www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnd1jKcfBRE

Neither of the finalists (Kate and Yasmina) are much cop really but I’d prefer Yasmina to win, if only because she seems to have a bit of personality and – from certain angles, in certain lights – is actually quite attractive.

Here’s (I think) the best picture of the two of them together.

No caption necessary.

]]> http://betamaxnomates.com/2009/06/codshit/feed/ 0 http://betamaxnomates.com/2009/05/your-tears-say-more-than-real-evidence-ever-could/ http://betamaxnomates.com/2009/05/your-tears-say-more-than-real-evidence-ever-could/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 15:20:06 +0000 Fergal http://betamaxnomates.com/?p=346 The Apprentice Quote Of The Week™

Back to Ben this week, here pondering what the sign for the ‘London Gateway‘ might represent:

‘Gateway’ suggests that it’s a… gates to somewhere’.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw1vd9o1uM0

I remember watching this when I was a kid -- if memory serves it was repeated fairly early on a Saturday or Sunday morning. The host, Normski, gets slagged a lot but I always thought he was cool. Was probably geared out of his box, mind, as I imagine most of the dancers and indeed the performers in the above video were (love some of those seemingly wireless drum machines). Still, there’s no denying that ‘Playing With Knives’ is stone cold, cast-iron, bona fide, er… most definitive, classic of the genre. It grabs you right from the opening piano stabs, speeds through a combination of gleefully instructive vocal hooks (‘gotta get up, got ta feel good’) and climaxes with some strangely mournful strings. And that’s the thing about a lot of rave stuff: for all it’s surface day-glo euphoria, there’s a curious sadness to a lot of the songs -- piano-based tunes in particular. Zomby understands this, which is probably why his track ‘Float’, from ‘Where Were U In ‘92?‘, which homages (that is, rips off wholesale) the riff from ‘Playing With Knives’ is one of the most evocative from that release.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FriS8EVVJg

I’m not sure yet whether ‘Playing With Knives’ will make it into my mix. In some ways, it’s almost too good, too powerful -- what can you possibly follow it with? Maybe it could be a set closer but then that circular piano riff just begs to be repeated and to simply fade it out seems a shame. We’ll see. The mix (hopefully) will be finished some time this week as well as (all going to plan) the next Made In Glitch Podcast.

Now though, to the bedmobile!

‘I didn’t want to have something that looked like it was poisonous on the front of the box’.

‘I’m not nervous. Whoever’s up against me, their arseholes are going to be twitching like rabbits noses’.

I quite like hanami season. It’s essentially a more sophisticated version of a popular Irish past-time known as ‘knacker drinking‘. As ‘pennyr200′ very eloquently describes it:

‘When Irish teenagers are underage and have nothing less to do they go knacker drinking. This is where they buy (or some one who is over 18 buys for them) cheap alcohol (usually Dutch Gold or vokda) and drink it in woods or the side of the street parks are also popular… It’s usually pissing rain and you go home feeling like shit and wet… but it was a night out and you don’t feel the wet cause you are so drunk. All is well until some night the guards catch you and you are brought home in the back of the cop car or your stomach gets pumped’.

I never really did much knacker drinking when I was younger. A friend and I did attempt it one night  a few years ago though. Hopelessly middle-class types that we were though we did so not on some dingy allotment but on the grounds of a stately home. With a bottle of champagne. A bottle that neither of us were drunk/socially irresponsible enough to smash after we had finished it it. I can’t remember if we just put it in a bush somewhere. We may have taken it home. And recycled it. Huzzah!

The new series of The Apprentice is a bit rubbish. It’s still entertaining and all (and hilariously tone-deaf to the current economic climate) but I’m not sure I’ll bother watching the rest of the series. Too many obvious set-ups, too many disingenuous edits, and contestants that – far from being a selection of Britain’s best and brightest -  just look like any other bunch of reality TV chancers, equally at home competing on Big Brother or Deal Or No Deal. That said, this weeks episode did produce this rather spectacular turn of phrase:

‘James couldn’t pour shit out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel’.

Poetry.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJmpQptN6vU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyUvNnmFtgI