I’m going to be brief on this one, because it doesn’t need much explanation. I’ve been a Marillion fan since the late 1980s: I think it was my son, Chris, who introduced me to Script for a Jester’s Tear and Misplaced Childhood. Like many others, I found an echo of an earlier love in this music: it harkened back to the original Genesis* and albums such as Trespass and Nursery Cryme. (For me, Invisible Touch is the nadir, not the apotheosis of Genesis’ work. But I digress.) 
Part of the magic of the first incarnation of Marillion (from 1982 to 1988) was the slightly-manic presence of Fish, the lead vocalist. When he left, many wondered if the band would survive, and the first new release with Steve Hogarth, Season’s End seemed to confirm our fears: it was closer to pop than prog. But gradually the new band forged a new identity, and albums such as Brave and Afraid of Sunlight were eagerly snapped up. The two most recent albums, Anoraknophobia and Marbles, were self-produced by the band, financed by advanced orders from tens of thousands of fans (including me).
This album is a double CD of their work on EMI. The first CD covers the Fish era, including classics like Assassing, Kayleigh, and Warm Wet Circles. The second covers the Steve Hogarth (“H”) period up to 1997, including The Univited Guest, Waiting to Happen, and Afraid of Sunlight. (It also includes the execrable Hooks in You, but that’s what the SKIP button is for.)
If you want to understand Marillion past and present, this is a great collection. If you just want to plunge in and experience today’s Marillion, I’d recommend the 2002 release Anorak in the UK Live instead.
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* The Genesis line-up with Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett, and Phil Collins
Author: geoff
Speech, speech! (But where are the DVDs?)
Just watched the final evening of the Democratic Convention (on C-SPAN, of course). I thought Kerry’s speech was excellent, capping a week of wonderful speeches from Clinton, Gore, Carter, Edwards, Cleland, and Obama. And Kerry’s daughters were fantastic, more than making up for Lieberman’s embarrassing performance.
Naturally enough, I want to share some of these moments with folks that I know missed the Convention. So why isn’t the DNC selling DVDs of the Convention Highlights on their website? Doesn’t this seem like an obvious fundraising opportunity?
And yes, I have emailed the DNC to suggest this.
The uncounted casualties of Iraq
As I write this, the official number of US military dead in Iraq is 906. But many soldiers die without being added to the casualty list. Over at Democracy Now! you’ll find a gut-wrenching interview with the parents of a 23 year old Marine Reservist, Jeffrey Lucey. (It’s also mirrored here, at John Fabiani’s blog.) The Hermit summarised it on Terry’s blog like this:
[This is] the story of a family whose son went to Iraq at 18 [actually 21] and came back and hung himself. He had two sets of Iraqi dogtags that he wore to honour the two men (prisoners) that he had been ordered to shoot, close range, unarmed. He told his sister he was a murderer and could no longer live with himself. The VA committed him at his father’s insisting and released him after 3 days despite his telling them of four ways he was considering using to die. He got told he was weak, to suck it up, and get on with his life. His father found him hanging in the cellar.
A political junkie's dream site
The Current Electoral Vote Predictor integrates recent polling data to create a map of Electoral College votes. As with most successful sites, it concentrates on doing just one thing, and doing it extremely well. (Only omission is that there’s no RSS feed to alert me on updates.) Thanks to Tim for the link.
Community action on viruses
A number of my colleagues at Sun have been blogging about the number of MyDoom-generated emails in their inboxes today. Compared with most companies, Sun is barely touched by these infestations, but in a company which generates tens of thousands of emails a day, even “barely touched” means a lot of effluent. The incidence should be even lower, because (with a few exceptions) running Microsoft Outlook within Sun is a violation of IT policies, and the penalties can be severe. (In fact, even running Windows is prohibited unless the system has been “neutered” in various ways.) But people still do it.
My approach, which I recommend, is social pressure. In my email client, I’ve set up a rule that says “if this message originated from within Sun, and if it was created using Outlook or Outlook Express, flag it in red”. Then whenever I see a red message in my inbox, I drop a brief note to the sender asking if they realize that they’re violating IT policy.
If enough of us do this….
[Updated: In response to Dan’s comment: I have never had a false positive. My filter checks for “sun.com” in both the “From:” and the “Message-id:”, and for “Microsoft Outlook” (and variants) in “X-Mailer:”; it also checks that the message was NOT processed by any of Sun’s external gateways.]
[Updated: Here’s a representative Mail.app rule. You will have to add “X-Mailer”, “Received” and “Message-id” to the list of headers that Mail.app understands. I actually use a number of rules to let me identify particular versions of Outlook, but I don’t expect others to be so obsessive-compulsive about it….
Is emigration to the USA out of control?
I just spent a fruitless half-hour on the United Airlines frequent flier website, checking availability of round-trip award flights from BOS to LHR.
Is everybody leaving Europe for the USA? Permanently????
How else can I explain the fact that for every date pair that I tested in August and September, I found one or two eastbound flights with available award seats, but zero (none, nada, zilch) westbound returns?
