7 September 2007 – 4:21 pm
New Heavy Trash album and a Blues Explosion rarities collection oh, Mr Spencer with this garage rock you are really spoiling us.
6 September 2007 – 10:54 am
5 September 2007 – 11:50 pm
EncoreOriginally uploaded by bounder
The Polyphonic Spree are indie’s worst nightmare, a matching 28-piece army-cult of pure exaltation. The bass player throws rock poses in front of the harpist, the brass section dive out of the crowd for a mosh, the Glee club even take out the seats and relax for once.
I wonder if this is the last time we’ll see the Spree over in the UK, there were tears before bedtime as TIm berated the trombonist for “going back to school” and revealed that his niece (one of the four possessed backing vocalists) was off too – after seven years.
It seems impossible to me that they haven’t had that euphoric 10-weeks-at-number-one hit single, and I’ll be disappointed if their cover of Lithium is the song that breaks them in England – heartbreakingly wonderful though it is.
Go get Fragile Army
now.
3 September 2007 – 11:33 am
If you’ve read my rantings on ‘survey culture’ on the BiNS blog, or heard me go on about it as part of the reason for Talk Like A Brummie Day, you might not be surprised to see me link to this article – which is about how a ‘survey’ for Veet (which is Imac – am I right?) was constructed and then ‘backed-up’ by buying a team of experts.
The press release they sent out even dissregareded their paid experts – and this sort of thing goes on ther whole time, and the press swall evey time. So when you see an article saying that ‘something is the top, or bottom, for something’ or ‘something has been voted..’ just read the article down to the bit where it tells you who’s paid for the ‘research’ – and then dismiss it as the shite that it is.
A new book by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’ on e-mail etiquette, Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is already billed as the “genre’s Strunk and White,’, but proposes that we use exclamation marks willy nilly.
Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.
Please. God. No!
On the overuse of exclamation points. – By Jacob Rubin – Slate Magazine
Where as I say “gowan then” to people who ask to use my Flickr pics, there’s a certain type of people that seemingly don’t want you to even see theirs. D_morton (who probably doesn’t want the link ; ) ) always puts “You may not use, copy or print my photographic image files without my permission.” in the description of the hundreds of photos he uploads – usually candid shots of people in Brum and Walsall.
While anyone is entitled to do that – and there are licensing settings and other tools to prevent that on Flickr (although the only safe way would be not to put them on the ‘net) – it seems overkill and for some reason it annoys me when I see the photos in one of my RSS photo feeds. Rant over, I wonder if it’s possible to do exclusions by username for Flickr RSS – yahoo pipes perhaps?
EDIT: Yes it is, annnnd relax.
22 August 2007 – 11:18 am
Naboo and Bollo decide that INSIDE the couch is funOriginally uploaded by bounder
My mate just asked if I had any pictures of the cats with ‘green eye’ (like red-eye, but for cats) for a book on photoshop he’s writing (not these, but one like them he does loads) and I sent him a couple. Of course you wouldn’t charge a mate, but quite a few of my pics from flickr have been purloined (with permission) for magazines (and no doubt a fair few I don’t know about) and I haven’t asked for more than a credit there either.
Then I think of all the free writing I do as well, snippets for The Birmingham Post and some charity magazine this month alone.
So I suppose the question is, do you have to start charging or do you have to say no?
You know you’re spending too much time on the interweb when…
You see this headline: Tube network crippled by strike and you don’t think London, you think online flash-based video sharing.