Newsquizislamification by Bbc Radio 4, The News Quiz, 091002  
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NewsQuizIslamification.mp3 (1536 KB)

Just a short snippet from Radio 4's The News Quiz, in the week it was announced the BNP would be appearing on BBC's 'Question Time', and the excellent Mark Steel on the 'Islamification of Britain'. 

Snipped from the Podcast (I'm only just catching up - and having a hell of a giggle), which you can grab from the BBC's website here.

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Linda Smith's A Brief History Of Time Wasting - A Little Excerpt by Linda Smith  
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LindaSmithExcerpt.mp3 (1489 KB)

If there was one comedian who just oozed charm and pleasure, it was Linda Smith. Pure wit.  This is from 'A Brief History of Timewasting', which I stuck this on earlier today while getting some paperwork out of the way, and after two episodes had flown by (and the work all done) I was still giggling; this is just a little 'musical' out-take from one of the episodes.  I don't think you can buy this any more (I certainly haven't seen a copy of it, and a quick run through the BBC Store and Amazon doesn't turn it up), but they do re-play it on BBC Radio 7 from time to time, and both series are well worth a listen IMO. 

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I managed to spend all of yesterday behind the screen, beating my head against the table trying to get a tedious, repetitive job done; so today I decided to at least pop out for a couple of hours and get some fresh air as a break from the job (which is nearly done- Yey!).

Destination: D. Sansom & Sons' Nine Wells Watercress Farm, Whitwell, Herts, SG4 8JP. 

Don't ask me why, but the name came up in conversation a couple of days ago, and with Watercress being damn expensive in the supermarkets, and me with a couple of hours to waste, I thought I'd 'pop' over there for a bit of a gander... and it's amazing.  The farm nestles between the hills behind Luton airport, but somehow manages to escape pretty much all noise from the planes.  The beds are fed by (surprise surprise) nine wells, and the brothers who run the place still do everything the old-fashioned way - sliced and bundled by hand; I'm not sure much has changed in the last 100 years.  It's all sold direct from their barn, alongside a variety of other vegetables, which I assume are also local (I forgot to ask).  What was initially a bit strange was the constant flow of people who are travelling out into the middle of nowhere, navigating all those windy little lanes, tractors and horse riders (all of which brings travel speeds right the way down to London levels) to pop into the barn by the beds and grab some of this stuff by hand - but I can see why. Their product is absolutely brilliant. The demand for Watercress has one up massively recently (ah... another 'super-food') but this stuff just seems to be a step up (so far - we've only nibbled one bundle :)).

Anyway - work calls again, but if you ever fancy a bit of a weird trip back in time, tradition and even partly in language, drop by if you're passing.  They do some pretty mean little pumpkin/squashes... Next time I'm around there, I'll investigate the rest of their stock :).

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Irvine Welsh

Nabbed from The End of the Line?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/04/france.britishidentity

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Click here to download:

Hobnox2.swf (20954 KB)

Well, this was a hell of a lot of fun :). I'm not really from the step-sequencer age of electronic music. Even when I tried FruityLoops (sorry, FL Studio), it left me in a bit of a lather of confusion with its piano roll editor and little lights. But I have always missed the immediacy of plugging a few bits of gear together, launching up a basic sequencer, and just plugging straight away at it (I've had a little experience of this with my Korg Triton and some other MIDI hardware - it's very immediate).  So this was an absolute pleasure.

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Yesterday so nearly didn't happen.  Last minute rehearsals had been arranged, and perhaps a 2 hour gap had been squeezed in for a break, but then due to random events - the whole day cleared up!  So, yesterday, I was lucky enough to experience Longplayer Live - a 1000 minute section of a 1000 year long, non-repetative, generated piece of music played on Tibetan Singing Bowls for our pleasure at The Roundhouse, Camden.  Actually, I was even luckier (than what, I'm not sure ;)), and massive thanks to @Documentally for the ticket - it was more than gratefully received and enjoyed.

What was it like? It's hard to describe it without using the most popular words of yesterday, which seem to have been 'sonorous', 'mesmerising' & 'resonant', but the sound of apparently randomly timed outbursts and drones from (at any one time) around 12 of the singing bowls was, if anything, utterly captivating; this was the one thing I really wasn't sure the event would manage.  @StuartWitts did point out (amongst all his wisdom) that the procession of time was extremely difficult to gauge in there - certainly hours seemed to vanish into minutes, and if you left the round for a while, you could never be quite sure that anything had actually changed when you wondered back in.

But it certainly was magical.  There's tons of material out there from the days staging - a quick Twitter Search for #Longplayer, and a gander through @Documentally's Longplayer Posterous (live blogged on the day) will feed you some of the buckets on media that was pumped out on the day - there's plenty of audio, audioboos, video and stills if you fancy venturing into Longplayer (Flickr is also rammed with some of the most lovely photography I've seen in ages).

