Life in the Bus Lane

"Slut" and "faggot" are back again.

Radio 1 backs down in Pogues row

"You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy beep".

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York.
Radio 1 censors Pogues’ Fairytale

From http://www.hmhb.co.uk/

Word is that a new LP will appear "earlyish in 2008".

As Matt didn’t post a YouTube video last Friday, I thought I’d cover for him, and offer two for the price of one.

I’m currently sat listening to Flibbidydibbidydob by Snuff. I reckon the last time I listened to it was when I was in Leeds back in the early 90s, it certainly takes me back.

I finally gave in to temptation and bought myself a mp3 player, partly prompted by having to commute into Bristol next week, and therefore spending quite a lot of time sat on a bus. The mp3 player will save me carting a bag full of mini-discs around with me.

I ended up buying a Creative Zen Xtra with a 40GB HD. The first job was to replace the UK firmware with the US equivalent to get around the 100dB limit imposed by the EU nanny state, then I had to pare down my mp3 collection to fit into the 40GB of available space.

First impressions are quite good, the only problem was the initial inability to play more than 2 seconds of a track, however this was cured by a hard reset. Apparently this is a “feature” of the current firmware.

I’ll give it some more thorough testing tomorrow, and during my commutes next week, but I don’t expect any more issues.

BPI has forced CD-WOW to stop parallel importing of CDs, therefore forcing CD-WOW to raise it’s prices by £2 per CD to £10.99

Henceforth I won’t be buying any CDs from CD-WOW due to the greed of the BPI. If they manage to convince Play.com to do the same thing I’ll probably stop buying CDs altogether and just download them from the internet.

It’s finally been officially confirmed, the Pixies are reforming for a US tour. I wonder if they’ll head over here as well?

The BPI are seemingly doing their best to kill off the record industry in the UK. As previously mentioned they are taking CD-Wow to court for selling CDs from abroad cheaper than you can buy them here. They are also targetting Play, and are investigating Amazon (US). The last one strikes me as even more bizzarre, as they are investigating a US company, not the UK arm which only sells UK CDs, in effect they want to stop us buying CDs from anywhere but a UK shop.

Maybe they should spend their time working out why it costs around £12 to buy a CD on the high street here, yet the same CD can be bought from abroad and shipped halfway around the world for around £8.

If they succeed in cutting off the supply of cheap CDs, they will only kill off their own market. Personally I refuse to pay the inflated prices we get charged over here, and will just stop buying CDs at all and resort to downloading them from the internet. The end result is that the record companies will then get no money whatsoever from my.

I already refuse to buy copy-protected CD’s, something which the Belgians seem to have right idea about.