The Afterword

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Venus and Mars are alright tonight

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If you look west into the sky just after sunset, Venus is as bright as you like at the moment. If you have a pair of binoculars and you look towards it you’ll notice the pinprick of red light that is Mars very close to it. Look east and the brightest object in the Sky is Jupiter, the best views we’ll have of it for eight years or so as it is in direct opposition to the sun.

That’s all, no charge for this service.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=geVR-YI0Tvc

Playing music detective

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We all have those songs, stored somewheres in our heads or on a dusty cassette from long ago (if we’re lucky), that we hope we will someday, somehow, track down. Being a determined sort I’ve hunted down most of mine, though there’s 2 that have eluded me for years. Found this on another music blog today & am planning on using some of his methology to nail at least one of my elusive musical butterflies, & thought it might be useful to some to post it here too. Happy hunting. http://markfgriffin.com/2015/02/18/need-help-identifying-song/

Anyone for some AC/DC?

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It’s my privilege to christen this spanking new website with its first AC/DC thread. I think you’ll all agree that since the last site went down, the boys have enjoyed the international spotlight for rather mixed reasons. Phil’s Rudd arrest for nefarious activities and all sorts of revelations about Malcolm’s illness with dementia have kept them in the headlines.

Angus and Brian have fronted a quite extraordinary public relations and media campaign to keep the AC/DC juggernaut on the road with the release of a new record and generate publicity for a forthcoming tour.

I’ve got my ticket for the pitch at Wembley in July to see the boys and I do hope you some of the rockers amongst you will be there too. Here they are with one of their cracking new tunes. Turn it right up!

1001 Albums – the story so far

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I trawled through my previously-unheard “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” Facebook posts, copied and pasted and edited them into this synopsis:

So I got this book “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” for Chrimbo from my nephew and his missus. They really should have removed the “Half Price” sticker before wrapping it but never mind that. Although I have no plans to die in the immediate future, I’ve decided to give all the ones I’ve never heard a listen, just in case I’ve missed something amazing (and, of course, to confirm my prejudices when these prove correct).

Taking the unheard listed albums in alphabetical order by title, my first was “Ace Of Spades” by Motorhead. I’d heard most of it over the years but never the complete thing in album order. The otherwise loathsome Gary Bushell was probably correct in saying “Motorhead are Heavy Metal in the only meaningful sense of the term – everyone else is just pretending” in his 5-star review of this album in Sounds, all those years ago. I shall be buying this for playing loud in the car.

The next in my list was U2’s “Achtung Baby”. I was not » Continue Reading.

Sample Use

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Today I downloaded a YouTube video of (what I think is) a 1964 BBC Horizon broadcast of Arthur C Clarke, stripped the audio and cut it up for use in a track I’d put together. It’s all complete and I’ve uploaded it to SoundCloud.

Essentially, it’s my cackhanded take on the Public Service Broadcasting idea.

While I anticipate that only a few people are likely to feel obligated to show any interest in it, and while I strongly doubt there’s much possibility of anyone that matters caring that much, is anyone here able to point me in the direction of any good advice in respect of the sampling of non-musical audio from a TV recording? I can find lots about the legality of sampling, but it’s all musical stuff.

A celebratory Mingle?

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Well as we’re back up is anyone interested in a 2015 London mingle?

They seemed to have fallen out of favour with many if the low attendance at the last one is anything to go by, but a it’s been a long time, so if at least a dozen say they are up for it I’m in favour of going ahead, in say mid to late March

Trumpton – The UKIP Version

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“There’s the Mayor. He used to be the Labour Mayor, then the Tory Mayor. Then he defected to UKIP when Trumpton went a bit racist”

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/17/ukip-trumpton-video_n_6698858.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/17/ukip-trumpton-video_n_6698858.html

Cough up, Germany!

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I think this is fair enough. I’m surprised that Obama hasn’t had a quiet word in Mrs Merkel’s ear and reminded her that Germany did very nicely out of the rest of Europe after the war, and it’s payback time.

It isn’t even as though this has come out of the blue. As the text says, an international conference ruled that Germany needed to pay Greece war reparations as well as paying back a loan that the Greeks were forced to pay the occupying Nazis during the occupation. So far Germany has paid back nothing.

The outstanding sum would cover Greece’s deficit. Germany’s leaders, so it seems, are ignoring the whole issue.

I’ve put my name to it.

http://www.change.org/p/angela-merkel-pay-greece-the-billions-you-owe-as-restitution-for-the-atrocities-committed-in-greece-by-germans-during-the-second-world-war?recruiter=15758621&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_term=des-lg-action_alert-reason_msg&fb_ref=Default

Lucky Jim, well James, and his ‘free’ Marantz gear

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Found out my next door neighbour is an electrician who specialises in AV systems, I allas thought he was a builder, anyway he helped me out a few weeks back with my new LG Blurry and swapped a dodgey optical cable for me. Unfortunately the swap meant the audio and picture were out of sync, so I gave him a call on Friday to see if he could help. He popped over and swapped the input which rectified the prob, while he was here I told him about the hum on a t/t a mate had given me. He had a look at it but couldn’t trace where it was coming from, he also said he had a hum on one of his systems so I offered him an old Kenwood amp the mate with the t/t returned to me. He took it away and tried it, returning about 20mins later to tell me it was a bit knackered. But thanks anyway and would I like some gear he was chucking out. Wait for it… a Marantz AV Receiver – http://us.marantz.com/DocumentMaster/US/SR4600specsheet0506.pdf and a Marantz Super Audio CD/DVD – http://us.marantz.com/DocumentMaster/US/DV7600specsheet02-06.pdf Boy am I full of WIN! I’ve got the CD/DVD up » Continue Reading.

The NME goes free?

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This was posted on the Vice website: http://www.vice.com/read/the-nme-is-going-free-the-music-magazine-will-charge-a-cover-price-for-the-last-time-this-week-552

I stopped reading the NME almost 30 years ago, and I don’t know any youngsters who do, but if it was to become a music-fans “Metro”, it might have a function. The US has lots of advertising-funded freesheets acting as independent media guides for their cities, along with specialist music freesheets. So it may not be a disaster.

http://buzz.bournemouth.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/NME-1972-213×300.jpg

How far would you you go ?

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It was almost a year ago that I managed to get tickets for Kate Bush, which then entailed me flying half way around the world (well 7000 miles from Singapore to London) just for the concert.

A colleague of mine (who is originally from the US) is currently trying to get tickets for all three nights of the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago in July – apparently its three times oversubscribed and thats only the pre-sale !

So how far would you go for a concert and for who ?

Ripping DVDs

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I think this came up on here before but a new house, a new thread.

I want to rip my own – bought and paid for – DVDs to an external hard drive. Using Windows 7 or (still) XP. I want to copy the entire disc – menus/extras etc. I can do movie only but not the whole disc.

I have DVD Fab to rip and Roxio to create the ‘disc image’. But it almost always just copies part of the movie, leaving out the last 10 or 15 minutes.

Suggestions?

Fail

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Am I the first person here to fail the maths test when I tried to log-in? Fortunately I managed the 1×1 question the second time around, so all’s well…

Survivors or what?

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Good to see all the old names climbing aboard. That’s two disasters that most of us have weathered, what with the loss of the good ship Word, and the torpedoing of SS Afterword 1. We must be gluttons for punishment.

ATM: Manics

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The Manics are on tour in the USA. Actually coming very close to me, with a ticket priced at a very reasonable $25.

I have much of the early canon, as well as the obligatory Greatest Hits. But I’m a bit undecided about whether or not to go.

Anyone seen them recently? If so, would you recommend going to see them?

The golden pancake of hope

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Tuesday 17th February 2015 will be recorded in the Ancient Annals of Afterwordia as the day on which, phoenix-like, the Afterword flew from the Frying Pan of Despond and became once again a golden pancake of hope for the world.

But now we are all gathering here again, shouldn’t we be doing something big?

Bringing about world peace? Saving the whale? Protecting Mother Earth from a fiendish alien invasion?

Sorry! Far too ambitious. Those are jobs for chaps who wear their underpants over their tights.

But what task is appropriate for the mighty men and women of the Afterword?

Anybody got a towel?

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Very close to exhaustion, having trodden water in the Ocean Of The Lost And The Damned for three months, I spotted the Salvage Vessel and hauled myself aboard, only to lie on the foredeck waiting for someone to rub me down. Has anybody got a towel? In the meantime, I’ll be popping over to Rafferty’s cabin to have a fruit tea, so you know where to find me. I think I can hear a few voices I recognise…

A mere 13 years before our “democracy” sinks without trace. Let’s party!

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Stepping out of my Time Machine this morning, having popped into the latter half of the century to get some REALLY fresh milk for breakfast from the village GrubOmatic, I chanced upon a copy of the day’s newskindle. Scanning the main story, I was reminded that the UK as a political entity will cease to exist in just a few years time, to languish under military rule for many years:

Back in good old 2015, tucking into buttered crumpets and real coffee over a printed copy of the Grauniad, I pondered that we could take all sorts of liberties with our politics in the coming election, reasoning that it won’t really matter anyway, given the approaching coup.

Then I thought that perhaps it’s this very sense of hopelessness to come that has somehow already seeped back from the future, colliding with today’s own political torpor and disgust to create a brew that will likely deliver an ineffective cobble of a government, unable to prevent any slide towards totalitarianism.

As my preferred tactic of rounding up the current Westminster establishment, dumping them all in the desert somewhere in the north of Syria with one shared » Continue Reading.