I think my mother wrote this...

Pictures of Walls dot com

If I hear the word "metatarsal" one more time...

Top five reasons why I don't care about Wayne Rooney's injury:-

1. He looks like a potato
2. He used to play for Everton
3. The less Manchester United players in the England squad the better
4. I want Brazil to win the World Cup anyway
5. He'll need the time off to learn to spell for his £5million book deal

Kopite Mod out.

Unless You're Very Lucky

In a change to the published program I've decided to chance a foray into mp3 blogging. This week I bought on cd one of my favourite albums, Astronauts by the Lilac Time, which I also have on vinyl but for that reason never play. It's a gently melodic collection of wistful songs by Stephen Duffy, who's amazingly still better known for having the dodgy soubriquet of "Tintin" in an earlier incarnation, and also recently supping with the Devil and writing songs for Robbie Williams.

In between his band, named after a line in the Nick Drake song "River Man", made 4 albums of acoustic gems that couldn't have been less inkeeping with the late 80s and early 90s fashions for all things grunge and madchester if he'd started an Arthur Askey tribute band. But then Blur did that, eh.

So here is my favourite tune, and indeed one of my favourite songs by anyone ever. "Grey Skies and Work Things", as in:-

"I know what tomorrow will bring
- Unless you're very lucky -
Grey skies and work things"

Folky mod out.

The Kleptones are back

A mysterious entity from planet Brighton, Eric Kleptone has done it again, posting more bootleg and mashup tracks than you can shake a stick at. Unless you can shake a stick 33 times that is.

Preliminary highlights include Cold Turkey over Unfinished Sympathy, some silliness involving Careless Whisper, and INXS backing up Aerosmith. All melted around some delicious samples from movies and the six o'clock news and served on a bed of Rrrrrock.

Get 'em while they're hot!

Mod out.

Paddy's day humbug

I had a bit of an auld Pogues listen this morning, partly cos it's Paddy's day, and partly cos I listen to the Pogues all the time anyway. The lines below really stuck with me and put me right off going out tonight. Of course I will, but if anyone comes near me in one of those stupid green leprechaun hats they'd better beware.
Take it away Shane...

"Where 'ere we go we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies"
- Thousands are Sailing.

Mod out (of patience with Ireland being marketed as a brand of jolly drunk people).

Witness the Fitness

By Hutch. Keep up with his stuff here.

"Mixin' up the Guinness with the raw egg yolk..."

Mod out.

Book of the month

I've just started Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World", and it's been getting me needlessly annoyed on the train morning and night all week. So far he's set out with laser precision exactly how little common sense our rulers have, and how much they rely on stupidity of every creed.

Obviously, Dubya and his god thing. Reagan and his horoscopes. But it isn't just the nazis, the Democrats are as bad. Hillary Clinton regularly met new-age gurus who spoon-fed her bullshit, Al Gore shrank from condemning "intelligent design" while running for President, and our own Tony Bliar is not only a christian but has swallowed hook, line and sinker all the management consultancy gibberish which now passes for New Labour policy.

And these are supposed to be the clever people. When he deals with the weirder end of things, from Sunday Tabloid astrologers to surreal-titled corporate personal growth books ("God wants you to be Rich"; "The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun"; "If Aristotle Ran General Motors") all you can do is laugh. It's a very funny book if it wasn't so depressing.

You'll find a much better precis here, so I'll leave you with a quote Wheen gives at the beginning from the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant:-

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! "Have courage to use your own understanding!" - that is the motto of enlightenment."

Or, as Public Enemy put it, don't believe the hype...

Mod out.

Tis the Season to be Merry...

So why not pick up some drinking songs down at Locust St.?

As Fats Domino puts it...
"You know the sun never shines in whiskey heaven,
It rains Jack Daniels all the time"

Cheers!

Mod out.

Downloaded Tune of the Year

A bit early, but unless something really seismic passes my way quite soon the best thing I've nicked off the net all year has to be dj BC's mashup of Philip Glass and Dizzee Rascal, Stand Up Dance.

