I have listened to more of the Mystery Jets since my last post, and some of it not unpleasant, and some of it sounds like there is something there. But….

It sounds terrible.

Now when I say it sounds terrible, I mean that the MP3s sound terrible complared to other MP3s, and I do not mean that the MP3s have damaged the sound more than normal, but that the sound of the recordings is bad. It’s clear, even through the fog of MP3 compression that these recordings are not open; they are stilted, closed, clostrophobic, undynamic…bad. Wether this was done in the mastering or the multi-track sessions I cannot tell, but it’s bad.
Whoever produced the ‘album’ Making Dens (a ‘james ford’ aparently) failed to do the job right. John Leckie; now he always does it right. Believe it or not, Paul Oakenfold could have done it better…there are so many, the point is, without the art of studio recording at your fingertips, the tracks will never cut it, you will be able to tell its all wrong if you have the ears, so, why bother?

Just to reality check, I wipped (yes, ‘wipped’) out some recordings that are around twenty plus years old (as you can see from the playlist below) and the difference, even in the steamed up mirror of MP3 sound, is astonishing.

Still, they are on to something; mentoring. Making sure that you don’t fall into the endless traps that strapping on an electric guitar immediately opens you up to.

The best track so far? ‘Little Bag of Hair’, and by ‘best’ I mean…well, you KNOW what I mean.

What with the cold weather and assorted other things I’ve noticed if I’m not smiling (or on the positive side of neutral) when I’m wearing earphones the sound is much flatter and deadened. It must be because smiling pushes your ears out slightly and changes the resonant space in your ear slightly.
Maybe the ‘iPod effect’ is owners of new toys being happy whilst listening to their music and noticing the improvement in the sound. Maybe it’s not smugness after all, just satisfaction.

Talking of which I think African Head Charge’s ‘Hymn’ must be the happiest piece of music I’ve heard.

Yesterday, when I had a chance to read a free copy of The Independent newspaper I read about a new group called ‘The Mystery Jets’ whose catalogue I am sifting through right now.

I got down to ‘Ageless’ on the Eel Pie Island EP, when BANG: hey WAIT A MINUTE, I know that guitar intro….search search search…

Its LED ZEP, ‘The Rain Song’….. DIE DIE DIE!

The reason why I am mentioning this at all, is because this article said that the group is being mentored by an ‘old’ rockist. This is an interesting idea, get someone who should know better to control a young group, and maybe they wont be shitty. It looks like however, they are just plundering his knowledge and not using it as a ring fence to prevent them from stepping into and sining in the quicksand of pointles duplication.

That review, not that we needed to check at all, was totally innacurate….check it all out for yourself….

Jowell singsong
‘broke licensing laws’

Hélène Mulholland and agencies
Friday March 17, 2006

Tessa Jowell returned to the spotlight today for breaching a law she herself introduced as part of new legislation which MPs say was mishandled by her department.

The beleaguered culture secretary fell foul of regulations under the Licensing Act (2003) when she led an apparently innocent singsong to mark International Women’s Day on March 8.

The Licensing Act heralded a massive overhaul of the regulations for public entertainment and drinking, combining 10 separate licensing schemes into one regime.

Though the terms of the act require a licence for any musical performance in a Royal Park, Ms Jowell did not have one when she lead a rendition of The Truth Is Marching On in front of a statue of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens Royal Park near the Houses of Parliament.

The council’s attention was drawn to the minister’s breach by musician Hamish Burchill, who has campaigned against the act’s provisions on public entertainment.

Westminster city council’s cabinet member for licensing, Audrey Lewis, confirmed that Ms Jowell and her fellow singers had breached the law, but said no prosecution was likely for this first offence.

She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Technically, to have a performance which was advertised of singing in a Royal Park, which is a premise under the terms of the new Licensing Act, is an offence, because it is not licensed.

“We would not, however, expect to prosecute because nobody has complained about it. It wasn’t a question of disorder breaking out or indeed public nuisance. Having said that, they have had a first offence and if they wanted to do this quite regularly, they would have a warning.” […]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1733278,00.html

The fact is, she is not being prosecuted because she is a minister. That being said, there is something moreinteresing about this story.

I have written before about there being too many laws; we will eventually reach a tipping point where there are so many new and absurd laws that parliamentarians are directly or indirectly affected. When that happens, (in a perfect world) there would be an immediate push for mass reapeal of all bad law. This can only happen when, for example, a ministers daughter cannot have music at her wedding because of some stupid statute.

As for tessa jowel, since we are commenting on a Guardian story, lets put the knife in, in a way that would be guaranteed to be erased from comment is free: What a stupid fucking bitch!

The Guardian has a new ‘group blog’ , called “comment is free”. Instant impressions:

• It is very Guardian-like
• It is very newspaper-like; Its editors pick what is to be given front page prominence (like they know better than the readers what is or is not interesting). That is so 2005/Slashdot. The users decide what is cool and what is not cool.
• It is not blog like
• Its stuck to the left
• It is set in three columns
• No user feedback, other than comments, ie no moderation of stories or comments or user tagging

Read the introduction:

Welcome to Comment is free, the first collective comment blog by a British newspaper website. It will incorporate all the regular Guardian and Observer main commentators, many blogging for the first time, who will be joined by a host of outside contributors – politicians, academics, writers, scientists, activists and of course existing bloggers to debate, argue and occasionally agree on the issues of the day.

Why are we launching it now? Because it’s obvious to us that our major competition for opinion and debate is moving online, and unless we move with it, we’re failing our journalists and future generations of readers. […]

Translation; everyone is getting their news from the blogosphere. They are reading our stories and then spinning them. We are losing influence. The Empire must strike back.

We need to expand and deepen the debate which takes place every day in our newspapers and for which we have an unrivalled reputation. We need to ensure that the Guardian and Observer remain at the heart of the liveliest liberal-left discourse (although we’ll continue our long tradition of carrying voices from across the political spectrum). How? Not only by doing so much more than we can in print, and much more immediately, but by putting our own writers where their real rivals are. Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation, and much more engaged than print allows. […]

The debate is already deepened, thanks to the blogosphere. The fact that it has taken The Guardian so long to do this proves that brontosaurus media is on the way out. Now, had they cloned Digg, this would be an entirely different matter, they might have had their Jurrasic Park style second chance at life, but they did not, and they have missed the next phase of news aggregation, without good reason either. “Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation” Un oh, dinosaur speak spilling out.

Comments will only be allowed with a valid e-mail address and registration, to try and keep the standard of the debate as high as possible.

Why? If the readers are to be at the heart of this mythical paleo babble “conversation” why should we obey this absurd command when we can set up our own blog in 5 minutes and then publish and be read? If everyone wants to read rants, let them, and if not, let the readers moderate themselvs. Editors no longer have a job; this is what the tectonic shift is all about, and its frighetening the shit out of these people.

Please tell us what you think. Post your comments below or email us at comment.is.free@guardian.co.uk.

or how about “post on your own blog and link to us” heh, of course not, because they are for centralized control of thought and agenda, the top of the pyramid being the grand poohbah editor. Posting to your own blog means accepting that other blogs are the equal of any Guardian Blog, diminishing their importance, which is happening quite nicely and naturally wether or not they like it.

Some of the comments on this post are interesting, the first saying “just what is your job Ms editor” the others saying that they dont like their location being attached to their names The editor, finally weighed in with an apology for not commenting on the comments with this amazing text:

Hello again – apologies for not coming back earlier to answer some of your points but it’s been a bit busy today.

Say what? You just launch a new blog, you are the ‘editor’ and you leave your keyboard while the comments are flooding in? You have to pay attention to your blog if you are going to rul0rz it, and to not be there in the first few hours, I mean, honestly, do you KNOW anything about what you are doing?

My role as editor. The central role, as with any editor, is to try and make the site the most lively, diverse, engaging, surprising comment site around.

You arent needed for that. Look at Digg. Be like Digg. Or die. The users make the site lively, they provide the diversity (which is not true diversity if there is a black crow school marm hovering over everyone making sure you dont say ‘Fuck’) they also provide the surprising comment. All of that has nothing to do with editors.

We (the team) will try and ensure that we have a broad range of opinion and that means doing some direct commissioning of particular people on particular subjects, while encouraging a wide range of contributors to blog as and when they want on whatever subject they want. I won’t be doing what I’ve spent my life as an editor on the paper doing – close copy editing and going back and forth to writers working with them to change their pieces, improve their pieces or think about arguments they haven’t thought about. The nature of the blog is that we will have to try and let go a bit and let peple say what they want within the bounds of libel and the constraints of our blogging guidelines.

Pointless. Either let go and destroy the death star, or be a newspaper, not some half assed hybrid snore-fest. We have everywhere else to read; why should we read anything with even the slightest bit of control imposed upon it?

Commenting on pieces taken from the paper: this is something we’ll introduce as soon as possible. It’s purely a technical issue, and we’re keen that everything that appears on the site can be commented on.

Computer illiterates!

Comments: yes, we’ll keep a close eye on these.

