Wrong things on-line.
You know when you see a link to something, and just know it’s going to be horrible, but can’t help but look. So it is with Siegfried And Roy’s website – oh yes, the bright orange, mullet-haired, tiger-taming millionaire oompa loompas have a website as cheesey as the act.
Bizarrely I can’t find any mention of the incident that ended their show – Roy being half eaten by a Tiger (‘It was trying to save me after I fainted’ says the implausable talking tangerine).
Anyway, their site contains a load of horseshit about their psuedo-conservation plans for the white tiger, which contains this marvellous give-away line –
“For more than 20 years, we have been entrusted with the care and preservation of the Royal White Tigers. There are now 200 of these precious creatures roaming the earth, 38 with us in Las Vegas.”
Right, so at least 38 of them are in their natural environment of casinos, strip clubs and wedding chapels. I hear that the first white tigers were in fact the off-spring of a normal tiger and an Elvis impersonator in a white jumpsuit… Why anyone who cared about animals would keep 38 endangered tigers in Vegas is beyond comprehension. And why anyone believes that shit is equally unfathomable.
Everything that’s wrong about everything is summed up in the words ‘Siegfried And Roy’.
Finally, my edinburgh festival tickets have gone on sale!!
Phew, that’s a relief – after a few days of having very little info for my entry on the Edinburgh Fringe website, they’ve now updated it, with full dates, photo and the chance to order tickets.
So get to it click here to view the page, and book tickets – forward this to all your Scottish friends!
Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane.
Online articles from The New Statesman
I’m a big big fan of The New Statesman – it’s the only magazine I subscribe to, and read it avidly every week.
They don’t tend to put much of the content on their website, prefering to tease people and get them to buy the mag, or pay for online access.
Anyway, I was just reading some stuff on Mark Thomas’ website, and he’s a got a fairly big archive of a lot of the things he’s written for them on there – click here to read some – he’s a very good columnist, and his site is a great resource for political action links.
Soundtrack – Charlie Haden, ‘Nocturne’.
Be like them, they're sexy
So PETA – People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals – are running a vote thing on their website at the moment to find The world’s sexiest vegetarian – yes, you can vote for some irrelavent celeb or other who wisely doesn’t eat dead animal things, proclaiming their sexiness…
What Total Bollocks. Why? Why trivialise the animal rights movement by stooping to Heat mag level nonsense. Who gives a shit about the sexiness of vegetarian celebs? I can’t even begin to list the ways in which this is SO WRONG!!
I’m sure if you asked PETA, they’d say that it’s just another way to highlight the number of people across the world who are veggies, and how it’s not a fringe weirdo thing, but even celebs are veggies. Fair enough, but FFS, world’s sexiest vegetarian??? – going veggie is good for your health, it’s a compassionate thing to do, it’s good for the planet and the people who live on that planet as well as the animals who aren’t getting killed to be eaten, but it has precisely jack-shit to do with whether someone is sexy or not. I could list a couple of hundred very sexy meat eating omnivore humans here, I’m sure there are sexy people who are murderers and psychos. So what? Ugly vegetarians are still vegetarians, they aren’t lesser veggies than the sexy ones.
I’m very pro animal rights, I support animal rescue shelters and Animal Aid and suggest that everyone go Veggie, but not because Bryan Adams, Avril Lavigne and Weird Al Yankovic are!!!!! Sweet Jesus, this stuff annoys me!
(thanks to The Cheat for the link)
Soundtrack – The Smiths, ‘The Queen Is Dead’; Kenny Young And The Eggplants, ‘The Search For EggPlantis’.
Yet another reminder to back up regularly…
One of the forums I visit most regularly online is The Dude Pit – a bass-related forum, hosted by Steve ‘Dude’ Barr. It’s a fun place, with some amazingly knowledgeable bass peoples, some really good friends, and a fair few scary mad people as well. But good scary mad people, I’m sure.
Anyway, the forum is hosted by ezboard – a pay-to-use service that hosts thousands and thousands of boards. They appear to have been hacked on Monday and have lost loads of data, and lots of the money that people had paid in to keep their boards running. All stuff that really ought to be easy enough to restore from their backups, if they had any, which it appears, they don’t.
So, I’m reminded once again to back up everything regularly. All the content on my main website is generated by my PC, so the original copies are all still here. But I do need to remember to make backups of the blog and the forum once in a while…
Soundtrack – Bill Frisell, ‘The Willies’.
geek alert – found a fun bit of code!
Was browsing sites of people who use Audioscrobbler, and found this fun bit of code on someone’s website –
http://lumi.valkoinen.org/music/as_np.php?nick=solobasssteve
…well, obviously it didn’t say ‘solobasssteve’ on their site, it had their user-name, but what it does is display the last track you listened to, like this –
cool, eh? Will have to add it to the right hand side of the screen here…
Soundtrack – Andrew Booker, ‘Ahead’ (Andrew’s a marvellous drummer, in a band called Pulse Engine, who are fab, and his solo album’s pretty fine too – he came round last night and we recorded a load of bass and drum looped duets – look out for an MP3 or two here soon!); Mo Foster, ‘Time To Think’ (this album is a ‘must have’ for any fretless bassist – a true master at work)
Do you have it in you to be a torturer?
Browsing a bass-discussion site yesterday, I came across a random link to the Stanford Prison Experiment – a very famous sociological experiment into what happens when you take 18 ordinary men, divide them arbitrarily into 9 prisoners and 9 guards, and monitor their behaviour.
The site is brilliant, in that it walks you through the stages of the experiment, and even draws parallels with the abuse in Abu Graib Prison in Iraq.
And, especially with the abomination that is Big Brother back on UK TV for it’s 6th (sixth?????) series, it shows us how bizarrely people can behave when new social heirarchies are imposed upon them, and how abusive the BB experiments can be, when BB decides to be ‘evil’ just to up the ratings a bit.
So, boycott it, and read the stuff on the Stanford Prison Experiment website instead.
Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘Jordan – The Comeback’; Juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.
Eric Roche news
I mentioned that I’ve got a new tune dedicated to Eric Roche, and that he’s been ill again of late. Here’s the latest news item from his website –
“We offer our sincere apologies to the people who tried to see &/or wanted to see Eric play in his recent scheduled shows around the UK
We are very sorry to inform you all that Eric’s cancer has spread & he is taking some proper time out to receive the best care, love & attention which he needs & deserves.
And, it is breaking his heart not to be well enough to play on stage at the present time, but as you can imagine, he is fighting hard to play live again soon.
Thank you for your kind words on the message board. We will keep updating the site with news as we get it.”
It breaks my heart to think that after all Eric went through last year to beat his initial cancer, that it’s back again. He’s one of the nicest, gentlest people I know, an incredible musician, and all-round inspiration.
If you’ve not heard him play, PLEASE go and have a listen to some of the MP3s on his site, and if you like what you hear (you will, believe me) buy a CD or three. Falling ill and not being able to gig is one of my biggest fears as a pro musician. We don’t get sick pay – this is what we do. If we can’t do it, we’re in the shit. So, head over to ericroche.com, listen, read, buy his CDs, and post nice things on his message board.
Get well soon, Eric,
x
Thank God it's not 'goodbye'
On his BBC London breakfast show, Danny Baker has been making reference to this being his last week on the show for a while. The thought of him leaving was too horrid to comtemplate, so I’ve been hoping against hope that this was just another weird Baker joke.
So I was delighted to find this article on the BBC London Website – apparently he’s taking the summer off, and will be back in the Autumn. While I’d rather have him there for the summer as well, I can see the need for some time off after getting up at 4am for years on end. Here’s hoping he has a marvellous break and is back fully of mind boggling weirdness on our airwaves before too long…