The world is a less funny place.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
There’s one I’ve been concerned about. Afraid it’s going to push some buttons. It comes out tomorrow. Go over to
Oh, and feel free to send her Royal Highness some E-Mail too!
Johnny Rotten’s official response to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, which came in the form of a handwritten letter posted to his website:
“Next to the SEX-PISTOLS, Rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We’re not coming. We’re not your monkey and so what? Fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table, or $15,000 to squeak up in the gallery, goes to a non-profit organisation selling us a load of old famous. Congratulations. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You’re anonymous as judgets, but you’re still music industry people. We’re not coming. You’re not paying attention. Outside the shit-stem is a real
SEX PISTOL!”
We’ve had Sirius’ “1st Wave” stream on at the movie theater off and on the past few weeks. Some cool stuff on there, like today when they had an hour of interview and live performances with Dave Wakeling (from the English Beat and General Public). But the more I listen, the more I wonder how many people who listened to all these songs years and years ago really got it?
I won’t bore everyone with stories you already know, like the true meaning of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come On Eileen. (No, there’s not supposed to be a comma in the title, which should give you an idea. Google it.) But some of the more interesting songs, which I’m sure a lot of people in other nations and American “intellectuals” got, have to have gone over the heads of most people.
First, there are bands like Midnight Oil who pretty much only did protest music. Every single song they wrote and recorded had a message behind it. I wonder how many Americans who danced to Beds Are Burning understood what it was saying (along with all the other songs on the Diesel And Dust album) about the plight of Australian aboriginal peoples. Not too many I’m sure, which is why their next album (1990′s Blue Sky Mining) was a critique of American culture and values. That album actually gave me one of my all time favorite songs, Forgotten Years, which is so much more poignant in this era of the Bush dictatorship.
Our shoreline was never invaded, our country was never in flames.
This is the calm we breathe, this is a feeling too strong to contain.
Still it aches like tetanus, it reeks of politics.
Signatures stained with tears, who can remember?
We’ve got to remember.
On a lighter note, we also got songs like House Of Fun by Madness, which other than being a happy little ska dance tune, has hysterical lyrics for anyone with a passing knowledge of British slang of the time. It’s about a 16 year old boy who goes into a chemists’ (drug store) shop and tries to buy a pack of condoms, but the clerk keeps getting confused, thinking he wants to buy party favors. (“box of baloons, with the feather touch.” “We don’t stock party gimmicks in this shop!”)
For those who don’t want to read “Queen Victoria” on LJ, there’s also an RSS feed you can subscribe to through your browser or other reader. Feel free to distribute this address far and wide:
I’m moving “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” off into its own journal/feed finally, to clean up the look of this journal, and keep the funny all in one place, for those of you who like the Queen but don’t like my other observations.
The new blog for “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” can be found at
Turns out that researchers, examining a clay pot from the ancient city of Pompeii, made an interesting discovery. Over a thousand years before Edison did it, the Pompeiians had unwittingly invented the phonograph. Vibrations affecting a graving tool in a pottery shop in Pompeii actually ended up recording sounds and the voices of the people in the shop as it was being made!
You can hear some of the audio in this news story: Warning, most of it is in French.
This has to qualify as the world’s earliest recording.
Recent Comments