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The Magic Numbers do Kate Bush. This is a big ask, because you need a good ten minutes to appreciate it. But I’ve not heard a cover version that’s made me tingle so much since I first heard Orbital do the Doctor Who theme. And this is nothing like that. http://www.fabchannel.com/the_magic_numbers Track 12, "Slow Down". Half way through, they wander off into another song. If I’ve not overhyped it already, sit back and enjoy. I could never have imagined this 20 years ago – last night I saw Kylie Minogue in concert. The girl who was a significant part of the reason my family’s bought their first video recorder puts on quite a show. I do remember that first summer holiday of a twice-daily Neighbours fix – new episodes at lunchtime, repeated the next morning – with a skewed teenage fondness. Eventually the BBC caught onto the fact that this was actually the biggest TV programme on the planet and moved it to the early evening slot it has had ever since, but until then I know we were far from alone in the world in compulsively recording half an hour of Australia’s finest export every day. Let’s be honest – Kylie made some shocking records early in her career. But this was a greatest hits tour, so all the offenders were there and stood up to be counted in suitably cheesy fashion. The karaoke version of Especially For You was somehow nothing like as bad as it should have been and I just found myself laughing uncontrollably during I Should Be So Lucky – not so much anything to do with the show, more the fact that I realised I was actually enjoying a live performance of a song that I detested with a passion. Amongst this and other retro campness, including a candidate for t-shirt of the year – "Kylie Says Relax" (you don’t need a picture) – there was even, surprisingly, a moment of musical genius in the swingin’ cabaret arrangement of The Loco-Motion. Absolutely stunning (really) and God bless YouTube and camera phones for letting me share it here. As I’ve finally made the effort to figure out how to post YouTube videos on here, what could be better than a little festive music. Ladies and Gentlemen The winner of this year’s X-Factor will be Ben. The simple reason – he has the easiest name to type on a mobile phone. VOTE BEN. It works just fine with predictive text, and nobody is going to come close to spelling it wrong. These things are very important. Last week’s evictees, The Unconventionals, were doomed before they got going. VOTE UNCONVENTIONALS. Their voting details stood out like a sore thumb against all the other text keywords. Even though predictive text (on my old Nokia at least) finds its way there if you can spell it at the first attempt, you are really going to have to like these guys to be bothered to vote for them at all. I actually thought they were OK, and with a shorter name they may just have survived. Today we saw the dismissal of Wolverhampton’s finest boy-band-on-a-TV-show, 4Sure. Their pre-match interviews have given us plenty of enjoyment remembering how Claire used to speak, and she’ll demonstrate that she still can add a "Y" sound to pretty much every woyrd if she trieys. VOTE 4SURE. It is actually possible to do this all in one go with predictive text enabled if you press and hold 4 then type SURE but their name choice could have been better. Voters have to remember the clever pun that makes up their name, and then have to figure out how to type it. Next week it must surely be either the grimfully dismal MacDonald Brothers, or Nikitta that suffers. Neither of these acts spell their name correctly – having it the same way as burger clown Ronald, or the girl from the Elton John song would help considerably – and neither work with predictive text. We end up with VOTE MACE? and VOTE MILITU? respectively. The MacDonalds’ time is next week. Surely. Please? As for the rest of the pack, Dionne has problems (VOTE DINOME), Eton Road will struggle (VOTE FUNN) and Ashley needs intervention in order for the message to be sent properly (VOTE ASHLEX). Ray is not as safe as he looks either, despite being the most likeable character on the show. VOTE RAY does get there fourth time, after cycling through SAY, SAW and PAY, but many texters won’t bother to look at their screens before sending. Coupled with the fact that he’s introduced as "Ray" but the huge scrolling banner lights on stage and the X-Factor web site announce him as "Raymond" (possibly a better choice, with no alternative spellings in predictive text), he might just lose a few thousand crucial votes when it matters most. Similarly, Kerry will come in second to somebody named Jerry who is not actually in the competition. The final three will be Leona, Robert and Ben. Having said all that, it’s worth pointing out that I don’t actually vote