On Advice

When people ask for advice, why do they never seem appreciative when you offer the advice 'panic!' I wonder? It's silly, because random panicking often helps. Even if just as a stress reliever.

Random Realisations

I was thinking the other day, an activity I am prone to when not busy with more important tasks. I was idly realising that it's now over a year since I last had a drink. Not necessarily interesting, but true. And in the last year, I've not even been inclined to, and haven't been that bothered by not having one. As far as great insights go this is not spectacular, I realise.

Dissertation Update: gnreghreahgreaughrauigfhreauigheraguhreguiear. Still.

Random Musings

Today, for no apparant reason, I've been listening to a lot of Dropkick Murphys. In my mind they are a superb band, and they are one of those who I have not seen live who I really want to. For those of you who have not heard them, been forced to listen to them or heard them blaring out of the speakers as you walk past my room, it is basically classic punk rock music. With bagpipes. I cannot describe how thoroughly awesome this sounds.

One of my favourite songs of theirs, however, is very dissimilar to their usual style, which is quite interesting. The song is about the First World War, and idly looking through YouTube this evening I found clips of many photos together to the background of this song. I include below one of the best ones I saw, for you to have a look at and a listen at. The song is called 'Green Fields of France', and the effect is surprisingly haunting and moving. It has this effect for me as a song on its own, but with the visual accompaniment it really does make you think.

Silver Linings

One of the lesser known benefits of insomnia is that you are actually awake for a fire alarm at 4:10am. And not complaining because it's interrupting your sleep. In fact, it's interrupting your interruption from sleep.

Musical Stuff

I've noticed a lot of my blogs recently have been of a musical theme. By this I don't mean the blogs themselves sing, although this would be an impressive achievement. However, they do come fairly close to it in the fact that they mostly contain musical elements.

Something I've noticed of late is that there seem to be some consistent themes within all punk-rock bands. Namely, the following:

(1) The length of a drummer's hair must be proportional to the amount of drumming they do. If you're rocking out on the drums, you need long hair to do it properly. If it's a softer melody, the drummer has shorter hair. Strange but true.
(2) Whatever the circumstance or song, a bassist must look completely unaffected by everything going on around them. Nothing phases a bassist or makes them change their expression. They must also be able to exude cool without trying.
(3) When a guitarist is also a backing singer, they must sing dependent upon how loud they're playing the guitar at the time, not dependent upon what the lyrics actually call for.
(4) If you play a rarer instrument, for example the sax, trumpet or similar, your main job is not to play the instrument. Your main role in the band is to walk around the stage and put off the other members of the band.
(5) Lead singers who don't play instruments are a law unto themselves and there is no explanation for them.

A Theory On Terrorism

In a surreal discussion, like I often am, I was discussing earlier how it's strange that you never really get terrorism in cold places. It's all the hot places where you get terrorism. Do you get terrorism in Canada? In Greenland? Iceland? Alaska? No. You get terrorism in warm places.

This logically presents a second query - is it a mere coincidence that as global warming has taken effect over the last decade or so, terrorist acts have increased dramatically in frequency and scale? I would say no. It's got to be a correlation.

This, of course, creates some interesting and not at all random results. The most obvious is that the fossil fuel lobby, especially the oil lobby, are now assisting the terrorists. This means Halliburton are a terrorist organisation. "Well, so what?" you say, "we already knew THAT". But, now we can prove it. All the Americans driving their huge SUVs are clearly contributing to terrorism.

Of course, what this doesn't register is the impact this could have for the environmental movement, and the green lobby. Tying this all together, you could easily persuade people to cut down on their carbon emissions by invoking the dreadful bogeyman of terrorism.

For example:

"bin Laden WANTS YOU ... to leave your lights on even when you're not in the room!"
"bin Laden WANTS YOU ... to turn UP your thermostat!"
"bin Laden WANTS YOU ... to leave your car idling when you go into the store!"
"bin Laden WANTS YOU ... to mix recycleable goods with garbage so that none of it can be recycled!"
"bin Laden WANTS YOU ... to ignore fuel efficency numbers when you buy your NEW car!"

Well, it's worth a try. Nothing else will really cause people to view global warming as a serious problem facing us now and not in some hazy future.

Back Again

Well, I rarely updated my blog while I was at home. For 'rarely' read 'not at all'. I'm going to attempt to do a bit of the filling in the gaps, but not now. For now I will write a meaningless short paragraph.

Today for some reason I've had the Lost Prophets song Can't Catch Tomorrow in my head. This is good yet annoying. Considering it's from the Liberation Transmission album - which I widely regard to be rubbish - this is quite an impressive achievement. Albumwise I'm a Fake Sound Of Progress fan, which still probably is my favourite album for the overall quality of the entire piece. However, the LP sound has changed very much since then, although the odd track is still okay. This track has just got the right balance of nice hard riffs and melody without descending into the softer gimmicky tunes which embodied the Start Something album. This song is almost certainly as good as anything on Fake Sound Of Progress, and arguably better than the middle songs (Handsome Life Of Swing/Thousand Apologies especially, and perhaps about the same as Kobrokai) as a standalone track - although the latter do act as the perfect bridge for the FSOP album, whereas Can't Catch Tomorrow would not.

Anyway, have a listen if you want. If you don't want, I won't force you. Another band that I'd recommend are The Pigeon Detectives - Tim would love them, I'm sure, just on the name alone. No links this time, I'm afraid, but their latest song "I'm Not Sorry" is worth a listen to if you can find it. Their previous track "Romantic Type" is also okay, although tends a bit towards the pop end of pop-punk for my liking. Look them up, have a listen, and so on.

Packing

I'm heading home for a week to have a break from the gorgeously sunny climes of ... Aberystwyth. Yes, I did say sunny - it's been gorgeous here all week.

Anyway, when packing and with a deadline somewhat in mind, it is incredibly awesome to randomly have 'The Final Countdown' come on your playlist.