Been ripped off (again)

Cross post from Niallism.

So, somebody called Michael Trombley has started a new night in Detroit called Menergy. Hmm, "Menergy"... that name is familiar. OK, it's a Patrick Cowley song - we don't claim ownership of the name.

So, what is this new night's music policy? Italo disco and Hi-NRG, you say? Well, everyone loves disco! Right? Sure, can't take credit for that, especially when we admit to being influenced by well established club nights like Melting Pot and Horse Meat Disco. Only, we were one of the first clubs to focus strictly on Hi-NRG, a sound that is a huge and under-acknowledged part of Scotland's clubbing history (if you're in doubt about that, ask Optimo's Twitch about Fire Island or Bennets, or check out this Menergy guest mix from Stuart MacLean aka Frenchbloke)

But anyway, this must all be just a simple co-incidence. Oh, wait a minute...

Menergy Detroit poster (FEB 2012):



Menergy Glasgow Poster (JAN 2011):



Hmmm, ok. But that's a popular song lyric.

Sure.

So check this...

Menergy Detroit flyer (FEB 2012):



Menegy Glasgow flyer (NOV 2010):



Yeah, it's pretty obvious there's some direct "inspiration" going on here.

But I'm gonna let you in on a little something - my jaded tone of indifference to all of this (as opposed to fuming anger) has got less to do with a hipsterite archness and more to do with having experienced it before.

Since January of 2011 I have been promoting drag-and-disco parties in Manchester with my partner Joe Spencer. We go by the name of TRANARCHY. You can find out more about us at www.tranarchy.co.uk.

Imagine our surprise when, in December we found out about Sink The Pink presents TRANARCHY.

Here's one of our promo images from last year:



And here is theirs (low quality as it's the only one available):



Any similarities?

Oh well, just another co-incidence, I'm sure.

Just like how this article I wrote for the website Dangerous Minds (in April 2011)

So that makes you a square: In Defense of the Hipster

was absolutely no inspiration whatsoever on this article for Disinformation (from August, 2011)

In Defense of the Hipster

despite DM and Disinfo sharing staff members in the past who left very acrimoniously (including myself).
Yep. No "inspiration" going on there - just pure, blind co-incidence.

So. do you think I should be angry about all of this?
Because, surprisingly, I am not.

Maybe I'm just too jaded by the repeat experience, but I DO take being copied as a compliment. I take what I do very seriously, even if that is not apparent to everyone all of the time. I pride myself on being a writer and musician of intelligence and integrity who is often ahead of the curve (or on a totally different tangent to most other folks). This can work to my detriment sometimes, but I still put a huge amount of effort into all my endevours, because I believe a half-arsed job is not worth doing.

There's nothing I can do to stop people copying me, and conversely there's nothing copyists can do to stop me doing my thing. If someone else comes along and likes what I do enough to want to do it too, or even if they think they can do it better, that's their call. Because at the end of the day, when you bite me, it's a sign that I'm doing something right.

The Warrior Show

How did this ever come to pass? Who the hell pitched the idea to MTV to have the utterly batshit insane Ultimate Warrior, play Drill Sergeant Nasty to waif-like emo and post-hardcore bands? Billed as an "extreme motivational mind/body/soul work-out", it seems to consist of the 52-year old, steroid-ravaged Warrior (his legal name) attempting to turn kids from complete non-athletes to "looking like a fucking god" by screaming at them in a personalised gym/ torture chamber. Oh, and by saying "fuck" more times than ought to be humanely possible.

Genius!





HEAVY FUCKING METAL!

Bad Rave Flyers

Is a blog that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Some of these are seriously HORRIFIC.













Don't worry - there's PLENTY more where they came from.

Woman Kills Rapper With One Punch

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere. From The Daily Mail:

A 22-year-old woman allegedly killed an aspiring rap singer with a single punch for a $5 party bet.
Tiffany Startz is accused of killing John ‘Fatboy’ Powell with a single blow to the face and has been told she has to stand trial.
The 25-year-old had agreed to be hit in the face by Starr in return for $5.

Today's the Day!

