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Archive for the 'comedy' Category

‘Other’

Posted: June 28th, 2010, by Marceline Smith

So, I just had a bit of a minor rage incident and finally deleted all the contents of the Genre field for all my music in iTunes. It was someone marking a track’s genre as ‘Other’ that finally pushed me over the edge but it’s been a long time coming. It’s partly the endless rows of ‘Rock’, ‘Pop’ and, ugh, ‘Alternative’ that make my music collection look so much more boring than it actually is, and partly the thought that someone might think I myself chose some of the more cringeworthy genres – AlternRock anyone?

In some ways it’s an eye-opener, a peek into the life of people whose music collections are so tedious they put Mogwai and Tortoise in a genre of Unclassifiable, or people so rockist they think Saint Etienne are Classic Rock. For all that, there have been some great moments – Christmas Song by Mogwai marked as ‘Holiday Music’, The Pastels as ‘Twee’, a live Joanna Newsom track simply as ‘Awesome’ (I disagree but applaud the enthusiasm) and The Teardrop Explodes as ‘Pop-Psicodelico’ (um).

I’m thinking of doing as many have and re-using the Genre field for record labels unless anyone has any better suggestions? And please share any moronic/hilarious genres you’ve come across yourself.

Email Fail

Posted: June 17th, 2009, by Marceline Smith

picture-1

There are at least five big problems with this email – see if you can spot them (click to see it full size). I’m partcularly glad they like the product range here at XXXXXX.

BTW, I am having my annual broken internets month, but hope to be back soon with some proper content. No doubt I shall have to update the FAQs as well.

Q: What are your advertising rates? Would you like to do a banner swap/become an affiliate?

A: HOW MANY ADVERTS CAN YOU COUNT ON DISKANT?

diskant rewind: Etch-a-Sketch Yr Fear of AIDS #6

Posted: January 20th, 2009, by Dave Stockwell

(Originally posted September 2004)

Etch-a-Sketch Yr Fear of AIDS by Dave Stockwell

[Before I begin ranting, let me just clarify that I am in no way a Metallica fan, and nor was I ever one. But…]

Fuck! I think I’ve finally found a film that I can safely say YOU HAVE TO FUCKING WATCH THIS about for 2004. It’s the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster. I tell you, it’s the new This Is Spinal Tap.

No, seriously. You know how Tap was just crammed full of classic, unbelievable moments, hilarious quotes, and godawful haircuts? You know how there’re moments where you find yourself exclaiming out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and then there’s others where you’re howling in painful laughter? Well, SkoM probably matches it in all of these regards. It’s so much more than I was expecting. This thing was made during the recording of their new album, just after bassist Jason Newsted quit, and saw the entire band go into therapy, James Hetfield check in and out of rehab, and an awful lot of squabbling, sulking, repressed anger, and an insane amount of money spent on doing nothing.

I tell you, this film has got everything. I was going to reel off a list of highlights, but there’s just so goddamned many. I could write for hours. There’s the interview with Newsted, who’s hilariously candid about how he got bullied as ‘the new boy’ for a full ten years before he finally had enough; which is boosted by Hetfield saying that he’d driven him out because he felt threatened by Newsted’s desire to promote his other musical project, whilst merrily recalling that he never let the fella have any creative input at all into Metallica. There’s the bit whilst everyone sits around in the studio for A YEAR waiting for Hetfield to work up the botheredness to come back to work; during which Ulrich finds the time have a therapy session with Dave Mustaine, who breaks down in tears about how he considers himself an utter failure since he got sacked as Metallica guitarist back in ’82 (note: Mustaine has sold fifteen million albums in Megadeth). And when Hetfield deigns to come back, you get to see him sulking like a baby when the others dare to listen to tapes of sessions outside of the strict noon-’til-4pm schedule that he has to work by. Then there’s the band’s laughable attempts to work together on lyric-writing, which reaps some of the worst teenage poetry you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear outside of a GCSE English class populated by tragic Goths. Oh yeah, and there’s the awful lumpen riffs all over the place…

And this is just scratching the surface. There are just so many classic moments.

Continue reading »

Take note!

Posted: January 11th, 2009, by Marceline Smith

Or, some random stuff I have dredged out of my inbox/RSS reader/brain.

– Sometime diskant contributor Fraser Campbell‘s comedy sketch show The Magic Glue aired on Radio Scotland this weekend and you can have a listen on iPlayer for the next week by clicking that link. I’m guessing it’s their usual amusing mix of stuff about bams and neds but why not listen and find out.

