Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Apples and Oranges

Entry 884 posted in: 4. Orb Weavers

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Pomme Fritz (aka The Orb's Little Album) (1994) was the second Orb cd I bought and it nearly made me loose my appetite for LX Paterson and his goofy friends. Although it was rather short I could never bear to listen to it in its entirety. The jewel box lay next to the player and for weeks I tried to digest it with the only result that I ejected the disk, mostly somewhere during the quite abominable We're Pastie To Be Grill You track.

In the end a cat with good taste peed on it so I finally found it was time to place the goddamn thing in between those other plastic do not open boxes that just gather dust in my cd collection. (If you really want to know it was in between Meatloaf’s Bad Out Of Hell and T’Pau’s China In Your Hand.)

But on the twelfth night of the twelfth month of the year 1999 I finally took a breath of fresh air, put the 'Little Album' in my cd player and listened to it in one go. Here is the (previously unpublished) report I wrote about that.

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KARTOFFELN MIT SCHWEINEBRAT

It all starts in March 1994 when the Orb announces a new single: Pomme Fritz, to be part (with Valley and Plateau) of a new album that will be called Orbus Terranus. A few months later it is promoted as title track of The Orb's Little Album, little indeed, as this full cd has about the same length as their infamous single Blue Room.

Paterson explains in the press that they decided to reshape the single into an album to make it available for the fans. They don't want the same thing to happen as with Blue Room, labeled as a single and since long withdrawn from The Orb's back catalogue. Seems logical, but some paranoiacs believe that their new record label, Island, may have a hand in this. The adventurous days of the Island label are long gone and the record bozos are probably not happy with a group that continuously undermines long term record company management plans by issuing 40 minutes singles, albums for a day and a saucerful of very limited mixes for the small, but happy, few.

This doesn't mean it is a bad record. Is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music bad? Not if you love the sound of dozen buzzing amplifiers, it is not. Is John and Yoko's Two Virgins crap? Not if you like the lurking game, with an ear against the wall, while your neighbours are having a go at the Kama Sutra inside the lid of a grand piano. Is Amon Düül's Minnelied a joke? Probably. (I bought mine for its cover alone).

Pomme Fritz has a nice picture as well, reminding me of the cover of the remastered Pink Floyd Relics cd, so once in a while I took it out to have a look at the strange machine.

Pink Floyd trivia. The LP version of Pink Floyd's Relics (1971) had a drawing by their drummer and once architectural student Nick Mason, representing a Pepperlandish machine. The most common cd version has a 3D model of this original drawing.

I DON'T LIKE FISH

I once mailed the superfluous statement to the quite lethargic alt.music.orb newsgroup that I never realised what a fine track Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg) really was until I heard it on the compilation album U.F.Off. Some Orb lover replied that Little Album wasn't that bad when listening to it on acid. I am not an acid man myself (and no other illegal drugs either, gentlemen of the FBI & CIA, whose Internet tracking machine that goes <ping> just went <ping> by detecting the word acid, <ping>, acid, <ping>, acid, <ping>, LOL) so tonight I planted myself as a Bombay potato in my couch with a glass of lethal, but legal, Italian Sambuca on the side and let the horror loose.

As I already stated, Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg) really is a nice track in the fine traditional Orbian mix between Kraftwerk and the Magic Roundabout. Somewhere near the end a voice promises us an electroshock therapy and that's what the rest of the record really is about, I guess. The only question is: how many electroshocks will it take to like the rest?

More Gills Less Fishcakes isn't that bad either if you take the Vickie Leandros Après Toi and sect leader annex mass killer Jim Jones samples for granted. Then it is time for the already cited We're Pastie To Be Grill You, seven minutes and fifteen seconds of the same sentence being repeated over and over again, in altered states, sometimes slowed down, sometimes accelerated, shaken, not stirred, run through a dozen of noise inducing filters. This is experiment for the sake of experiment and most of the time it sounds as if a Gregorian monk choir is singing inside a helium infested studio.

Emptying your mind and letting this track take possession of your brain is a trippy experience indeed, although not always a pleasant one.

As a matter of fact the sampled sentence does not really say We 're Pastie To Be Grill You but "We're happy to be with you" and Pink Floyd fans will probably compare it with the Roger Waters experiment on 1969's Ummagumma: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict.

Pink Floyd trivia: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict is basically a Roger Waters fun track using human voices and nature sounds playing at different speeds. The track may have been inspired by Ron Geesin who experimented with tape loops before and who asked Roger Waters to co-compose a soundtrack for the documentary movie The Body (1970). One track of their partnership, Our Song, used body noises to create music.

Bang'er'n Chips further elaborates on the electroshock sample, but can’t keep its promise "that you will be more relaxed than you've been in weeks". Alles Ist Schoen, German for "everything is beautiful", shows the composing skills of someone who will soon become a full time member of The Orb: Thomas Fehlmann. His musical roots are buried among the German minimalists whose repetitive electronically drones were very successful in the Seventies: Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Gerhard Froese and Kraftwerk.

To end the record there is a two minutes joke track called His Immortal Logness vaguely build around the tradition or German march music.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A JOKE?

That's about it.

For the first time in years I finally managed to get through the complete menu. And while I realized that Pomme Fritz (The Orb's Little Album) isn't really that catastrophic at all I put on Robert Wyatt's masterpiece Rock Bottom to console myself. With its backwards taped vocals, its shrieking trumpets, its repetitive and monotonous drones, this record must have sound as alienating in 1975 as Pomme Fritz did to me in 1994.

You maybe have found out by now that a culinary theme runs through the album, but most titles also hide a few puns. Pomme Fritz is, of course, linked to the French Pommes Frites (French fries) but Fritz, as we all know from televised black and white Saturday afternoon movies, is also a nickname for the Germans. The Orb's Little Album was, for a great deal, recorded and mixed in Berlin and most of the numbers have had input from Thomas Fehlmann and his band Sun Electric.

More Gills Less Fishcakes could be a possible Pink Floyd pun when reversing the reading order of the title (Gilmour?) and while I'm at it Fish Rising was one of Steve Hillage's solo albums (a long shot, I admit).

I already explained that We're Pastie To Be Grill You is a bastardization of the "We're happy to be with you" sample. I can't make anything decent from Bang'er'n Chips although the term chips is used as a synonym for French fries (I won't get into details about the bang'er'n bit that probably means the same as ummagumma).

Alles Ist Schoen (or schön in neat German) is the literary translation for 'everything is beautiful'.

His Immortal Logness could be, with some imagination, interpreted as a little dance performed by the last living species of a crusty old dinosaur, which lives, as we all know, in the lake of Loch Ness.

EN FRANÇAIS S'IL VOUS PLAIT

In 1994 I found an advertisement for Le Petit Album in a French magazine with French song titles. Those are:

English Title	French Title
Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg)	Viandes Et Legumes
More Gills Less Fishcakes	Oeufs Farcies Aux Cèpes
We're Pastie To Be Grill You	Crèpe Suzette
Bang'er'n Chips	Beatrice Dalle Et Brigitte Bardot
Alles Ist Schoen	Tout Est Beau
His Immortal Logness	Bon Appetit

Some happen to be literary translations of the English titles, some are not. I never figured out if the album was indeed issued with these French titles in France, or not.

CONCLUSION

Is Pomme Fritz "little more than a meeting of disparate electronic doodles from an endless array of natural and synthesised sources without the benefit of any obvious musical landmark" as Peter Kane wrote in Q? It certainly isn't the album I would point starting Orb fans to buy first. Do Pink Floyd fans really listen to the studio disk of Ummagumma? Who has ever made it through Nick Mason's Grand Vizier's Garden Party?

FLOYDABILITY

In mind but not in music.

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Pomme Fritz has recently been reissued in a remastered version, containing a second disk with the following rare or unreleased mixes: Sausage Tats Mit Gravy, Star Twister, Potato Fields of Electric Gliding Blue (extended version of Alles Ist Schoen), Eastern Hot Dogs in Gardens of Dub and Wrapped with Salt & Vinegar.

I don't think I will ever listen to it.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: U.F.Orb 2007

F-Prot: Don't Panic!

Entry 880 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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Last week’s entry was about buggy software. This week I wanted to post about the first of the most recent Orb reissues, 4 in total, but then disaster struck.

I have been sympathetic towards the anti-virus product F-Prot since my MS-DOS days. F-Prot has saved my day and my ass at least a couple of times. F-Prot was (at least the dos version) freeware and with some tweaking you could make it run as a real-time scanner on Windows 3.11, 95 and 98 as well. Shame on me!

The dos versions refused to work on XP though (due to the NTFS file system) so I was obliged, well not really obliged because I could have switched over to another one of the free AV tools, to buy some licenses. I’ve got 35 of those now. F-Prot is not only very reliable it is also very very cheap. One single license costs you about 20 Euro but 35 licenses will only amount to about 100 Euros, and that is still cheaper than some of the big shots in the AV world for one license alone.

F-Prot released version 6 of their product last year and were so thrilled with it that they announced that the previous version, number 3, something must have got wrong with their numbering, would be discontinued in June.

But disaster struck with Thursday’s update. Apparently that one automatically deleted the old - existing - version without replacing it with the new upgrade. Every PC had a dreadful red security center icon telling that the antivirus had been disabled. I don't know how many clients F-Prot has, that is not my goddamn business anyway, but they must all have felt as protected as swimming without a tampax.

While some forum aficionados were contemplating what had just happened (and proposed solutions and workarounds for the problem) the F-Prot management and programmers had suddenly disappeared from cyberworld, as if they had been annihilated by a passing convoy of Vogon warships.

About 8 hours after the first forum message signalling the problem an official message appeared. It read:

“We are experiencing a minor temporary malfunction in our update servers.”

This kind of infantile crisis communication was of course like swinging a red flag in front of a jumpy bull. As another forum member sarcastically remarked:

“I don't think this is a minor temporary problem. I think this is a Major Meltdown.”

Don't forget that thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands of computers had suddenly no virus protection anymore (or so it seemed anyway).

The official reason why the F-Prot management apparently didn’t find it necessary to communicate about the problem was explained (a day later, again on the forum) as follows:

“The reason was not that we weren't taking the problem seriously, it's been our only concern for the last 48 hours or so. We just didn't want people to panic.”

So far for the official reaction of F-Prot that was published in large friendly letters.

