…and Happy Chanukah and Happy Kwanzaa and Winterval and Festivus and all the rest!

Merry Christmas!

Sweet Home Alabama.  It makes my throat stretch and feel tight.  My eyes well up immediately. 

A few scenes from the movie…

Melanie walks into her apartment.  It’s rose filled from top to bottom.  Teenagers, college students and wanna be brides are awe inspired with the romantic nature of it all.  My first thought is who is cleaning up the mess.  Second thought is why don’t the roses match?  They are a hodge podge of yellow and red.  Cheesy.

Melanie is escorted to the backdoor of an unknown building and met by her boyfriend.  He’s been asking her about a trip to Ireland, but he flips it.  The lights go up and they are standing in the middle of Tiffany’s.  The question is popped and it’s all… ‘pick one’ meaning a huge diamond engagement ring.  Cheesy.

The roses turn my stomach.  Tiffany’s catches in my throat, flips my stomach, makes my eyes water and constricts everything.  It isn’t about wanting to get married.  Possibly the gesture; though it’s over the top dramatic, cliché and arrogant wrapped into one tight ass little package complete with pompous turtle neck sweater.  Maybe it’s a damn princess complex. 

Later she goes to apologize to a friend she outs as being gay.  “If I pointed at you they wouldn’t be pointing at me,” she says.  Constricts my throat again.  I feel the pain.

After a night out at a street fair Melanie wanders into the Coon Dog Cemetery and begins talking to the tombstone of Bear wondering what it was that she did wrong.  Jake (her not so ex-husband) joins her and they sort out old times a little.  They talk about a pregnancy gone bad she had that was an adventure to him and an ‘only’ adventure for her.  My throat clenches. The tears roll. 

Melanie stutters at signing her divorce papers at the altar.  I’m bawling at this point. 

The moments are all cheesy, predictable, by the book, theorized.  Yet they elicit a response for reason.  Surely there are Freudian reasons interlocked into the response.  Sweet Home Alabama happens to be one of my favorite feel good/feel the pain sort of movies that keeps me ‘feeling’…feeling human in an atmosphere that sometimes just doesn’t elicit the same response.

I remind myself that ALL dragons can be defeated…

The creature laughed scornfully. “I,” it said, “am frightened of nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” it said.

Charlie said “Are you extremely frightened of nothing?”

“Absolutely terrified of it,” admitted the Dragon.

“You know,” said Charlie “I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?”

“No,” said the dragon uncomfortably, “I most definitely would not.”

There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. “That,” he said “was much too easy.”
Neil Gailman, Anansi Boys

Three cheers to free wifi! I’m going to be in and out of airports as I make the (unreasonably) long journey back down South. I’m sitting in Boston Logan as I’m typing this, waiting at my gate to head on to Raleigh-Durham North Carolina. Then I get to sit there for three hours until my next hour and a half flight to Miami. Fun fun fun. I can hardly contain myself. I’ll be playing Chrono Trigger on my DS for the rest of the day. No big.

-Estherocket

One of the things that, from the beginning, has stood out to me about British television is the hard-hitting adverts (sorry, commercials) about stuff that matters.

“Stick to the Speed Limit” commercials that show a little girl walking through her neighborhood and getting hit by a car going 40 instead of the posted 30mph.  Her dead body slides in slow backward motion back to where she was crossing the road and she explains to the camera the statistical rate of survival if she’s hit by a car going 30mph (about 80% she’d live) vs one going faster (similar percentage that she’d die).

“Don’t Drink and Drive” commercials that show a guy having a beer in the pub with his friends, and just as he’s about to leave cuz he needs to drive home, he catches the eye of a pretty girl at the bar and tells his mates, ok, he’ll have another.  Suddenly the camera speeds up towards the girl, a look of fear on her face, you hear a squeal of tires and brakes, and she is slammed up against the bar and falls to the ground with blood pouring from her forehead.

There are also commercials for really good causes that are really really well done.

