It seems The Fiery Furnaces whole purpose in life is to confound expectations. After releasing the critically acclaimed (but widely misunderstood) 2004 avant-schizoid-pop get-it-or-don’t album Blueberry Boat, they went and recorded a sprawling concept album entitled Rehearsing My Choir about their grandmother – with their grandmother on guest vocals – to near complete critical derision (although, it has to be said, I think it’s great and actually far more accessible than Blueberry Boat). At the same time, they recorded Bitter Tea, which is a more logical successor to Blueberry Boat, except more bleepy-synthy-poppy (insofar as the songs have a recognisable structure) and with around 50% of the vocal parts recorded backwards.

So, obviously, when playing live, they tour as a White Stripes-esque garage-psychadelia-prog-blues-rock band, reducing their 11-minute sprawling operettas down to 3-minute blistering aural assaults. That’s not to say the songs aren’t recognisable – all the hooks and riffs from the originals are there, and the lyrics and melodies (insofar as there are any) are still broadly the same – but they’ve sped everything up by a factor of two, changed all the time signatures and stripped all the keyboard and synth parts out.

And – and this is the crazy thing – after all of this, they’re still completely recognisable: if you ‘got’ Blueberry Boat, this all made perfect sense. It would be very nearly impossible to recreate their recorded and produced schizophrenic pop sound on stage – so they don’t even try. Instead, they strip everything back to basics and then go at it all cylinders blazing. And it works brilliantly.

You’ve never heard anything quite like them, but really, you owe it to yourself to give them a go. They’re really quite something.

FAA manages air traffic with Linux

The Federal Aviation Administration has saved $15 million by migrating computers that manage air traffic flow to Linux, according to an announcement issued last week. The upgrade is part of a broader service-oriented architecture initiative that will replace proprietary traffic management systems with applications using Java, Web services, open-source software and Oracle products.

If there’s one class of application that really, really doesn’t need a hideous, bloated, complex, consultant clusterfuck of buzzword-laden bullshit behind it, it’s the software that stops giant lumps of metal in the sky crashing into each other. I mean, sure, this is great for all the Open Source weenies now, but when four hundred people die in a screaming ball of fiery death because some sweaty, greasy fingered thirteen-year old in his parents’ basement missed a bracket at 2am, are they going to just sit there and say:

Well, if you found a bug, submit a patch and maybe it’ll get in the next release.

I say again: We are all going to die.

Having been invited round for tea with Richard and Fiona, I finally met Sven and his lovely girlfriend Bryony tonight. Well, to be completely correct about it, I met Sven for the first time and Bryony, apparently, for the second time, because it seems she actually came round my flat once a couple of years ago for a party we had, but I had no idea who she was then; apparently she knew a friend of my flatmate’s, or something. The world truly is a strange, small place.

Also, I spent nearly all of this evening with my shirt on inside out, but insisted that it wasn’t. It was, of course. I hope I didn’t look foolish.

This is a link to a story that features its title – “This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself” – several times within the story itself.

Chances are, if you’re reading, well, any mainstream media anywhere in the world, you won’t have heard about Stephen Colbert’s half-hour monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, in which he systematically lambasted, lampooned and destroyed both the US President and the fawning media circus that surrounds him. The man is a legend; he said this, stood not 10ft away from Bush:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

And he said this, in front of the assembled news media of America:

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

Daily Kos has a full transcript as well as links to the full video (also available on YouTube).

And whilst you’re at it, don’t forget to thank Stephen for his efforts.

So, on Saturday I got tricked into evangelism.

Okay, that’s not quite true. But basically a “gig in Stockport” turned into “an open air gig in Stockport” and thence into “an open air envangelistic event in the centre of Stockport, complete with visiting guest evangelists imploring passers by to repent of their sins and follow Jesus and all that”. We got things thrown at us, and I spent quite a lot of time sort of staring at my feet. We had to carry all our gear – including the PA that we’d had to bring with us – down several flights of stairs through a shopping centre. And then afterwards, only one of the ten or twenty organisers/helpers helped us to derig and carry the stuff back to our cars; I put my back out carrying some heavy gear and spent most of Sunday in agony. I’m sure they all meant well, but I left the whole thing with a rather bitter taste in my mouth – that said, we did sound great and when we weren’t bashing people over the head with the Bible, we had a decent size of audience, and we did get paid (a nominal sum) so it’s not all bad.

So, Sunday was kind of a writeoff in terms of doing anything, but it did mean I got to spend the afternoon setting up a second character in WoW. If you see FightyDude the Human Warrior running around on Bloodhoof, say hi and give him any spare leather you might have – he’s basically just there to harvest for my main character 🙂

And then today was the first windsurfing day of the year – having bored Naomi to tears on saturday evening looking at weather forecasts and banging on about things like occluded fronts and the beaufort scale, I established that being on the water at about 12pm today was going to be a good thing – and indeed it was. Nice, high and fairly consistent force 4 winds; the odd white horse – great planing conditions for a 6m sail. Of course, I’m not used to having these sort of conditions so spent a good deal of the time in the water, but whilst I was blasting up and down it was great fun; I only came in when the wind died and I could no longer feel my fingers (hey, it’s not that warm yet…)

So, what did you do?