Everything old is new, eventually
It often seems these days like everything ever recorded by everyone will at some point become available on CD (or whatever audio format lies further down the track). This is, after all, the age of the reissue, and, moreso, the age of the previously unissued. Sometimes it may take a while to rear its head, but it'll rear it eventually. Eleven years after it was recorded, Fear Factory's "new" album Concrete is finally doing exactly that.
Concrete represents not only the first recordings of the band but also the first work of its producer, Ross Robinson. The story of the album is told in the liner notes and briefly goes like this: Robinson recorded the album with the band in 1991, and then attempted to get them to sign a contract with him. The band refused, wound up in court, and left with the rights to the songs and the publishing. Robinson left with the rights to the actual sound recordings.
The band then used their copy of the tape as a demo, securing a deal with Roadrunner Records, who eventually bought the tape from Robinson and who present us with Concrete at last. You've actually probably heard many of these songs before, as the band rerecorded eight of them with Colin Richardson for their first released album, Soul Of A New Machine. The liner notes describe the various fates of the songs; some of them even saw action long after this time, with one track being rerecorded during the Obsolete sessions in 1998 and turning up as a B-side on the "Resurrection" single.
History will note Fear Factory as one of the most interesting metal bands of recent years, and Concrete permits us to go back to their beginnings. In 1991 they were still a pretty much straightforward death metal band, although even in those days they were not averse to leavening vocalist Burton C. Bell's death growls with more melodic vocal lines and throwing in the occasional sample too. Still, it's a work of comparative juvenilia, as evidenced by the lyrics; although Concrete features no lyric sheet, Soul Of A New Machine does, hence we can check out at least some of the songs and see they're relatively limited compared to their later stuff; there seems to be little if any of the technophobia the later albums display. (Odd, perhaps, given the amount of technology the band made their music with.)
Then there's Ross Robinson's production. The cover art for the album is a scratchy thing in various shades of grey, much rougher than the art for their later albums, and you could say the same for the production job too. Robinson's production is primarily sympathetic to Dino Cazares' guitars and secondarily to Raymond Herrera's drum work. Vocalist Bell comes out of things less well; his tenor register in particular seems to suffer a certain lack of definition. (The liner notes leave me in some confusion over the bass parts, first claiming one Andy Romero was the bassist—the photo in the album shows a quartet—but then state Dino Cazares played bass on all tracks.)
All told, then, Concrete probably demonstrates more than anything that both parties involved, Robinson and Fear Factory, had better things ahead of them. Still, it makes for fascinating listening and gains some power from its relative compactness, with only four of the sixteen songs lasting over three minutes and only one of those lasting over four, plus a further three tracks that clock in under two minutes. Fans of Fear Factory in particular and the metal genre in general will almost certainly need to hear this.
6:14 PM | link
Massive Attack join "Don't Attack Iraq" campaign.
The trio emerged from the southwestern city of Bristol in 1991 with a platinum-selling album "Blue Lines," and are widely credited as forefathers of the darker "trip-hop" genre.
Er... Massive Attack haven't been a trio for a few years. Andrew Vowles quit the band around '99 if I remember correctly and they've been a duo ever since. Still, good to see the band staying together long enough to do this; if only they'd stay together long enough to release the album they've spent the last few years working on, as rumours were they'd broken up a few months ago and weren't going to be putting it out.
4:38 PM | link
Vince Neil storms out of show when audience don't know the lyrics to his songs. I know bands like to have their audiences sing back to them, especially in big stadium settings, but you really shouldn't rely on them to know the words for you...
4:18 PM | link
John Oates releases new solo album, insists Hall and Oates "plan to keep playing and recording even if their years of massive success are over". You mean they're even still in the music business?
4:15 PM | link
Reality TV takes "groundbreaking," "alarming" and "actually kind of sick" turn. And those are comments from the network producing the show discussed here, not critics of it.
4:09 PM | link
If the US is going to take out Saddam Hussein, perhaps they should add his fucking son to the hitlist.
The 38-year-old Uday ordered reportedly a servant to force the
advisor to drink two liters of Whiskey and then calmly watched how the man died of alcohol poisoning.
Whisky in Iraq? Isn't that supposed to be a good Muslim country?
3:45 PM | link
So much for being bulletproof.
Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini had only been using the £110,000 Mercedes-Benz car for two days when the tyre was punctured.
The Durban dealership which sold him it says it will cost £1,300 for a new tyre from Germany.
A spokesman says although the special tyres can resist bullets, small sharp objects like nails can still penetrate them.
Call me confused, but I thought bullets were small sharpish objects too. Or do the tyres only resist small sharp objects moving at a certain velocity?
3:32 PM | link
The war of words on Lygon St. I don't know what to make of this. I was in Carlton a couple of years ago and found myself being fairly fond of Readings while I was there. On the other hand, much as I know I should probably be against giant multinationals driving out smaller local competition, I do kind of like Borders, or at least the Sydney version of same. Still, the dozens of Italian restaurants on Lygon St don't seem to be putting each other out of competition, so I don't know that Borders will necessarily kill Readings off...
