Tomorrow morning I’ll be setting off to the 2008 Leeds Festival and I can safely say I’ve never been more excited about anything in my life.
Unfortunately (or fortunately to those who despise my web site, OH CIRCUS…) I won’t be online for about 5/6 days as of tomorrow so there’ll be no new posts and no new comments published until I return unless I get haxord. But who would do that?
And for those who didn’t manage to get tickets this year, feast your eyes on these!
Sorry.
So quite often when me and my friends go out, my friend Johnny will take his camera along to document and interesting things that happen. This is what the outcome was, 11 minutes of hilarity!
I’ve just arrived back from a week long holiday to a town called Calafell, about an hour away from Barcelona, Spain. Over the next few days I’ll be putting up a lot of pictures of all the interesting stuff I saw there and to kick it off here is some amazing sand art I discovered on the beach front of Homer Simpson. It’s truly amazing, the proportions are perfect and you can instantly identify Homer. I’m not too sure who that pig on the left is meant to be though!
There was a lot of sand art all the way along the beach, all of which seemed to have been created by homeless people who have this incredible, unique skill of modelling with sand. I must say the Spanish homeless have much more interesting ways of trying to get money than the English ones!
More Spain pictures to come soon!
Adam
EDIT: I’ve noticed that this post has been doing the rounds on the net and it’s getting lots of traffic, don’t forget to link back here if you use the pictures and feel free to leave a comment on the post
Well actually I´m a good few miles out of Barcelona at the moment but that´s the closest big city. I´m currently writing from one of the hotel´s internet computers that charges 2 Euros\30 minutes and it has one of those stupid European keyboards where you have to press “Alt Gr” and “2″ to get an “@” sign. Also it runs off some stupid modified Windows XP install that only allows you to use Internet Explorer 6 (Grrr) and MSN Messenger (Argh). Those two programs have to be two of the most hated programs by myself. Not good. Also, being me I checked up the internet connection on speedtest.net and the download maxed out at around 750kb\ps and the upload at around 200kb\ps.
Other than that the place we´re staying in is cool, I have, believe it or not, sported my pair of Speedos, yes the Y-Front style and the main town has lots going on and we´re literally a 20 second walk from the beach! There was some really impressive sand art on the beach, in particular a massive Homer Simpson lying on a couch, it was amazing. I have pictures of course but you´ll have to wait till I get back to see them, the PC´s here are locked in cupboards so I´ve no luck with ym card reader.
For those of you unfamiliar with www.deezer.com, it’s a French free Internet-based music-on-demand service and a very impressive one at that. Deezer is to me is the new radioblogclub.com. It has a massive inventory of music, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen online, all available to stream for free, with a very sleek interface allowing for users to create playlists as well as listen to Smart Radio, genre specific radio and upload their own mp3 tracks to listen to when they’re away from their personal computer.
Deezer also supports some awesome methods of embedding players to websites. You can embed a single song or a whole playlist with lots of customizable options to change the look of the player. Here are some examples:
I know this has been done before thousands of times but when you actually do it yourself it’s amazing! Here’s a video of me and my friend John with a bottle of 20p Asda Smart Price Cola and a pack of Mentos mints. Watch as I put 3 of the mints into the Cola…
Hey guys. I’ve been rather busy this past week and have only just got round to writing a new post so there’s a few things I want to talk about.
Firstly, this past week I completed my first contracted web-design for an organisation called Project Eco-8. If you would like to see the design and what Project Eco-8 is all about (It’s a good cause) then head on over to www.eco-8.co.uk.
Of course as well I’ve got to speak about the circus review! I’d be a fool not to! What a success is what I’ll say, not only did the review reach Page 1 on Google, Yahoo, Aol and more search engines for search queries along the lines of, Unlce Sams Circus, but It was also read by the ringmaster himself! I’m not gonna talk about the ringmaster himself as a lot of you have already expressed your opinions on him in the comments section of that post, a very entertaining read I must say. Anyway I’ll include a chart below to show just how popular the circus post was.
Other than that I’m off to see the new Batman film tonight, so I may wack up a review of that sometime later on in the week!
So it’s that time of year again when “Uncle Sam’s Great American Circus” takes over a field adjacent to a roundabout on the A41 in my home town of Ellesmere Port to showcase what they themselves dub as “The Greatest Show on Earth”.
Approaching the show, the whole setup looks very impressive and American, which is what you would expect really from an American Circus. Around the perimeter of the field there are lots of big trucks styled like American 18 wheelers, with paint jobs to match as well as American flags here there and everywhere!
