- Clean-cut “youf” operatic quartet G4‘s cover of Radiohead’s Creep is either a crime against music or a post-modern deflation of passive-aggressive indie rock whining. I’m not sure which, but either way I am worried that my sister likes it and that I can’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t.
- “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?” should be subtitled “…Including This Book“. Imagine two boring blokes from your year at university sitting in a pub, pissed and rambling away to each other in an attempt to make each other laugh and you’ve got some idea of the level of the tired “observational” “alternative” “comedy” packing its alphabetically ordered pages. I wouldn’t put that sort of feeble crap on PooterGeek—and that’s saying something. Interestingly, though, this book is unfunny in exactly the way that Charlie Brooker is funny. He manages to write about the same sorts of things, but his writing prompts snorts of amused recognition and is genuinely quirky and insightful—rather than, well, shit.
- Take That recorded two-and-a-half very good pop songs—which is as much as a manufactured pop group can hope for and sufficient justification for their revival tour.
- The Big Sleep has dated to the point at which it is now uncomfortable to watch—but Lauren Bacall’s appearance in the same film hasn’t.
- iTunes for Windows is still as horrible as I remember it being last year. Why should people have to wrestle with such a frustrating interface just to listen to and copy music they legally own? Why isn’t there a big button that says “rip CD to MP3s on my hard drive”? Why can’t people just plug any old device into a USB port and copy a song? Why? Why? Linux notoriously sucks at multimedia and device driver support and yet I can still do these things trivially on my own machine—and the necessary software is completely free. Gah! Talking of braindead digital media rights management, ladies and gentlemen, I give you The New Yorker!…
- Digital cameras still suck, but less so.
31Dec05 — 5
So what’s wrong with The Big Sleep? I suspect it of being perfect.
What George just said.
Also, as we’re thinking of buying the Complete New Yorker set we found Mr Jalopy’s posts very interesting – at first. It is ineed “the finest magazine ever published” (his words) and having 80 years’ worth of it – 80 years! – accessible in any form at all seems astonishing, amazing, impressive, whatever positive adjective you like. Contrast having it in hard copy form, cluttering up the room, or several rooms, generating dust, and so on – not to mention how much it would cost to acquire. But what does Mr Jalopy spend most of his 2,000 words on? On whining about how “the disk swapping is truly gruesome”, how “profoundly disappointed” he is that he can’t transfer the contents to his hard disk, and how he feels compelled to “revoke my recommendation that it is worth buying”. What? FFS, it’s the Complete New Yorker! Plenty of things can be called “onerous”, but is swapping DVDs around really such an awful burden? It’s not that we’d defend the nasty little copyright protections included on the DVDs, nor that Mr Jalopy should just shut up and be grateful – he does make some valid points, especially about how media corporations keep shooting themselves in the foot – but you don’t have to be able to recall the days before the Web and DVDs and all that to think that he’s going way over the top.
Or maybe you do. We don’t particularly want “the ability to have the entire New Yorker run on [our] airplane tray table, in bed, in the backyard or to read when … stuck at a drive-through window” (!), but Mr Jalopy says he does. Young people today, eh? They just don’t know how lucky they are, etc., etc.
Anyway – not to close on such a curmudgeonly note – many thanks for another year of entertainment and enlightenment, and all the best for 2006.
Chandler’s dialogue in The Big Sleep will never be dated, never ever ever.
Plus, thanks to you posting a bloody review of a fancy new Sony digital camera I became aware of a fancy new Sony digital camera and found myself unable to resist the urge to purchase one, and now I am skint. Thanks a bunch.
DRM = Destroy Retail Market
Via the magnificent Pootergeek and BoingBoing is a four entry review/rant about the “Compleat New Yorker” 8 DVD set which is fatally lamed by its use of DRM. The 8 DVD set makes up some 60GB of scanned New Yorker and is, apparently, a treasure but th…
The Big Sleep, dated?
That’s a dirty crack, brother.