Whatever happened to all the country songs about drinkin' whiskey and kickin' ass?

[alexsarll]

It's not often that I enjoy a club where I barely know any of the music, but it's lovely when it does work. Computer Blue used to be one, all those strange electronic sounds forming an alternate track of pop history which at the time was a total closed book to me. And Nashville-on-Thames last night was another. I recognised the Johnny Cash song and 'Walking After Midnight', and that was it. But the great thing about country is the stories; if you don't know the song then you don't know the ending, so you get a new drama every four minutes. The live band were great too; The Blazing Zoos are travel/music journalist Andrew Mueller, two of Jesus Jones and two other blokes gone country, with a repertoire ranging from the self-referential ("Always wanted to write a country song but I never had a girl who done me wrong, no I never had the material 'til now") to the outlandish - as I say, I'm no expert, but I'm guessing there aren't many country songs about Albania.

I taped the first Primeval, but I was pretty sure I'd abandon it before the end of the episode. Unusually, I was wrong. I'm not saying it was the best thing I've ever seen, but unusually for a modern ITV programme, it didn't seem to have been aimed at an audience of retards. Ben Miller aside (and oh, how he has fallen) the actors were actually *acting*! The script only occasionally collapsed into imbecility! The effects weren't risible! And while I was initially sceptical about the creatures they were using, turns out that even the improbable winged one was real - so extra props to them for using obscurities rather than the usual suspects. Scenes which could have been hammered home were instead left to speak for themselves - cf the dinosaur-obsessed kid terrified by a real dinosaur, a well-made point you could equally play out with vikings, knights or pirates. The anomaly and the Permian were done vastly better than I'd expected (and comics readers - is it just me or does the anomaly look a lot like Wildstorm's Snowflake?) - oh, and Hannah S Club, of whom I'd never taken much notice before, appears to have become incredibly hot. I approve, and shall be continuing with this (although I'm still glad that it's only running six episodes, rather than 13 - not least so as Who clashes won't be an issue).

Is the Olympics really not enough sports-related waste and misery for one decade in one country?

Comments

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Oh marvellous, bloody football.

http://www.axt.org.uk/essays/sacks1.htm this is an interesting read. Good old Chief Rabbi.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, quite. And with the Emirates stadium one of half a dozen in the country which will meet the regime's requirements. I wonder if the alleged left will be as supportive of the 'insurgency' I feel this crap bringing on as they are of the Islamofascist variety?

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find, Alex, that hating footballism is disgustingly classist and probably racialist as well.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

If it could ever be claimed as a pursuit linked to the white working classes, those times are long gone. Besides, when it was it was probably less objectionable, simply because there wasn't quite so much faff associated with it outside the relevant (slum) areas. Hell, back then Arsenal actually played in Arsenal, rather than scrawling their name inappropriately across Highbury.

Anyway, as regards that article, obviously I agree with the vast majority of it, BUT:
"I am proud that the Union of Jewish Students, who have been subject to much verbal and physical abuse recently, have led the fight against Islamophobia on campus"

Given what passes for 'Islamophobia' these days, that's hideously counterproductive.

"I turn now to the antisemite. I say to him or her: Forgive me, but I cannot return hate with hate."

Yeah, well there's part of your problem, then. You talk about not internalising anti-Semitism as happened before, but I think if you take 'tolerance' that far, you're doing pretty much the same thing. There comes a time when holding on to the moral high ground can become self-defeating - because if it allows scum to triumph then you've allowed the appearance to become more important than the essence. Similarly, when he talks about "the capacity to compromise" - well, with some opponents you just don't compromise. Ever. Were there compromises he thinks should have been made with the Nazis? But then, I have just posted some other stuff on this topic.

"More than hate destroys the hated, hate destroys the hater."

Not if you do it right.

"The failure of that dream is one of the most devastating chapters in European history. The depth of its failure is measured by this: that virtually all the great philosophers of modernity—Voltaire, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Frege—made sharply antisemitic statements in the course of their work"

Whilst Nietzsche was very critical of Judaism qua religion (seeing it as the progenitor of christianity and thus the origin point of slave morality), he was no harsher on the Jews as a race than he was on everyone else. This may have been distorted because his works were largely known in versions edited by his sister, who really was an anti-Semite, but in particular there's one splendid passage where he suggests that rather than expelling the Jews, Germany should expel the anti-Semites, because they contribute considerably less to society.

And the phrase "the world's oldest hate" - well, surely that applies to the more basic fear of the Other, and racism in general, than to anything as specific as anti-Semitism?

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

The Coelurosauravus was a bit too "flying" for my liking, and refering to "sarcoptergians" is rather too broad- humans are technically sarcopterygians. Even if you restrict it to fish lungfish have a fossil record in the tertiary, but coelacanth's don't, so why they didn't use the more familiar term I don' know).

Other than the minor nitpicks I wasn't badly upset, (and using the Beeb's "Walking with..." websites was pretty amusing.)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and isn't yer man the gorgonopsid less than wholly a reptile? But these are technicalities, considering. I mean, when I saw something with four legs AND wings I thought, bollocks, everything vertebrate works from a four-limb pattern. Well, turns out I was wrong.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Gorgonopsids are indeed more closely related to people than any living reptile. ("Reptile" isn't a clade, its more of a grade.)

You weren't actually wrong. The wings are supported by elongate dermal bones, rather than ribs (as in Draco volans) and certainly not another set of limbs.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

So dragons proper aren't such a massive deviation from everything else as all that...

But you say they shouldn't have been so flying? Were they more gliders along the lines of the 'flying fox'?

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Dragons proper are supposed to have six limbs, and are a massive deviation from real tetrapods. Draco volans is a small gliding lizard with a membrane stretched between elongated ribs.

Yes, Coeleosauravus was a glider, and wouldn't have had powered flight, which is . It was much more like Flying Lemurs (which don't really fly and aren't lemurs) and sugar gliders. Flying foxes are actually fruit bats, and really do fly.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think I had flying foxes confused with the jumping-from-tree-to-tree-with-flaps-between-front-and-black fellows - so those are the lemurs, yes?

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Yep. Technically called "Dermopterans", and probably fairly closely related to primates, but not actually primates.

[fivelongdays.livejournal.com]

I dig the Beavis and Butthead reference in the title. I was pleasently suprised that I'm not the only person who quotes that!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

(I would never have remembered it unassisted, but it was on the posters they had up at the club (http://www.myspace.com/takethisclubandshoveit) and seemed wholly fitting)

no, really!

[kendall-lacey.livejournal.com]

when me and Volksway saw S Club, Hannah WAVED AT ME! and she was cute then.
x
xx

Re: no, really!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But did she have the sexy leather jacket in the S Club TV shows?