For me, I'm just glad that I managed to spend longer than the hour or two I might have had in a venue I love experiencing something totally new.  Marcus du Sautoy was, as expected, a joy to listen to - exceptionally happy I managed to catch his section in the talks.  Oh, And also to the lovely people who kept me entertained - thank you! See, it's dangerous for a musician to actually have a day off ;).

PS - my own flickr set, with the images from this post in high res, can be seen HERE!

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Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for
Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who
came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred
in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British
experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to
honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches
of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which
have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take
up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am
both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists,
historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and
celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of
dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on
breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,
without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could
well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can
point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt
of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that
he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross
indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he
was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical
castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own
life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing
and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt
with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his
treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance
to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and
the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted
under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more
lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this
government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT
community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most
famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long
overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to
humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united,
democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once
the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in
living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by
anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices
– that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European
landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls
which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is
thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism,
people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war
are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely
thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved
so much better.

Gordon Brown

If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing's memory for future
generations, please donate here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/

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I'm sitting the garden of my local, awaiting the arrival of Anneliese and little Oscar. Surrounded by members of the local Running Club. Also members of the local Cricket club. It's 'fairly' busy...

Anyway... the end of a long day, and that sunset I mentioned on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/RiddlerMusic ). I'd like to get them home, gimp them up (crop, colour balance etc) but this is a great excuse not to talk to sweaty people ;).  Actually, not something I'd normally avoid...

Too strange. Back to the Pint.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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And, of course, the ever present Scooby Doo. Yesterday was fairly well and truly flumoxed by appalling traffic, but they did manage to get up here for a few hours. A wonder round, atrip to the pub, a formal introduction to all the locals, and Oscar has experienced our madness for the first time :).

He is, of course, a little sweetie (unlike Doo and Rox, he is believed to be a pure Staffie) and has tiny little bitey bitey teeth (that he only occasionally used). He's got bollocks too (well, you can tell that from the photos ;)), and even 'tried' to stand up to the mighty Scooby Doo.

But we know who won that one :).

Right, back to trying to fix my PC. If anyone's in South West London tomorrow (Sunday), we're playing at the Lavender Hill Festival - a street party all along Lavender Hill from Clapham Junction onwards. We're on at around 2pm, towards the Eastern end of the road - and the whole thing is free... Do come along if you're free... apparently last year was a right laugh!

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

PS Incidentally, I did search out the most retro towel I could find. Thought it suitable. Definitely suited to close combat friction burns :). Shame about the photo (having seen it now :))

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I'm having a bit of a slow day today. We have a recording session tomorrow (which I'm really looking forward to - it's in an amazing, secret venue :)), but that means today is preparation day.  Bouncing tracks, preparing clicks, and a lot of waiting around really... so I took the opportunity of being sat at my desk to try out SpinVox (http://www.spinvox.com) - and put simply, it's brilliant. For those who don't know about their service, you phone up a dropbox, leave a message, and their clever little elves convert it into text which can be texted or emailed back to you, to other people's mobiles, or indeed straight onto your blog; all powered by D2 (or as they slightly scarily call it, 'The Brain').

I can see so many uses for this (their primary 'business' is converting your voicemail into text and forwarding it to your mobile, which I can see a stack of uses for), but today was just about playing around with it.  So I left 'The Brain' two messages, just reading from a magazine and a book that were on my desk. 

WAT I SED:
"Exploring mash-up ideas in pop.  Pop has its detractors and there's little wonder when you consider that kickstarting a career these days simply involved auditioning for a variety of Saturday night entertainment shows and courting the public vote.  However, for producers, pure pop..." - at which point their memo service cut me off.  Quite rightly :).

WAT IT SED BAK 2 ME:
"Exploring mash up ideas in pop. Pop, have it to tractors and is little wonder when you consider that kick starting a career these days, simply involves auditioning for a variety of Saturday night entertainment shoes and courting the public vote. However, for producers pure pop"

Not bad.  I like the idea of pop having "tractors", and "Saturday night entertainment shoes" (I want some of them), but I'd say that was pretty accurate. Now for the slightly harder test...

WAT I SED:
"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water... we might expect, on my theory, that such individuals would occasionally have given rise to new species , having anomalous habits, and with their structure either slightly or considerably modified from that of the proper type."

WAT IT SED BAK 2 ME:
"In north America, the Black bear was seen Huns(?) swimming for hours with widely open mouth. Thus catching almost like a whale insects in the water. We might expect on my theory that such individuals would occasionally have given rise to new species having anomalous habit. And with their structure either slightly or considerably modified from that of their proper type."

