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The news that’s been too overlooked to post:
Contra Costa Times: Lawmakers call smoke a pollutant – In California today, state lawmakers have classfied second-hand smoke as a toxic air pollutant that’s a danger to human health that could lead to even stricter regulation on smoking pracitces despite California’s stringent current rules. Amongst the information brought before the panel by the Air Resources Board is informatino on the 31,000 episodes of asthma it causes in Californian children each year.

From Reuters.com:

The designation by California’s Air Resources Board starts a process that could lead to further smoking bans in a state that has often led the nation in health and ecological regulation. “I think there is no question that this puts California way ahead,” said John Froines, chairman of the Air Resources Board Scientific Review Panel.

“To actually have the major air pollution agency in the state of California to list ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) as a toxic air contaminant is going to have immense impact, we think, in terms of public education around other states,” he said. “It will clearly lead to regulatory changes within the state.”

Seattle Times: Punt, pass and plié: Ballet has its Seahawks fans, too – The Seattle Times looks at the worlds of Ballet and NFL Football ahead of Seattles groundbreaking Superbowl game. The Seahawks have never been in the superbowl before so this is a 30 year first for them. At the same time Seattle has an amazing ballet company, the PNB. The two cultures don’t seem to mix, but in a funny way, they sometimes do.

“I wish my art form created the emotional fervor that this thing does,” said [Ballet instructor] Wells, a Tacoma native. “We struggle with our ticket sales for the ballet, and my understanding is that they can’t sell Seahawks T-shirts fast enough.”

The Guardian: ‘I can win this time’ – Having just come out to the party and public through in interview with a UK tabloid paper, Liberal Democrat Party MP Simon Hughes is looking for support from his party to become leader. He gave an interview to the Guardian a couple of days ago saying that he wasn’t gay. Now he’s singing a new show-tune and the paper reviews his position.

The Guardian: Apple Print Ad Top of Tree – An advertisement for the supermarket chain Tesco has won the top prize from the Awards for National Newspaper Advertising. With the simple image of an apple and accompanying text the ad declared:

“What’s the difference between ours and our competitors?”

“Not much really. They’re the same quality as Waitrose. And the same price as Asda.”

The Guardian: ‘Sea power could provide 20% of UK electricity’ – A new report from the Carbon Trust, out prior to a report on the UK’s position with regard to Nuclear energy, says that 20% of the UK’s energy could be produced through the adoption of wave and sea power souces. With investment and greater production of equipment the costs of wave power could be brought down to current levels of carbon-emitting power sources. It’s a challenge the government could meet, but may not like to due to the likelihood of failure.

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It’s like an open source Tivo on your computer. It’s sharing Bittorrent files without worrying about the legal hoop-la because it’s all actually legal! It’s new and it’s online and you’ll love it because it’s what so many people love; television. Using the power of P2P, this new application allows users to subscribe to video feeds that can automatically download, via the Bittorrent ’swarm’ protocol, the newest and most current television or video content.
This isn’t meant to be network television, such as would be the case for the new RSS subscriber Tv Tad but for legal content. The idea is to spread citizen journalism, publicly owned content and free content that users are interested in, rather than the highly publicised and promoted content that media networks own. This isn’t about tv episodes as Digg.com described TV Tad, but free video content.

The creators of this software, the Participatory Culture Foundation have created alliances with publishers of video content who would like to have their content distributed to the masses via the internet. They create ‘channels’ for the content from these allies, one of which is called ‘telemusicvision’:

A new music video channel [that] plans to use DTV to broadcast videos exclusively from independent music groups.

This is great news for me because they include music videos from some of my favorite artists of the moment, like the Postal Service and Azure Ray. Alternative music’s use of P2P downloading has been found to increase significantly the fanbase and sales of small and independent artists, while marginally decreasing the sales of the most popular mainstream bands. This is a great example of the alternative viewpoint getting a voice.
Other examples of DTV friends include Current TV, the new network started by former US Vice-President Al Gore, and Pancake Mountain, a educational film provider.
It’s not available on Windows yet and the the Mac OS X version is currently in beta, version 0.7. However, the group expect Windows support soon and the Linux version is anticipated in the next weeks. For anyone with a Mac, check it out.

participatoryculture.org: DTV

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She’s great when she’s in the close quarters of television because it’s intimate. She’s great when she’s horsing around with co-hosts because her infectious laugh fills the television studio so well. They chat, the laugh and they play silly games with each other all while viewers are watching live, and that’s why she’s excellent. She cultivates a mood that becomes the selling point of her shows, however when she’s on stage for an award show… everything’s wrong. You can’t be intimate with 10,000 people all at the same time. While the TV camera provides the opportunity to be ‘in the room’ with her, a stage just makes it all the more obvious how unusual her style is.
Smash Hits Poll Winners Party 2005, just before introducing Jack and Kelly Osbourne, she says to the crowd, quipping,

Can you say Boo?

It’s hilarious because it’s so like… eh?! WTF?! It’s funny for us ‘at home’ because the crowd are still screaming in anticipation for the next act and they didn’t really hear her, meaning all they could really do is go on screaming; Yah! They couldn’t understand what she’d said and so it was even more silly. No-one understood what on earth she was on about!
Lessons for the future: When on a live stage, speak clearly and don’t make clever side remarks: nobody hears them!

