Reasons to love the joined-up-interweb: musicians you love telling you about new musicians they love, with YouTube vids embedded, etc.
Tanita Tikaram recommends Marina and the Diamonds' I am Not a Robot
happy![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pink_weasel first clapped eyes on me and thought "nice guy, shame about the jumper".
I rarely update my oldest web site these days. But to end the year, I get to add a couple of new links to TanitaTikaram.net. Tanita has started blogging and has an official MySpace page.
Via pesky33.
The Music Intelligence Quiz
Your final score was 132/180
Mix-Tape Master (109-144 points)
You are a music evangelist: the person in your network of friends who always has the coolest new song, the one whose iPod gets picked to DJ every party. You understand the art of the segue, how the key to the best mix-tape isn't just the songs you pick, but how they interlock with each other. You also know who the up-and-coming acts are and are quick to recognise where their influences lie and whether they will make it big. You work hard at the pursuit of this knowledge, scouring music blogs, magazines and record stores. Most importantly, you are generous with your passion - and your friends should be very, very grateful. Still, it's always good to get new inspiration for your latest mix
Or... I'm just good at trivia.
mellowVery True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve's blog of the same name. The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn't be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)
indescribable
contemplativeVia miss_newham
My band is called Administrative Template and our album is List of QI episodes.
confused
Saw The Lord of the Rings musical courtesy of work and the producers. It's not really fair to call it a musical as it barely contains more songs than the books do, though the fight scenes are superbly choreographed to music. The producers prefer the term 'spectacle' and it fits that label very well. The design element is superb - Black Riders, Ents, Shelob, the Balrog are all achieved on stage in innovative but effective ways that you probably wouldn't imagine. The use of crutches and prosthetics to distinguish the orcs may not be very politically correct but it does convey the twisted and deformed nature of their creation.
It's quite long but still has to compress the story somewhat. The first act follows the first book reasonably closely (no Tom Bombardil, though he does get namechecked at the end, no Barrow Wights, no Glorfindel, and the Nazgul attacks on the Prancing Pony and Weathertop are combined), but after the interval things start to diverge rather more. I was starting to get suspicious when Boromir kept on talking about "The Kingdom of Men" rather than Gondor and it turned out that they had indeed combined Rohan and Gondor - and hence Theoden and Denethor, and Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields. Whilst this moved the plot along quite quickly it removed some of the subtlety from the story and a lot of "fan favourite" characters and scenes - no Eomer, no Eowyn, no Faramir, no PalantÃr, no Wormtongue, no Paths of the Dead, no Witch King. On the plus side they do, briefly, include the Scouring of the Shire.
The performances ranged from the very good to the very camp but even Malcolm Storry as an excellent Gandalf suffers somewhat in comparison with Ian McKellan in the films. In fact the hardest thing to keep in mind when reviewing or just watching the stage version is that it's an independent adaptation of the book not the film. It aims for a very different feel - more mythic, more rooted in fairy tales, rather than the "realistic" fantasy of the films. In this sense it's perhaps a little truer to the spirit of Tolkein even if it taks much bigger liberties with his story.
pensive
I saw this Build Your Own Stonehenge kit in the shop yesterday. A miniature Stonehenge. How Spinal Tap is that? amusedMy iPod's dead. And guess what? It's about fourteen months old and so just out of warranty. Fucking typical.
[Update] - For the curious, here's what's wrong.
I didn't have time before work this morning to do any further tests, but it doesn't look good.
angryOn Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.
On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn't remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon's courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.
I didn't recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:
Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.inf
osystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/ ... I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google's archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).
I'm just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it's used for something different.
Thank in advance,
Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I'd answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message
Bribery worked.
Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I'm finally getting some reward.
pensive
sillyVia rozk
The Veteran
You scored 82%!
You've picked up the majority of the classic rock basics. You probably have a classic rock collection and can sing along with most of the songs on your local radio station.
This is not the highest score, but it is arguably the best: that subtle combination of impressive knowledge and not being a pretentious geek.
cheerfulmiss_s_b
If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Sergei Rakhmaninov.
I lived in the early Twentieth Century and was well known for my compositional, conducting, and piano skills, yet I am melancholy despite this talent. My famous works include my nearly-impossible piano concerti.
Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test
confused confused
