Month: April 2024

How people change

I presume this is the same Tom Ellard from Severed Heads who used to lose his shit at the thought of people pirating his music, to the point where he would embed a unique code in each of his CDs so that if he found his music circulating online he would be able to source it back to the original owner of the CD it came from and… I don’t know, threaten to play Garry Bradbury at them, I don’t know what his plan to punish them for it was. We appear to have shifted our position on piracy a bit over the last couple of decades, or maybe it’s OK as long as it’s Apple TV… Not that I’m judging Tom, of course, cos as a frequent downloader of things I haven’t paid for myself I would be a bit of a hypocrite if I did judge him; just find it mildly amusing, is all.

Wait until he hears about the Sabine women

Someone shared this on Bluesky:

Apparently this is what I miss out on by not following Oolong on Twatter, i.e. this sort of first-class mind speculating on history as if he were the first person to ever have this idea and THE FUCKING ROMANS THEMSELVES hadn’t thought of it MILLENNIA ago. Like… the Aeneid exists. It has done since before the putative birth of Christ. The Trojans are there in the extant parts of Dionysius and Livy, which are of the same period.

And the Romans got Aeneas from the Greeks, much like they got almost everything else. I don’t know exactly when the story of him founding the Trojan colony in Italy first originated, but we do find this in the Iliad at one point (Emily Wilson translation):

Aeneas has been fated to survive,
so that the family of Dardanus,
whom Zeus, the son of Cronus, loved the most
of all the sons he had by mortal women,
will not die out, forgotten, with no seed.
But Zeus has come to hate the line of Priam.
Therefore Aeneas and his children’s children
who will be born in future generations
will rule the Trojans.

That’s Poseidon speaking in book 20. Aeneas isn’t a big character in the Iliad, but the idea that he was being spared by the gods for something big was present in this text, whose precise date and origin are still quibbled over (and have been for millennia as well) but it’s generally considered that it was committed to writing some time in the eighth century BC. So the idea that Aeneas was fated to survive the war and flourish as the Trojan ruler (and it doesn’t say he would necessarily rule Troy as such, just the Trojans) goes back a very long way.

And here’s this stupid cunt going on like he’s the first person in history to ever think this. As if he’s ever given the Romans any thought in the first place. Next thing he’ll be noticing that English contains a lot of words from other languages…

Important images 44

Some of these are quite timely, cos yesterday marked the birthday of Charlie Chaplin, who famously satirised our other birthday boy Adolf H. in The Great Dictator; also, I now know “Jehan Sylvius” was actually one Ernest de Gengenbach, who was one of the more interesting characters considered in that Patrick Lepetit book I read recently. I’d never heard of him before but he was evidently one of the more intriguing and thoroughly odd people to have been tied to the surrealists.

Also, there’s some nudity herein. And quite a few cats.

Continue reading “Important images 44”

“Pandemonium” was right

The Pandemonium Rocks festival has been in and out of the news for a few months now, and it’s been kind of amazing to watch. I think I first heard about it when there was harrumphing about the Sydney date being held at The Domain on Anzac Day:

A music festival planned for Sydney’s CBD will be moved to Western Sydney after the RSL deemed the event “inappropriate”.
NSW Premier Chris Minns defended his decision to relocate the Pandemonium event from the Domain in the CBD to Sydney Olympic Park.
The rock music festival, which features acts like Alice Cooper, Blondie and Deep Purple, was initially booked for 11:30am in the CBD, a venue managed by the Botanic Gardens of Sydney.
The annual Anzac Day commemoration service will take place in front of the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park at 12:30pm, in earshot of the music festival.

And to be sure it probably wasn’t the best idea to do this, but I was more intrigued by the lineup. Alice Cooper, Blondie and Deep Purple? And then there were more: Placebo? Wolfmother? Psychedelic Furs? Palaye Royale? Cosmic Psychos? Gyroscope? WHEATUS? GANG OF FOUR? DEAD KENNEDYS? What, and indeed, the FUCK. This would not be the last time the words “what the fuck” would be uttered in response to Pandemonium, especially when news came through that it had been cancelled.

