Archive for September, 2007
EMF are reforming
Yes, they are.
As No Rock ‘N’ Roll Fun puts it:
So, that’s Shed 7, MC Hammer, the Inspiral Carpets and EMF all on tour in the UK at roughly the same time. No wonder nobody’s bothered to invent time travel; there’s nothing bloody left in the past to go back and visit.
Everybody panic!
A terrifying warning, courtesy of the Daily Mail:
Britain should brace itself for cold temperatures this winter.
The danger of selective quoting…
…is that people might go and see what the full quote was.
From the press page of Nicopipe.com, a place selling nicotine inhalers:
More Smoke, Rod Liddle - The Times OnLine, 6th July 2007
…A friend bunged me one of those new smoke-free smoking devices, called the “Nico pipe”, a slender, tapered, black metal thing into which you insert a nicotine cartridge purchased from “pharmacies or your doctor”…
What came after the dots? Let’s have a look at the Times piece.
I don’t think it’s for me. I’m not walking the streets sucking on what appears to be a weasel’s dildo, nor queuing up in the surgery for six hours to get a prescription. Also it seems like a particularly cowardly form of capitulation and collaboration with the enemy.
Oops.
Scotland’s drink problem. Some people do get it
There’s an opinion piece in today’s Herald by Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, head of the Violence Reduction Unit at Strathclyde Police. It’s one of the few such pieces I’ve seen that suggests there’s more to Scotland’s love of booze than its price.
If we want a cafe culture in Scotland let’s build more cafes. If we want to carry on the way we are, and see our society suffer even more, let’s keep on building bars where loud music inhibits conversation and the design - few seats, plenty of standing room - encourages drinking; let’s keep on having loss-leading drinks promotions in off-licences, allowing customers to have a few cheap drinks before they even reach these bars.
BBC illustrates Halo 3 story with PS3 game
Oh dear. As UKResistance - which is rarely, if ever, safe for work - says:
Now we know all modern games are about shit-boring bald space marines that all look and act the same, but it’s still quite the embarrassment.
Amazon launches its MP3 site
I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9!
The RSS feed finally works properly
Or at least it seems to. Just upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress so the odd bit of weirdness might appear for a bit.
Stars of CCTV
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
iTunes: the “i” stands for “indecent”, says record company
Vivendi, parent of Universal Music Group, says Apple’s cut of iTunes tracks is indecent:
“The split between Apple and (music) producers is indecent … Our contracts give too good a share to Apple,” Vivendi Chief Executive Jean-Bernard Levy told reporters at a gathering on Monday organized by the association of media journalists in France.
At present, UMG, the world’s largest record company, gets 0.70 euro ($0.99) out of the 0.99 euro retail price charged by iTunes, Vivendi said.
70% to the record company seems pretty decent to me: the PPD (published price to dealer) for a CD that sells at £15 is £8. Distributor takes around £2 of that, and the remaining £6 goes to the label, the artists etc. So “indecent” here seems to mean “more than we get for CDs”.
There’s a practice in music called “change a word, get a third”. It’s when a songwriter is told that the talent wants a cut of the songwriting royalties because he or she has changed the lyrics, and the writer has a stark choice: get two thirds of loads, or 100% of nothing. It strikes me that with music shops, the record companies have a similar choice: let Apple sell your stuff in big numbers and grumble about it while pocketing the money, or demand a bigger cut and sell only through Virgin Digital. Oops, that one’s just shut down, hasn’t it?
Another one bites the dust: Virgin’s DRM download shop
Blah blah blah shutting up shop blah blah blah DRM protection blah blah blah downloads will stop working blah blah blah copy to CD and re-rip or lose them forever blah blah blah more proof that DRM sucks blah blah blah.
As ever, this is a kick in the nads for anyone who bought legal music instead of pirating it.