Tales from the Bitface

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the musician Moby has the right attitude about record companies, CD prices and file sharing. His blog is generally interesting, too. There’s a LiveJournal feed of it at .

Oh, all right then:

Desolation Row (Bob Dylan)
Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen)
Venus in Furs (Velvet Underground)
I Feel So Good (Richard Thompson)
London Calling (The Clash)
Get Over You (The Undertones)
Another Girl, Another Planet (The Only Ones)
Totally Wired (The Fall)
End of the Night (The Doors)

A while back scunner pointed me to Emusic, an online site where, for a monthly fee, you can download as much music as your bandwidth can cope with. It’s all legal and above board: the artists get royalties per download, and all in all it seems like a fine model for how music can be distributed.

Obviously not every artist on the planet is going to be on there, so it can be kind of disappointing sometimes. However, the kind of artist that is there (in my brief study of the matter) is kind of off the wall, left field stuff that maybe doesn’t get major mainstream distribution. The sort of stuff I tend to like, in other words.

Furthermore, I have no problems using Mozilla at their site, and their download manager is available for Linux as well as Windows. They just get it, I thought.

So I just started a trial subscription period: fourteen days, fifty files. Plenty to choose from, and it’s all going very well.

Or it was, until I started seeing this message appear alongside some albums: Not available outside North America due to licensing restrictions.

And this is alongside, for example, everything they have by The Birthday Party. Bugger. Bastards.

I’m expecting comments from scunner and swisstone about this, because they specifically said that Lazy Line Painter Jane by Belle And Sebastian was on Emusic; and it is: a Scottish band, not licensed outside of North America.

So does anyone know how to get round this? I could change my registered country to the US, but it would cause some problems as my credit card billing address, I fancy.

Though its not like they’re sending anything…

Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis kind of thing. As my thirty-ninth birthday rolled around the other day — thereby taking me into my fortieth year — I decided that it was time to do something I’ve been vaguely thinking of for quite a while.

So I’m going to start studying with the Open University. And as a Physics graduate, and long-time programmer, obviously I’m going to study Humanities. Specifically, in February I’m going to start this course. Before that, though, in November, I think I’ll probably do this short one: Start Writing Essays.

Then, in years to come, there are courses in Literature, Music, History, all kinds of stuff. Even IT, should the mood takes me; though I suspect that OU courses may be less than cutting-edge in that area.

Which only leaves the inevitable question: since I don’t have time to do all the stuff I want to now, how the hell will I find time to do this?

… as we all knew; but now we can see how it’s helping rock ‘n’ roll. This is a great story about how Ernie Ball, the guitar string maker, switched form Microsoft to Open Source software.

What support? I’m not making calls to Red Hat; I don’t need to. I think that’s propaganda…What about the cost of dealing with a virus? We don’t have ‘em. How about when we do have a problem, you don’t have to send some guy to a corner of the building to find out what’s going on–he never leaves his desk, because everything’s server-based. There’s no doubt that what I’m doing is cheaper to operate. The analyst guys can say whatever they want.

I got the story from a blog I originally knew as “A Book In Ten Days”, but which now appears to be called “Stakeout”. Its LiveJournal feed is still at abookin10days; though if you click that link you’ll see that the details there say “Stakeout”, too.

We had a rehearsal last night, we Burn members. Well, more we Bu members — or should that be ur, or maybe rn? Because ‘s still on paternity leave, and phoned in sick (hope you’re feeling better, Tony); so only and I were there to hold the fort.

Which was quite limiting, but also interesting. We hadn’t rehearsed at all in nearly a month, and our last fully-plugged one was on the 8th of April, if my diary is to be believed. So we were, to say the least, rusty. It was appropriate, then, that we should close with ‘Powderfinger‘, since that comes from Rust Never Sleeps.

And indeed it doesn’t. But still, we did some good work. Memories were refreshed and songs were practised. We showed a definite pattern of “play it badly, try it again, play it better; sometimes repeat.” Which is as it should be, of course.

It was good to be back in Backstreet, with its strange, mouldy, under-the-railway-arch smell; it was good to crank the guitars up and let rip; and it was good to drive there on a sunny evening with all the windows open and Bruce Springsteen‘s The River blasting.

I arrived at the studio just as ‘Hungry Heart‘ was playing, which was appropriate, as we considered covering it once, when we heard that Springsteen originally wrote it for The Ramones.

This article in The Observer tells us that the Iraqi “mobile bioweapons labs” were nothing of the sort: they were, in fact, almost certainly mobile units for producing hydrogen to be used for artillery balloons.

Artillery balloons are essentially balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere and relay information on wind direction and speed allowing more accurate artillery fire. Crucially, these systems need to be mobile.

Iraq bought them in 1987. From Britain.

Don’t bang the doors on the way out, BlairyBush.

Saw The Matrix Reloaded the night before last. Arse was seriously kicked.

From the few comments I had read while trying to avoid spoilers , I had got the impression that people thought the action was good while the philosophy was overdone — not blended in as well as in the first film, I believe was the sense of it. This was utter bollocks.

In fact, if anything the fight scenes, etc, were too long — though I did find myself chortling with glee throughout several of them.

If we hadn’t had to get back to kids and babysitter, I would have been in favour of going back in for the 11pm show — which is something I’ve never done.

I suspect that the mixed reviews had lowered my expectations sufficiently that I enjoyed it more than I expected too. So, all thanks to the mixed reviewers.

Roll on Revolutions.

Shortly after I posted it, I realised that my previous post could be taken as a “comedy mishearing” — and indeed, it duly was so taken. That’s not what I originally intended it as — and indeed, if I had, it wasn’t very funny.

No, when I started writing it, I was genuinely wondering what Robert Johnson was talking about. Why was he thinking about methane? Could he, perhaps, have been interested in the search for life on other planets, where the existence of methane might suggest the existence of oxygen-breathing life?

Or might he have been using a methane-burning stove? A dangerous and unpleasant cooking solution which might well have weighed on this thoughts and made him think of rambling.

Or perhaps “methane” was code for a drug or sexual practice — we are talking about the 1930s US, after all: a less enlightened time and place than our own.

But the dreary reality was that I had misheard “mean things”. Perhaps when I discovered that I shouldn’t have posted; but I was only a click or two away and it’s hard to stop.

Still, it all gave and the chance to have a little chat, and for the latter to point us to Kiss This Guy, where some of the mishearings actually are funny.

Anyway I hope that this has made it clear that I wouldn’t waste precious posts on such a thing as a comedy mishearing.

At least, not unless it was funny.

^{[1]See [www.sfgate.com/columnist...](http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/mondegreens.shtml)}

I was listening to The Complete Recordings earlier, and in the first of two versions of ‘Rambling On My Mind’ (though not in the second), he sings (I’m sure), “I got methane on my mind”.

You don’t want to dig too deeply into these things, though: they can spoil things.

I feel the need to quote Billy Bragg at this point: “The temptation/to take the precious things we have apart to see how they work/must be resisted for they never fit together again”. Not quite what he was talking about, but still.