I just think the F-Prot heads were panicking themselves and had to clean the shit out of their own pants first. By the way, their website doesn't mention anything at all about the would-be crash. For them, it is like it never happened. They should perhaps check if there are still dolphins swimming in the ocean.

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The DOS versions of F-Prot can (apparently) still be downloaded and used. More info (and some utilities) can be found on the following addresses:
Download F-PROT Antivirus for DOS (official)
Claymania F-PROT for DOS page
Living with F-Prot for DOS Antivirus

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: True Story 

Buggy software

Entry 873 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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At the right side of the screen there is a link to the giveaway of the day website. The concept of this site is simple enough. For a day, and that day only, you can download a commercial software package and license it for free. The deal is: no upgrades, no support and in most cases no commercial utilisation of the program. What you get, so they promise, is a complete version with no trial version limitations.

Up till now I have only installed a couple of programs of the site, less than half a dozen in fact, as I only download programs when I need them. A minus of the system is that it is impossible to migrate the program from one pc to another or to re-install it after a crash (unless you have a mirror or if you have used an installation watchdog that can copy back all the hidden files and registry entries that were created during install). As others have remarked before on the forum: there is no point of downloading an all performing crash recovering program if the day that your pc really crashes you need to buy the software anyway in order to recuperate your data.

Another thing is that most software comes from dodgy companies, some of those can't even spell their menus right, who offer pretty useless utilities at exorbitant prices. Who needs a password generator at 29.95 bucks apiece anyway? The good thing however is that each giveaway of the day entry is largely commented by a horde of critical people who often point you towards freeware that does things better and has free updates.

A couple of weeks ago I was again tempted and I downloaded an English dictionary that would tremendously enhance my blogging skills. Alas, Typing Assistant only spelled in American English and not the Oxford variety of the language. And crazy enough it crashed several times in the most popular and widespread text editor around: Microsoft Word; switching once too often between programs resulted in a terrible messed up screen.

But to add insult to injury whenever I wanted to input an apostrophe - quite a commonly used sign in Shakespeare’s language I might add - the soft automatically replaced my typed letters with an unwanted entry from the dictionary:
here's was changed automatically into hereafter,
won’t was distorted into wonderstruck; and
I’ve miraculously transformed itself into interpretes.

I found out that the mistake was due to my exotic keyboard layout called azerty. The azerty keyboard, used in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and some parts of Switzerland has a top row that does not default to numbers. Top row numbers are only chosen with caps lock (or shift lock) on and when the caps lock is down the digits are not numbers but ampersand, hyphen, all those weird French letters with accents, brackets and so on. On my azerty keyboard (there are some different regional versions as well) the apostrophe is placed at position 4. To cut a long story short: although Typing Assistant rightly interpreted the 3 middle rows of my keyboard it failed to do so with the top row.

Because I still believed that the typing assistant had a valid function especially for non-native speakers I contacted the makers of the program. Although the giveaway number one rule says no support a reply came back sooner than I had expected.

It read.

We mainly target to English keyboard layout, because there are so many keyboard layout we can not research them each.

Free gift or not this answer does not entirely satisfy my soul.

In order to predict the right word this program needs to log the letter that has been triggered by a key and not the key itself (a mistake that was often made in dos days and that made games and programs quasi unusable for non qwerty users). In my opinion that is not a matter of a weird and exotic keyboard configuration but of bad programming. Period.

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Some freeware typing assistants:
Let Me Type
PhraseExpress

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: GiveAway Of The Day 

iPod Random Generator June 2008

Entry 871 posted in: 9. I, Pod

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Also in 2008 my MySpace page will contain some useless iPod statistics. This year however my iPod will always stay in shuffle mode, in others words: the machine will decide what songs will be played. For more information: Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics.

At the end of each month I will publish the ten most popular songs of the year and the ten most popular songs of the past month.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in 2008 go to http://www.myspace.com/atagong.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in April, go to the MySpace blog section.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: iPod Random Generator May 2008 

European Frontal

Entry 859 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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On Sunday mornings all is dull and quiet. Some people go to church; I take a cup of Italian coffee, start the computer and surf a bit. Sunday is the day I visit those sites I usually don’t visit very often, except on Sundays that is.

One site I visit from time to time is Snopes that is dedicated to urban legends. Is or isn’t there a penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid home video? Is it true that Jessica Rabbit doesn’t wear underwear on four frames of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie (who are the people who have the time to go hunting after these things?). And can one really read the letters S-E-X in a dust-cloud during The Lion King?

(I really should quit writing these posts; I have just lost half an hour browsing the Snopes site again. And speaking about penises, is this warning label true? It comes from another minute muncher of a site that I just discovered a couple of days ago.)

Another of my favourites is Badmovies that lists a series of reviews of so-called B-movies. This is another one of those click-and-read & click-and-read-a-bit-further sites. Once you start you can’t stop and to add another cliché to the hopeless bunch of clichés I have already used… Badmovies.org is like a box of chocolates. Barf.

One of the movies that has recently been reviewed is Zombie Lake, aka Zombies’ Lake, originally Le Lac Des Morts Vivants (literally: the lake of the living deaths). The plot of the movie is simple enough. Somewhere near a small village in France lies is a lake and although it is forbidden to have a swim it takes victim #1 about 30 seconds to completely undress only to get devoured by an undead Nazi soldier who happens to be living, although living is not exactly the right word, under the water surface.

