Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

So according to the good old Beeb, Barak Obama’s extended familiy live in a small town west of London in the UK. In 1997 his half-sister got married and he came over for the wedding and was also invited along to the stag party. The first stop was the ‘Three Frogs’ pub, but after a few drinks and a change of venue to ‘The Rose’ pub things got a little more ⇥ Continue reading

The Freakonomics guys are following on with their series of watching ‘The Wire’ with a group of ex-hoods. I’m not going to spoil it, but for those who think those hoods are hard, unfeeling folk, this week’s episode really got them, proving they really are a bunch of soft-hearted, soppy luvvies…..honest!!

A friend of mine makes t-shirts for a living….now I know what you are thinking, there are tons of t-shirts out there for the likes of Led Zeppellin, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Hendrix, but these are slightly off the beaten track from the usual and cater to the…how can I put it….the music snob in us

These are the designs –

and if that doesn’t appeal, there is always this one…although we could never be seen to condone such a viewpoint

…and it obviously works, you can tell as I am about to link to it right about here….very funny though!

As a follow up to this post, in which a guy sat and watched Season 5 of The Wire with a group of thugs and ganstas to get their opinion on how true to life it really is. Well, I thought I had better point you to the follow up post. As one of the comments said, ‘Can we get commentary like this every week? This is great.’ Let’s hope so – I’ve got money on Marlo knocking off Prop Joe……

and, according to this article, it was only tied as Earth’s second warmest year….very dissappointing really! In the UK, we had no summer to speak of and my brother got married in Australia and the weather in Melbourne was, to be frank, awful! My Mum has some photos of myself and another friend trying to take photos at the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road while we could barely stand in the winds that were blowing. To give you some idea of how *&^%ing cold it was, remember these winds were straight up from the Antarctic and hitting us fill on as we stood on top of the cliffs by the ocean’s edge…..so here’s to summer 2008

As I mentioned in my earlier post, EMI are getting rid of an awful lot of staff and several of their artists are getting a bit upset, claiming that they don’t know if they will get properly promoted. Radiohead and Macca have already left the label and now the likes of Kylie Mingogue and Coldplay are making similar noises. Robbie Williams is the one that is making me laugh though – his manager, Tim Clarke, was recently quoted as saying

“The question is, ‘Should Robbie deliver the new album he is due to release to EMI? We have to say the answer is ‘No’. We have no idea how EMI will market and promote the album.”

Well they do have a point, over a million copies of his last opus, ‘Rudebox’ are going to be crushed to pave Chinese roads so maybe the new promotional tool will be to have his new release ⇥ Continue reading

…and the largest collection of anoraks ever seen on Brick Lane Last reports are that there is a line of about 400 people for the 230 capacity gig, do you get the feeling that some people are being more than a little optimistic. Still they will be broadcasting it on ⇥ Continue reading

One of my musical hero types, Bob Mould, of Husker Du (minus all the accents I can’t find on my keyboard!) Sugar and er Bob Mould fame, is going to be on the Steve Lamacq show on BBC 6 Music. The good bit is, being the Beeb, even if you miss it you can hit the play it again bit and listen to is later in the week, so no excuse whatsoever for missing Bob on my fave radio show…..a months detention for anyone that doesn’t.