Max Headroom is back!

He looks horrible!

Here's the story.

Word of the day

Gongoozler.

"People who enjoy watching activity on the canals in the United Kingdom. The term is also often used in a more general way to describe those who have an interest in canals and the canal life, but do not actively participate."

Here's where you join up.

Go Gongoozlering on Google Earth! (Googlogongoozlering?)

Vote Splashy Pants!

You know you want to.

And he's back.

Right after I made a small deal about Lawrence Miles gaining in popularity, he pops up and posts to his secondary blog about Doctor Who. (Because everyone should have a secondary blog about Doctor Who.)

Of course, to us, the mad glut of Doctor Who merchandising available for Christmas 2007 is definitive proof that We Win. Let's be quite clear on this point: here in the latter '00s, Doctor Who is more popular than at any time in its prior history. Naturally, the viewing figures were higher in the late '70s. This is partly because there was nothing else to do in those days, when the TV set was the only leisure accessory that ran on electricity, and when "getting boozed up on a Saturday night" wasn't seen as a fit pastime for all ages, classes and genders. But it's also because viewers in the 1970s saw themselves as belonging to a wilfully captive audience. Saturday-night viewing was part of a complete entertainment experience, the stay-at-home descendant of the Music Hall, and you sat through the entire BBC schedule - or the entire ITV schedule, if you were a bit common - whether you liked all the programmes or not. You wouldn't have switched channels, even if you'd had one of those newfangled remote controls. In those days, before geek-scum tried to claim that Doctor Who should be just like Babylon-5, the series was part of the World of Showbiz. And yet…

…and yet it wasn't what the BBC now likes to call its "jewel in the crown" show. Doctor Who was halfway down the bill of the entertainment line-up, it was never the star attraction. The ratings may have been higher in the supposedly golden year of 1979, but even then - even at a time when you could rely on one-third of the population to have seen Julian Glover rip his face off and become a one-eyed seaweed-man - the importance that's attached to the series now would have been unthinkable. In 1979, it was taken for granted that it'd always be there. In 2007 (if slightly less so than in 2006), it matters. It's a lodestone of British pop-culture rather than a reassuringly ever-present quantity, the Beatles rather than One Man and His Dog. "Popularity" is measured by impact rather than ratings, and for the people of the 1970s, it'd beggar belief that "Sontarans Return" would qualify as a news headline. In a world where Showbiz was a rare and precious commodity, it was always going to be overshadowed by The Generation Game. In a world where celebrity culture seems somehow more banal than fly-on-the-wall footage, something as strange and as (potentially) unpredictable as Doctor Who is bound to thrive. For a while, anyway.

In a perfect world, there would already be statues of this man.

testing

Let's see if this works. Enjoy it if it does.



Learn More.

Great moments in tech support

From the Microsoft Help pages:

"During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on."

Larry goes viral!

When Lawrence Miles posted that he would be taking his blog down, I decided to set up a Google search to alert me in case he popped up again someplace else. Recently, I've been picking up hits for posts such as this one.

It seems that the list of "Nine Things Which Appeared on The Muppet Show, But Wouldn’t Make It Onto Family Television These Days" is getting passed along. I hope this has a positive effect.

One of the bits most frequently quoted is:

But what we forget is that the issue of cross-species fertility is raised even in the original series, specifically in Miss Piggy’s performance of “Waiting at the Church”, a song about a bride being deserted by her bigamous husband on the day of her shotgun wedding. Piggy performs the song in a wedding dress that’s been bulked out to make her look eight months pregnant. This image is so distressing that it’s been erased from our collective childhood memory, yet there she is on the screen, reciting the opening lines ‘I’m in a nice bit of trouble, I confess / somebody with me has had a game’ in the finest music-hall tradition. Four-year-olds in the audience must surely have asked their parents why she looked so fat that week, and it’s doubtful that the phrase “big with spawn” would have satisfied them.

I have to admit that I did not remember this bit.

Turns out that every episode had a UK-only segment, as a half hour episode had to run shorter for American broadcast to make room for the increased number of commercials. These segment were generally music segments of no consequence, but I can easily see that this particular one was flagged to be cut from the US version for censor appeasement - in this case invalidating Miles' argument.

For the curious, it's in the second season episode hosted by John Cleese.

