Rage Against Scowl

There's a campaign on against Simon Cowell and the X Factor as most know. The idea is to use a song by RATM to keep the X Factor single from the Xmas #1. Cowell has repeatedly attacked the campaign, insisting it's unfair to the X Factor artists and it doesn't affect him personally at all.

That's a lie. And it also sidesteps the question why such a campaign would materialise in the first place.

The campaign materialised because people are sick and tired of the way Cowell and the organisations backing him have taken 'art' out of popular music. All people get now is schlock - this year it's a horrid cover of a horrid song by a horrid artist that actually is a horrid copy of yet another song. It's all shit and what worries people is that idiots still go out and waste their money on it.

Cowell's and Fuller's shows - the Idol and X Factor franchises - were purportedly to find talent that somehow didn't get recognised by the 'music industry'. The first thing you have to ask yourself is where the music industry fits into a British Xmas #1. There's no promotion to speak of - that's all taken care of by the shows themselves - and there's precious little need for 'plastic'. Today everything is digital. An Xmas #1 in Britain is the equivalent of a successful act with a MySpace page who muster up the fans to fill Wembley Stadium. The record companies have no role in the greater scheme of things anymore. Neither the artists nor the fans need them or want them.

And what 'talent' has been found in all these years? Ask Cowell himself. He says Leona Lewis is the only talent his shows have ever found. Leona's the exception to the rule. Look at all the rest and where they are today. They're nowhere. Does Simon Cowell care? Of course not. A flash in the pan Xmas #1 is still money in the coffers of Sony BMG and Cowell's and Fuller's corporations. The investments in these ephemeral acts is minimal. The revenues gained - especially from the obscenely lucrative voting - are ginormous. It's not about music and it's certainly not about art - it's about making a quick fortune year after year and the collateral damage of the 'artists' exploited for those ends is something none of them bother about.

Which brings us back to the first part of the question - the fact Simon Cowell is lying. For not making a #1 does in fact impact on Simon Cowell and his friends personally. It breaks the bubble. It means the 'magic' of the X Factor and the Fuller 'Idol' shows is broken. It means they're finally exposed for the trash they are. It means contestants have that much lower incentive to try out for next year's competition. It means the lure of the show - instant (but brief) success for whoever wins - is ruined.

Simon Cowell says he's been in this business of reality television pseudo hunts for 'talent' for nine years. That's about enough. It's about time music got back to being the business of sharing art.

Tiger's Mulligan

Tiger gave up.
http://web.tigerwoods.com/news/article/200912117801012/news/

Reading this is like watching clips of Bill Clinton. They've got to him. The petty mediocre of the world are going to eat him alive. He'll never be himself again.

Here's only the world's best golfer ever. Who has made billions. And everybody wants in on the game. And they'll get it. And destroy him in the process.

Tiger Woods

Jesus H Fucking Christ leave the poor people alone. He hit a tree and a fire hydrant. The planet's gone hysteric.

At the bottom are product endorsements worth millions to everybody. Because the discerning consumer buys things based on who's on the label. The Daily Mail, the Mirror, the Sun, the fabulous News of the World, the Enquirer, the Globe, TMZ - even the mainstream media: they're all in on this. It leads if it bleeds.

Obama's just announced he's escalating a war, his health care plan sucks, there's disaster and starvation and pestilence and human rights abuses everywhere - and what do people do? Obsess over a golfer and his pretty Swedish wife living in Florida?

The same morons who buy products based on stupid endorsements are the ones going nuts over this. And the media are feeding the frenzy. It's a classic trait of the nobodies to have absolutely no empathy for anyone. Even the Florida police are in on the act: they jumped right in to fine Tiger for hitting a fucking tree. Nobodies are always taking advantage of situations like this - it helps them think they're not nobodies anymore.

Going Going Gone

Ah that lustful Louis Walsh. He finally got his. The twins from Hades have been tossed out of X Factor. And it's about time.

If one goes back over their history one finds not a single hint of any talent. They've been terrible all along. Some people actually liked their contribution to the show but that's another story dealt with below. The question at hand is how anyone could justify keeping them in and excluding others. The answer is it can't be justified at all.

