Yes. Perfect.

Sp3ccylad -- [noun]: A person of questionable sanity who starts their own cult 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Who is this?

A man could get lost
Originally uploaded by sp3ccylad

I took this photo in Vox two weeks ago, and I have no idea who she is.

Ideas anyone?

It only took a year...

...but Fnurgled is finally available on emusic. Joy of joys.

Perfect!

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

I rather like this

Laptop
Originally uploaded by sp3ccylad.

So I thought I'd show it off. And why not?

What lovely colours.

Pre-order a t-shirt with them on here.

Ded Peepulz

Ded Peepulz
Originally uploaded by sp3ccylad.

Muffin: late on the bandwagon as ever.

Venison is now seafood, apparently

Cornish lobster fishermen land a deer:

"It was a perfect sunny morning. Cornish fishermen Chris Earl and Tony Allsopp were chugging out to sea on their boat, Spilgarn, to check on their lobster pots.

And then the deer, all antlers and big worried eyes, swam past. 'It's not the sort of creature you expect to see half a mile out,' said Mr Earl yesterday."

No, I don't suppose it is.
Seadeer photomontage by raan19

But first a message from our sponsor...

Peter Gabriel shakes the tree, ad-supported MP3s fall out

"Peter Gabriel is one of the founding investors of a new music download service that offers tracks for free to users who are willing to listen to ads. The service, called We7 for some reason, offers MP3 versions of tracks with advertising attached to the beginning of songs. Four weeks after downloading the track, the user can then download a version without the ad. Artists get paid by the advertisers, music lovers get free tunes, and advertisers get to reach music lovers."

An interesting concept. Not entirely sure how I feel about it, but... What do you think?

They'll enjoy Somalia: but should they?

Some of you living in foreign parts will be aware of Chris Morris's fantastic series Brass Eye, but unable to watch because the powers that be think that not enough foreign people will find Brass Eye funny. This is nonsense, of course, but when did DVD distribution ever make sense?

So all hail the person who put Brass Eye on Google Video. All the links are here.

Knitted Masks

I was sent this link with the anguished question "Is this... right?" in the subject line.

I don't know. I don't... know.

Begorrah.

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Alan Ball 1945-2007

Nothing more to say really. OK, his time at City wasn't his greatest spell ever, but that's in the past.

I want to say something and mean it:

Alan Ball's a football genius.

The Great Escape

Wired Magazine: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran

"November 4, 1979, began like any other day at the US embassy in Tehran. The staff filtered in under gray skies, the marines manned their posts, and the daily crush of anti-American protestors massed outside the gate chanting, "Allahu akbar! Marg bar Amrika!"

Mark and Cora Lijek, a young couple serving in their first foreign service post, knew the slogans — "God is great! Death to America!" — and had learned to ignore the din as they went about their duties. But today, the protest sounded louder than usual."

Yeep. A gripping story from start to finish.

Bronx Bronx Hair Machine

Make Mom Mad

Bronx Bronx Hair Machine.
Bronx Bronx Hair Machine!
BRONX BRONX HAIR MACHINE!

A Motivational Poster

A Motivational Poster
Originally uploaded by sp3ccylad.

I'm saying nothing else.

'Death to US': Anti-Americanism examined

A superb article from Justin Webb of the BBC about anti-Americanism and its origins:

"The US is perceived by many as an international bully, a modern day imperial power. At this critical moment in history, Washington correspondent Justin Webb challenges that idea.

He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to Cairo, Caracas and Washington but it begins where anti-Americanism began - in Paris."

Anti-Americanism examined

Happy (belated) Easterberg

A word of advice before I start this one. Remember - your entire taste in music is made up of what you've heard. What you hear is controlled by the music industry almost 100% - or, as cke put it in the blog Chunks, Eggs en Prix:

"Think of it--there's only so much music that one person can listen to in a day. Most people seem to prefer to have music playing dimly in the background through virtually every waking minute of their lives (except when they're watching television). Of all those hours of daily music, virtually all of it comes from the commercial music industry. This means that, not only was all that music produced according to some pretty specific and slick-sounding standards, but that it's all owned by those companies as well. In essence, the music industry is meeting virtually 100% of the daily demand for music that people have, and they're doing it with material that they own, and that sounds at least halfway decent. They also have control over virtually all the primary promotional avenues. In other words, the entire musical landscape, from the musicians all the way to the brains of listeners, is almost wholly controlled by the recording industry."