3:04 PM | link
Man found with child porn claims he was only trying to eradicate it from the Net. Of course. The world is safe from child porn as long as it's contained in your machine, eh?
2:58 PM | link
Well the search statistics have turned psycho today. I got all of these today up to this moment:
MEN FUCKING DOGS
judge michael finnane
wil wheaton age
finnane rape terry healey
find australian email address michael finnane
"Jim Henley" poetry
Michael FINNANE
N.S.W district court finnane j
celebrity fakes
c.i.a. flyer ads
elvis fakes death
Chomsky Enola Gay petition
"cold war" lyrics "and i don't" song 1984
christian1000
dokic fakes
I know Michael Finnane is the judge who gave that rapist 55 years the other day. I otherwise have no idea what to say about any of these, particularly the last and third last ones. I can't wait to see what else I get today.
2:51 PM | link
I have as of today received a thousand hits since transferring my counter to the blog page. That astonishes me. Used to take anywhere up to six months to pull in that many people with the old site. Here's the latest batch of searches from the counter stats:
pieter van zyl rugby photos
news of pauline chan commits suicide
Pauline Chan suicide death
SEX VIDEO HOT
Actor James who was stabbed
peter elliot new zealand actor
weird news items
lyrics for Zambian national anthem
TRANSCENDTAL MEDITATION
black white sex
Hot Buttered
Russell
man impaled on cactus
conpsiracy theories
Of course those two with the typos are strangely galling cos they make me look like a complete fucking idiot. But the one for the Zambian national anthem is just a classic. And who is Pauline Chan and what's this about her committing suicide?
10:17 PM | link
Evangelists reckons Muslims haven't apologised enough for Sept. 11. DUH, Franklin. Of course not. You should know they partake of an evil religion, you said so yourself.
9:56 PM | link
US gives the gift of sperm to the UK. So that's how you carry out your great imperialistic plans; fuck war, just impregnate the other guys and pass on your genes...
9:05 PM | link
As 50 or so of us—mainly American tourists—waited in a small auditorium, the first of the show's oddities could be noted in the programme. "A cigarette is smoked during this performance," ticket-buyers were advised. In this detail, the America of before September 11 came into collision with the nation after that day. A country in which 3,000 people had been murdered in their workplace by flying bombs still felt it necessary to warn an audience of the risk of passive smoking. You could feel the national definition of danger in painful transition.
Pressure group wants Eight Legged Freaks posters banned. Normally I'd just say this was frivolous, but my arachnophobia puts me behind this one.
8:38 PM | link
Chinese teenagers learn about sex through porn. Surprise surprise!
8:27 PM | link
Shop refuses to serve customers with "visible underwear". I could make an obvious joke about how customers have to wear invisible undies to shop there, but I'll try not to.
8:25 PM | link
South Australia finally proclaims the end of WW2. Apparently the Emergency Powers Act of 1941 was still in effect and no one noticed.
8:22 PM | link
Catherine Keenan on Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Saw this at a media preview two months ago; finally I can review it on the show this week. I wouldn't use the term "masterpiece", as many critcs have tripped over themselves to call it, but it's undeniably a remarkable achievement.
8:05 PM | link
Student gets 50 years jail for school shooting. No word yet on whether or not this has been deemed out of proportion. Given that the kid was facing 425 years, it could be argued he got off lightly, I suppose...
7:55 PM | link
Nick Whitlam thinks he's being picked on because of his name.
The disgraced NRMA director insisted his family connection was critical as he was also hit with a $20,000 fine by NSW Supreme Court judge Ian Gzell for breaching Corporations Law.
"If my name was Smith or Jones it would not attract the same attention," Mr Whitlam told Sydney radio 2UE soon after Justice Gzell's decision.
"I have no doubt that they (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission) pursued me because my name was Whitlam.
"It not only hurts me, it hurts my immediate family, it hurts my family at large, it hurts my father. It's designed to hurt my father."
Get your hand off it, Nick. I'm sure Gough's too busy wallowing in his own delusions of legendary status to feel like people are targeting him by proxy. A fuckwit by any other name would reek as badly...
7:39 PM | link
Criminologist seems to think 55 years for gang rape is a bit much.
He said crimes needed to be viewed in their proper context.
"The real problem with very, very long jail sentences is that we need to retain proportionality in the NSW criminal justice system," Mr North said.
"It would be very difficult to tell the parents of the girls who are murdered that a 20-year sentence was sufficient if 40-year sentences are being handed down where people are not murdered."
OK, so make things proportional. Increase the sentences for murder. I see his point to a certain extent, but I think it's a pretty spurious argument for reducing the length of the sentence. It'll be interesting to see if it does get knocked down on appeal; I think there'll be some outcry if it does. And though I don't always agree with Chris Textor's opinions, you have to marvel at his expression of them.
