Fuck PZ Myers

There are two times… no, that’s wrong, there are no times when I actually like spiders as such, but there are two times when I like them even less than usual:

One, when they’re in big closeup on my computer or TV screen, or in a magazine or book;
Two, when they’re in my house and I’m the only one awake to deal with them.

I particularly dread the latter situation, and so obviously it came about last night just when I’d been thinking “hmm, haven’t seen any spiders in here for a few days”… there it was in the room with me, just sitting by the back door. The only way this could’ve been worse would’ve been if the fucking thing were in my bedroom (I expect that to happen in the next few days). Housemate was asleep and I didn’t want to wake him (he doesn’t like spiders but he’s not phobic about them like me), so that left your hero here. Oy.

Now, all I could do was spray the cunt, cos DAMNED if I was getting close enough to something that size to hit it with a shoe like I would if it were a cockroach (which I also don’t like but I’m not phobic about those)… so that meant hitting it with a lot of Mortein sprayed from a safe distance. And, well, it did not want to die (I’m surprised *I* didn’t die before it). It took more minutes than I would’ve liked for it to finally do so, and it kept hanging on to the wall for dear life, until it finally dropped off… I didn’t see exactly where it landed, but I saw it again a few minutes later. It didn’t get far and would not be going any further. Whew.

I kept looking over to the spot where the corpse was to make sure it was still there, and I put it out this afternoon. For once, housemate had no part in disposing of one of our eight-legged friends, I did this myself all the way… if I wasn’t so repulsed by having to do so, I might feel proud of myself for coping. I’m still catching myself looking over at the spot where the corpse was (did it just now, in fact, after I wrote those words) to make sure it’s not still there or something. Maybe I’m not coping 100%, I don’t know.

Hi, I’m an arachnophobe. Just thought I should clarify that in case it wasn’t obvious.

Continue reading “Fuck PZ Myers”

What happened to vinyl?

But I was shocked at what I encountered. Few of the albums I wanted were available in vinyl. Prices were outrageously high. The whole market seemed designed to discourage buyers.
I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter—the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.
In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels—who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.

Ted Gioia is unimpressed by the vinyl market as it currently stands. I am, frankly, a vinyl skeptic; I remain unconvinced about its supposed superiority to digital (especially when it’s produced from digital sources, and didn’t Mobile Fidelity fuck up on that account recently) except insofar as vinyl doesn’t (usually) fight in the loudness wars as much as digital recording does. I no longer understand why I used to think having stuff on vinyl was important (unless that was the only way in which it was available), most of the stuff I do have on vinyl I now have in digital form too (whether CD or flac files), and in any case I have nothing to play it on anyway. And, apparently, I’m not alone there. Ted further observes:

But here’s an even more ominous sign. Half of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. They apparently bought the Taylor Swift album as a kind of memorabilia—something a little nicer than a band T-shirt.
This can’t be a good thing for the record business. After all, how many records are you going to buy if you don’t have a turntable? This is like trying to sell Teslas as a status symbol to people who don’t drive. […]
I guess it could be worse—but it couldn’t be much worse. The music industry took its fastest growing segment and killed it through greed and laziness.

I get the appeal of the physical artifact and all that, but a vinyl record is… a bit useless in thar regard if you can’t play it. Especially given how expensive they tend to be, which is what really puts me off them these days… At the moment JB Hifi is selling a vinyl edition of Neil Young’s Eldorado for $54.99, which is not only a 34 year old catalogue item, it’s a fucking EP, not even a full album. And they want fifty-five dollars for that? To be sure, JB are also selling Neil on CD at kind of absurd prices too (thirty-eight dollars for a single CD of one of his bootleg series?) so I wonder if that particular case is a Neil thing, and it should be said some of JB’s vinyl actually is rather more reasonably priced… but not a lot of it.

The ludicrous price of new vinyl is the chief sign that the vinyl revival is really pitched at hipsters with money to burn, with the industry basically just doing what it did when CD was new, i.e. lazily bilking people out of money for music they already owned, except now they’re presenting the twelve-inch disc rather than the five-inch one as The Thing To Have, and I’m afraid I’m just not buying it (literally or figuratively). Mind you, I can kind of understand the nostalgia aspect of the vinyl revival in some ways; what baffles me is the cassette revival. I remember when cassette tapes were still a thing and they always left a fair bit to be desired. I don’t understand the appeal now at all. I mean, the revival isn’t exactly big; Gioia’s piece has a graphic showing that cassette sales aren’t even into seven figures, although numbers are rising even so. But the fact that it’s happening at all confuses me. That’s the modern world, though, it has that effect on me generally…

2 Passion 2 Christ

Apparently the Passion of the Christ sequel we were threatened with a few years ago is finally about to happen… I recall it was supposed to come out in 2021 but I presume a certain worldwide pandemic got in the way until now, assuming of course that it is in fact happening (I don’t know if it’s actually confirmed or not). Either way, the news has inspired a string of possible titles for the film as you can see in the article I linked (I quoted my own favourite in the post title), which further inspired this:

I rewatched the original Passion a few years ago, having not watched it since the day of its release in 2004, and where I didn’t like it on that first viewing, I hated it on that rewatch. It’s pornography by and for an anti-Semitic ghoul, and seeing Jason’s post above moaning about the mockery really let me know where he is as a fucking idiot. Mel Gibson knew exactly what he did, and I’m disinclined to forgive him for it.

