My favourite Christmas poem
Many years ago when I was a nipper, my granddad would recite this when he'd had a few.
It was Christmas Day in the workhouse,
The season of good cheer,
The paupers they were merry,
Their bellies full of beer.
The arrogant workhouse master
As he strolled along the halls,
Wished them all a merry Christmas,
The paupers answered, 'balls'!
This made the master angry,
And he swore by all the gods,
He'd take away their Christmas pudding
The dirty rotten sods.
Then out spake one old pauper,
With a face as bold as brass,
Said, you can take your Christmas pudding,
And shove it up your arse.
Every child should have a grandfather who can come out with gems of folkloric wisdom such as this.
Merry Xmas to all my readers
I just wanna say I love you all! [blows kisses] Thankyou so much for being such loyal readers and, dare I say it,
friends!
Well really it was just an excuse to indulge in a bit of Photoshop manipulation and compositing, not to mention red wine and Led Zeppelin CDs.
I usually send out some digital artwork for Christmas, the theory being it's good P.R.
Who knows?
Computers & culture
Since the beginning of recorded music, the sound of human song has changed with each new generation of people. There's no confusing a 1930s song with a 1940s song, or a 1950s song with a 1960s song. The pattern sticks until roughly the end of the 1980s. It's not easy to tell whether a song came from 1990 or 2000.
This might sound like an extraordinary claim, but you can test it yourself. Listen to random clips from the many sources of songs available on the Internet and don't peek at the year they were produced. You'll discover that it's harder to date songs from the last two decades than songs from previous decades...
If you accept that there has been a recent decrease in stylistic variety in human song, the next question is "Why?" There are plenty of possibilities: Maybe the Internet makes too much information available, so everyone has the same influences to absorb—and songs lose flavor and take on a generic quality. To be more cynical, it could be a sign of cultural decline.
Another explanation, which is the one I suspect, is that the change since the mid-1980s corresponds with the appearance of digital editing tools for music.
Reading an
article by Jaron Lanier in which he mentioned that each decade has turned out a distinctive music up until the 1990s / 2000s, when popular music started to become indistinguishable, it occurred to me that while I couldn't disagree with this, I doubted the cause to which he ascribed it, probably that computer based production tools are enforcing a particular sound, particularly in the accuracy of sticking to the beat. Computers have pervaded all cultural fields, not just music, yet there seems to be quite the opposite happening elsewhere. For example, photoshop has opened up vast new possibilities with say, photographic montage, and has by no means rigidified uses. His other suggested cause, that the internet has exposed everyone to the same influences doesn't hit home for me either, that would if anything, widen an individual's input stream.
I think it's more what's happened to popular music within our society. It's long been, as part of the teenager marketing phenomonen, a means to fame and fortune for the record companies and their insiders. The distinctive musical forms of the last century have largely happened outside the industry, later to be adopted by it. Think blues, hippy, punk or techno. It's an industry now on the defensive and at the same time youth culture has become consumerist and money_worshipping. The creativity's dead.
The revolution starts tomorrow: until then you're stuck with the back-catalogue.
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3ix v RBN
Received a couple of e-mails today from 3ix tech support. Seems they weren't ignoring me after all.
We have checked your issue and banned the source for the script on our server.
...
This is due to some specific accounts i.e. some accounts have incorrect permissions given to the files and folders.Because of this some malicious scripts are added to the files.We have banned such IPs on server and changed Firewall rules.
I'd already found a way of preventing the malicious script tampering with my pages, but I'd prefer not to post it here as they may use the info to make their script cleverer.
I now have a dead laptop to contend with. It was a dual-boot XP / Ubuntu, but with XP suffering so many faults plus nervousness about it possibly having been trojanned by RBN's nasties, I decided to reinstall XP completely. This wiped out my Ubuntu partition but didn't remove the GRUB boot loader which now fails because Ubuntu's gone. The solution it seems is to get into the recovery utility from the XP setup CD and fix the MBR (I'd never heard of it before last night either). But the laptop being a Vaio, you don't get a CD, everything's preloaded onto the hard drive including Sony's proprietary extensions, which while mainly bloatware are essential for the thing to run properly. So tomorrow, see if I can borrow an XP setup CD...
This blog was made with recycled bytes.