So. Let me broaden your mind. OK? Just don't get on my back if it sounds a little unfamiliar at first. Uncomfortable is good.

It's no great secret that I'm an admirer of the work of Maggie Osterberg. Her work has a lo-fi precious quality about it that sets it apart from so much of the mass-produced crap that passes for music these days. She sounds real. And that's what I love about her. So let me take you through a bit of a sampler - some stuff that you can get for free, and if you like that, well: there's stuff for sale too.

Right. First things first. It's an unusual singing voice. In a world of American Idols and Cowell-made monsters, this voice wouldn't get past audition 1. That's no criticism. I'd love to see what they'd have made of Neil Young, too. But the critics like her. Milo Miles described her music as

"Garage-prog with a passion for melody sprinkled over everyday scenes of despair and contentment."

So you begin to get the idea. A little rough around the edges, but knowingly so. She knows what she's doing.

I can't think of a better way of describing the first track of hers I'd like to introduce - "The Last Two Drops". Actually, I can - because when I first heard it I went a little bonkers. Click the link, and while you listen, read the review I dashed off at the time.

"Jeeze: somebody stop the room swaying.

It's Fear And Loathing On The Stamen Island Ferry.

Cuts right to the intuitive, does mosterberg's latest. Back in the recesses of my mind, it actually has a sense of menace that I've only experienced once in my life when I entered a benighted store just off Interstate 10 in Kent, TX (sorry, make the benighted store the whole of Kent, as it really was that deserted) and got the chilling phrase "You ain't from round here; are you boy?" as I perused the dust-covered Wrigley's in a somewhat disoriented travel-addled state of mind.

I told him no, I'd come from Eugene, OR and left in a colossal hurry. Scary shit.

Like when you get too drunk, and it stops making sense.

Like this fractured little gem. Wow."

Yeah, you see? Do me a favour: listen to it twice. The first time is acclimatisation. The second time is appreciation. I love the way the Marc Ribot-influenced guitars spider around each other, and her spacious use of reverb - which isn't very trendy right now. People are taught to like their music bright and dry by the music industry these days: Maggie Osterberg likes space and swamp. It's different, that's all - and different is good. Those voices too. It's quite an intoxicating, spooky little package. All in all, I'm a fan of Maggie's judgement, to be honest - and this song shows off her judgement in shovelfuls.

So - on to song #2 in this little article. This one was written as a birthday gift for little old me. "An Appointment". And what a birthday gift it was. Again: my thoughts from when I first heard it. Click the link and read.

"The town that I originally come from is a fairly sleepy, but fair and moderately liberal-minded town called Grantham in Lincolnshire. Although surrounded by tracts of arable land, it had a fair concentration of heavy engineering for a town of its size.

Ingenuity in war production had always been one of Grantham's strengths. Eight years prior to the Great War, a local company had demonstrated to the War Office a novel form of vehicle propulsion where the wheels were encased in a metal band, allowing the vehicle to traverse obstacles in the field that would stop conventional vehicles. The War Office had written the invention off as having "no significant military application". A decade later, the battle of Cambrai would see the tank make its terrible entry into modern warfare.

Lessons had been learned - as soon as war became probable in the late 1930's, all Grantham's factories were converted to war production and RAF Bomber Command No. 5 Group was set up there - where Barnes Wallace was later to perfect the "bouncing bomb". Of course the lessons had been learnt on the other side too, as Nazi tactics made liberal use of the caterpillar track to shock countries into submission in 1940.

Grantham has always had a degree of importance in the greater scheme of things, having been a stop on the stagecoach route from London to York and Edinburgh (the A1 used to run right through the town centre), and at that stage it was a major marshalling yard for the London and North-Eastern Railway.

All this meant that, on German maps, there was a great big cross-hair over Grantham.

