Fans caught up in trouble at a football match in Plymouth have blamed a "low-key" approach by police.
At least 20 people were arrested on Tuesday evening at the first Devon derby between Plymouth Argyle and Exeter City for more than eight years.
In other news:
Bear criticises lack of woods presence - I had to take a crap on the street, he says.
Pope criticises lack of Protestants in Vatican area
Etc
Wednesday 10 November 2010
Tuesday 9 November 2010
Ain't That Peculiar
Crossposted onto Severnside
How, exactly, do you turn a romantic, soulful song into one that barely celebrates the beating of hearts, let alone the complexities of living?
And, more to the point, how do you thereby reinterpret the song for your age, giving it the empty heart of your own time?
And, worse, how do you suggest something of the reality of timeless emotions in a bounded and digital era?
Well, the first thing you'd do is splice the rhythm of the song, so that it functions like a set of punctuation marks. The next thing you'd do is introduce instruments that don't exist. The final thing you'd do is give the vocals a portentous, pretentious tone, ensuring that you're driving them with a kind of stuttering, halting deliberation.
You'd also have the most talented bassist of his generation doing his thang.
You'd end up with a piece of music that communicated the changing of times. It would mix human emotions with political realities and physical technology. It would show that music can morph itself. It would build the anxieties of a culture on the verge of profound, permanent change in which the individual becomes a piece of malleable information, to be created and discarded at the whim of whoever is controlling it, with the expressiveness and emotion that makes us human in any age. To seek digitalisation and to embrace its dividing arms is what has driven us, in reality, since around 1943 (Colossus), but certainly since 1971 (the Intel 4004) and accelerating from 1981 onward (the release of the IBM PC). It's hard to say for sure, but it's a fair bet that Steve Jobs's attempt to take over every single element of our lives has its roots in that movement.
I think that sentence was meant to be ironic.
In any case, serious or not, it is not a party-political point. This is a point about the changing world circa 1980. Regardless of who was in power, we were destined to become 0s and 1s.
It was what we would have wanted...
You'd start with this:
And you'd do this to it:
How, exactly, do you turn a romantic, soulful song into one that barely celebrates the beating of hearts, let alone the complexities of living?
And, more to the point, how do you thereby reinterpret the song for your age, giving it the empty heart of your own time?
And, worse, how do you suggest something of the reality of timeless emotions in a bounded and digital era?
Well, the first thing you'd do is splice the rhythm of the song, so that it functions like a set of punctuation marks. The next thing you'd do is introduce instruments that don't exist. The final thing you'd do is give the vocals a portentous, pretentious tone, ensuring that you're driving them with a kind of stuttering, halting deliberation.
You'd also have the most talented bassist of his generation doing his thang.
You'd end up with a piece of music that communicated the changing of times. It would mix human emotions with political realities and physical technology. It would show that music can morph itself. It would build the anxieties of a culture on the verge of profound, permanent change in which the individual becomes a piece of malleable information, to be created and discarded at the whim of whoever is controlling it, with the expressiveness and emotion that makes us human in any age. To seek digitalisation and to embrace its dividing arms is what has driven us, in reality, since around 1943 (Colossus), but certainly since 1971 (the Intel 4004) and accelerating from 1981 onward (the release of the IBM PC). It's hard to say for sure, but it's a fair bet that Steve Jobs's attempt to take over every single element of our lives has its roots in that movement.
I think that sentence was meant to be ironic.
In any case, serious or not, it is not a party-political point. This is a point about the changing world circa 1980. Regardless of who was in power, we were destined to become 0s and 1s.
It was what we would have wanted...
You'd start with this:
And you'd do this to it:
Wednesday 3 November 2010
New, Non-Politically Partisan or Sweary Blog Started
Yes, I've decided to start a new blog, with Ms Drummer, in which I write for the first time *under my real name*.
But in the spirit of the new Coalition era, I'll not be whinging about the govt (though I could do plenty of that if I chose). It'll be what I wanted TTD to be, before I got obsessed by NuLab.
