Thoughts

1) Who came up with rap "music?" No, really. Who decided "hey, I can't sing at all and I'm going to make a career out of it?"

2) In a similar vein, who came up with punk music? Who decided "hey, I can't play my instrument at all and I'm going to make a career out of it?"

3) Stop listening to what he says. Look at the people he's appointed. Look at the world leaders he's supported. Look at the allies he's stabbed in the back. Obama's the most left-wing President the country's ever had, and he's earned that position in months. What's this country going to look like in 2012?

4) 2009 deaths I give a crap about: Patrick McGoohan, Andy Hallet, Les Paul. End of list.

5) If everybody chose not to drive for 24 hours, people would die. Food wouldn't get to where it was needed.

6) You can have "clean" energy, or you can have your plains and deserts unmolested and your view unobscured. You can't have both.

7) You can't have only clean energy. It's just not viable.

8) If no band/artist that hadn't released an album by 1980 were allowed to release an album after 1980, we'd a) miss out on a couple of awesome bands and b) live in a much saner world.

9) ACORN should be dismantled and every politician with ties to them should be thrown out of office. We wouldn't have a viable government anymore, but we'd be better off.

10) If the government really wants to lower the cost of anything, they should get the hell out of it.

The top ten Iron Maiden songs

(according to me)

10. Aces High - Powerslave
9. Fear of the Dark - Fear of the Dark
8. Wasted Years - Somewhere in Time
7. The Trooper - Piece of Mind
6. 2 Minutes to Midnight - Powerslave
5. The Wicker Man - Brave New World
4. The Number of the Beast - The Number of the Beast
3. Phantom of the Opera - Iron Maiden (Yes, I am going with the version sung by Paul Di'Anno, with Dennis Stratton's Queen-esque backing vocals.)
2. Revelations - Piece of Mind (The live version from Flight 666 is also quite awesome.)
1. Hallowed be Thy Name - The Number of the Beast (Not just the greatest Iron Maiden song, but the greatest metal song. Ever.)

Songs that just didn't quite make the cut include Powerslave, Remember Tomorrow and Can I Play With Madness. Also Drifter and Die With Your Boots On are way, way underrated, but there was no way I could actually put them in a top 10 list. And no, Run To The Hills was never in the running, because it is overrated.

Dead Musicians are Better

"He's famous cos he's dead."

You've heard it before. I've heard it before in regards to:
John Bonham
Keith Moon
Cliff Burton

And probably lots of others, so I just wanna set the record straight here. John Bonham was the greatest drummer of all time. Cliff Burton was the greatest bassist of all time. End of discussion.

Keith Moon? My opinion of the Who is kind of distorted because of the fact that they're all a bunch of dicks, but he was a good drummer. Besides, the Who were collectively on the receiving end of the most epic burn in the history of music, so hey.

What was that burn? You can find the full version somewhere on Cracked.com, but here's the condensed version, complete with the jokes that I stole from that site:

See, Keith Moon and John Entwistle (bass) were at a party. So was this well-known supertalented session guitarist, who we'll just call J for now. J tells the Who guys about a band that he's putting together with a well-known supertalented session bassist/keyboardist. The band will feature some skinny long-haired hippies with tight pants and open shirts singing songs in falsetto about orcs invading Middle-Earth. The Who guys, being, as I said before, dicks, respond:
"That'll go down like a lead zeppelin." Meaning it'll crash and burn.
Our guitarist, J(immy Page), goes to practice the next day and says, "Guys! I got a name for our band!"

The Who who? All hail Led Zeppelin.

Anyway, returning to the original purpose of this rant, which is basically to get a few more digs in at a dead man (really, you think I'd be above this)...
"He's famous cos he's dead" absolutely applies to Kurt Cobain. Sorry. Again, no respect for suicides. None whatsoever. Believe me, I'd much rather he hadn't blown his brains out so he and his band could be relegated to the dust heap of music history, but because he was grunge's martyr, we're stuck with that crap now.

Guitar Hero 5's necrophilia scandal

No, I don't own it. No, I don't plan on owning it. Perusing the setlist, I come across exactly one song that I like - "2 Minutes to Midnight" by Iron Maiden.

On the one hand, I get it. "The Number of the Beast" was great on 3, and apparently there was a cover of "The Trooper" on the Xbox version of 1. But even 3, bad though its setlist was, had a couple of decent songs for every stage.

But 5's setlist is godawful. Rap "music" has no business being on a Guitar Hero game, end of discussion. Screw them and their drop-tuned "riffs" and their disgusting lyrics. Iron Maiden did themselves a disservice by letting their music get associated with this dung pile. It's not like they needed the money.

Okay, okay. "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash isn't bad. Santana, The Stones, Megadeth, Deep Purple, the Police... there are a bunch of decent artists on here. (But... are songs like "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Sweating Bullets," which are both fairly long and repetitive, going to really be that much fun? I vaguely recall there being more piano work on "Sympathy" than riffage...) And then there's Attack! Attack! Are you kidding me? They're on the same stage as Dire Straits! "Sultans of Swing!" There are a lot of B+ songs on here... and then there are a handful of truly horrible bands that go and ruin it.

Y'know who else gets a major disservice here? Kurt Cobain, and I don't even like Nirvana. I don't blame Burnt Cocaine and company for "killing" metal, because they didn't- they were just the parasite that crawled into metal's empty shell. Hell, Pearl Jam outsold Nirvana until Kurt blew his brains out. Dead musicians are better (more on that on my next post).

Anyway, Kurt's ex-wife, who we all know is the pinnacle of politeness and decency, has allowed his image to be used in the game. I don't know why they made a big deal about it. I'd be more happy to see Stevie Ray Vaughan or Randy Rhodes in the game if we're going to have a famous dead guitarist. At least these people's deaths were genuine tragedies. I don't respect suicide "victims." And I dare you to find a Cobain solo that trumps a Vaughan one.

Anyway, all of Nirvana's whiny fans got to jizz their pants when the news was announced that yes, Kurt would be in the game.

The word got out that he'd be an unlockable character. Dear God you could hear the complaints from the moon. They'll have him rapping along to Public Enemy or playing a Motley Crue song. Well you got your hero in the game, didn't you? I don't recall people bitching about the fact that you could make Slash play the bad songs in GH3! So shut up.

Also, Courtney Love is stupid for selling Kurt's body like that.

The ink's rather dry on this...

...but I feel somewhat obliged, as somebody who knows a thing or two about this, to speak up. Not that anybody reads this blog.

It starts here.

The important quote is this: " it suggests prior knowledge of Ulrich’s near-sacking. But there can’t be prior knowledge of said incident, as this little factoid is not common knowledge" (emphasis mine)

Yes, it damn well is! I knew it, and I barely pay attention to anything! Specifically, I heard it here. Check the info box. It aired in April 2008. A year and a half ago.

By the way, for anybody who doesn't know what the hell I'm going on about, this might be a useful 4-minute primer.

Also regarding that article: "many fans, rightly or wrongly, think of Burton as the anti-Ulrich who would’ve ensured many more years of awesome metal, and would protect the world from Load and St. Anger and the other Load and whatever that thing that came out last year was called." I'm going to weigh in on the "wrongly" side. No disrespect to Cliff, because anyone who disrespects Cliff deserves to have all their teeth pulled out without any anesthesia (ho ho, I'm clever there, aren't I?), but the guy who insisted on wearing bell-bottoms at all times was certainly not the most "metal" member of that band. I'm not talking out of my ass here. Read Joel McIver's book To Live Is To Die: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton and you'll know whereof I speak.

Oh, and Scott Ian has since retracted his statement. Which he apparently didn't make in the first place. So nobody's denied it yet. Scott hasn't denied telling Dave (and Anthrax opened for Metallica in 86 on the tour when Cliff died, so there's every possibility that he would know). Nobody from Metallica has addressed it. Lars did note a while back that Dave tends to slam him in the press whenever a new Megadeth album's about to come out... but again, I don't think that this was a planted question. Dave mentioned it a year and a half ago, so people knew. Apparently nobody watched Navarro's show, but Mustaine did say it.

The best argument that it didn't happen is that it didn't come up in Some Kind Of Monster. James and Lars were pretty much at each others' throats, and that entire damn movie demonstrates that the band's not above exploiting inter-band tension for financial gain.

And if it's true, so what? If Kirk, James and Lars managed not to kill each other back in 02/03, they're not going to kill each other over something that didn't come to pass 23 years ago. I wouldn't put it past Lars to own the Metallica name today, not sure if that was the case back in 86...

I'm straining myself to come up with one incident where a band fired someone they managed to part ways on good terms, and all I've come up with is Iron Maiden and Blaze Bayley. And nobody will admit to liking him. So huh.

It's been a while...

Whoa, there went the summer. We got most of the police scenes shot, but unfortunately, we're not happy with about half of them. When you see the finished movie, you'll realize that that's about 1/3rd of the movie, and we've got to re-shoot half that... so really the things' about 1/6th of the way done. I eagerly anticipate a Christmas '14 release!

What else happened this summer? I got a new guitar, which will feature in the movie. And I spent a lot of time putting blisters on my fingers and wondering what that ringing in my ears was. I learned a lot of Iron Maiden songs as well: The Trooper, Fear of the Dark, Killers, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wasted Years, Powerslave, Ancient Mariner... to my eternal surprise, the first album that I know half the songs from is not an AC/DC or Metallica album, but is in fact the Number of the Beast!

There wasn't a great deal of Doctor Who to be watched. I did see a couple more classic serials - The War Machines and The Power of Kroll. And I got Series 4 (30) on DVD... despite the production team's boasts, it did lag horribly in the middle, especially the Agatha Christie episode, my reaction to which alternated between "zzz" and "wtf" for most of the episode's running time. The Doctor's visited H.G. Wells (way back in a forgettable Sixth Doctor serial called Timelash), Charles "Paid-by-the-word" Dickens, Shakespeare, and Agatha Christie (and I don't hold very high opinions of any of those episodes, except maybe the Shakespeare one). High time he visited H.P. Lovecraft, in my opinion.

But here's the thing: they already did a story where the Doctor went to a Roaring 20s-esque setting, way back in the old series, in a serial called Black Orchid, and that wasn't very good either.

Now, my favorite part of Season 30 comes in the penultimate episode, when the Doctor starts going all nostalgic on Davros, in the same way he went nostalgic on the Master at the end of the previous season. Then he subverts it. Brilliantly: "After everything we've been through, I have only one thing to say to you... bye!"

As for the older serials I watched, The War Machines feels like a precursor to The Invasion, though I must admit that it is very, very good for the last intact Hartnell adventure. The Power of Kroll starts off very promising with the hovercraft stuff, but making a majority of the characters half-naked and covered in green paint was probably not the series' best move ever. Also, after the first episode the plot doesn't feel like it's going anywhere particularly fast, and while the giant octopus moster looks halfway decent by 1978 standards, the modelwork is godawful.

Everything said below is true.

"Many fans of Metallica insist that they released nothing after that bus crash. Others say that their recording career ended immediately before the Black Album, or immediately after it. The tiny fraction of fans left insist that they went on to make three more albums after this, but when faced with a copy of St. Anger, go into violent conniptions."
-tvtropes.org

In actual fact, of course, their studio burnt down during the recording of the Black Album, along with all the notes they'd taken about which songs to leave off. A studio exec somewhere left the last three songs on the album despite the fact that they were clearly slated for deletion. Lost in the fire was a glorious three-minute solo in 6/8 time that would have appeared on "Nothing Else Matters." In recognition of what they lost, Metallica never entered the studio again, except briefly in 2006-07 to record no more than three songs.

And just in case it's not obviously clear, nothing said above is true.

StudyFail

Collegehumor.com got this first, but hey, here it is:

Study = no fail
No study = fail

Study + No Study = Fail + No Fail
(No + 1) Study = (No + 1) Fail

Study = Fail

Okay, let's take a look at the math behind that. I'll assume the following values.
Study = 1
No = -1
Fail = -1

Ergo
1 = -1 * -1
-1 * 1 = -1

So far so good.

1 + (-1*1) = -1 + (-1*-1)
(-1+1)*1=(-1+1)*-1
1=-1

Turns out the wiseguy just did the old "divide by zero" trick made famous by the following riddle:
x=y
therefore 2x=2y
x-y=2x-2y (because they're both zero)
1(x-y)=2(x-y)
1=2

And the Doctors

Okay, let's do this. This is really going to hurt at the end, trying to figure out who gets stuck in last place.

1. Tom Baker (4). Um, duh.

2. Patrick Troughton (2). Simply magical.

(these two are a few light-years ahead of all the others)

3. David Tennant (10). He's clearly doing throwbacks to Peter Davison, but Tom's madcap lunacy shines through on more than one occasion.

