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I’ve noticed many people saying the only thing wrong about the crazy world of the Heston’s Feasts series has been the celeb diners making their inane comments. So yes, the format is great — a talented man’s fabulous cooking inspired by myth, fable and history — but the guests he’s cooking for are (mostly) rubbish.
I’ve not, so far, seen people making the complementary complaint about cBeebies ‘Big Cook, Little Cook’. A long description of the show can be found on an old post on Richard Herring’s blog, but in short the eponymous cooks have to cook for a character from nursery rhymes or fairy tales (Snow White, Old Macdonald). The problem is that as a show meant to inspire children to cook, the options are limited to recipes involving mashing together cottage cheese, crushed up crackers, toast and food colouring, with specially shaped-cutters (stars, fish, etc) to theme it up a bit. more »
Historical records: ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’, Rosemary Clooney, Candide and Noël Coward.
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Delightful nonsense — that’s the standard way to write off this song, and at FT we find nothing wrong with that. Indeed some would say there is no higher accolade. However as any illuminati or discordianista will tell you, the best place to hide the TRUTH is in PLAIN SIGHT (and on national television if you can) where people will assume it is nonsense. Ahhhhh!
“Bring home a dime, Make mine a 99″
No. It IS total nonsense. Awesome. It’s also the KLF’s last new single proper — although with the KLF, this is a blurry-line to define as the song is material recycled from not just other artists but also previous KLF productions. After this they did re-release a version of 3AM eternal with Extreme Noise Terror, performed with ENT at the Brits, and that was (sort of) that. (Full and proper details in William Shaw’s Select article from July 1992.)
Here’s THAT ToTP performance (via ToTP2 sadly):
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F0EsFv1M8lM
Tammy bless her. But It was all about the ice-cream van, first seen with my personal favourite It’s Grim Up North (only no 81 in out top 100), and the dancing ice-cream cones with mickey-mouse gloves (for it is THEY). Isn’t it? Read nothing more into it.
With so much stuff whizzing around the internets, accelerating barely-humorous* claims of big bangs, and all-devouring black holes zapping around one way, and conspiracy nuts spiralling out of control going the other way and throwing out like actual death threats to physicists, what does the resulting explosion of uninformed daftness tell us about the small-scale fabric of culture itself? Follow the tracks of the memes as they galvanise those around them and work backwards to the source…
Pop cultural candidate #1 has to be Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’ which features a finished LHC (as did Brown imitating ‘Decipher’ by Stel Pavlou). I have not read it, but it sounds particularly bonkers — I look forward to the forthcoming film. CERN even have a page for A&D fans explaining the reality. But that (appears) to be largely about a large bomb — it’s not the source of end-of-world-ism.
It’s got a sort of negative echo of Y2K about it all — those who know that there is little (i.e nothing) to worry about, are actually going out of their way to stress that this is the case, as it might lose them funding. The Y2K fear and uncertainty was, by contrast, a great source of cash.
It also feels like — finally an end of the world i can relate to! A bang not a whimper! A Statham/Cage blockbuster firecracker of doomscience instead of the media drip-feed namby-pamby melting ice caps and ‘won’t someone think of the polar bears’ editorials. Like boiling frogs, we can only get agitated when the threat is instant but fictional, not incremental and more likely. more »
WATCH THIS VIDEO. It’s a LOVE STORY. It’s like REMAINS OF THE DAY 2.0. The greatest love story ever blogged. erm, set against an epic backdrop of the deep south and the american civil war CSS standards compliancy and web-browser wars.
If you haven’t heard this song just go and listen to it. (You may recognise it — it was used in the sproutface DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet). That’s all I should say.
However, to make the your perhaps-momentous discovery more possible, you may need preparing.
If you have not heard Stina’s voice it’s because you’ve never seen an Ariston washing machine advert, and it’s her voice that could be the deal breaker. There are songs you cannot persuade people they will like, and often it’s because of the vocal. If a voice is like nails on a blackboard to you, you won’t get past that. Similarly if it’s like being repeatedly limply patted on the shoulder by a wet teddybear, you’re going to get fed up quite quickly. Still, I made an effort to like Neil Young and Morrisey, so you could have a go with winsome Stina, eh? She’s Swedish — you love Swedish pop right?
In a way this is the song to get past her twee etiolated voice. Like the little star, her voice might feel initially weak, but it’s got a hidden and precise power more »
Delightful nonsense — that’s the standard way to write off this song, and at FT we find nothing wrong with that. Indeed some would say there is no higher accolade. However as any illuminati or discordianista will tell you, the best place to hide the TRUTH is in PLAIN SIGHT (and on national television if you can) where people will assume it is nonsense. Ahhhhh!
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