Normally an incident like that should discourage other skinny-dipping enthusiasts but alas, the French have their own way of reasoning and that is why a complete volleyball team, do I have to stress the fact that it is an all-female volleyball team?, jumps in the water a while later. The movie is set about a decade after the end of the Second World War, anyway in a period when textile was very scarce or during those odd years when all swimming suits were prohibited in France. So were razor blades. For the younger readers of this blog, who shouldn’t be reading this at all by the way, the black triangles you can see on certain regions of the female body are not the artistic product of an overzealous censor but the main reason why these body parts used to be addressed as beaver, muff or pussy.

But I just don’t want to publish another review, as there are already a few circulating on the web, and I’ve just spent most of the last Sunday morning (and afternoon) reading those. To get rid of the uncanny feeling that I ruined an entire day I present you hereafter…

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Felix Atagong’s entirely useless review of 9 Zombie Lake reviews.

(Skip immediately to The Zombie Lake Movie First Five Minutes Faq if you are not interested.)

Bad movies (9/10). I like the reviews at this site. They are funny, witty with a touch of irony. The reviews are so well written that you actually want to have a look at the movie in question, even when it reads that this is the worst movie ever. The Things I Learned From This Movie rubric makes one chuckle, as it tends to demystify the ever-growing list of movie clichés.

Pro: every review contains a character overview, the plot, stuff to watch for, some sounds, images and a (short) video clip of the movie in question.

Cons: Almost every B-movie, even this one, carries a danger sign scene that is instantly disregarded by the person who is going to expire a few seconds later. Although this site has a warning that reads: “There are currently ZERO bare breasts on this website.”, this is actually the truth. Pictures that do contain a certain amount of pixels that could arouse the odd couch potato have been censored with a banner.

Antagony & Ecstasy (7/10). The thing I like about the review on this blog is its title: Zombies & Tits. As an appetizer this can count. Also the fact that reviewer uses a Belgian movie poster speaks in favour for him. Thanks to him I now know the Dutch title of this tiny masterpiece that is nothing more than a word for word translation of its French title.

The article contains some interesting titbits (I know I just can’t resist that word) about the creator of the movie (who was apparently so ashamed that he changed his name on the credits). The pictures have been chosen to illustrate the film’s cheapness and not its scarcity of textile. I would like to point you to the fact that the author uses a neologism I happen to like a lot: vaginidyll. If more blogs would use this word it could grow into 2008’s new big googly thing!

All Things Zombie (5/10). What is wrong with these people? Don’t they have a sense of humour? First their website takes as long to load as an average zombie needs to cross the road and then they simply trash the movie? Probably the reviewer didn’t have his brains for breakfast.

Realm Of Horror (6/10). A short review that is indecisive whether it should stay serious or not.

Bad Movie Planet (7/10). This review tries to describe the complicated (complicated as in incomprehensible) plot in much detail with an eye for the many flaws in the script. There are a few pictures, including one with the famous volleyball-team-skinny-dipping scene. The author is a weird person though, because he uses red rectangles on the pictures to hide the black triangles. What’s wrong with triangles?

B-Movie Graveyard (8/10). Man, this is a big review, and with big I mean BIG. Reading it takes about the same time as watching the entire movie, but reading about it is of course more pleasant than viewing the whole thing.

Pro: Many, many subdivisions and extras: the credits, the plot, a more elaborated plot, a character map, several downloadable video scenes, the many mistakes (wrong type of Volkswagen used, for instance), some pictures, an extensive review, a content breakdown, movie statistics (containing a dead bodies, boobs and bush count!), downloadable dialog excerpts, theme music, more photographs, more video clips, extra comments, unanswered questions and WTF moments containing a real pair of uncensored yummy boobs! B-Movie awards, trivia listing, the Final Word.

Cons: You need a lot of time to read this.

Bad Movie Dimension (6/10). Well, one of the serious reviews about this very unserious movie. Well worth the read and the fact that I only give it a 6 out of 10 could come from the fact that I have just been reading half a dozen of reviews before…

Movie Mistakes (4/10). A list of 27 mistakes in the movie, but most of those have been spotted in the other reviews as well. Pity for the annnoying ad in between pages.

But if you are more or less in a hurry you can watch the online video review of...

The Cinema Snob (8/10). The cinema snob doesn’t mind telling us what this movie really is about, so if you are not offended by quotes as ‘this movie has officially urinated on my face and told me it is raining’(3’33”) this is the review for you.

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The Zombie Lake Movie First Five Minutes Faq  

1. In the beginning of the movie you see a swan on the lake. Why don't the zombies attack it?
Have you ever seen a restaurant with swan on the menu? Duck yes. Goose yes. Swan no.

2. Why does the brown haired beauty remove her clothes?
Topless sunbathing is a national sport in France. As a matter of fact it is considered anti-French NOT to sunbath topless. Just like it is considered anti-American in some circles to eat French fries, although that is rather stupid as a: the French in French fries has got nothing to do with France; and b: French fries originate from Belgium anyway…

3. Yeah but the brunette removes more than her blouse.
Technically she is still sunbathing topless. Ask Bill Clinton.

4. Come on, she is stark naked!
Sunbathing naked is perhaps not a national sport in France but if you wander around at the French Riviera you will count a respectable minority of nude sunbathers, even on public beaches. God, I love that country!

5. Why do the zombies suddenly decide to attack the girl after they have quietly lived at the bottom of the lake for a dozen of years?
Probably nobody ever had a swim before in the lake, as the whole village is apparently dimly aware of the curse.

6. Here is a small village in France. There is a lake nearby; did the children never go for a swim then? It must be very tempting, especially when parents forbid!
Perhaps only sexually mature maidens will arouse the zombies. If one single drop of blood can turn a handful of dust into a full-grown vampire, then the pheromones of a woman, swimming in a lake, might wake the zombies as well. Call it a zombie puberty catalyst.

7. Not all zombies are green, some have normal skin color, especially in the neck and behind the ears. Surely this is a case of (very) bad make up.
What if these undead only change skin color when they turn into – what I call – zombie puberty, triggered by the female pheromones (see faq question 6). A bit like black babies that are (often) born quite pale and only turn dark after a while (and some body regions of black people, like their hand palms, will always be lighter in color).
On the other hand they could suffer from a mild case of cupper oxidation as well.

8. That still doesn’t explain why the brunette jumps into the water.
Probably because the girl is not only pretty, but stupid as well.

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And if you have enough of reading all this, you can have a little fun with the Zombie Tower Defense game. Its simple, its dumb, its addictive.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Popular science books are fun 

EUlogy

Entry 854 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash, 8. Unfinished

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What follows is a rather boring post, but I've spent a lot of time writing it, so I'll publish it anyway. Sorry for that.

My country, although you probably won’t believe me, was one of the founding dwarfs of the European Union. Belgium itself is an amalgam of three different nationalities that, due to several historical atrocities, were cut off from their original fatherland, whether they liked it or not. Because Germany, Holland, France (and even England) had better things to do than to quarrel who would take care of that ungrateful lot a job search was done for an unemployed member with royal blood. Because they couldn’t find any they settled for a German duke who would become the first king of Belgium. His son Leopold II, still a hero in our official history books at school, would create his own little playhouse called Congo, where he could rape and murder and become immensely rich (and a while later very poor again).

At the end of the Second World War Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg created an economical entity called the Benelux (a Belgian-Luxembourg treaty already existed in the Twenties). A couple of years later France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux-3 signed a treaty that was known as the European Coal And Steel Community. One thing lead to another and today we have a political and economical community with 27 member states and a population of nearly half a billion. Hurrah!

But there is a strange thing going on: the bigger the EU becomes the less popular it is with the actual inhabitants of the Union. There are a couple of reasons for that. You’re not going to escape from my reasonings!

EU devours money by the quintillions

Because the principal members of the EU couldn’t agree to have a single headquarter they created two. A couple times a year they switch from one headquarter to another, meaning that files and papers have to be physically moved from one place to another. This cost about 200 million Euros a year.

Like any other country Europe has a set of ministries, commissions, workgroups, you name it. As every state likes to have its share these centres are based all over Europe. The EU can be easily be categorized as being Europe’s biggest travel agency.

EU is the perfect scapegoat for local mismanagement

For years local (national and regional) politicians used Europe as the perfect scapegoat to cover up for their own mistakes or to put unpopular laws into place. All over the European Union decision were taken, not because politicians, in their own words, deemed it was necessary, but because it was ‘ordained by the European Union’.

This created the image of the EU as an overzealous police officer, harassing the local neighbourhood, instead of dealing with the real problems (whatever these real problems might be).

EU is more concerned with its democratic appearance than with democracy itself

When the European parliament was founded (in 1979) nobody seemed to care that the institute had less power than their Soviet Russian counterpart. Although big shots from all over Europe wanted a well-paid seat they didn’t bother to show up anymore once the press attention had diminished. Slowly the parliament got more power, real power, but the real decisions are still taken outside the parliament. One of the most important items of the European Union, its budget, is totally out of control, literally and figuratively speaking.

EU loathes real democratic decisions

One of my unfinished projects, and I’ve got this idea for a novel over twenty years now, starts when the communist government of a further unspecified country in the east of Europe wants to inundate a historic site because the great Bozo who is in charge has decided to do so. Then the Berlin wall starts crumbling down and a couple of months later a democratic government is in charge. And guess what? Nothing has changed. The damming project will still go through because the communist decision makers have all turned into democrats and businessmen. Of course a lot of interesting things happen after that, larded with a lot of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Dan Brown and Stephen King may be happy that I never wrote the novel to begin with.

And I just thought up the following while writing this post. The European Union is the modern equivalent of the Papal States. Although the pope was a ruler of his own independent country (part of it what we now call Italy) his word was also law in the other countries of Europe. If, for instance, the French king wanted to take a decision and the pope said no - it was no. No reasoning with the pope. That is why every papal election was such big fun, with all European countries lobbying to have their pope elected; cardinals eliminating other cardinals to influence their chances and if a pope wasn’t really up to par for a certain party an antipope would be elected as well.

Anno 2000, when the European Union speaks the parliaments of the member countries jump. No questions asked. The main problem arises when some countries start to get difficult and really want to involve the democratic process by ways of a referendum. Then the results tend to differ a bit.