I note that several bloggers have given up since the erection: LFAT, Mr Eugenides, to name but, er, two. Mr E is the real loss, for although LFAT was reasoned and liberal, Mr E was the genuine voice of anguished anti-NuLab sentiment.
Centre right blogging was born in the UK out of a sort of proto-Tea Party movement. It was born and flourished on the basis that NuLab were in charge of the country and the world's biggest media organisation (ie the BBC) and that they were virtually unchallenged, given that the Tories were so crap. This was something like 04/05. Blogging really took off during 06, when the Tories got their act together. Then the Left got really sorted, with outstanding blogs like Liberal Conspiracy doing what the left do best: agglomerating voices against an enemy. Then we were back where we started: voices in the dark, shouting at each other.
You need a certain nerve to be a political blogger, one I never had, despite being referenced once by the Staggers as a Tory blogger...I never wanted what I became as a blogger, though I asked for it right enough.
Where do I stand today, as if matters? Well, I was happy enough to see the end of NuLab, but I don't really know what to make of the new govt. Part of me sort of hopes to see elements of the Tories and Lib Dems merge.
The new party could be called something like...oh I don't know..The Liberal Party, maybe?
Anyway. The new blog is being set up and written with Ms Drummer, who is some way to the left of me. That's probably part of it all.
It's here: http://severnside.wordpress.com
I may keep open TTD for random witterings when I'm in from the pub or whatever I want to write. But I'll also refer readers here to new posts at Severnside.
But in the spirit of the new Coalition era, I'll not be whinging about the govt (though I could do plenty of that if I chose). It'll be what I wanted TTD to be, before I got obsessed by NuLab.
I note that several bloggers have given up since the erection: LFAT, Mr Eugenides, to name but, er, two. Mr E is the real loss, for although LFAT was reasoned and liberal, Mr E was the genuine voice of anguished anti-NuLab sentiment.
Centre right blogging was born in the UK out of a sort of proto-Tea Party movement. It was born and flourished on the basis that NuLab were in charge of the country and the world's biggest media organisation (ie the BBC) and that they were virtually unchallenged, given that the Tories were so crap. This was something like 04/05. Blogging really took off during 06, when the Tories got their act together. Then the Left got really sorted, with outstanding blogs like Liberal Conspiracy doing what the left do best: agglomerating voices against an enemy. Then we were back where we started: voices in the dark, shouting at each other.
You need a certain nerve to be a political blogger, one I never had, despite being referenced once by the Staggers as a Tory blogger...I never wanted what I became as a blogger, though I asked for it right enough.
Where do I stand today, as if matters? Well, I was happy enough to see the end of NuLab, but I don't really know what to make of the new govt. Part of me sort of hopes to see elements of the Tories and Lib Dems merge.
The new party could be called something like...oh I don't know..The Liberal Party, maybe?
Anyway. The new blog is being set up and written with Ms Drummer, who is some way to the left of me. That's probably part of it all.
It's here: http://severnside.wordpress.com
I may keep open TTD for random witterings when I'm in from the pub or whatever I want to write. But I'll also refer readers here to new posts at Severnside.
Saturday 2 October 2010
Thoughtcrimes
Well, I've messed around again with the posts I wrote for the blog on Nineteen Eighty Four. I've revised, added and expanded them up to 21000 words and published them on Lulu. So if you're interested, follow the link at the side. It's all pretty basic in presentation but then I always was crap at art.
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Severn Gurls
I thought, given that Katy Perry is signalling the death of postwar western civilisation through her evil song _California Gurls_, that I would try to persuade myself and anyone who wishes to read that life goes on. Building, making things, creating families goes on. Even after Katy Perry and her festival of zero.
Well, to be honest, it's not easy.
Because sun-kissed skin so hot it'll melt your popsicle, even though or perhaps even because it's so self-contradictory, so utterly meaningless given its stated objective, its clear innuendo-meaning - because that is so shit, language seems to have been finally shat out after a 50 year curry and 50 years of crap, factory made lager; because, ultimately, even pop music has conflicted itself in its own greatest exponents, and they, as they speak, have called for erectile dysfunction in the midst of "undeniable" hot sex teenage girls -
because of all that, meaning has now finally been flushed down the karzee.