Sweeping The Nation is looking for guest bloggers “to write a decent amount of words about a single album released during the Noughties, explaining why it’s so good and why everyone deserves to hear it”. On you go.

– Ben at Stereo Sanctity has finally finished writing about his top 30 records of 2008. It’s amazing to read such genuine enthusiasm about so many records I’ve never even heard of, and all from last year! It’s unlikely I listened to 30 new albums in the last 3 years, let alone had a paragraph’s worth of interesting thoughts about them. Go have a read, plus there’s MP3s too!

Hello World!

Posted: October 5th, 2008, by Marceline Smith

So, I write this other website Super Cute Kawaii! (in the guise of a cute bunny) and a recent press release informs us that Japan’s ambassador for cute, Hello Kitty, has just made her first album. Since she doesn’t have a mouth, she has roped in some “talent” to help her out, none of which I have ever heard of. Just reading the tracklisting, a mix of ‘you go girl’ optimism and ‘ain’t I cute”‘ sugariness, I can practically hear it. Her good friend Chococat has also muscled his way in to funk things up with Chococat’s Jam, which sounds particularly inedible. I guess in an age of Hannah Montana albums, Kitty has a right to feel she’s capable of putting an album together but it all seems a bit power-crazed; having seen the lengths Hello Kitty goes to in Japan to get her face into everything (including dressing up as food and other Sanrio characters), I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns up next as Japan’s new Prime Minister. Especially since they’re already going that way with current manga-loving otaku Prime Minister Taro Aso.

What times we do live in.

Check out Hello Kitty’s jams here.

Ed Hamell – RANT & ROLL (DVD, Righteous Babe Records)

Posted: August 21st, 2008, by Pascal Ansell

“Hamell is Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Strummer all rolled into one sweaty, snarling, pugnacious pit bull of a man.” Well, the press release is half right. You could just as easily say this rasping American comedian is one very angry bastard – you would be if you were brought up in a horrendously conservative American family in horrendously conservative America in the 70s.

There is one gem of a story involving a mother’s dead body and her son’s extremely inappropriate humour. The whole DVD is worth just this story, and I won’t ruin it for you. Hamell says his excuse for divulging in his friends’ most private of stories is, with an irresistible shrug: “well, if you’re my friend and you tell me these stories…”There’s also a horrifying satirical song about ‘The Trough’, an ultra-modern restaurant of Hamell’s invention which advertises “our friendly immigrant staff will even chew the food for you… you know, doing those jobs us Americans don’t wanna do.” Despite the unattractive aspects of ‘Rant and Roll’ there are some pretty clever cracks (e.g. Hamell visits “a crack bar from ‘Cheers’”, whatever a crack bar is) and without being patronising his memory for lines is astonishing.

Footage from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival seldom tickles the un-PC ribs; a great deal of his material can be lazily vulgar and extremely irreverent. This is just a personal thing, but I’m not massively comfortable when drugs are glamorized. Luckily for Hamell he doesn’t exactly do this, yet he looks on his drug-fuelled days (we’re talking crack, here, ho bloody ho) with undisguised nostalgia. A lesser prude would probably love the spaced-out tales more than I do – going to church on acid and being horrified by ‘eating the body of Christ’ is a good one, admittedly.

The incessant verbal attacks, the angry ramblings get a bit too much towards even the half hour mark, but if you think you can stomach some seriously crude material, then give ‘Rant and Roll’ and spin and I think you’d enjoy his “wicked sense of humour” more than I did.

www.hamellontrial.com

Pascal Ansell

diskant rewind: Honey Is Funny #8

Posted: August 12th, 2008, by Chris S

(Originally posted April 2003)

Honey Is Funny by Chris Summerlin

I work in a large office of people. It’s quite open plan so you can see what the person on the opposite side of the office is up to even though they’re quite far away. This has major disadvantages in that, well, people are annoying. Me included, in fact especially me. And living in each others’ pockets for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week means if you have the slightest chance of developing some kind of irrational hatred of someone or something then it will happen.

Since I started doing this column I’ve been dying to write one about my office. I only recently summed up the courage to watch The Office and sure enough it was frighteningly close to my life. But I always held back because, and this surprises me as much as will no doubt surprise you, some people who I work with read this column. And I never told them to either! Hi Christophe Dejous!

But this month I get to do it. You know why?

2 days ago I QUIT.

