Yes, another posting about Virgin Voyagers. This came in from Matthew Cambourne on the SWRG mailing list. Says it all really.
Almost all of the Virgin staff I have seen today have been saying how much they hate the Voyager. One member of staff thrust his fist in the air on seeing his train was an HST.
After deleting ICQ a few months back because I was fed up of the number of blue screens of death and my machine being continually hosed, I’ve tried installing Trillian. Let’s see if this is any more stable that the piece of AOL-owned bloatware I deleted.
For those that are interested my ICQ ID is 74213108, and my AIM ID is “karazthan1“
BBC NEWS | Wales | Blow-up tank ‘missing in action’
The British army have lost an inflatable tank!
The inflatable, life-size dummy tank was moored to the ground during a training exercise near Tredegar, south Wales.
But 80 mile per hour winds tore the battle tank replica from ropes tethering it to the ground and the vehicle is officially “missing in action”.
A widescale search including a helicopter is now underway for the errant inflatable.
On Monday a military spokesman said they were anxious to hear from anyone who may have woken during the morning to find a tank in their garden.
Shades of Pink Floyd’s famous escaped pig (from the cover of “Animals”) that drifted over south London 25 years ago.
As ever, the revolving door of musicians gives yet another line-up. This time he’s got ex-Rainbow singer Doogie White, former Dream Theater man Derek Sherinian on keys, and Yngwie stalwart Patrick Johansson on drums.
Musically, it’s much what we expect from a Yngwie album; a lot of blindingly-fast scales and arpeggios, and songs with violent imagery. Sadly, most of the songs are fairly ordinary, with the standouts being the two of the instrumentals, “Majestic Blue” and “Air”. Derek Sherinian’s talents are largely wasted, since the keys are mostly inaudible. On one song, Yngwie proves to the world he can’t sing when he takes the vocals of “Freedom isn’t Free”.
Lyrics are either mindless macho crap or gloriously dumb, depending on your opinion. For example, in “Valhalla”, we get this Spinal tap-esqu gem:
We come from the north
We come from the ice
We live dangerously
And very short lives
We fight day by day
Sailing the seas
Makes his earlier “I am a Viking” look like a classic.
Overall, this is neither better nor worse than any of his previous umpteen albums. Yngwie has been a parody of himself for years. Although he’s got an undoubted instrumental talent, he’s never been more than a mediocre songwriter and a truly terrible lyricist. He really ought to team up with a singer that writes, but sadly his gigantic ego prevents him from collaborating with anyone else with some compositional talent, I’d love to hear him do an album with Dio, for instance, but I can’t see it ever happening.
I’ll rate this one as a mere two (out of five)
It looks like I’ve violated the Unspeakable Law (if you mention something bad, it happens) See Solonor’s Ink Well: No Escape, Part II.
I notice Virgin Records are doing a major promotion for the new Manic Street Preachers greatest hits album, “Forever Delayed”. Since the much-derided (and frequenly late) Virgin Voyagers sell CDs in their “shops”, I wonder if this album will be sold there?
I haven’t said much about Iraq on this blog, for the reason that anything I might have to say has already been said by others better at words than I; for instance, go read what people like Bruce Baugh have to say.
There’s a long thread about Bush, Iraq etc. on Dreamlyrics. Anne Blaeske has already posted the first message of the thread on her blog. This is David Edelstein‘s most recent response.
I’ve never been much of a liberal, as you well know. When Bush was elected, I was slightly disappointed, but not terribly upset. I didn’t think Gore was much better, and while nothing about Bush impressed me, at least he had a reputation for picking competent “assistants” who actually make all the decisions.
I figured he’d be a mediocre President, quickly forgotten, much like Jimmy Carter (except that Carter has gone on to do far more good as an ex-President than he ever did as a President, something I don’t expect from Bush.)
Instead, Bush has been pretty nearly an utter disaster.
A year ago, the entire world was rallied around us. We had the sympathy and support of the entire planet. We were getting condolences from freakin’ /Libya/!
In one year, Bush has pissed all that away and turned us into the bumbling cowboys that everybody hates again. Afghanistan was one thing — we were perfectly justified in bombing the s*** out of the Taliban, and I’m glad we went there, although now we are rather predictably mishandling the aftermath.
But instead of maybe pressing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to do more about the fanatics in their country from whom al-Qaida and the Taliban originated, instead of doing something about the mess in Israel and Palestine, instead of standing up to China’s desire to become the next superpower, or pushing North Korea towards its inevitable collapse and trying to do something to make it as bloodless as possible, Bush doesn’t show a single spark of statesmanship. Instead, out of left field, suddenly the villain we all need to worry about is _Saddam Hussein_! WTF? Saddam has been a noxious toad squatting in Baghdad doing exactly what he has done for the last 10 years, no more or less. He blusters and threatens and tries to rattle our chain now and then, but he hasn’t done anything to provoke a serious U.S. response, and is highly unlikely to do so. All this crap about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is dubious at best, considering that all the experts who don’t happen to be taking their marching orders from the Administration say it’s unlikely Iraq has any or could develop any in the near future.
Bush wants to look better than his Daddy did. His oil cronies want a more “cooperative” trading partner in Baghdad. And there are an awful lot of chickenhawks, from Bush on down to certain people posting on message boards, who have never faced any danger and who know neither they nor their sons or daughters will ever go anywhere near the fighting, and from that safe vantage point bang their fists on tables and thunder that _Saddam must go_! The fact that most of the senior military leadership has been expressing reservations about an Iraq campaign (and when senior military officials express “reservations” about a plan proposed by a President they like a hell of a lot better than they liked his predecessor, it means that in private they’re probably saying “Is he out of his freaking /mind/?”) should say something about the advisability of stepping in there. But no, we have people who think that the Middle East will somehow become a safer, more peaceful place if we just kill someone we really don’t like. We can’t find Osama, so Saddam makes a convenient standin, because he’s /there/, like a scab that never completely healed.
Oh, and meanwhile the economy still sucks and the unemployment rate is still high and our budget surplus is history and health insurance is becoming so insane that even I am starting to think that socialized medicine might be a preferable alternative, and John Ashcroft wants us to do our patriotic duty and support a police state, but don’t worry about that because the /really important/ thing is that we take out a dictator on the other side of the planet, because that will so improve the lives of the Iraqi people.
*spits*
You can read the whole thread here.
It’s a pity Amadán doesn’t have a blog; he’s a good antidote to the increasingly shrill tone of all those warbloggers, many of whom seem to take all their political, social and moral opinions from the pages of Robert Heinlein juveniles.
To the person that just came here looking for railway delays due to todays weather, the site you want is www.nationalrail.co.uk/realtime/fs_realtime.htm. It’s not a pretty site at the moment; virtually nothing running in the midlands or the south north of the Thames; a long list of train companies (Virgin included), that have given up attempting to run any kind of service due to fallen power lines and trees on the line.
The worst of the wind has died down here in the Thames Valley, but the bad weather is moving north. At least I still have power and a phone connection, unlike some. I’m assuming this is what’s knocked Dreamlyrics off-line.
Update: Pete Hat has confirmed it is indeed the weather that’s taken Dreamlyrics off-line. Currently they have no power in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.
This summer on my holiday in the west of England just about every photo I took of a loco-hauled train featured class 47 bashers “flailing” out of the window. As far as I know, nobody suffered the fate of this guy.
But why would someone hang out of the window of a 4-CIG enough to have a fatal encounter with a tunnel? It’s not as if there’s any “thrash” with an electric multiple unit. Sadly the HSE Taliban will use this as an excuse to insist no trains can have windows that open (so no more taking photos from moving trains!)
Of course, the BBC illustrates this with a class 455, which doesn’t have opening windows.
This week’s Game Wish (I’m catching up now) is about Heart Characters
Today’s question is about your heart character. The heart character rests on the idea that over the course of a gaming career, players would revisit certain themes that were important to them for some reason, and that one or two characters in particular would embody those themes or ideas. Whatever it was about the heart character(s) would draw the player back to those themes.
Do you have a heart character? More than one? If so, what makes that character a heart character? If you don’t have one, do you think there are themes you revisit with your characters? Or do you think this entire theory is full of it, and if you do, why?
Thinking about some of my favourite characters, particularly the on-line ones that had more detailed back-stories and personalities, I do notice a couple of themes. One is the ‘Ordinary Joe’ caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the other is the character who’s life had been shattered, and must try and pick up the pieces and survive.
My very first on-line character embodied both of these. He was a technician with a comfortable life working for a large cyberpunk megacorp (formed of a merger between British Airways, Stagecoach and Virgin Trains, we decided). His life was shattered when he was falsely accused of causing a fatal accident and sent to jail for manslaughter. All his friends and family deserted him. At the point he entered play, he’d just been released having served his time, only to be caught up in the complex web of cyberpunk intrigue and violence.
I’ve already mentioned Karl Tolhurst of Ümläüt; his back story (in the game in which he first appeared) was the same basic theme; the tragedy was the murder of his lover with his best friend the principal suspect, the extraordinary circumstances were simply the fact that this was a Call of Cthulhu game.
I don’t know what this says about me except that I prefer lower power levels; spandex-clad superheroes with their kewl powerz are simply not my style.