The George Lite Zone

Ashes to Ashes - Thursday 7th February 9.00pm BBC1 Scotland

It’s nearly beer o’clock once again, gentlemen, the follow up to Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes is one week away and counting. So set your Sky+ series link and get ready to go for a spin in an Audi Quattro with the Gene Genie. Excellent.

Netscape’s browser has been temporarily reprieved by AOL, who are extending the support period and releasing a new update for Netscape Navigator 9. This update will apparently smooth the transition to suggested alternatives. Navigator junkies can skin up Firefox to give it the look and feel of the old war horse. Meanwhile AOL are promoting Flock as suitable alternative, with it’s media streaming, social site integrating, blogging and friend finding capabilities, Flock is a Web 2 browser fit for the 21st century. I’ve been using it for a number of weeks now and other than the occasional crash find it a most excellent product. The beta for Flock Version 1.1 is out soon and will include integration with Gmail, Yahoo and Picassa. Hopefully this release will be a bit more stable.

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Susumu Hirasawa, the author of “The girl in Byakkoya - White Tiger Field“, the main theme to the Satoshi Kon film Paprika, has made it and the outtake track “Runner” available for free download to commemorate the release of the official soundtrack album.

To download them in MP3 format, click on the track titles above. Before you do so though, please click here first to view the terms and conditions. I’m just listening to them now and they’re pretty cool.

Hirasawa also did the soundtrack for Kon’s Paranoia Agent and the dreamlike quality of these new tracks is reminiscent of this show.

As an aside, Kon’s work would make a good backdrop to a Hawkwind concert. Paranoia Agent for Paranoia anybody?

I was playing about with Last FM last night. Last FM is an application that keeps track of the last tracks you played on your PC, then allows you to display them on social networking sites such as Facebook or on blogs, such as this one. This is done via plugins to popular music players such as Windows media or Win Amp.

Sampling some of these goodies I’ve added, two music quilts on the right hand side of this blog. Far better than the sort that Grandma used to make, these cycle through the pictures of album covers. I created two. One for Hawkwind and one that cycles through the bands listed in my MySpace profile.

I also added a radio widget which allows you to play bands in my favorites or that are similar in nature. Hit the play button on this to get some quality music to listen to while you surf the net.

Finally I’ve added an RSS feed from the site to display the last five tracks I’ve played.

Check it out, I’ve got a feeling that Radio Motörhead will be appearing on a blog in the near future.

Watching tonights Horizon program, “What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity?“, I thought I’d google “Space Time” to get a bit of background gen on one of the topics being discussed. In so doing I found a nifty 3D browsing and searching utility called, strangely enough, Space Time. Taking this out for a spin I typed in Hawkwind and selected Google Image Search as my option. Among the myriad images resplendent on my desktop was this fine picture of the Hawks from 1973. Looking at Stacia the forces of gravity don’t appear to have affected her much in those days. Onward flies the bird.

After Warner Brothers recent announcement that it was switching to Blue Ray, another death knell was heard pealing for the HD DVD player. Prior to Warner’s move the hardware market sales were split roughly 50/50. Sales figures after the sale (week ending 12th January 2008) were 90/10 in favor of the blue boy. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, Toshiba are insisting that the fights not over yet and that the disparity was down to their removal of a Christmas discount and the bundling of Blue Ray players with some flat panel TV’s by certain awfully nice manufacturers.

In a move to fight back, Toshiba swung a mighty kick at their foe by cutting the price of their players. To paraphrase King Arthur in Holy Grail, “Look, you stupid bastards. You’ve got no arms left!”

On the blue ray front, news that a lot of existing players wont be able to play disks coming out next year that have features included in the BD Video Final Standard Profile 1.1. With profile 1.1 persistent memory is mandatory which is a problem if your player doesn’t have in-built flash memory. Furthermore the Profile 2.0 (aka BD Live) spec makes internet connectivity mandatory, which is a bummer if you haven’t got internet connectivity.

That’s going to leave a lot of irate early adopters who splashed out a grand on a player only to find that it can’t play all forthcoming releases. If they annoy enough of them, then the blue format could yet be killed off by the manufacturers stupidity. HD DVD players had both persistent memory and internet connectivity inbuilt from the start, which made them a damn site more future proofed than their blue rivals. A year or so down the line we could see lawsuits taken out against blue ray manufacturers for selling machines which won’t play all disks.

My advice is to avoid buying a dedicated Blue Ray player until the manufacturers get their act together and buy a PS3 instead. It’s a damn fine player, can be upgraded to profile 1.1 and the presence of an ethernet port means that in all likelihood it will be possible to upgrade it to profile 2.0 when the time comes.

Two new on-line petitions have been setup to allow you to give your opinion on the future of HD DVD. The first requests that the studios save the format, and asks Warner’s to reconsider their decision to jetison it. The second asks the same studios to put HD DVD out of its misery and let the format die. With the volume of people involved neither are likely to affect the film industries decision either way, but hey it’ feels good to be able to give a thumbs up or down either way.

It’s Friday night so it must be time for a double bill of gratuitous music videos. Yet another way to get stiff.

Now that’s what I’d call Grindhouse!!!

First Lemmy shakes his blood with the Suicide Girls while Dave Grohl does what he does best and plays the drums.

I still rate him as one of the finest drummers in the world. Shame he didn’t guest with Zeppelin at the recent O2 gig.

From the album Probot

Then Nick Cave and the Raga Girls bring it on.

I actually had the idea for that video, in the sense that the video maker Johnny Hillcoat said, “What do you want to make a video about?” and I asked him, “What do videos looks like on MTV these days?” and he said, “They look like a lot of black girls wiggling their arses at the camera,” so this is basically what we ended up doing, really.

Nick Cave in an interview for BBC Stoke January 2003

A much better quality version of this video can be seen on Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - The Abattoir Blues Tour [2006]

I saw Nick live in Edinburgh last year and he was superb. This DVD captures him at his best live. All that and the Bring It On video. Quality !!!

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!
Aboon them a’ yet tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’a grace
As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin was help to mend a mill
In time o’need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin’, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
Bethankit! hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad make her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckles as wither’d rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash;
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ blody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs an’ arms, an’ hands will sned,
Like taps o’ trissle.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer
Gie her a haggis!

See Greasy Truckers Party Food for recipes.

Blogged with Flock

If you want to get stiff this weekend check out The Independent. They’re giving away 2 free 10 track CDs that celebrate 30 years of Stiff Records.

Volume 1 on Saturday 26 January

1. Madness - Baggy Trousers (Live)
2. Ian Dury and The Blockheads - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (Live)
3. Kirsty MacColl - A New England
4. The Belle Stars - Sign Of The Times
5. Department S - Is Vic There?
6. Chris Difford - Come On Down
7. Jona Lewie - You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties
8. Tracey Ullman - Breakaway
9. Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin - It’s My Party
10. Desmond Dekker - The Israelites

Volume 2 on Sunday 27 January

1. The Damned - New Rose (Live)
2. Lene Lovich - Home
3. Theatre Of Hate - Do You Believe In The Westworld?
4. Kirsty MacColl - They Don’t Know
5. Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World
6. Tenpole Tudor - Swords Of A Thousand Men
7. Rachel Sweet - B.A.B.Y.
8. The Members - Solitary Confinement
9. Nick Lowe - Heart Of The City
10. King Kurt - Destination Zulu Land

Shame there’s no Motörhead, but hey, never look a gift CD in the mouth.

Thanks to MotörheadBlögger for giving the heads up on “The Big Stiff Box Set“. If I hadn’t read his post I wouldn’t have noticed The Independents freebie when it was advertised on the telly.