In the past, I’ve gotten pretty burned out by the likes of Sally Struthers and the Christian Children’s Fund.  Aka – the crying children adverts.  I’m sorry, I know that sounds heartless.  And I know those problems are really real and the organisations are probably really good.  But the “We’re trying to tug at your heartstrings” tactic was just too obvious and pretty annoying.

Tonight, we saw a commercial for the NSPCC – National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  Without the warm fuzzy lighting and the sad music, with simply a matter-of-fact narration, it first showed a little girl hiding in bed under her blankets with the sounds of adults screaming in the next room, then a toddler by himself strapped into his stroller out on the back porch at nightfall, and last, a little girl skipping down the sidewalk in front of her school, climbing into her family car, only to see a man instead of the mum she was expecting (for this one, the narration explains that her mom doesn’t believe that he hurts her), and we see the car doors locking.

Ush made a comment about how good that advert was at bringing to light a real problem and I agreed.  It made me want to throw up; to consider that children really are treated like that, right under our noses.

But then I thought, “Yeah, but what’s the point of a good commercial like that if I see it but don’t do anything?”

So I went to their website and signed up to give £2 a month.  And that’s how you knows it’s a good ad that has accomplished its purpose… You feel moved to help out (make a donation, volunteer, etc), you’re happy to do it, and you didn’t feel guilted into it.

Shout out  to S. Vic a.k.a. Meta-5 Shi

The Wake Up Coming soon..

S. Vic – Materialistic (Preview)

Preview screening of Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, London BFI, December 5, 2009…

The film magazine that started it all...

I never get lucky with competitions. Which is why I am lucky enough to have a friend who does. This is accidently going to turn into yet another blog post about the wonders of Twitter. If you are bored of this Twitter talk already then persevere; the following story may just be enough to convert you…

This time last month I was bemoaning the loss of Borders. As I sanctioned in an earlier post, amazing film magazine Little White Lies dedicated its last issue to Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. At the end of my post I warned that people should get their hands on the magazine rather soon as it was certain to sell out. Before Borders announced their demise in the UK, I had trekked into the centre of Cardiff on five separate occasions to buy this particular issue, only to find it still wasn’t in stock. It was only once I found out that Borders had gone into administration that it occurred to me to buy the magazine on the LWLies website. But it had sold out, as I had predicted…

This is all a rather roundabout way of saying that I now have my hands on the issue. I got it at the LWLies premiere of Where The Wild Things Are at the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank. And the reason that I mananged to be at the premiere is thanks to my friend Danielle who accidently entered a LWLies competition on Twitter. And then won.

LWLies asked their followers to tweet them with their favourite childhood cinema memory. And the winning entry was…

@LWLies cinema memory = watching The Lion King and having to comfort my Dad as he cried when Mufasa kicked the bucket. I was 7. He was 35.

The beautiful world of Where The Wild Things Are...

And so with two tickets won, we headed to the capital for the screening.

There is something truly special about the BFI. It is a cinema unlike any other I’ve been to, and has a gift shop crammed with so many amazing books that it could easily rival the British Library. After being asked if we were from Time Out magazine by the ticket staff, and regretfully replying no, we headed into the cinema. As we took our seats right near the front I was almost giddy with excitement to see that every seat in the cinema had the latest ’sold out’ issue of LWLies. Having finally got a copy in my hands it was hard to resist the overwhelming temptation to read the magazine from cover to cover, but we had barely taken our seats before the lights went down and the film began.

Sendak's Max in his transforming bedroom...

I had been excited about seeing the film ever since I heard that it was being made. I’ve loved Spike Jonze’s previous feature films, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, and love the fact that he has directed music videos for the musical genius that is Bjork, amongst others. And, like many around that world, I loved the book and its illustrations when I was little, particularly the pages where Max’s bedroom gradually transforms into a wild world. Although this particular part was missing from the plot, the film really manages to capture the essence of Max’s imaginary kingdom and the wild things that manifest his inner emotions perfectly. The film is richly imaginative and beautifully shot, yet strangely terrifying at the same time. As I was watching it I couldn’t help but feel that if I had watched this film as a child I would have been petrified of the wild things, in particular Carol, Max’s closest, yet most distant furry friend.