The next question is therefore why they were kept in. Simon Cowell hated them. Threatened to not even fly with them if they got through and he became their coach. Everywhere people were cringing at the prospect of them appearing on the live shows. Others wept and lamented the good talent Louis Walsh dismissed so he could keep the twins who he so obviously lusted for.

For this wasn't a question of any ordinary prejudice. This was pure raw sexual lust. And Louis has been looking like a perve 'freshly fished' for the past few weeks. They've certainly been an aphrodisiac for the dirty old man.

But it was Brian Friedman who kept them in week after week with his elaborate stage shows and choreography. He complained continually about what a pain they were to work with but he certainly gave it his all, allocating significantly more to their acts than to anyone else's. And he had to: for what do you do with two outrageously annoyingly untalented twits like them? You surround them with talent. You have to drown them out. Rupert's Sun are spreading a rumour that the sound engineers deliberately mixed their vocals down on the live performances. But that's rather typical for a rag effectively boycotted to this day in Liverpool. GOTCHA, Rupert.

They were cabaret shows. At the centre were two rather unconscionable idiots. It was bizarre.

Simon Cowell made a lot of money by booting Lucie Jones. The voting and the viewing have been hysterical. But 'Scowl' knew that the short term win would backfire in the long term. By this time next year everyone would have forgot about Jedward but they'd remember how Simon undermined the career of a lovely girl and ultimately destroyed his own franchise.

H/T to @Katiewalker93 for coming out and saying it as it is.

Direct Messages 2

For the past month or more my Twitter account has said I have two DMs which don't exist. We all know Twitter is running a number of different databases trying to keep things up to date. We all see how certain facets of the interface 'lag' from time to time. But to have such a serious error and to have no way to correct it is really bad software engineering.

Two ghost direct messages that don't exist is trivial under the circumstances. It's been a while since many of us have seen the big elephant with the proclamation 'Twitter is over capacity' but we get other messages instead - plain text ones stating we can't connect, that there is an error, that the servers can't handle the request, etc.

Twitter is a new service and its membership is still growing by leaps and bounds. The Twitter people recently received an injection of $100 million in new venture capital. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they invest some of this unseemly sum in sorely needed computer hardware.

But above and beyond that: these Twitter 'engineers' need to stop dimensioning their system for yesterday and start dimensioning it for tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after that. That's the real world of software engineering. And the Twitter people seem abysmally inept at understanding that and woefully inexperienced with nontrivial software system projects.

@Schofe & Mariah

@Schofe had a bit of a run-in with Mariah. He's such an easy going chap but good old Mariah is anything but that. She's a diva of the most ridiculous proportions.

@Schofe didn't do anything to Mariah but that didn't stop the tabloids. They're watching his Twitter feed obsessively. @Schofe worked overtime to stay on after transmission to receive Mariah for a special interview to be recorded and shown later. He waited an hour and then some.

Mariah paraded in with an entourage bigger than Denmark and then proceeded to waste even more time as she selected and reselected appropriate attire for the interview.

@Schofe had a picture taken with her afterwards. Just as he did only days earlier with Bill Nighy and Michael Caine. Both those pics were immediately posted to his Twitpic account. They're nice photos.

Mariah wouldn't allow it. She's demanded her people first study the pic and only when they give their approval will he be allowed to post it. That approval still hasn't come.

Westfield shopping centre wanted Mariah to turn on their holiday lights. Good enough - but Mariah demanded they get her 100 white turtle doves and 20 white kittens to surround her as she flipped the switch.

Unbelievably enough the Westfield people got the doves. But they couldn't get the cats. And the shopping centre specifically forbids animals. How this latest farce turned out is not known.

Mariah is a jackass. Of the highest order. Perhaps @Schofe can't say this but others can. She redefines 'diva'. In her case there's not the smallest minimal semblance of reasonability. She's just a jackass - an intolerable one at that.

Good singer? Hardly. Her material is crap and her mind is deteriorated beyond repair. She's bloated and mostly does playback. Nobody cares about her and no one should.

@Schofe is the ultimate gentleman. He doesn't deserve Mariah's much deserved bad publicity.