I wonder how long this site will be up as I’d guess some of it is copyright material, but anyway, go here, and check the Deeper Underground video. That, my friends, is my fucking guitar. (Well, ok, it’s the same model, not really mine, but still.) I knew he used a MusicMan, but didn’t realise it was a white on white Silhouette, just like mine. Sorry, that’s really guitar geeky, but it made me smile. There’s plenty of other Jammy-rocky downloadables available there, so if you’re a fan of the twat in the hat, I’d pay the site a visit.

DRUMMERWORLD - Drum Clinic is a great set of videos and sound samples from various instruction DVDs, books, etc. I found it while looking for the name of the drummer on Simon and Garfunkel’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, which turned out to be Steve Gadd.

I don’t like washing my car, and now I don’t like the song Car Wash.

  ..1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ----------------------------------
D ----------------------------------
A 35--35--35--35--35--35--35--35--35
E ----------------------------------

Honestly, how tricky can it be to play that? I thought the slap fill was going to be the tricky bit, but oh no, I can’t get past the first sixteen bars of the song without drifting out of time. Still, only twenty-eight hours to go before the gig starts, so there’s plenty of time to get it sorted.
UPDATE: OK, after some practice I’ve found it’s not tricky when you’ve got a metronome clicking on the beat. But when it’s just me and my tapping foot (which is never that reliable an indicator of time) vs. the hand claps at the start of the song, it’s tricky.

Well well, it looks like my first gig as bassist with Casa will be this Friday (some fresher’s week gig, though for a grad college so the age gap won’t be too scarifying). I guess between now and then I should make sure I can play all the usual tunes, I’m only up to speed on about 50% of them! *bricks it*

I started this week off with a couple of days in Cologne (I’d say Koln, but I can’t work out how to put an umlaut on the o in Wordpress; I don’t approve of translating place names), on a conference. The social event was a tour of the cathedral followed by a “surprise.” After the tour finished we walked down into the nearest underground station and waited on the platform. And waited. And waited some more. Mutinous whispers went around about buggering off to the pub for food, and people started joking that we were waiting for the party train.
As it turned out, we were.
Up rolled a little two carriage train that we piled into to find a bar and buffet, then off we went on a tour of Cologne (the train ran above ground as well, it wasn’t just a scenic view of the inside of a tunnel). Imagine a slightly more organised Circle line party and you’re there. The beer was served in 200ml glasses, which meant that I quickly lost track of exactly how much I’d drunk, the numbers becoming too large for a booze-addled mind to hold onto. After a couple of hours of waving at commuters waiting for their trains, we decamped to the pub. It was here that I realised that I’d definitely had enough to drink when I wandered into the loos, spotted these rather funky splash mats:

And actually took a photo of one. Hmmm.
The weirdness didn’t end there. My flight back with German Wings was slightly delayed, but they were handing out sparkling wine so I didn’t mind too much. There were a few guys with TV cameras hanging around, but I assumed they were making a German equivalent of that Airport series. Eventually we boarded the plane, and once we were in the air a chap got up and announced that to coincide with the start of London fashion week, German Wings had organised a mid-air fashion show, a “catwalk in the sky.” Cue music and various oddly dressed people parading up and down the aisle. How rare. I wondered if I would get applauded if I got up to go to the loo, but I don’t think I was looking “urban” enough. I’m more urbane than urban.

Well well, my comment on that Bad Science article turned up in Saturday’s Guardian. I should watch where I point my links! Or at least check my grammar before clicking “publish.” A quick glance at my webstats shows that this publicity has added approximately no new visitors to my site, so it would seem my dodgy English is safe from criticism.
This isn’t my first brush with the national media. The radio in the lab where I did my PhD was tuned to Virgin Radio, who used to have a “workplace requests” section. Actually they might still do, but I don’t listen to VR anymore. I’ve no idea why we listened to it then, I think it was because everyone hated it, so no-one was getting preferential treatment. Anyway, I emailed in a request for something by REM or U2, not because I was desperate to hear anything from either band, rather because I knew that was what VR wanted to play and I wouldn’t get my request heard if I chose some funky jazz. I was called back and had a brief chat with the DJ off air, trying to give him some idea about what we were doing. I realised I wasn’t going to be onto a winner when he said, “Protein, isn’t that some kind of amoeba?” Fortunately I overheard someone else in the studio correct him with, “No, you dick,” so didn’t have to myself. In the end I threw the DJ the handy bone of saying we were working on a cure for cancer (true in the loosest possible sense; but doesn’t it make me guilty of turning my research into one of those media “breakthrough” stories the Bad Science article criticises?) My brief appearance on Virgin also nearly caused an accident on the M11, as a friend was listening at the time and nearly drove off the road in surprise at hearing my voice. Mass media is a dangerous thing.

I do tend to be rather childish, but don’t the photos of the asteroid the Japs are probing make it look like a giant space poo? No? OK, just me then.

WordPress.com is a new community blogging site set up to run Wordpress. Same idea as Blogger, but currently ad-free and runs on everyone’s favourite free blogging software No idea if it’ll take off, surely there’s only a finite number of people who can be arsed to run blogs? There are already more than enough blogging solutions out there, so it’s difficult to see why anyone would want to set up another one.

