Hard News by Russell Brown

That Mary Jane Girls 12" pickup is a score. Dang.

Frankly, when Ed came here for the first time in years to support Television, he blew the academic New Yorkers off the stage.

He certainly did. Television played like they had to do it to get paid, not that interested. But sadly no solo concert for Ed in Chch - and I have no burning desire to see a shortened support set for the Stramglers (or the Stranglers for that matter.)

Wonder if he'll do Everything I've Got Belongs to You?

Hopefully Wilderpeople and Tickled get some AUS distribution, we shall see I guess …
One thing I’ve been enjoying is this bloke Cortez’ jazz mix Niles (DL available):
https://cortez.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/mix-niles/

The second track in particular was really catching my ear, and when I double checked the tracklist I realised I have the Trunk reissue filed in the shelves! Speaking of Trunk, aka Johnny Trunk, his latest tome of library music album covers has just been released and would be a good addition to coffee tables everywhere … I scooped at a nice price on Ebay
http://fuel-design.com/publishing/music-library-2016/

And I’m sure you’ll have no shortage of things to do in NYC Russell, but if in East Village and strolling along 5th ave keep an eye out for Good Records, a tidy boutique type record shop. In my experience you can get some good soul/jazz/funk stuff there (i.e. in the US & at Good) at a fraction of what it would cost in these parts of the world. Williamsburg market can also be a good place for perusal as well

http://www.goodrecordsnyc.com/

That Mary Jane Girls 12” pickup is a score. Dang.

I thought so!

And I’m sure you’ll have no shortage of things to do in NYC Russell, but if in East Village and strolling along 5th ave keep an eye out for Good Records

Thanks! I have three days in Brooklyn and a list of shops to visit there before I move to a hotel near the UN, but I'm sure I'll have time for that too. Record shops, they are nice.

Bloody hell!

The King's Arms has been designated a Special Housing Area and is set to be the site of 60 new apartments.

PDF map here and more detail here (under "Newton Cluster").

I don't know what the ownership situation is and nerds seem to differ on the likely level of heritage protection.

Auckland needs to make k road it's music street. Like a south pacific sunset strip, so begging for cool venues. K road is our most musically perfect street. And when it has a station , look out.

Auckland needs to make k road it’s music street. Like a south pacific sunset strip, so begging for cool venues. K road is our most musically perfect street. And when it has a station , look out.

I definitely agree.

And the return of Newton gully to residential – after 30,000 people were expelled in the 1960s so the motorways could be built – makes some sense too.

Central Auckland needs to be a hub. That’s how it works and inner city Auckland can be magnificent if planned properly. The intensity of a new throbbing isthmus needs to be optimised for the future of this strangely confused present soulless city. Historically music has pushed the vibrancy of the city. In the nineties Bfm culture showed how the city could be very exciting, that vibe needs to be revisited and extended.

Hopefully Wilderpeople and Tickled get some AUS distribution, we shall see I guess …

Both should find there way into at least some theatres in Aus... Keep your eyes peeled.

Sad to miss Keuper in Chch. Saw some great gigs in Sydney in the late 80s – both stripped back, and with horns. Should be good shows.
Wilderpeople is a great romp. Looking forward to Tickled too – there was some talk of backers getting access to a stream?

Random factor post...
Not sure where to put these links - science stories that may have huge impacts down the line...
http://phys.org/news/2016-04-state-two-dimensional-material.html

An international team of researchers have found evidence of a mysterious new state of matter, first predicted 40 years ago, in a real material. This state, known as a quantum spin liquid, causes electrons - thought to be indivisible building blocks of nature - to break into pieces.
Quantum spin liquids are mysterious states of matter which are thought to be hiding in certain magnetic materials, but had not been conclusively sighted in nature.
The observation of one of their most intriguing properties—electron splitting, or fractionalisation—in real materials is a breakthrough. The resulting Majorana fermions may be used as building blocks of quantum computers, which would be far faster than conventional computers and would be able to perform calculations that could not be done otherwise.

and
http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/artificial-dna-stores-1-million-copies-of-a-movie-160405.htm

A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water -- and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.
...
DNA is almost unimaginably small -- up to 90,000 molecules can fit into the width of one human hair -- so even such a large library is totally invisible to the human eye. All you can see is the water in the tube.
"This, we believe, is what the future of movie archiving will look like," Bolot said.
...
The company's work builds on research by scientists at Harvard University, who in 2012 successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data -- around 700 terabytes -- in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a factor of one thousand.
...
The contents are "read" by sequencing the DNA -- as is routinely done today in genetic fingerprinting -- and turning it back into computer code.
Converting movies into man-made DNA brings huge advantages, said Bolot, who points out that the archives of every Hollywood studio, currently taking up square kilometers of floor space, could fit into a Lego brick.
Another problem overcome by DNA storage is that the format for reading it doesn't become obsolete every decade or so, unlike celluloid, VHS, DVD and every other medium in the history of filmmaking.

also – I’m loving the Met Service’s city webcams for Auckland Wellington and Chchch – timelapse shots that ‘mousing over’ can animate – from dawn to realtime – you can watch the all the boats rise on the tide in the Viaduct harbour, and I’m sure one day I’ll spot a tagger finishing their work in the Chchch one…

The link is just to the right of the forecast (as you look at the screen)

The rain radar and satellite shots are neat too…

…and elsewhere there’s always http://www.abbeyroad.com/crossing for evening entertainment here in the antipodes.

The link is just to the right of the forecast (as you look at the screen)

Wow! Best mouseover experience ever. Those shadows moving....

Wow! Best mouseover experience ever.

You obviously don't frequent xkcd.

I had no idea that xkcd had mouseover text. There goes my morning!

I had no idea that xkcd had mouseover text.

I can't find any 'mouseover' action there - maybe it's invisible?

Meanwhile here's this to be going on with...

I wondered why the soundtrack for Hunt for the Wilderpeople sounded so familiar (but in a new sort of way), then I remembered this from back in the 80s: