Posts by Ethan Tucker
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Top TV pre-royal wedding highlight: Jimmy Carr reciting one-liners on 10 O'Clock Live last night whilst dressed as Diana, wearing angel wings and floating on a fluffy cloud in heaven. Particularly the line about it being 'car-crash television', and the usual "If you see William, give my love to his father. And if you see Harry, give my love to his father", that sort of thing.
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I'd go into town for the spectacle, if only I wasn't allergic to bunting. Oh well.
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It's from the Wailers' incredible 1973 performance for Old Grey Whistle Test. Peter Tosh stars as The Coolest Man on Earth, and harmonises like a Beach Boy.
The introduction to that clip on the Whistle Test DVDs points out that for Marley & the Wailers it must've been one of the hardest gigs they'd played. A freezing cold BBC hangar in Birmingham, with no audience apart from middle-aged pipe-smoking brown cardigan-wearing cameramen. Soon afterwards they would can their first visit to the UK and flee back to Jamaica. And yet this performance is so legendary, and it laid the foundations for Britain's love affair with the man and his band.
For those unaware of the Whistle Test, I highly recommend sampling their archive material. There's plenty of great stuff on Youtube, but the DVDs aren't that pricey and are really worth owning, particularly the first collection.
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Hard News: Friday Visions, in reply to DexterX,
There should be 80 seats in parliament 70 electorate and 10 list seats...
Then it wouldn't be MMP and it wouldn't be proportional representation. In fact, that's even less proportional than Supplementary Member. And with only 41 required for a majority the pool of talent would be much smaller. There'd be hardly any government backbenchers - nearly everyone in the governing party or parties would be either a minister or a select committee chair.
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Enjoyed The Greatest Man in Siam clip, particularly the banner on the king's palace:
King's Daughter Contest
Also bowling at 3.30pmVery Simpsons! Or the Simpsons is very Shamus Culhane.
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to Sacha,
As long as it's a privately-owned monopoly, you understand.
You have to wonder how any attempt to dilute the rigor-mortis-like market grip of an unnamed privately owned monopoly would ever succeed, given the expensive lawyers and purely hypothetical political campaign donation power of that broadcaster.
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The first time I can recall hearing it was in 1986, when Farley Jackmaster Funk's 'Love Can't Turn Around' topped the singles chart in Britain.
Apologies for being a popspotter and perhaps harshing your nostalgia buzz slightly, but Love Can't Turn Around 'only' made it to no.10 in the UK charts in August 1986. A remix re-entered (just) ten years later, but that only reached no.40. But I'm guessing that given the standards of chart material at the time, to have one of your faves riding high must have seemed like a chart-conquering effort.
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to Sacha,
Ah, 'good' old Flying Pig, I'd forgotten about you. They've always been a fairly conservative bunch. I worked at Whitcoulls part-time for a couple of years in the early 90s and it was pointed out to me that it was one of the few retail chains that largely shunned TV advertising. Its policy on sales was the opposite to the flog-em ethos of Briscoes et al: I think there were two annual sales, regular as clockwork, never more. Does this paint a picture of a company that assumed its position as the bedrock of the NZ book retail market was unchallengeable?
I love the access here to London's many discount and remainder bookshops - Judd Books in Bloomsbury is my idea of paradise. The contents of most sale displays in places like Whitcoulls and Borders pale in comparison. Couldn't a savvy book-loving investor make a mint by hopping a cheap flight to London once or twice a year and shipping container-loads of quality remainder stock to NZ?
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to DexterX,
I would think he would be better off trying out as the lead singer of Bananarama...
In the interests of accuracy, I'm sure you'll all thank me for pointing out that Bananarama don't have a lead singer. In fact their Wikipedia entry once noted that they are 'known for their unique vocal style which features all members singing in unison rather than three-part harmonies'. This information has since been removed at the request of the Sarcasm Police.