Jarvis Cocker, complete with inadvisable beard, is going to be sitting round the Question Time table with David Dimbleby, forgotten Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith, Labour’s Harriet Harman and, best of all, objectionable right-wing bigot Peter Hitchens. Unmissable viewing on Thursday evening, BBC1.
I have now been listening to recordings of Numbers Stations for two and a half hours. I think it might be driving me slightly mad. Yet it’s also curiously compulsive. So much so, in fact, that I am pondering giving up all forms of writing and instead throwing what little creativity I still possess into setting up my own mysteriously unnerving radio presence somewhere in the hidden depths of Shortwave, so that I can sit in a darkened room with a single microphone and intone emotionless streams of numbers all day, every day.
For your uneasy listening pleasure, there’s four CDs’ worth of Shortwave Numbers Stations available free of charge via The Conet Project.
<curmudgeon>13-year-old boy is given 30-year-old Sony Walkman to use for a week instead of his iPod. Hilarity ensues! “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape,” he says. That’s because you are going through the modern education system, and you’re stupid. “I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day,” he adds. Oh shut up, you ignorant child - this is my history you’re trampling over with your smug, condescending attitude. I hope he was also given music from 1979 to listen to, for that truly authentic Walkman experience - much better than all this Dubstop, Electropica and Postal-Rock that pesky kids listen to today.</curmudgeon>
A local councillor in Wales referred to homosexuality as “a notorious disability”, saying that “the modern culture is to defend these people from any form of discrimination. Hurray for diversity”. Then he went on to claim that he had recently found a book (yes, apparently he can read) which suggested “that homosexuality is a demon which can be driven out”. But it’s okay, everyone, because he further clarified his stance: “I respect them as someone who is struggling with a disability as I would with someone in a wheelchair”. Finally, he rounded things off by crying as he read passages from the Bible during his disciplinary hearing.
Nurse, the screens.
Even amongst the catalogue of ridiculous sounding titles for desktop and/or mobile Twitter applications, there is a general consensus that most of them should begin with ‘Twit’ or ‘Tweet’. Makes sense. So what were tha makers of Spaz thinking? And did no one tell them that it might be misinterpreted?
Weather report. It is hotter than Satan’s underpants. I feel like I am about to melt into Beelzebub’s very own sweaty crotch. I am so British. White and pasty or colour of boiled lobster. And nothing in between.
A classic Steven Wells column from 2002, shortly after he had started writing for The Guardian about sport, of all things.
Oh. Bugger. Swells is dead. For many people my age, Steven Wells ranting, apoplectic music journalism was an essential read in the inky NME each week, gurning between his intense cohorts waxing lyrical about the “sonic cathedrals” committed to disc by pale young men with guitars and floppy fringes. In subsequent years I occasionally read him in The Guardian, but didn’t realise that he had moved to Philadelphia and wrote for the Philadelphia Weekly - who have published his last, very moving column.