Philip Glass - minimalist New York composer famous for his "difficult" operas and repetitive motifs. Check his symphonies of the David Bowie albums Low and Heroes and pretty much anything else he's done, although Music with Changing Parts might induce headaches in the underprepared. I quite like it, myself.

Dizzee Rascal - south London grime MC who's finally banished all Americanisms from British hiphop (not that Roots Manuva hadn't done his best already, of course).

Put them together and you get the tightest, meanest and most interesting tune this side of some of the RZA's weirder productions.

The whole album, Glassbreaks, is more of the wonderful same, and available (for now) via Mashculture. Get it while it's hot!

Mod out.

Sgt. Rafa's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Trawling through one of my favourite Liverpool FC forums (and I have several) I found a link to the above picture, which has been proudly gracing my desktop all weekend. Bringing together pop art, classic 60s rock (although I don't like the album nearly as much as Abbey Road or Revolver) and some of my all time heroes, it's made me a very happy mod.

Highlights for me are John Barnes in a gimp mask, Cisse in the dressing gown, and Stevie G as John Lennon (of course). The Shankly bust is a nice touch too. Clearly some people have too much time on their hands, but if they didn't there's a whole range of stuff we wouldn't have. This is merely the acceptable end. I would claim.

YNWA.

Mod out.

Late birthday presents...

Someone just gave me a hammock. Or rather the combined might of the American and British Postal services just gave me a hammock, only 5 weeks late. But woo, anyway.

Anyone got a spare garden?

Mod out.

New Highway Code Instructions

Mod out (of his car and claiming "you can't touch this").

How to get arrested

Have a rucksack. Wear a coat. Go on the tube. Avoid looking at the police in the entrance. Look at people. Look at your phone.

For fuck's sake. If this is the level of our police intelligence then we're all headed for sunny Cuba. Remember to publicly praise Bliar in earshot of every copper or you too could be tortured in Egypt, no expense spared.

Cynical mod out.

Out in the sticks with only whisky to live on

Well, maybe not, but having just got back from a jaunt to Scotland I was struck by how little goes on up there compared to southeast England. Less people, more space. It's a salutary lesson, probably in economics and the lack of manufacturing industries, but anyway. It felt nice to me.

Oban is a small port town which seemed to be doing alright on tourism, but by far the largest taxpayer must be the local distillery. We went on the distillery tour, which was fascinating for many reasons, mostly how they make the stuff, but also to my mind how such a small (in physical size) business can make so much money, mostly for the government.

The Oban distillery covers about the same area as a medium sized supermarket, employs 7 (seven) people to shovel the malt and move the pipes around, and manages to produce around a million bottles (offsite) of whisky every year. Impressive. What's even more mind boggling is that at around £30 a bottle, and the tax on every bottle being around 70%, this one small factory in a small community miles from anywhere gives somewhere in the region of £21m annually to the Exchequer. Which is madness. But it's madness that's been in motion for centuries and you can't fight that sort of inertia. The Treasury is never going to give up on that sort of money; Oban is one of the smaller distilleries and the largest producers must pay many times that amount for their skill in boiling up some barley and water and adding yeast.

In these times where idiotic petrolheads complain about how much it costs to give children asthma and fuck up the planet, surely a word should be put in for this harmless eco-friendly industry (they use the leftover malt and hops for agricultural purposes, and recycle the casks, which were secondhand to begin with), which for me is one of the great pleasures in life made ridiculously expensive by our avaricious rulers. But barricading the gates of distilleries would be as stupid as barricading oil refineries. And twice as ineffective. So what are you going to do?!

Anyway. Cheers.

Mod out.

Five things blah blah blah

Well, apparently I've been tagged. And while I was asleep, too. Mr Prefect sir, you're a pervert.

But anyway, tea's up, it's raining outside, so here goes...

