Cornelius and friends mash up spectacularly
Best google maps use I’ve seen for a while… certainly more entertaining than Penguin’s story on a google map
Also, Cornelius can also teach you to count. It’ll be good to see him live again.
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Why? Does Alex Love Alopecia
Hard to say, but I’ll try anyway.
Why? – Alopecia
Way back in ’03 I came accross Why? (aka Yoni Wolf) after coming accross him via Fog. Over time he and Fog collaborated on Hymie’s Basement then both gradually reinvented themselves from oddball solo artists into band leaders. Now everything has come full circle and Andy Broder (Fog) and Mark Erickson (of Fog’s current band) have collaborated with Why?’s band to produce an utter masterpiece. Much like the excellent album Ditherer Fog put out last year it sees Yoni take his sound and peculiar style and push it to eleven by using the might of a full band and the confidence of a few successful releases behind himself.
I’m very much a lyrics man myself, and Why? does definitely play towards that kind of listener, but also he’s found a way of taking his near monotone delivery and like many of the best rappers taking it as a way of focusing on delivery as well. This is not, in the main, a cheery album, which at least makes it fit with most of his previous work. A good example comes from my favourite track These Few Presidents…
Even though I haven’t seen you in years, yours is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere
…which gets sung in a laid back breezy style. Looked at in text form the lyrics seem unworkable, but somehow the whole adds much more than you’d imagine. And even if you don’t like the sound of that – check out their cover of Close To Me on their Myspace.
If you're wondering about the name change…
Astute, observant or just plain obsessed readers may well have noticed that after many years of calling this Alex’s Blog I’ve finally decided to change name to nutty’s nuggets. I’d love to claim that this change was precipitated by weeks of research or even some discussion. But no, instead it’s me ignoring what made this happen:
Above is a chart of my views by week, as you can see 2007 was barely scraping along fed in part thanks to my total lack of blogging at times. Then I made my annual blog about music of the year a month early. As of today that post has had 1,078 views on the site here, more than 10 times the next most popular post which is merely a couple of linked Gondry youtube clips. Now I think some of what caused that success was calling the blog Alex’s Blog which made it float up to the top of largeheartedboy‘s roundup which fed me nearly 1,000 of those 1,078 views! However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to get linked elsewhere I should have a snappier name hence nutty’s nuggets, which at least is as endearingly rubbish as my site design.
On an interesting side note, I was also linked from and had my data scraped for Hype Machine’s 2007 roundup, which includes their rather nice visual version of my top 10 albums of 2007, which they explain a bit in their own blog.
Anyone who’s been following the blog since then, don’t panic!, musical content here will ramp up as I get off my arse to go to gigs and as the new albums by Devotchka, Misty’s Big Adventure and Madness turn up…
Let's use google for good, then!
OK, so there’s the continuing rumbling rows about politicians expenses. Let’s have some fun seeing what we can find by looking online.
First things first – what data can we get, well there’s a bit on MPs at Westminster, but it’s not very detailed.
Instead, let’s look at MSPs and see what we can find there. We should look at the current financial year (2007-2008), then an expense that might be interesting, so how about Website Costs, which obviously I know something about. We get a total of £15,906.88 accross all MSPs, Charlie Gordon MSP has claimed £10,014.39 of that, now £35.40 of that was for Queen’s Park FC (?) and the remaining £9,978.99 was paid to GMG Solutions.
Hmm. What could make his website so much more expensive than everyone elses? Though admittedly only 20 MSPs claim for this expense anyway. For extra credit you might do a whois search, because then you find it lists a Gavin Gordon as the Administrative Contact. I wonder if he has an M for a middle initial and that GMG Solutions is his company. I’m not seeing anything illegal here, but it does seem odd, does it not, that one MSP claims about 62.9% of all expenses for all MSPs for this year for this type of expense. Maybe he should talk to his colleague George Foulkes who is a marvellous example of restraint in comparison with a single cost of £800 funding a website which includes a blog which even encourages Federalism (but without an rss feed, alas).
