Warning! Hideous face alert!

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Jackie (That’s my photo. I’ll sue you!) Danicki …links to this charming video of Paul Potts singing Nessun Dorma but feels compelled to warn us about Amanda Holden’s face: ‘Try not to recoil in horror at Amanda Holden’s awful plastic surgery. She was beautiful the way she was!’ says Ms Danicki


Are you ready? Are you sure? Try not to puke on the keyboard, please! Ok, you were warned, here she is…

 

 

Arrrrrrrrrgh!!!! I think I’ll leave the hall light on tonight, please mummy.

 

Here is Paul:

 

Paul Is Not Dead

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Newcritics - Paul McCartney: Memory Almost Full
It is not a depressing album — one could really never accuse McCartney of trying to bum out his audience. What it is is a record by a man who has led an astonishingly full life, who knows he’s not immortal, and who faces his inevitable demise with clear-eyed honesty. It’s the artist’s fate ever to express in public what we all feel privately. This is a grave responsibility, and McCartney’s always been at his best when he takes it seriously.

Perhaps the most touching song on the record is “That Was Me,” a look back over his childhood, his adolescence, his mindboggling fame, with the astonished thought, “That was me!” It can’t be easy to have been Beatle Paul McCartney without let or hindrance for some 50 years without some coping method, some mechanism to shut oneself off from oneself, and here we see him reconnecting with the parts of himself that he shut out: “And when I think that all this stuff/Can make a life/It’’s pretty hard to take it in!” The song, despite its melancholy theme, is actually quite a fine rocker, with his voice rather more successfully roughened to his Little Richard tone.



Shut it down, says Powell

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Think Progress -  Powell: Close Guantanamo Now (Video and Transcript)
This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, Gen. Colin Powell strongly condemned the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it “a major problem for America’s perception” and charging, “if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon.”

He also called for an end to the military commission system the Bush administration has created to try Guantanamo detainees. “I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system,” Powell said. He scoffed at criticism that the detainees would have access to lawyers and the writ of habeas corpus: “So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about?”

“Every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds,” Powell said. “[W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open… We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.”




Two and a quarter million viewings in two days!

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YouTube - PARIS HILTON GOES BACK TO JAIL! Exclusive Video

I got an email earlier this evening purporting to come from the copyright holder of this video threatening me with legal action if I didn't remove it from my 'AD'.

I won't bore you with the subsequent correspondence but after I pointed out that A) the video was posted on YouTube together with embeddable code and a big notice saying 'SHARE' and B) not only was the page on which the video appeared not an 'AD' there wasn't a single fucking 'AD' on the entire website, all 3,000 odd pages of it, I got a 'whoops sorry' from the myopic twat.

I was going to forget the whole thing but then I thought - I'm using my webspace and bandwidth to promote and disseminate this guy's fucking creation, and getting threatened for doing it.

So FUCK YOU mister and your video.

I've dumped it. Watch it at YouTube if you want. Or at the link below.

Via (I know. Sorry! But credits are credits)


The service here is shite!

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National Service

Rather than worrying himself about some uncomplimentary comments made on a blog about an axe killer perhaps Über -Blogmonitor, Tim Ireland, could get his arse in gear and show some results for the money he happily took off some of us six months ago (in the days before he saw fit to suggest I was a liar, of course). I’m not bothered about the dough but if he’s not actually going to produce the goods perhaps he would like to donate my £50 to charity.

UPDATE: Don’t bother to click the link above. Since I posted this last night the National-Service site has been unavailable. Update 2: It’s up now (Trackback spam, apparently)






Finkelstein dumped - nothing personal

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Jews sans frontieres: Finkelstein denied tenure at DePaul University
Now we shouldn’t assume that the tenure has been denied because of his stance on such issues as holocaust “compensation,” zionism generally and, of course, Professor Alan Dershowitz in particular but it does seem rather odd that Dershowitz has a prestigious seat at Harvard and Finkelstein can’t get tenure at DePaul. It’s like zionists have some special influence in US academia but they can’t have, can they?
I do hope we see posts condemning this decision from the likes of Geras, Phillips, Grant et al.