I have no job to go to and I have a 6 week notice to serve here but after that I will be UNEMPLOYED. It’s quite scary but at the same time so is the information that I have (at last count) wasted 2 years of my life working for a company that wouldn’t even exist were it not for Thatcher’s desire to privatise everything in sight.

When asked for the reason why I quit I said there were too many to list but I simply didn’t enjoy any part of my job. So I’m in a bad mood and therefore my column this month will be about the stuff that REALLY GETS ON MY TITS in my life. A Room 101 if you will. A pet hates list. So you can see what a mentalist I am. It’s not restricted to my working life and I will be adding to it month after month as well.

What are we waiting for? Lets go!

THE COUGHING MAN AT WORK

God. This one is the killer. This man (who will remain nameless) has broken me. I have worked in the same office for 2 years and about 18 months of that have been spent within earshot of this man. His job is to call people at home and ask them to read their gas meter. This means that for 8 hours a day I hear him repeating the same line over and over again. I ask myself if my annoyance is because his voice really is that grating or whether it’s the old saying that familiarity breeds contempt but the real reason he makes me want to cave his head in is that he coughs.

“What?” I hear you all cry. Go on, do it…

Sure, everyone gets a cough every so often. Especially working in a close environment like an office. No problem, cough away. But this guy has had a cough for 18 fucking months. EVERY DAY. EVERY FUCKING DAY. And he coughs in such a pathetic, crap way. And the worst bit is he tilts his head back a few degrees prior to coughing and then like some custom built germ-spreader he lets fly with phlegm. Where are his hands? On his desk that’s where. Now we’ve all seen those film clips where it shows germs flying out of a person’s mouth so I know and you know that putting your hand in front of your mouth when coughing really doesn’t do much. But, at the same time it does cover the gaping hideous chasm in your face and it also stops spit and god knows what else from flying into the air or worse still at your neighbour. Every day at 4pm he walks to the coat rack to get his coat and right as he gets there and is facing my coat he lets fly with the coughs. When I leave I’m going to buy him some cough mixture and a tissue. Or better still just wade over the 2 desks that seperate us and pummel him to death with a Wallis Elite Series office chair. And he’s a twat as well. Last classic quote from him was “I couldn’t really give a toss about the war. How does it affect me?”. If I killed him no jury would convict me.

Continue reading »

Onion News Network

Posted: August 5th, 2008, by Stan Tontas

Haven’t bothered visiting the Onion for quite a while, it seemed that either the written content was getting formulaic or I couldn’t find the lulz because of the redesign.

However, I’m liking their video podcasts. From the 2 I’ve seen, they’re doing for US cable news what the Day Today did to News at Ten. This one (Beijing Olympics: Trap?) is like a 3 minute primer on Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

In other news: beat rising prices by holding a barbecue at your house. Result: fridge full of food.

Drowned in corporate sounds

Posted: July 18th, 2008, by Marceline Smith

This is getting old, our sniping at DiS, I KNOW, but damn they make it too easy.

I was over there to link up their interesting interview with wee Stuart Braithwaite about Young Team’s reissue. No hard feelings – promote what’s good and all that. While I’m there, I get a popup asking me to take a survey so I had a look.

These are the only choices for what music sites you have visited recently.

Even for the NME, that would be a sad list to see. Hell, even for Q Magazine. So, what’s the deal, DiS? Do you really think these are your readers?

It’s almost as funny as the time Interscope hijacked Trail of Dead’s mailing list to try and sell their fans fast food and trainers.

Summer catch-up: special introductory offer

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, by Greg Kitten

Given strict instructions to write about A RECORD, A BOOK, A FILM OR DVD, A COMPUTER GAME, A FANZINE/MAGAZINE/COMIC, A TV PROGRAMME, A BAND, A PLACE OR EVENT and/or A WEBSITE, I nearly fainted from the wealth of options on the table. I knew I had to have my finger on the pulse, write about things that matter to the kids, and pull it off in a fashion that leaves me looking cool as fuck in the eyes of the reader. A role model, a deep thinker… maybe even an Idol.

So I was going to write a paragraph about A BOOK, and wax all philosophical like about the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the pointless focus on game balance and oversimplistic mechanics overhaul at the expense of backstory & other fluff on player races and a shift of focus away from collaborative storytelling and toward MMO style XP grinding, but fortunately for you guys, something exciting happened in my life, so you’re all spared.