Should there not be something similar to the John Lewis list of reasonable prices as used in but not disclosed by Westminster to be used in assessing the costs all representatives charge the taxpayer for all expenses? Maybe Westminster does have something to teach Holyrood? Is it possible that other MSPs are listing their expenses for websites as a different type of expense, and if so are these figures not helpful when examined at this level?
But here’s the question I really want to know the answer to: if all this is public knowledge and freely searchable, why has no-one else picked up on it? After all Charlie Gordon was the subject of some considerable press coverage recently in the Wendy Alexander donations saga. Is it because it’s actually all hidden in so poor an interface as to make only random interrogation a useful method for finding things out? I’d dare say yes – time to try and write a site scraper, or see if anyone at the Scottish Parliament would be willing to provide a data feed.
"How are the sounds and beats made?"
I was somewhat startled this morning in bed listenning to the Today Programme on Radio 4 to hear their feature on Autechre.
I’d have known it was coming if I’d kept up to date with their Twitter feed.
Good interview, though.
If this is the last blog I ever make, do write to me in Belmarsh
The London Police have started another lovely new terror campaign, in their continuing efforts to stamp out the rampant threat of terrorism in London that threatens us all. This time they’re targetting people with multiple mobile phones and people who take photos of CCTV cameras.
So, mutiple phones looks suspicious, in that case we’re dead if the terrorists find these sim switching devices. Quick, make the technology illegal, THEN we’ll be safe.
How do you take a photograph in central London without including a CCTV camera anyway? OMG! What if the terrorists find the internet, there’s lots of photos of cctv cameras there – and maybe a map of them! Why look, the London Borough of Lambeth are terrorists.
(sigh)
And that took about 60 seconds of googling, just think what the finest terrorists on earth could achieve in an hour.
Pagan Wanderer Lu
Pagan Wanderer Lu’s Live at last.fm is a nicely recorded free introduction to the peculiar musical stylings of Andy Regan. A label mate of Napoleon IIIrd whose In Debt To is not only the CD I nearly snapped in half by stepping on it on my floor this week but also my favourite new British act of last year.
Basically you get a mix of organ sounds, urgent vocals and some odd noises whacked on top. What both he and Napoleon IIIrd do is interesting and doubtlessly they will be compared to Badly Drawn Boy if they make it big in any way. But actually I’d rather they just stick to their lo-fi stylings for now and produce obscure pop of this nature. It’s dead good stuff. If you don’t fancy a whole EP, then grab Our New Hospital Sucks in early radio form from his website.
Pagan Wanderer Lu – The Tree Of Knowledge – Live At Last.fm/Presents
Or get Tree Of Knowledge which has a very repetitive beginning with chants in very schoolyard like style and which has for me the lyric that is a gold standard and hard to beat.
Christians like you are why god invented lions
And there’s the bit that sounds like him taking out the tape and playing it backwards. I dearly hope that’s what he did. Shame, his technology minorly fails him near the end, but I disagree with him, the lad deserves applause.
Can’t wait for the album…
Rent
An interesting study reckons the way to sort out the rental market in London would be to encourage bigger brands and longer lets with branded build to let schemes. Now I can definitely see the attraction in this, because if I’m going to rent a property I’d rather it was modern, and well built, with someone caring for the whole block. Obviously if there’s a single owner this would be a good idea, and when you look at the proportion of new build flats that are bought solely to let as an investment there must be mileage in building such properties to be let.
Also, if I’m paying a more sensible rent for a higher quality property then I’ll either not want to buy a place or when I do I’ll actually have more of a deposit together thus negating the need to look for one of the now disappeared 125% mortgages.
There’s definitely the germ of a good idea in this, and it could be approached as a green policy if it helped foster a form of letting that encouraged owners to invest in energy efficiency and the like. Certainly as tenants move house more often than owners they are far more likely to make some form of choice based on a Home Information Pack like energy rating. And this is exactly the kind of scheme I had in my head when I objected to the new office block at the bottom of my road and instead suggested the council build something I could afford to rent/buy and live in.
And if you want to read the actual report it’s over here.