Tired of the same old Ikea bookshelves?

Time to Pimp My Billy!

Well, I screwed that up

Yesterday I put up two posts about where to go to listen to music. Today I discover that yesterday was No Music Day.

Sorry.

Take the memes and make a theme

There's plenty of potato peeling being done this morning!

[embedded video removed - youtube is acting weird today. See it here.]


And then comes the shopping! (via Cool Blue Shed)

The Armchair Traveller

I am alerted to a recently published book that compiles a few works by a 19th century travel writer named Favell Lee Mortimer.

In the middle of the 1800s, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer set out to write an ambitious guide to all the nations on Earth. There were just three problems. She had never set foot outside Shropshire. She was horribly misinformed about virtually every topic she turned her attention to. And she was prejudiced against foreigners. The result was an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece: 'People who are dainty must not come to Norway.' 'If the Siberians' taste in dress is laughable, their taste in food is horrible.' 'British America [Canada]'s Lake Superior is so immense, that Ireland might be bathed in it; that is, if islands could be bathed.' In "The Clumsiest People in Europe", Todd Pruzan has gathered together a selection of Mrs Mortimer's finest moments, celebrating the woman who turned ignorance into an art form.

You can purchase the volume (as I will, if after Christmas has gone past I've not been given a copy) in the usual manner (US,UK) or go to Google Books where a large number of her original volumes have been scanned and posted. To help you out, here are the links to her volumes on Asia and Australia, Africa and America and Europe.

To give you a quick hint of what is in store, a quick skim allowed me to find her entry on the city of Liverpool, which I now post in its entirety:

And one more once.

In my post about places to go on the interwebs to hear some fine music, I forgot to add Crying all the Way to the Chip Shop, "The sentimental musings of an ageing British expat in words, music, and pictures." It's fast becoming one of my favorites.

Actually, Doctor Doom and I went to the same tennis camp

As part of my Thanksgiving travels, I find myself in the company of a six-year old boy whose blossoming interest in superheros has caused him to come into possession of a copy of the Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus (US, UK) (Pronounced AAAAAAAHM-nee-bus).

He's been waiting for me to show up, as he was told that I know all about superheros. I think that this might have been taken to mean that I am friends with them.

The young lad is particularly taken with Doctor Doom, particularly after I told him that Doom is not a robot. It is terribly unfair that other villains appear twice in the Omnibus, but Doom only appears once. We have just finished having a long discussion on how Doctor Doom's arms and legs can bend even though they are encased in metal.

I like this kid. He is going to go far.

Helpful Hint: "If you have to be in a fight with a robot, you gotta punch the robot in the throat, so that you make its head fall off and that's how you win."

This week off pod

I've left the little bugger home for the holidays, so I'll quick share some other sources of good sound I've been nibbling at lately.

PVAc to 44.1 kHz is a music blog that posts entire albums - almost all of which have never been released on CD ever. Consistently excellent stuff.

I've been dipping my toe into tapes of entire John Peel programs. I've had phases of looking at his playlists and descriptions of his tastes, but I'm finding that there is no better method of getting into his head than listening to a nice two hour broadcast. (I'm even starting to appreciate Kevin Ayers.) Here's a good place to start from.

Pandora has just expanded its "Music Genome" to include classical pieces. Naturally, I have been goofing around with it.

Finally NPR has been fiddling about with their music interface. This means that I'm not going to link to the things that I was going to. I can't find them anymore. When I can find them again, I will link to them. So there.

Girls with blue whiskers tied up with noodles.

Thanksgiving week

Posting will either be lighter or heavier this week, depending on the whims of the Turkey Gods.

Late harvest

Enjoy the best crop circles of 2007.

Already?

I was hoping to put off my annual look at the UK Christmas single woo ha until December started, but I am alerted to an underdog that I must champion.

Christmas chart battles are usually the territory of reality TV stars, novelty artists and Westlife, but this year a very unlikely pop star has thrown his hat into the yuletide ring.

Malcolm Middleton, once of Scottish "miserabilists" Arab Strap and now a successful miserabilist in his own right, has announced he will release the single "We're All Going to Die" in a bid to make it the Xmas number one single.