WHY? You are not responsible for the comments that users make, if you are legally in the UK, then you need to spin off the blogs to a company in another jurisdiction whose job it is to run the your free speech wing, insulating you from prosecution. You simply cannot do this in the blogosphere, because we will go and read something else, where people are totally free to express themselvs, on the exact same stories, even stories from your own newspaper. This is pretty basic.

We hope registration will help keep up the standard of the debate, but we’ll watch for the ususal libel issues or breaches of our talk policy code.

What a monumental waste of resources; indeed someone has already asked the question:

Does this mean we are finally going to be allowed to comment on the Jowell-Mills saga, or are you going to close down that debate like you did on the Newsblog?

And there you have it. It will be stillborn in terms of doing something really groundbreaking and worth a repeat visit.

Discussions with authors about their articles. I’m encouraging our contributors to re-blog on the reaction to their articles and comment on the comment. Some will, some won’t, and I’m not insisting on it.

‘I’m not insisting on it’. Brava!

‘re-blog’?? ‘conversations’?? ‘upper-positive plates‘??

When Digg launches its ‘other than tech news’ site, it will be very interesting to see how it gets taken up. I have to say that my first impressions of Newsvine were a little dampened. It is completely beautiful design wise, modern, fast etc, but I found that the blogs that people are wrting there interfere with my search for news.

I use blogs to read the facts about news, and for the most part I use news sites to collect the stories initially; bloggers dont have the resources to get many stories together in one place, and so in my mind, I keep these two resources separate; people with the means to gather thousands of stories, and people with a free reign to tell the absolute truth on any subject. Where these two liquids meet in an emulsion is where the interesting things are happening, and what I need is a tool to navigate that emulsion, like Digg.

Newsvine tries to mix oil and water; news sources and blog writers. There is no distinction between the two in that site, and so to me, it is a mess; ‘News Type: Opinion’ is an example of this mess. An opinion is not a news type. Opinions are opinions and news is news; oil is oil and water is water. Digg gets the balance just right, the users set the agenda, control what gets seen, can say whatever they like, and you get to read the news and the first line of cobweb sweeping comments all in one place. It is extremely simple to use, easy to look at and navigate, and fast to get what you need out of it. Newsvine, though beautiful, is a little labrynthine, the headlines are not given equal weght on each page (there is a big headline, and then lots of smaller – read less signifigant – ones, one story has a photo, and thes su stories do not).

It feels like its energy is spread out too much, wheras on Digg, the energy flows neatly down the page from headline to headline into the comments and back again. You can take it all in, and there is lots of it, and it seems like you never miss anything important, since all the tech sites repeat Digg stories after they have been dugg. This is crucial; I feel like I am keeping up to date when I read Digg, whereas with Newsvine, I feel like I am missing something, and the blogs there only reinforce that feeling, because they are taking up space that should be spent on news source fed articles.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

“Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

Gates described the computers as being for shared use, but the project goes under the name “One Laptop per Child.” A representative for the project did not immediately reply to an inquiry seeking comment.

Earlier this year, Google founder Larry Page said his company is backing MIT’s project. He showed a model of the machine that does use a crank as one source of power.

“The laptops … will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data,” according to the project’s Web site. […]

http://today.reuters.com/

Here we see the TRUE face of the ‘philanthropist’ Bill Gates. Here is a man worth billions, but who will not give money to this vital project, simply because they will not use his crippleware OS.

The kernel of true nature of generosity is sacrifice. Giving away money, even in the hundreds of millions is not a sacrifice for Bill Gates, no matter how useful that money is to the recipients.

A sacrifice for Gates would be for him to pump hundreds of millions into the GNU Foundation, to  put his legion of developers at work on bolstering Linux and Open Source – to actually give something away that matters to him, ie, domination of the worlds desktop operating systems.
Gates obviously doesn’t care a damn that millions of children will have internet access on these exxcellent computers, whose screens by the way, whilst being small, are much bigger than the screen of a GameBoy, which takes up the time of millions of children to no good end.

Applications cost nothing when they are licenced under the GPL. This is anathema to Bill Gates. If the price of every child on earth becoming not only literate but computer literate, would it not be an act of greatness, philanthropy, charity and sacrifice for Microsoft to support this project and the free software that is going to be run on it? Or would he rather that all those children remain illiterate, cut off and impoverished, all for the sake of transient market share?

I think the answer is pretty clear. Anyone who is against this project is against literacy, learning and impoverished children.

And that my friends, is pure evil.

And just to correct this article, the laptps will NOT be shipped “without software” , they will also not need a hard disc, since ultra reliable flash drives will do the job of storage, and finally, just what is ‘a huge amount of data’? The smallest flash drives can hold an entire dictionary; if this project can get a laptop into every child’s hands that has an OS, some networking tools and a dictionary, that would be a very cool thing indeed. And of course, when you can get online, the whole internet is your storage medium, so this statement is totally irrelevant to the utility of this device.