Spike Jonze on the WTWTA set with Max Records...

Yet as Jonze explained in the Q&A section after the film, the film is not necessarily for children, rather it is a film about childhood; “I started thinking about it differently and I started thinking about who the ‘Wild Things’ were and who Max was. I think the idea that I had was that the ‘Wild Things’ are wild emotions. Once I had that idea, I could just kind of expand on what that means when you’re nine years old; how overwhelming and scary it can be, unpredictable emotions in you and people around you.”

As well as answering questions from top film journalist Mark Salisbury, the audience were also invited to question Jonze. Some of these ranged from questions about the director’s inspiration to his working relationship with the book’s author Maurice Sendak and even a question about Jonze’s favourite sandwich. Yet the answer that I found most intruiging was in response to Jonze’s decision to use Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O’s music as the soundtrack, rather than a score;

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O wrote & performed the film's soundtrack...

“When I started the script, I knew I wanted her to write the music and she’s somebody who just writes from her heart. She doesn’t write analytically and she writes whatever she’s feeling. She kind of closes her eyes and goes with that feeling and writes a song about that. Everybody around her gets sucked into this stream of hers and it feels like her eyes are closed until she opens them and the song’s completed. I just wanted to have that; I thought that would be really powerful.”

Just as I had mustered up the courage to actually ask a question it was time for Jonze to leave the stage. Luckily he stayed around the BFI for a bit to answer a few more questions and to give autographs. And so my lovely, hard-earned copy of Little White Lies now bears the inpromptu slogan “To Heather, Enjoy. Spike Jonze” emblazoned in shiny permanent marker. As we headed back out into the drizzly streets of London and took the ’scenic’ route along the Thames, we discussed the film and Jonze, as well as our amazing luck. But not before we bypassed the BFI gift shop to silently salivate over all the books and DVDs…

Shoes & Socks Off & Kevin Devine, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff. December 2, 2009…

It was with huge excitement that I realised that Big Scary Monsters would be invading Cardiff for their annual Christmas tour this December.  The cult record label was started in Oxford by Kevin Douch back in 2003 and is almost as big as the bands that it represents, with many of their fans listening to the bands purely because they are on the label. Some of the best acts they have signed include Yndi Halda, Talons and This Town Needs Guns and some of the past acts that have since either spilt or hit the big(ger) time include Tubelord, Meet Me In St Louis and Cats And Cats And Cats.

It was with this initial surge of excitement that my fellow gig-goers and myself booked our tickets in anticipation that the event would sell out pronto. However, when we arrived we were quite surprised that the sizable main stage room in Clwb Ifor Bach was rather empty. However, this turned out to be a good thing as the event turned from potential riot to an intimate gig that perfectly complimented the unusually acoustic nature of both acts.

Starting the show was Cardiff-based band Rescue Party, who, as we trundled in late, were playing a wonderful acoustic version of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. The Cardiff three-piece were made up of two guitars and a violin, as well as vocals, and produced a tranquil yet vibrant support act.

In between acts we headed over to the merch stand, where Kevin Devine was signing posters and selling 25 copies of his Christmas single Splitting Up Christmas. Wrapped in festive paper, and each signed by Devine, each single also contained a secret B side. On each night of the BSM tour Devine recorded a different B side on each of the 25 available. Our night contained the track The Longer We Lay Here by Pedro The Lion, which he played during the gig. Other nights on the tour included B-sides of Elliot Smith’s Whatever, Concrete Blonde’s Joey and Neil Young‘s Harvest Moon. You can now download all 9 singles from the BSM website until December 31.

Shoes & Socks Off is a one-man band in the form of Toby Hayes, ex-frontman of the sadly now defunct Meet Me In St Louis. While his former band walked the line between metal and post math rock, Hayes’ latest solo project couldn’t be more different. Merging thought-provoking lyrics with soft vocals is certainly a new direction for Hayes, yet one that further demonstrates his musical ability. Unusually, Hayes has released three albums in one year, starting with From The Muddy Banks Of Melitzer. This was soon followed up with Hand-reared Suburban Piglet which featured exactly the same ten songs as the first album, but this time featuring more instruments and friends’ input which surprisingly produced a completely new sound. Hayes third album Where The Skyline Is Fortified With Windows And Doors featured 10 new songs and included a backing band made up of members of BSM recruits Blakfish and Palehorse.

Disappointingly the crowd was nowhere near as large as it should have been yet this did not dampen Hayes’ spirits. The half hour set was a wonderful blend between the stripped back versions of songs that usually contain more instruments than just a guitar, but it worked really well. Highlights include I’m A World Class Assassin, Hang In There Buddy and That Was Yesterday, Today Things Are Different. As well as his own material, Hayes also played Nirvana’s Lounge Act, which sounded amazing.

After only a 10 minute break, Brooklyn-based Kevin Devine took to the stage. Although Devine has five albums under his belt since 2002, Circle Gets The Square, Make The Clocks Move, Split The Country, Split The Street, Put Your Ghost To Rest and Brother’s Blood, it is only his latest album that has been released in the UK through Big Scary Monsters, making him an official part of the BSM family.

Also solo and guitar-clad, Devine played an awesome hour long. It was rather surreal as the whole audience took to the floor cross-legged, school assembly style, and watched up in awe as Devine played. As well as playing both songs from his Christmas single, he also played a wide range of songs from across his musical career, with a good smattering of new material thrown in. Particular highlights included I Could Be With Anyone, Another Bag Of Bones and his first song of the night- his latest album’s title track Brother’s Blood which perfectly exemplified the dramatic dynamics of his vocals.

Upon noticing the unusually large disco ball in the venue, Devine illustrated the full extent of his song writing ability by proceeding to make up a hilarious song about it on the spot. This, combined with amusing anecdotes in between songs and granting song requests from fans, really made for an impressive performance, despite quiet appreciation taking the place of audible enthusiasm from the small crowd.

However my favourite song of the night had to be his cover of Bob Dylan’s The Man In Me from the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski. This closed the performance just before Splitting Up Christmas injected some Christmas sentiment into the night. Although both Hayes and Devine were brilliant, it really was a shame that there were not more people there to support them. Hopefully when they return to Cardiff next year the turn out will truly reflect the talent of the duo and provide an audience size that they deserve…

Kevin Devine…

Shoes & Socks Off… (Complete with Hugh Morris’ interuption…)

For slightly better recordings, have a look at Alfie Tolhurst’s blog ANOther Manc. Also have a ganders at Hugh Morris’ interview with Kevin Devine on the night- Wax Lyrical.

Designing with CSS – An Introduction

This article is a small introduction to two new series about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

• CSS Tips, Tricks and Techniques
• CSS Snippets

With improvements in browsers’ compliance with W3C standards there is a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML along with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style web document elements and objects.

The aim of this introductory article is to familiarize those who are totally new to CSS with some of the basics. To gain the most from these two series you are expected to be a web designer with elementary knowledge of XHTML and CSS. The idea is to provide web designers with the ability to create standards compliant, accessible web sites using XHTML and CSS. The CSS tips, tricks, techniques and snippets to be published on our blog would enrich and supplement your knowledge of CSS.

Purpose of CSS
The purpose of CSS is to provide web developers with a standard way to define, apply, and manage style characteristics, such as font, size, colour, and position, to the elements of XHTML documents. CSS provides these capabilities through a technical model based on parent/child hierarchy of the web document, the separation of style from content, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created and documented set of standards.

Using Cascading Style Sheet
CSS information can be applied in different ways. CSS style information can be either attached as a separate document or embedded in the XHTML document. Multiple style sheets can be imported. Different styles can be applied depending on the output device being used; for example, the screen version can be quite different from the printed version, so that authors can tailor the presentation appropriately for each medium.

