Month: July 2023

Twitter’s pining for the fjords…

Oh good GRIEF. This bullshit is Oolong’s latest… I don’t even know what to call it, “business decision” seems wrong somehow. Basically he’s decided it’s time to get rid of the last thing that’s worth anything about Twitter, namely 17 years of brand name recognition, by rebranding it as X Corp. This is evidently not a sudden decision, as he was thinking about forming a holding company of that name for Tesla and SpaceX as early as 2012 and he apparently started forming the holding company when he started on his epic quest to… do whatever it was he was thinking when he offered to buy the birdsite. Why now? Why anything that Musk does?

Because the letter X by itself is such a unique and immediately recognisable logo that will make the company stand out because there aren’t dozens of other companies whose corporate logo resembles an X in some way… apart from these ones, anyway. Similarly, it’s not like the bird wasn’t one of the most recognisable corporate symbols in the world, if you don’t count the fact that it was:

…as I saw someone post on Twitter. As for supposed CEO of …whatever the fuck it’s now called, here’s what she had to say:

I don’t really know what purpose Linda Yaccarino serves. Dickhead is clearly still the one making all the decisions, and since she’s only been CEO since June, she can’t exactly claim any credit for this X thing in any way. What is she even there for? I don’t even see her drawing fire away from Oolong, which I thought would be her main task…

As for the logo design…

…this seems weirdly hard to beat somehow.

EDIT a few hours later: just saw this on Mastodon:

Join what? I think there’s a mixed message in that for all of us…

We are not the robots. No, really.

My favourite photo of Kraftwerk:

Not sure of the exact year, but obviously around the time they picked up Bartos and Flür, so probably 1975 or ’76. In any case, the spectacular unnaturalness of this picture just fills me with absolute joy. It just has this marvellous vibe that I can only describe as “we are normal human beings behaving like normal humans”. I’ve often felt their music (at least the later stuff) sounded like someone had described pop music to them, and they set out to make that sort of thing but they weren’t really successful at it, and this photo gives me a similar impression. Like, “people smile in photographs and we are smiling, we are normal… ja?”

Pauvre con

Have you noticed how much I tend to use the word “cunt” here? It’s not something I’m really proud of, but it’s a thing I do… I first heard it when we went to Scotland in 1981, I was 6, and we were visiting the rest of the family over there, and I recall one of my cousins saying it about someone else. I didn’t know what it meant—I thought maybe it was just a Scottish word people didn’t use here in Australia (wasn’t I wrong!)—but I had a feeling it was a Very Bad Word and I decided against letting anyone know I’d picked it up.

Anyway, it’s still a Very Bad Word but Malcolm Knox here reckons it’s becoming a lot less so, maybe not in the eyes of the law (don’t call a policeman one, even when he’s being one) but it’s certainly cropping up a lot more than it once did (my own earliest memory of it being used on TV was the legendary Blue Murder back in 1995). He is, however, wrong about one thing:

The French, epic lovers of obscenity, had normalised their word for c— to such a degree that when used by Serge Gainsbourg in Je t’aime Moi Non Plus, his 1968 duet with the late Jane Birkin, it sounds a little sexy.

I mean, maybe it would if it did in fact appear in the song, but it doesn’t, unless Malcolm has heard a different version to me. On the other hand, Serge Gainsbourg did write a song called “Requiem pour un con”… maybe that’s what Malcolm was thinking of and the recent passing of Jane Birkin made hm confuse them? Then again, “Je t’aime” is a lot more (in)famous, so maybe not? I don’t know. In any case, I also don’t know about the word being “normalised” as such…

…that being the record sleeve for the single release of “Requiem” in 1968; the record company might’ve tolerated the word in the song but not on the record sleeve, apparently. And “con” can actually be used much more mildly as “jerk” or “idiot” as well, indeed when I ran the French lyrics through Google Translate those were the words it gave me… but given that the record sleeve mutes the word “con”, that suggests Gainsbourg intended the Bad Meaning.

Talking of what Serge may or may not have meant: the recent passing of Jane Birkin put me in mind in a roundabout way of this one time on Celluloid Dreams, the film show on 2SER I used to be part of (let’s not discuss, I’m still a bit angry about that too), when we were interviewing a French lady called Catherine Chauchat… the latter had made a short documentary on the history of the vibrator that must’ve been showing somewhere in Sydney, and she stuck around with us for drinks after the show. So I decided to take the oppprtunity to ask a native French speaker (my own French was no longer good enough for me by then to confirm or deny) if something I’d read online was true, namely that a certain line in the chorus of “Je t’taime” (“Je vais et je viens/entre tes reins”) meant “I come and go between your kidneys”. Which she thought was HILARIOUS; apparently that is what it literally means, but in practice it’s more of a slang idiom pour le bumsex. I still hope Gainsbourg meant it literally…

And more testicles means more iron

Potatoes are better than human blood for making space concrete bricks, scientists say

Engineers have created an intriguing concrete alternative using simulated Martian or lunar soil, potato starch and salt.
The “space concrete” is twice as strong as conventional concrete, the researchers say. They hope the new material will eventually facilitate construction efforts on the moon and Mars.
In a new study published in the journal Open Engineering, two researchers from the University of Manchester in England demonstrate the effectiveness of potato starch as a binder to create the novel “StarCrete.” […]
Stronger concretes typically last longer, but that isn’t StarCrete’s major advantage as a potential building material on the moon or Mars. The scientists estimate that just 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of dehydrated potatoes could be used to produce nearly half a ton of StarCrete, which is enough to sculpt over 200 bricks. For context, you need about 7,500 bricks to construct a three-bedroom house here on Earth. […]
Potato starch wasn’t the first medium that University of Manchester scientists tested in their search for ISRU building supplies. In a previous study, the same team explored the possibility of using human blood and urine as binding agents for their extraterrestrial concrete. The blood and urine of astronauts, after all, are renewable resources, and they’re available wherever an astronaut’s mission might take them.
Concrete from the researchers’ trials using blood and urine also produced strengths above traditional mixtures, measuring around 40 MPa. These bricks’ construction, however, would require that astronauts repeatedly drain their own bodily fluids, which was viewed as a drawback.

