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So, my current favourite radio station of all time, EVAR (part 1) has just finished its yearly 100 greatest Rock songs of all time…
- Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name
- Metallica – One
- Foo Fighters – Everlong
- Tool – Sober
- Metallica – Enter Sandman
- Shihad – Home Again
- AC/DC – Back ‘n’ Black
- Guns ‘N’ Roses – November Rain
- Pearl Jam – Black
- Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird (Fixed spelling… you can’t trust anyone in this copy/paste world…)
So, how many surprises do we have in there…?
Well, Rage is currently loved more than usual (even in NZ) following the shafting of Cowell last Christmas. With the exception of Shihad and Tool (neither of whom I’m heard of before) it’s all pretty much as expected. In fact, Freebird is the only one of those tracks that wasn’t in the top 20 for last year’s chart.
How many new entries were there in the top 100? It’s a depressingly short list…
- I Am Giant – City Limits
- Slash – By The Sword (incredibly forgettable, IMHO)
- I am Giant – Neon Sunrise(which I think is a better song than City Limits)
- Rise Against – Saviour (another great song)
- Disturbed – Inside the Fire (urgh…)
- Slipknot – Snuff (It’s slipknot…. that’s all you need to know)
- War Machine – AC/DC
Wait… what? War Machine was released 2 years ago. How did the fans of AC/DC take two whole years to get that into the top 1000?
Strangely, one of my favourite tracks on The Rock (American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem) didn’t make it onto the list at all.
Most depressing of all is that U2 managed to get 21 tracks in the top 1000. Still, at least they didn’t manage to get higher than 93…
Do any of you remember this wonderful video from the icy bit last year…?
I saw it back then and made disparaging comments about the driver.
Then I realised who the driver is.
Hi Stuart… *waves*
XKCD original alt text : "Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you."
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had this conversation. I don’t care where the entrance to your street is, or if there’s this tricky little junction by the pub – if I don’t know how to get somewhere, I use a satnav which knows where you are.
The only two exceptions are if you live at number 23, which is hidden between number 3 and number 81, round the back of number 42, or if you happen to live in a house that was built in the last 12 months.
Besides, the satnav is less likely to miss out a junction and inadvertently put me onto the one way system from hell. Or tell me to turn left at the Rose and Crown, forgetting that the bloody thing burnt down in 1981 and it’s now a scrap yard.
A while back, someone on FormSpring asked me who would be on my list of the 10 sexiest women in the world.
Recently I got bored enough to actually think about it. There are some who will complain that it treats women as objects (it doesn’t) or that it’s disrespectful (it isn’t). But the list did surprise me a little… Read the rest of this entry »
Amongst my father’s stuff I found the beginnings of an autobiography. It’s disjointed as hell, and probably of no interest to anyone who isn’t in the family. For them, I may end up copying it out.
But the thing that caught my eye was the list of topics yet to cover… Read the rest of this entry »
The next batch of photos, this time from Taupo towards Tauranga…
Taupo, Craters of the Moon
You know what…? I got bored with writing about NZ. Don’t get me wrong, I love the country and love going through the photos. The problem is that I loved it too much and there’s not enough people interested in what happened to spend time moping about how I want to go back out there. So I’m going to image dump…
Napier Aquarium
Lobster man, lobster man, does whatever a scuba diver can...
Read the rest of this entry »
Lobster man, lobster man, does whatever a scuba diver can...
This is what happens when I don’t drink coffee in the mornings…
I was listening to Tom Jones chatting with Chris Moyles this morning. As is slightly predictable, the subject turned to the appearance of underwear appearing on stage.
The thing is, I know from my personal experience of throwing things at (and missing) the laundry bin, that clothing doesn’t fly very well. So, for every pair of knickers (panties to you for’n types) that land on stage, another dozen or so land on the heads of the people in the first few rows.
That’s not a result for anyone.
So, here is my shot at making millions and millions out of that still fresh phenomenon of throwing underwear at ageing singers…
Ultra whispy lightweight g-string or thong knickers, with mesh replacing the remaining fabric, and with industrial strength elastic in the waistband. With a little bit of practice, I think that you should be able to ping them – rubber band style – ten times as far as you could throw normal underwear.
And as a humourous bonus, the larger the underwear, the further the range. Although you might want to think again if it takes to people to aim them…
So, with the mighty power of iPlayer, I watched part one of BBC’s new Sherlock mini-series last night. And, all in all, I was pretty impressed…
Spoilers ahoy! Read the rest of this entry »
So… I realised that the ancient travel guides have some fantastically odd adverts…
I know that South Africa has Biltong and America has Jerky, but nothing says “tasty food products” like “MEAT LOZENGES”.
Oh god… Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things my grandfather gave me before he died, was a fantastic book called “Through the Chilterns to the Fens”.
The premise of the book is a simple one – to give a guide to the towns in the corridor from the Chilterns to the Wash near Lincoln, inexplicably including a chunk of modern London and Hertfordshire.