1972 - Norway refuses to enter the EU
1992 - Denmark votes against the Maastricht treaty
1994 - Norway refuses to enter the EU (for the second time)
2000 - Denmark refuses to join the Eurozone
2001 - Ireland votes against the treaty of Nice
2003 - Sweden refuses to join the Eurozone
2005 - France refuses the European constitution
2005 - Netherlands refuses the European constitution
2008 - Ireland votes against the treaty of Lisbon

Instead of finding a way to diminish the democratic deficit of the EU and to make the Union more attractive to its citizens the EU moguls choose the easy way out.

A referendum was negative? Change the treaty in such a way that for a second vote you don’t need a referendum anymore but just a vote in parliament. Satisfaction guaranteed (a few days ago this was proposed as a solution for the Irish problem).

A referendum was negative? If the no-votes only had a slight majority you can always try to organise a second referendum, hoping the weather will be better and the population is in a slightly better mood (Denmark, 1993 and Ireland, 2002). The strange thing is that consecutive referenda are sometimes held to switch the decision from negative to positive, but never the other way around.

So how does it all end? Well in my unfinished novel some committee decides to relocate a historical church to an open-air museum somewhere in America and the vampire that is freed per accident becomes the next president of the United States. Nobody notices the difference. “All’s well that ends well”, to quote Will the Great.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Just like Belgium 

Solidarnosc

Entry 847 posted in: 5. The Pink Thing

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Years ago I used to make some fun with those Iron Maiden fans who wanted to buy every piece of vinyl defecated by their favourite band. Each album contained at least four singles. Every single existed in different formats and they all had one or two unreleased numbers. Probably Iron Maiden has got more unreleased bonus material floating around than regular album tracks.

"Look.", said one of these metal (although in those days we still called it hardrock) guys when he ran to me out of breath on the schoolyard: "This single is wrapped inside an exclusive Eddie calendar. Wow, an exclusive Eddie calendar! Can you believe it!" What the fuck are you gonna do with an exclusive Eddie calendar, I thought, and my inner reflections wandered back towards that unknown island, somewhere near the Greek coast, were Pink Floyd was believed to have a villa were you could nookie all day long for free.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good chunk of Iron Maiden, especially their recent work that tends to be a bit more - uhm - philosophical. Somewhere on my cd pile I’ve got a DVD-single, and don’t laugh at me now, please, that ‘includes (an) extensive exclusive selection of tour photos’. Never bothered to put it in my player though, I was tempted just a few seconds ago but then I thought: naaah, my life will not be less miserable with or without a bunch of exclusive tour photos. Most metal fans are ugly anyway, not to speak about the Maiden themselves…

Lucky for me I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the Seventies and the band was known for not issuing singles, maxi singles, remixes and additional – previously unreleased – material in any audio format you could dream of. True? Well, as any anoraky knows, not quite…

Follows a small interlude for anoraks. Skip if you don’t want to read it.

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Let’s trash a few Pink Floyd myths to begin with…

1. Seventies Pink Floyd never made any singles. Right? Wrong!

It is true that classic Pink Floyd wanted to be known as an album, not as a singles, band and refused to release singles in the United Kingdom (and the USA), but in other European countries their demand was simply ignored by the local subsidiary of EMI (Harvest). Pink Floyd singles have been released in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands and a bunch of other countries.

2. Learning To Fly was the first global cd-only single. Right? Wrong!

Of course Pink Floyd started to bring out singles again in the Eighties and beyond, starting with the smash hit Another Brick In The Wall (for anoraks: Part 2). In 1987 the reformed Pink Floyd made the newspapers by stating that Learning To Fly was the first global cd-only single (with the exception of a few vinyl promo NOT FOR SALE copies for the radio stations)

If this is the case, how does it come that I could purchase a 7-inch 45RPM on pink vinyl at the local record shop? Germany, France and the Netherlands released those.

3. Pink Floyd were ‘first in space’. Right? Wrong!

When Pink Floyd released Delicate Sound Of Thunder in 1988 a copy (on tape) was given to the Soviet (and one French) cosmonauts who played it on board of the MIR space station. Pink Floyd and French president François Mitterand attended the launch of Soyuz TM-7 on the 26th of November 1988. A global press release was made to commemorate the fact that Pink Floyd was the first rock band to have its record played in space.

As a matter of fact French synthesizer composer Didier Marouani whose Space Opera cd was flown to the MIR space station by Soyuz TM-3 on the 22nd of July 1987 beat Floyd with more than a year. (This is not the entire story and I am planning to make a post about it in the future – if you can’t wait you can already check this post on alt.music.pink-floyd).

Interlude End  

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But if we’re not too nitpicky one could say that Pink Floyd wasn’t a singles band. Period. The good thing about this all was that as a fan with about 100 Belgian francs pocket money per week I could easily get drunk at the pub instead of planning how to beg, borrow or steal this week’s exclusive release. That’s why these metal fans are all criminals to begin with, too many fucking releases, not enough money! (the previous is obviously a joke, I have never met nicer people than on hardrock gigs).

