You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
The first shot is of Lindisfarne (AKA Holy Island), where we spent last weekend, and I was a bit chuffed to see that it had been named Photo of the Day on Gadling yesterday.
The second is from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which was the previous Saturday’s entertainment. I’d struggle to think of a more engaging walk (and decent Cafe too).
A truly fabulous post (here) by Kate Belgrave at Liberal Conspiracy.
It includes such marvellously spiky rantings as this:
Why do followers of God still get airtime in politics and press? In all other (normal) forums like parties and pub nights, they’re laughed out of the room and never invited back. The person who brought them is usually expelled forever as well. If you see a Christian preaching on the street, you cough the word ‘loser’ and cross the road. But there they are in Brown’s cabinet. Go figure.
It may make you grimace but Kate has a point.
I also liked this from Anton Vowl in a very lengthy comments section:
I agree entirely about religious figures being granted undue significance. Why, simply because someone believes in Jesus (or Allah, or the flying spaghetti monster) should that person’s views be considered more weighty than any other non-expert source?
Couldn’t one argue that their weird belief in some mystic deity, contrary to all scientific evidence, is a reason to take them +less+ seriously than a non-believer? It’s anachronistic nonsense that the modern media can’t shake off even in an increasingly secular society where church attendances are falling off a cliff almost as fast as newspaper readerships.
As the comments here show, even otherwise intelligent people blithely assume ‘facts’ about Jesus Christ’s life and existence (look at the annual outcry about children not being taught the Nativity story)
It’s not ‘intolerant’ to point this out, and I’d say it’s fair enough to be mocking about people who frequently think you’re going to hell and suffer for all eternity just for not believing what they do.
Of course everyone has the right to believe and worship. But that doesn’t make them more important, more spiritual, more intelligent or more worthy to give an opinion on subjects like abortion than anyone else.
It’s worth noting that amongst all these comments, on a political, rather than religious blog, there are only a couple of dissenting voice despite the tone of the language. Like the Americans coming out of their post 9/11 closetsand admitting, now that there is a fashionable option, that they never really liked Bush - people are realising it is okay not just to be un-religious but also to speak out against religion.
In addition, perhaps, while people should be respected (unless they prove unworthy of it), religion is now no longer being afforded respect by default. I believe it is okay to question - and it is okay to ridicule the ridiculous.
Update: Paul Linford reacts (from a more Christian point of view).
When talking crap in the small hours the concept of fantasy gigs comes up from time to time.
Who have you seen? What gigs do you regret missing? If you could choose any band from history who would you most like to see?
Gigs I’ll never forget include the Stone Roses at Whitley Bay, just weeks before they split. Billy Bragg at Glastonbury’s Leftfield Tent takes some beating but then again the same artist playing in Durham, at an event to remember the miner’s strike, was especially poignant.
Radiohead at Glastonbury was incredible. So were REM and the Flaming Lips. Years earlier I remember the less-well-known Jah Wobble playing a Glasto set that blew everyone away.
On Tyneside the Baghdaddies never fail to leave a room smiling and sweating. As a kid I have happy memories of the Lindisfarne Christmas concerts – a fabulous, and much missed North East tradition.
Gigs I missed? Radiohead the year the big rains came – largely seen as the greatest ever Glasto performance. I never did see The Smiths either. This year Wilco cancelled the UK part of their tour without any real explanation. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I passed over the chance to see the Stones Roses at the legendary Spike Island gig. I still would love to see the Shins.
As for fantasy gigs, that’s a difficult one. I would, of course, have loved to have seen The Beatles. Than again they split before I was born, but this is fantasy, right?
Whenever I think of that impossible gig I always imagine some level of intimacy. My fantasy isn’t going to place me at the back of the stadium watching the action via video screens. It isn’t also going to have me at the front in a sweaty crush.
I don’t want a private audience - I just want to be part of a small one.
I’d love to see Tom Waits, but in a surrounding conducive to really enjoying him. In a jazz club where smoking is not only allowed but also doesn’t give you cancer.
There are so many bands I’d love to see under those conditions (even without the smoking) from Beth Gibbons right through to Van Morrison. I should point out that I have see Van The Man three times before and he was desperate each time. At least in my fantasy gig he’d be superb and, for once, he’d be arsed to actually make an effort.
There is a point to these ramblings. Because I have actually found my fantasy venue. Okay so it’s not a smokey club and its size means only smaller bands will play there.
Having said that I saw the Cowboy Junkies there not so long ago. Seeing them singing their version of Sweet Jane in such close proximity will stick with me forever. Totally spellbinding.
The venue of my dreams is Hall Two at the Gateshead Sage. Never have I been so close to artists. Never has my view been better. Never has the sound been so good. Never has a venue felt so intimate.
I’ve booked two more gigs to see at Hall Two and I am starting to get the impression that I’m buying the tickets more for the venue than the bands.
I just wish Tom Waits would play there.
… I bought the domain.
I visited the very wonderful Sage Gateshead on Saturday to see King Creosote.
It was rather good. But even better was the support act, Pip Dylan.
Since returning home I’ve been scouring the net without success to find his music to download. It’s beautiful stuff - Americana by way of Fife and with a voice lingering between the gravitas of Neil Diamond and Roy Orbison.
So with no tunes to download and bugger all available from his record company Fence, I instead bought this:
I believe in you Pip. Now where can I buy your stuff?
Sidenote: On the way home, our taxi driver, a Scouse lady asked what we had been watching.
King Creosote, we replied.
She said she knew him.
Are the Coconuts still with him, she asked.
Update: Thanks to PT from Fence who posted this link below. Hope you like his tunes as much as I do.
How much better would the internet and media be in general if we could just, at a stroke, cut out everything related to Mac, Apple, Steve Jobs etc?
Is it really just me that finds it so incredibly dull? It’s all so “Me Too”. So embarrassingly corporate and people are falling for it in their millions. Adults wanting new toys because “all my friends have one”. Are you so insecure?
I find myself reading blogs that, without obviously intending to, write exclusively on what Apple product they have just bought, how it works, what they’ll buy next. Every other Twitter feeds is the same.
People leave messages on blogs and websites saying: your site looks great on my new Apple iDick. It’s as excruciating as saying: your haircut looks fabulous through my new Armani shades.
I don’t care what people buy, but don’t they have more self respect than to turn themselves into viral marketing fodder for Apple? Apple is a business - that’s all. You’re doing what they want you to do. Don’t you feel used?
You’re as duped as the idiots I used to work with who all ate a KitKat one Friday because Rowntree had informed them it was National KitKat day. Suckers.
Jemima Kiss at the Guardian includes links to the advertisement for the latest MacBook. Free advertising again. Imagine all the non-Apple organisations that could better use that free plug. Viral video charts are fun but can we please keep the corporate stuff out of it? After all we don’t run “favourite ads on TV” sections? Or how about Today’s Top Training Video. Utter tosh.
Just the other day I saw an on-line request from someone who was due to visit Paris on holiday and they were asking if anyone knew if there was an Apple store locally.
ARRRRGGGHHH. Can’t you people leave it alone for a second?
I’ve said this before, but the single main reason that I stick with my PC rather than investing in a Mac, is that I would hate to become yet another Apple disciple who bungs up their blog with their awful gushing.
It is not important who made the tools you use. It is what you use it for. You can change the world and what are you doing?
You are writing about the tool itself that’s what.
When they invented the printing press did they then use it to produce books about fecking printing presses?
For the love of God. Please, please please stop.
Okay. I said it. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Pic and words from South of West.
“Kids in Kibera have a new game. They have fashioned their own cameras out of mud, baked hard in the sun, and run around “filming” the mob of journalists that gathers on a hill overlooking their slum each day.”
I’ve been tracking through the blog that that above is taken from. Right now it’s only fuelling the wanderlust. Africa has always scared me but I’m getting braver. Who knows?
Hat tip to Noodlepie for the link (plus other interesting ones too)
Following Noodlepie’s unearthing of the worst restaurant review ever (via Pittstop Works), today I read what surely the most awful, most laboured, match report I have ever seen.
The match was good though. Big smiles today.
He wasn’t my first choice but he’s back.
And for some reason I’m grinning like an idiot and can’t wait for tonight’s match. It’s been a while since I felt like that.
While the chances are it will end badly, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun in the meantime.
Tonight my heart is happy and although my head is dissenting, it won’t know what’s hit it after pre and post game celebrations.
The Toon managed to find the manager I didn’t even know I wanted.
…using the phrase: “ticks all the boxes”.
It’s getting right on my nerves.
More stuff on the fallout from the sacking of Sam Allardyce.
Assembled stuff from nufc.com below. Still the only place you can find intelligent comment on Newcastle United.
On Harry Redknapp being touted for Toon manager:
Trepidation gives way to alarm….Friday’s newspaper back pages are almost universal in their reporting of Ashley’s intent to pay Harry Redknapp a cockney kings’ ransom to succeed Sam Allardyce at SJP.
