Where Worlds Collide

Long time since we had a music meme doing the rounds. This once came via The Ministry of Information.

1. Of all the bands/artists in your cd/record collection, which one do you own the most albums by?
There are several artists I’ve got a lot by, I think it’s probably Deep Purple. Add in Rainbow and Blackmore’s Night, Richie Blackmore is probably a clear winner.

2. What was the last song you listened to?
“This is the 21st Century” by Marillion

3. What’s in your record/cd player right now?
Marillion’s Anoraknophobia

4. What song would you say sums you up?
I am too complex to sum up in a single song.

5. What’s your favorite local band?
From my old home town of Slough, it would have to be the now sadly defunct I Zingari.

6. What was the last show you attended?
Marillion at Manchester Academy 1

7. What was the greatest show you’ve ever been to?
Tough one. Blue Öyster Cult at the Hammersmith Odeon way back in 1989 is hard to beat.

8. What’s the worst band you’ve ever seen in concert?
Ignoring many dreadful support acts, the worst headliner has to be Sledgehammer in the early 80s. Dire barrel scrapings of the NWOBHM scene, played deafeningly loudly in a failed attempt to disguise the fact that they couldn’t play and had no decent songs.

9. What band do you love musically but hate the members of?
Can’t bring myself to hate an entire band, so I’ll select an individual. A few years ago I would have named Roger Waters or Richie Blackmore, but I think both of them have mellowed with age. So I’ll nominate Tarja Turunen, the (former) singer of Nightwish. Great voice, but I can see why the band sacked her.

11. What show are you looking forward to?
The Mars Volta, this Thursday

12. What is your favorite band shirt?
Has to be that black and yellow Uriah Heep one!

13. What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?
Buck Dharma of BÖC seems like a cool guy.

14. What musician would you like to be in love with for a day?
Heather Findlay. Unfortunately I believe she’s already spoken for.

15. Metal question: Jeans and Leather vs. Cracker Jack clothes?
Lack of knowledge of the nature of these ‘Cracker Jack’ clothes prevents me from answering this question.

16. Sabbath or solo Ozzy?
Sabbath, definitely. With Ronnie Dio, of course.

17. Commodores or solo Lionel Ritchie?
Neither

18. Punk rock, hip hop or heavy metal?
Metal, of course.

19. Doesn’t Primus suck?
If you say so. I don’t know one note of their music. Now Pete “I should be in rehab rather than touring” Doherty’s Babyshambles, there’s a band that really sucks.

20. Name 4 flawless albums:
Only four?
Marillion, Brave
UFO, Strangers in the Night
Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
Queensryche, Operation Mindcrime

21. Did you know that filling out this survey makes you a music geek?
So what?

22. What was the greatest decade for music?
The 70s. The decade of the almighty Mellotron!

23. How many music-related videos/dvds do you own?
Very few; I think it’s single figures.

24. Do you like Journey?
Of course. Get past the cheesy power ballads and they can rock out with best of them.

25. Don’t try to pretend you don’t!
It’s only trendy to slag them off because pop fans used to like them.

26. What is your favorite movie soundtrack?
This Is Spinal Tap.

27. What was your last musical ‘phase’ before you wised up?
I was never dumb enough to feel any need to ‘Wise Up’.

28. What’s the crappiest CD/record/etc. you’ve ever bought?
The self-titled album by Angelwitch. Awful songs, awful vocals, awful production. NWOBHM at it’s very worst.

29. Do you prefer vinyl or CDs?
CDs. Vinyl may be ’superior’ of you’ve got several grands worth of stereo equipment and keep your records in a sterile dust-free vault, but CDs are better for those of us living in the real world.

Another meme, from Norm

Directions:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

This takes me right back to 2002, and gives the final line, “And they got them!”, from this post. So much for English teachers insisting that you should never begin a sentence with a conjunction. It will be split infinitives next!

Appropriately for a meme from a cricket fan, it’s one of the very rare sporting posts on this blog, about the finale of the England vs. Sri Lanka Test Match. Norm will be horrified to learn that I have no recollection whatsoever of that match three years later.

I’ll pass the baton to anyone reading this who wants to pick it up.

“J Nelson Kwango” of the KFA Forum is rangly.

Comrades!

I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people!

Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!

