Tag Archives: news

offputting offsetting

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cheatneutral.gif

Currently BAA are attempting to get a massive injunction against Airport Watch to try and stop them protesting at Heathrow.

However, I think for all the endless free publicity BAA have helped them get nothing is as clever as their Cheat Neutral spoof which has a big go at carbon offsetting schemes.

When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

Which pretty neatly skewers the notion that offsetting is a way to deal with your behavior. Funding (or better still taking part in) schemes and actions that are good for the environment just as part of your own every day life is pretty obviously a better idea than trying to offset certain portions of your carbon footprint with extra managed forestry.

In other news, did you know that the UK is planning to use offsetting as 70% of the reduction planned for meeting its long term carbon targets? And of course, those targets ignore emissions from aviation. More interesting still are the complex disagreements about how to measure aviation emissions in the UK, most figures quoted seem to be for flights departing the UK only.

Whatever your position, it’s pretty clear that you have to look beyond any headline figures and look to the finer detail to get any sense of what’s really going on. But also, for all that flying may have a major effect, it’s what you do year round that makes the difference. One carbon offset holiday a year does not a green life make.

Anyway, enough of this, time to sign up for £2.50 a month to remain single – though clearly by supporting a green agenda I may only have a limited amount of time to earn if Nuts magazine is to be believed.

flood

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No, not the classic They Might Be Giants album.

It appears to be a bit wet out there, though I think The Evening Standard is being more alarmist than usual.

Right now many people are working around the clock to try and avoid losing a major national grid switching station to the waters and plunging several hundred thousands into darkness. Unfortunately it would appear that those who were involved in refurbishing it only last year were only too aware that it was built on a flood plain.

‘We will have eight out of 16 circuits transferred by October this year, which puts us bang on target to have the new switching station fully commissioned for the end of 2006. Transferring circuits calls for planned outages. This is timed to ensure that there is no supply disruption to Central Networks customers during the peak winter period. Also the position of the site on the river flood plain presents some challenges for working during winter. The switching station is on raised ground, and the building itself is on stilts, and in one period of heavy rain it became an island surrounded by flood water.’

Perhaps they’ll be raising those stilts before the winter.

Music of 2006 – Part 2 -Those Difficult Second Albums

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Following on from my last post here’s some albums that various acts (one in revamped form) released following up on impressive debuts.

  • The Futureheads – News & Tributes [myspace] [wikipedia] [official site] [metacritic]
    futureheadsnt.jpg
    Obviously The Futureheads first album was pushed heavily thanks to their cover of The Hounds Of Love, fortunately Kate Bush liked enough to leave them a voice mail message. Unfortunately it leads a lot of folk to overlook everything else they’ve ever released (as the link shows). Which is bonkers. A bit like a lighter and more consistent version of XTC, the thing that always gets me with The Futureheads is their vocals, wordy songwriting (Excepting Yes/No maybe) and rhythm based arrangements. There’s no covers here but what you do get is a wonderful grab bag including the should-have-been-a-single Fallout which I love mainly for the echo-y fuzzed guitar, obvious and great single Skip To The End and best-sub-three-minute-love-song-of-2006 Favours For Favours which has fucking great lyrics and could also have been a single. Unfortunately they released Worry About It Later as the second single, which along with News & Tributes forms the lesser tracks of the album due to the forced nature of both songs. Still, a good record and worth it for Fallout or Skip To The End or Favours For Favours alone, and it helps me cope with the ongoing reality that XTC are unlikely to record much again.
  • Ratatat – Classics [myspace] [official site] [wikipedia] [metacritic]
    Ratatat-Classics.jpg
    Ratatat’s début was a strange record in many ways and a bit too much of a hipster fave. On the other hand though it’s the finest keyboard/guitar electronica I’ve had stuck in my head ever since it came out so I’d been awaiting the second album with baited breath. Sustaining an album without lyrics is always tricky and there was always a risk that they’d just repeat the sound of their first album, but they’ve avoided that well whilst at the same time only just coming up with a track that could top 17 Years, the explosion of RAWK which opened their first album. The first album lay low after the opener and was quite sombre, evoking lazy afternoons spent playing 8 and 16 bit computer games with those classic warm tonal sounds pouring forth from the TV. This album isn’t and is all the better for it. Bizarrely the effect of the second album is to render the first less listenable because you get addicted to Ratatat Version 2.