RIP Jeff Beck

I don’t think I knew there were different kinds of meningitis, nor that one of those kinds can be fatal within hours of getting it (and that it will fuck you up if it doesn’t kill you), but, thanks to today’s news about Jeff Beck, I certainly know that now… sigh. The only non-Yardbirds Beck I have are his first two solo records, which I’m giving another listen to tonight, cos it’s been a while anyway.

Regarding which: Double J dusted off an old interview with Beck from when he was in Australia back in 1977, wherein he says this:

Two of the three albums Beck released in his 20 months with the band comprised entirely of covers, which he saw as a limitation.
“I said to them, ‘We can’t keep going and doing Howlin’ Wolf numbers for the rest of our lives. Or Sonny Boy Williamson. You got to start writing your own material’. I found that I had a lot of influence on that.
“The first record we did, other than blues, was ‘Shapes Of Things’, which is a homemade job. And it worked a treat.”
That 1966 single – and Beck’s blistering solo in particular – became part of the blueprint for the psychedelic rock that would take over popular music in the following decade.
The Yardbirds shift from blues into more psychedelic territory was hugely influential on the development of rock’n’roll. Like so many important moments in rock history, many fans hated it at first.
“There was this great sort of complaint from all and sundry about the fact that they weren’t sticking to their guns,” Beck recalled.
“But, like I said, you can’t just sit around playing Howlin’ Wolf numbers. Sooner or later, you’ll die of boredom and people will die of boredom listening to.
“And you won’t even die gracefully, you’ll die having failed playing someone else’s material. So, it’s completely negative. We had to move on.”

Weird, then, that Truth, his first album from 1968, was full of covers, including not only a Howlin’ Wolf number but the aforementioned “Shapes of Things”, and even the three numbers actually credited to Beck & Rod Stewart are all rewrites of existing blues songs by Buddy Guy and B.B. King. Jeff apparently was less ready to “move on” to original material than he wanted his bandmates to be… and I think the next album, Beck-Ola, maybe demonstrates that too; the original material is kind of thin next to the two Elvis covers. Points to “Rice Pudding”, though, for the abruptness of its ending…

Am I the baddie?

Yeah, a “life journey” all the way to the fucking Premiership of New South Wales…

So glorious leader (NSW branch) Dominic Perrottet made a somewhat extraordinary admission:

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has apologised after revealing he wore a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party.
Mr Perrottet said he was “deeply ashamed” for wearing the uniform to a fancy dress party, saying it had caused him “much anxiety” through the course of his life.
He told a press conference in Sydney that he decided to come forward after receiving a phone call from a cabinet colleague two days ago.
“When I was 21, at my 21st fancy dress party, I wore a Nazi uniform,” he said. […]
Mr Perrottet said he was “not aware” of any photo depicting him in the uniform, denying the announcement was made to pre-empt any political attacks ahead of the March election.
“I thought this was important, that this is my truth, that I should be the one to explain that to the people of our state, not someone else,” he said. […]
The premier said he was “naive” at the time of the incident and “didn’t understand the significance of that decision”.
He said the party’s theme was “uniforms”.
“It was stupid,” Mr Perrottet said.
“It was just a terrible mistake where I, at that age in my life, I just did not understand the gravity and the hurt of what that uniform means to people, not just in our state, but around the country and around the world.” […]
Mr Perrottet said he acknowledged his “mistake” the day after the party, after his parents told him it was “wrong and insensitive”.
“It’s been something that I’ve had to carry with me for my life,” he said.

Dominic has been so haunted by his “mistake” that it’s taken him 19 years to admit to it, during which time he’s had a flourishing career as a Liberal politician in which he is currently the Premier of NSW. He would’ve turned 21 in 2003, only 58 years since the end of World War 2, and somehow he came to adulthood with apparently little understanding of what happened during that war and why cosplaying one of the Bad Guys from that war might be considered… inappropriate at best.