Bloody spot on. It appears 'The Brain' is well read, with it's only real error getting a name wrong (unsuprising really) and missing an 's' of habit - which I probably garbled anyway. OK, the punctuation is a bit out, but it's not bad.  So, if you can see uses for this kind of service, I'm loving it.  Their website isn't clear about what you pay for and what comes free, but I thank @Whatleydude (http://whatleydude.com and http://www.twitter.com/Whatleydude) for clearing that up - they charge for the Voicemail conversion (and that's only £5 per month). - currently I'm looking at the Blast function for texting a specific list of mobiles with a message... sounds "super-useful" :).

Back to the bouncing. One more to go...

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This is one little subject that I've been pondering for a while (mostly due to tutoring the subjects to some really hard working pupils who are utterly, utterly let down by the current GCSE sylabus/examinations when they hit A Levels).  So thanks to The Now Show for comparing two science papers, one from John Holmes' GCSE year, and one from last year (probably 21st Century Science :)).

From a GCSE paper from the late 1980s (at a guess, 1989).
The process of dialysis may be used for patients whose kidneys malfunction. This washes their blood with water purified from significant quantities of Calcium ions.  A 10 cubic centimetre sample of water known to contain Ca2+ ions was passed through a resin column. the water was collected & in a titration it was found to neutralise 8 cubic centimetres of aqueous Sodium Hydroxide.

Assuming the patient needs water containing less than 0.01g per cubic decimeter of Ca2+ ions, decide if the water is suitable for use in dialysis.


From 2008's GCSE Science paper.
Sharon is riding a horse. She is wearing a riding hat. Give the name of the one organ that the hat protects.


OK, it's not a fair comparison. There are more testing questions, but very few that will stretch the most able. There's far too much multiple choice, join the ideas with a line, work out which opinion/fact supports idea A or B, and short-answer questions (showing an iGCSE paper, or an A Level paper to students who have taken the 21st Century course usually brings out cold sweats as there might be a question with more than 2 lines to write your answer in - they get this in other subjects at GCSE, but in Science, it always seems to stump and disturb).

The current courses do encourage a far wider range of understanding, trying not to leave people behind and give everyone a reasonable science education (something that I encourage, and would never put down), but it lets down those who are to continue and specialise in a subject. Oh, and they waste far too much time on 'opinions'... This isn't an attack on the students who work hard and succeed in their GCSEs today.  Just the system itself.

My two pence :). 

Photograph courtesy of.... ugh. The Daily Mail. God, I've just seen myself ranting in the pub brandishing a copy of the Mail shouting 'Immigrants, Lesbians and Teachers are destroying our childrens' way of life'.  Quite humbling :).

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via news.bbc.co.uk

OK. Late night rambling... It's appalling that a Class A Drug can get into a simple consumer product like a computer game. However, I'd like to quote the first three paragraphs of the story...

" Four ecstasy pills have been found inside a computer game bought at a High Street store.

Richard Thornhill, 34, found the drugs under the front cover of X-Box game Grand Theft Auto IV, which he bought from Gamestation in Cheltenham.

Mr Thornhill said: "What made me feel the most distraught was the fact we let our 12-year-old play the game."

Paragraph 3. #ParentingFAIL - FFS. Sorry. I'm sure you were distraught.

Right. Back to the Merlot ;).

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Oh God. Had a bit of a panic earlier as the Rode K2 went flying from my hands. Is it Dead? Thank fuck, no.
My voice, on the other hand, appears to be. Can you work out why I don't sing in this band ;).

PS - Rode - you make amazing gear, your returns/servicing policy is the NUTS, and we generally love you ya Aussie bastards ;). Hugs and Kisses from all of us.

Is It Dead? by Riddlermusic. Co. Uk  
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Is It Dead.mp3 (396 KB)

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Actually, I think what I really need is some sort of massive modular system.  And some sort of theme for a modern man...

And a cape.

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Ring Classic 02 Ver2A by Riddlermusic. Co. Uk  
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Ring_Classic_02 Ver2a.mp3 (205 KB)

Ring Digital 02 Ver2A by Riddlermusic. Co. Uk  
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Ring_Digital_02_Ver2a.mp3 (151 KB)

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Ok. Have just set up this posterous account, so it's about time to test it out. Double whammy, as my wireless connection has decided to die, so this is testing posting from my G1.

Geeky. Very :).

Hopefully, all will go well, and I can start using the account from anywhere and everywhere. And a little shout out to the posterous co-founders who tweeted @RiddlerMusic and persuaded me to choose posterous.

So here, hopefully, is a picture of my enormous real coffee I had a few hours ago while TwitPic was down...

M

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