Financial Times in punctuation Disaster

From a Financial Times article on the recent comments on rape by the "Justice" secretary Ken Clarke:

"The justice secretary had endured a bruising encounter with a member of the public who had been raped during his interview with BBC Radio 5 Live."

Oh dear. :(

The Niallist embroiled in Facebook gay kiss controversy

Crossposted from Niallism.com

So I spend one day away from the computer, and when I get back in I find I have been embroiled in a homophobic Facebook scandal. Wow!



The story is this: last week a young gay couple were ejected from the John Snow pub in London for kissing. Expressing their anger via Twitter the story caught on and a same sex "Kiss-In" demo was organised via Facebook at the John Snow pub for Saturday. The pub shut its doors but the demo continued outside anyway - UK readers will probably know about this as it ended up being on the national news.

This is where I come in: I wrote a very short blog about the demo for Dangerous Minds on Friday, and used a picture of a gay kiss from Eastenders (above)to illustrate it. Richard Metzger then posted the story to his Facebok wall (as he does with practically all DM entries) only for some homophobic jerk to leave insulting comments. Thankfully this idiot was outnumbered about 20 to 1 by people telling him to shut up and/or fuck off. I thought nothing more of it.

I came in from a day out on Saturday to find an unusually large email chain from the DM staff in my inbox. Turns out Richard received an email from Facebook warning him not post indecent material in the future. As the Facebook wall is one of DM's main channels for sharing stories, he was understandably concerned, and forwarded it to all contriibutors to be careful what we post. Richard had assumed the offending story was one of Marc Campbell's fairly frequent go-go compilation videos that feature nudity, but as the mail chain progressed I was shocked to find out (as were all the writers) that it was the post on the kiss-in that was removed.

We were all shocked and appalled that this picture could have been deemed offensive enough to warrant the removal of the entire post. It is really very mild, and Eastenders is a mainstream, pre-watershed television show in the UK. Richard wasted no time in writing another blog post detailing what happened to the original post and publishing it on Dangerous Minds. He then published the second post, using the same picture as the first, on the Dangerous Minds Facebook wall.

This story and the associated picture has spread like wild fire, having been re-shared now close to 60,000 times, and been retweeted almost a thousand times. Dangerous Minds has now crashed twice due to traffic volume, and we have been getting almost unanimously positive support. Hundreds of people are changing their profile pictures to images of same sex kissing (which, if it is between two women seems perfectly acceptable on Facebook). The post on Dangerous Minds about the Facebook scandal has now almost four hundred comments, more than twice the highest number of comments for a previous entry (which may have been my own piece in defence of hipsters - end smugness).

All this and the story hasn't reached the mainstream press yet, or been retweeted by a major figure like Stephen Fry. Facebook have yet to make a statement as to why exactly the pic and the story were pulled. This is at the discretion of Facebook of course, but I would hope that with the amount of stink being kicked up they will be forced to say something. If they don't, the cries of homophobia and anti-same-sex bias just gain credibility. As it stands, our post was pulled witihin the space of 24 hours, yet the Feacbook group claiming to have raped Lara Logan (and enjoyed it) took four days and dozens of complaints before it was removed. This to me is ample proof of hetero-normative and masculinist bias on the part of Facebook moderators (not to mention a subtle endorsement of rape culture).

The most heartening aspect of this whole affair for me though is the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the public. I have grown used to homophobia on the internet, especially on megasites like YouTube, so to see lots of people (especially straight folks) taking a stand is great. I had almost given up on this being the case - a depressing state of affairs I guess, but how does one combat something so vast, so subtle and so ingrained? I guess this is a start.

I will update with any more news, but for now here is the original kiss in post, here is the second post about the scandal, and here is the Facebook profile of Dangerous Minds.

Cat and Dolphin

You may think this looks all cute and "awww" but just remember what Bill Murray says near the end of Ghostbusters. Cats and dolphins playing together = END.OF.DAYS.

Fuck You = Bless You

A Xtian take on Cee-lo Green. Just how wrong is this? Let me count the ways...



Thx to Christian Nightmares.

