The future of music, in a strange alternate universe.

Get Down!

Season's greetings to Pirate Skulls everywhere!

Dammit, Jimmy Page still knows how to look cool when he wants to. Is this fair use? I suppose it's commentary.

First Song, First Album

Or what about 'Good Times/ Bad Times', come to that: 'In the days of my youth...'

Why didn't they ask me?

There was a review by Colin Tudge in yesterday's Graun of a book which purports to debunk Dawkins et al. The review was startlingly fallacious - I have no idea about the book, not having read it - and so I was going to witter on about it here.

But bugger that! Led Zeppelin are playing tonight fer fuxake! Yes, this lot:



Corks. I was glad to find that video, as that would be the 'Telecaster as offensive weapon' I was talking about on a previous post. There's a still more ferocious version of the song here.

No I didn't get tickets.

But the reason for posting was that I realised that unbelievably, I have failed to have the 'what will they/should they play' conversation with anybody, in particular the will they/won't they play You Know What thing. What kind of geek do I think I am?

Well, My two pennyworth is this: I think they should start with it. No one will expect that, and most importantly it will get it off their chests right from the start; speculation dealt with, they can then get on with the rest of the gig and play. More than all that, though, it would work terrifically in terms of dynamics. Picture it thus - pitch black stage, and spotlights pick out each of 'em in turn as they come into the song, Page first, then Jones, Plant and finally, ahem, JB, who will get a HUGE response, I hereby predict. Instead of a hammer blow to start with, we go from hush to a roar, within the first song. The trouble with opening up hard and fast is that in terms of dynamics, you've nowhere to go but down; after this, they can go anywhere they like.

In the recent Queens of the Stone Age DVD they open spectacularly with Go With The Flow, an excellent WHAM of a beginning with a terrific visual punch to go with it. The trouble is, that song has rather a down beat chorus, the melody descending and releasing rather than climaxing, and so you feel that the impact is lost even before the first tune is over.

If you have to go with attacking from the off then it would have to be CB I guess, as in the above vids. One of the first songs they ever nicked, sorry, wrote, and it, ahem, never fails to bring the proverbial Rock, as far as I'm concerned. Somehow it's all in that one riff, a bridge from Cochran to Hetfield and beyond.

My prediction, though? It would take a heart of stone not to be sorely tempted by the sheer cheesy appropriateness of 'It's been a long time since I rock 'n' rolled', would it not? Either that or D'yer Mak'er. Not so much Sons of Thunder as Sons of Althea and Donna.

NME and Uncut will be blogging live as the band plays. I will be watching, because I'm old enough not to care if you think I'm sad.

Aaah - aaaaaah - AH!

(Now, if he can still do that, I'll be impressed.)

Your Kung Fu lousy.

Well, here's a splendid video. To summarise, amazing martial arts magician demonstrates his fabulous Chi powers and chucks his students around the room without laying a finger on them! He challenges any martial artist (or possibly any martial artist from a particular discipline, I don't know) to fight him for tons of money! Do I need to spell out the next bit? Here it is:



So, how does this all happen? My strongest hunch is that these students actually believed all that they were doing. There are a huge amount of social pressures which push people to act in the ways expected of them, but that doesn't mean that the students are putting it on. They think they are going to get knocked about by magic, and so they are. He thinks he can knock people about by magic, and so he can - as long as they've drunk the kool-aid (I nicked that). People can persist in these parallell worlds absolutely forever, unless something happens to fracture it. And you know what? I bet that even now that guy believes he can do it, it's just that the meridians weren't flowing right, or the other guy secretly practiced ultra anti-chi woo more powerful than his woo...

So, don't ever give me 'lots of people think homeopathy has worked for them so it must be true', because it's bollocks. As are crystals. Psychics. MMR did not cause your child's autism, and the strength of your conviction that it did is the strength of the force beating the student around the head so that he is helpless, vibrating in space.

I wonder if there's something here, too, about how it is that manifest fools like Rumsfeld and Bush can command so much respect and obedience for so long. There's lots more to this, but I'm tired now. Laugh at the fool!

Music: Neu!2

My teddy bear is called 'God is a cunt.'

So, what can we say about the Sudan that will shed any light onto the sorry spectacle playing itself out over there? For one thing, it needs to be noted that people out there have been being murdered, tortured and raped in their thousands, without so much as a naming a beanie baby after Abraham. In a sense, then, the current spectacle is not really that important.