Instead, I’m writing about AN EVENT, that event being my getting arrested for the first time. What can I say? Being arrested sure isn’t what it was in the old days. I always figured it’d involve handcuffs, a night in the cells, blagging a “snout” where and when I can, and an eventual court appearance, which, let’s be honest, would be a near perfect excuse for buying some clothes that look like they should be worn by a grown-up. Fortunately, I was spared this indignity, and can continue dressing like a badly informed 19 year old for the foreseeable future.

This is how it “went down”:
My band played a show last night, our first for like two years. Needless to say, it was a real return to form, what with my late arrival for soundcheck, typical tuning problems and a heaving crowd of around twelve people once all the emo kids had gone home to bed, just in time for the headline act. After the show, the spirit of rock & roll clearly pumping through my veins, I managed to obtain a small amount of the smelliest weed I have come across in years. Thing is, I don’t really smoke anymore. Rarely touch the stuff. But as I say, this night was clearly all about the power of rock, and with no groupies in sight after about 10pm, I was destined to take a ride on the Children’s Plastic Slide with A Badly Formed Snake’s Head of the “slippery slide” of the drugs world: weed.

Heading back to my illegally-parked car with a spring in my step, closely followed by despair on my face, I noticed I had acquired a new decoration on my windscreen; a bright yellow flyer advertising a band called “Fixed Penalty Notice”, with an eye-catching yellow and black logo. This was truly going to be a night to remember.

Driving home with my windows down, the breeze in my hair, and the reassuring pungent odour of cat’s piss filling my nostrils, my attention was drawn to flashing blue lights in my mirror. I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting them to just pass right by, but to my dismay, it was me they were flashing.

I was taken to the rear of my car, and told that my brake lights weren’t working. I expressed genuine surprise – I keep my car in decent order, and am always up to date with tax, MOT and insurance. It was at about this moment that I started feeling my age – policemen are usually such cliches, it must be part of their initiation or something, but this time, I was the damn cliche. I kept looking at the officer writing out my ticket, and all I could think was “god damn, you young”. It also seems he was a young man, most likely a non smoker, with a keen nose. He told me in no uncertain terms that my car did indeed smell like an elderly male lion had decided to mark it as his own, and to be perfectly honest, he was right. On being pulled over, I had cleverly removed the offending article from my pocket and placed it in the super-secret compartment known to the criminal underworld as “that bit in the door where you throw your change and sweet wrappers”.

At that moment, perhaps noticing that I was suffering a little from the cliched thoughts going through my head, the young officer decided to take the weight off my mind and run out a few for himself. As he was searching me (very thorough, though not as intimate as I was hoping), he basically told me that if I co-operated and just told him where the weed was, this would all go very smoothly for me, but if I gave him a hard time and made him actually work for it, my night was going to be over. I held out for a couple of minutes, but as soon as they requested backup in the form of a couple of female officers to search my female passengers and a gosh darn, full fledged dog unit, I decided it was probably best to come clean. I handed it over, and the dog unit and backup duly arrived to search my companions and car.

I was put in the back of the police car, and told I was being given a “Cannabis Street Caution”. Now, this was pretty impressive – I like that they throw in the word “Street” there. It makes it sound cool and edgy. But this is the confusing part – they told me I was under arrest, read my rights etc, but I was merely getting this caution. So basically, I was under arrest for about half an hour while they filled out some forms, which were delivered by yet another officer in the fourth police car of the night, which I now fondly refer to as the “Forms-mobile”. They asked me a bunch of not-very-thorough questions, and transcribed every single word of my answers. This was one of the cooler parts – I noticed they were doing this, so rather than saying “yes” every time, I mixed it up a bit to make it exciting for them. I broke out “Indeed”, “I understand” and “very much so”.

All things considered, they were actually pretty cool about the whole thing, and they completely upheld their end of the deal, which I didn’t expect. They did spell out exactly how it would have gone down had I not cooperated – night in the cells, blood test, followed by court appearance and loss of driving license. Dude even pulled my trousers up for me while he was searching me, though I did have to point out that he was the reason for them nearly falling down. A few cliches later (“Needless to say, we’re not going to give you your drugs back” and “so, this is what ‘no cannabis’ looks like”) and after being forced to sit there and listen to them chat about how they were lucky to be “back on their patch” and not have to “go back into town” (this was the only slightly unsettling part – they were vocally really pleased that they were dealing with me rather than stopping people being knifed and bottled in the town centre) and I was free to go.

Five officers, four cars, two dogs, one bag of weed. Result!

Now something about A TV SHOW – if you don’t watch LOST, you’re insane.