Elvis, Jimmy, Noel, Sugarbabes, Stevie W, ...

Spotify

I've found Spotify. I found it because someone posted on HotUKDeals that Spotify had the new U2 album available for streaming this week (i.e. prior to release) and I thought I'd give Spotify a try.

Well, I'm impressed. I've used last.fm on and off but it seems to stream me lots of stuff I don't like and it's catalogue doesn't seem to have all the stuff it want to listen to. Spotify is different. To start with you can programme the music you want - none of this "XYZ Station" stuff which gives you a track by "XYZ" every fifteen minutes. 1-nil to Spotify. The catalogue is pretty good - I've noticed the absence of Richard and Linda Thomspon's "Shoot Out The Lights" - and it is just so good being able to explore music at whim. I particularly like being able play several versions of a song. For example, there are versions  of  "I Only Want To Be With You" by Dusty Springfield (*****), The Bay City Rollers (*),  The Tourists (****), Tina Area(**),  Nicolette Larson (*), Michell (* German but she sounds Japanese to me), Michael Poss (nil points - worse than the BCR).

Well worth a try out.

BBC Radiophonic Workshop

I went to the gym today and listened to a great Radio Clash podcast on my iPod. It celebrates the 50th Birthday of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and is a really interesting listen. So download it here and give it a go.

I was surprised by how good most of the stuff sounded. And impressed by the amount of work that went into preparing the tapes etc. I had (still have, actually) a reel-to-reel recorder, I know how tedious and fiddly splicing tapes is. But in the end, splicing is easy - making music isn't.

Listen of the week

I am a fan of CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks podcast. Regular readers (reader?) may recall that I mentioned the Bambiraptor a few months ago. Well, Bob MacDonald surpassed himself with an item on the May 5th show, entitled Genitalia Most Fowl that I've only just listened to. I'll never hear the term "screw" again without thinking of ducks.

Bambiraptor

I listened to a great item on CBC's Quirks and Quarks podcast today as I drove into work. It talked about a dinosaur with an opposable thumb, the Bambiraptor (Bambiraptor feinbergi). The opposable thumb was discovered by Dr. Phil Senter of Lamar State College in Orange Texas.
In the program he says that the Bambiraptor's capability would be limited as it had (hard) claws rather than soft finger pads. I'm not so sure. As I say in this e-mail to Dr Senter:

Phil,

I've just caught the excellent item on Quirks about your work on Bambi Raptor. Very interesting and I wanted to raise one issue that you mentioned in passing. You said that humans had soft tissue on their hands which meant that they could pick up item with precision, but that the BambiRaptor had claws and that meant that they could only pick up soft things. "Fair enough" I thought. Then I thought "Chopsticks". I'm pretty good with chopsticks; the native Chinese and Japanese are really good. Sure enough, when eating I don't eat pebbles and rocks, but peanuts, even cooked, are pretty hard. Don't underestimate the BambiRaptor!

Best Regards

Roger


I'll let you know what happen to my chopstick contribution to palaeontology.

New Adventures in Music

I used to listen to the venerable John Peel from time to time. I'd go through phases; sometimes he would be compulsive listening, sometimes something to be sampled. What was alway great though was his "Festive Fifty". So, it was with great delight that I received a mail, via MySpace, from Dandelion Radio, telling me that they had run this year's Festive Fifty in lieu of the late Mr Peel. The bad news was, it now being February, they had stopped running the show. However, the website listed all the tracks, and thanks to the wonder of that collection of tubes, known as the internet, many of them could be heard on-line. What an education! After many months of listening only to podcasts, to be shown another world.

So what's hot? My answer is The Pipettes. Why their great Pull Shapes only made number 19 in the Festive Fifty, and not number 1 over the whole world is beyond me. There links to many of their videos on their record company's site (good quality) and loads of stuff on YouTube. The video for Pull Shapes is great, a homage to Russ Meyer.

Finally, respect due to Rocker and the rest of the Dandelion crew.