Mega-money claims of salaries, transfer kittys and private flights from Dorset to Tyneside are being made.
Is it just us….or are others equally nonplussed by this apparent attempt to replace one dodgy operator with another? After all, the bloke is still on bail until next month.
On the media:
Wall-to-wall twaddle about a groundswell of opinion over a certain sheet metalworker’s son from Gosforth sticks in our throat somewhat - based as it is on what seems to be no more than hot air and presumption.
Our friends from Sky invoke their favourite blues player Muddy Waters with their obtuse and garbled coverage:
1. Thursday: “Sam took training today” - a statement made against a backdrop of footage from a training session, with the intention being to suggest that it was current.
Look at little closer though and the cracks start to appear - like the presence of Joey Barton and players now off to the African Nations Cup.
2. Teenage tosspots full of blue pop, asked twice to perform a “Shearer, Shearer” chant for the cameras outside the Britannia Stadium before kick-off on Sunday.
Said footage is now being presented as documentary evidence of “The Geordie Nation” backing Shearer to take over at SJP.
You’re having a laugh? Whoever told you he’d passed all of his badges was talking nonsense. just ask Tommy Craig and the SFA - we did.
The Mail are no better: “As Newcastle fans continue to demand Alan Shearer as their new manager” they wrote on Friday. How and when? Have they been round your house?
3. The attempt on Wednesday to mislead all and sundry about the Newcastle managerial situation with quotes presented as being live about Sam being dismissed without his knowledge.
4. David Craig interviewing the man with forked tongue from The Chronicle outside the ground - this is the Self Preservation society….giving each other cosy stories.
PS - Here’s a message for Steve Bruce, Phil Brown, David Moyes, Paul Jewell, Alan Curbishley and anyone else who succumbed to the lure of the Sky microphone waved under their noses on Thursday:
Shut your yap. You don’t know what you’re talking about - try concentrating your efforts on the dung heaps you claim to be in control of….
On what next:
For Mort and Ashley this is the point that they draw a line under their first seven months, having overseen much positive change off the field.
However they have watched their initial policy of leaving the previously-appointed man in post undo some of that good work by providing sub-standard product to sell.
Another link with the previous administration is severed then - and it’s the last major one.
Whoever takes the job now has a fantastic opportunity to rewrite history - whilst trying to succeed where a galaxy of familiar footballing names have ultimately failed.
It’s a sad fact that the identity of our new manager will at least partly dictate how much rope he’s given by the press - both national and local.
Football as a metaphor for life once more.
Apologies that only football fans will follow this, but…
It’s all to do with this, the sacking of Sam Allardyce, Newcastle United’s manager.
It’s all so strange. It’s strange that me and my friends, who pay money each week to go and see Newcastle are pretty much, to a man, delighted with the news, yet…
It’s strange that the Southern-based media, who don’t live locally, don’t pay to see matches, and let’s face it, don’t even watch our games are against the move.
It’s strange that those of us who go to watch the football are told we can’t expect to be entertained while we thought that was the whole point.
It’s laughably strange that Joey Barton describes ME as vicious. Ha!
It’s strange that Newcastle fans are seen as fickle despite the fact that we still regularly fill a 52,000 seater stadium even though we’ve won nowt in most of our life times.
It’s strange that sacking managers is seen as a result of unfair pressure from fans as opposed to clueless club suits appointing dickheads in the first place.
It’s strange that I hear that we demand exciting football rather than winning football, when in reality we’re seeing neither.
In short…
The prejudiced southern media have their platform and their chance to voice their ill-informed opinions without fear of condemnation.
The managers get to spend millions on rubbish, get to fail and get to walk away with a cheque for millions and the sympathies of the above.
Meanwhile, those of us who pay for them all - who put in the hours, who queue for tickets, who buy our satellite dishes and read their papers, are disregarded.
We’re unimportant, ripped off and labelled as fickle, ignorant and ungrateful.
No wonder we’re angry.
First off, Happy New Year.
I’m back from a magical few days in Poland.
Truth be told we were snow hunting. A white Christmas seemed like just the job after our times in the tropics. The colder the better. In truth though while the temperature dropped to minus six there were little more than a few flakes of snow (although long-frozen stuff was to be seen on the ground).
Now, back in Newcastle, typically we’re surrounded by the stuff. As I look out my office window I can see something approaching a blizzard. Bring it on. I always did love snow.
No pics yet of the Toon in it’s new winter wonderland white elegance. But here’s some from the Polish trip. Oh and I can well and truly recommend a trip to Krakow.
All the pics here.