7:23 PM | link
Piers Akerman reminisces about Elvis, and his indirect part in getting a muckraking book about him into print. He opens with this statement:
Working in Hollywood in the 1970s, those in the swim or who wished to give the impression they were dropped first names into the pond on the assumption there was only one Jack (Nicholson), Warren (Beatty), Roman (Polanski), Marlon (Brando) or Elvis.
Unless my own knowledge of the American film industry has some particularly bad holes in it, there surely wouldn't have been that many other people with the first names Roman or Marlon working in said industry at that time who could've been confused with Messrs Polanski or Brando, let alone Elvis (the IMDB actually reveals several people with all those names who've worked in films, but I doubt they were all in Hollywood in the 1970s), so one doubts there would've been many conversations where people said "oh, THAT Roman and Marlon and Elvis? Sorry, I thought you meant Roman Rstkhiladze, Marlon Pires de Mendonca and
Elvis Tsui"...
7:12 PM | link
Man sued under 17th century law for emailing people. This is a really bizarre story.
6:31 PM | link
John Ashcroft wants detainment camps for "enemy combatants" now. Whatever that may mean, anyway; the definition of "enemy combatant" will likely be as broad as John boy can make it. The man really is a menace, and the only thing stopping me from shrugging my shoulders and saying "thank Yog I'm not living in the US" is that I wouldn't trust the government here not to do the same thing if they thought they could get away with it.
6:21 PM | link
Police believe Thai woman's suicide by crocodile was planned. Get away with you. I thought she'd done it on a whim.
Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm executive Charoon Yangprapakorn told the daily that the park would increase its "already strict" safety measures, but that if someone was determined to die, there was little that could be done.
"Our farm is used as a standard for other local and international crocodile farms," Charoon said.
"The only other suicide took place more than 10 years ago, after which we enlarged and reinforced the fences," he added.
That's the really bizarre thing about this whole case: not that this woman chose to kill herself by letting crocs eat her, but that someone else did the same thing before her.
6:10 PM | link
Express mail in China c.220 BC. Still in China, lost parts of the Great Wall rediscovered.
6:07 PM | link
Man dies in freak pea accident. At least it wasn't a freak pee accident. I don't know whether that would really have been worse or not...
6:02 PM | link
Remember to visit Blogcritics.com. Just saying, is all.
5:45 PM | link
The evils of the state of Delaware. It's the opening note which baffles me:
[ Editor's Note: This article erroneously states that Delaware has no gasoline tax. It does. ]
Now, if there's a known error in the text, surely the editor's function should be to correct the error rather than just note its existence? I'd have thought that's what an editor does, you know, he or she edits...
5:25 PM | link
RIP Edward Headrick, inventor of the Frisbee. Perhaps appropriately, "Steady Ed" said he wanted his ashes placed in some of his Frisbee discs:
"My father would be really happy if we actually played Frisbee with his remains," Danny Headrick said. "He said he wanted to end up in a Frisbee that accidentally lands on someone's roof."
MovieMask: lets parents "direct" films, lets the actual directors of those films get mightily pissed off.
"It's just appalling to me as a director," said Martha Coolidge, the president of the Director's Guild of America. "Movie Mask and the changes in the movie that Movie Mask is capable of can utterly change the meaning of the movie," she said.
The DGA may take legal action.
"We are going to talk to the studios and the Motion Picture Association of America and our members and look into what we can do about this legally," said Coolidge. "Movie Mask is censorship because it is someone deciding that certain things are inappropriate and cutting them out and simply changing them."
Personally it just strikes me as parents wanting someone else to take responsibility for their kids. If they're so concerned that the violence in Saving Private Ryan might warp the kids, surely the simplest and cheapest answer is to just not bring the thing into the house where they can get at it rather than this jumped-up V-chip bullshit?
5:04 PM | link
This stress relief method doesn't exactly seem to be working.
Professional stress-buster Lynn Ogilvie has been sending staff at Lothian University Hospitals Trust the daily poems.
The Daily Record reports bosses are threatening to take away email access from staff if they don't stop clogging up the system with poetry-related messages.
Ms Ogilvie says it's good for people to complain about her poems, as it allows them to release pent-up aggression.
As long as they don't take it out directly on you, dear. Perhaps the hospital bosses should just tell her to fuck off and then the staff won't have any reason to clog the system with messages damning her...
4:52 PM | link
Argentine nightclub uses cockroaches as part of the decor. I think I'll be giving that place a miss, then. And I'm slightly worried by their claim that they collected all their dead cockroaches from restaurants and pubs. I'll be giving those places a miss too, perhaps...
4:50 PM | link
96 year old woman nearly misses celebrating her hundredth birthday. In related news, a 115 year old woman discovers she's only 114.
4:46 PM | link
Politician sues opponent for hyphenating her name, claiming she now has an unfair advantage. Redefining the phrase "frivolous lawsuit"...
4:44 PM | link
John Pilger says the impending war on Iraq is really about oil. Next: John Pilger tells us something we actually haven't already guessed.
4:38 PM | link
John Polson considers remaking Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Meanwhile, expect to see "straw" and "dogs" being chosen as the signature item for the next two Tropfests.
4:23 PM | link
For the 25th anniversary of Elvis leaving the building, Jon Casimir names his top Elvis picks. None of the soundtrack material is included, you'll notice. Wonder if there'll ever be a re-evaluation of the Elvis movies; everything else seems fair game these days for people trying to restore things to critical favour...
4:21 PM | link
Man faces 60 years jail for pack rape.
In sentencing submissions for X in the NSW District Court today, defence barrister Terry Healey said the cumulative prison terms for the offences could be as much as 60 years.
"It would be a crushing penalty, unprecedented by anything we have seen before," Mr Healey told the court.
Judge Michael Finnane said it appeared X was the ringleader of the pack.
"At all times during the trial he (the defendant) appeared to be the dominant one in the dock, he appeared to be the one who was pushing everyone else around, he was the major finger-clicker, he was the ... one who seemed to have the most aggressive attitude," Judge Finnane said.
"Even today he seems to have an attitude of amused contempt."
However, Mr Healey denied his client was any more culpable than the other men convicted of the rape.
Fine. Give all the cunts involved 60 years then, if they're all equally to blame.
Update: I just heard at the end of the news that the bloke actually got 55 years. Don't know what happened to the other five year (would've made it a nice round figure), but it wasn't far off the predicted mark. No word on what the others got.
4:15 PM | link
Germaine Greer tells Tony Blair: stop fucking Cherie and let her get on with her own career.
The Blairs' fourth child Leo was born two years ago and was the first baby born to a serving prime minister since the 1840s. They still have children Euan, 18, Nicky, 16, and Kathryn, 14, living with them in Downing Street.
"That is a very weird relationship," The Guardian newspaper quoted her as telling the Edinburgh International Books Festival in an address on the unequal nature of marriage.
It's called a family, dear, supposed to be one of the most natural communal relationships there is. Perhaps you would prefer the 14 year old girl to be living rough on the streets by herself or something. Apart from which, I'm damned if I can see how the Blairs' sex life is any of Germaine's damn business anyway...
4:07 PM | link
So just who's Aboriginal these days?
The way this occurs is that the Aboriginal women who partner non-Aboriginal men are doing so with men who possess more years of education and considerably higher incomes than do the Aboriginal men living with Aboriginal women. There is a similar pattern for the Aboriginal men who partner non-Aboriginal women.
Hmm. Well, that bloke living with the Aboriginal woman a few doors down from us must be keeping his massive fortune and brilliant education a secret from us all. Either that, or more likely he's just the exception to this generalisation...
3:59 PM | link
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That's the third or fourth time I've taken this test, with exactly the same answers each time, and I get a different result each time. I feel so disillusioned that an online test obviously cannot describe me with any accuracy. Still, this result is at least better than being called non-goth or a vampire. Incidentally, this test came via this site, which I shamefully haven't linked to before despite having received a number of hits from them recently. Hot Buttered Death is one of a select few blogs in the "to visit" section, along with Neil Gaiman and Wil Wheaton. I may say that's pretty good company to be keeping.
3:37 PM | link
Poor bloody Adam Ant. This whole saga of him just makes me very sad indeed.
4:31 PM | link
Phil Spector records again! He's apparently done some tracks with Starsailor, which are the first things he's done in over 20 years.
4:18 PM | link
Entertainment industry ready to take on individuals for file swapping. Because of course the entertainment can afford to run millions of simultaneous lawsuits with the royalties they deny to the artists whose interests they're allegedly serving. I can't wait for them to take the next step and sue people for actually buying their product...
4:16 PM | link
How Korean Air narrowly avoided being blown out of the sky by the US on September 11.
Pilots on Korean Air Flight 85 mistakenly issued a hijack alert at 1:24 p.m. ET as they neared Alaska on the way to Anchorage. Military officials, who had ordered two F-15 fighters to tail the jet, told Anchorage air traffic controllers that they would shoot it down if it did not turn away from populated areas, several sources told USA TODAY.[...]
Flight 85 landed safely in Whitehorse at 2:54 p.m. ET. Its transponder emitted the hijack code for the entire 90 minutes. Only after the co-pilot stepped off the jet at gunpoint and was interrogated did officials confirm that the jet had not been hijacked.
And not until today did they deign to tell anyone else, it seems. That's just mind-boggling.
4:09 PM | link
Problem discovered in Internet Explorer... after five years. I knew there was a reason why I didn't trust secure sites on the Internet... because apparently you can't, at least not while you're using IE.