Grantham suffered over 270 alerts, but the night that sticks out in many people's memories was the night of 30th September 1940.

More about that later, but a bit of background first.

My grandma on my mother's side was a singular character. Fiercely loyal and oddly independent, she took virtually no domestic skills to her marriage. She'd not so much wooed as cornered her husband - but that's a different story. Anyway, she was chatty, lively, the worst cook ever, had an outrageously cheeky sense of humour and had a predilection for dying her hair on a whim. My grandad (a shy, reserved type of bloke) was a postman, and he did the nightshift working out of the railway station. My mother has plenty of stories of my grandad waking up ready to go to work, to be faced with near inedible food and a wife with a new, almost offensively vibrant hair colour. After a while, he'd just sigh.

Grandma had an active mind, and no skills to occupy it with. She had three kids - a boy in the army, a girl quite able to look after herself, and a quiet, reserved daddy's girl who was just starting piano lessons. That was my mum, and she'd just turned seven. Grandma was bored most of the time, so used to take every opportunity to see a film. She viewed babysitting expenses as a frippery, so dragged my mother out to the pictures most nights. My mother remembers her schooldays mainly as a battle to stay awake.

On the 30th September, as usual, they went to the pictures. On this instance it was the pictures at the other, south side of the town that they chose to go to. If an air raid took place during a film, the sirens couldn't be heard at all clearly inside; so the custom was to show a slide informing patrons of the situation, and assuring them that if they wanted to stay, the film would continue.

The same tired old phrase would be trotted out. "We may as well stay. If you're going to bloody die, you may as well die watchin' a film," was my Grandma's reasoning.

At about 8:30, the slide appeared - and although a few people left, most people stayed and the film played to an almost-packed house.

At 8:45 the cinema shook and my mother remembers hearing a most tremendous sound. For a few seconds, it was dark. People began to panic. There were a few servicemen in there who had seen active service in France earlier that year and their calming influence was instrumental in stopping what could have been a lethal rush for the doors. The noises carried on for a while and then died down.

The target had been the very factory where those caterpillar tracks had been made before. Some of the largest bombs deployable at the time, 1,000kg and 1,800kg monsters (appropriately codenamed "Satan" by the Luftwaffe), had ripped through the factory, destroying the area assembling depth charges - and no doubt exploding a few in the process. The blasts had taken out the electricity, gas and water simultaneously, and the factory was less than 200 yards from the cinema.

Once the terrible noise had died down, Grandma realised that there was probably not much chance of catching the rest of the film (duh!) and decided to make her way home.

My mother's description of what she saw as she left the cinema still chills me.

"It was like day - everything was lit up - and there was fire everywhere. The picture house was the only building on London Road not on fire. I've never been so scared. There was stuff falling all around us." There were fire crews strung down the street, battling hopelessly as fires raged out of control, destroying buildings.

The only thing to do was dodge the falling debris and run home across town.

They ran up High Street until they were met by an ARP Warden, who sternly rebuked Grandma for being out with a young child and sent them into the shelter at Lipton's. They cowered there, petrified - my mum told me she wasn't sure she'd see daylight again: as far as she was concerned, this was it.

My granddad had heard the news, and, knowing his wife and daughter were out in the middle of the conflagration, was excused his duties for the night. He went looking for his family.

My mother had almost given up when she heard a Cockney accent at the doors of the shelter.

"I'm looking for a woman with a little girl..."

"It was when I heard Dad's voice," she said, "that I knew we were going to be OK." He joined them in the shelter, and they sat the rest of the raid out, waiting for the all-clear. The toll was terrible - my mother remembers stories of the local open-air swimming pool being used as an emergency casualty centre and mortuary.

Many years later, my mother was diagnosed with a carcinoma of the kidney. By all rights, she shouldn't have survived that, but 18 years later she's still here. I was talking about that with her only yesterday, and I reminded her of what a friend had said.

Eleanor (an ex-girlfriend's mother) is a doctor and a devout Catholic. I'd described the cancer and my mother's almost inexplicable survival. She concurred with the medical opinion I reported and she'd said "obviously your mother has things to do... She hasn't finished yet."

"Damn right!" Mum said when I passed this on. "The doctor told me my chances and I got so... so... God, angry! I remember thinking, sod that! I'm not qualified as a piano teacher yet! You're not beating me!"

It wasn't the first time she'd cheated death to see the future, was it?

Listening to that incident retold in song, with the image of a seven-year-old girl running for her life to make it to her son's birthday party in the future, was really very special. Maggie had no idea my mother's such a fighter, and her interpretation was prescient to say the least.

It's probably the best birthday present I've ever had."

The layered voices, the angry guitar chops and that bass make for a very special song indeed. Listen to the combination of space and muscular presence, and the way a seemingly disorganised song coalesceses around the "baby's birthday party" hook before slowly unravelling again. This woman really knows what she's doing. And the lead voice - heartfelt, unselfconscious, full-blooded: singing with conviction and passion.

I have goosebumps.

Now a "compare and contrast" moment. One of the marks of a good songwriter is whether a song survives the transition from one artist to another. Writing for your own voice is one thing, but once someone else gets hold of a song...

Not much comment here:

"Stupid Rain" by Maggie Osterberg

"Stupid Rain" by Matt Duane Griffin (who deserves a blog post to himself, to be honest)

One song, two very different treatments. Very interesting.

Now for the final song in this set."Goodnight". I consider this to be her masterpiece. If "The Last Two Drops" was fractured, then this is shattered, in every sense of the word. Written one late night after a hospital visit, Maggie's sigh at the beginning sets the tone for a toned-down howl of anguish that expresses in music everything it struggles to say in words. Again, my thoughts at the time.

"I know that sigh. I have a similar one.

There's something that about dark times that brings out the best in an artist. It really sucks that we have to go through it, but the payoff for us listeners is potentially fantastic.

This is one of those "tick all the boxes" numbers. Unselfconscious, raw and melancholy: Maggie's back and she's flying in on one engine emotionally. She's got a habit of producing late-night nuggets of lo-fi precious, but there's a sense of humour behind most of them. Granted, it's concealed behind a scary facade, but it's there.

Not this time. She's tired, ground down and someone should give her a hug.

But he can't move. What can we do?

This is broken. This is sparse. This is heartbreakingly triumphant.

Oddly, iTunes gave me Johnny Cash's cover of We'll Meet Again straight after and - I am aware this may sound heretical - it came across as callow and lightweight by comparison. The comparison shocked me.

No: you want Americana at its most raw? This is the real deal.

We are lucky, lucky people."

We are, you know. We're lucky to have an artist like Maggie Osterberg daring to show us what her world is like in such candid detail.

Should you want to own more of her work, her album Bent, Not Broken, is widely available online at the iTunes store, eMusic, and many other places. I utterly recommend you check it out.

Utterly.

I have no explanation for this.

March's webstats for "Don't Look Back In Anger". Yeah. Just March. Go on, make it worse. Click here and have a listen. Oh, I despair sometimes.

In the meantime, I was faffing around on Google (what, you mean you don't type Sp3ccylad in?) and I found this:



Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

Dick Dale, telling it like it is

Legendary guitarist Dick Dale, asked for advice for the struggling musician. He's startlingly frank.

I heartily agree with every word.

Citizen! Stop that! NOW!

Just when you think things are about as Orwellian as they can get, we edge just a little bit closer to the precipice with the latest wacky scheme. This time, the powers-that-be aren't content with watching us constantly with CCTV.

Britain is already the most watched nation in the world: there's 1 camera for every 14 people in the UK. Probably more, as that figure was quoted last year.

So, we get watched all the time. It's just another infringement of what little privacy we have left. Even more so, with the latest trend, which is for cameras that talk back. Yes, citizen, you read that correctly. Cameras are being fitted with loudspeakers so you can be told off by a CCTV operator. Seeing as putting people in the stocks has been rendered illegal by that pesky human rights legislation they keep on importing, they're going to tick us off, right there, in the street instead.

