Published on 29 January 2005
in Music.
Blogrot heartily recommends Gruff Rhys’s first solo album, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, to all lovers of Welsh-language lo-fi rock. With Gruff playing everything himself, the result is so stripped down it makes Super Furry Animals‘ Welsh-language lo-fi rock masterpiece Mwng sound like a grossly overproduced Phil Spector number by comparison.
Just some of the numerous reasons to love Yr Atal Genhedlaeth include:
- It has not one but two songs called “Egg Pudding”
- Its title is a pun on the Welsh for “contraception” that loses somewhat in translation
- Another song title manages to pun the name of a Welsh mountain with the two currencies Euro and Sterling - lyrical genius!
All in all a fine achievement and a gaping hole in the record collection of anyone who doesn’t already have it. And I now know the Welsh word for “stuttering”. Handy, that.
didgeridoo… easel… functor… are you laughing yet?
Published on 29 January 2005
in Movies.
Volkswagen are understandably upset by an unofficial viral marketing ad that associates the VW Polo with suicide bombers.
Long time no blog! I’ve just got back from a three-day trip to Helsinki. Finland in January is an experience not to be missed: temperatures were nudging at -15°C but somebody clearly forgot to tell the taxi drivers, who plummet recklessly along the snow-packed roads, cheerily oblivious to wheel-spin, and take the corners like a kid playing a rally game (with the added attraction of having fully-loaded buses to dodge). Last night we ate out at a Russian restaurant where the house speciality was Delicacy of the Czar: bear paw braised in goose fat en croûte with game sauce at only €145.00. They had a range of other bear dishes (bear soup, bear sausage) but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I had the reindeer instead.
Ability to make employees say “Bill, not only do I count you as one of my best friends but I also respect you as my boss.”
Warning: these pictures of Bill Gates the chilled-out entertainer would turn Robin Cook gay.
Published on 17 January 2005
in Sci/Tech.
It shouldn’t work, but it does: classic Lemmings! implemented in JavaScript! It’s a perfect replica, complete with remembering which level you were up to between sessions. I really wish I hadn’t found this when I have other things to do today…
For as long as I can remember, the railway bridge over the M57 at Switch Island was adorned with the graffiti “THE PIES, THE PIES”, in 6ft-high letters, over the north-bound carriageway. I’m sure the comma was there, although I may be imagining it; I don’t think punctuation would be foremost in my mind as I teetered, paint brush in hand, over the middle lane.
Anyway, it became my all-time favourite graffiti, boasting a dream combination of meaninglessness and longevity. The only other one that came close was the slogan painted on a wall at the bottom of John Dobson Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, of which my wife and I were espcially fond: “Tyneside 90% Latvian”.
And then, disaster struck! They repainted the bridge and replaced the graffiti of the gods with one of those bloody GOURANGA stickers. For what seemed like an age, it appeared that those wondrous days were gone forever.
Until, that is, a renewed assault was made on the bridge: see right. This one is just a single “The Pies”, lacking the soporific rhythm of the original, but then an exact replica might have been seen by some as disrespectful. Instead, we have a glimmer of a golden era, surely left by the hand of Zeus, and with which no mortal man should interfere. Taking this picture with my camera-phone whilst doing 85mph, I felt a tiny frisson of that same adrenalin rush that must have driven the artist to commit the act itself. Actually, maybe it was just a bit of flatulence.
If you’d like to share your The Pies, The Pies stories, please leave a comment.
Terry Jones and Gordon Brown: only Tony Blair can tell them apart.
These are the top ten words in the world’s news, at time of writing, as measured by the astounding 10×10.
Jackie Stallone and Bubbles De Vere: only their mother can tell them apart.
…I can’t say the first thing on my list of priorities is to chew it into a pulp and use it to make a nest.
Maybe second, but definitely not first.
Blogrot is in a state of eager anticipation ahead of tonight’s screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera, featuring “transsexuals, nappy wearers and a troupe of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen”. Sounds right up my street. And as if that weren’t enough, it also pisses off evangelical Christians and Michael Ancram. Heck, it’s as if I wrote it!
I particularly love the nitpicking over the number of “obscenities” the show contains. The BBC swear it’s only 300, but the fundamentalist Christians - big fans of 4 to 5-figure numbers - make it up to 8,000 by counting each chorus member individually. There’s an implication there that if it were only, say, 500 obscenities the Christians might come round. I can just picture a bunch of BBC bigwigs and top-bollock evangelists sitting round the Stormont table past midnight trying to broker some kind of compromise. (”OK, we’ll show you video evidence of five wanks being decommisioned if you’ll accept that 27 nappy-wearing gay satanists singing Ooh, me twatting bollocks in close harmony is only 2 swearwords and not 54…”)
A premium wallpaper here for all fans of the UK’s premium 200m freestyle “comic“.
They’ve managed to capture a look of excitement rarely seen on an Airedale.
Blogrot field operative Chubby Bat has alerted me to this list of community groups in Oxfordshire. Chubby Bat writes:
Random sample of six consecutive entries:
Baptists
Basketball
Battered wives
Beekeeping
Bell-ringing
Bi-sexuals
I’d quite like to do a week at each, out of curiosity.