10 years ago...
Enjoying a summer of cool as my musical tastes meld seamlessly with the best Glastonbury has to offer, Massive Attack, Jeff Buckley, Spearhead, Red Snapper and so forth. I then spent the rest of the summer working in a brewery. Not quite as cool as it sounds, honest.

5 years ago...
Hmm. 2000. Not a very good year. Someone's dad died, someone else's mum died, a friend crashed his motorcycle and died, and my mum had a stroke. I got very good at drinking in this year.

1 year ago...
I was probably living by the sea, smoking a bit more dope than I currently do, and wondering if Liverpool will ever win the European Cup in my lifetime. What a difference a year makes...

Yesterday...
Work, pub, curry, 2 episodes of "Spaced", bed. Tough life

Tomorrow...
Work, Super Cup final vs. CSKA Moscow, beer, silly conversation until too late, bed.

Five snacks I enjoy...
Marmite on toast, chocolate hobnobs, apples (I know, I know, but I do!), curried scotch eggs and tea. Which counts as a snack. No, really.

Five bands whose lyrics I know most of...
Queen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys and the Boo Radleys.

Five things I'd do with $1m...
Buy a house, buy some art, travel, have a big pirate-themed party, invest the remaining 100 quid.

Five places I'd run away to...
New York, Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, Buck's Mills (Devon).

Five bad habits I have...
Eating chocolate hobnobs, smoking when drunk, drinking too much, an inability to be arsed with serious financial matters, pathological hatred of christians.

Five things I like doing...
Reading, listening to cricket on the radio, drinking, arranging things in alphabetical order, playing guitar.

Five things I wouldn't wear...
Brown shoes, patterned ties, anything with a noticeable label or manufacturer's name on, trainers unless I'm playing sport, a Nirvana tshirt.

Five TV shows I love...
The Sopranos, The West Wing, Absolute Power, the Mark Steel Lectures, BBC4 documentaries.

Five movies I love...
Once Upon a Time in America, Three Colours Blue, Top Gun, Withnail & I, Head.

Five famous people I'd like to meet...
Joni Mitchell, John Cale, Brave Captain, Iain Banks, Christy Moore.

Five favourite toys...
My laptop, my guitar, my ipod shuffle (although it's giving me tinnitus), my long wave radio (for the cricket) and crosswords. I know the last one isn't really a toy, but unless I'm allowed books or my aviator sunglasses, I can't think of anything else.

Five people to tag...
The Count, who's currently extremely incommunicado and won't get anything I send him.
The Desk of the Sellout Generation, who'll shout at me for tagging him.
Joeri
...and er, that's it.

I don't know too many bloggers. Yet.

Mod out

Holy analingus, Batman!

Now that I've got your attention...

I just read this BBC news story. In short, an artist called Mark Chamberlain had a show at a posh New York Gallery featuring the above painting and similar others, including a lovely shot of Robin and his bum, as part of a whole collection of gay Batman pictures. Although they've been there since February, DC Comics have only just got their act together and sent the lawyers in.

Now, I'm no lawyer, and I'm sure it's important that copyright on something like Batman is protected, otherwise clearly the world will end and no-one will get any cake, but doesn't the fact that it's "art" count for something? How come Warhol didn't get sued for his Campbell soup tins? Also, isn't there a world of difference between the mafia selling millions of fake dvds and one bloke painting some pictures? Apparently not, but that's lawyers for you. No sense of beauty or appreciation of how hard it is to afford good quality brushes.

So is there more to it? Is the fact that he portrays them as gay the problem? Given they've spent decades prancing around in tights, I reckon the cat's out of the bag on that one, and DC should learn to live with the fact that people's perceptions may not match the company line.

I'm less interested in the art than I am in the whole kerfuffle about it, but since we're talking about fruity pictures of the caped crusader, see some of the rest of the paintings here and hope that DC's pursuit of anyone who chooses to offer an individual take on their product bankrupts the fuckers.

Mod out.