Some of the followup comments are well worth reading too. Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s parody and what isn’t. (Link from Samizdata)

Norm is spreading a name meme

• My prOn star name (name of first pet owned plus street name of first address): Pepper Alderbury
• My West Indian cricketer’s name (surname of the US president in year of your birth plus last seaside town visited): Kennedy Sheringham
• My Star Wars name (first car owned plus the name of any medication you’re on, which reminds me of this): Volvo Loratidine

I had to cheat on the last one since, like Norm, I’ve never actually owned a car; it’s the vehicle my parents owned when I was 17.

I can imagine Kennedy Sheringham as a swashbucking middle-order Batsman.

This meme appeared on Ken Macloed’s blog, although it doesn’t seem to have spread very far, at least through the sections of the blogosphere I read. It appears to be a mutation of the earlier music meme.

1. How many books to you own
Never tried counting them all, but adding up all the SF novels, railway books and RPG rulebooks probably comes up with a figure in the high hundreds. Don’t think it’s in four figures yet.

2. Last book read
Neil Stevenson’s Quicksilver I’m about halfway through so far.

3. Last book purchased
Blue Pullman, by Kevin Robertson, purchased yesterday at the DEMU showcase.

4. Name five books that mean a lot to you

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe.
An epic in the true sense of the world. I can’t think of any other fantasy or science fiction work that rivals this for atmosphere; it’s been a big influence on my own RPG worldbuilding.

Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov.
Asimov’s first novel, not his best work by any means. Probably very dated now, like so much ‘golden age’ SF. The reason I’m listing it is because it’s the book that first got me hooked on SF, borrowed from the school library when I was about 14.

Red for Danger, L T C Rolt.
Tom Rolt’s history of railway accidents. Rolt avoids the tabloid-style lurid descriptions, and concentrates the technical aspects. He shows how the worlds railways are a safe means of travel today because of the lessons learned from the past.

Diesels in the Duchy, John A M Vaughan
An odd choice for “Books That Changed My Life”. When I returned to railway modelling in the mid 80s, I was looking for a suitable prototype to follow; John Vaughan’s wonderful photographs of class 37s, 50s, and Westerns in the beautiful Cornish scenery made that choice for me; the end result was several Cornish holidays doing ‘research’, and far too many N gauge locomotives.

The Bible.
Read the whole thing, and discover how the random verses the fundies love to quote often mean something quite different when read in their proper context.

5. Five people to tag
Since I didn’t wait to be tagged, anyone not on this list who wants to pick up the meme shouldn’t need to wait either! I’m still going to pass on the baton anyway, to Carl Cravens (responded), Ken Hite, Patrick Crozier (responded), Ginger Stampley (responded), and of course, Scott

Or Yet Another Music Meme.

I’ve been tagged for this Music Meme from Perverse Access Memory: Some similarities to an earlier music meme, but I’ll do it anyway.

1. Total number of records I own on CD (or vinyl or cassette):
CDs: Long time since I counted them, so I have no idea, but in the high 000s
Vinyl: About 300, all in storage at my parent’s place. There are an awful lot of classic albums I’ve still only got on LP.

2. Total volume of music files on my computer:
Very little

3. The last record I bought:
Van der Graaf Generator’s reunion album: Present

4. The last record listened to / song playing now:
Last record listened to: Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing. As I started to write this, Robert Plant and band were performing a song who’s name I didn’t catch on BBC2’s Later with Jools Holland.

5. Five records that I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me (either singles or albums):

• Pink Floyd: “The Wall”. First album I ever bought. Overlong, patchy, and self-indulgent in places, but still magnificent in others. And I got to see the whole thing performed live.
• Rainbow, “Down to Earth”, or more significantly the song ‘Eyes of he World’. This wasn’t Rainbow’s best album, with some cheesy pop singles and far too much mediocre filler, but that song is still a classic. And it was hearing that song on the radio that got me into Rock
• Blue Öyster Cult: “Some Enchanted Evening”. Their 1977 live album, with the incredible version of ‘Astronomy‘. I got into this band through a friend at university, Mark Huggett. I remember being completely blown away the first time I heard that song.
• Twelfth Night, “Live at the Target”. This was the debut album of the relatively short-lived 80s neo-prog band, who never achieved much commercial success, but were a big influence on bands like Marillion. Significant for me because I was in the audience the night they recorded it. I’ve since been to shows by UFO, Gillan, Thin Lizzy, Marillion and Uriah Heep that ended up on live albums.
• Mostly Autumn, “The Last Bright Light”. First time for many years I’ve been really enthused by a new band, and this one’s still my favourite album of theirs.

6. Finally, tag five people to do this meme:

Scott (again), Karen Cravens, Steve “Electric Nose” Jones, Martyn Read and Alan Monk. Not having a blog in no excuse, that’s what the comments are for!