for things like this. I still think the idea of being charged 50p a time to cast a vote or answer a competition question is ridiculous. Instead of paying for a stamp to send in your vote, you’re paying the price of two stamps you don’t need, on top of whatever your normal text message cost is. If I think back to when I used to enter competitions on Saturday morning kids TV, this would be like Philip Schofield asking me to send in my answer in on the back of a postal order. Last weekend I impulse-bought an iPod nano. This is actually the first thing made by Apple I ever bought. I’ve had a portable MP3 player of some kind before the word (?) iPod was invented, harking back to a 6Gb Creative DAP that was as big as a CD player. I did have one coat that it would fit in the pocket of, but it wasn’t exactly portable. The Creative Zen I replaced it with three years ago was the tinyest thing you’d eveer seen at the time. It’s about three times the size of a standard iPod now, let alone making the nano look like like an ickle tiny baby. My move to the white side has been on the cards for some time, but amazingly I’ve shown enough discipline to actually wait until the new 8Gb version came out. I didn’t quite have the discipline to go through with my plan of actually getting something useful with my PokerStars FPPs though. I just checked this, and they do have it in stock, and I actually do have enough points, dammit. Hey if anyone wants to buy an iPod let me know 🙂 Otherwise I guess I could order a few dozen stress stars… So of course now I have to use iTunes to get my CD collection back onto the thing. Which is pretty nifty – I particularly like that it will find album artwork automatically (When Claire got her iPod last year this wasn’t a feature and she spent days downloading pictures…!). And I’m impressed at just how much of my music finds a match straight away. With the exception of Radiohead (who are clearly too good to be downloaded) and a few early Saint Etienne albums, I think it’s all there. I knew getting everything I wanted into 8Gb would be a squeeze but I hadn’t quite prepared myself for how long it would take to rip all this stuff again. After a marathon session last night (after dumping out of the Poker Dome satellite in unspectacular fashion, and trying to clear $750 in stacked up bonuses on PokerRoom.com) which it had to tell me resulted in 1006 tracks being transferred, I twice thought I’d cracked all my regular CDs leaving only some dodgy MP3 downloads and whatever compilations I want to chuck on there. Apparently not, and I’ve still found yet more. Maybe I’m going overboard – it tells me I already have about five days worth of music to listen to already (why tell me that?!) But it’s not over yet. Must … keep … ripping. This is something I was toying with in Vegas for ages, then ran out of time before I could actually post it. So as a result it’s probably lost something in transalation. The idea was that I was trying to build the perfect ipod playlist for driving into and out of Vegas. Our house was about a 20 minute ride from anywhere, with the strip lights visible from about half way. The first thing I found was that Vegas is just so intense that if the music you listen to driving there is too fast or too cheesy it just becomes sensory overload. Much of the music I would normally drive to is excluded this way; whereas Orbital’s Impact kicks ass when you are driving in and out of the tunnels around Birmingham City Centre, or you can use the pure cheesy goodness of anything by Flip and Fill to make almost any journey go faster, these didn’t last 30 seconds on my drive from Green Valley to the Strip. I’ve allowed myself four different playlists – about 1h20m in total, depending on traffic signals – for four different occasions. There is no way I’d have been able to pick just four or five tracks for this so cut me some slack! It also means I get four blog entries for the price of one… 🙂 Until my web host (hey wait, that’s me!) tells me to take the illegal MP3s down, you can listen to the tracks in full! Oh and look, I slipped a few links in there that didn’t make the final cut too… I actually do have a video tape of the drive in both directions (camcorder wedged in passenger seat headrest – ok, yes, it’s very sad) and I might edit it up one day with this soundtrack just to see how it works. For now, here’s part one: 1. The Who – Baba O’Riley [5m01] 2. Freeland – We Want Your Soul [5m07] 3. Pet Shop Boys – The Soddom and Gomorrah Show [5m19] 4. The Donnas – Take It Off [2m40] 5. The Go! Team – Panther Dash [2m50] A very near miss was Delgados version of Mr Blue Sky. Part 2 coming soon …! The cheese on toast that is Las Vegas is finally back on Sky One for a third season. Not content with using and abusing every possible Vegas cliche already, they