This turned out to not actually be the case, but I don’t think anyone would’ve been too surprised if it had been (quite apart from the way music festivals are going tits up left right and centre around Australia right now). Unfortunately, the show was going on… but reduced from two stages to one and accordingly losing Placebo, Deep Purple, DKs, Go4 and Gyroscope. (Palaye Royale just dropped out too, but that was a family emergency rather than incompetence.) People were pissed, not without reason, and it didn’t help that Apex Entertainment weren’t exactly forthcoming with offers to refund people; currently they’re refusing to offer more than $70 cos that’s how much they’ve reduced ticket prices by.

The most interesting detail in this was that Blondie and Alice Cooper offered this joint statement:

So, am I reading that correctly if I think they’re saying the bands have actually been doing some of the organisational work for this festival…?

Frankly, though, they should be offering people refunds for adding Warwick Capper to the bill… that was JUST what was needed. That brothel he bought last year must not be paying the bills for him. Anyway, just as the people still looking forward to the event were getting ready for the tour to start tomorrow, THIS happened:

Pandemonium Rocks has inadvertently leaked the bank account details, phone numbers, names, and email addresses of hundreds of ticket holders. This breach occurred late this evening through a form that was distributed to festival attendees seeking refunds.
The data exposure includes sensitive financial information such as BSB and account numbers. These details belonged to attendees who submitted their personal information to claim a partial refund after the festival lineup dramatically changed last minute, leading to the cancellation of performances by 7 out of the 13 scheduled bands.

Fuck. Me. Dead. Someone was asking Joel King, the author of this piece, on Facebook (where I first read it) if he thought Apex’s Andrew McManus had actually done this deliberately to discourage people who hadn’t yet applied for their refund, because this is the 21st century and this is the Internet and people make that sort of assumption because it’s de rigueur, and King said probably not but to be honest I think I actually wouldn’t be surprised to find that he had… and in any case there’s a bunch of people on brother King’s FB who are now very wary of taking McManus’ offer. Oy. I just hope against hope that the shows still go OK, cos I can imagine this festival fucking up even further, though I’m afraid to ask how in case McManus tells me. In any case, I think the real headline show will eventually be in court somehow…

In fact it’s a gas

House conservatives have a special group dedicated to preserving their power. Of course, it’s called the FART team.

No, really, that’s what it’s called. The Floor Action Response Team. FART.

Mind you, this isn’t the first time they’ve had trouble naming things according to Wiki:

The caucus originated during the mid–January 2015 Republican congressional retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania. According to founding member Mick Mulvaney, “that was the first time we got together and decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys”. Nine conservative Republican members of the House began planning a new congressional caucus separate from the Republican Study Committee and apart from the House Republican Conference. The founding members who constituted the first board of directors for the new caucus were Republican representatives Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Jim Jordan of Ohio, John Fleming of Louisiana, Matt Salmon of Arizona, Justin Amash of Michigan, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, Mulvaney of South Carolina, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.
At the retreat in Pennsylvania, the group settled on the name Freedom Caucus. Mick Mulvaney told Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, “We had twenty names, and all of them were terrible. None of us liked the Freedom Caucus, either, but it was so generic and so universally awful that we had no reason to be against it.” According to Lizza, “one of the working titles for the group was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus.”

As far as bunches of fucking deadshits go, this clown car certainly is one. The fundamental unseriousness of these people is stunning.

Those teeth are a bit loud too

Found this via one of those Tumblr archives I’ve got downloaded. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in recent years about the loudness of TV ads compared to the shows, but clearly this is not a new phenomenon… took a bit of effort to track down exactly when this issue came out, but I now find the year was 1959. So the “loud” commercial thing has been an issue since then at least (I wonder what the “facts” were; the US has laws against ad volume exceeding program volume but that’s only been since 2012) and it’s not even remotely a new thing, which is interesting. Well, to ME at any rate…