Richard Hall’s Economics and Theology blog reviews John Wilding’s God’s Unfinished Business: Evolution of Humanity. I thought I’d mention it, because not only am I related to the reviewer, I also know one of the authors.
I’ve never paid much attention to the customer reviews on Amazon.com. When something’s filled with typos and bad spellings, it’s difficult to take the reviewer seriously. Charlie Stross has trawled though some of worst, and come up with some hilarious takes of classic works of literature.
To give a flavour, here’s some wingnut on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At best, Marquez reveals an egalitarian attitude that seems to pervade the Americas south of the Rio Grande (no wonder those countries are in constant economic trouble). Marquez should study supply side economics as described by Milton Friedman, another Nobel Prize winner, in order to give his book better balance.”
Others cover such classics as 1984, Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities
In a post about music and radio stations, David T of comes up with this gem, deep in the comments thread:
There’s Radio 2, for those who have resigned themselves to their middle aged fate.
Then, there’s 6Music. Which is basically Radio 2. But it plays more Clash.
For a few years, I thought: ‘Oh, this is cool - I’m still into new trendy music, and so I’m never going to get old and die’. Then I realised that things like 6Music, the (excellent) Word magazine, and all those revivals of punk bands etc. were actually just an enormous marketing ploy to make me feel as if I was still in touch with coolness; and were, in fact, the cultural equivalent of wearing lo-slung jeans with a middle aged gut hanging over them.
Indeed. Reminds me very much of that work colleague who I’ve mentioned before.
In fact the only cultural different between the current crop of formulaic new-wave of new-wave of new-wave post-punk retreads and the third-generation prog-rock I listen to is that the prog-rockers never try to pretend that they’re cool and trendy. Oh, and they know more than three chords and therefore play far better actual music. But if you’re reading this blog you knew that already.
As a bit of an experiment, I’ve included an Amazon aStore on this site. It’s still a bit rough and ready, and not yet fully intergrated with the rest of the site, but give it a try.
You’re probably going to call me a total commercial sellout for this.
Like last year, there’s a lot of live music coming up over the next couple of months. This represents as many shows as I saw in the whole of 2004.
So far I’ve got tickets for the first four of those. The Crewe Christmas gig isn’t quite a definite for me yet, but Mostly Autumn’s Xmas shows are usually well worth attending.
Rather silly article by Philip Hensher which is supposed to be about why rock musicians shouldn’t attempt anything more ambitious than three-minute pop songs, but really says a lot more about the snobbery of large sections of the classical world.
One of the reasons such enterprises often fail so dramatically - and it’s very difficult to think of any that have lasted more than a couple of performances - is that their composers rarely have the technical ability to record and convey their intentions with any accuracy.
Many rock musicians can’t read music and have what strikes most classical musicians as rather a loose conception of authorship, relying on amanuenses to transform vague ideas into detailed life. In the world of popular music, such transcribers, arrangers or “producers” have always done a great deal more than the public suspects.
Note the scare quotes around the word ‘producer’. I know that it’s not exactly a secret that a lot of best-selling chart acts have extremely limited musical abilities, and their records owe more to whoever’s producing them than anything else. But there are plenty of other rock artists with plenty of compositional and arrangement ability, especially those working in genres outside the fashionable ‘indie’ mainstream. Some can ever read music!
When he starts talking about ‘amanuenses’ (yes, I did have to look that word up), Hensher reveals how little he understands rock music and how it’s created. He can’t get his head round the idea that you can have highly complex and sophisticated music that doesn’t completely revolve around ‘the dots’. If a lot of rock musicians can’t read music, then a lot of classically-trained musicians are incapable of playing by ear. I remember a bassist telling me how frustrating he found it to work with musicians who couldn’t play a note unless they had those dots in front of them. The reason rock works the way it does because of the ubiquity of recording technology, something else he fails to grasp.
Actually, one of the worst things about many rock/classical crossovers is the appallingly lacklustre playing by some of the orchestral musicians. Frank Zappa has railed against this sort of thing on some of his many orchestral collaborations, especially the complete lack of rhythm of some orchestras. Listen to the original recording of Uriah Heep’s “Salisbury”, where what’s actually quite a good composition is spoiled by some very sloppy and out-of-time playing.
The article ends with a rogues gallery of unsuccessful rock/classical collaborations, while conveniently neglecting to list any of the successful ones.
Have Railroad Earth done a Robert Johnson and sold their souls to The Devil in order to play that shredding mandolin and fiddle? Is there an Ümläüt in the making? If you think I’m worrying unnecessarily, look what’s happened to one of their fans.
Captain Electra has some predictions for model railway products from the year 2026.
Hornby were showing off their Lyddle End “Nano-Folk”, 1:148 scale robotic folk who can be programmed to perform simple tasks such as getting in and off trains, waiting impatiently on the platforms and going shopping. We are assured that the problems encountered with earlier Chinese-built “Nano-Folk” will not be repeated and they will not form a Democratic Republic on your layout.
Will the range include nano-chavs?
At work I’ve spent most of the past year’s work as an IT tester working on an extremely complex work allocation function as part of a housing management system. Some of my test data is somewhat humourous; I’ve got aging rock stars as operatives, “Disinfestation of rats and mice” as one of the jobs, and “Sharp pointy stick” as one of the required material items. Little did I know that reality would catch up!
Update: Now it seems that “Disinfestation of Pigeons” needs a Pelican.
Some completely stupid drivel from a tiresomely hipper-than-now New Statesman scribbler called Rachel Cooke.
Podcasting is for geeks — created by geeks, listened to by geeks. Think about it. Don’t you ever wonder why you no longer see anyone wearing a Marillion T-shirt? I’d bet good money that the reason for this is that the owners of said T-shirts are all too busy at home, messing around with their podcast software.
Doesn’t she know that Marillion T shirts are for wearing when going to model railway exhibitions?
I find something vaguely fascist about the Bruschetta-eating literati’s hatred of ‘geeks’. They seem to feel threatened by the very existance of people that don’t conform to their narrow definition of ‘cool’. How dare we listen to music which has some depth and complexity rather than the latest three-chord style-over-substance flavour of the month? How dare we read science fiction rather than pretending to like dull novels in which nothing happens but are deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against his socio-polical environment?
