All Readers!! EXCITING NEWS INSIDE THIS ISSUE!!!

That's right pals, from next week we're welcoming our chums at "Monster Fun" to "Angry Since 1967." All your favourites will be here, plus some great new stories I know you'll love. Laughs are guaranteed as "Our Survey Says.....Exactly What We Want" and "A Week Without Mp3s" meet "Frankie Stein", "Martha's Monster Make-Up" and "Kid Kong". That's right! From next week "Angry Since 1967 and Monster Fun" is the only place you need for your fix of chortles and guffaws! And, as an extra special treat, we've a Twitter feed FREE for all our friends! And all these jolly japes and giggles aplenty are yours for just 6p! Remember mates, you don't want to miss your weekly fix of laughs, ghoulish goings on and depressing, wearying curmudgeonry, so place an order at your local newsagent NOW! 

AS1967 Revamp

Yeah I'm footering with the layout of the blog, as with all the archived posts it was becoming a pain to find things. I'm not entirely sure yet what I want to do, so expect an indeterminate time to pass before I work out what the hell I want it to look like. 

Exactly..... 

A Week Without mp3. Now in HD Sound. And available on iTunes.

I can't help noticing, but we appear to be in the middle of a concerted effort to rebrand the downloaded mp3 facsimiles you buy from legal sites as "digital music". Indeed Apple have been advertising several recent album releases on TV with the catch line (I'm paraphrasing) "start your digital collection with...". Now far be it for me to rain on this particular parade, but this is utter bollox. How precisely are these downloads any more "digital" than a CD and doesn't the simple act of owning a CD mean you already have a "digital music collection?" 

Of course not that this will stop them from making the claim. Especially now, when you can, for the first time, download (sorry "add to your digital collection") the complete Beatles back catalogue from iTunes. Not that you would, of course, as there are a couple of problems with these downloads. They will sound worse than the original 50 year old vinyl versions and they are, quite incredibly, more expensive than the equivalent, better sounding, CD versions. Perhaps the two companies, whose "historic" agreement made this possible, and who so famously reference a pomaceous fruit, picked the wrong brand name. Given their continued reliance on flogging old rope, it would have been more accurate to name their respective organisations "Hemp."  
  
Of course this "digital music" marketing-ese which Apple use, isn't an isolated example. There are many others just as culpable. Take the BBC. Recently they announced the introduction of "HD Sound" versions of their streamed radio channels. So does this service offer 24 bit/96khz streams, comparable to SACD or DVDA? Of course it doesn't. It is just a slightly higher quality version of the lamentable thing they offer at the moment. No harm in that I suppose. Well, yes and no. I can't dispute that it sounds better, but "HD?". If you read the technical gobbledegook they've posted to justify the addition of the prefix "HD", you'll realise the patent misdirection they are engaged in. No matter how they try to cache it, the 320kbps standard they've picked is patently worse than the "real" HD formats of SACD or DVDA. By a considerable margin.  This so called HD sound is not, by the commonly accepted definition, "HD".  More damning? It's actually worse than that unloved throw back - good old CD. And here's the thing. I'd always suspected, sooner or later, someone would call an mp3 based audio format, offering sound quality worse than that of CD, "HD". The only surprise? The culprit is the BBC. Why the "surprise? My money was on Apple. 


If ever there was an example of why I need a sub-editor it's the tortuous language I've used in this post. Honestly? The more I think about what I've written, the worse it gets, especially when I try and "fix it". I reach the point when the sentences stop making any sense. Or rather when the sentences start making even less sense. Damn my clumsy sentence construction....*

*Still at it.  

Our Survey Says....Exactly What We Wanted (16)

As you can see nothing has changed. This "survey" demonstrates exactly my point. Company / Charity is selling a service, the survey finds it is either indispensable or better than that offered by its' competitors. And, predictably, the media prints the results with uncritical and unquestioning reverence. I will make a simple observation. When was the last time you saw a survey which found an organisation, different or distinct from whom it was commissioned by, coming out on top? 

Exactly.  

Queues form as Angry Since 1967 launches new blog post at midnight.

The newest post on Angry Since 1967 caused mild hysteria yesterday as fans queued for hours to be the first to read it. The internet, which stayed open to midnight for the occasion, claimed that this was an "unprecedented" event. Angry Since 1967 has grown to be an internet phenomenon, and has literally had a dozen hits since its inception back in 2006. One analyst claimed Angry Since 1967 had "redefined the blogsphere's zeitgeist", and was "a continually evolving paradigm shift" which "resonated across the social media's entire ecosystem". 

In the queue spirits were high. One person said "I'm so excited I've wet myself, I can't wait to read what he's written this time." Another claimed "I was promised food and a warm bed". One said they were habitual queuers "If I see a line of people I have to join it. Especially if there is a wee roped off bit with some red carpet at one end." 

Another individual, who preferred not to be named claimed they made a good living from midnight launches. "Yeah I'm employed by the company as an "ambient participant", although previously I've played the role of an "active participant". I get to be interviewed by the media immediately after being the "first" to buy the new piece of ephemeral tat they are plugging. Obviously learning my lines can be a bit of chore but I enjoy it." So how did this happen? "Well I wanted to be first in line outside a local electrical retailer for the their Boxing Day sale, when I was told the position had been already been filled by someone else. When I saw their well practised joy, as the cameras popped after they'd "bought" the damaged repaired cooker they'd been queuing for, I realised "that's the job for me". Yeah I've had to work at it, but it's paid off, now I go to all the launches. Okay a god forsaken shopping centre on a cold November night isn't great, but I did get to go to Los Angeles and New York earlier this year for the launch of a tablet computer, and I got to be first in line as well." So what did they think of Angry Since 1967? 

