Weyer Gig Poster

Here it is in all its magenta majesty:

But Seriously...

I should check in with the Vinyl Word more often, but, somehow, remembering it after a few weeks away isn't too bad. There's plenty of content built up for one.

If any doubt remained it has evaporated now, but Joe Queenan really, really, really hates Phil Collins.

Literally

Christ on a Bike!

Via Making Light.

More About Me

So the pics from the gig at the Gallery section of Doherty's Pub are a little blurry, but I do like this one from the gallery for the next day:

The BluesBerries Gig

It went really well. I'd expected about 20-30 to turn up and, all told, probably somewhere over fifty made it.

The first set was pretty controlled and I was in fine voice. We finished the set with Dead, Drunk & Naked to great applause, I was genuinely touched. The crowd was good to us all night. With the possible exception that a few of my jokes were only appreciated by those whose English could stretch to them, ah well...

Second set was a bit more raucous, I think. We had a guest harmonica player for the encore, Hoochie Coochie Man, which went down a storm. We also had a request to reprise Crazy About Automobiles, which we did. It's a good number and the band have a lot of fun playing it, so to get asked to do it again was an honour.

All in all, I had a great time and I hope we won some new fans.

Roll on the Weyer gig!

Anika's Odyssey

If, like me, you're in need of a little cheering up today and McClaren being sacked just seems too little too late then you could to worse than give Anika's Odyssey try.

It's a simple point and click game in the Samarost vein. It's a little easier than that game, but it's a whole lot cuter. The artwork in it and the animations are positivly lovely. Blushing mountains have never been so artfully rendered.

Filler: Beat It

Jermaine Dupri, an R&B producer, struggles to pinpoint what's wrong with downloading music:

We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and we hurt ourselves. Back in the day when people were excited about a record coming out we'd put out a single to get the ball going and if we sold a lot of singles that was an indication we'd sell a lot of albums. But we'd cut the single off a few weeks before the album came out to get people to wait and let the excitement build.

Now, I'm still a little old school when it comes to music. I like buying CDs. I like going to music stores and just browsing. Then again, I like my albums to have as little filler as possible, none at all being the platonic ideal.

Dupri, on the other hand, seems to suggest that filler is somehow a right and that allowing fans, consumers if you must, to cherry pick the good stuff off the albums means he's missing out on some royalties. He doesn't see this as a message to up his game, no, he sees it as a reason to go whining to the press.

I have some sympathy. Giving the consumer just what they what does seem to be a way of stifling creativity, but, then, bands who innovate tend to have fans who'll buy the whole album because of that, I doubt that the non-single Kriss Kross album tracks are anything other than bland R&B filler. Like any other consumer I've bought plenty of albums that have the single and a bunch of other stuff on (I sometimes refer to this as the 4 Non-blondes 1 Decent Track phenomenon not that I've held any bitterness for this length of time), thanks to iTunes and so on we don't have to put up with that anymore if we don't want to and, really, it's about time.

Cheap Beer and Exploding Bladders

I may have mentioned once or twice before the British media's problem with binge drinking. Well, it seems that "Beer sales plunge as Britons stay at home". That's right, pubs are selling 14m fewer pints a day than in 1979. This is because more people are drinking wine and that whole, vile alchopop thing, but guess what the proposed solution to help Britain's brewing industry is?

Yep, make beer cheaper to make it more attractive to those who've forsaken it...

Of course, binge drinking gets a mention:

"It is no coincidence that Britain has the highest level of excise duty in the EU and sales in the on-trade are falling, and yet binge-drinking is on the increase as supermarkets cynically exploit the consumer by offering cut-price booze to drink at home," he said.

When I'm back in England I often feel cynically exploited by the fact I can get three bottles of Black Sheep for four quid. It's a damaging destructive relationship but I can't help going back for more.

But not too much more, as a new report says binge drinking has increased to such an extent that cases of 'exploding bladders' are on the rise in the UK. Well, actually "we don't know the exact numbers, it's important to remember that ruptured bladders are rare - these are the first documented cases in women in the world." So that's a rise of infinity per cent then...

Myths Misfire

John Allen Paulos, author of A Mathematician Read The Newspaper among many other fine maths related books, has a column at ABC News. This month he looks at how cognitive biases colour our view of the issues and can affect policy choices. It makes you question your assumptions, which is always a good thing. He brings up a scary study by University of Michigan psychologist Norbert Schwarz:

Schwarz copied a flier put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intended to combat various myths about the flu vaccine. It listed a number of common beliefs about the vaccine and indicated whether they were true or false. He then asked volunteers to read the flier. Some of them were old, some young, but shortly thereafter he found that many of the older people mistakenly remembered almost of a third of the false statements as being true, and after a few days young and old alike misclassified 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Even worse was that people now attributed these false beliefs to the CDC itself! In an effort to dispel misconceptions about the vaccine, the CDC had inadvertently lent its prestige to them. In many cases, truth and elucidation can actually strengthen misconceptions and make them more psychologically available.

You know, actually, that explains a lot.

Via 3QD.

Judging Book Covers

My Favorite Book Covers of 2007 from The Book Design Review. I went to mock, but there's some really good covers there, even if the cover for The Little Girl and the Cigarette is astonishingly literal. I voted for Words Without Borders.

This is also very literal, but I thought that it also managed to show a lot of information in a witty and eye-catching way.

I'm not sure if I ever bought a book solely for its cover, but I do know I once used to prefer Picador because the spines were always white and they looked good together on a shelf. This was also a benefit with the Penguin classics range all having silver spines. As always, I'm sure this says something very bad about me...