unrestrained fanboy gushing and swearing, yet, surprisingly, I wrote this Johnny Boy review completely sober...

The CD single for Pull Shapes includes a dance routine. It is, therefore, an essential purchase.

Clap your hands!

After six years, going to America for nine months, several motherboards, power supplies, and processors, the Tower of Power has finally been retired. I am no longer running Windows. I am no longer running Linux. It's quite sad, really. I now no longer have a desktop machine, for the first time since 1997.

My journey to the dark side of Apple is complete. Bwahahahaha!

Aside from a slightly dodgy start and Torchwood being so inept that a group of Cybermen can simply hide some plastic sheeting, that wasn't too bad, was it? I think Russell has been reading Planetary and Ministry of Space along with Halo Jones - the barbed comment about Torchwood tech not being for the general public spoke volumes (I haven't seen Confidential yet, which apparently goes into the Torchwood setup into further detail, but I've love them to actually run with that concept instead of making them 'the good guys').

Given that the Nation estate probably wouldn't stand for a Cybermen victory, I'm expecting the Daleks to thin out the metal men ranks fairly swiftly. And who wants to put money on Rose being in that Void Ship by the end?