wibble

The Brit Awards have come and gone, and most went according to plan.  However, you must feel sorry for Lily Allen.  Nominated in four categories, but managed to win none. In my opinion, much better than Amy Winehouse, who I can’t see the attraction of.  I guess she’s one of those “critical acclaim” artists, but not really too popular.   (Lily Allen has been in the chart longer with her first album than Amy Winehouse was.)

(because 100 would be a cliché)

A humourous read - but again American-centric.

Rock clichés

So - the Christmas #1 song will again be hijacked by reality television, in the form of Leona, the latest winner of X-Factor.  What happened to the days when the Christmas #1 had that Christmassy feel to it, rather than just a cover of another song?

I guess the whole program is scheduled in such a way that they hit the Christmas market, and by dragging it out over a few months, the public get an affinity for the eventual winner after seeing them so many times over the preceding month(s).

I don’t think they’ll be able to get away from recording a cover of a previous song as they don’t know who will be the eventual winner.  Therefore, to suit the voice they have to pick a reasonably ‘bland’ song which anyone who can sing, can sing.

Maybe they should dig through the archives then and find a suitable Christmas song - there must be some ‘classical’ songs they can bring up to date…

You can definitely tell that Christmas is coming by the number of ‘odd’ albums in the charts…

Over the last few weeks there’s been an influx of easy-listening artists (for want of a better phrase), such as All Angels, Angelis and Katherine Jenkins. These aren’t the normal type of artist that manages to make it to the artist chart. These are normally the domain of the classical chart. However, as these contain their versions of ‘pop’ songs, they’re ineligible for that chart. I think it’s odd though that there should be so many at the same time.

This week sees the addition of the Fron Male Voice Choir to this ever growing list, as well as the usual Christmas ‘filler’ CD, Now 65, the latest in the series. Also add Westlife and the release of the new Take That album to the list this week and it means that the big guns (and the not-so-big guns) have been wheeled out for Christmas…

You may know that I like All About Eve (but I really wish they would release some new material and not release another ‘Greatest Hits’ CD…).
This was found on YouTube - a Final Fantasy video set to Martha’s Harbour

Lovely Day by Bill Withers

There’s something about the long note that really gets on my nerves.  Using it once would be OK, but used more than once it starts grating on me.

Yes, the new Itunes has been released and can be downloaded from here. This version adds podcast support (which I have written about before).

After a quick play, Apple seem to have integrated the podcasts fairly well. It took me a while to work out how to play the downloaded podcast episodes, but once I worked that out I was soon listening to them.

Looking at the help file, listening to some of the longer podcasts might be easier with iTunes as a result of bookmarks. Messing about in iTunes I was skipping between some podcasts, and when I went back to a previous podcast it carried on from where I was. I thought that this was supposed to happen with music that I upload to the iPod, but it never seemed to work for me. (Maybe this is only for proper audiobooks? I’ll have to try with the podcast novel I’m listening to…)

Uploading to the iPod is easy once you set which podcasts you want to transfer.
Provided you also get the iPod Update (a hefty 47Mbdownload) they appear under a new menu item.

So - more podcasts for me to discover and add to my list. I’ll have to keep an eye on the new podcasts for anything interesting. If I find some partcularly insteresting podcasts I’ll let you know.

While listening to one of the Daily Source Code Podcasts, I heard a song that sounded rather funny. I then went to the website and found an even better song - London Underground.

What makes it good, is that although it is meant to be funny, it’s made even funnier when you know that it’s all true. Those that have had the dubious pleasure of having to commute into London by tube every day will find much merriment in the lyrics!

Have a look around the website and click on Listen to hear some more of their songs. Be warned, they are not work or child friendly songs

Eurovision is over for another year, with Greece being the leader from about half way through. To me, it’s a usual type of Eurovision song, but there were some better songs. I fancied Switzerland, and they were leading for some of the early stages of the voting, but then they faded to end up about 8th.

And on to the UK entry… To me, the song sounded a lot like the winner from last year, with loads of drums, so I wasn’t too sure whether it would be enough to win. However, listening to many of the songs last night a lot of the songs had the big drums in them. So considering there were a lot of songs that were similar, why did UK end up third last???

The voting is still a joke, with all the buddy votes, and sticking together - eg Greece and Cyprus giving each other 12 points year in, year out. Are the votes being rigged?? You can’t tell me that every year, the Greeks think the Cypriot song is the best and vice versa.

I can think of two ways to ’streamline’ or ‘improve’ the voting
1. you can’t vote for a country you border - this should hopefully reduce the buddy voting (although this doesn’t help the Greece/Cyprus voting as Cyprus is an island!!)
2. get rid of the current voting system…. this takes just as long as the singing itself. One other way could be just to tally the total number of votes for each song and add them all up for the result. (Although there will be some outcry about the sizes of the countries and the number of votes, I don’t think this is too relevant - not everyone votes for a particular country - only those die-hard Eurovision fans!)

Terry Wogan made an intereting comment last night - ‘the bottom 4 countries are those that contribute the most to the running of Eurovision each year - the songs seem to have moved away from the Western songs’ Maybe it’s time to reconsider the financing of the show. With 39 countries in the competition, there should be enough money raised, rather than just having some main contributing countries.

I’ve discovered Podcasting - which are basically the same thing as ‘amateur radio stations’ on the internet. By the looks of it, it’s been around for about 2 years, but hey, I’ve only had an iPod for about 6 months. So far, I’ve only been listening to a few of the most popular - Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, Dawn And Drew, but the best so far is Coverville. This is a show that broadcasts covers of songs. Some are really obscure, of which I’ve never heard either the original version or the cover. Still, it’s interesting to hear some that sound totally different to the original.

Another musical thing I like is mashups (two songs mixed together), and there seem to be a few podcasts that broadcast them. Again, these are interesting, for example Eye Of The Tiger and Galvanize seem to work well together!