    The upgrade comes with a number of key new features:
    Lex not only comes close to being named after me but also attempts to outdo 17 Years in broken up song territory.
    Wildcat has the finest sample of a wildcat committed to a song in living memory and seems like the soundtrack to some forgotten 8 bit adventure of wonder. I had a master plan of making a video for it myself (somehow) which fell apart when I realised that Golden Shower had covered that idea years ago with Video Computer System’s immensely cool video. On the plus side, Wildcat rocks.
    Nostrand is also possibly the sweetest and coolest thing they’ve ever done.

  • Islands – Return To The Sea [myspace] [official site] [wikipedia] [metacritic]
    120px-IslandsReturnToTheSea.jpg
    I’m not counting this as a début cos the band is essentially a successor to The Unicorns. And I always wanted another record from them, so getting 2/3 of them to continue was good. Unfortunately now it’s 1/3 of them recording the next album! Anyway, as The Unicorns everything was about songs that changed on a whim, short and lo-fi numbers with structure thrown to the wind. The Islands sees much longer songs with longer gaps between the shifts but it’s still basically the same shtick. And I still love it. Opener Swans (Life After Death) lasts nearly ten minutes, but doesn’t out-stay it’s welcome for a second, honest. The rest of the album is a hodge-podge of tales of destruction and love with one mind-bendingly great instrumental stuck in the middle.
  • The Emperor Machine – Vertical Tones & Horizontal Noise [myspace]
    int_emperormachine.jpg
    Andy Meecham is a closet pop genius. As part of Bizarre Inc he had a hand in one of the 90s greatest girl-singer-warbles-whilst-two-second-rap-samples are played over synths records, I’m Gonna Get You. Nowadays he’s part of Chicken Lips, but more importantly he’s also The Emperor Machine. I first came accross this sparse bass heavy sci-fi electronica due to the first album but it all kicked off with a couple of 12 inch releases which I acquired along with the subsequent four volumes of Vertical Tones & Horizontal Noise in vinyl form (plus a turntable) in the middle of the year. In vinyl form (for home listening anyway) each song is much more of an experience and a number of the tracks gain from the added attention they get from being a whole side of listening.
    Anyway, this meant that when the second album finally appeared I didn’t come to it fresh and feared my familiarity with certain tracks might render the whole thing dead and sterile. Fat chance. Clearly the new album was a struggle (as the credit to synthrepair.com proves), but he succeeds in moving his sound on marvellously even sparing a track or two to experiment with vocals, which works best on No Sale No ID. My particular favourites are Monkey Overbite, which has a ludicrous opening leading to the soundtrack of a desolate post-holocaust wasteland and Fear Of Woman which combines a cool title with the kind of music Buck Rogers believed he could play.

I would say don’t ask me to pick any favourites but I think somehow the two mainly instrumental albums edge it with The Emperor Machine standing out best. Which kinda surprises me.

YouTube – XTC – The Road To Oranges & Lemons

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Apparently all the cool kids are destroying the internet by rotting their brains looking at videos on google video and youtube. I’ve succumbed as well, having found that there are a lot of interesting vintage clips along with even rarer footage of Scotland winning football matches. I’ll be logging my favourites over there.

Such as this puppet show made by XTC depicting their history which is chaotic genius. Clearly Adam and Joe stole all their ideas from XTC.


