This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Saturday 28th February 2009 at 13.04pm
Twee to the max
Have you seen the ING adverts? The one with the dog and the one with the little girl and the puddle? Well, the music to those adverts is from "Be Gentle With Me", by The Boy Least Likely To. They've got to be the tweeest band ever. It's just incredible how twee they are. They have a new album coming out soon, and a single - the two videos they've just released (both songs from the single) are pretty fun.
A Balloon On A Broken String
Every Goliath Has Its David (not such a good song, but the video made me laugh).
Posted Saturday 28th February 2009 at 12.55pm
The World in 202 Meals
Some friends of mine run a website called The World in 202 Meals. The idea is that they visit one restaurant in London for each of the 202 (approx.) countries in the world. They've got off to such a good start that they appeared in Time Out's "London's best food blogs and websites" feature.
Posted Sunday 22nd February 2009 at 10.46pm
Beware Greeks bearing gifts
English cricket was recently embarrassed by its connections with Texan billionaire Allen Stanford. To cut a long story short, the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board - Wales isn't important enough to join the acronym) accepted an offer from Stanford to play a series of games against his "Stanford All Stars" team for massive cash prizes. The first match took place late last year and the All Stars won comfortably. Stanford has since been arrested in the USA and charged with carrying out "a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world" (not involving the ECB, I might add, but still inconvenient for them).
The ECB has, unsurprisingly, taken a bit of flak over this. There seems to be barely a British sports journalist yet to admonish Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, for "jumping into bed" with Stanford; in fact nearly every one of them has used that metaphor. Many argue that not enough checks were carried out on Stanford's companies before the contracts were signed. Personally I don't have too much of a problem with the fact that they didn't check Stanford wasn't conning Americans out of billions of dollars. That's not what the ECB is supposed to do.
No, the ECB is supposed (I propose) to run English cricket to the best of its ability. It saw that its Indian counterpart, the BCCI, had created an exciting, well-financed, popular new domestic competition, and it said No, we are English (and Welsh), we invented the game, we should have the exciting, well-financed, popular new domestic competition. But we don't have a billion people living in our country, much less hundreds of millions of cricket fans. So, lacking the public money to resist the Indian board's power, the ECB turned to Stanford.
My problem with the ECB is that they ever thought they could, or should, compete with the Indian Premier League. They thought the Stanford matches would sate the England team, who, earning half a million quid for one night's work, would turn down several hundred thousand more from the IPL. They became obsessed with trying to prevent their own players joining the Indian competition. (They also forgot that England might lose the Stanford game and end up with nothing.) Never mind that every other country in the world is happy to send its players over to England in our summer and India in their summer, both to earn money and to improve as cricketers. The ECB was arrogant and greedy and jealous, and as a result took millions of pounds from a cheating Texan who doesn't even really like cricket. We should be worried about that rather than their inability to notice a financial crime that the US Securities and Exchange Commission took years to uncover.
I once had to deal with the ECB. I found myself trying to facilitate a conversation between one man who was sat in an office without a computer and refused to communicate by any means except telephone, and another man who was sat at home with a computer and refused to communicate by any means except e-mail. The ECB don't need press hacks to think up metaphors for their incompetence, they're quite happy to provide them of their own accord.
(Of course, I'm being harsh on the press. This from the wonderful Andy Zaltzman:
'When the news of Stanford's little commercial inconvenience broke on the BBC's Test Match Special, qualified sage Vic Marks floated up a bit of Virgil's Aeneid into the rough - "I fear Greeks bearing gifts," he quoted, warming the hearts of those who believe TMS should still be broadcast entirely in Latin. The original, unexpurgated text of The Aeneid, recently discovered in a secret vault under the Lord's pavilion, continued: "And I fear Greeks even more when they pitch up in a helicopter with 20 million bucks in crisp, non-sequential notes. The big wooden horse is one thing, and I'm not comfortable with it, but really, the chopper-and-cash combo is just vulgar."')
Posted Saturday 21st February 2009 at 8.16pm
The year in photos
The Boston Globe has done a 2008 in photos feature in three parts. It has some incredible photos. I found the link on my friend and isomorphic image Matt Rudy Jacobs' (mostly) film blog.