Of course there is an alternative explanation to “mass emigration”, but I’d prefer not to go to bed in a cynical frame of mind…
Phone frustration
Frustration is…
- Calling a hospital ward in the UK
- Being given a phone number so that I can call a patient directly
- Discovering that since it’s an “07” number I can’t dial it from the USA…..
Things that make no sense (ongoing series, apparently endless)
Per Terry, it seems that while the U.S.Army is so shortstaffed that they are recalling a 67 year old retired Colonel,
the Air Force and the Navy are doing fine. They are offering early outs (as much as 12 months) with no penalties to first term enlistees because they have (sit down, it’s a deusy†) 50,000 too many people.
(Of course it might help if those being reactivated could actually count on getting paid for their services.)
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† Transcribed from the (correct) original: no sic is required.
First NASCAR race
I went with my son-in-law, Mark, to the New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon, NH, to see my first ever NASCAR race. I’ve enjoyed motor racing since I was a kid, both in the UK and USA, but I’ve always gone to “road courses”: I like to see drivers turn left and right!
The race was sold out (the NHIS seats 91,000 101,000), the weather was warm and sunny, and it was a good race. The only frustrations were the number of cautions (a dozen, each requiring track crews to come out with ambulances, wreckers, and street sweepers to clean up the circuit), and the stupid restart system which deliberately mixes slower, lapped traffic into the pattern. The effect is to significantly penalize the 3rd place and subsequent drivers compared with the first two. Only after the very last caution of the race, a couple of laps from the end, was there a simple uncomplicated restart, and it led to some really close racing.
I had a dilemma: who to cheer for? I know little about the NASCAR circuit, and have no strong affiliation to any team, driver, or sponsored product(!). On the other hand, watching a sporting event “in the abstract” isn’t very satisfying. Needing a hat, I wandered over to the trailers selling memorabilia and decided on Matt Kenseth, last year’s champion in a Ford “Taurus”.
(They use the names of street cars, but don’t be fooled.) I bought a hat and a model car, (shown here) and returned to my seat to watch the race. Matt had qualified poorly, back in 31st position. It was fascinating to watch him fighting his way up through the field to 4th place, coping with lapped traffic, overcoming a mistake in the pits, and so forth.
And just for the record, Kurt Busch (Matt’s team-mate) won the race from Jeff Gordon, with Ryan Newman (who led for the first 170 out of 300 laps) coming in third.
I’ll be going again. Thanks, Mark!
CD of the week: Soul Calibur II Soundtrack
OK, this one is weird. 
I enjoy videogames, although I’m not very good at them. I don’t want to have to learn lots of complicated stuff in order to play. If learning is required, I’d rather apply it to something a bit more important. That’s why I gave up on Final Fantasy X; I couldn’t be bothered to learn how to play three-dimensional water-polo, with complicated rules, just for a game.
Some years ago I saw the original Soul Calibur game on the Sega Dreamcast, and I was mesmerised. It’s a 3D fighting game: oriental swords, axes and nunchuks rather than fists or guns, and characters ranging from hulking monsters, to ninjas, to anime-style Japanese schoolgirl heroines. (And then there’s Voldo, of course.) Gorgeous graphics, good A.I., playable at various levels from mindless “button-mashing” to intricate 10-click combination moves. I bought a Dreamcast just to play Soul Calibur. Eventually my Dreamcast died, Sega got out of the console business, and I put it all behind me.
Recently Sega released Soul Calibur II on all the major consoles, and I bought a PlayStation 2 just to play it. (OK, I do play a few other games, but 90% of the time it’s SC2.) Visually, it’s gorgeous. Playability is perhaps a little inferior to the original, but there are some nice new modes to explore.
But one of the aspects that really grabbed me was the music. (Yes, this really is a CD of the week entry!) It borrows familar themes from the original Soul Calibur, but there’s a lot of wonderful new music. Eventually I bought a Japanese import of the soundtrack on eBay.
So what kind of music is it? It’s a glorious pastiche: an amalgam of all kinds of musical styles, from John Williams-style triumphal marches to dark atmospheric passages that might have escaped from the Twilight Zone, to pastoral tone-poems. At times it’s a bit reminiscent of Sibelius’ Karelia Suite. And it draws upon musical styles (or, more often, cliches) from all around the world – flamenco from Spain (oddly the theme for a French swordsman), swirling music from an Ottoman bazaar, and characteristic pieces from China, Korea, and Japan. And the major themes are presented in many different arrangements, from full orchestra to delicate piano-violin duets.
It must be odd doing the music for a videogame. It has to stand up to incessant repetition (so the CD contains lots of relatively short passages that can be assembled in various ways), and it has to reinforce the gameplay, so consistency is important. Hardly anyone will actually listen to it, of course. And the rest of the project is so expensive that the budget for the music is pretty good; no need to skimp. Combine with a Japanese attention to detail (and, it must be said, a complete lack of musical inhibition or conventional ideas of taste), and the result is extraordinary.
And why did I choose this for my CD of the week? I have a CD changer in my car, which uses a 6-CD cartridge. I realized yesterday that the Soul Calibur II double CD has been in the cartridge for the last four months. Other CDs have come and gone, but SC2 became my own soundtrack. Odd, that.