The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 27th, 2006

I’ve spent the last three weeks watch­ing Celebrity Big Brother on Chan­nel 4.

It’s no sur­prise, since I’m a fan of the Big Brother for­mat, but this par­tic­u­lar celebrity ver­sion has been spe­cial. I’ve watched a well-known Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment com­mit polit­i­cal sui­cide; live on television.

How often do you get to say that? Count­ing this time, just the once!

George Gal­loway, the MP for Beth­nal Green and Bow shocked the nation when he entered the BB house three weeks ago. He’s known for being part of the anti-war move­ment, who met Sad­dam Hus­sein more than once and impressed many with his per­for­mance before the US Sen­ate last year. He gave those losers a right reaming!

After see­ing him on CBB, I think his per­for­mance at the sen­ate was just that; a per­for­mance. In the BB house, George Galloway’s true colours came through.

I don’t mind that he pre­tended to be a cat, or that he danced badly in a red leo­tard, that was just part of the game. Even the inces­sant rule break­ing could be for­given, because all he really did was speak about nominations.

No, where he lost me was when he lost it with Michael Bar­ry­more. Bar­ry­more, a British enter­tainer with a che­quered recent past, was an easy tar­get for Gal­loway and he hit at him ver­bally and hit hard.

The quote that did it for me is when Gal­loway said the fol­low­ing to recov­er­ing alco­holic Bar­ry­more; “poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.”

Classy, eh? Now Bar­ry­more has given grief to his share of peo­ple in the house as well, but this was a new low.

Pretty much every­one in the house is dam­aged in some way this time. With every series, the freak show gets all that more freak­ish. I can’t wait till the next proper series starts this May.

I heard they’re going to recruit actual men­tal patients and arm them all with rusty knives! It will be a rat­ings winner!

I’m still think­ing about that whale.

You know the one I mean; the whale that swam up the River Thames and died dur­ing the res­cue attempt. Yes, that whale.

The num­ber of peo­ple I’ve encoun­tered in the last few days who have expressed emo­tion over this sad tale amazes me. It seems this ran­dom event has touched a lot of peo­ple, but what does it really mean.

My younger brother (the inter­net whiz who designed this very site) said some­thing to me about it that got me think­ing; that the whale’s appear­ance in Lon­don and sub­se­quent death is a bad omen for my home city.

It’s an inter­est­ing thought and it got me won­der­ing what the sig­nif­i­cance of this event could be.

While I think my brother is in the right direc­tion, he hasn’t really nailed it down com­pletely, but he has inspired me to have a go at doing so.

I’ve decided that the whale is a metaphor for the state of the planet.

The whale lost its way, got sick and died.

You might argue that as a race, we’ve lost our way and now the planet’s sick too. You’d be right.

We’re going to hell in a hand­bas­ket; we’ve passed the point of “no return”. At least that’s what they had on the front page of the Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per a cou­ple of weeks ago. The Indy seems to rel­ish hav­ing a fright­en­ing head­line as often as possible.

The party’s over folks, even the whales are check­ing out early. That’s why I’m sit­ting here puff­ing on a juicy, skunky, spliff in the mid­dle of the afternoon!

Oh fuck it, I’m always puff­ing on a spliff! The state of the world has noth­ing to do with it! Does it really mat­ter that we’re fucked? None of us are going to live for­ever, although

I am look­ing into hav­ing my brain down­loaded into a com­puter when I die. If the can some­one forge me a dig­i­tal cock that can actu­ally be sucked, I’ll hand over my credit card details asap!

Besides cheat­ing death, I’ve been look­ing into solu­tions to my musi­cal library problems.

It’s funny how you don’t really know you even have a prob­lem until you dis­cover that there’re prod­ucts out there offer­ing you solu­tions for it!

I’ve got my entire musi­cal col­lec­tion on the hard drive of my iMac as well as on my iPod. Groovy so far, but at the moment I have no way to eas­ily play all this ripped music through my home stereo, a scant 5 metres across the room.

