bickster

Still falling into the trap of believing that awards are anything other than a sales pitch

Anyway, Jeremy Hunt has donated over £100,000 to his own constituency party since the last election. He donated less than £5000 in the previous elections to 2010 There was a constituency poll done in his constituency, published this weekend (Survation for 38 Degrees I think) LibDems - 35% Tory - 29% Labour - 23% The other interesting thing is that the LibDem vote has hardly moved, the switch has been from Tory to Labour It just needs someone to tell those Labour voters to switch and he's toast. The first Chancellor to lose his seat at a General Election Another aspect of the polling was tax cuts or improve NHS and the NHS won by quite the margin, in his own constituency

I don't think that particular example undermines democracy as currently practiced by the UK. You or I might think it wrong but that's a different matter, we'd need to change our democratic system for it to be wrong But there are plenty of examples where the Tory party can be said to have undermined democracy, lying to the queen when proroguing parliament, the constant lies and misleading of the house etc

Good week so far, 79 with Gabriel and Saka to play

Wordle 989 4/6*

Two telly household, I used to watch TOTP on the portable. I don’t actually recall my parents ever complaining about my music though I on the other hand, did complain about theirs, in a true Kevin and Perry style quite probably.

My mother bought me a record once, just as I was starting to show an interest in music and buying my own records. I'm sure she bought it so I'd play something she liked. She had no clue, no clue at all. It’s possibly one of THE WORST records ever made, it even contains bagpipes. Yes she bought me Mull of word removeding Kintyre. She really should have stuck to Max Boyce and Dafydd Iwan. Thankfully she never repeated this experiment.

Oh no, I'm definitely not listening to Sing Something Simple, Military Brass bands, War Theme Tunes and keeping an Abba album in the cupboard just in case I need to seem with it

Chart Music, now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard for ages. Charts, that’s something else I haven’t looked at for… decades but tbh I never really did. The only chart I ever looked at was the NME Indie Chart and I even gave up on that when it was deemed that SAW /PWL was an indie label and the chart was full of Kylie and Jason et al but even when I looked at that it was only the new entries and not the actual chart placings I looked for. I think the last time I cared about the actual chart was when Going Underground went in at number 1 and the only reason you cared about your bands being in the charts was because it made TOTP more bearable to watch

Another sampler, this time Beggars Banquet and their offshoot Situation 2. It’s all there on the cover Decent stuff on here but it’s more typical of the sampler than Pillows and Prayers in that it’s a mixed bag of decent and average Yes that’s Peter Murphy of that Bauhaus covering Magazine, he really shouldn’t have bothered, he adds nothing Also much like EBTG on Pillows and Prayers there are three Bauhaus tracks here and it’s clearly after the band split because Love and Rockets wouldn’t be on there otherwise.

And Outlook is just shed inventory

There She Goes Again was the B-side of Radio Free Europe, There’s definitely a Pale Blue Eyes cover out there, After Hours too. There may be another one I've forgotten. REM are possibly one of the best covers bands that ever existed, they loved a cover and generally did them in the right way, always either paying homage to their heroes or bringing attention to bands their fans may otherwise have never heard of, Strange by Wire springs to mind but as well as the ones they put to vinyl, there’s a bunch more they only did live too

No you weren’t. Just in case you missed your original hyperbolic post

Well worth investigating

Tribute albums are generally shit (and I say that as someone who likes cover versions more than most) but this one is an exception that breaks the rule. From the moment Michael Stipe starts singing Sunday Morning, you're hooked . You'll notice how they don’t even mention him in the cover which is rather odd too

Anyway, someone take the Guardian journalist who wrote this, outside and shoot him guardian

I'm just confused how we managed to score two headed goals yesterday if this is true. That was Ollie’s third headed goal of the season (in the PL), he must be shit at them.

Interesting that Sweet Caroline is also the last standout track mentioned on the cover, generally they named what they considered the best tracks first. Time has a way of proving them wrong

Definitely the same start word After line 1 it’s just a lottery between a 2 and 4 Wordle 988 3/6*

This mornings Sunday session has started. I'm sure I've posted this before. There isn’t an 80s indie / post punk / alternative music kid that didn’t own this album. Even back then, 99p was a ludicrously cheap price, they were giving it away, it was a label sampler designed to generate sales in their other albums and with this I'm pretty sure it worked. But the important thing about this album that makes it a classic, is that it flows and is absolutely groove jammingly full of classic tracks. It’s on the cheapest, flimsiest piece of vinyl you'll ever see and it plays just fine. I actually have two copies of this for some reason. Plenty of labels put out samplers but this one is just one of the best ever, it’s a classic in its field. It can even be forgiven for having 4 Everything But the Girl related tracks on it (which I'd generally frown upon in a compilation - not a crit of the music though, just variety)

Nope, never heard that until I just played it now. Tbh, That stuff is just not my thing and I don’t really listen to any outlets that would promote music of that ilk. So it is perfectly possible to not be aware of it. I have no clue even as to what sub-genre of music that is, it holds zero interest for me. As it goes, it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t awful but it is rather lacking in any real hooks to keep me wanting to listen to it either. It just seems like a generic modern tune. If it was on a radio I couldn’t avoid, it would just get filtered out in my head as something I wasn’t interested in. Anyway, the Brits aren’t awards, they are a sales pitch. Always have been

A stop every 120 meters. Must have negated the time savings from being in traffic. Mad bastards

They converted 14 buses to run on a 600 meter guided trackway, what kind of insanity is that?

Maybe, maybe not. Ive seen reports saying that Russia has been flying without AWACS since Ukraine downed the A-50 right at the start of this series planes falling out of the sky. It could just be that simple, there’s no-one running cover for the Russian Airforce and their aircraft are just easier to see.

He’s always been more Pep than Pep