Read a few pages in the Saturday paper this morning over my cup of tea.

Convinced me more than ever how uninteresting and generally shit the media in Britain has become. It's not the news, or the sport, or the TV etc that I find uninteresting, it is the way these things are presented.
The following (short) rant is a rare example of social commentary on this ere blog.

For instance. Accompanying a 'story' about Wayne Rooney's wedding/family etc (how is that of any relevance anyway...) is a small picture of his fiancee's friend at a party flashing her boobs at the camera. The picture is 'licensed' from Hello, and has a couple of logos strategically placed covering her nipples.
The caption describes her etc etc, and suggests ' a bit of help from us to protect her modesty.' One, its not help from the paper, its an integral part of the Hello license (otherwise it would say the newspapers name or be a black square) Two, its not to 'protect her modesty' - its a legal condition of the paper and the whole topless woman thing. Three, why would a girl who is happy to flash her tits to Hello magazine photographs at a public bar need her 'modesty' protecting anyway...

Second story. Another young girl has gone missing in the Midlands, a nine year old called Shannon something.
Reading behind the headlines is always so much more interesting. There is a last known photo of her shown leaving a leisure centre after a swimming lesson with school, wearing her 'distinctive' red furry Bratz boots.
At school???
She was last seen by her mates walking home after the coach dropped her off at school.
Walking home alone??? She's nine years old.

England is going to the Dogs Kai Motte

My second post of the evening (which probably isn't a great idea) but I wanted to make a note here of my thoughts on the Chris Watson album "Weather Report" that I have played a couple of times in the last week or so during the evenings.

Even by my standards, it's weird. It's not even, almost, or is it, actually 'music' at all.
Founder member of the extraordinary (and I know far too little about them) Cabaret Voltaire in the late 1970's early 80s, Watson is now one of the world's leading wildlife sound recordists as well as being a member of the experimental industrial noise scientists Hafler Trio. I've mentioned this before, but I hadn't really played it then.

This is an album that consists of three 20-minute pieces, each a 'reduced' time compression of a much longer project recording the various effects of weather on our lives and landscape
Ol-Olool-O is a fourteen hour drama in Kenya's Masai Mara from 0500h - 1900h on Thursday 17th October 2002.
The Lapaichis the sound of a Scottish highland glen through autumn and into winter during the four months of September to December.
Vatnajökull presents the 10,000 year climatic journey of ice formed deep within this Icelandic glacier and its lingering flow into the Norwegian Sea.

I think your reaction to this album depends on how you interpret and define 'music', which isn't something I've really done before and probably can''t do very effectively in five minutes.Wikipedia describes 'music' as: an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner.
This album doesn't feature instrumentation or vocal tones. Its made up of the sounds of the natural world, from the electricity of storms and the sound of wind and rain, though birdsong, animal calls and noises to the creaking and reverb of glaciers and ice fields. But that makes it sound like a 'sound effects' album from the BBC wardrobe which would be ridiculous. Although it is exactly what Chris Watson has recorded before.
What makes this album different from that is his treatment of the sounds and the way he has compressed the aural projects into short pieces, organising, structuring and repeating the sounds to create atmosphere, rhythm, emotion and harmony.
It's very, very clever and haunting. The sound of serious rainfall is mesmeric.

Tx hates it of course, and it has pushed the boundary of 'ridiculous' even further into the abyss.
Perhaps its a preparation for my forays into Polish and Russian traditional music which should be much easier to bear.