:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Friday, January 09, 2004 ::

For all you naughty peeps out there, it's interesting to note that the Evil Ones who are preventing us from making legitimate backup copies of our favourite music - ya know, just in case it gets run over by a bus - are being sued... heehee everything is free!

:: Dash 9.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Stolen from Michael Moore, the US gets a taste of its own medicine
from Brazil. who are fingerprinting every US citizen who enters the country.

Last night I was invited to a private viewing of Beatles in India and Rolling Stones Photographs and the Royal West of England Academy by the Victoria rooms. Free booze, so why not, I thought! Yes the photos were good. Yes I was hobnobbing with the semi-stars of Bristol (well maybe one or two). But really I was left wondering why I was in a room full of posh assmeisters who could afford to spend ?1,300 on a print of Keiff off his tits on M&Ms. No reason, but being introduced to them as Wonderboy and having my music played to them later somehow makes it all worthwhile. Oh hang on, no it doesn't! I left after five mins. Wankers.

:: Dash 9.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Stolen (including a good chunk of text) from yesterday’s Guardian Online recommended web sites:

"Can you make a living by playing online role-playing games? Julian Dibbell hopes so. He is half-way through a year-long experiment to earn a crust by trading in the immaterial wealth of the sci-fi game Ultima Online (UO), and has launched a blog to document it. Play Money is a daily blog of "one man's attempt to get rich selling castles in the air". Dibbell has a wife and child, but in April, he will state that his primary source of income comes from "the sale of imaginary goods" - the buying and selling of virtual weapons and property created inside the UO game world. Dibbell auctions these virtual commodities, and estimates that online trading in UO amounts to $1.2m annually, but he earned just $3,131.42 last quarter."

Realtime Jazz generation from a live video feed from inside Philadelphia's railway station. Carbonated Jazz. Sonata for the Unaware.

UK site for Japanese exotica. Including Vinyl Killer, The VW Van that plays records.

Google hints

GNU is 20

:: Dan 9.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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I haven't seen any of the Science season on 5 as I've been totally engrossed in 'Big Cat Week' on BBC1 this week. Each of the episodes have been left on a cliffhanger so far. The main cause for concern this week is that Simba's dominance is under threat by two young males who want to take over the pride and kill his only son. Also two leopard cubs, whose mum turned her back for a second to tie her shoelace up or something, are now hiding in a tree whilst a gang of baboons wait outside to duff them up. Find out what happens tonight at 7. It's all great telly and really quite moving. Also, it has endless footage of cheetahs beating the crap out of baby warthogs and then walking away laughing. Fantastic!

Also, if you needed proof that estate agents are simply football yobs in suits, look no further than Property People which started last night on BBC2. I loathe these people. It's got to be the lowest job a man can do. I've got more respect for the guy who works on porn-movie shoots being paid £1.26 per hour to wipe up fresh ejaculate.

:: Simon 8.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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New extended link list on right ---------->
Now contains almost entire contents of my favourite folder so gives away where all of my best oddities come from. Hope you find something you like.

:: Dan 8.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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The annoying programme about the possibility of other life in space also, inevitable, contained music from Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds and Duran Duran's This is Planet Earth, how did they ever think of those? This inspired me to listen to War of the Worlds again this morning and it is still a great as ever. I give you WotW related links:

War of the Worlds fan site

Full text of H.G. Wells classic book
Timeline of published versions of the book
H.G. Wells bio
The H.G. wells society

Text from Jeff Wayne's musical version
About the album
Buy the album
Buy the (probably awful) remix album
What else did Jeff Wayne ever do?
The Musical Version: The Game

Script from Orson Welles' infamously realistic suicide inducing radio play
Buy the radio play
About the radio play

The fairly average 80's TV version
The appalling Hollywood movie version

:: Dan 8.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Channel 5 is showing a surprisingly good Science Season at the moment, it's worth a look, 7:30 each night, this week and next. I was, however, annoyed by a blatant contradiction of itself last night. In Tuesday nights The Big Question, on how life started on earth, Louis Pasteur’s experiments were recreated showing how Amino Acids could form naturally in the conditions present on the early Earth. On Wednesday night, a programme about whether there is life out in space speculated that all life on earth may have come about as a result of Amino Acids being brought here by a comet as sucj acids have been found in some space debris. But you said they were here already! Durr! That aside, The Big Question is quite interesting.

:: Dan 8.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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It looks like Beagle 2 is now officially lost on Mars. The thing is, NASA have their 'Spirit' rover up there as well which is working perfectly well. Why don't they simply get Spirit to sniff about for Beagle and, when it finds it, instruct Spirit to turn Beagle off and then back on again? Should work. Or perhaps the 'special relationship' doesn't extend that far.



More than likely, Beagle just landed awkwardly and has been trying to correct itself. A reboot should sort that.

:: Simon 7.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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NASA Mars pictures now in colour. Most expensive picture of a rocky landscape EVER^* (8 MB JPG). More here.
* joke stolen from drill_boogie on mu board, sorry.

:: Dan 7.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Cup of Chincha has just brought to my attention this series of old Guardian articles about Difficult Art Forms. The one on Electronic Music (primarily Stockhausen) is particularly interesting, as are the ones on Jazz, Minimalism, Surrealism and probably all of the others I haven't read yet.

:: Dan 6.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Blacksmoke is the new music/art project from one time KLF man and Orb co-founder Jimmy Cauty. Interview about it here and official site here.

Boom Bip interview

:: Dan 6.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Cook'd and Bomb'd has given us a huge Christmas gift in the form of rare comedy captures for download, see here for rare Chris Morris GLR shows and Queens Speech cut-up (both from 1993 I think). They have also published and interview with Julian Dutton about his work with Peter Baynham, Herring and Lee, Harry Hill, Al Murray, Armando Iannucci etc and an article about the lost Dutton, Baynham and Sarah Smith (League of Gentleman) classic 20's boy's own spoof the Harpoon, which is downloadable here.

:: Dan 6.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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Beeb interviews Vint Cerf, "Father of the Internet", although he disagrees with that term, "I feel like typhoid Mary, I want to spread it as far as possible."

The winner is in from Today's Listeners Law poll:
1st place: Law 5: The proposal to authorise homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders. 37% of the vote.
Hmm, so as a society it seems we rate personal possessions above human life? Wasn't doing that one of the top ten bad things according to that book?

The Today programme has also had an interesting week of guest editors over Christmas, including Stephen Hawking and Thom Yorke (and his annoying spelling).

Mark Thomas is touring again. There will be a full UK tour in the autumn but to keep you going until then there are a few dates splattered around the New Year, including 21 Jan and 3 March in Bristol and plenty of London dates. Check here for news and updates.

:: Dan 6.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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If you're still up a 1am tonight you should listen to Ed DMX and Ceephax Acid Crew on the Breezeblock on Radio 1. Monday 5th Jan from 12:45 - 1:30am GMT. Ed will be playing Breakin' Records stuff including new unreleased tunes and Ceephax Acid Crew (brother of []P) will be playing unreleased tracks of his own. Listen here. If you have a digital box, set your video.

:: Dan 5.1.04 [Arc]    ::
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