Still, it's unedifying in the extreme, isn't it. I've thought of all sorts of epithets for the numpties on the streets who are so upset about their wretched prophet being apparently insulted, but truly what they are is wretchedly ignorant. I don't know whether they have been whipped up by local authorities into their frenzy or if its truly spontaneous or, indeed, what, but it amounts to the same thing.

One thing, though: if, as, of course, all the moderate voices agree, this is ridiculous, then it is equally ridiculous for there to be any suggestion that it is not OK to insult religion in any way. Offense is in the eye of the offended, and how offended they are should never ever be used as a measure of whether what was done was illegal or otherwise reprehensible. The Sudanese have a point, in the sense that the intentionality of the person causing offense is irrelevant, it's just that they draw the wrong conclusion.

And you know what else? As long as we allow there to be a law against blasphemy on our statute books, we are the sodding numpties. There is no better justification for it than for burning teddy bears. This is not Islam's problem, it is the problem of any system of thought which privileges recieved wisdom, because belief without evidence (i.e. faith), no matter how apparently benign, is a doublethink which inevitably leads to absurdity. And blasphemy laws do nothing other than protect people from having to listen to facts and opinions and, indeed, lies, which might challenge their doublethink.

And by the way, if your God, the arbiter of the afterlife, really wants you to kill people who say rude things about him or his, when he has all eternity to do as he wishes with them, then he is a miserable, wretched hobgoblin who deserves every insult he gets.


Appropriate, time, then, to rediscover this. I heard this when it was first broadcast, inserted in the middle of a routine radio 4 topical comedy show. The visuals are well done, but will, I fear, add little to the experience. Just listen...




oops! forgot to add the Music: not sure now; Either Lou Reed - Rock 'n' Roll Animal or Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile. Probably.

Phew, FW...!

Having heard about it ages ago, I finally got around to checking out Snopes. This is a worthy website whose purpose is to debunk - or occasionally verify - the ludicrous rumours that get spread around the interweb, like looking at asylum seekers will cause your eyeballs to get infested with horrid parasites. That sort of thing. Next time someone FWs you some scurrilous rumour, go here and you will quickly discover if its fer real or just nasty minded crap.

Gast me flabbers, though, at what is number two on the list of current rumours. That's right, Philip Pullman's books have anti-religious themes, and they've been made into movies! In case you're rabidly clicking to find out what else it's all about, I'm afraid I must disappoint you. That's it. At the risk of sounding like a Spitfire pilot, or even a teenager, like, duh.

This is the second most shocking piece of info currently tearing its way from computer to computer in the most powerful nation on Earth. Fear for your children! Free thought alert! At some point I may return to this computer and pour forth some more bile about this, but QI's on in a tick and there might be some people there who can cope with the idea that it's all right to think that the universe and life happened in the way that the evidence suggests they did, rather than having to protect your kids from any actual information so that they can continue to swallow like gannets the absurd cosmology of a two and a half thousand year old desert sky god cult and another thing ...


Music: Skindred - Roots Rock Riot

Spoilers below. And blasphemy.

Mark was up last week as he says here, and delighted I am that he had a good time!

While he was up, he remarked that it was rumoured in some quarters that the upcoming Pullman adaptations have actually left in a good deal more critique of the Catholic church than they are letting on; slipping it in under the counter, so to speak. Nicole Kidman was dumb enough to marry insane midget Tom Cruise, so I guess she'll believe whatever she's told. I simply can't be bothered to search out the bit where she says she's a Catholic and so wouldn't be in a film which was against Catholicism, but it's out there somewhere.

I can't help thinking that there must be something to this. You can mess around with the trappings of the Magisterium in order to make the resemblance less obvious, by all means. But just how, exactly, do they propose to alter the later books, where God turns up and turns out to be a wretched fraudulent tosser, in order to pretend that this is not the assault on religion and hymn to skepticism that it is blatantly intended to be? It wouldn't be the first time Hollywood completely obliterated source material, of course, but Pullman's involved in this project, I believe, so here's hoping.

Music: Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains The Same (the new version, and it sounds awesome. The old version of this was rubbish. Amazing job.)

My best, most pithy and meaningful post ever.

Because I am a walking tragedy, and at rather a loose end tonight (definitely avoidance behaviour, as I really should be practicing) I've been wondering how to add one of those little bits at the bottom for popping in info on the Rock that is currently Rocking Me. Like what Mark does. And I dod wonder if it was a bit of a rip off. But then I thought sod it, I'll just type the bugger. So I will, in a minute. Maybe I'll actually ask Mark if and how he has that set up. But that would be confessing that I've been actually thinking about this....
I've just bought a new duvet and so will be going to bed soon.
In the meantime...