"Dying is a bit like writing a letter to Santa," explains Middleton, by way of a press release, "unless you've been a good boy or girl, you're fucked."

Go to his MySpace for a listen, it's quite nihilisticly jolly!

Copyright kielbasa

In the news

Boy George Charged For Allegedly Enslaving a Norwegian

Continuing with the genres

Continuing on with my glurbling on about Saturday Morning bubblegum pop, I offer this bit of fluff, a segment from the 1969-71 Hardy Boys cartoon. The conceit of the show being that in addition to solving crimes, the boys are in a band. The producers of the show were able to push out two soundtrack comps of the songs, which are now quite the collector's items.

So, enjoy the excellently catchy well-produced tune, while also goggling in amazement at the astonishingly rotoscoped psychedelic animation.



Meanwhile, here is a review that cought my eye - The Duke of Straw examines Corb Lund's new CD and proclaims it to be "the greatest horse warfare album ever." I think I will recant all the bad things I have ever said about genre compartmentalization if I can find my way to a store that has a labeled section for "music about horse warfare."

Have a taste.

This Week in Pod doesn't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard

Between my last post and this one, I have added a grand total of three CDs to my iPod. They are:

Various Artists - Mojo Magazine: Americana 2004
Various Artists - The Songs of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Various Artists - Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

I have a playlist programed to only play things that have been added in the past week, so currently I have a playlist that only contains the contents of those three discs.

It's an odd mix. The three of them are odd mixes to begin with, but mixing them together is particularly odd.

From what I've been able to tell, "Americana" is a term that started out in the early nineties as sort of an umbrella term for record stores that didn't want to have separate racks for "Blues" and "Country/Western." As it was presented as a holistic genre, contemporary artists began believing that it really was one, and we are left with things like Gomez. I am very strange about "Americana" because while I hate the genre as a concept, I tend to really like just about everything that gets coded with the term.

(I am a hoot in record and video stores when I am in a foul mood and start asking the manager to quantify the genres. I stopped going to Blockbuster because every time I went in I took issue with the fact that they had separate sections for "Action" and "Adventure." "If this 'Action' film turns out to be quite adventurous, can I get a refund?")

Boyce and Hart were a songwriting team/occasional band. History has caused them to be be best known for their stint writing for The Monkees, but a look at their resume shows that they had their fingers in a lot of the sixties. One thing that they didn't have their fingers in, I discover, was what was called "The Bosstown Sound," a bunch of bands from Boston that were marketed heavily in the mid-sixties as an American response to the "British Invasion" bands. (See, here's those arbitrary genres again.) I had presumed that Paul Revere and the Raiders was one of the Bosstown bands, because their first single was a Boyce/Hart tune and, well, the name and the whole Spirit of 76 outfit/getting their photos taken with muskets thing.

Turns out the guy's name was really Paul Revere, and he showed up at precisely the wrong time, or right time depending on how you want to look at it. The Boyce/Hart song was "I'm not Your Stepping Stone," later covered by The Monkees, and then The Sex Pistols. You could write a dissertation on the meaning and trajectory of that one song.

I'm certain I picked up the Scooby-Doo CD because it had the tracks from the first season that played in the background as our heroes were being chased back and forth across the screen. While televised animation of the late sixties and early seventies stunk to high heaven, the folks making it were blessed with a bunch of talent pumping out the bubblegum pop in the background. Also on the disk are two tracks from the era of Scooby Doo when every episode had a guest star, and the musically inclined guest stars would do a song. These two tracks are from Davy Jones, who was at the time recording with Boyce and Hart, and Jerry Reed, who would later become best known for acting in and performing the theme song to Smokey and the Bandit, in a genre that is now wrapped into "Americana." It all comes together quite nicely, doesn't it?

Most Played Song:

Thea Gilmore - "Bad Moon Rising"

I pick ten tracks at random:

Abra Moore - "Summer's Ending"
Paul McCartney - "Nod Your Head"
Kirsten Bråten Berg - "Bånsuller"
764-HERO - "You Were a Party"
Jimi Hendrix - "Love Love"
Cold 8 - "Club Hearts"
Lisa Loeb - "Furious Rose"
Brian Keane - "American Open"
Maire Brennan - "Peacemaker"
Matisyahu - "Close My Eyes"

For hard drive space (and my own sanity) I do have to delete the occasional album. This week I deleted:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

I had completely forgotten that I owned this CD:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

The last thing that I ripped:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

The future of medicine

Let us suppose that you have been charged with the task of encouraging the youth of America to consider a future as a health care professional. What would be the obvious method to attract their attention?