The photo (below) of the Olympic games opening ceremony in Beijing also reminded me of how amazing that ceremony was. In no way can London ever compete with that in 2012 - I remember someone suggesting that we cut our losses and just hand out sausage rolls and party hats to everyone involved.
On the music front, I've been listening to Beirut's new double EP, March of the Zapotec / Holland. Zapotec features a Mexican brass band, and sounds similar to the brilliant The Flying Club Cup but with more brass, especially in the lower registers, and less varied instrumentation. There are a couple of instrumentals, and in general the emotion of the songs is provided by the instruments rather than Zach Condon's vocals. Holland is more electronic and returns Condon to centre stage, which I thought might be a bit of a drastic change, but actually the two halves fit together well - helped by Condon's voice and the band's distinctive marching rhythms. I don't think the songs are as strong as those on The Flying Club Cup overall, but it's a really nice stopgap before Beirut's next album.
Posted Wednesday 18th February 2009 at 11.40pm
Boooooooo to the Brits
Oh dear. Kings of Leon won both Best International Album and Best International Group at the Brit Awards. Now, I don't pay any heed to these things - but this one really confuses me. My sister got the Kings of Leon album (Only by the Night) for Christmas, so I heard a fair bit of it. "Sex on Fire" is ok as a single, I don't mind that (although Michael McIntyre makes a good point), but the rest of the album is completely insipid. It's like Athlete's second album, but with more songs about sex. If the National all had their fingers chopped off and replaced Matt Berninger with Russell Brand, they might make something like Only by the Night. Except they'd be more exciting. Maybe if Brand had a lobotomy too. And wrote all the songs on his own.
If, for example, MGMT had won, I could understand. Oracular Spectacular is catchy as hell despite its basic / nonsense (Black gold in clawfoot tubs unchanging / I am fire, where's my form? / Whisper crimson I intrude) lyrics. But Kings of Leon? Come on.
Unfortunately I don't listen to anywhere near enough British music to be able to give many better alternatives. Los Campesinos' second album is the best British one I've heard this year by about a million miles. Internationally I haven't been that impressed either - Fleet Foxes have some great songs, Vampire Weekend's album is really good (although why they left their best song off it I have no idea), and Bon Iver's debut is nice - especially on cold morning walks up the hill to campus.
Posted Wednesday 18th February 2009 at 11.53am
Not quite spelunking, but close
And, with a sigh,
She allowed the burden of belly to drop like an apron full of boulders
If you could hold up her threadbare
Coat to the light where it's worn translucent in places
You'd see spots where
Almost every night of the year Bear had been mending suspending that baseness
Now her coat drags through the water
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows;
In the magnetic embrace
Balletic and glacial of Bear's insatiable shadow
Posted Sunday 15th February 2009 at 10.15pm
Nice catch
Adam Voges (who happens to be Notts' overseas player at the moment) took a great catch in today's Twenty20 game between Australia and New Zealand. He took the ball just inside the boundary but didn't have it under control as he began to topple over the rope. So he quickly threw the ball back into the air, fell over the rope, got back up, jumped back onto the field and completed the catch before the ball hit the ground.
The commentators justifiably went pretty crazy, saying they'd never seen anything like it before. I have seen something similar before though. I went to see Cambridge University play Lashings (a club side that are bankrolled by some guy who pays for former and current international stars to play for them) on the day my Part III exams finished. Chris Cairns (a former Notts overseas player) hammered a ball towards long off, where I was sitting just beyond the boundary. One of the Cambridge players ran back, jumped into the air, caught the ball, threw it back up again while still in the air, landed over the boundary - almost landing on my can of lager - then running back inside to catch the ball before it hit the ground. It was even more impressive than Voges' (although admittedly not with the pressure of 48,000 people watching live and a hundred million or so watching on TV).
Posted Saturday 7th February 2009 at 2.10pm
Heyzap!
A friend of mine, Immad Akhund, has set up a website called Heyzap. It's basically an online games widget that anyone can embed into their own website to let visitors play the games. It seems to be doing incredibly well at the moment, a week or so after launch - they were even featured in the Telegraph business section yesterday.
Posted Saturday 7th February 2009 at 2.01pm
Wales photos
Posted Thursday 5th February 2009 at 8.51pm
Igloo!
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