4. Jon Pertwee (3). James Bond - Lothario + in space = Third Doctor. (Snappy dresser, too.)

5. Sylvester McCoy (7). He got off to a rocky start, and his script quality was always sketchy at best (JNT had a thing about not letting old hands write for the show, which was stupid^infinity).
6. Tie. Paul McGann (8). The Shada remake gives us an example of what could have been, had we only had a decent script. He was witty and charming and reminded me of Pertwee (who died just before the telemovie aired) in every way that matters. Christopher Eccleston (9). Manic and loony, just as the Doctor should be. They both come in so low because neither had a great deal of time in the part; given a couple more years, either one could be up in 3rd or 4th place.

8. Peter Davison (5). Coming in for only three short years in between the two most bombastic Doctors would make anybody seem bland. To his credit, Peter underplayed the part, which was exactly what the role needed after 7 years of Tom Baker. Unfortunately, he came off as a weakling. He'd rate higher if he could have, on occasion, saved some people. That, and he bears the unfortunate distinction of being the first Doctor to be stuck in a bad costume. A cricket theme would have been all right, but the end result was too much.

...Okay. I'm not really in a last-place mood, and William Hartnell (1) and Colin Baker (6) both have redeeming qualities. Hartnell comes in so low because he wasn't much more than a typical absent-minded scientist (and yes, there were real-life reasons, tragically, for his absent-mindedness) and Colin's Doctor, as I've said before, was an awesome character but was just all wrong for The Doctor. Ergo, cop-out and tie for 9th place.

...and the greatest Sci-fi show of all time is...

Wait, you really had to ask? http://www.wizarduniverse.com/25greatestscfishowsever6.html

A different sort of Who Review

Yeah, whatever I said however many weeks back when I said whatever it was... forget it. Not happening, primarily because the way my life's going at the moment I can't be bothered to watch the 75 minutes of boring that are An Unearthly Child episodes 2-4. Though there is some skull-crushery in Ep 4. Children's program my @$$.

Speaking of deaths, how about Tom Baker's plunge at the end of Logopolis? Love the absurdly fake miniature effects, the pointless grab-the-support-thingy, the fact that the Master gets away while the Doctor dies... Everybody talks about The Caves of Androzani being the greatest exit story, but really that thing's absurdly nihilistic. Everybody dies, Rose... just this once, everybody dies! Tom went out saving the entire freaking Universe, and all Peter managed to save was one girl with a fake American accent. (Granted, she was the only person in that serial worth saving, except the real Maj. Salateen, but hey, this being a Robert Holmes script and him being a somewhat bitter survivor, he was a walking dead man from the word go.) Not only that, but take a look at the villains the Doctor has to ally with. 4 has to work with the Master, the most evil evil evil evil ad nauseam person in the entire Universe (bar possibly Davros). 5 has to work with the Phantom of the Opera's cousin.

(That's another thing. Holmes already did the Phantom bit in Talons of Weng-Chiang, and oh he did it well there. Sharaz Jek was a somewhat disappointing re-do of Magnus Greel. Hell, Greel's costume beat Jek's gimp suit.)

The thing that's really cool about Logopolis is the fact that the Doctor knows, after a discussion in the second episode, that he's going to die. Gee, wait, in Caves, the Doctor also finds out that he's dying in the second episode.

I like the political complexities of Androzani, but in a post-9/11 world they leave a bit of a sour taste - the government's corrupt, the President's a tool, the army is apparently run by a corporation of some sort (can't really remember Morgus's deal at the moment), and the terrorist is just out for some well-deserved revenge. As I said, sour taste. At least there wasn't an economic crisis. Oh, wait, there was a hint of that too when they were talking about the Spectrox shortages. (I like how everybody was a Spectrox junkie. Not sure what the subtext there was, but I liked it.) Oh well, at least there was no Swine Flu. (Insert jokes about the Doctor being retarded enough to not immediately administer the antidote to himself when pigs fly here.)

See, when the Master tilts that platform, 4 knows it's the end. He's gonna yank that cable out, and then he's gonna fall. (Gee, cult television show, high platform, very bizarre and poorly-explained setup/solution that requires the main character to go splat in order to save the Universe... history sure doesn't repeat itself does it?)

The 5th Doctor's last word is "...Adric?"
The 4th Doctor's last words are "It's the end... but the moment has been prepared for."

Which is better? Seriously?

-James

Oh, and in case you had to ask, yes, that other show did it a hell of a lot better... but it was still poorly set up.