"Who? 

A Week Without mp3. Another "Another" update

I read this article people won't pay for "free" internet music streaming services and it neatly demonstrates the point I made here and here about Spotify. People won't pay, if free is available, regardless of the limitations you impose. Until, that is, the limitations become apparent, or if it ceases to be worth the hassle, then people will find an alternative. Which, in the case of music delivered via the internet, are all those P2P sites you can download music from. And "free" with no limitations will always beat "free" with limits, no matter how illegal the former is. Now this certainly isn't right, and I'm not condoning it, but it seems to me that for the music industry to compete against the pirates they need to work out what the hell they "really" do and what they are "actually" offering the public. At the moment all these sites  We7, Spotify, Itunes and the rest, are just answers to a question no-one ever asked.

Welcome To Fear. Side Two

I get a sense people thought I was exaggerating in my last post. 

Health Risk From Texting 

Welcome To Fear*

You wake. The first decision of the new day waits - getting out of bed. And off to the bathroom you go. But you can’t take a shower as the water is filled with female hormones from the contraceptive pill, and you can’t use soap because it causes eczema, or brush your teeth due to the dangers of fluoride and the dangerous plastic materials in your toothbrush. You can’t use mouthwash either as you've read it causes mouth cancer. All you can do is peer at your ablutions, worried they contain some hidden omen of your mortality. 

You dress, carefully and guiltily, thanks to the highly inflammable materials used and the poor children in the third world living in squalid conditions who sew your clothes together. Breakfast follows. Cereal and milk. But the cereal which is high in fibre is high in salt and the one high in flavour is packed with sugar and fat. Your coffee is made by a company with dubious practices in the third world, which you don't drink anyway as its full of caffeine, leaving you to decide whether to take your chances with tea made with hormone soaked water, or milk filled with DDT and artificial fertilizer. 

The journey to work offers no relief. You daren’t get the train, as it’s a walk down a dark, badly lit street, where you could be accosted by rapists and muggers, or trip on the badly maintained pavements, or fall over some inappropriately placed signage. The bus is out as well; all that coughing and spluttering from your fellow passenger’s guarantees you’ll be infected by some strain of super-flu, assuming you survive the knife brandishing hoodies, you’ll share the journey with. So you take the car, trying to ignore the likelihood of Legionnaires disease brewing in the window washer bottle, and the other drugged or drunk drivers in their uninsured, insurance write-off cut and shut cars, complete with counterfeit tyres that you share the road with, don't get you today. And that you avoid the fraudsters who deliberately break on roundabouts so they can claim whiplash injuries on your insurance. Assuming, of course, you’re simply not hauled out of your car by hijackers posing as newspaper sellers. 

And once you've made the fraught journey to work? You turn on your PC. And as you are bathed in the faint radioactive glow from your monitor, you remember that the only thing protecting you from the poisonous heavy metals which it contains is its thin plastic case, covered in lead based paints, made in a factory by people earning 5p a month, for a 100 hour week. But you console your self, at least they have a job. With the cuts and stuff you’re lucky if you still have one, and certainly when you lose it, as you inevitably will, you’ll fall down the between the cracks in the welfare system, cast out of your cowboy builder built house because the miss sold payment protection insurance you took on your mortgage doesn’t cover your repayments. Unable to afford anywhere to live, you end up destitute on the street, easy prey for sex traffickers and the methadone addicts. Which, given your productivity has collapsed due to the RSI from using your keyboard incorrectly, combined with the lower back pain from you slouching in your unsupportive seat, seems your inevitable fate. 

Lunchtime arrives. You daren’t eat any of the sandwiches Tesco sell – too fatty, salty or sugary, or any of their wax coated, pesticide treated, flown in fruit. An although their water is “pure” it comes in a bottle made from plastic, which will, in a couple of years time, be fished out of a blow hole of a drowned Sperm whale and traced back to you, your finger prints having surviving the poisoned seas intact.


You’d surf the internet at lunchtime but with the groomers and the scammers trying to steal your identity so they can spend all your money on Chupa Chups and Monster Munch you decide not to. And no I won’t change the printer toner either lest it explodes or I inhale any of its carcinogenic toner powder. And certainly I won’t change the paper. What if I got a paper cut which then became infected by an antibiotic resistant superbug?


The trip home is an equally hazardous adventure – dark evenings, road rage drivers in unsafe cars, high on Pine Magic Tree fumes. Home offers no solace. You turn the TV on and see a list of new things to be fearful of – parcels from Yemen, hidden fees, pension shortfalls, dirty hospitals, dangerous dogs, knife crime, unhygienic restaurants, alcohol, global warming, deforestation, overpopulation, water shortages, trans fats, freak weather, lone gunmen, internet, the rise of the right, the rise of the left, the rise of the middle, music, video games, ra-ra skirts, platform heels, indoor toilets, outdoor toilets and the rest of the wearying, predictable, unending menu of fear mongering which now passes for the “News”.

Calling it quits you retire for another restless night – worried the smoke alarm won't work or that you'll be consumed by voracious bed bugs while you slowly choke on the allergens in house dust mite faeces. 

Worst of all? You know, come tomorrow, they'll have new things for you to be afraid of.


*Yes I've managed to work in DJ Shadow reference.