Blakk and Whyte

Today I shared a couple of posts with The Half Man Half Biscuit(HMHB) Appreciation Society on Facebook, because I'd been listening to Half Man Half Biscuit this week, and the likes and visits on those two posts are like ten times my normal number of visits. I think there are maybe twenty of my Facebook friends who visit my blog regularly and the rest are just robots but the visits today have really gone through the roof for me.

Maybe I don't put myself about enough, although I always hope that my titles and preamble will tempt in visitors, although that's obviously not working.

I love it when people read my stuff and make (ideally positive) comments about my stuff. Yesterday I wasn't going to write about Burt Reynolds and today I didn't expect to be writing about this but I am.

I expect this post to get maybe twenty or thirty hits but that's what I'm used to. It would be nice to have a million followers but I just have three, not very many for a twelve year old blog is it.

Today I saw an amazing young band called Trilogy busking in Northumberland street. I took a minute of Instagram video here so you can see how good and young they are, even younger than The Strypes and General Fiasco when I first saw them. They literally blew all the other buskers off the street very impressive.

So I will leave you with The Strypes covering The Beatles' "Taxman", the opener from "Revolver", in their youth , sleep well my friends.

Remastered Deluxe Derangement

Just checking the reissues this month and it seems that everyone is going overboard with 2 CD , DVD deluxe reissues of old albums. We've had the Beatles Remasters series , where the sound has been scrubbed up and CDs augmented with a documentary which is unfortunately in Quicktime format . Why they couldnt do it as DIVX so you can play it on your DVD player I dont know, Quicktime is part of the Apple Bloatware Empire.




I recently acquired "In The Court of The Crimson King" and "Red" by King Crimson which sound incredibly great on my basic 5.1 system. These are part of the King Crimson 40th Anniversary reissues:




While this is all very well these Deluxe Reissues seem to be becoming the norm rather than the exception, very often augmented by out takes which were deemed "not good enough" for the original release. So this poses the question - "Is this just andnother money grabbing exercise by the record companies?".




Probably , but it does give you the opportunity the hear stuff that would have been lost , and hopefully doesn't affect the production and promotion of new music , but I feel that shops and companies are more likely to push a Beatles reissue than a new record by , say , General Fiasco. And that's a bad thing!!

Mugged By Apple

It's not out of choice but I have iTunes on my PC . A couple of weeks back I bought Rebel Get By by General Fiasco , and paid my 79p which is fine. However I looked at my list of purchased items and theres two tunes in there that I didnt know I'd bought. Because I'd left myself logged in on iTunes it had done the purchase when I copied the url of the song I wanted to listen.

So if you must have an iPod , and therefore iTunes, beware if you buy stuff off iTunes , log out when you're finished with it!

Motion Blur

In this modern age where things get superceded almost before you buy them , I was suprised (or maybe not surprised ) that HD TVs suffer from something called motion blur , a shadow following something that moves across the screen. Apparentlly the new LED TV sets dont have it. I've always been worried about the HDTV situation which advertises it's product by shoeing and in focus forecound item (such as Wayne Rooney) against a blurred background. I don't want a picture with a blurred background , especially if I'm paying a lot for it.

Incidentally the version of True Colours in the Sky advert is by Ane Brun , available here.

About 5 years back I bought a Beko 32" CRT Television that is still going striong and gives a decent picture. Think I may wait untoil these flat TVs have themseves sorted out.

Last week we had another storming General Fiasco gig , album due in January , at the O2 Academy in Newcastle. This band is so good it's not true. When they introduce a new song you're actually looking forward to it because it's more genius from Owen (bass + vox) , Enda (Geetar) and Leaky (Drumz). They're back in September , I'll be deffo there..

Also next week Blur play the academy in preparation for their O2 Arena Gig. I'll be going for a curry at the Spice Cube.