But recently there has been a change in Mr. David Jon Gilmour’s behaviour. Perhaps the metal polish for his CBE medal has taken an unpredicted lump out of his household budget because the man is in an urgent need of money. Our hero, whose epitheton ornans is ‘the voice and guitar of Pink Floyd’, will release his fortcoming album Live In Gdańsk in 5 different formats and or versions. A rather nice overview of these can be found on his blog.

Live In Gdańsk will be the second complete live release from Gilmour’s latest solo album. On An Island isn’t entirely a bad album, but it isn’t groundbraking either. I quite like it, other’s don’t. But does one really need two live versions of it? When I attended a Gilmour show (with Richard Wright on keyboards) a couple of years ago the audience politely applauded after each of his Island songs, that made the first part of the show. When the axe, for the second part, played a hitbox selection of his Pink Floyd tunes the crowd went berserk. Some fans were even spotted dancing without holding tight to their rollator.

Alexis Machine, a member of the Echoes mailing list, describes the On An Island continuing story as follows. It is an excellent overview so I won’t pretend I made this one myself (I have added some comments here and there):

It's amazing how much David Gilmour has been able to generate from one album! While we can say he is generous, would someone else interpret it as greedy? Here's all that I found that is available related to this release:

1. On an Island CD (FA: the green spine cd)
2. On an Island with bonus CD of "Island Jam", available through Best Buy (FA: Island Jam could also be downloaded at Gilmour’s website)
3. On an Island LP
4. On an Island CD + DVD package (FA: the red spine cd)
5. On an Island Single
6. Smile 7" Single
7. Arnold Layne 7" Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
8. Arnold Layne 10" Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
9. Arnold Layne CD Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
10. Remember That Night DVD
11. Remember That Night DVD with bonus CD, available through Best Buy
12. Remember That Night Blu-ray
13. Live at Gdansk 2 disc set
14. Live at Gdansk 3 disc set
15. Live at Gdansk 4 disc set
16. Live at Gdansk 5 disc set
17. Live at Gdansk 5 LP set (FA: to add insult to injury, this one will contain one track not included on the other formats. The official reason is, and I quote the Gilmour blog: "There wasn't enough room for it on the CD". Yeah, sure.)

(.../...) ...removing all the different formats, I still have 2 live shows coming out of one album. Even Pink Floyd were never given that luxury!! I loved Remember That Night and I'm sure I'll enjoy Gdansk as well, but it's just that I HAVE to get everything, so having to buy the 5 different variations of Gdansk, along with the vinyl version is really irritating.

With some of the Gdansk versions comes a Web Pass to download 12 additional live songs (one per month) although 83% of the fans voted against it on the official blog. But here is a fine opportunity to offer other downloads at supplementary rates later on…

So hold on tight, cause gravy train is coming and it is going to hit your wallet very hard. Big man, pig man, charade you are.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Pink Floyd Mini-Vinyl Studio Box Set 

Picasso Power

Entry 843 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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This week, in the middle of the week, I found myself with a mini writer’s block, not knowing what to comment about on my blog. Professional writers have got little black books for that, with throwaway subjects when this occurs. I don’t.

A few, two, three, weeks ago I wanted to vehemently comment on one single chapter from Adrian Berry’s The Giant Leap. I have already stated here that I had started reading the book; as a matter of fact I love reading those old science books because I’m a nitpicker at heart. It is amusing to point out the errors from an old book but, if I look deep enough in my heart, it is also a cheap trick. It can also be quite embarrassing.

In my thunderous days I was (a very small) part of an illegal radio station in the city of Louvain. Now it is a widespread rumour in Flanders that if three Flemings come together they form an association of some kind. If a fourth member comes along there will be a quarrel within a week and the organization will split. So after a couple of months there were about half a dozen of local radios in Louvain, all illegal, but because the police had other things to do than to arrest young boys with a bunch of records under their arms (there were hardly any females in the illegal radio world) the radios were left untouched and everybody waited for the political world to come up with a solution.

Anyway, we were sitting in an apartment above a pub called Picasso cooking a radio show (I did the sound mixing) when the presenter started a satirical comment about a television anchor we commonly disliked. We were all so bold and beautiful and fucking progressive and we knew it. What we didn’t know however was that the television star in question was having a beer in the pub downstairs. It must have been a million to one shot (or is that one in a million?) but it happened. The celebrity jumped up the stairs, broke into the studio and asked, in fact demanded, for a live interview so that he could politely react to our accusations. The presenter became very pale and suddenly vanished from the studio. We found him later in the toilet where he refused to come out again as long as Mike Verdrengh (who would later become a founding father of the biggest commercial TV station in Flanders) was standing there. If I learned a lesson (although I was - technically - just an innocent bystander) it was that if you throw a stone at someone it might come back and double hard so.

Back to Adrian Berry and The Giant Leap, as his book deals a lot with space travel and the speed of light in a vacuum (known and more or less unchanged since the Fifties) there aren’t many errors to be spotted. These can only lay in short term predictions between 2000 (when the book came out) and now (for a quite recent discovery involving speeds faster than light you can consult Adrian Berry’s website here). ^Note But I completely disagree with Mr. Berry’s viewpoints concerning starships and politicians (as one of his chapters is called). Adrian Berry is (correctly) suspicious of bureaucrats and politicians but to deduce from that fact that salvation is only possible when one gives all possible freedom to economical moguls isn’t quite healthy either.