Music: Comets On Fire - Avatar

Try it!

How do you confuse a Mail reader?





Tell them that asylum seekers kill paedophiles.

Young people today...

So I joined Facebook. It's like discovering how your granny felt about the video recorder.

This is almost certainly a breach of copyright, but I really don't think anyone will mind. By the way, homeopathy is a fraud.

To cut a long story short, various homeopaths were caught red-handed peddling bloody dangerous twaddle. An article about this on a blog appeared, and the Society of Homeopaths bullied the blog provider into taking it down. You can read more about it here. Having read that, I thought, what the heck, I'll post the article myself. This may be an unnecessary gesture, as it is now out there in lots of places, including, I think, its original home. But I want to. So here it is:

'The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.
The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.
As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

"48 • Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.• No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.
72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease."

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.
Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

"Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems."

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

"Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. … The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs…"

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.
Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

"The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective."

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.
However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that ’she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics’. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.
A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

"introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya."

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for ‘treating’ various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

"is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack."

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.
Let’s remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

"there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won’t find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice."

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.
Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the ‘immediate priority’ to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?
I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?
It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?
At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?'

So much for God; now you, Adolf...

Check this out here or here.

For a taste, try this:

'… [Dawkins's] sense of 'Fascism' is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument. The lack of that necessary body of knowledge fatally undermines Dawkins's right to attack Fascism in the first place.'

Absurd? Well, no! Look at this: 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. ' 'What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?'

More from the more serious review:

'Worse, he does not seem to realise that his own position, so-called non-Fascism, is actually a kind of Fascism: a structure of belief determined by Fascism, dependent for many of its core ideas on Fascist traditions.'

'I am not, of course, suggesting that Fascism has been perfect; no reasonable Fascist would. Whilst it's true that the Leader is the inerrant embodiment of the will of the People—ordinary Fascists themselves are prone to all the fallibilities of the human condition.'

Enough; go read the whole thing. I only wish I'd thought of it.

Beware! Screaming Gittery!

Everybody in the world really should read Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn from today in full. But for the heck of it, here's a few choice quotes:

'If it wasn't for the Enlightenment, you wouldn't be reading this right now. You'd be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch.'

' "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination.'

And I can't edit this paragraph at all without losing a bit I really like, so here 'tis:

'Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies. Everywhere you look, screaming gittery is taking root, with serious consequences. The NHS recently spent £10m refurbishing the London Homeopathic Hospital. The equivalent of 500 nurses' wages, blown on a handful of magic beans. That was your tax money. It was meant for saving lives.'

All television reviews should be like this.

Ooh, get her!

I love a nicely turned piece of understatement, so here's one from today's Guardian single reviews:

'note: "reasonably agreeable" is not really a compliment in rock'n'roll'.

Envoy to WHERE?!

Around fifteen years ago a friend and I compiled an imaginary tape to have been entitled 'Thatch No More'. The details are lost in the mists of time and that long ago drunken haze, but the lead off track was to have been 'Glad To See You Go' by the Ramones.

Please don't misunderstand, I love America, but no one can embarrass you like those you love...

Well, now. I recognise that brainstorming can be very productive, and that you've got to throw around as many ridiculous ideas as you can in order to get at the good ones. But Gay Bombs? Gay Bombs? Only in the confused, repressed, creationist mind of a midwestern Colonel, surely.

As is often the case, Stephen Fry has expressed it in a way which probably cannot be bettered:

“Tell you what, lovely army, very nice vehicles and things; d’you have any grown-ups anywhere?”

As if I didn't have enough to do

I fear I'm going to have to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at some point. Try this passage:

‘But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.’

Isn't that lovely? I'd count myself a serious writer if I could manage a passege that good just the once...

Life in a Secular State

On the radio this morning, I heard one of the Republican candidates for the Presidency of you know where. It seems that following outcry from various scientists and the like, he had decided to moderate his earlier comment that he did not believe in evolution. He now said that all he knew was that God had created the world, but was not too concerned with how, and didn't see that it affected his ability to carry out the duties of the President.

Well, as far as relevance to his duties goes, it would demonstrate a capacity for rational thought. And it would demonstrate that he could take on board uncomfortable information, rather than just pretending the world was the way he wanted it to be and acting accordingly.

So I suppose he was right, at that.