video

Metal Monday: not so special K

'Eavy Metal, video
Published on

As I think said before, for some reason the groups I follow tend to cluster around certain letters of the alphabet: A-C, I, M and S being the most noticable. Which also means some letters have no representation in my collection whatsoever, like today’s letter: K. In fact, of the seventyfive bands known at the BNR Metal Pages, I only recognise a few and those I do recognise I’ve never really followed, like e.g. King Diamond, which a lot of my fellow metalheads at high school used to like back then. This is Abigail:



Some others are a bit dubious. Take KISS for example. Now the line between rock, hard rock and heavy metal is of course thin and easily crossed, but to me KISS is on the wrong side of the line somebody like Alice Cooper is on the right side off, in my definition of hard rock and metal. Still, there’s at least one classic KISS song everybody, including metalheads like:

KISS – I Was Made for Loving You:



An even more odd band to be represented at the BNR Metal Pages is Killing Joke, the UK post-punk band best known for “Love Like Blood”. As the site puts it, this is one of those “not-really metal bands that kind of sound like metal and that metal fans often like”. Fair enough and it gives me the chance to show two of their best songs.

First up: “Love Like Blood”



Somewhat later and different is the next song, “Democracy”, from the 1996 album of the same name. Somebody wasn’t happy with the state of politics in Britain…



Metal Monday: Unleashed in the East

'Eavy Metal, video
Published on

Judas Priest. Who could guess the leather daddy lead singer was gay?

For the “J” installment of Metal Monday there’s only one band that can be featured, the lawbreakers themselves: Judas Priest. To me Priest is the perfect link between hard rock and heavy metal, sort of halfway inbetween hard rock pioneers like Sabbath and Deep Purple and NWOBHM bands like Maiden, able to match both. Discovered them sometime in the late eighties, when I found a huge stack of their records on a flea market, for a guilder a piece. Not quite in pristine quality when I got them, played them so much over the years the grooves have worn out — long live MP3s.

Now the least interesting thing about Priest is that their lead singer, Rob Halford, is gay, which he only openly acknowledged in 1998, though it really couldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, considering the outfits he tends to wear. Heavy metal may unironically celebrate the macho leather look, but Halford is a bit over the top even so. Again, it shouldn’t matter and luckily for most fans it didn’t, but it seems still to come as a bit of a surprise to outsiders. Metal has a bit of a reputation as neanderthal music I guess…

The other thing everybody knows about Priest is that they were accused of putting subliminal messages in their songs to get their fans to commit suicide, to which Halford said that would be the dumbest thing a musician could do, kill of their fans and that they’d rather subliminally influence their fans to buy more albums…

Priest’s music has evolved a lot over the years, though the core qualities remain the same. One of their earliest classics is “Diamond and Rust”, a Joan Baez (!) cover from 1974 here in a great recent version:



1980 album British Steal saw this breakthrough hit, complete with naff videoclip:



From 1990 comes Painkiller, which may be one of the few songs in which I prefer the studio version. The quick pounding drums come through much better that way. Especially with the sound turned up to eleven on headphones. Still haven’t lost the buzz…



And of course, no metal band should be without their serial killer shoutout — The Ripper:



Once Upon a Time … Space

science fiction, video
Published on 3 Comments on Once Upon a Time … Space



The local cable network is doing a promo for their kiddies channels package, which would not be of much interest to me, if not for one thing. One of the channels involved is repeating episodes of Er Was Eens… De Ruimte, (Once Upon a Time… Space) that was about the only proper science fiction on the telly when I grew up. I last saw this when it was first broadcast, in 1982/83, when I was already reading science fiction but Dutch television had little of interest; Battlestar Galactica was a few years ago, V would come a few years later. So it fell to an originally French cartoon series that was a sequel to a not very good series about The History of Man to fill the gap.

Which it did quite well.

Now compared to a roughly contemporary Japanese series like Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets (or Sj-force as it was also know in Holland) the animation quality was … not quite … as good and the characters somewhat on the stereotypical side (the main bad giuy actually being called “Generaal Naarling” (General nasty)), but it was also much more properly science fiction. Set some 1,000 years in the future, where a dozen or so races including humans have formed a peaceful union, the series follows the adventures of several new members of the union’s space police, as they have to deal with natural disasters as well as intrigues by the bad guys from Cassiopeia, a military dictatorship part of the union but constantly trying to gain ultimate power. The good guys are led by Omega and tend to go for peaceful solutions before grabbing for the laser.

The series lasted twentysix episodes, with the last six-seven or so forming one big story arc, featuring a new big bad manipulating Casseopia, a threat only resolved in the last episode. It was this that made the biggest impression on me, the first sustained space opera I’d seen. And what also made an impression was the music, both the opening theme as featured above, as the incidental background music, which is as burned in my memory as the Star Wars music…

Pay no attention to the software behind the curtain

Amsterdam, geekdom, posts interesting only to me, video
Published on



Bit of a bother with my bike today. A couple of weeks ago I had finally gotten a new bike, after my last one had been stolen more than a year ago. At the hospital S. is unfortunately still in there’s a bike repair place which also sells secondhand ones and when I looked there they had a nice, proper Raleigh bike, one of those that you can’t help but ride sitting up ramrod straight, for less than 200 euro. In very nice condition and looking as if it came straight out of the fifties, I was a bit wary of leaving it out on the streets. Which is why I usually stall it in the underground automated parking at the ferry when I go to work. And this uses some sort of Windows based software to do all the work, which I know because the first time I wanted to use it, it had blue screened. Not a good start, but I had been using it without problems ever since.

Until today. Checked my bike in with no problems; wanted to check it out tonight, no go. The chip and pin machine, with which you pay and which uses your bank card to recognise which bike you’re attempting to collect, was borked. So I called the emergency line, they asked the usual questions, then got me called back by somebody with some clue, he asked for the last four digits of my bank pass, then used that to locate and get my bike. The video above shows the physical side of that process; thanks to the monitor screen normally used to explain the system, I got to see the software side of things. It could’ve been an old skool DOS programme, a light blue background with hideously big buttons, with a list of ticky boxes in red (occupied) or green (free) followed by the bank pass number (only the last four digits shown iirc) the customer had used. The admin checked mine and hit the button “get bike” et viola, there it was.

As a card carrying geek it’s always interesting to get such a look at the software behind the curtain — and because it was a nice hot day, I had no problem waiting a bit longer than normal to get my bike either!