October 2009 Archives

How often do you watch Question Time on BBC1? Me neither. Of late they've tried to update it by including panel members from popular culture, comedians and the like. I think they figured that the general public were more likely to trust and engage with those individuals than they were with politicians. I still didn't watch it, I suspect that neither did you.

The invitation to a known and committed racist is a different ball game of course; it attracted far more attention and, inevitably, viewers. Even I watched some of it. What did I learn? Not much, really: that politicians - whatever their political hue - will try to weasel out of answering any question and always talk in general terms rather than specific ones. I already knew this from numerous news broadcasts and past editions of Question Time.

Summer is over. I know this because the TV channels have rolled out their autumn/winter season - and I know that because the amount of TV programmes I actually want to watch has quadrupled in the last three weeks.

Amongst those progs are included some completely new shows - True Blood & Flash Forward. Both have been fairly engaging so far, but I fear the worst. Based on my past viewing history at least one of three things tends to happen to any major American series I begin to watch:

1. The storyline becomes so ridiculous that I feel guilty watching it, and eventually I'll abandon it - but not before wasting countless hours of my life, hours that I'll never get back.
2. The series (or season as they call them stateside, I refuse to do so) becomes so engaging and popular that subsequent episodes are bought up by satellite networks that I don't subscribe to. I'll thus have wasted countless hours of my life, hours that I'll never get back.
3. I'll accidentally miss an episode or two due to work, other commitments or memory loss and as I don't subscribe to networks like SKY+ . I'll subsequently lose the thread because they'll have put in some random plot twists involving time-shifts, alien spacecraft or polar bears, and I'll have wasted countless, etc.

Some things never change.

Some 40 weeks ago I wrote about the Sony Reader (tech it or leave it - I would link to it but can't remember how), in which my main gripe was that the damn thing costs too much and that digital books or e-books are stupidly overpriced.

This week Amazon released its successful Kindle E-reader (for want of a better term) in the UK. Actually it didn't - it allowed us to import them from the U.S. - but that's a different (and more tiresome and expensive) story.

"Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks."

In their other similarity with arseholes most people's opinions should be kept quiet and out of sight. Sadly, we live in an age where most people share their thoughts on an all too regular basis. Who do you trust, who do you look up to, where and who is the voice of reason?

Currently the volume - in both senses of the word - of opinion is overwhelming. It'd be virtually impossible to read everything on a given subject, even if you had nothing else to do with your life. Over the past few months I've regularly returned to the issue of file-sharing/downloading or recorded-music-theft; however you wish to refer to it there is no doubt that it is an issue of vital importance to the music industry as a whole, musicians in particular and those of us who work in the peripheries.

The problem is that there is a mass of opinion and no real consensus. The ridiculous point is that you can't even get everyone to agree on the simple issue that 'file-sharing' is bad, because many people will jump on the alternate opinion that it's a valuable way to publicise a new band.