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I don’t want to hear
I don’t want to know
Please don’t say you’re sorry
I’ve heard it all before

One continuous mix of tracks that spans the length of the twelve tracks, dance euphoria is an unapologetic disco triumph. It’s a triumph but it’s not something that you necessarily grow into. Because of the essentially ‘pop’ nature of the dance mixes, these are not all songs you’d listen to many times, nor an album you will play the entirety of, as would have been the case with Madonna’s previous dance album, Ray of Light.
There are some excellent songs, namely Hung Up, Sorry, Let It Will Be & Isaac. Isaac is one of the most interesting songs on the disc, starting off with the words of a member of the London Kabbalah Center named Yitzhak Sinwani. ‘Isaac’ would presumably refer to Isaac Luria, the founder of the Kabbalah religion that Madonna follows to much public mocking. The song has produced accusations of blasphemy for using the religion’s prophet for profit, but as a song it’s intriguing as it’s so different. Madonna’s standard lyrics of not-really-meaning-anything words that that fit into the beat have been mixed with a fantastic baseline and chanting that has some sort of symbolism.

Staring up into the heavens
In this hell that binds your hands
Will you sacrifice your comfort
Find you way in a foreign land

The rest of the album is good, but not the ‘believe the hype’ revelation that some like NME would have us believe. The use of a single continuous mix has been much lauded as selling point, but it’s not all that noticeable when listening to the songs. The tracks tend to fade in and out like most albums do, but here they just fade out slightly less than most. It’s not unique and it’s not all that special. It works but we shouldn’t think of it as anything more than a simple ‘why not?’ style decision. If this is a dance album it’d be much more strange to not have the tracks mixed together. Think Daft Punk’s album Discovery for a perfect example of how this works and how it worked in 2001. In contrast to Daft Punk’s work, don’t expect to play any of the songs straight from the CD in a club; they’re simple made-for-radio versions of dance music, not anything a dance fan would deem worthy. Dance music proper has beats that fade in and overtake you with they rapid all-pervasive variety; there are highs and lows to appreciate.
This ‘dance’ is really just pop with a faster beat and a some interesting guitar and synth work. It’s a more frail and considered album than the ‘American Life’ of 2003. Where that album boldly strode into the limelight with a Bush criticising music video, with symbolism that posed Madonna as a Che Guevara style, anti capitalist, anti war icon (if Guevara, a militant, could ever be seen as anti-war). The image fell flat as the American public, or at least the media, withdrew their support. Burned and apparently out of touch, Madonna’s new album is safer. A studio mix that never goes too far, never holds out too long to bring the beat back but as a result never really fulfills. It’s a fearful and calculated mix that’s hoping to appeal to vast numbers of people, but doesn’t actually say anything about the singer herself. Where ‘American Life’ fell because it revealed too much, this one falters because it doesn’t reveal anything at all. ‘Isaac’, the Kabbalah disco-chant, is interesting but it doesn’t how any weakness or any love. The soul of the Ray of Light album was pulsing and strong, but here it feels like the bars on some sheet-music; nothing to write home about no matter how perfectly executed.
Confessions on a Dancefloor by Madonna. Worth listening to, worth buying, but don’t hold your breath for a techno salvation.

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Use of sleeping pills has gone up by 85% in the time between 2000 and 2004, which the New York Times says indicates another sign that “parents and doctors are increasingly turning to prescription medications to solve childhood health and behavioral problems.”
I honestly think it might just be that people are trying to fit so much into their time that they end up so buzzing at the end of the day that they need something to keep them down. If their parents can take a night cap, why can’t the kids take a Nytol? But then at the same time:

Dr. Andrew D. Krystal, director of the insomnia and sleep research program at Duke Medical Center, said that insomnia had long been undertreated, and that few doctors recognized how much insomnia could worsen other medical problems. Long-term medication can help relieve these problems, he said.
Dr. Krystal said he [also] consulted for and did research paid for by several drug companies.

NYTimes: Sleeping Pill Use by Youths Soars, Study Says

At the same time as kids are taking drugs to get away from it all, the Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the US Navy in Los Angeles courts to halt or cut down the use of active mid-frequency sonar during training exercising because of the damage the systems do to whales and other sonar-prone mammals. The group wants the Navy to avoid known calving and migration routes but does not request any change in behaviour for sonar use during critical periods.

The lawsuit blames the Navy for the January stranding and deaths of at least 37 whales on North Carolina’s Outer Banks after a mid-frequency sonar exercise. The Navy said it was unlikely the whales were harmed by sonar because the exercises were too far away.

The NRDC sued the federal government in a New York federal court in June, seeking documents about the mass stranding and other marine mammal deaths. The new lawsuit also cites a May 2003 case in which orcas behaved erratically and porpoises were found dead in northern Puget Sound following exercises by the USS Shoup, a Navy guided-missile destroyer.

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The bad thing is that you are almost promoting what you are trying to protect against. You are upsetting the fan that went out and purchased the record.

Jason Brown, president of Philadelphonic, a management company that represents Tristan Prettyman, whose album in among those trialing ‘copy-protection’ with EMI.

Fans get annoyed with having newly purchased CDs marred by the implementation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software which controls what can be done with the content. By restriction consumer choice, the record companies are driving away their most needed customers, the ones who are tech savvy enough to rip their music to a computer. If they can’t do that, surely the response will simply to download if illegally? What’s new is that now the artists themselves are joining in the protest by aiding listeners in breaking the DRM. The software normally allows users to burn at least one ’standard’ copy of the music on an unprotected CD. That CD can then be ripped back onto a computer as with any unrestricted CD.

Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, “Nothing Is Sound,” is copy-protected — and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week — recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

CNN.com: Musicians tell how to beat the system

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Sometimes I follow you
I Look through your window
and I watch you sigh
You’re getting off real soon
I should ask your name
Maybe get your number
We could go out sometime
It’s all in my mind

I need some excuse just to come talk to you
Be my five minute friend
You know I’ve got time to spend

I hope you don’t mind
That I’ve come to see you
and It’s no mistake that you see my face
I know I’d do best to forget about us
‘Cause there is no us
I forget: It’s just a crush

‘Cause there’s someone else
He knows your name, yeah
and He’s got your number
Maybe he’s just a crush
Maybe he’s so unkind
And he’s never on time
He Doesn’t know your such a find
There goes my mind

I need some excuse just to come talk to you
Be my five minute friend
You know I’ve got time to spend
» Read the rest of this entry «

Popularity: 3% [?]

‘Juliet’ releases her much anticipated album in the next couple weeks, while the reviews are building. If the first single, Avalon, the collection of high powered expertise (produced by Stuart Price, aka Jacques Lu Cont [Madonna], arranged by Guy Sigsworth [Frou Frou] and engineered by Mark Stent [Massive Attack, No Doubt, U2]), and the combined weight of the positive feedback are anything to go by, Random Order is an album to keep on heavy rotation.

From Juliet sounds.com:

Set against a backdrop of scintillating dance-inflected rock beats, Random Order induces a tidal wave of emotional vistas where Juliet’s brooding vocals seduce and entice listeners with a potent cocktail of penetrating sensuality and undeniable bravado. Composed spontaneously over an inspired 2 week writing spree in New York and London, the album is a kinetic hybrid of melodic electronic, dance, pop and rock referencing 1980’s post-punk / new wave with sleek and, deceptively simple, modern musical innovation that is both nostalgic and contemporary.

Previously having fronted the pop band 1 Plus 1, Juliet was ‘unhappy’ with the image and style of their band. “I never wanted to be a face or a product. When I realized that I was about to be another manufactured pop tart, I shaved my head, started screaming in black instead of bouncing in pink, and Mannequin was born. [The music label] Elektra had no idea what to do with us and let us go”. She travelled around clubs and performance halls over the course of two years and then reconnecting with 1 Plus 1 former A&R man, signed on to Virgin Records for her first solo album. Due August 30th, Random Order counts 12 tracks.

Billboard.com: Juliet Bringing ‘Order’ to Debut CD

Sean Piccoli in South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Juliet (Richardson), a 25-year-old Philadelphia native based in London, moves past her Shirley Manson moment quickly enough. Random Order gets rolling, and by the second track, Avalon, it’s clear we’re in the presence of a formidable talent. Random Order puts Juliet in the company of other DJ/MC hybrids — LCD Soundsystem (New Jersey native James Murphy) and M.I.A. (British Sri Lankan Maya Arulpragasm) — making smart, sexy dance music that doesn’t expire outside the club.

From BradfordShellhammer.com:

Madonna has a tough act to follow

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Every year in Britain there is a competition, sponsored by a building society, that recognises outstanding songwriting in albums released that year. This Mercury Music Prize is so-called because it was begun by the now-defunct phone company Mercury. Oddly enough this year the prize, given to British songwriters, was awarded to a man from New York, though he qualified by being born in the UK and living here until the age of 10. Anthony Hegarty won for his writing on the album I Am A Bird Now. His acceptance speech was exceptional.

“I think they must have made a mistake. I am completely overwhelmed. I think that’s insane.

It’s kind of like a crazy contest between an orange and a spaceship and a potted plant and a spoon – which one do you like better?”.

I feel I’ve been pulled out of my nest.

From Reuters:

An androgynous New York-based artist who sings haunting ballads about gender confusion was the surprise winner of one of Britain’s most prestigious music prizes Tuesday. Antony Hegarty, whose quavering voice has been likened to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, won the Mercury music prize with his band, Antony and the Johnsons, for their album “I Am a Bird Now.”

Acclaimed by critics but little known in the mainstream music world, Hegarty has been described as the “gayest thing ever recorded.”

Bloomberg: Antony and the Johnsons Win U.K.’s 2005 Mercury Music Prize
Contcatc Music: Antony and the Johnsons Win Mercury Music Prize
Reuters: Androgynous New Yorker wins top U.K. music prize

Watch the video for the song ‘Hope There’s Someone’ at video-c.co.uk

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