A few weeks back, I posted the whack infomercial for the new Desmond And The Tutus album, Mnusic which is going to be landing shortly.
It got some mixed reactions – personally I thought it was pretty damn awesome but one or two of my readers felt that they’d taken the whole thing a little far.
Any way you slice it, it got people talking which is the important thing. Fast forward to this morning and I get an email from ol’ Dezzy himself (aka Shane) saying the first single from Mnusic has landed, as has the video, which is shot in the same, spoofy low-budget vein that the infomercial was.
Check it:
Not too sure I’m sold on the video (bit of a dramatic ending) but that’s a killer song if I ever heard one!
Will hopefully be getting my hands on the new album to review it soon.
And this time around, we’re putting our sushi-making skillz to the test and rolling up some Kenny Kunene-style sushi.
Of course, it wouldn’t be legit unless we served the sushi on a scantily-clad female, which is where “Kate The Plate†comes into the equation.
Having trained for years in the field of professional planking, Kate decided to take things to a whole other level and enrol at the International University of Human Crockery where she has been specialising for the last two years in “platingâ€.
A consummate professional, Kate refused the 12 glasses of wine she was offered prior to the challenge, opting for a modest 9 instead.
What a trooper.
That brings us to the end of the Half Arsed-a Chef series, but hopefully the guys will release a bonus bloopers reel where you can get a behind-the-scenes look at the madness that ensued.
Sick campaign from an even sicker brand. Nomu, if you guys are planning any whack sheeit like this in the future, you have my number.
Suffering from the post-Easter weekend blues? Your Tiger pal’s got just the thing to cheer you up now that the 24-hour chocolate high you were on has come to a grinding, shivering, teeth-gnashing halt.
Remember a few weeks back when Alicia Silverstone posted a video of her feeding her son like she was some kind of bird of prey or something?
Well Jimmy Kimmel has taken things to the next level, the badass. He encouraged American parents to adopt Silverstone’s questionable feeding methods by chewing their children’s food for them before serving it to see the kind of reaction it would get.
Nom!
If you thought that was disgusting, what I’m about to tell you will definitely push you totally over the edge.
It is widely accepted that the act of kissing evolved from exactly what we see Silverstone doing in that video, regurgitating food into her son’s mouth.
So the next time you think about leaning in to make out passionately with the cute intern that gives you bedroom eyes every time she breezes past your desk, just imagine her transferring a massive wad of chewed up Big Mac into your mouth and who knows?
Back in high-school we had this badass English teacher who was like a walking encyclopaedia of life-changing quotes.
She used to print them out and tack them to the walls in her classroom. I’ve forgotten most of them over time and the ones I remember I only half remember.
One of them was about golden fruit, it was a metaphor for greatness. It went something like “Heavy hang the boughs that bear golden fruit.â€
I thought of it today because I got to thinking about Layne Stayley, a man who you’ve probably never heard of, but who was one of the greatest vocalists who ever lived.
Like a lot of artists that were part of the grunge scene in the early 90s, Layne got strung out on heroine and on April 5th 2002, the exact same day that Kurt Cobain had eaten a shotgun eight years earlier, Layne overdosed in his flat where he’d been living as a recluse for a number of years.
That was exactly 10 years ago today.
He was the singer and frontman of grunge / metal band Alice In Chains, who recorded the last great album of the grunge era, the self-titled album they released in 1995.
I don’t know why, but one of the lines he wrote was floating in my head yesterday so I started digging up some old articles about him and what I found was pretty heart-wrenching.
His dad was a junkie who left him, his mom and his sisters when Layne was eight. It was a heavy blow growing up without his father and at one point he even got a phone call telling him his father had died, which was a lie to protect Layne from his old man.
Layne said he felt like he always had the talent and creativity to be a rock star and was motivated by the thought that if he became a celebrity his dad might return.
Sure enough, once Alice In Chains started gaining momentum when Layne was in his early 20s, his dad saw a picture of Layne in a magazine and suddenly wanted to be a part of his son’s life again.
Sadly, it wasn’t quite the reunion Layne had imagined growing up. I found this on the MTV site, it’s part of the last interview that Layne ever gave:
"He said he’d been clean of drugs for six years," Staley related. "So, why in the hell didn’t he come back before? I was very cautious at first. Then the relationship changed. My father started using drugs again. We did drugs together and I found myself in a miserable situation. He started visiting me all day to get high and do drugs with me. He came up to me just to get some shit, and that’s all. I was trying to kick this habit out of my life and here comes this man asking for money to buy some smack."
Layne’s father finally kicked his heroine habit, but Layne’s dependence on the drug only worsened over time.
Alice in Chains only ever recorded three studio albums, three EPs and one live album. Layne’s heroine use got so bad that they band didn’t finish touring to support their second album and didn’t tour following the release of their last album at all.
