andcurve.weblog

I’m back from Romania. Here’s a sneak preview.
The Timisoara tram service - not the most modern, but efficient and useful. 19th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionA typical Timisoara street. Almost everyone here drives a Dacia, which is a primitive but reasonably reliable home-grown car. 21st September 2006. Click image to view larger versionSomewhere, deep in the Romanian countryside, a bit of post-communist industry. They are trying to clean up though. 23rd September 2006. Click image to view larger versionAn occasionally dubious Romanian, Oana, trying to look innocent in Sibiu, central Romania. I know better, though. 23rd September 2006. Click image to view larger versionSome really incredibly old buildings in the medieval heart of Sibiu, in central Romania. There are Germans nearby. Many Germans. 24th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionA busy boulevard in Timisoara, facing towards the main train station. 26th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionThe main town square in Timisoara. See if you’ve seen a photo very like this on this site before… 26th September 2006. Click image to view larger version
More shortly, with plenty of pictures and a few stories. I recommend a reread of my earlier adventures in Romania.

Right, that ‘Phil’ business was entertaining - and so was Garret, from time to time - but it’s dying a death. www.make-phil-and-his-fucking-contraption-history.com. I’m in Romania right now, having a ball, relaxing, enjoying myself, having an actual holiday (I was told they were good, and I thought I’d take the plunge, so to speak) and taking about four thousand photos, you’ll have to sit through some choice cuts before long. I’d put up a photo now except for the fact that this damn Internet cafe doesn’t actually have USB on this computer (This USB business is important because it means I can attach the memory card from my spanking new Canon Digital SLR to the computer and… Well, you’re clever people, you’ll get it.) and it’s pretty slow. I know you’re all going to say something like “Hey you, like what is the fuck this, you know?”; to which I’ll probably reply “Well whatever fuckarse, because, hey, you know.”.

Special shout out to the beautiful, clever and occasionally dubious Oana, who is chaperoning me, owning me, taking care of me and showing me around Romania. Shouts also out to Roxana, who has suggested many clever things to get up to, and the girls of ExamPlus for keeping Oana on her toes and being a generally great bunch of people. I’ll be curious to hear what they thought of ‘Intermission‘ featuring Colin Fucking Farrell which I thought was a reasonable Irish film with contemporary Irish culture, and ‘The General‘ which is a pretty good representation of Ireland in the nineteen eighties.

Anyway, better go. Oana’s getting bored and we have a train to catch from (as she would say, and probably will) a dubious train station, else we’ll be trapped in Sighisoara tonight. I’ll try and post again, but I’ll be back on Wednesday night, and by Saturday you’ll all be wishing I’d stayed here; by then Garret may actually seem like a less painful option after all.

Oh, and one more thing; I finally met Ovideo! It was sheer coincidence, but it was icing on the cake for a great week. It really was.

This is great. “Hi, my name’s Phil…” - etc, etc. What an opening line to a demonstration video of some guitar japery in ‘Phil’s Epiphone Les Paul Kaoss Pad Mod’. There’s a lot more where that came from, along with a number of fascinating yelps, squeals and strange noises for which there are, in all likelyhood, no names yet assigned. If this guy was to really try to extend his vocubary of noises, then I doubt even a hardened team, hand-picked by Garret himself, could keep up.

I got this link from this article on Ars Technica, which is a great site, full of pearls of wisdom and often some good writing too by fellow geeks.

Incidentally, this link is dedicated to David and to Sean, who are both great fans of making peculiar and frequently loud noises with guitars and other implements (and, damn their talented hides, quite good at it too.) which I enjoy listening to. I’d like to learn how to play guitar myself one day. I have no talent for music, but these things don’t always stop me (even when it would be in the Greater Good for me not to try).

If either of you guys have an opinion on this link or additional information, please comment below!

That last post didn’t exactly set the world on fire, did it? Well, this is more important.

I think.

Me, being very dark and serious as I consider dark and serious matters. I’m also trying to look a bit Polish, to get into the mood.

It’s not a new story, but I hadn’t gotten around to writing about this (Nothing new there, then.). There is a plan in this State to bring in Biometric ID cards; plastic cards containing lots of personal identity information with which to identify the card-holder. Now, this is similar in principle to to how they are planning on doing this in the United Kingdom (who are applying pressure to the Irish State to bring it in too, partly because there’s a mutual free movement agreement between the two States, whereby Irish and UK citizens can freely live and work in each other’s countries.) but with a unique Irish twist; it’s just for non-EU citizens.

So, let’s say Garda Siochana Officer O’Reilly stops Oleg on the street, and says ‘Sorry Sir, can I see your Biometric ID card, I have reason to believe you are an illegal immigrant. Snap it up there, sonny.’. Oleg, who is Russian and although he is a nice guy, he really shouldn’t be here, he realises the game is up, and his many years of diligently paying income tax while working hard to help bolster the Irish economy have just been laid to waste. But wait! Oleg, not being Irish, comes equipped with some native cunning, and comes up with an ingenious plan, and answers: “I sorry, Mr Police Office, cannot be help. I don’t have card”. Very cunning indeed. Because, you see, if you’re not an illegal immigrant, then you don’t have to have a card! So, basically, you just lie and say you don’t have one, and then you won’t get arrested and thrown out of the country. If you’re not Irish, then pretend you’re Polish, which currently puts you into a very, very large ‘minority’ ethnic group in this country; apparently there are anywhere up to four hundred and fifty thousand Polish people in the country right now, which is more than one in ten people? And Poles are here legally (well, we’ll see what Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte has to say about that; he’s calculating forty million. That’s all of them!) at the moment.

In a few years time - short, thin on the ground years - the situation will be even more convoluted: Garda Siochana Officer HlavaVeprova stops Oleg on the street, and says ‘Hey you, you foreign guy, show me the biometric ID card that you are having, so that I can know the point.’. Oleg realises the game really is up this time, and his even more accumulated years of diligently paying income tax while working hard to help bolster the now failing Irish economy have just been laid to waste. But wait! Oleg, not being Irish, Polish, Latvian or indeed any EU nationality, comes equipped with cojones of the highest order and decides there’s nothing to lose. He answers: “I sorry, Mr Police Office, cannot be help. I don’t have card!”.

Garda Siochana Officer HlavaVeprova laughs and says “Ha ha, I am making a shit on you, it is joke! I not having card either, I am from Croatia! Ha ha!”. They go off to the pub and do a deal on Semtex and Kalashnikovs.

Now I’m just being facetious. But, I do have a very real and serious issue with the first scenario, because it will shortly become a real one. You can be stopped on the street and challenged to produce an ID card on the basis that you don’t belong here. As I understand it, if you’re here legitimately, then the card is a boon, it will allow you to use healthcare services, social welfare, State services, and generally fit into society. But with this card comes legislation to make this card a legal requirement for non-EU citizens, and brings with it the notion of everyone in Ireland being legally required to carry one at all times. Just the same as they’re going to bring to the UK (which has some interesting implications, as I described at the start of this post.). How will they know who to check? Skin colour? Accents? An armband with a special symbol on it? A tattoo, applied to non-EU nationals when they enter the country?

Anyway, I’m curious to see what you think. David used to joke about what he would do when he was in power with his Fascist State, but the Progressive Democrats are the real deal. Fascists in power now. Here are some links, to get some more detail on this story:

Dry and factual analysis (hopefully you’ll stay awake the whole way through): http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/

Brief and concise: http://www.rte.ie/news/

Also brief and concise: http://www.breakingnews.ie/

I’m not the only person to have reservations: http://www.boards.ie/

Here’s a really good one, which shows you where the so-called Irish Left is at:
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent - requires registration; more on that below.
This is an excerpt from The Irish Independent. I don’t like The Irish Independent. It is rubbish. It is a rubbish newspaper. It is badly written. It is opinion masquerading as journalism, and articles frequently descend into inarticulate, badly punctuated, apoplectic rants. But, they do have some gems from time to time, such as this one.
Earlier this year, Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte sparked anger in his own party ranks after calling for restrictions on workers from new EU member states coming to Ireland.

In an interview he said: “The time may be coming when we will have to sit down and examine whether we would have to look at whether a work permit regime ought to be implemented in terms of some of the non-national labour.

“There are 40 million or so Poles, so it is an issue that we have to look at.”

Read that last line again, maybe even a couple of times. “40 million or so Poles”. If it wasn’t such a wildly ridiculous statement and also dangerous statement, it would be funny. That son of a bitch. Who is building this country, Mr Rabbitte? Yeah, let’s get the Poles to wear armbands or something, good thinking Rabbitte. You should be deported, you vote-grabbing Neo-Fascist.

Check out my comment in reply to Anto’s story on registration in order to enter a site and view the content. Actually, I’m just going to put the comment here in it’s entirety, but remember to check out Anto’s site, I agree with him on this…

Well, there we have it. I think it’s safe to say that I fear The Irish Independent more than I fear Biometric ID cards or vegetarian fundamentalists.

This business of just linking to stuff is going to get old very soon, but stick with me and enjoy the wild ride into… The World of Interweb Kevin and his 802.11g connection to the world!

Me, striding manfully up the beach at Wexford a week ago. I should have been on Baywatch, or Celebrity Love Handles. Click image to view larger version…

The last chunk of new music I got my hands on was an album by ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ by none other than ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah‘, a band who made their name by self-publishing and getting rather famous by being good and getting talked about on the Interweb (as opposed to shagging a music executive and having huge amounts of money poured into advertising their album). Kenny had been going on about them for a while, and then my brother Conor got me the cd, which was good. Very good.

Now, I was biased because I hadn’t listened to anything new in a while, and I tend to get blown away by any music that I haven’t listen to over and over and over on my iPod, several times a day for the last four years. This is actually slightly peculiar since I have something like three thousand tracks available to me, at least a thousand of which are not stupid sound tracks or incredibly crap, so I should be able to go and explore some of these. More over, a lot of those are actually sets from full albums (Don’t worry IRMA, I own them and paid far too much for them, as you well know, you cunts.) and I haven’t even ‘ripped’ a lot of my other albums onto my iPod either. Sometimes I even take out my portable record player to listen to my cds; it’s great, having these big plastic disks which you have to swap when you want to hear a song by a different artist. Anyway, I don’t do these things, for whatever reason, and my mind is starved of new music, which is why I get very excited by hearing something new and good, and then I get obsessed with it for about two to three weeks before I go back to listening to the hundred or so songs that I feel comfortable with (You can take that as being too lazy to set up a new playlist. Yes, apathy, my friends!).

A good manifestation of this effect was after I went to the Castle Palooza festical and came across ‘8 Ball‘, an up and coming band with a good sound; I located the website, downloaded the samples, and then listen to the samples over and over and over like some sort of crazed, obsessive loon. I am, possibly, a crazed obsessive loon; that’s not the point. It’s just not healthy and it was clear that new music was required. Also, their album is apparently not available, or out of print, or banned or whatever, one of these things you have to do leg-work for and then be bitterly disappointed.

Before I get to the explanation of where all this is going and the subsequent linkage, there’s something I need to point out (and I do so love a good pointing) which is that I have a habit of endorsing enthusiastically whatever I’m into, or doing at the moment. Five a Side Football, learning Romanian, contracting, premature baldness, masturbation, whatever it is, if I’m doing it then I’m convinced that everyone else should be doing it too because you’ll all enjoy it at least as much as I have. But you knew that, because if you’re reading this then you know me, right? Yeah, I have a post for you on that subject shortly. The net effect is that if I find something I like then I have to tell everyone to get onto that too. If this blog ever started getting read by more than five or so people (make that a tentative six, since we may now reliably have Aideen onboard; time will tell.) then I could make a living out of doing things and then endorsing them. Somehow.

So I needed some new music, and at the same time I have difficulty with going out to a music store, because of all the hassle involved in trying to find a cd, comparing prices, all that. The iTunes online music store is not bad, but it’s a swindle because they’re charging the same as I’d pay for a cd in a shop, but without all the bells and whistles. Some cds, notably a few from Sony, have copy protection, whereby if you put the cd into your Windows PC it installs some software which opens your PC to virus attacks (I’m simplifying here) and then prevents you from copying the music onto your PC, and then onto your mp3 player. So you still need your portable record player, thanks to those stupid cunts. Buy a Mac instead, which allows you to carry on as usual and looks nicer. I want my bells and whistles if I’m paying for them. Or I can go to Amazon or somewhere like that and again, try and get it cheaper by searching around a bit, and then wait a few weeks while they figure out how to get it to me and An Post (our beautifully hopeless local postal service) loses the delivery.

Or I can go here:

AllOfmp3.com
Cheap music to download from Russia!
http://www.allofmp3.com/
Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and try this site. It sells music (Not quite everything, but a damn good selection.) in almost any format you can think of, and it’s legal. In Russia. So, I went to Russia on the Internet, bought credit, selected the music I wanted, it sent me an email when the site had processed my request and put the files up for me, and I downloaded them! I organised them and put them on my iPod! It was cheap and easy! Ok, almost too cheap, Russia isn’t known for being the most secure place to do business with a credit card (Possibly less safe than Finglas West.) and I was a little disconcerted when the credit card company rang up a few hours later to check if I really intended buying the fissile uranium from Uzbekistan, to which of I course I said maybe, depending on the quality. The site is easy to use, well-designed and clearly secure (You only get one shot at every download, but it hangs on to them until it knows you were successful and only charges when you complete the download) and I’m totally comfortable with using it. This is the way this should work.

I’ll say it again, because I love repetition and over-emphasis: This is the way this should work.

It was cheap, the cost is basically calculated by file-size which is dictated by the quality and format of the files, so an album might work out to between two to five euro, and the processing (they generate the files on demand, depending on if you request a popular format) is fast. The site is something that so many other similar businesses could learn from; it looks great and still delivers the goods. It even has decent preview samples!

I would actually pay even more per album, and with that I’d like a PDF file of the cover and sleeve notes, but the basic principle is great, and this is the way it should work. Everyone could make money off the deal, especially the recording artist, and the losers would be the people who are currently making money by having a big office and a sharp suit; yes, these are also the people who are opposed to a better way of doing business and who will sooner or later find themselves having to adapt to having to work for a living. I mean, it’s a model that works for the guys at the top of the pile, but there will over time be more bands who will move into the new model which makes use of the Interweb and new technologies.

The next discussion would be, how about myspace.com getting into selling music for unsigned bands? That is the begginging of the new model, and they have the money to push it. Bring it on.

Oh, and the music itself.

• New Order
  Yes, the obsession continues, and my therapist says that listening to some actual albums light help. They don’t need any further introduction.
  • Waiting For The Siren’s Call
    Bloody excellent. Krafty is particulary good, and is why I wanted this album. It’s very good indeed.
  • Power, Corruption & Lies
    Not bad, although a lot of it sounds like variations on ‘Blue Monday’, so I guess that was the sound of the day, or maybe the sample was broken or there was a sort of concept there or something.
  • Substance
    Great stuff in there. Yes please. All the collected singles up to 1987.
• Goldfrapp
  Didn’t hear too much of their stuff, but apparently they are where it’s at and I decided to taste a bit. They generally seemed to get good reviews, and they have a very reclusive, shy lead singer after whom the band is named.
  • Black Cherry
    Great stuff. Touch of the Gary Numans about it, but he was always top notch, if a bit of a whinger. She really has an excellent voice and it’s great stuff. Harsh electronic sounds with a good beat. It’s definitely ‘different’.
  • Supernature
    The opening track, ‘Ooh la la’ is what sold me on this, and the rest of the album is as good. Fantastic stuff. The sound can be a bit repetitive at times, and it seems intentionally a bit retro. Some great dance tracks, which I like.
• Snow Patrol
  Oh dear! Material for another post! This is because I went to see Snow Patrol a couple of weeks ago with the Jennifer (I got her tickets some time ago, to cheer her up; she’s a big fan. A very big fan.) and heard the music for the first time. Not bad, and a great live act, which always does it for me.
  • Final Straw
    Good music, but miserable stuff. It’s an album of misery, although the music itself is chirpy enough; I decided to actually listen to the lyrics because Jen talks about it a lot and it seems to have made a big impression on her. Man, I’m going to think long and hard before I buy her an album again, it gets me into all sorts of trouble.
• Blondie
  Again, if Blondie needs an introduction then you need to get out from under your rock more. Seriously now.
  • The Platinum Collection
    A collection of all the singles, the hits… Forty-seven tracks. It’s probably every piece of music, every squeak, every burp and every fart they ever made. Dear God, what was I thinking. Some great stuff in there though.

Now I’ll have to listen to it all, compile some new playlists, and worst of all clean out the crap. There is a lot of it in there, believe you me.