But who decides what deserves public embarrassment and what is passable behaviour? Who gets cut a bit of slack and who gets pulled up? You see, this is what worries me about the whole venture. No doubt the same arguments will be trotted out as for ID cards - you know, the old saws along the lines of "if you've got nothing to hide..." and the whole idea will appeal to the type of Daily Mail reader nostagic for the village bobby giving miscreants a quick clip around the ear, but I have extreme doubts about the whole thing.

You see, everybody has prejudices. Everybody. I'm not so arrogant as to claim I'm prejudice free, and neither should anybody else. It's just that some people are less able to keep their prejudices in check than others, that's all. I don't wish to run the risk of being the target of some CCTV operator's petty likes or dislikes - but sooner or later I fear I won't have a choice.

And there's one other thing - we're the most watched society in the world, yeah? Well, consider this. I was witness to a rather nasty assault in Leeds about 18 months ago. I remember picking the victim up afterwards (sans half a front tooth) and telling her not to worry; CCTV's all over this bloody city - so apprehending the culprit shouldn't be a problem.

The result? Not one picture of the culprits was recorded on camera. Not one. Not one of any of the five blokes fleeing together. Not one of the victim lying prone on the floor. Nothing - in spite of the fact that it took place on Briggate: Leeds' busiest shopping area. It might as well have never happened.

So is it really all just a sham constructed to make up for a lack of police officers on the ground? Considering most of the people with police connections I know bemoan the paperwork, bang on about "too much political correctness" and secretly wish they could act like Gene Hunt from Life On Mars, you know; the talking camera might just be the safer option.

Even then, they don't always work, as this rather odd story proves...

Wanted: condom testers

No, I wish I was making it up, but truth, yet again, is way stranger than fiction. Durex want condom testers.

"It isn't some crazy kind of '60s love-in," said a spokesperson.

(Regardless of their denials, feel free to apply here.)

Thanks a bundle, Captain Astiz.

I never was a fan of Thatcherism. I can't draw any pride from coming from the same town as Baroness Thatch. The only thing her roots are useful is a form of idiot test: "comes from Grantham, must be a conservative" is a surefire fast-track to losing my respect.

I've been thinking a lot this week about the Falklands War 25 years ago, and how everything seemed to change from that moment on. It was the beginning, really, of my politicisation - up until that point I was fairly apolitical: a few woolly liberal views instilled by my mother that contributed towards a kind of middle-of-the-road sensibility. Sure, never right wing, but kind of nice. I remember being appalled by the human cost of mass unemployment in the UK - we'd finally crossed the barrier of 3 million unemployed - and I was pretty sure that it would mean the end of Margaret Thatcher as PM. Certainly the heat was on her on this issue - surely it was only a matter of time before she would have to go to the country to seek re-election. Then the game would be up.

Then everything changed, thanks to Naval Captain Alfredo Astiz (see picture, right) - known in some quarters as the "Blond Angel of Death." He invaded the island of South Georgia on 19th March 1982, and triggered the whole bloody mess.

As an aside, I remember a turning point in my world-view happening around this time. The BBC had sent a three-man crew down with the Falklands Task Force. Most people remember it for the stellar reporting of Brian "I counted them all out..." Hanrahan, but there was a slightly more personal side for me. The sound recordist for the team was a Lincolnshire man: John Jockel, who recently died at the age of 68. His son attended the same school as me.

John had taken the opportunity to snap some film down in the Falklands, and one of his photographs sticks with me to this day. I wish I could find a copy, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere on the web - as far as I know, its only publication was in the Grantham Journal. It was of a crate of 35mm anti-aircraft ammunition abandoned at Goose Green by the surrendering Argentine forces; clearly marked as manufactured in Grantham. We'd been making ammunition, so it could be fired at our own airmen.

The rest is history - Thatcher rode the Falklands to victory in the 1983 elections and... well, Simon Jenkins tells the story better than me.

The cost of becoming American

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
And your cash. Especially your cash."

Immigration is a subject close to my heart for all sorts of reasons - not least because I've been an immigrant. It's a costly business, and in the USA that applies more than most. I remember being fleeced for two Employment Authorization Documents (12-month temporary work permits sold as an interim measure prior to a Green Card at around $150 a shot) simply because the Portland INS office (as was) took 450 days minimum to process a Green Card application. That hurt.

The ultimate aim of many immigrants to the US is naturalization. Why? Well, I can't speak for everybody, but for me it was partly because I think - and several years of Bush-based disillusionment have not dimmed this - that the American social experiment is a bold adventure, and I wanted to be part of it. I don't have any great romance about my notion of America. Look, bub: small-town Oregon will cure anybody of that, and I don't mean that unkindly. Quite the opposite, in fact. You see life as it really is, not as some notion gleaned from a flickering screen. And I loved it.

I loved the grass-roots bottom-up nature of the political structure - the first country in the world where power flows up, you know: like the rain in Dr. Who the other night. I loved the fact that even my pest control guy had a political opinion and thought nothing of debating it whilst ridding me of ants. It was intoxicating to see the soul of a country being fought for in hearts and minds in a way that is lost on poor, jaded spoon-fed Brits.

The message was loud and clear: "this country is whatever we make it."

And now, the fees for naturalisation are to be substantially increased. I realise that it is enshrined in law that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have to be self-funding, but have their costs really gone up by the best part of 50%? The signal is clear - the ladder is getting harder to climb, the doors are shutting - and the last thing the US needs right now is thousands of (perfectly legal) permanent residents who remain uncommitted Americans because the wrong signals were sent out from Washington.

Bit by bit, Club America becomes harder to join. And that's a genuine shame.

Paying too much to be American - Los Angeles Times

Glory Hallelujah! The end of DRM is nigh.

I'm not entirely sure I can believe today's announcement made by Steve Jobs and Eric Nicoli, the CEO of EMI, stating that EMI's catalogue (with one notable exception, of course) will go on sale DRM-free.

Only a few days ago, I was all but asking people wanting to buy my stuff to go elsewhere than shop at iTunes, such was the degree to which DRM pisses me off. Now, I wouldn't exactly say I have the clout as an artist to make any difference (yeah, right), but I know I'm not alone in this regard. As much as it's nice to make money and recoup some of the considerable expense that comes with realising the music I record, it's way, way more important that people hear it. I mean - I hope nobody thinks that record deals are designed with the artist in mind.

I've been purchasing DRM-free music for donkey's years now. It's called vinyl and CDs. The ability to encode music, which should have been liberating, was taken as an opportunity to gouge loyal customers and put people off experimenting with music.

Just as the mix tape woke me up to so much music over so many years, so the ability to share music builds taste and broadens minds. It acts as a catalyst to sales, not as an alternative.

To that end, I offer a little taster from my forthcoming album ...Amongst Tax Collectors and Thieves. This song is dedicated to all those people who make cash without regard to artists or consumers.

Ladles and jellyspoons, I give you...

Joe Dice

Ye Gods

I... Er...

The Raincoats. Leeds. That is all.

The Raincoats! Argh! *swoons*

Call that humiliation?

Trust a Python to get it right. Terry Jones writes in The Guardian about the Iranian diplomatic hoo-hah and calls on the West to get the plank out of its own eye.

"For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? "

Genius.

Who is this man?

He's Brian Johnson - a student at Duke University. He's been responsible for hacking into sp3ccylad.com, producing, amongst other things, that really time-consuming thing that wound Abroad At Home back to August all the time, which, frankly, nearly had me quitting blogging out of sheer frustration.

I'll be in touch with Duke in the morning. With a whole raft of evidence.

But what evidence?

You see, the key lies in scads of URLs embedded into the rogue August page (and the index page as well, amongst others), of the rough format http://linux.duke.edu/~mbjohn/centos-3/i386/tingtones.php?id=454

Here's the URL again, taken from a screenshot. The internet's so helpful like that:



Click here for the code in full.

BTW, the tingtones.php stuff magically disappeared at 11:34 am EDT, once I told Mr Johnson that he'd been rumbled. On a mailing list he runs. Oh, I'm rude.

Of course, I'm sure Duke don't back anything up.

So, Brian. You've got until 9 am your time to get your story straight. That's when I use my nice cheap international calling plan to wait on hold until someone answers who can do something about this.

Now keep the fuck away from me, geek.