Of course some politicians are corrupt, of course some government projects cost 3, 4, 5 times more than their privately managed counterparts. But government organisations don’t build these projects; they first ask privately managed enterprises to quote for it. If these privately managed enterprises triple the price whenever government organisations are involved and even bribe the politicians behind it, who is then to blame? Take away government control and you have child-labour, even in Europe, before you can utter the words Adidas, Nike or Reebok.

But I also realize that the stone I’ve thrown towards Mr. Berry is quite useless. If this world ever wants to build a starship it will indeed be a lot cheaper if it comes out of a private group than from a government organisation. But I hope it will not be build by childslaves because there will be no more government left to prevent it.

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Note: One of his wrong predictions (in 2000) was that the Euro currency would (probably) have no future (p. 46). Back to text.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Popular science books are fun 

iPod Random Generator May 2008

Entry 822 posted in: 9. I, Pod

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Also in 2008 my MySpace page will contain some useless iPod statistics. This year however my iPod will always stay in shuffle mode, in others words: the machine will decide what songs will be played. For more information: Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics.

At the end of each month I will publish the ten most popular songs of the year and the ten most popular songs of the past month.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in 2008 go to http://www.myspace.com/atagong.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in April, go to the MySpace blog section.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: iPod Random Generator April 2008 

Twinsen Ma Non Troppo

Entry 817 posted in: 3. Gamebits

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I urgently need to stop writing about these games I’ve once played. Remembering LBA (Little Big Adventure aka Relentless in the USA) in a previous post Tycooning was enough for me to go hunting after it. I soon found the floppy version (only 13 MB) and thanks to Dosbox I could play it in a jiffy.

I tried it for a couple of days and decided that the floppy version wasn’t exactly what I wanted, although it does contain the complete game, but without the vocals and the intermediate movies. So I went webbing at the market-for-free for a cd version. Now I want to tell you, girls and boys, that I am totally opposed to downloading copyrighted games. But LBA is presently floating in a grey area that game aficionados call Abandonware and – AND – I used to have a completely legal - official - original cd of LBA in the past but I can’t find it anymore, honestly. Probably I lend it to somebody who never bothered to give it back. Not that this comment would carry much weight at the court of law.

Finding a cd version of LBA isn’t hard, there are several versions floating on the web, but making it run was nearly an adventure as exciting as playing LBA itself. Dosbox has the ability to masquerade a folder on your drive as a virtual cd-drive, provided you have a so-called image of the cd you want to store on the harddisk, and that is what I wanted to test.

One 460 MB download contained a NRG file but it wasn’t recognised as a valid cd image. I extracted the file with Izarc so that its directory structure was revealed and created an ISO file out of it, using an utility called ImgBurn. This time Dosbox mounted the ISO-image without a problem and I could install LBA from the virtual cd drive (D:\) on a virtual dos drive (C:\).

The Magicball forum was very helpful in showing me how to setup the sound card configuration for the game:

D: [Enter]
Install [Enter]
Choose your language
Hard Disk Installation
C:\RELENT
Music Sound Card Configuration: "Sound Blaster Pro 1 (OPL2)", "220"
FX Sound Card Configuration: "Sound Blaster Pro 1", "220", "7", "1"
Speech Configuration: "Keep Speech Files on Hard Disk - YES"
Save Parameters
Quit

But when I wanted to start the game I got an error that there was still no cd present. Blast, blast and triple blast! This was a dead end for sure. But if Twinsen, the hero of LBA, refused to give up trying to save his world from the dictatorial reign from the evil FunFrock, so would I.

µTorrent lead me to a 496 MB archive that contained a cd IMG file that was created with yet another cd-copying tool. Bingo! Here is how my Dosbox configuration file looks like now:

mount C C:\Download\Lba
imgmount D "C:\Download\LbaCD\LBA1.img" -t iso
C:
cd RELENT
RELENT

Although Twinsen’s world is populated with hilarious bunnies and funny elephants that seem to have escaped from a Teletubbies show it doesn’t mean that this is a child game, quite the contrary. If a hostile elephant grabs you he clobbers you to death as in a Quentin Tarantino movie and there are several really-very-close-to-suicide missions (the screenshot above-left shows an unhappy encounter with an armed Rabbibunny clone) .

It took me several hours to get through the Temple of Bù (rolling logs, spitting fire balls, murderous skeletons) and believe me; it can be very frustrating to get through a maze of blazing mitraillette fire only to be killed at the end by a soldier who comes out of the toilet.

On the other hand LBA is very humorous in a kind of continental way, LBA was (is) a French game and thus PC (as in political correctness) is not casting its evil shadow over it. The second LBA game, so I recall, started with a very proud Twinsen who shows us his big-bellied girlfriend, and correct me if I am wrong, there are not many games around where the protagonist has a pregnant wife to care for.

I was amused to find out that there is still a rather active LBA community on the web, with people trying to make a fan-based Twinsen prequel and others still hoping for the release of LBA3, a project that was stopped when the original company merged / disappeared / went bankrupt (just pick your choice). Apparently the original makers of the game still try to revive the interest for the third part of the trilogy . But for the moment all that there is to read on their website is: coming soon…

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tycooning