The Futureheads: This is Not the World

Image by ratatuiadotnet via Flickr

The Futureheads’ new album, This is Not The World, is really quite good. It’s been on my iPod for the last week or so and I’m really happy to have found yet another British album that I actually really like. The great thing about bands like The Futureheads and Maximo Park for instance is that they are very similar, but more commercial/accessible than bands I used to listen to. Some tracks on TINTW sound like Peter and The Test Tube Babies (in their Mating Sounds of South American Frogs – phase), while others sound like high-end emo/melody core.

While most British ‘indie/postpunk’ that is now in the charts I don’t really like, it’s the melodic, slightly edgy/arty stuff that really gets my juices flowing. I’ve even checked The Futureheads’ touring schedule and have noticed that they play Rheinkultur – a free music festival in the Bonn Rheinaue that I used to go to AGES ago!

So, if you’re in Germany, and in the Bonn area on the 5th July 08, by all means go along and check them out 😛

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Season Finale of Peep Show

Image via Wikipedia

The season finale of the excellent CH4-series Peep Show was on last night. While not as good as episode 4 (I think it was episode 4 – the one where Jeremy doesn’t get his inheritance, and Mark is ‘raped’ by a woman), it was very still funny and with a great cliffhanger (Sophie pregnant with Jeremy’s child).

Peep Show is probably the best, most perceptive, cringeworthy comedy since The Office. The actors match their characters so well (regarding looks, tone of voice, features etc.) that you can’t imagine them doing anything else. Unlike Shameless, you could watch Peep Show forever – I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the characters, or indeed the show.

Series 6 has been confirmed too – and I will buy the ‘entire box set’ once it’s run its course (I already have series 1 on DVD).

Mad Men Season on BBC 4

I got into this a bit late, though I knew it was on (it doesn’t help that on the BBC website this supposed ‘Mad Men’ season isn’t actually promoted on their website in a separate section, which is annoying if you want to find out more).

From what I gather, this ‘Mad Men’ – season consists of the series Madmen (about advertising in New York in the 60s) and is framed by various documentaries and programmes to do with Advertising. For instance, yesterday I watched a documentary about David Ogilvy, and there’s a tie-in series called The Hard Sell, of which I’ve missed most episodes but which explores Advertising in Britain.

I should have been a bit more on the ball and watched whatever I missed on the BBC iPlayer; alas, I’ve been either too busy or not bothered enough to do so. The other thing is that I currently only use my laptop as my desktop PC is not on the internet just now, and I try avoiding any multimedia stuff on my lappy.

I’m using this blog post BTW to try out Zemanta, which anaj blogged about the other day. So far, so good – the only couple of points of criticism right now are that:

• You can’t seem to be able to choose which words the suggested links are applied to (the Wikipedia ‘Mad Men’ article was suggested; however, it automatically attached it to the words ‘Mad Men’ as in ‘Mad Men season’, rather than the TV show – one word ‘Madmen’). That is, when links are suggested, users should be able to highlight which word in the text they want to apply it to. Not sure if that’s already possible by configuring the settings, but I intenionally tried it out as a dumb user, i.e. without any background reading, so I get the most authentic ‘first user’ experience
• No YouTube – clips are suggested thus far. Now that would really help, especially, as embedding YouTube into wordpress is still a bit of a pain in the arse; also, in the case of TV shows etc. you’d often want to embed a trailer and so forth, so this would indeed save a lot of time. Again, this may be possible, but as I said I’m just trying the default settings just now as a first-time user. Any configuration I can do later. As it is, this blog post will stay without a clip 😛

And that’s it!

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