LastFM increases its coolness and raises the bar with charts you can make from your account to put into your site, like this:

pulled right from my profile, and available in many different flavours:

Cool-ness!

With Bittorrent of course. Licence payers should not have to pay AGAIN for programmes they have already funded through the licence. As for people with IPs outside of the UK, our culture and content is the best ambassador Britain could possibly have, and measured against what it costs each licence payer, cheap.

While most media organisations are cutting back frantically to compete with the internet, the BBC is demanding “inflation plus two and a half per cent” from the government to prop up its ratings. The claim is absurd. The licence fee already yields a stunning £3bn. The BBC recently said it could lose 3,700 staff with no loss of broadcast quality; so who hired these useless people? The BBC bureaucracy is the common agricultural policy of the air, filling silos with overheads to cushion its eventual collapse into one gigantic pension fund. Come the digital revolution in a few years, the Cotswolds will be settled entirely by wealthy BBC pensioners all listening to Classic FM.

Simon Jenkins

Who would have thunk it? A supremely great paragraph methinks, “the CAP of the air” wonderful.

Relatedly it seems that the BBQ is thinking of localising it’s free online content, now it would seem perfectly reasonable to give UK resident’s the choice of accessing online content via the license fee or on the same terms as overseas browsers – in fact any system that doesn’t introduce a BBQ tax on the sale of computers or broadband connections

The BBC is set to begin commercialising traffic to bbc.co.uk, two strategies the company is considering are charging overseas users to access the site, and running commercials on the site. David Moody, director of strategy ad new media at BBC Worldwide has asserted that “Now is the right time to look at commercialising international traffic to bbc.co.uk.”

The BBC has also used the services of consulting firm Accenture to investigate ways to “make money from people who use its services but don’t pay the license fee.”

Mr. Moody has hinted that even license fee payers may have to pay an extra fee for certain types of online content, for example they might have to pay to view video material after the expiry of the current seven day window period offered by the online interactive media player.

http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2006/03/bbc_may_charge_for_web_access.php

I started to draft this back in the day and ran out of steam:

What is a passport anyway?
It says that to officials of another country that you are afforded legal protection in a foreign country by the country of issue.
In which case the idea of a passport as a prerequisite for travel is unsound (there is no obligation to buy travel insurance when going abroad, so why should one be required to have the ‘insurance’ of the State when going abroad?
Certainly when travelling within the EU where legal frameworks are almost homogenous anyway.)

The truth is that the mass British Passport has always been an identity document:

The modern passport system really began at the time of the First World War, when states began to issue passports as a way of distinguishing their own citizens from those they saw as foreign nationals.

The British Nationality and Status Aliens Act 1914 was part of this process.

—————————-

History of British Nationality Law

The UN charter relating to stateless persons

… The personal status of a stateless person shall be governed by the law of the country of his domicile or, if he has no domicile, by the law of the country of his residence…

…Article 27. – Identity papers

The Contracting States shall issue identity papers to any stateless person in their territory who does not possess a valid travel document.
Article 28. – Travel documents

The Contracting States shall issue to stateless persons lawfully staying in their territory travel documents for the purpose of travel outside their territory, unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require, and the provisions of the schedule to this Convention shall apply with respect to such documents. The Contracting States may issue such a travel document to any other stateless person in their territory; they shall in particular give sympathetic consideration to the issue of such a travel document to stateless persons in their territory who are unable to obtain a travel document from the country of their lawful residence…

Way back (in internet time) when we took a look at an alternative to your state issued passport. Lets look again at it:

THE
WORLD
PASSPORT

The World Passport is a 30 page document printed in 7 languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Esperanto. Each passport is numbered and each page contains the World Citizen logo as background. Two pages are reserved for affiliate identifications: diplomatic corps, organizations, firms, etc. There are nineteen visa pages. In the inside back cover, there is space for home address, next of kin, doctor, employer, driving license no. and national passport/identity number. The cover is blue with gold lettering.Go to World Passport Application Form