WOAH

There's been some scary footage of Friday's Japanese earthquake/tsunami, but this is unreal. Three words: FUCK ING HELL.



NOTE: The original video is here, but won't embed outside Facebook. The above is a highly condensed version of the clip, which on FB plays out in real time.

Goat Worship

What the everloving fuck?

Chris Korda "I Like To Watch"

Is this the most offensive song in the history of everything? Watch the vid and judge for yourself. There is no way in hell I am gonna post the original video (still below), which is like this one, but intercut with about 50 odd cum shots and lots of jocky American sport action. But hey, if that tickles your fancy, you can find it here.



This has shades of Chris Morris' extreme satyrical genius, and also a Ballardian sense of depersonalising an horrific incident through sexualisation of the subject matter. And it has teh megalolz (listen out for nostril spurting guffaw moments at c.1:20 and 2:40). This is almost ten years old now, but still retains its power.

Chris Korda is the transvestite leader of the cult The Church of Euthanasia, the four main pillars of which are Suicide, Abortion, Cannibalism and Sodomy (or any non-procreative sex). Signed to International Deejay Gigolo in the late 90's, s/he's a respected producer, though I'd never heard of this tune til a few days ago. Like a much more extreme version of the Church of Subgenius, CoE seems even more relevant today than it did in the 90s. Please come back and shock us some more Chris!

You can download I Like To Watch for free, along with remixes by Richard Bartz and Cannibal Whore Feast, right here.

Rubber

Quentin Dupieux aka Mr Oizo has completed his third film 'Rubber', a comedy/horror about a killer tyre on the rampage in the USA. Definitely the most outlandish/highly boring idea for a horror flick since The Human Centipede (see below).

WTF CIA

The CIA's formed a unit to examine the damage caused by WikiLeaks, and they're calling it WTF.

"Fuck Off Harrods"

Revenge on the shop by a disgruntled ex-employee. Awesome! Full story at dashperiod, made all the more memorable by this genius quote with its belly laugh inducing punchline:

“Honestly, I am disgusted, ” said Irene Rider, 59, from Gary, Indiana. “I was with my grandchildren. We had just gotten off the bus. I said ‘look everybody’ and pointed up to the lights – but you know what the lights said? They said f**k off. And that is not an appropriate message for a child. At least not at Christmas time.”

Irish Economic Crisis Explained By Robots

Sadly I'm a bit out of the loop of the Irish media to know what is going on there with the current financial situation (but to summarise it's not good) but this clip which my brother linked on Facebook offers up some answers. To summarise, they're not good.

Uh oh... [Averted]

So, NASA is going to broadcast a news conference at 5:30pm today to talk about an "exceptional object in our cosmic neighbourhood". What could it mean? A planet? An alien ship? A comet that is on a collision course with Earth?? We're holding our breath here...

***EDIT***

It's a black hole, the youngest black hole in our galaxy. So no harm there then.

This is the first time I've checked out NASA TV, it's actually pretty cool.

Peter Sissons on Anne Robinson

Happy Halloween Pt 2: Creeeepy Ads

What better way to get this All Hallow's Eve started than some fine spooky vintage adverts from Youtube? These aren't deliberately spooky, which makes them all the more creepy.

First up its the doll that won't stop laughing. Dolls are creepy enough at the best of times, but throw in some possessed looking children and a maniacal voice over and it goes off the scale:



More dolls - this whispering doll wants to kill you sometime:



Now for an all-time classic, an ad I was made aware of a few years ago by Glasgow-based artist Stina Wirfelt. This is so wrong I won't even start:



But this one takes the biscuit. I thought it would be impossible to usurp the Kinder Surprise ad as the most bizarre of all time, but dammit those Japanese have gone and done it:



There is a sequel to this ad too, if you think you're strong enough to handle it. OK, one more for the road - and remember kids to tune in at nine for the big giveaway. And don't forget to wear your masks... Happy Halloween everybody!

Charles Bronson's "MANDOM"

I never knew that Charles Bronson had his own fragrance:



Thx for sharing TJ Kong!