Although initially impressed by the circus before entering, our moods soon dramatically changed when the woman taking money for tickets would not allow us to use our half-price vouchers we had acquired a few days before (believe me, the whole town is now littered with the things, half-price vouchers all over the floor wherever there are any signs of life,) for reasons unknown. She stated they were not valid on the first night and even though we proof read the vouchers inside and out, back to front and found no indication that they were not valid on the first night we still ended up having to pay the first night special price of £6. That’s quite a bit when you’re only expecting to pay £3 and I’ll tell you now I would not be caught paying the normal price of £12.
Now on entering the “big-top” I can safely say it is a lot more impressive looking on the outside than in. Inside the chairs were old, uncomfortable and many were falling apart, not what you want when you’re about to sit down for a 2 hour show!
At this point I should mention that I visited the same circus last year and as soon as the show started I noticed a few things that immediately gave me the impression that this show wasn’t going to be as good. First off the ringmaster was awful. I mean, I’m by no means a regular circus goer but even I could tell that this guy was by no means a regular ringmaster! The guy doing it last year put on a strong American accent, he interacted with the crowd a lot as well as the various acts and helped give the show that real American feel. This guy just stood around at the side, introduced the acts in a very stereotypical British accent (see video at the end) that was near impossible to understand. Also judging by his facial expressions I got the impression that he was looking down on all the acts as if he was superior to them all, when in reality anyone can stand around and talk but not everyone can balance a sword on the end of a stick from their mouth and climb a ladder at the same time.
Regardless of the ringmaster the other let down to the show this year was the absence of a live band bar a drummer. All the acts were now choreographed to backing tracks of which the drummer played along too, EVEN THOUGH the backing tracks had drums in them. Why this drummer was a part of the show I do not know at all, but he seriously irritated me the whole way through. This is probably due to the fact I’m a musician myself, a drummer to be precise and the fact that his drums sounded awful and he played out of time. As I say it’s probably just something I picked up on and something the general public wouldn’t think twice about.
As for the main acts some of them were absolutely amazing! I mean some of the stuff they performed was just jaw-dropping! The “professor” on the trampoline was very impressive as well as the three girls performing various acts involving boxes and spikes, I’m sure you know what I mean. The acrobats in their various forms were also very well polished and certainly must have been some of the best in the business, very impressive stuff. Then there was the “Globe of Death” (see video at end) where they had three motorcyclists riding around in it all at the same time! All I can say is god knows how they learn to do that.
Some of the other acts were questionable in terms of quality and were certainly aimed at the younger members of the audience. Unfortunately as we were swiftly told shortly after the show started that cameras were prohibited in the arena, photographs of the performances were rare and we had to adopt a stealth style method of photography because some of the acts were just so awful we could not leave without evidence of them!
I’m going to finish with John’s (who accompanied me to the show) response to the question, “What was it like?” John replied, “I don’t know really.”
It was a weird experience indeed, but I can safely say that it is not worth paying £12 to go and see.
Enjoy some of the photos we took. I also have some videos which I’ll update the post with at a later date.
Less Than Jake have always pretty much been my favourite band and I’ve recently been giving their latest album, GNV FLA, a good listen I couldn’t be more pleased with it.
Quite often when bands I love so much release new material I become quite weary whether they will still sound the same and if they’re new music will still be as good as the old stuff. Less Than Jake themselves have been on a bit of a roller-coaster of releases these past 10 years with the previous two albums, Anthem (2003) and In With The Out Crowd (2006) differing quite a lot from their early albums such as Losing Streak (1996) and Hello Rockview (1998). There’s no saying that in the later albums that distinctive Less Than Jake sound was not present, because it surely was. But largely their ska sound had been toned down and a more mainstream sound was coming across in these releases.
Now though, with GNV FLA, as the press-release states, “It’s a return to form that could be called the “traditional” Less Than Jake sound,” a statement that couldn’t be any more correct. The horn section of the band play a much more major role again now, the vocals are more aggressive, the guitars are back to basics and the songs are more catchy than ever. Tracks such as “Golden age of my negative ways,” “This one is going to leave a bruise,” “Summon Monsters,” “Handshake meet poker face,” “The space that they can’t touch,” and “Conviction notice,” could easily be tracks off Hello Rockview or Borders and Boundaries and the rest of the tracks do a good job of giving the album depth and variety. “Settling Son,” shows influences of fast, hard rock in the intro and evident in more tracks we can see how LTJ have decided to up the tempo and get more of a straight up punk sound.
Titled, GNV FLA, the album is heavily orientated around LTJ’s home town of Gainesville, Florida. A sort of tribute to where they began with many of the songs inspired by the town, also evident in many of the song titles, “City of Gainesville,” and “The state of Florida,” it’s great to hear of how passionate they are about their home town and how it all began for LTJ.
Now all I need to do is decide whether to go and see Less Than Jake or Rage Against The Machine at the Leeds Festival this August. Why do they have to clash, why, oh why?!