---

The World Passport represents the inalienable human right of freedom of travel on planet Earth. Therefore it is premised on the fundamental oneness or unity of the human community.In modern times, the passport has become a symbol of national sovereignty and control by each nation-state. That control works both for citizens within a nation and all others outside. All nations thus collude in the system of control of travel rather than its freedom. If freedom of travel is one of the essential marks of the liberated human being, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then the very acceptance of a national passport is the mark of the slave, serf or subject. The World Passport is therefore a meaningful symbol and sometimes powerful tool for the implementation of the fundamental human right of freedom of travel. By its very existence it challenges the exclusive assumption of sovereignty of the nation-state system. It is designed however to conform to nation-state requirements for travel documents. It does not, however, indicate the nationality of its bearer, only his/her birthplace. It is therefore a neutral, apolitical document of identity and potential travel document.A passport gains credibility only by its acceptance by authorities other than the issuing agent. The World Passport in this respect has a track record of over 50 years acceptance since it was first issued. Today over 150 countries have visaed it on a case-by-case basis. In short, the World Passport represents the one world we all live in and on. No one has the right to tell you you can’t move freely on your natural birthplace! So don’t leave home without one! […]

http://www.worldgovernment.org/docpass.html

So, you can get one of these passports, and then keep it and your expired British passport together when you travel. You leave the UK on your Expired British passport, enter your destination on your World Wassport, and then re-enter the UK on your expired British passport, since they cannot refuse you entry to Britain just because your passport is expired.

OR can they?

Is there a rule saying that you cannot leave the UK on an expired British passport? I know people who have left the UK on expired foreign passports (and then even entered the countries that they were going to on expired passports), so we would have to google that.

Then there is the possibility of getting a passport from another nation. It is presumed that this is harder to do, since normally you have to be a citizen of a country to get its passport. A quick google throws up:

How You Can Have a Second Passport, New Residency & Global Freedom
By Catherine Jones.

Why deal with one nation on its terms; when you can deal with all nations on your terms?

As things continue to deteriorate inside the United States
having a second passport becomes more and more of a priority
The loss of civil liberties in the USA has become chronic – the growing censorship, a stark warning.
Rational people having taken notice – those with their heads in the sand must bury them deeper to block out the obvious.

A new e-book by Catherine Jones – This is the only e-book that will get you a second passport; without the hype, the rip off, the B.S. and the run-around common to most books on this subject. This e-book will also show you how to get residency, work permits, retirement residency, and student visas in every region of the world. Twenty seven nations covered – 241 pages of rock solid facts.

How Do We Get A Second Passport?
This e-book supplies the answers, the methods and the requirements, (the majority of which are not commonly known,) for getting a second passport. This e-book can get you into the EU. This e-book can help you retire in dozens of nations. This e-book covers the subject of gaining legal residency, a second passport, work permits, asylum, honorary passports, retirement visas, and a great deal more, it provides the real facts and the real solutions, which sets this e-book apart from anything else in its category. This is neither a dream book, nor a book about vague ” under the table ” deals; it is an e-book about what it takes to get new residency, a second citizenship and a legal second passport. In fact.

The information complied by the author has never before existed in a unified form. This e-book is a first. The data was all but impossible to compile, even on a case by case basis, as for the most part none of it was posted or publicly available. It had to be extracted, like an elephant’s molar, from each separate government, and then the precise agency within that government, always at great effort; and only after the correct government agency could be found. The immigration offices, their systems and their requirements for conveying information differed absolutely in every nation that was contacted. It was like trying to find a needle in an infinite number of haystacks. […]

http://www.escapeartist.com/

and this, from a firm of specialst lawyers:

Henley & Partners are recognised as the world’s leading specialists for exclusive private residence solutions. We have also built an international reputation for citizenship law of selected countries, comparative citizenship law and the acquisition of alternative citizenship. We advise on all legal possibilities and programmes currently available to acquire an alternative citizenship and to legally obtain a second passport. We give unbiased information and advice on the advantages and disadvantages of the available options. Individual clients as well as other law and consulting firms worldwide rely on us for specialised advice and assistance in this delicate area where our expertise and experience are second to none.

Alternative Citizenship and a Second Passport – Freedom to Travel and to do Business, and Security for Life.

Citizenship and Passports

Citizenship is the relationship between an individual and a sovereign State, defined by the law of that State and with corresponding duties and rights. A passport is a personal identification and travel document for international use issued by a sovereign State. Generally, only passports which are issued based on a person’s citizenship are of any interest and use. Only through the acquisition of full citizenship can you legally acquire the right to a passport. Non-citizen passports and other passports issued to Non-citizen passports and other passports issued to non-citizens are most of the time illegal and/or useless, with certain exceptions such as the Panamanian non-citizens passport issued to persons holding a retiree residence permit in Panama, or diplomatic passports issued to non-citizens, UN and refugee passports and certain other travel documents issued by international organisations or individual States. Diplomatic passports are only legal and useful if issued by the competent authorities within the issuing State or international organisation and if the holder is properly accredited in the receiving State.[…]

http://www.henleyglobal.com/m-citizenship.html