And I should be revising, so it seems as good a time as any to post here again. So! Homeopathy, glad that went away... Oh. I must develop some new obsessions!
music: Jethro Tull - Songs From The Wood
Friday, March 19, 2010
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Notes and Chords Mean Nothing To Me
Rather a shame that the title gives away what is to come! Still, give these lads money, underwear etc...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Pusillanimous Priest Produces Piffle
When I started this blog I intended to provide a fair bit of writing about matters secular and religious, and hopefully to produce some insightful commentary.
Thus today's comments by Rowan Williams would seem like prime material for acute, insightful dissection.
What a fucking numpty the man is.
Music: The Almighty - Crank
Thus today's comments by Rowan Williams would seem like prime material for acute, insightful dissection.
What a fucking numpty the man is.
Music: The Almighty - Crank
Monday, February 04, 2008
Life In Cold Blood.
Attenborough.
Extraordinary.
With all this wonder and simply awesome richness and variety, why on earth would anyone find such a tawdry idea as God to be more attractive than reality?
If these are animals then I am proud to be one and wouldn't swap it for all your angels. When I feel tenderness and love I shall imagine myself to be as beautiful and as glorious as a turtle or a crocodile.
If you need to sell kidneys to see this one, get your scalpels out now.
Music: The Duke Spirit - Neptune
Extraordinary.
With all this wonder and simply awesome richness and variety, why on earth would anyone find such a tawdry idea as God to be more attractive than reality?
If these are animals then I am proud to be one and wouldn't swap it for all your angels. When I feel tenderness and love I shall imagine myself to be as beautiful and as glorious as a turtle or a crocodile.
If you need to sell kidneys to see this one, get your scalpels out now.
Music: The Duke Spirit - Neptune
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Time to admit it...
I may just have been wrong about all that spiritual stuff...
But have I also been wrong about moustaches?
But have I also been wrong about moustaches?
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
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.)
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.)
Sunday, December 02, 2007
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
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
Friday, November 30, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, November 23, 2007
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
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
Monday, November 19, 2007
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.)
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.)
Monday, November 12, 2007
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
I've just bought a new duvet and so will be going to bed soon.
In the meantime...
Music: Comets On Fire - Avatar
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)