had to end the second series with a casino being imploded, and now it’s been rebuilt. The most impressive thing is that during the construction work, the Montecito hotel appears to have moved a couple of miles along the Las Vegas strip! In the previous seasons, there were some fairly clever computer generated shots of a shiny fake hotel sitting across the road from Mandalay Bay. This is the south end of the strip and keep going any further south and you get to see not a lot more than desert, the airport and a freeway intersection. This is roughly the site of the Klondike casino, as featured in the movie Miss Congeniality 2 – semi-essential Vegas viewing, and although far from a great movie, it’s really not that bad for an unnecessary sequel to a film about a beauty pageant…. The Klondike is 45 years old, and is actually due to be getting knocked down itself any day now (although I don’t think an implosion will be necessary on this tiny place!). So then there’s a shot of the strip from a distance in the season opening episode of Las Vegas that shows the all new Montecito glimmering in the distance, right between Aladdin and New York New York. Monte Carlo has been obliterated, and Manadalay Bay stands alone at the right of the screen. You can be absolutely certain that if it moves again I’ll be taking notice! In fact I’m starting to wish I’d burned a copy to DVD so I could post a picture 🙂 There must be someoneelse who cares about this stuff as much as me…? It’s T-23 before we head off to the bone-melting Nevada heat so it’s really time to start getting in the mood. So, prompted by my DigiGuide renewal reminder, I’ve been searching for what Vegas related TV is coming up over the next few weeks and hit upon these gems that I’ve not seen before. I promise – as ridiculous (or as ridiculously dull) as these sound, they are the genuine synopses from the TV guide. I couldn’t make this stuff up. FILM: Leprechaun 3 COOKERY: United States of Reza FILM: Hell Squad SITCOM: Two and a Half Men I honestly do not think that I’ll be setting Sky+ for any of these. Some good news though, the third season of cheese-fest show Las Vegas finally starts on Sky One next Friday! Here’s some stunning episodes teasers from the official web site. "Monica is furious that nothing can be done to stop a rich ‘whale’ who always wins at the tables while Mike (James Lesure) searches for a wallet-nabbing thief." "Mike (James Lesure), Mary (Nikki Cox) and Delinda (Molly Sims) are amazed by the Montecito’s guest magician, Criss Angel, as he performs magic tricks for the Montecito patrons on the casino floor." "Jilian (Cheryl Ladd) sprains her ankle and convinces Ed (James Caan) to walk the family dog at a local Dog Show." Can’t wait.. I’ve not made any secret of the fact that I was going to see Take That in concert this weekend. Certainly not my number one choice of band to see (I actually got the tickets for Claire‘s birthday) but really, whatever you think of them, whatever dissent you might show to boy bands in general, you have to find it fascinating that a pop group that split up ten years ago can still sell out the country’s largest venues in a matter of hours. I don’t really get it, and I’m not that embarassed, so I thought it might actually be interesting to see what the fuss is about. The only problem was that we’d been given probably the absolute worst seats in the place. I expected it to be a long way away, so I was prepared to only be able to see four dots jumping around the stage (or, as I’ve now learned, three jumping around and one just acting a bit wooden). However I had expected to actually be able to see the stage. Look at the picture below (apologies for the quality from my camera phone) – tell me how this is not a "restricted view" seat!
The big white arch changed colour when it got dark. Very pretty. Shame that it obscured all but the very front of the stage from view, including the large projection screens! We ended up moving to the left quite a way into a block of empty seats for a better view of one of the screens, with not much less of a view of the stage – still pathetic though for a full price ticket, and whenever there was some kind of running about or dancing going on, we were oblivious. 60,000 girls and about 300 men certainly seemed to enjoy the show. The female bias was pretty severe – and the commercials they showed on the big screens were somewhat targeted towards the audience: for body spray, spot cream and… bingo! Support act was probably the safest choice in the world – the hopelessly bland Sugababes. Oh, and if you didn’t guess from the title, the real, actual Lulu was there to sing her bit of Relight My Fire. I wonder if she’s going to travel around with them the whole tour just to do half a song…? |
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