Meaning has finally, thankfully, been disowned. We no longer need a word or a phrase to correspond to an idea.
Think about it, you twats, think about it: a pop song asks to you want to fuck teenage girls. Then it tells you they're so hot your popsicle will *melt*. You will just go soft, just sort of being there.
I really don't think that it means you will come in your pants.
Really. I don't.
It means the literal opposite of what it intends to mean.
Language is dead. Words have no purpose.
Katy Perry killed language.
Dante is too dead to save it; Chaucer too ironic; Shakspear too involved in non-existent persons;Pope too into the sounds of words; Austen in ghastly inter-human relations;Dickens in the...the...play of words, pictures and sentences. After Dickens everyone is toying with their own history. Plath is killed doing it, Hughes after having sex with words; Larkin hates words too much; Roth just has too many of them. Orwell thinks words mean something, for fuck's sake; Hardy thinks they are about how there is no God (probably) and Amis (jun) veers from the play of words to the play of his memories.
Shit.
Language was killed by Katy Perry. She sliced it open with an auto-tune.
Open and its guts spilled into the air, to be eaten by the Eagles and vultures and Beatles and flies and Airplanes and to be left alone, token gut by chitterling, to fly away.
Fly away.
Well, to be honest, it's not easy.
Because sun-kissed skin so hot it'll melt your popsicle, even though or perhaps even because it's so self-contradictory, so utterly meaningless given its stated objective, its clear innuendo-meaning - because that is so shit, language seems to have been finally shat out after a 50 year curry and 50 years of crap, factory made lager; because, ultimately, even pop music has conflicted itself in its own greatest exponents, and they, as they speak, have called for erectile dysfunction in the midst of "undeniable" hot sex teenage girls -
because of all that, meaning has now finally been flushed down the karzee.
Meaning has finally, thankfully, been disowned. We no longer need a word or a phrase to correspond to an idea.
Think about it, you twats, think about it: a pop song asks to you want to fuck teenage girls. Then it tells you they're so hot your popsicle will *melt*. You will just go soft, just sort of being there.
I really don't think that it means you will come in your pants.
Really. I don't.
It means the literal opposite of what it intends to mean.
Language is dead. Words have no purpose.
Katy Perry killed language.
Dante is too dead to save it; Chaucer too ironic; Shakspear too involved in non-existent persons;Pope too into the sounds of words; Austen in ghastly inter-human relations;Dickens in the...the...play of words, pictures and sentences. After Dickens everyone is toying with their own history. Plath is killed doing it, Hughes after having sex with words; Larkin hates words too much; Roth just has too many of them. Orwell thinks words mean something, for fuck's sake; Hardy thinks they are about how there is no God (probably) and Amis (jun) veers from the play of words to the play of his memories.
Shit.
Language was killed by Katy Perry. She sliced it open with an auto-tune.
Open and its guts spilled into the air, to be eaten by the Eagles and vultures and Beatles and flies and Airplanes and to be left alone, token gut by chitterling, to fly away.
Fly away.
Wednesday 18 August 2010
Nu-Heimat
Well, time moves on and if TTD didn't, he'd be dead.
Accordingly, the world of TTD has changed and now the village of Hill is the Drummer-heimat (yes, he changes his past, just like the Party). Sadly, Hill is too small even to merit a single nuclear warhead, although both Berkeley and Oldbury-on-Severn both count, probably.
The closest serious target then, apart from the two nuclear power stations (alright, alright - only one, and even it isn't sorted yet), is Thornbury.
Wikipedia defines Thornbury thus:
which seems about right.
Accordingly, the world of TTD has changed and now the village of Hill is the Drummer-heimat (yes, he changes his past, just like the Party). Sadly, Hill is too small even to merit a single nuclear warhead, although both Berkeley and Oldbury-on-Severn both count, probably.
The closest serious target then, apart from the two nuclear power stations (alright, alright - only one, and even it isn't sorted yet), is Thornbury.
Wikipedia defines Thornbury thus:
which seems about right.
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