Stealth Munchkin's New Writeups

Are you thinking what we're thinking? (idea)

2005-05-01T18:30:00Z

This phrase was the slogan for the Conservative Party's British election campaign in 2005, used prominently on posters from February through April of that year.

Each poster would consist of some 'common sense' idea such as "How would you feel if some bloke who'd been let out of prison early attacked your daughter?" - ideas that almost invariably appealed to the lowest common denominator, and made sense for ten minutes til you actually thought about them.

The campaign received great notoriety though for one particular poster - "It's not racist to impose limits on immigration". This poster was an extremely disingenous way to appeal to supporters of the British National Party (and to a lesser extent the UK Independence Party), an extreme right-wing fascist party that has been taking support from people who would traditionally have supported the Conservatives. Immigration being a code-word in Britain in much the same way that 'bussing' once was in the USA, this poster unleashed a…

Gettin' in over My Head (thing)

2004-06-27T17:37:40Z

Gettin' In Over My Head is Brian Wilson's third solo album of original material, released in June 2004. Encased in a horrible Peter Blake cover, the music inside, while patchy, is some of Wilson's best in decades.

First, a bit of history - between his two 'proper' solo albums, 1988's Brian Wilson and 1998's Imagination, Brian Wilson recorded material for two unreleased albums. The first was a finished album, called Sweet Insanity, which had moments of utter splendor (Rainbow Eyes and Don't Let Her Know She's An Angel among others) but was slathered with synthesisers,had terrible lyrics courtesy of 'psychiatrist' Eugene Landy, and contained such atrocities as Smart Girls, Brian's attempt at rap ("My name is Brian and I'm the man/I write hit songs with a wave of my hand" , "Wouldn't it be nice if PhDs/Were stroking me with hypotheses" , "God only knows where I'd be/Without smart girls, hip hop and harmony") which bore more than a…

Strawberry Fields Forever (thing)

2004-05-22T17:13:50Z

Strawberry Fields Forever is a Beatles song credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney but solely written by Lennon.

After the Beatles' last ever gig, in 1966 at Candlestick Park, the band members seemed desperate to find something to occupy them. While George Harrison learned sitar and Paul McCartney composed the score to The Family Way, Lennon was appearing as Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester's film How I Won The War, filmed in Almeria, Spain.

While the film initially interested Lennon, he rapidly bored of the experience, his low attention-span meaning he needed constant stimulation. He fell into a funk, and spent the entire time fiddling with a single song, the song that became Strawberry Fields.

The song is clearly the work of a lonely man - Lennon was away from his friends (other than Ringo Starr and Neil Aspinall, who visited during part of his time in Spain) and his marriage was breaking up. While the line "No-one I think is in my tree" has always…

Andy Kaufman (person)

2004-05-20T23:16:16Z

There have been many rumours over the years that Andy Kaufman faked his own death. He had spoken in the past about the idea and had met up with Alan Abel, a hoaxer who had faked his death a few years earlier. Kaufman was also obsessed with Elvis, and especially with the ideas that Elvis too had faked his own death. These rumours had been fanned over the years by the repeated appearances of Tony Clifton at small clubs. While his writing/performance partner Bob Zmuda admitted that he had sometimes played Tony during Kaufman's life, and also insisted that Kaufman was definitely dead, he still wouldn't categorically state it was him playing Clifton.

These rumours flared up again in the wake of the film Man On The Moon, but slowly died down again. However, Kaufman had stated that if he ever did fake his own death, he would return on the 20th anniversary. 'Just in case', Zmuda, along with Kaufman's girlfriend, placed ads in the press 'to remind him' and hosted a party at the House Of Blues…

Eminem and the Inside Rhyme device (thing)

2004-05-11T12:52:04Z

This technique is hardly unique to Eminem, and Dylan was hardly the first to use internal rhyme in his songs, and it's sad to see that someone could truly believe, firstly that Dylan 'unwittingly' 'stumbled across' the technique, and secondly that this is any kind of innovation.

Dylan's song was, as Dylan himself freely admits, an homage to the style of 'talking blues', and especially to the song Too Much Monkey Business by Chuck Berry, the lyrics to which, like "Running to and fro hard working with the mail/never fail with the mail, here comes a rotten bill" and "Salesman talking to me trying to run me up the creek/Say you can buy it come on try it you can pay me next week", bear more than a passing resemblance to the work of some of the more intelligent rappers (and unlike Eminem's lyrics actually talk about something).

Talking blues lyrics were a huge influence on the development of hip hop, especially through the influence of late-60s performers such as…

nicotine (thing)

2004-05-09T11:18:15Z

Nicotine is also the name of a (GPL'd)client for the Soulseek P2P network, for *nix operating systems.

Written in Python, it is an updating/rewriting of an older client, Pyslsk, which is now no longer being updated. While it is primarily designed for Gnu/Linux systems and uses GTK and PyGTK, many people have reported making it work successfully on OSX as well.

In my own experience Nicotine is a nicer client to use than the Windows version, having all the same functionality (friend list, instant messaging, queuing of full folders, share to friends only option) plus some additional functions that are not currently available on the windows client, such as blocking IP addresses by country.

I had some problems installing this at first, even from RPMs, as it seemed to have some circular dependency problems which took several attempts to resolve, but it was the first application I had tried to install as a linux newbie, and no-one else I've spoken to has had these…