Month: May 2008

Is it just me…

~ Inquisitor

…or wasn’t Indiana Jones and the Belated Sequel (insert that crystal skull thing here) actually not that bad? Definitely not worth the fanboy outrage you can see on AICN, and most certainly not prequel awful; it’s actually quite endearingly old-school. And Shia LaBeouf isn’t nearly as bad as he was in Transformers, although he most certainly is unnecessary.

It does get a whole lot better once Karen Allen turns up, though. And John Hurt always does a good nutbag. And… oh, what the hell, it’s OK. You could definitely do worse right now.

Eurovision 2008 liveblogging

~ Inquisitor

Arse, Twitter’s down. So I’ll be liveblogging here for you all.

  • (19:57) Trailer break on BBC1.
  • (19:58) An apology over last year’s Making Your Mind Up. Wow. Nice black screen they’re using for these. Shame it didn’t affect the outcome, really.
  • (19:59) It’s here!
  • (20:00) The Confluence of Sound, according to Wogan and the title screen.
  • (20:01) They’re showing translations on the Virgin Media standard subtitles this year! YES! And that Serbian lady’s cleaned up a bit…
  • (20:02) Prayer/It burns my sore lips like a fire…
  • (20:03) Twitter’s back up, so I’m over there. If it goes down again, see you again here.

Coming up tonight – Eurovision 2008 liveblogging

~ Inquisitor

Later tonight, why not come over to Twitter and watch my Eurovision 2008 live blog? (If Twitter’s not working, I’ll do it here.) I like Sebastian Tellier. I don’t think our entry’s the worst thing we’ve ever put in; not when our last few included Scooch and Daz Sampson. Who knows, we might even come in halfway through the table… hah.

What follows behind the “continue reading” link is a reprint of my Twittering for the Your Decision show with added explanatory and exclamatory comments.

Continue reading “Coming up tonight – Eurovision 2008 liveblogging” →

New look

~ Inquisitor

Haven’t switched theme for a while, but this one looks a lot less clashy and readable than the last one. Advice welcome.

It’s not perfect, but then what is?

Music matters

~ Inquisitor
  • Still very much enjoying on a regular basis Neon Neon (Stainless Style, a rather lovely 80s-influenced concept album about John deLorean by Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip), M83 (Saturdays=Youth, now with more vocals and yet much better than Before The Dawn Heals Us) and Nine Inch Nails (The Slip, a new Nine Inch Nails album). If you haven’t downloaded The Slip yet, now is the time to do so.
  • The new Ladytron (Velocifero) is pretty decent. Not Witching Hour quality, but well worth your time. There was a crap-quality Myspace stream, but not any more. Album’s officially out at the beginning of June and I shall be buying.
  • The Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip album features a hilarious and unexpected Dizzee Rascal backhand and a tribute to Tommy Cooper but an inferior – less spontaneous, I feel – rerecorded version of Thou Shalt Always Kill, which is a shame. It also sounds really odd on my PC, so I need to work out over the next few days if it’s my system (I’m playing most of my music ReplayGained with foobar2000, files encoded as lame 3.97 -V2, to a pair of Sennheiser open-backed headphones plugged into the high-quality stereo output port of my Envy24-chipset sound card; must try on Xbox->hi-fi and original CD->hi-fi) or if it’s just bad production. Still, good stuff on there.
    • Edit after listening to the CD in my separates system: Nah, it’s just really bad mastering compression – Scroobius’s vocal clips obviously through the spoken word intro and it gets worse from there. You can make “loud” albums that don’t sound wrong – Primal Scream XTRMNTR, for example, an exhilarating rush of an album – but it’s just bad for this album.
  • I’m still getting used to Portishead’s Third. But it’s really growing on me. (Machine Gun really was an odd choice for a first single, wasn’t it? Damn good though.)
  • Went to the last Triptych gig a few weeks ago – Mogwai and pals in the Tramway in Glasgow. Mogwai left my ears ringing for pretty much the next day. The new album material they played is, well, new Mogwai material and that’s always fine by me. Malcolm Middleton really surprised me; absolutely fantastic set. Only one completely duff act, which out of nine bands is pretty good going. Nice Rock Action sampler CD, too.
  • All this good music out there, even some with tunes and poppy and glorious, and none of it’s selling that much (although Portishead’s chart position is pleasingly steady.) Meanwhile, Scooter are #1 in the albums chart based on some shitty advertisements on music TV and an audience of idiots. There’s a lesson there, but I don’t think I like it.

I’m speechless

~ Inquisitor

The Media Guardian “Media Monkey” section (may need free registration) reports on the ‘Shaftas’, a negative award ceremony for the worst sort of hack…

Heat magazine won worst magazine of the year for their infamous tasteless stickers stunt.

This was a sticker featuring a picture of Katie “Jordan” Price’s profoundly disabled five-year-old son with the insignia “Harvey wants to eat me!“. This was so amazingly dreadfully out of tune – and, what’s more, widely reported – that Heat were forced into apologising. Words cannot describe how uncommon an event that is.

Media Guardian then however report an incident that didn’t make it to the press at large, unless you’re a reader of Loaded “magazine” (a publication that, all else being equal, should have been snuffed out at birth):

But they failed to show up so the award was given to Loaded instead for the magazine’s “110 birds we’d like to bone” feature. Even the hardened Shaftas audience shook their heads at Loaded’s inclusion of Kate McCann in this list, with a caption which read: “Sensitive one this but there’s nothing more erotic than a pained woman in need of some good lovin”. Hmmm.

Hmmm is about right. “Sensitive one this”? Kate McCann? That’s gall. That’s so amazingly tasteless I’m actually mostly speechless. Even most b3tans won’t go down to that level, and those that do at least are usually trying to be funny rather than creepy.

And that is creepy. It’s practically on ‘sick stalker’ level.

Loaded editor Martin Daubney bounced onto the stage to accept the award, saying: “I would love to blame a reporter but I wrote that myself.” After it was pointed out that made him a “truly dreadful human being”, he countered: “And I’m paid for it.” Monkey predicts future Shaftas greatness for this man.

Why do people buy Loaded magazine anyway? It’s not even very good porn, and it’s obviously from this not at all funny, so why bother?

The rest of the awards are interesting, bashing Richard Desmond and the usual suspects; worth a look.