Posts by James Butler
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I gather it’s entirely fixable: install the proper acoustic panels.
But as you say, the company that built and manages the place should have known and done that in the first place.
Here's the thing: I'm still planning on forking out $130 tomorrow for a show there, and I'm sure it will be pretty much sold out, so why would they bother?
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Sacha,
here’s-this-album-in-order-track-by-track
wasn’t that the whole plan for that tour?
I think it was the plan for the whole series of All Tomorrow’s Parties tours – Sonic Youth did the same thing with Daydream Nation a year or two before. Actually the SY gig was way better than the Pixies IMHO – the sound quality was better (Bruce Mason Centre vs. Vector being the main reason); the band was more engaged; and they played a whole set of mostly new material after playing through their 70-minute double album. Those last two points I think are probably down to SY being (until very recently) still an active working band involved in making new music and doing new things; The Pixies, after disbanding for years, got back together a few years ago just to play their old stuff in stadiums to pay the bills. And that’s all they’ve been doing since then, and it shows.
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Hard News: Can we get an adult up in here?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The HBGary leak has easily been Anonymous’ best by a long shot.
Certainly their funniest.
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And the other shoe drops.
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I quite like the framing of faith-based organisations as "holistic"; not the first adjective they might want to be associated with...
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Hard News: That page doesn't exist ..., in reply to JacksonP,
Not to mention their roles as ‘safety net’ only exist as a result of societal failures.
I don't know about the "only". "Usually", sure. But I suspect that even in the best of all possible societies there would always be corner cases (by which I mean "people") who hit the net. Provided it's there.
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Hard News: That page doesn't exist ..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
faith-based groups “would consider it their core business, as being a Christian community” to offer that support.
"Faith-based groups" are often wonderful, but let's consider for a second the wisdom of offloading our social safety net onto groups whose "core business" is so open to wildly varying interpretations.
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From the link:
Housing Minister Phil Heatley was unavailable for comment today but he was quoted by local media as saying the changes were a part of a shift away from a "state house for life" housing policy, towards a new system designed to ensure those struggling the greatest were given priority.
Posted without comment, as my head is currently buried in my desk.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There's some amusing pieces on the extras with the cast talking about how hard it was to be speaking these words without any idea of their meaning, They did get coached with pronunciation but the question was raised about what a native chinese speaker would make of their efforts. My guess is it's something like hearing a US actor attempt a kiwi accent.
This is a pretty common issue for classical singers, who end up getting very good at reading gobs of Italian at high speed without understanding more than a word or two. OTOH, one very rarely sings in a non-Indo-European language, or one written in a non-Latin script (I did spend a few weeks learning Cyrillic once, for one concert).
It can be quite illuminating hearing a non-native English speaker singing English. When Andreas Scholl - who speaks very fluent, but accented, English - was here last year, he sang a song by Purcell. His pronunciation was almost flawless; but he messed up the vowel in "the", always pronouncing it "theh", when it should be "thee" or "thuh" depending on the first syllable of the next word. When was the last time you thought consciously about that?
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to BenWilson,
all the work all the horses in the world could produce wouldn’t be enough to maintain the level of production that we currently have.
This was my point, better made. And I don't know how big a part of the answer biofuels can be, considering that their production depends on exactly the kind of high-intensity industrial farming which will become more difficult in the future. I don't doubt that technology will improve, that people will adapt; but it will be harder, and it's going to look different.