The problem is that the book really isn’t a big book – A6 size, and barely 160 pages – and there isn’t a lot of space to give detailed descriptions of all the locations the author wanted to cover.
In a stroke of genius, instead of leaving towns out, he just gave fantastically brief descriptions. Others get incredibly involved, but are humourously out of date.
These are a few of my favourites… Read the rest of this entry »
You may well know that there is something of a disagreement between my wife and I about the difference between a geek and a nerd.
The case for the defence recently presented a Venn diagram that showed ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ with an intersection ‘people who argue about the difference between geeks and nerds’.
The prosecution would now like to offer this Venn diagram which has been floating around the internet for about a year…
The first person to comment on the geekery or nerdishness of arguing with Venn diagrams will be sacrificed to the school bully.
This here amuses me no end…
QWxsIHlvdXIgYmFzZSBhcmUgYmVsb25nIHRvIHVz
What amuses me significantly more is that none of the 6 Google results currently showing this string are in the same deeply retro-nerd context that I’m using it in…
Answers (if you give a shit) on a postcard to the usual comment box…
EDIT : 7/7/10
I suppose the string should really be one of these two
QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVTLg==
QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVT
but I don’t like all-caps (even if they are technically correct) and there are no results at all for those two…
So, I’ve been bug fixing…
1) How come nobody told me that the input fields on the comment form had no text to tell you what each one did…? Oh… Nevermind…
2) There’s now a ’subscribe’ link under the comment box so that you can have it tell you if anyone else comments on a post. At the moment it insists that you approve every time you subscribe. I’ll see if I can fix that one.
3) I’ve added a tracker that adds any post marked ‘hoot’ to my twitter feed. I doubt many of you will care, but I thought it would explain the new (and odd) tag.
As anyone who reads my twitter may have realised, I was at a wedding this weekend.
Well, technically, someone (possibly the groom) told me, it either wasn’t a wedding or wasn’t a marriage, since both the grooms were male and they are now civil partners, but to everyone there, it was a wedding. And a damned fine one too.
At the risk of offending others, I think I have to say it was the most relaxed group of friends and family I’ve ever seen at a wedding – everyone dancing, singing, shouting, and laughing like the greatest of lifelong friends.
Yet, somehow, none of the photos I took of people were to my liking. Every one of them was blurry or oddly posed. I know that I prefer going macro or landscape to going portrait, but still… Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve ever been in an Internet argument about the spelling of the word humour, or tried to explain that something vaguely coincidental isn’t “ironic”, you have probably have been told that the Internet is an American invention. (Presumably we’re ignoring the fact that the Web is an Anglo-Swiss one).
So, it’s always surprised me that there’s something decidedly (and I fear to say the word) communist about the modern Internet.
No, there’s no repression of religion, and no, we’re not being sent off to fight the Germans with a broken AK-47 and a tonne of beetroot, but there is something, well, odd, going on.
How, exactly, did America – the land where the dollar rules and capitalism is king – create a system where everything has to be free? Where there is no such thing as paid content? Where nothing belongs to anyone any more?
There are websites galore out there, dedicated to republishing other people’s work. Sometimes the content is licensed under Creative Commons, or constitutes fair use under US law, but all to often it’s just a picture stolen from another website, without attribution or (worse) with the copyright-holder’s watermark overwritten with the name of the new host. There’s sites dedicated to this kind of bollocks.
Then there’s the joys of thepiratebay.org , a wonderful repository of all things. And, yes, I’ve downloaded stuff from there (normally when I can’t find my original disks or some arsehole music label has copy protected their music, to prevent my fair use of the product), but the thing also houses links to every TV show, film or audio CD you’ve ever heard of. I’m not here to argue the legal or moral positioning of this, but it’s an obvious blow to the glories of capitalism.
How has this happened?
The obvious thing happening right now is the paywalling of The Times and The Sunday Times websites. Now, I actually quite like the Sunday Times… I hate the news, but I hate the news from all sources. What I like is the blogs and features. It’s my ‘Playboy’, if you will. Yes, I know it’s famous for its news, but I read it for the features… Read the rest of this entry »
There was a woman on Radio4 last night talking about the wonders of modern art and it’s value as an investment…
Artists like Picasso, Monet and Manet always have an appeal to investors because they are popular the world over, from Tokyo to Los Angeles.
I don’t think that nugget conjured up the image you wanted it to…
View stupid radio 4 woman in a larger map
Before you watch this, you need to know three things…
- There is a surprisingly large slab of the fan fiction culture who believe that Capt Kirk and Mr Spock have a secret romantic relationship that is barely hinted at in the series
- There is a thriving community of people bolting together TV show clips to make music videos.
- Someone once told William Shatner he could sing, and he’s (intentionally, I think) taking the joke further than the rest of us are.
That said…. comedy gold…
I’ve embarrassed myself in public many many times now by referring to things of much coolness as “XYZ porn”. Normally I end up looking at kitchen porn (entirely SFW). This is probably the first time I’ve found ceiling porn…