The current blog meme doing the rounds, from Harry’s Place, Ten things I’ve Never Done:

1. Owned a car
2. Visited any country outside Western Europe or the US.
3. Voted for any successful election candidate who hasn’t either suffered from cancer or died in office.
4. Been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi
5. liked The Smiths or Morrissey
6. Managed to read more than 100 pages of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time”.
7. Read anything at all of “Ulysses” or “Atlas Shrugged”
8. Played a MMPORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game)
9. Actually finish a model railway layout.
10. Managed to build a Parkwood OOV “Clayhood” wagon kit that runs properly.

Time for another meme. This one comes via Perverse Access Memory:

List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can�t really understand the fuss over.

Since this blog covers multiple interests that are beyond the ken of “mundanes”, I’ll try and include one from each of them.

1. Depot layouts: A model railway consisting of a traction maintenance depot, with loads of locomotives, but no coaches or freight wagons. Sorry, but I’m interested in trains, not just locomotives on their own. At one point, for diesel and electric era modelling at any rate, depot layouts had become as bad a cliche as those endless GWR branch termini (half of which were of Ashburton)
2. Morrissey and The Smiths: A good candidate for the most overrated singer of all time. If this self-obsessed bore was really as good as his fanboys claim he is, he’d have sold a lot more records than he did. At least Roger Waters had some music to back up his miserablist lyrics.
3. The entire superhero genre: Comics, films, RPGs, the lot. I find the common tropes of the genre so inherently ridiculous I’m unable to suspend disbelief enough to care about the characters or the stories. If people started developing incredible superhuman powers, why do they adopt silly codenames, wear brightly-coloured Spandex costumes with their underpants over their trousers, and Fight Crime! And silliest of all, why do they always have to have secret mundane identities? And why does the presence of vast numbers of superpowered beings have no significant effect on history or culture?
4. Dice Pools: As used in Storyteller, and the horrid Deadlands. I guess the idea behind dice pools in RPG game mechanics was to create a level playing field between those who could do basic arithmetic in their heads, and those who are functionally innumerate. The problem with too many dice pool mechanics is that the designers themselves don’t seem to understand the probability curves of their own systems, which for me can lead to some very unsatisfactory gaming. When I keep rolling critical failures, I’d actually like to know whether I’m just being unlucky, or whether I’m attempting things my character doesn’t have the skill level for. Or whether the probability curve is so opaque that the GM doesn’t know what target numbers to set.
5. Football: If I go to the pub at lunchtime with work colleagues, most of the time they spend the entire lunch hour talking about bloody football. I’m sure the number of sad obsessives amongst football fandom exceed the total number of roleplayers, railway modellers and prog-rock fans. And when was the last time serious drunken violence erupted at a model railway exhibition or an RPG convention?

And now I’m supposed to pass the meme on. I’d like to nominate Amadán, except his blog is in limbo. Or Steve “Electric Nose” Jones, but he doesn’t do memes. But I can nominate Scott, Silkenray, and Carl Cravens.

I’m told this meme started somewhere in the Blogosphere, although I ran into it on Dreamlyrics.

The goal is to change one letter of a book title so as to give the story an entirely new meaning. After the altered title, offer a one or two sentence explanation of the new story.

I’ve interpreted changing one letter and including adding or removing a letter as well as replacing one. These are my contributions to the meme:

Neuromincer:

The true story behind Mad Cow Disease

The Curious Incident of the Bog in the Nighttime

Why did a suburban garden suddenly change into a swamp?

The Munster Manual

A d20 sourcebook for TV sitcoms.

Lard of the Rings

The adventures of a team of seriously overweight wrestlers.

Star Ward

Stories from hospital for celebrities, being treated for such things as freak gardening accidents.

The Mountains of Mudness

The terrifying story of sanity-draining non-Euclidian mud!

Valley of the Dulls

Very boring, and nothing at all happens in 703 pages.

The Stairs My Destination

A Dalek scientist struggles with the problem that’s been thwarting the Dalek conquest of the universe.

Gob Emperor of Dune

He rules the universe. But he’s all mouth.

Casio Royale

James Bond must thwart a villain who’s trying to dominate the world using sinister mild-control devices embedded in pocket calculators.

Dr Po

Another Bond adventure, featuring a terrifying overweight red villain with a television ariel growing out of her head.

It appears that a European advert for the film “Super Size Me” is upsetting the Freepi. Serves them right for the ridiculous “Freedom Fries”.