If, like me, you can’t stand Coldplay but you love th satirical musical comedy stylings of Mitch Benn, you’ll love his latest single, Everything sounds like Coldplay now. First played on The Now Show, the song now has the appropriate videoclip to go with it (Quicktime required).
Link via Reinder.
I’m not a Kate Bush fan; I got one album Hounds of Love and like the obvious singles (“Wuthering Heights”, “Running up That Hill” “Cloudbuster”) but that’s it. Reinder Dijkhuis on the other hand is enough of a fan to have all her albums. In honour of the upcoming release of her new album, Aerial, he has provided reviews of all her albums:
- Countdown to Aerial 1: The Kick Inside
I have no memory of a world without Kate Bush’s music. I suppose it must have been 1978 or 1980 when I first heard “Wuthering Heights”, and my musical memories simply don’t stretch back much further. I’ve pretty much always been a fan of her work, even when I only knew it as “that strange song with the high voice”.- Countdown to Aerial 2: Lionheart
It’s true, I’ll admit, that Kate’s second record doesn’t surprise the way her debut does, but on its own
merits, it’s a very strong album. There’s no sense at all that the songs were mere leftovers from the previous batch – more likely they were deliberately kept in reserve.- Countdown to Aerial 3: Never For Ever
Never For Ever has quite a few rocking moments (she sounds like Nina Hagen in “Violin” and “The Wedding List”) and uses dynamics and crescendo a lot in the arrangements, so playing it at high volume definitely improves it.- Countdown to Aerial 4: The Dreaming
The Dreaming is not merely the best Kate Bush record; it’s THE BEST RECORD EVER MADE BY ANYONE IN THE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC!!! It’s perfect from beginning to end: strange, innovative, melodic, exciting, packed with raw emotion, violence and clever storytelling. It also has Kate braying like a donkey.- Countdown to Aerial 5: Hounds of Love
Hounds of Love, then, is really two great albums compressed into 40-odd minutes’ playing time. It’s essential. The 1997 remaster has a few bonus tracks that are okay; a bit of a grab bag to be honest.- Countdown to Aerial 6: The Sensual World
There’s plenty that’s good on the record though. The title track is lush and erotic – Kate is probably the only arranger who can make uillean pipes sound sexy.- Countdown to Aerial 7: The Red Shoes
[…]on the whole, The Red Shoes is listenable. It gets the odd spin at the studio, from people other than me, even. It just… doesn’t grab, doesn’t irritate, doesn’t connect.- Countdown to Aerial 8: Aerial
For the most part, though, the album sticks to the background, prettily washing over this one listener
just like much of the previous record did. There is, on the whole, more to pique the interest in the first
disk, the collection of Kate songs, than in the second, conceptual one, but in both, there simply isn’t enough.
Last week Shell workers went on strike to keep their retirement rights. It did not take long for Shell to cave in (link in Dutch) under the threat of closing down production at the refineries at Pernis, “Europe’s largest”.
The unions fought to keep the retirement age for current employees at 60 as well as to force the company to keep paying the entire pension premiums. In the new agreement with Shell, they have largely though not entirely gotten what they wanted. For current employees, retirement age will stay at 60, but the official retirement age will still become 65. To bridge the gap between 60 and 65, there’s the “levensloopregeling”, which is a new savingsplan introduced by the Dutch government this year, through which you can save up part of your wages before taxes to either take early retirement or unpaid leave, with wage taxes defered to the moment you actual start using the fund. Shell has now pledged to annually pay 6.5 % of each worker’s income into this fund, instead of the 3 % it had first offered. By trading in two vacation days, each employee can add another 1.5 % annually as well. However, the Shell workers will have to start contributing to their retirement funds: 2/5 of their wages.
So, a victory for the Shell strikers? Or could more have been achieved with a more hardline attitude?
Every tester hears these sooner or later; some of them are straight from the mouths of developers I’ve worked with, or so it seems:
And from comments: ‘It works on my PC’
(Our version of that last remark is “it works in the debug version”. Such a pity you cannot deliver debug code to customers…)
David Blunkett has said he is “deeply sorry” for the embarrassment he has caused Tony Blair, after
he resigned as work and pensions secretary.He said he was guilty of making a mistake on three occasions and was now “paying the price for it”.
Tony Blair has paid tribute to Mr describing him as a “decent and honourable man”.
Gag me with a spoon. It’s Bush that has the reputation of not wanting to let go of his fuckup “friends”
but Blair’s just as bad, isn’t he? Blunkett, Mandelson, even Estelle Morris all resigned in disgrace only
to return to the fold not that much later.
In the Commons, Mr Blair told MPs that none of the allegations against Mr Blunkett warranted his
dismissal under the ministerial code, saying: “I could discover no impropriety or wrongdoing.”The mistakes arose out of an “honest misunderstanding”, he said, and Mr Blunkett had left office “with
no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever”.
When did we hear that before? Oh yes, the previous time Blunkett resigned “with his integrity intact”. Not very many secretaries can resign from office twice and say that!
Most politicians who had to resign in shame stay resigned, but not Blunkett. He has now joined Mandelson in that short list of politicians who had to resign twice; one wonders if a fatcat job in Europe can be far behind…
The way in which this happened is typical of Blunkett: arrogant and stupid. I can’ help but think a lot of this has to do with his background. He is so used for fighting for what he wants and winning, to succeed in spite of the odds that I think he has
started to think that he can do anything, that rules are for lesser men. How else to explain that he thought he could get away with taking up a directorship of DNA Bioscience, purchasing shares in it, taking these shares into a family trust when he became a secretary again, without telling the advisory committee on business appointments about it and with the company having an active interest in the business of his department!