I could just plug the iPod into the stereo, or use a pow­ered dock to con­nect it, but that’s not ideal. On the iMac, iTunes is able to cross fade songs, so it is actu­ally bet­ter than the iPod in that regard.

There are two wire­less options I’m con­sid­er­ing for mak­ing this con­nec­tion between my desk­top com­puter and my stereo.

The first way would involve buy­ing another Air­port Express, adding it to my wire­less net­work, and then con­nect­ing it to my stereo. The Express will do a good job of stream­ing my music across the room using the famil­iar iTunes interface.

And the lat­est ver­sion of iTunes can now stream to three Air­port Express’s at the same time, plus out­putting to the inter­nal iMac speak­ers at the same time. Now that’s pretty cool too. Apple uses it’s own Losses codec over your wi-fi net­work, so the sound qual­ity will be as good as the encode of your library. Mine’s only 128 AAC, and some 128 MP.3’s, which is good enough for me anyway.

The only hitch to this plan is I don’t have a remote con­trol for my iMac and there are a few less than ele­gant solu­tions to this, so over­all this is not the best solu­tion. I’d have to get up and walk to the com­puter to change tracks or playlists and here in the future, I shouldn’t need to do that. Per­haps I could get a robot to do it for me.

In the interim, I’ve been attach­ing a set of high qual­ity wire­less head­phones to the iMac, my Sennheiser TR120, which are really good, but I want room fill­ing, foun­da­tion shak­ing sound! Also, I don’t want to always wear the head­phones, which though very good, are a lit­tle cum­ber­some. They’re not uncom­fort­able, but they’re not light, in-ear head­phones either!

I’m wear­ing them right now, as I spew my dri­vel. I’ve got iTunes set to shuf­fle, and as always it’s throw­ing up some nice sur­prises, like Steely Dan’s “Hey, Nine­teen” and “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West. Dig it, fuckers!

The sec­ond way I’m con­sid­er­ing is to use some­thing called a “Squeeze­box 3”. This is also a wire­less device, but it works a lit­tle differently.

The Squeeze­box 3 joins your wi-fi net­work and uses it’s own server soft­ware to stream music files from the iMac’s hard drive. It has it’s own remote con­trol and the device has a dis­play of it’s own that would show all the track infor­ma­tion. It also receives inter­net radio sta­tions, inde­pen­dently of the iMac. It’s actu­ally a very impres­sive and seem­ingly well-designed piece of kit.

The down­side to the Squeeze Box 3 is it won’t pick up on my iTunes playlists, though I expect you can cre­ate sep­a­rate ones on its server software.

The Air­port Express method is the sim­plest, except for the lack of a remote. It’s also cheaper than the Squeeze­box 3, by about half. I think I’m reach­ing my own con­clu­sion here!

The Air­port Express is the way to go!

The solu­tion to the lack of a remote is to pur­chase a share­ware pro­gram called “Sail­ing Clicker” which uses wi-fi or Blue­tooth enable devices you might already own, to act as a remote for your iMac. It only costs about 20 quid, so it’s not an expen­sive option either. Plus, it’s won awards.

See, this blog doesn’t just help you, it helps me too, with all of these impor­tant pur­chas­ing decisions!

And speak­ing of help­ing you, my new blog is attract­ing a lot of vis­i­tors already. I guess becom­ing a proper web­site is a good move. I’m get­ting all sorts of new hip­py­fans every day.

Lots of you are dig­ging the hippy! Keep book­mark­ing me and grab­bing those syn­di­ca­tion feeds! Once a hip­py­fan, always a hippyfan!

And very soon, you’ll be able to sign-up to the hippy’s brand new newslet­ter! It will be set up soon, as will my clearly stated pri­vacy pol­icy, so you’ll know that I won’t do any­thing with your email address except send you my occa­sional newsletter!

Dig it, fuckers!