4:06 PM | link
Bruce Baugh posts about why he doesn't want to say too much about the prospects of war. There's wisdom in what he has to say, and the only thing I'd say against it is that if people didn't shoot their mouths off as much as they do about stuff they don't really know a lot about, they'd run out of things to say.
3:49 PM | link
Catholic Church admits the Jews may have something with that covenant between God and them.
3:30 PM | link
British voters to be allowed to vote for "none of the above"? COOL. I'd love to be able to not have to vote for any of the scum on the ballots here at election time.
3:28 PM | link
Weekly Standard accuses New York Times of anti-Dubya agenda. Next: people surprised to discover media is biased.
3:26 PM | link
Man cleared of manslaughter when judge decides running stop signs is not reckless driving.
3:24 PM | link
Eric Olsen's Blogcritics is up and running. Already updating, too; I just checked again and found about three more reviews than there were when I first looked in during a lull in class this morning. (On the odd chance that anyone cares, I'm blogging now because I'm just taking the afternoon off instead of shopping and filmgoing. I'll still head out later for the show, though.) Yours truly is not yet on the list of contributors, for the perfectly good reason that I've not yet contributed anything. However, I have a review of the new Fear Factory album (the hitherto unreleased one recorded in 1991) in mind, so will most likely send that along.
3:15 PM | link
Police find shitloads of drugs at Grateful Dead reunion show. Like that surprises anyone?
3:00 PM | link
Artist wants Aristotle's Law enshrined as actual law.
In a philosophical effort to come up with a city law that no one could ever break, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats wants Berkeley to legally acknowledge Aristotle's law, commonly expressed as A=A.
More plainly put, it means a table is a table. A blade of grass is a blade of grass. The mayor is the mayor.
Mayor Shirley Dean was dumbfounded.
"I haven't a clue what that means," Dean said of Keats' proposition.
Few others did either as Keats tried to get them to sign his sidewalk petition Saturday near the downtown Berkeley BART station.
They don't understand "A=A"? Someone should introduce these folks to Ayn Rand. Actually no they shouldn't, there's more than enough Objectivists in the world as it is.
2:58 PM | link
Artist creates Elvis portrait using toast. With picture, on the odd chance you found the text too unbelievable.
2:48 PM | link
Taipei bookshops don't get the versions of Snow White they were expecting.
Kao Pei-yi, an aide to city councilwoman Chen Yu-mei, said children quickly discovered the books, which had innocuous titles and cartoon characters on their covers.
"It's appalling to see children sitting on the bookstore floors reading those horrific books," Kao said.
I'll bet the kids were pleased, though: "Wow, I don't remember her doing that in the cartoon..."
2:46 PM | link
Men arrested for watching porn film in car. What, was that the most private place they could find to watch it? Arseclowns.
2:44 PM | link
John Farnham prepares for his last tour. Until the next one, anyway.
2:40 PM | link
Film industry wants harsher penalties for DVD pirates.
The director Rolf de Heer later gave an example of how piracy had affected sales of one of his older films. He had lost a "solid deal" for the DVD release of Dingo, starring Colin Friels and Miles Davis, in the United States recently because pirate copies were on the market.
I wonder if there's a case to be made here that the distributor involved is actually promoting piracy, cos basically they're saying the pirate copies already out there are good enough. Of course the fucking pirates are going to harm your business if you don't put the product out there in the first place...
2:38 PM | link
Man wins $10,000 for study showing the government's mutual obligation policy to be unethical. If only he'd managed to get the government to do something about loosening the mutual obligation thumbscrews, he might've even deserved his ten grand.
2:27 PM | link
Accountants threaten paper war against Australian Tax Office. Well shit, someone better call in the UN then, eh? Don't let them get away with it, Alexander Downer! If we let the accountants away with murder, who knows what rogue profession will threaten to destabilise democracy next?
2:01 PM | link
spearfishing fish kill brain (yes... yes, I daresay it does)
couric fakes (I mean really, does this look like a celebrity fakes porn site to you?)
1:43 PM | link
By the way, if you happen to have a spare small thermonuclear device lying about the place, would you please drop it on my ISP? Their Net service tonight is rivalling even Blogger for sheer ability to shit me to tears.
7:29 PM | link
The full list of all films voted for in the latest Sight & Sound poll, along with who voted for each film. This is infinitely more interesting than the mere top 10 list. Some particularly interesting choices from Stuart Gordon and George Romero...
7:07 PM | link
Drug trade thriving around methadone clinic.
In a sullen ritual played out each day, more than 1,000 drug addicts descend on a Northeast Washington neighborhood off New York Avenue to receive treatment at the three public methadone programs in the area.
They are a primed clientele for the drug dealers who operate out of a nearby McDonald's parking lot. Brazenly hustling in broad daylight, the dealers sell a jumble of pharmaceuticals to an unrelenting stream of buyers -- an operation that D.C. police describe as the largest open-air pill market in the region.