Layne did vocals for another two Alice In Chains songs for their boxset, which was released in 1998, but from 1999 until his death in 2002, he lived as a total recluse.
Drummer Sean Kinney was interviewed about Layne’s final years:
"I kept trying to make contact…Three times a week, like clockwork, I’d call him, but he’d never answer. Every time I was in the area, I was up in front of his place yelling for him…Even if you could get in his building, he wasn’t going to open the door. You’d phone and he wouldn’t answer. You couldn’t just kick the door in and grab him, though there were so many times I thought about doing that. But if someone won’t help themselves, what, really, can anyone else do?"
More tragic than that was bassist Mike Starr’s last recollection of Layne when he saw him on April 4th 2002. Starr tried to get Layne to call 911 and get himself checked into hospital because his drug use had gotten so bad that he was completely emaciated, had lost a number of teeth and was wracked by pain and nausea.
Layne threatened to end their friendship if Starr called 911. The two fought and Starr stormed out of Layne’s apartment. Starr later said that Layne called out, “Not like this, don’t leave like this†to Starr as he left Layne’s condo.
On April 19th 2002, his accountants phoned his mother and told her that no money had been drawn from Layne’s bank account in two weeks.
The police kicked in the door to his home and found his remains lit by the flickering light from the television he died watching when he overdosed on a lethal combination of cocaine and heroine.
His mother was there when they found him. She asked the police if she could move some things off the couch so she could speak with her son one last time.
After an autopsy was performed it was revealed that Layne had died on the 5th of April, making Starr the last person to ever see him alive.
Starr blamed himself for his bandmate and close friend’s death for most of the remainder of his life, which ended tragically last year in March after he OD’ed on methadone and prescription medication.
Alice In Chains reformed in 2009 with a new vocalist and bassist to release Black Gives Way To Blue, but it just felt like a cardboard cut-out of a band that, for all the incredible music they recorded, has largely been forgotten.
Growing up, I promised myself I’d never become one of those sad, sorry fuckers who clings onto the “good old days†and reminisces endlessly about how much better things used to be, but when I think about the great musicians and bands that were around in the early nineties, it’s hard not to.
So many great minds, weighed down by the burden of the golden fruit they bore.
Great men, the ones that become legends of their time, endure untold suffering to bring some kind of truth, some kind of light into this world that is just as quickly extinguished and forgotten.
Let us not forget our brother Layne Stayley who lived his life with heaven beside him and hell within.
My review of the Nokia Lumia 800 is drawing to a close so I figured I’d wrap things by checking out the Nokia Maps that come standard with the phone, giving a write-up of the browsing experience and covering some gripes I have with the phone (if I can think of any).
Before I jump into that though, it’s worth mentioning that after updating the phone, my battery life has vastly improved. I can now easily get a full day’s charge out of the phone with medium to heavy use, which is pretty much par for the course with most smartphones these days.
Nokia Maps
The Nokia Maps on the new Windows 7 phones are ridiculously amazing. I was already sold on Nokia Maps because when we were in Thailand earlier this year, the maps on my N8 saved our lives. There’s no way we would have been able to find our way around Thailand without J-Rab checking the maps on the back of our scooter while I did my level best not to kill us both.
On the Lumia 800, the maps have been given an impressive facelift. Everything from the way the maps render to how quickly they load has been improved and if you’re connected to a WiFi hotspot the load time is about 5 seconds at most. Like Google Maps, you have an option to switch to satellite view so you can zoom right in to where you’re standing and watch yourself waving to the camera.
Not quite, but you get the idea.
It also has a handy “places†option which will list all the rad things close to you including listed according to “Popularâ€, “Eat & Drinkâ€, “Going Outâ€, “Sights & Museumsâ€, “Accommodationâ€, “Shopping†and “Leisure & Outdoorsâ€.
It’s also dead simple to share those locations via the networks you’re connected to so never again will you have to give directions that are utter crap to your buddy who is crap with directions – winning!
Browsing
I’ll admit to feeling my balls shrivel slightly when I found out that the default browser on the Lumia 800 is Internet Explorer, which goes some way to explaining why the browsing experience on the Lumia 800 isn’t much to write home about.
But then again, I’m not one to use my smartphone as my primary internet browsing device. Usually I’m hitting up websites to settle a drunken bet / look something up quickly and in that regard the Lumia 800 gives an OK browsing experience.
Benchmark testing has found that the iPhone is faster than the Lumia 800 when it comes to browsing and renders webpages in a much less cluttered way (I found myself zooming WAY INTO most of the sites I accessed via the Lumia 800 to try and read the text – horizontal browsing is the only way to make the experience bearable).
So yeah, the browsing is a little lacking, but like I said, if I’m surfing the interwebs for rad sheeit I’m usually doing it on a PC or my iPad so the browsing issue wasn’t a biggie for me.
Gripes
Had to really wrack my brains for this one and the only legit gripe I could come up with isn’t so much to do with the phone itself, but rather the Windows 7 phone version of WhatsApp which, even though it alerts you that a new message has come through, doesn’t immediately display that message when you go into the app to read it. You have to give it a couple of seconds to update before you see anything, which I found a bit weird.
They also killed all the rad emoticons that WhatsApp has on other platforms, so I can no longer send my buddies the throbbing purple eggplant which has become a symbol for the undying bromance we have for one another.
Otherwise I don’t really know what to say when it comes to things that irritate me about the phone because there really aren’t many.
Oh, and did I mention the fact that if you’re SMSing someone you can dictate your sms and the phone tries to figure out what you just said and writes it for you? Here, check it, I’ll use that method to dictate the final paragraph of this review to the device and faithfully write the results below:
“The single most important question any decent fun give you answers is the question what up by this phone myself. Dancer in this case is yes I would buy the Lumia 800 and I would I really enjoyed using it. This is my goodbye sweet nakia lynia 800 I’d rather say well until we meet today.â€
Um… not quite Siri is it? That was supposed to say:
“The single most important question that any decent phone review answers is the question, would I buy this phone myself? The answer in this case is yes, I would buy the Lumia 800 and I would really enjoy using it. This is not goodbye my sweet Lumia 800, but rather farewell until we meet again…â€
Hope you enjoyed my Lumia 800 posts, if I had to wrap it all up on one sentence I’d say if you’re a Nokia fan and PC user, I can almost guarantee you’ll enjoy using the Lumia 800.
If you’re already an Apple convert, I’m not sure why you’re even reading this.
Finish your soy latte, jump on your fixie and ride into the sunset or you’ll be late for that underground gig that band no one’s ever heard of is playing in their mom’s basement.
Regular readers of this site will know that once in awhile I delve into some truly weird, obscure shit when it comes to music.
I do this because when you listen to truck loads of new music constantly, sooner or later it all starts to sound the same and you need something to act as a defibrillator for your brain.
Enter Pepe Deluxe who I found courtesy of the killer music app I mentioned this morning – “Band Of The Day†http://www.bandofthedayapp.com/ (get it now, thank me later).
This Finnish band dropped their fourth studio album Queen Of The Wave at the end of January and it’s more eccentric than your buddy’s weirdo uncle who wore foil hats and got arrested every other week for painting his balls green and running naked through the zoo.
Queen Of The Wave is a concept album that blends psychedelic funk, 50s surf rock, soul, trip-hop and opera with a couple of Victorian harpsichords, Tesla Coil synths and Mellotron waterphones thrown in there for good measure.
“Refreshingly batshit†is the term that comes to mind…
Sick Tracks:
“A Day And A Night†was the song that got me into Pepe Deluxe. The bassline is sicker than a TB-ridden vagrant and, with the possible exception of the uncalled for arpeggio bridge halfway through the song, it’s kept pretty lean and mean throughout.
“Go Supersonic†is also pretty easily accessible and moves dextrously from a somewhat frantic Victorian-era verse into full-on Austin Powers 70s Tokyo girl-group, catchy-as-hell chorous.
The album opener “Queenswave†is also a great track. Faux synth bird calls are layered over a meaty bassline which is backed up with some nice, punchy drums. It’s atmospheric stuff and sets the tone nicely for the sheer musical indulgence to follow.
I also liked the slimey opening riffs of “Grave Prophecy†and the haunting sparsity of “In The Caveâ€, which is played on the largest instrument known to man, the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Built across 3.5 acres of Virginia’s Luray Caverns in the early ‘50s, this instrument delayed the release of the album by two years because the organ had to renovated.
They wanted to play it on the album that badly.
How batshit is that?
Should You Give A Shit?
At the risk of having my credibility as a music reviewer utterly destroyed, I’m going to say yes, you should give a shit.
They might be a bit bonkers when it comes to the way they arrange the tracks on Queen Of The Wave and they do have a tendency to go balls-to-the wall when it comes to dialling up the theatricality of their music, but there’s no denying that the production of this album is on a level I’ve seldom, if ever, heard before.
It’s ambitious, it’s gaudy, it’s complex, it’s bizarre and it isn’t for everyone, but it’s also a lot of fun and, because it’s so complex, it offers something different with every listen.
Here’s “A Day And A Night†to give you a little taste:
If there’s anything that having an iPad and frequenting the app store almost daily has taught me, it’s the value of the “Staff Favourites†section.