Death masks

I was in the British Museum a couple of years ago when I came across the death mask of Oliver Cromwell in one of their display cases. Oh, I thought, so that's what he looked like. That's the bloke who killed a king and helped drag Britain kicking and screaming into the 17th century. Oh, and killed a bunch of people, many of them Irish.
(And even a couple of kilos of plaster of paris can still be controversial).

You don't really get a sense of a person from a painting, at least I don't, but with a death mask you can look at the shape and size of someone's head, and imagine them lying there, asleep, about to wake up and invent gravity (as in the case of Newton).

They were created as soon after death as possible, to get the best likeness. The one above is of Beethoven, and obviously was once dropped by someone. oops. Other famous death masks include Jonathan Swift, Dante, and Hitchcock, oddly enough. For anyone who's as morbid as me, there's an excellent list here with pictures of Princeton's collection.

In the immortal works of Nick Ross, don't have nightmares.

Mod out.

Vertebrae and dodos

Someone once asked me who my avatar was. I was going to post about him, but then I figured anyone who really needs to know about dead geologists can look him up themselves. His name was Gideon Mantell, he lived up the road from where I work, and I like his sideburns should about cover it.

But having a quick google, I found this superbly bizarre fact...
"In 1852, Mantell took an overdose of opium, the drug he used to alleviate his pain, and later lapsed into a coma. He died that afternoon. His postmortem showed that he had been suffering from scoliosis. Richard Owen, his one-time nemesis, had a section of Mantell's spine removed, pickled and stored on a shelf at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. There it sat until World War II when it was lost, presumably destroyed, during a German bombing raid"

A little harsh, I feel, just cos the guy was right about dinosaurs and Owen wasn't. Although if anyone wants to remove any of Alex Ferguson's vertebrae I'm willing to pay top whack.

Richard Owen wrote a very cool book about dodos, which reminds me that the dodo was initally given the latin name "didus ineptus". Whether Owen had a hand in this I don't know, but again, a little harsh considering they couldn't fly and the humans had guns. But, phew, google informs me that they've posthumously been renamed "Raphus Cuculatus".

So that's alright then.

Mod out.

Banksy does it again...

There was a bittersweet piece of genius in this morning's papers - the infamous and excellent London graffiti artist Banksy has just got back from the middle east, where he tagged the wall that the Israelis have erected to, well, fuck over the Palestinians and steal their land (is there another interpretation?!).

Of course he did more than tag it - he produced some of the coolest images I've seen and without a word made a more eloquent statement on Israeli policies than a whole raft of Panoramas, Dispatches and newspaper articles. We all know what's going on, we all think it's wrong (don't we?), what's to talk about? If they won't listen, tag 'em!

The google news link above has some pictures here and there, but you can see all of them over on the Wooster Collective site, which is the online motherlode for all things spraypainted as far as I can tell.

My favourite one is above - I'm a sucker for a good stencil - but some of the others are technically more superior. Some paper this morning was suggesting he should be entered for the Turner Prize, and apart from the fact it'd go against his entire ethic, he'd surely win. Better than video loops or installations of rubbish. And funnier too.

His site is extremely cool, this or this for example. I'm not a big fan of simple tagging, but then if it wasn't for the penalties imposed for graffiti people would have more time to hang around and be creative. There's enough state-sponsored visual pollution already after all.

Mod out.

How to be English part 48

1. Following on from part 47 below, decide to try to go to the cricket again, getting in free with your useless ticket from the rained off match.
2. Leave your flat thinking that while the skies are grey they're a kind of bright grey.
3. Wait for the bus, noticing as you do that you can no longer see the horizon out to sea.
4. Realise on the bus that a serious sea mist is descending.
5. Arrive at the ground to find it's so misty that you can't see the middle.
6. Go for a pint, and enjoy that instead.

So that's twice this month an attempt to watch sport has led to drinking instead. I should cut out the middle event and stick to the pub.

In other news, Police give a 74 year old Muslim woman a heart attack by pointing guns at her 12 year old grandson. It's gonna get worse before it gets better...

Mod out.