No shit. Actually, maybe I shouldn’t say that in case they try that as well…

Out of the river all ugly and green

Anthem of the Sun, then. I’ve owned this fucking album for 30 years and I’ve only just realised it’s actually Pigpen who sings “Alligator”. I should probably be ashamed of that. I’ve also been terribly confused about it for much of that time, cos I was under the impression that the CD I bought way back in early 1993 was the remixed one… in the early 70s both Anthem and Aoxomoxoa were remixed for reissue, and I’ve spent years thinking the older CD releases of both of these were those versions. Then on a music forum I used to be a member of, someone was offering a vinyl rip of original 1968/69 pressings of both, which I obtained, was duly impressed by the differences… then I recently discovered the original mix had been the one on my early 90s purchase all this time and this purported original pressing was actually the 1971 remix after all. Years of misapprehension for some reason…

Anyway, NEVER MIND THAT, but tonight I opted to give both versions a back to back listen on headphones… I remember reading somewhere the Anthem remix was undertaken to make it sound more commercial or something, as if this could made to sound like anything of the sort. Anthem was an infamous experiment in combining live and studio recordings and it really is the sound of a band that didn’t really know what they were doing and going a bit mad in the process… producer David Hassinger quit the project allegedly when Bob Weir asked him to produce the sound of “thick air”, and one Warners executive apparently called it “the most unreasonable project” the company had ever been mixed up in. And “unreasonable” is possibly the best description of the whole thing, 55 years after the fact there’s still something preposterous about it… the remix certainly has a different character to the original, maybe a bit less muddy but also the editing seems kind of cruder and blunter, and I think I like the 1968 mix better. Either way, fucking great.

Toot toot

Ah, 1980s Miles Davis. To be honest, post-70s Miles is not something I’ve explored much, indeed this and Star People are the only 80s Miles albums I’ve heard, and tonight was my first listen to this. This (his first Warners album after nearly 30 years with Columbia) was actually mostly the work of Marcus Miller, who’d been his bass player on some of those comeback albums; Miles himself only has one co-writing credit and apart from the cover versions Marcus Miller wrote everything here and played most of the instruments.

Apparently it was Miles’ biggest hit in years, and also one of his most critically divisive at the time… which I can kind of understand, cos even by his electric period standards Tutu is a long way from conventional jazz, much as Bitches Brew had been in 1970… except Tutu sounds like 1986 in a way that Bitches doesn’t. Hard to explain, except maybe to say that Bitches obviously sounds of its time and yet also not, whereas Tutu is 100% of its time. On this first hearing what I heard most prominently was 1986. It was screamingly 1986. And the music, not just the production, sounds like 1986. It’s recognisably 1986-era R&B/funk. It’s good at being that, I think, but I need to give it more listens before I can really hear past all that 1986…

Let the games… go somewhere else

Shock horror news of the day: Victoria has cancelled the 2026 Commonwealth Games! In other news, a bunch of people suddenly realised for the first time today Victoria actually had the 2026 games to begin with…

The 2026 Commonwealth Games may not go ahead after Victoria withdrew as host, saying it was not prepared to spend as much as $7bn on “a 12-day sporting event”.
In an announcement labelled by the Commonwealth Games Federation as “hugely disappointing”, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said the cost of hosting the event had blown out from an earlier estimate of $2.6bn.
Andrews said his government would redirect the money to regional housing and sporting infrastructure.
“The Games will not proceed in Victoria in 2026,” Andrews said.
“We have informed Commonwealth Games authorities of our decision to seek to terminate the contract, and to … not host the games.”

I think it’s not entirely out of line to ask how the projected cost blew out that much (especially since the 2018 Gold Coast games only cost $1.6b, so the original estimate was already a lot more than that), but by the same token pulling out of such a ludicrously expensive event seems like the, I don’t know, responsible thing to do? At least the Murdoch media goons are taking it well:

Elsewhere there’s speculation about what this means for the Comm Games in general, but from what I’m now reading the games have been in chaos for years now behind the scenes… the 2022 games were supposed to go to Durban, mostly because they were the only bidder for them, but the CG Federation stripped them of the games cos they weren’t going to be able to afford them… thereupon Birmingham got the 2022 games after initially planning to go for 2026, leaving the latter games without a host after the CGF rejected a bunch of offers on cost grounds, until as late as April last year Dan Andrews put his hand up. And now… well.

So trying to get anywhere to host the Comm Games has apparently been a nightmare for years. Possibly because, let’s face it, it’s the Comm Games; by its nature it excludes an enormous chunk of the world’s athletes, like pretty much all other international games events that aren’t the Olympics (I saw it called “the Aldi Olympics” on Twitter, which I thought was fantastic). How much do people really care about it, with the obvious exception of people directly involved in sport? Is this such earth-shattering news for most people? If Brisbane suddenly decided it couldn’t hold the 2032 Olympics, that seems like it would be actually big news cos that would potentially affect the entire sporting world, not just the Commonwealth (although I don’t think the IOC would let them away with it; look at their insistence on the 2020 games going ahead even a year late despite Covid). I can’t help but feel most of the horror being expressed over the tragedy is because, well, it’s Dan Andrews. Media cares more about shitting on him than they do about the Comm Games per se…