I just read an interesting article over in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre, who writes their Bad Science column, entitled Don’t Dumb Me Down. (I’ve no idea how I’ve managed to miss the Bad Science column until now, as I read the Guardian… maybe it’s only in the weekday editions that I rarely buy, or possibly it’s far enough back in the paper that I’ve lost interest by that point. If you’re interested there’s an archive of his articles over at badscience.net, which also has this wonderful bio:

Ben studied Medicine at Magdalen College Oxford where he also edited Isis, the Oxford University Magazine. He left in 1995 with a First: before going on to clinical medicine at UCL, he was a visiting researcher in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Milan, working on fMRI brain scans of language and executive function, and was also funded by the British Academy to do a Masters degree in Philosophy at King’s. He is, as you can see, a serious fuck-off academic ninja.

Anyway, back to the point.) The article sorts bad science reporting into three categories, wacky, scares and “breakthrough” stories, then makes the point that it is the simplistic way in which science news is reported that is really at fault.

Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

I’d say it’s a bit of an unfair comparison; an exciting science breakthrough is actually news and so is expected to be read by a wider audience than a book review, which is usually only looked at by someone who’s interested. The dumbing down of science reporting is obvious and I even caught it in action recently. I can’t remember the exact scare story, but I believe it was some work showing a link between leukaemia and living near powerlines. On Radio 4 it was reported as being based on a very small sample set and the actual risk being very very small indeed, and that these two points were clearly made in the paper. By the time it made it to Radio 1, all these caveats had been lost. The main reason for this kind of thing happening is perhaps a more general problem with the media, in that they’ve realised that to sell papers/advertising time they must entertain or shock their audience. Well reasoned, balanced, arguments, which most science consists of, isn’t exciting. Cf the political media in America; fat obnoxious opinionated people make better entertainment than anyone trying to see both sides of an argument and admit that no answer can be completely correct.

I’ve been practicing my slap bass recently, using the book Funk Bass by Jon Liebmann for guidance. I realise that slap is something that should be used sparingly and can quickly become tiresome when overused (much like wah guitar), but the technique is new to me and I’ve a beginner’s enthusiasm for it. The book is quite good; the first four chapters are exercises to build strength, introduce various rhythmic ideas and extra techniques (hammering and pulling notes, trills, etc.). It doesn’t really cover the actual mechanics of slapping, but I found that I had a fairly instinctive grasp of the motions involved, and only really needed it pointing out that when your thumb hits the strings for the slap, your popping finger simultaneously moves under the string you’re about to pop, such that a slap followed by a pop is a performed by a single flick of the wrist. The last couple of chapters are exemplified on the audio CD that accompanies the text, and are various grooves and snippets for use in solos. One of the basic slap and pop patterns shown is an octave-based warm up, like so:

  1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1.
G ----------------------------------
D --2---3---4---5---6---5---4---3---
A ----------------------------------
E 0---1---2---3---4---3---2---1---0-

Frankly with this under your belt you can do 90% of disco, just listen to the chorus of Car Wash, Filthy Nasty by the Scissor Sisters and Alright by Jamiroquai for good examples.
Looking around at various websites discussing slap bass, the name Victor Wooten cropped up enough times for me to go looking for his website. There are some interesting lessons on his site, some of which illustrate what is apparently his signature technique, the “open-hammer-pluck.” This is put to use in a little piece called Classical Thump, which is transcribed on his site and which I have been annoying Kyla with for the past few days. The basic pattern looks like this:

A:
  1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ------4---4---------5-4-5-4-2-------5---5---5---------4---4-----
D ----5---5---5-----5-----------5---5---4---4---4-----5---5---5---
A --5-----------5-3---------------5-----------------5-----------5-
E 3-----------------------------------------------3---------------

B:
  1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ------x4--x4--------x5x4x5x4x2------x5--x5--x5--------x4--x4----
D ----x5--x5--x5----x5----------x5--x5--x4--x4--x4----x5--x5--x5--
A --x5----------x5x3--------------x5----------------x5----------x5
E x3--------------------------------------------------------------

(Where x represents a thumbed open string and the following note is hammered on.) He then repeats the first three bars in semi-quaver triplets using the open hammer pluck technique, then finishes with a descending G major scale down the G string (again in triplets). It’s quite fun mucking about in this kind of style, though I am reminded my learning to play Satriani’s Day At The Beach, which is played entirely using left and right hand tapping. It’s a nice piece, but I don’t think I ever transferred the skills I learnt while practicing it to any other part of my playing! Ah well, sometimes it’s fun to do something that is technique-driven simply for the show-off factor.

Seduction of the innocent is a gallery of panels from old comic books that feature some highly questionable dialogue (at least in modern terms). Think Finbarr Saunders, but with more Batman. What is this, the second comic-related entry in a row? A co-incidence, I assure you, I’ve never really been into comics, other than buying a few issues of 2000AD when I was younger (though I was pleased to find that the BBC has a few old strips from 2000AD here). I did read Watchmen recently, which amused Kyla, who accused me of reading a comic book. “Graphic novel,” I protested, loudly and frequently.

Comic Book Gorillarama is a site devoted to gorillas in comic books. No, really.

Simian characters have been appearing in comic books since the birth of the medium almost one hundred years ago (The Mischievous Monks of Crocodile Isle 1908). Gorillas and other primates were once creatures of great mystery and awe; beasts that resembled man but who were capable of an unmatched savage fury. They evoked the wonder of the unknown natural world, which was slowly being exposed in print and film by explorers who brought the jungle back to civilization with modern photography. Gorillas also became a standard menace in early cinema, influenced by the enormous impact of the classic film King Kong (1933).

However, I prefer:

• Imaginary green gorillas,
• Attack of the flying gorillas,
• Librarian-menacing gorilla,
• The cloudy green ape god, and my personal favourite,
• Nazi war-apes