It’s there that I discovered this radass music app called “Band Of The Day†that is free to download and is literally changing my life every time I use it.
The app is brilliant in its simplicity – it’s like an advent calendar full of cool bands with a new one uploaded every day to sink your teeth into and trust me, these are not your run-of-the-mill bands everyone knows already. In the entire month of March there was one band I’d heard of.
Selecting a band brings up a menu of options where you can access reviews of their latest album, bios of the band, Q&As (sometimes), a list of all their albums and videos and a player that streams some of their tracks.
With some bands the player is limited to three or four tracks, but in some cases there are eight or more tracks to listen to which, considering it doesn’t cost a cent, is pretty damn sweet.
The first time I fired the app up I lost myself for a good hour or so, trawling March’s bands and finding some very cool shit.
The “Buzz†option in the menu is also really sick – it pulls all the recent Tweets mentioning the band you’re listening to so you can see how may mentions they’ve been getting and what people are saying.
You can of course tweet and post to Facebook straight from the app as well to share new bands with your networks.
The only issue I’ve had using the app has to do with my ropey 3G connection which results in songs stopping while they buffer, but otherwise I literally cannot find fault with this killer app.
The second episode of Nomu Half Arsed-a Chef has landed and holy balls, not only does your pal Slicky-T NAIL some sick dance moves, but also the most epic high five ever filmed.
In this episode we make “Gumboot Pureeâ€, ie. we cram a bunch of tomatoes into a gumboot and squish the tomatoes into puree with our bare feet.
What they don’t show in this video is the fact that the judges tasted all the resulting puree, which is either very brave or very, very stupid. The jury’s still out on that one…
Big Daddy Savage (@lifeissavage) and Angel (@YesReallyAngel) deserve a special mention as well for their inspiring “Black Swanesque†ballet routine which was cut brutally short in the final edit.
Rich Hardiman (@RichardHardiman) also melted faces with some impressive freestyling whilst pouring all manner of shit into The Hot One’s (@monsters_closet) gumboots for their unique, beer-flavoured puree.
Deeeeelicious 😉
Did you catch that epic high five? See the way the girls fluffed it completely before Slicky-T stepped in their to save it?
Yeah, that’s because they let the excitement get to them and DIDN’T WATCH THE ELBOW!
Always watch the elbow. That is your lesson for the day.
Tune in next week for more Nomu Half Arsed-a Chef awesomeness.
I know that it’s out there and it’s driving me fucking crazy.
I’ve purposefully avoided watching any trailers or reading anything even remotely related to Game Of Thrones S2 because I don’t want to ruin anything but now it’s out, season two kicked off officially on Sunday, and GODDAMN I want me some o’ that!
But then again, do I? Because you know how it goes – you crawl over your own dead mother to get your hands on the season premier, but then have to wait a whole other week for the next episode, lame!
Isn’t that why we started ripping series off TV in the first place? To be able to line up 10 episodes at a time, no ad breaks, no torturous cliff-hangers, and then smash them all in one go?
No, I’m gonna be cool about this one. I’m not going to let my Game Of Thrones envy fuck this up for me, I’m just going to wait for the episodes of season 2 to magically find their way to me like they always do and if it takes a month then so be it.
Then I’m going to line up 5 or 6 of them, wait for a rainy day, put on my dressing gown, close the curtains, throw a duvet on the couch, plug a hard drive into the TV, make a big pot of steaming hot gluhwein, and completely forget about life for the afternoon.
Until then, I’ll be engaging in the internet equivalent of jamming my fingers in my ears and singing “lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala†every time I see anything mentioning Game Of Thrones anywhere.
Until then here’s a teaser for season two that I haven’t watched.
Like many guys who spent their formative years drinking in pool bars because they were easy to get into, I’ve spent countless hours playin’ stickball.
I’m a totally erratic player though. Sober, my strike rate is 75-80%. Two beers in that figure rockets to 90-95% and I start sinking shots that aren’t humanly possible.
But if I’m even one sip over that two beer threshold, my game turns into an abysmal display of uncoordinated fluff-shots that usually result in my opponent giving me pointers on how to play (which almost always results in me replying “Thanks pal. Go fuck yourselfâ€).
Which is why I have a profound respect for anyone who knows their way around a pool table, especially the trickshot players you’re about to see in the two videos to follow.
Imagine the faces you’d melt off if you could get this shit right the next time you rock up at Stones. Man-o-man. The people there would start a religion because of you.
Intense shit right there. I seriously hope these tricks get these guys a ton of ass because to be that good you’d probably need to practise for about 18 hours a day every day for pretty much your entire life.
Or you could just make metal pool balls and rig the table with magnets
A few weeks back, I posted the whack infomercial for the new Desmond And The Tutus album, Mnusic which is going to be landing shortly.