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Cold shafts of broken glass

Some years ago I read biographies of the Beatles and Pink Floyd one after the other, and having finished the latter I remember thinking “gods, Pink Floyd look like grown adults next to the Fabs”. That said, the bullshit over the liner notes to the 2018 remix of Animals that meant it took four years to finally come out demonstrated that when all’s said and done Gilmour and Waters are still pissy little children at heart. Syd would’ve been more than usually bemused had he lived that long…

Anyway, I gave said remix another listen tonight… don’t know how great the differences are beyond one or two really obvious ones, more a case of the overall sound being kind of bigger and fuller. Works fine for me either way. Like Low, which came out only a week before this, it looks like a strange album to have appeared in 1977 when punk was starting to blossom, and yet, in its way, it was also about as punk as Pink Floyd could’ve got… also the point where they really turned into the Roger Waters Band; with Gilmour only contributing to one song and Wright not writing anything, Roger was running the show. Given how miserable the ensuing tour seems to have been for all involved (with Wright threatening to quit at one point), maybe the show should’ve stopped there? But then, of course, the misery of the experience gave Roger the idea for another album…

A sad story of not much interest

I can’t bring myself to be glad as such at a person’s death, cos I normally find that to be kind of ghoulish. But there are some people who I can’t be sad about either. The world is not poorer for their having left it. And I won’t judge people who *are* glad about that person’s death. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Don’t you wonder sometimes

After listening to the live album the other day, I had to pull this out for another listen. I really didn’t get this the first time I heard it, though now I place it as my second favourite Dave album after Ziggy; but I was in good company in not getting it at first, cos in 1977 a bunch of critics (and his own record label) didn’t get it either. I don’t entirely blame them (though Charles Shaar Murray’s description of it as “an act of purest hatred and destructiveness” was kind of ludicrous), cos I suppose it was a fairly what-the-fuck album even in 1977, especially coming after Station to Station. Side two in particular must’ve seemed just alien. Somehow the thing was still popular once RCA grudgingly released it…

Splendid production and a quite remarkable range of sounds at work, and it’s got “Sound and Vision” on it, which is only one of his best singles (the remix of the latter on the Ryko issue of the album is less so, shall we say). And that drum sound. I know Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham get the credit for gated reverb, and Visconti didn’t actually do gated reverb as such on Low, but that harmoniser box he did use came up with much the same effect.

Next stop: Christian cinema?

I might normally feel sorry for Gina Carano’s new film being a spectacular box office failure, but she’s a kind of atrocious person so I can only join in the chorus of laughter.

As a result of Carano’s return film’s $804 domestic gross, the actress received backlash on social media for her theatrical performance, with one user claiming that she “didn’t bring much to the role.” The user took to Twitter and shared his review of the film and wrote, “The movie wasn’t terrible, but it was very simple, and honestly Gina Carano didn’t bring much to the role. One time watch.” Another user wrote, “Sorry sad how she pissed away such potential to make boring schlock.” Another user quipped, “Gina caranos first big release post Mando exit.” One user said, “67 People paid to see the movie.” One user shared a meme and wrote, “”Go Woke Go Broke”

Bit curious as to why this is only getting attention now, cos the film came out about six months ago. Mind you, this is the first time I’m hearing about the film having been released; maybe if they’d advertised their film a bit more than they apparently did, more people might have watched it… or maybe not.

But the thing that took me by surprise was that this thing was directed by Michael Polish, whose career I haven’t exactly followed but I recalled him having received some acclaim for Twin Falls Idaho back at the end of the 90s, and I assumed he’d kind of maintained a respectable career… though looking at his Wiki entry, I may have been wrong about that; indeed he’s already got a Christian film to his, er, credit, and thus far he seems to have avoided falling back into that particular gutter. But, by the same token, making a film for Ben Shapiro’s company doesn’t strike me as a positive career move either…

Anyway, when all else fails, as I suspect it will, Gina’s probably got a place awaiting her in the Christian film industry as well, and that’ll keep her going for a good long time. I expect her to make her first appearance on God Awful Movies within two years; indeed, given that they’ve already covered one other not particularly goddy movie distributed by Daily Wire (though they rather unfairly blame Shapiro for the content of same), I have a feeling they may even cover this one at some point…

The cassette played… Eurotones?

In the most I’ll-be-damned music news I’ve heard in some time, John Lydon has announced that Public Image Limited are competing to represent Ireland in Eurovision.

John Joseph Rotten and Eurovision are two things I don’t think I would’ve ever expected to associate with, and I don’t suppose most people would either. So maybe, by doing the last thing people would expect him to do, John boy’s doing the most punk thing he can? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalise something that, on the face of it, doesn’t make a lot of sense me. At any rate we are a long way from Metal Box…

Also, another thing most people probably don’t associate with PiL is the word “lovely”, and yet, that is pretty much what the new single (the one they’re attempting to get into Eurovision with) is. Apparently it’s about his wife, Nora, who is succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and, well, it is confoundingly nice. I would never have thought Lydon would write the words “you are loved” with a straight face, but there you go…