YouTube – XTC – The Road To Oranges & Lemons

the pleasure of living in London

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So, I got stuck in a small traffic jam on the way out of my house yesterday. Various police were zooming around on mopeds and talking animatedly, and hordes of police vans were descending on the area. I assumed that there was some form of a drugs raid going on. It would appear truth is stranger still, with a local “artist” dumping packages containing nails in parts of my area including my street.

Now, I can defend modern art up to a point when it just tries to create a stir. However, there’s something a little tackless in dropping dummy bombs in an area of London that had a failed bombing within the last year, merely a fortnight after 7/7 itself. And it’s the not only terrorism in the history of my street either, there was a cache of IRA guns above the shops oppostite my house in 1970.

I thought my room was small…

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Long before I got job in the big smoke, I’d realised that expensive as Edinburgh was, you got some space for your money. Now, my room is easily the smallest of anything I’ve lived in since starting school so it’s very reassuring to find that someone else is paying much more for so much less.

I even get the rest of a house with mine – which at least gives me somewhere to put bike, bookcase and baking ingredients.

135-a-week rent tag for cupboard

Ouch

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me migraine

I’ve suffered from migraine for a long time, since my teenage years. Over that time the attacks have ebbed and flowed, in a pretty natural manner – I had some really bad ones during my final couple of years in high school which culminated in a temporary loss of sight after going to see Star Wars in the cinema. So like a lot of other people I have issues with George Lucas.

During my university years I was able to live around the attacks much easier, the flexible timetable and loose long deadlines were helpful, so I managed to stay low stress and avoid all the risk factors. Somehow I was forunate enough never to get many at all during my exam periods.

However, rather suddenly after I returned from a very relaxing and pleasurable week back up north with my family and friends about a month ago it all came back, and much worse than ever before. It’s not been fun, I’ve only just had a series of days without any pain, but I’m still knackered.

The first few days all I noticed was that by a certain point in the day a migraine would develop, over the first fortnight this time got earlier in the day and then visual disturbances got worse. Ultimately I lost the ability to keep my eyes focused to read and got sent home from work a couple of times. At this point I opted to head for the NHS walk in centre. After a bit of a wait and a lot of understanding from medics (it would appear that suffering from migraines is pretty much ubiquitous in the medical professsion), I was given an emergency prescription for some Co-codamol to treat the pain, and additionally Sumatriptan to try and knock out the headaches.

This combination worked pretty well, and while I continued to have a series of very painful and disruptive migraines I could at least watch Dr Who. However, the series of migraine did not stop so I finally sorted out a local GP and got an appointment. In relation to the ongoing controversy I’d say that for me the real bugbear was getting registered, it would appear that whilst surgeries do have borders in their catchment they have no knowledge of geography or even a map perhaps that indicates which addresses the serve. Also, they seemed amazingly reluctant to give me the forms to sign up with, which meant that I had to delay my first appointment for 20 minutes as I took a while to fill in all the paperwork.

Anyway, after all that the doctor was great. After a quick discussion of symptoms and methods of treatment he concluded with a little help from his BNF that a regular dose of beta blockers was the best thing to try and stop the series of migraine. Thus far (5 doses later) it seems to be working, although I still seem to be amazingly short on energy. Also, if anyone would like to take me on at pool or snooker I’d be delighted to attempt a scientific experiment to test my nerves during the treatment.

New adventures in Hi-Fi

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So, imagine if the RIAA was lying all along and sales of music were actually improving?
You don’t need to dream.
Yes, all of those RIAA decline in music sales figures would appear to have been based on figures for “sold in” to shops rather than sold from. Naturally, high street stores are generally aiming to stock less and yet sell more (it’s a much more profitable way to operate). There’s also some interest as to how much the RIAA are interested in the sales all along the tail rather than just in the top 200.

You’ll be reassured to note therefore that online music (even the illegal stuff) is not evil after all. It would also appear that Sony like the idea of a itunes for video. Nifty but I’d like to see the Sony wireless movie viewer to watch them on first…