You might wonder why, if the police know this exists, they don't seem to be doing much about it; unfortunately, there's no answer to that question in the article...
6:39 PM | link
Dead famous people and their ongoing earning power. Still, death has never been that much of an obstacle when it comes to this sort of thing, has it?
6:23 PM | link
The latest attempt to get you to re-purchase your whole record collection yet again.
It may also create another 1990s-style boom by persuading people to buy their CDs in the new format, just as baby boomers "re-bought" CDs of albums that they already owned on vinyl.
Only one problem stands in the way: the record companies are divided between two incompatible formats.
I always found it amusing that all our advances in audio technology had to some extent brought us back to Berliner; after all, the compact disc is produced in similar fashion to his disc—mass reproduction by stamping and pressing—and is even the same size (five inches diameter) as his earliest discs of the 1880s. This current business between DVDA and SACD merely brings us back as well to where we were a hundred years ago with cylinders and discs. Viva technology!
5:55 PM | link
Philip Kennicott on the traps of the critical trade. Hilarious, and very true. Sample:
3. There are people starving in Africa. An essay about moral priorities that is very often a bad fruit salad mixing apples and oranges. For instance, you're worried about nine miners trapped in Pennsylvania when there are millions about to die of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa? Some artist has his knickers in a twist because he lost his state arts grant when artists in some faraway repressive country fear arrest or worse? These stories are generally premised on the false assumption that human sympathy is an exhaustible resource and must be spent wisely. But this sort of reasoning is a dangerous trump card, and it can easily be turned around on the author: The critic is saying that you, the reader, are worried about the wrong thing; but that means the critic is worried about you being worried about the wrong thing, which, to be blunt, is rather a silly thing to worry about given that there are people starving in Africa.
Billboards remind Bangkok drivers of Buddhist teachings.
One of the city council's posters tells drivers: "Have the wisdom to prepare your journey before leaving home."
Another says: "Have mercy and lend a helping hand to motorists with car trouble."
Yes, the Buddha believed in keeping an eye out for other drivers, all right. Next: billboards remind drivers of the road rules.
5:34 PM | link
School defends parent ID policy.
Parents of students at Thomas Acres Public School at Ambarvale are outraged at being forced to wear ID tags while visiting their children, with some threatening to cut ties with the south-west Sydney school.
The move was instigated after the deputy principal was punched in the mouth by a visitor while discussing a student's problem.
Quite right, too, kids have to be made safe from their parents. All we need to do now is make the kids safe from each other.
5:17 PM | link
Referee to sue Springbok fan who tackled him. Quite bloody right.
5:13 PM | link
No, I do not know how to explain the fact that someone breezed by this site about two hours ago in search of "live action tentacle porn maharishi". Hot Buttered Death is, however, the only site, to return this particular combination of words (obviously not in that order) on a Google search. I suppose that's some sort of distinction.
8:52 PM | link
British weather goes psycho. Eh. Last time I was in Scotland three years ago, I remember watching something on TV which said tornadoes are actually surprisingly common in the UK. Apparently there was a really big one actually made its way through London back in the 1950s.
4:53 PM | link
Another study to discover the bloody obvious.
People with low self-esteem are less motivated than people with high self-esteem to improve a negative mood, even when they are offered an activity that will change their frame of mind, a team of American and Canadian psychologists has found.
The finding is contrary to the common belief that all people are motivated to alleviate negative moods, according to Jonathon Brown, a University of Washington psychologist and co-author of the study.
"Many people with low self-esteem believe sadness is part of life and that you shouldn't try to get rid of it, while people with high self-esteem believe in doing something to feel better if they have a negative experience or get in a bad mood," said Brown.
What we really need is a study to determine why people spend millions of dollars on studies like this one which tell us things we could've already guessed with a little common sense.
4:49 PM | link
Man jailed after high speed chase.
A man driving a van with the message ''this is a stolen vehicle'' scribbled in lipstick across a window led law-enforcement authorities on a high-speed chase yesterday that ended in Bullitt County, officials said.
Is it just me, or does anyone else love the fact this chase happened in a place called Bullitt County?
4:32 PM | link
Thai woman commits suicide by crocodile. Beats shooting or hanging yourself, I suppose...
4:30 PM | link
Farmer hires goth band to play to his sheep.
"I have been astonished by the response. My ewes have produced nearly double the number of lambs this year. And all the animals' wool coats are a lot fuller and healthier."
But are they black sheep? That's what I want to know...
4:20 PM | link
Downer: fuck our farmers, we'll still talk smack about Iraq. Meanwhile, Alex, why not try doing something useful like convincing our alleged American allies to buy all that Australian wheat that Iraq doesn't want now as a gesture of support and appreciation for their friends down under?
