Jim Smith

“SIMPLE ONE-FINGER GRIEF CHART” - at last!

Well Clapton did inspire an entire anti-racist movement in the 70s by being a racist.

And agree with you but I think his popularity has outpaced his ability considerably

Daughter started MA with intention of doing the whole CCRU but abandoned in crisis after a year as it’s just too fucking big a topic. Speed and philosophy turn out to be a very productive mix.

Complete with outrage

*I* knew about phone hacking in 1989 and I was a reporter on a magazine for computer tape ops. There is no way someone could have been an editor in the 90s without knowing it was happening

I had to quickly check his age. I’ve got five years. Easy

Yeah I think a 93 McGee would have been a lot harder to handle. The Poptones McGee was easier, largely because he seemed to have left all the music to other people

Yeah, the folded sleeve. Mine did not get a handwritten note sadly. But looking at Discogs there are a lot of “test pressings” for sale

I worked indirectly for him immediately post Creation and he was actually quite pleasant once you got past the initial bluster. His entourage was more problematic

I had to order this in advance from Underground Records in Southampton. The day it came in was a good day. And gives me comfort I don’t have one of the extras McGee used to get pressed up when he was short of cash.

Is that a pizza menu underneath the transparent aluminium window?

I like this one: Netflix and Christofascism

Monetisation is obvious

Spotify but just for the songs musicians are thinking about but haven’t actually recorded yet because they are crippled with anxiety about whether they’re any good: AI can fill in the actual tunes. Maybe we could poke about their nightstand as well?

Godzilla eggs: the best way to start the day

This is true and is actually a quite hopeful state of affairs.

And it won’t make any actual difference here because ENO will still perform at the Coliseum! It’s almost like they fudged it that way.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a capital. I think the quasi-incoherent point I’m trying to make is that London dominates culture in the UK because there are no cities to challenge it. So you end up with these half-arsed solution where the govt throws a cultural bauble at the provinces…

The problem we have in the UK is a lack of cities that are close in size to London. London metro area is 14m, 2nd is Birmingham at 3m. Things like opera companies emerge from city growth. You can’t just SimCity in a cultural institution

Most attempts to find the centre of either GB or UK (eg with or without NI) end up in Lancashire, so Manchester is a reasonable choice.

The USians subtitle any British movie that uses a non-drama school accent. Which is a little strange because they’re usually the “serious” movies so the audience would probably make the effort. That said, as a southerner there are northern accents I need subtitles for

My French is worse than terrible, as the 20 minutes I spent trying to buy a data SIM card in Cherbourg demonstrated. Thank god the sales assistant was patient. I usually pretend I can’t speak it all when in France

The P in RSVP technically isn’t as the P in the initialism is “plais” (full French phrase is “Respondez Si Vous Plais “ - means the same thing though. On the other hand in the UK electrical appliances have to pass a PAT test

World’s most successful capitalist (maybe 2nd most) fails to understand how market economy works.

I wish that surprised me more, but it doesn’t

!foryou

Easy, just tail the piece with “….NOT!”

To date, the Saturn Vis the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond low Earth orbit. A total of 24 humans were flown to the Moon in the four years spanning December 1968 through December 1972. No Saturn rocket failed catastrophically in flight.

From the Wiki page for the only equivalent to the Starship. The last sentence does not appear to have been added recently

As can been seen from X, Musk picks whatever title he thinks sounds most fun. The only title I can find on the SpaceX site is “chief engineer”

Huh, it is War Games en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardial...

It was a play on wardriving, where you crawled around town looking for open WiFi. Now why wardriving was prefixed war-…

Apologies for basically reiterating the joke but it’s a favourite song….

Never entirely been sure what Richman means though. Is it a) nobody calls Picasso an asshole in NY where *everybody* gets called an asshole or b) he gets called an asshole everywhere else