That's right, an enormous rapping groundhog.



Here's the background.

++++++++

Further breaking news! It seems that there are folks who are under the impression that when the background singers are chanting "Go G-Hog," they are in fact chanting "Go Jihad." While it seems likely that these folks are not serious, the idea that someone could think that this video is some sort of subliminal message makes it even more amusing.

Yay!

There's a new Lucky Luke film coming out!

See the trailer.

This Week in Pod Has Lost Track of the Time

I think I shall have to abandon all hope of turning into a feature that I do regularly, and just keep on chugging it out when I can.

Luckily, I've slowed down the process of ripping CDs to match the slowdown in posting about it.

There are two reasons for this: First, I've been busy. Second, I've been noticing that my hard drive has been filling up. Because my hard drive has been filling up, I'm going to have to start making a lot more choices about what to remove then I have been.

First, I will probably have to get rid of the video that has filled up a few loose gigs. As my iPod is one of those video deelies, I've been taking the opportunities to download the free video content that iTunes has to offer. Most of these things I have yet too actually watch, but they are filling up about twelve gigabytes, so I suppose they ought to be jettisoned to make way for other things. For the curious these videos include:

1. The pilot episode of The Starter Wife. This is another in the current hip genre of shows about how interesting it is to see horrifically rich white assholes being made vaguely uncomfortable.
   
2. A Sesame Street Special about muppets with asthma. As someone who grew up as an asthmatic child, I do appreciate the attempt at informing the youth of the nation that if your classmate has fallen over and is unable to breathe, it is perhaps unkind to start tickling them. Unfortunately, I have yet to actually watch a moment of this. I think that in the back of my mind, I am saving it on my iPod for the moment when I suddenly collapse in front of a schoolyard, I can show the traumatized schoolchildren the episode while I dig through my manbag for my inhaler.
   
3. The first episode of Curl Girls. This is a reality show about a bunch of lesbians who like to surf. It is conceptually impervious to snark.
   
4. The first episode of Scott Baio is 45 ... and Single. Oh, let's just face it, if you put something up on iTunes for free, I'm going to download it.
   
5. The 15 minute short film which was meant to be a prequel to a film now in current release, but which seems to have attracted attention not for the merits of the short film itself, but rather the moment in it where a currently popular starlet takes her pants off. (I'm being rather circumspect, to foil the Google-bots) I have yet to see the actual film that this is a prequel to, so I think I cannot comment on the short as an independent work.

And we go forward:

Most Played Song:

The Pernice Brothers - "Somerville"

I pick ten tracks at random:

The Boomtown Rats - "Go Man Go"
Sinead Lohan - "Disillusioned"
The Gufs - "Give Back Yourself"
The Waifs - "Circles"
Steve Earle - "Nothing but a Child"
Kurt Wiell - "No 13: Mattes! Mattes!"
The Police - "Peanuts (live)"
Vic Chesnutt - "Girl's Say"
Yo-Yo Ma - "Franck: Sonata in A for Violin & Piano"
John Lennon - "Cold Turkey"

Hey! I got the Yo-Yo Ma the last time I did the random shuffle. That's weird.

For hard drive space (and my own sanity) I do have to delete the occasional album. This week I deleted:

Tiny Tim - Live in Chicago with the New Duncan Imperials

I had completely forgotten that I owned this CD:

"anything by The Cranberries" - I have two of them! I might have gambled that I had the CD with "Linger" on it, but I have two! Oh boy!

The last thing that I ripped:

Diamanda Galas and John Paul Jones - The Sporting Life

Enjoy a truly strange ad from Thailand

Not only am I an architect!

But I can play an awesome cowbell!

and if all else fails...

The Simple Dollar has advice on "Dealing With Professional Burnout Without Quitting Your Job"

It has nine bullets.

Number eight summed up is "Get your resume together so you can quit."

Number nine summed up is "What the hell, Quit!"

I suppose this means I have to throw some sort of internet keg party