UPDATE: Geras, to his great credit, has questioned the decision. He is no fan of Finkelstein but as a vociferous supporter of academic freedom and someone who is enegetically opposing the proposed UCU boycott of Israeli universities he set aside any antipathy towards Finkelstein to defend a principle. On a purely pragmatic level, with Dershowitz due here soon to support the Stop the Boycott campaign, to not at least question the DePaul decison would have been a glaring own goal.

Translate this...no fags here!

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Don’t Ask, Don’t Translate - New York Times
Consider: more than 58 Arabic linguists have been kicked out since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was instituted. How much valuable intelligence could those men and women be providing today to troops in harm’s way? In addition to those translators, 11,000 other service members have been ousted since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was passed by Congress in 1993. Many held critical jobs in intelligence, medicine and counterterrorism.

An untold number of closeted gay military members don’t re-enlist because of the pressure the law puts on them. This is the real cost of the ban — and, with our military so overcommitted and undermanned, it’s too high to pay.

As BuzzFlash remarks, paraphrasing Jon Stewart:

'The worst nightmare for a G.O.P. candidate is a future terrorist attack prevented by a gay hero.'




New music for old

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I've decided to bite the bullet and start transferring my old music tapes to MP3.   It's going to be a long process, there are hundreds of the buggers and it's carried out in real time. Working 24 hours a day it would take well over a month to complete the task so I think I can safely call this a long-term project. At least I'll have an excuse for listening to some great music that I haven't played for years.

I used to love making compilation tapes. Somehow, the digital, computer-based alternative just isn't as much fun. But audio tape now accounts for under 4% of all music listening and soon it will be difficult to even buy a tape deck. Curry's, for one, are discontinuing them.

On a Mac there are several methods of re-recording available. There is GarageBand, of course and there are the two most popular audio capture apps -Audio Hijack (+Pro) and Wire Tap (+Pro), both very good - I use Wire Tap for most of my audio capture needs. But for this particular task I'm going to use Amadeus Pro ('the swiss army knife of sound editing') which is a fully featured multi-track editor with batch processing capabilities and an easy to use repair facility which does a brilliant job of removing tape hiss while maintaining crisp, clear sound quality.  (Tip: It's an analogue signal going in so it does pay to use a decent cable to connect your deck to your Mac). Fortunately I didn't stint on tape/recording quality and the original tapes still sound great.  Writing out the track notes is going to be a pain though :(

I also decided to get an additional hard drive (not so much for audio storage but for the increasing amount of video files - which can eat up space) and decided on a Western Digital 500GB from EBuyer. With a £10 Google Checkout discount and 4-5 day delivery it came in at just under £75 which I'm pretty sure is the cheapest decent 500GB external drive available in the UK.



Are you or have you ever been...?

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LENIN'S TOMB: Latest attack on Galloway: dying before the newsprint cools.

The latest desperate attempt to smear George Galloway (for the third? time) ordered by Lord Goldsmith (what, the Lord Goldsmith who is up to his eyeballs in shit? - oh yes, it is he) over the Mariam Appeal looks like falling on its arse:
The 150th British soldier died in Iraq yesterday, in a war undertaken by a government that is up to its neck in scandal and corruption. It has, from the outset, sought to vilify the antiwar movement, usually by slandering its most vocal spokespeople. As is reasonably well-known, several phoney documents have been leaked to smear Galloway: he has received more money in libel compensation than the Mariam Appeal ever received from Fawaz Zureikat. One such concocted document was presented as part of the evidence provided by Norm Coleman and Carl Levin in the failed Senate hearings. At that hearing, too, a number of 'confidential' sources and claims emanating from individuals held in secret US captivity (where they apply miniature shock and awe tactics to extract implausible confessions) were presented. I doubt that this story will have much traction, but it is interesting to observe an unpopular, weak and nasty government on its last legs desperately seeking a patsy.

The comments are well worth a read. it's not often DSquared gets a smacking but he doesn't come out of these proceedings well at all. 'No smoke without fire'. Jeeezus!