4:11 PM | link
Scott Wickstein neatly expresses one of my own major reservations over the Iraq attack.
4:02 PM | link
Call for increased security after fuckwit tackles referee during rugby union match.
Forty-three-year-old Pieter van Zyl has since been charged with assault to do grievous bodily harm and trespassing, police announced on Sunday.
"The whole of the stadium was mal (angry) with him (the referee). It's just that I decided to do something about it," Van Zyl told the Sunday Times newspaper.
He said: "Referees around the world think they are bigger than the game and they're not. Fans like me is what rugby is about."
No, mate, the game is about a bunch of big burly men tossing an object commonly called a "ball" between each other and running from one end of a big field to the other with it, whereby they can score points. The game is not about stupid cunts like you invading the pitch and causing injury to people. And a fat lot of fucking good you did anyway, cos South Africa still lost the match.
4:01 PM | link
Muslim students want non-Jewish students segregated from them. At an American university, mind you. I mean, shit, I remember at school, the Jewish students had separate ceremonies from the rest of us gentiles for things like ANZAC Day, Foundation Day, etc, and that used to irritate me cos I thought we were supposed to be one mass of students all at school together and all of that. But shit, they wanted it that way, there was no other outside group demanding they be cast out from the rest of the student body at the official ceremonies. No one would've got away with making a suggestion like that. The university is apparently protesting that the organisation listed in the flyer doesn't exist and that it's a hoax, which for their sake it better be, otherwise there could be massive lawsuits and shit... Of course, the funniest thing is the opening line of the text:
When we Arab-Muslim students came to America for study, we had no idea that we would be forced to mingle with Jew students and take instruction from Jew teachers.
Obviously whoever's behind this never studied any form of history at school, otherwise they may have heard of a thing called Nazi Germany which saw a goodly number of European Jews fleeing to the US back in the 1930s and 40s, in which case they should've been prepared to discover that yes, the US actually does have a Jewish population, and did so even before that time. Here's just hoping the idiot who wrote that flyer doesn't come to Bondi for a holiday, cos he'll get another surprise then...
3:37 PM | link
Leni Riefenstahl speaks up about Jodie Foster's proposed biopic of her.
But Riefenstahl, who turns 100 on August 22, said she has not given her final go-ahead to the project.
"I won't sign a contract until I am satisfied that the film will be faithful to my memoirs,'' she told the newspaper.
"I have no intention of permitting sensationalist lies and distortions creep into the film, as is so often the case with Hollywood productions.''
I don't know what she's complaining about, since the lies and distortions are probably already in her book. Evidently if Jodie's film goes ahead, it'll be forced to hammer home the point about Leni never having been a Nazi and all that other shit. I don't know why they don't just wait for her to pop her cork before making this film (she turns 100 in ten days so it's not like she'll probably have that many years left to her) , they wouldn't have to worry about her interfering then...
3:15 PM | link
Democrats settle down for the moment. Wonder whether the party or Murray wound up making compromises, and if so which ones. Perhaps they can now get on with their appointed task of being a useful third party. No, I didn't think so either.
3:06 PM | link
New Moon photos. Supposed to be the sharpest pictures of the Moon ever taken from the ground.
4:37 PM | link
The "Pray Naked Experience" experience. Obviously Hot Buttered Death here would not get listed on this Christian1000 thing cos 1) I'm not Christian anyway and 2) even if I were, my repeated use of words like shit, piss, fuck, cunt, fucking, arsehead, fuckwit, bullshit, arseclown, etc would cause them to have coronaries. If they have issues with the phrase "pray naked", they'd need therapy after encountering me. Joshua Claybourn offers further thoughts.
4:30 PM | link
Police officers in trouble for horse-dragging incident.
However, officials said releasing a police videotape of the incident might violate the privacy rights of the three arrested men and also might create problems with the local police union.
Naturally the issue of whether or not the dead horse in question had the right to not have its carcass dragged through the streets like that is a non-starter. Anyway, the article here lists the names of the three fuckwits involved, so where does that leave the privacy question?
4:06 PM | link
Former school teacher caught doing drugs with students.
A 17-year-old former student said Poulsen allowed him to leave class so he could visit friends at other high schools to buy drugs, such as Oxycontin, Lortab and morphine lollipops. Poulsen paid cash for the drugs but also let the teen "slide" on his classes, wrote excuses for him and helped the boy copy other student's assignments, according to the teen's testimony.
There are such things as morphine lollipops? Oy, but I am far out of the loop...
4:02 PM | link
141 transplant recipients get food poisoning at Disney World.
Dan Szymanski, 43, of Emerald, was among 6,000 people from the United States and five other countries attending the U.S. Transplant Games, which is an Olympic-style event for transplant recipients held June 26 to 29.
OK, so we have the Olympic Games, the Commonwealth Games, the Gay Games, and now obviously the Transplant Games. Is there any other specialised social group out there still lacking their very own athletic event?
4:01 PM | link
Alex Cox wonders why there aren't any more films of plays by Shakespeare's Jacobean contemporaries. I don't know if Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford is Jacobean as such or if it falls outside that strict boundary, but there was certainly a film of it back in the 1970s. Anyway, if you're going to discount Ford for being non-Jacobean, you'd have to do the same with Shakespeare, too, given he wrote a good number of his plays while Elizabeth and not James was on the throne...
3:53 PM | link
Alexander Walker wonders whether Britain's new film censor is the man for the job.
So what films did he like, asked Mr Lawson, with devilish politeness. He fell for this one, too. Every single title he mentioned with fond recall was made nearly 50 years ago, including Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), and the oeuvre (unspecified) of Renoir, Eisenstein and John Ford. The most contemporary name he was prompted to mention was Arnold Schwarzenegger: yes, The Terminator. (Safe one for a man at the Northern Ireland Office.) It's clear he's got a steep upward learning curve ahead.
David Thomson laments that people's grip on film history is so feeble these days.
Well, it got cleared up. I told her there was this song in Casablanca - it was a movie - and how I had fancied everyone knew it. "Uh-huh," she grunted and I concluded that some hot-shot stockbrokers these days lack worldliness.
But then, the very next day, I met a friend who teaches film studies at a university in the San Francisco area. And he'd shown Sunset Boulevard. Not one person in a class of over 20 in the 18-22 age range had ever seen the film before. As it happened, most of the students enjoyed it. But they couldn't get past these things: that it was more than 50 years old, in black and white, and told a story. They couldn't relate.
Well, I've actually never seen Casablanca either, but I do have about 130-odd silent films in my tape library, so hopefully Mr Thomson will forgive that oversight. An interesting article, though I think he's overstating the problem. Probably your average moviegoing pleb has never cared a damn for film history, they don't care now and they didn't care back in the 1930s or 1940s. The actual proportion of filmgoers who actually take a particular interest in the background aspects of film, the history and all of that, has probably always been very small compared to the entire mass of people who watch films, and likely always will be.
3:41 PM | link
Brazilian councillor wants an official Vampire Day. For some reason I am not entirely surprised that the daughter of Brazilian horror film maker Jose Mojica Marins is involved in this.
3:24 PM | link
Pondering the popularity of talkback radio in Australia.
Price likens the talkback transaction to a dinner party. The good host draws his guests into the debate, the bumptious host shouts down those who do not agree with him. For this reason, Price believes that Melbourne has been more inclusive traditionally. It has to do with the journalistic tradition here. Sydney, by contrast, seems to like its opinion raw. The pool of Sydney listeners, says Price, has shrunk to those whose opinions accord with the gatekeepers.
Don't know about Melbourne radio, but that strikes me as a not unfair description of Sydney talkback. As for this question:
So what is it in the Australian psyche that makes us feel the urgent need to pick up the phone and chew the fat with a stranger?
I daresay that's not so much something to do with the Australian psyche, rather more that the sort of people who listen to talkback radio are the sort of sheep who feel a desparate need to have their thoughts validated by some right-wing arsehead on the radio for whatever reason...
3:05 PM | link
Asked about the Iraqi threats, Mr Crean said Mr Downer had handled the issue badly. "He has talked up the problem, rather than talked about a solution, and Australia, and its wheat growers in particular, are paying a very high price for that talking up."
Mr Downer's spokesman responded by accusing Mr Crean of taking President Saddam's side. "The Foreign Minister is astonished that Simon Crean would adopt the Iraqi line on this issue."
Ooooh, bitch Alex! Can it be long before terms such as "un-Australian" are being bandied about much as the word "un-American" used to be back in the McCarthy period?
2:57 PM | link
More search requests! I yanked all of these from my last 100 hits...
alien tentacle porn
george michael latest song bush blair
"graham swift" "last orders" plagiarism
Bill Malcolm molester
documentary South Australia Cactus
steve lilly child molester info
nida student weblog
funny movies reich ein
death to the euro
cheryl kernot and gareth evans email and privacy
I'm at a genuine loss to work some of these out. As always, the question is not so much why were people looking for these things but why did they specifically visit this blog in search of them.
2:50 PM | link
This is the club I was at last night. Don't normally go because it's not normally much of a club, but someone from aus.culture.gothic is visiting our fair city from Tasmania, and since I missed the bigger gathering he went to last week, this supplementary night was suggested instead. It actually wound up being all right; two of the three resident DJs are overseas at the moment, hence guest DJs were imported, and it was a marked improvement on the usual standard... hell, they even played a Killing Joke song at the end of the night which *wasn't* "Love Like Blood", which impressed me considerably. As such I stayed out later than I'd normally do and so wasn't in bed until about half past four or so. I'm paying for last night's dancing now with my splitting head and aching body; just warning you in case I seem crankier than usual here today...
2:42 PM | link
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