The Blood is The Life 14-01-2013

• Nick Cohen makes a sensible argument
  No, honestly. worth reading the whole thing too
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• Indy journo tries living on a normal income and finds it hard
  Still it's a sympathetic piece, it's just... How is this stuff not obvious?
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• James has a fabulous pithy response to Julie Burchill
  I'm quite often proud of James. This is one of those occasions.
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• Stavvers makes a good point on the Burchill debacle too.
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• What's the EU ever done for us?
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• terrifying vision of the future from the conservatives
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• an explanation of intersectionality
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• what if we approached sexual assault by limiting men's freedom instead of women's?
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• an open letter to Suzanne Moore
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• More on Burchill
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Doctor Who Fandom Challenge Days 13 and 14: Favourite theme tune and hated character I love

(a list of the questions and links to all the answers can be found on this entry)

Favourite version of the theme tune

You can watch all of them here:



You have to give props to the original Delia Darbyshire arrangement. Nothing quite like it had ever been done before, and it's been steadily watered down ever since. I particularly detest the current series inability to have it without a full orchestra. The whole POINT was its electronic otherworldliness. Orchestras are bad and wrong for the Doctor Who theme.

That said, I do have a soft spot for the Peter Howell version that suffuses my childhood memories. That BOOOM at the end...

Character whom I love that everyone else hates



Lookit him, he's so lovely.

Metal Monday: goodbye HMV

I've been planning to do my own riff on Music Monday for a while, and when I saw about the death of HMV on twitter it spurred me into posting.

When I was a wee thing, my godmother gave me a Jason Donovan album for either Christmas or my birthday. It was a reasonable guess, given the fashions of the time and my age, but she didn't know my musical tastes very well. Luckily she also had the foresight to include the receipt. So I toddled in to HMV in Bradford with a Jason Donovan album and a receipt and swapped it for two of the Iron Maiden First Ten Years double 12"ers. This song was on one of them:



You can also get it on Spotify and last.fm.

I spent much happy time in HMV Bradford, although as the years went by I spent less time buying music and more on peripheries. My two most recent purchases there were a set of headphones and an Iron Maiden T-shirt. Both times I looked at the CDs, and both times I thought "bloody hell, I'm not paying that." And therein lies the reason they're gone. I'm sad, but it's kind of inevitable.

RIP HMV.