Cascading Order
What style will be used when there is more than one style specified for an XHTML element?
Generally speaking we can say that all the styles will “cascade” into a new “virtual” style sheet by the following rules, where number one has the highest priority:

1. Author Styles (style specified by the web page author)
   
   There are three ways of specifying a style sheet:
• Inline Style: inside an HTML element, specified using the “style” attribute.
• Internal Style Sheet: embedded style in the head section of an HTML page.
• External Style Sheet: a separate CSS-file referenced from the document.
2. User Style
• a locally stored CSS-file specified by the user in the browser options, and acting as an override, to be applied to all documents.
3. User Agent Style (Browser default)
• the default style sheet applied by the user agent, e.g. the browser’s default presentation of elements.

The style sheet with the highest priority gets used to display the content. Declarations that are not set in the highest priority source, will get passed on by a source of lower priority such as the user agent style. This process is called cascading.

So, an inline style (inside an XHTML element) has the highest priority, which means that it will override a style defined inside the <head> tag, or in an external style sheet, or in a browser (a default value).

Caution:
If the link to the external style sheet is placed after the internal style sheet in XHTML document <head>, the external style sheet will override the internal style sheet!

Inline Styles
An inline style loses many of the advantages of style sheets by mixing content with presentation. Avoid using inline style!

To use inline styles you use the style attribute in the relevant element. The style attribute can contain any CSS property.

The example shows how I have changed the colour of header in this article from the original Albeo theme:


<h2 style="color:#0183ac;">Designing with CSS - An Introduction</h2>


Internal Style Sheet
An internal style sheet should be used when a single document has a unique style. You define internal styles in the head section of an XHTML page, by using the <style> tag.

Example:
In my main style sheet for my website with more than hundred pages, h1 and p elements are styled like this:


h1 {text-align:left;font-weight:bold;font-size:14px;color:blue;margin:5px 5px}
p {text-align:justify;padding:0 5px;margin:5px 0}


But in one particular page I would like them to be different, so I use an internal style sheet on that page, as shown below:


<head>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
h1 {text-align:center;font-weight:bold;font-size:18px;color:red;margin:10px 5px 15px}
p {text-align:center}
-->
</style>
</head>


External Style Sheet
External style sheets are best as you have the most control over styles. An external style sheet is ideal when the style is applied to many pages. With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire website by changing one file. Each page must link to the style sheet using the tag. The tag goes inside the head section:


<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css" media="screen" />
</head>


An external style sheet can be written in any text editor, and should be saved with a .css extension. The file should not contain any HTML tags. An example of a style sheet file is shown below:


body {font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:11px;line-height:1.25;color:#18397c;background:url('../asset/main.png') no-repeat top center}
h1 {text-align:center;font-weight:700;font-size:14px;color:#31659c;margin:0 0 5px}
p {text-align:justify;padding:0 5px;margin:.5px 0}


Tips:
Even multiple external style sheets can be referenced inside a single XHTML document. On my website, I have different style sheets for layout, typography, navigation, and forms, etc. If a page doesn’t have a form then it need not have a link to style sheet for forms. I also avoid whitespace, and use shorthand to reduce the file size.

Multiple Styles Cascade into One
If some properties have been set for the same selector in different style sheets, the values will be inherited from the higher priority style sheet as explained before.

For example, the h2 selector has the following properties in different style sheets for a document:

External Style Sheet


h2 {text-align:center;font-weight:bold;font-size:13px;color:brown;background-color:lime;padding:2px 0;margin:5px 0}


Internal Style Sheet


h2 {text-align:left;padding:2px 5px}


Inline Style


<h2 style="font-size:15px;color:red;">Designing with CSS - An Introduction</h2>


The virtual style sheet for the h2 element on the page with an inline style and the internal style sheet and linked to the external style sheet will be:


h2 {text-align:left;font-weight:bold;font-size:15px;color:red;background-color:lime;padding:2px 5px;margin:5px 0}


The font-size and color are inherited from the inline style (highest priority), text-alignment from the internal style sheet, and the rest from the external style sheet (lowest priority). Interestingly, padding is modified as per the internal style sheet.

CSS Rules
CSS is a simple language. It is easy to read and write, and takes very little time to understand the basics and start building your own style sheets.

In CSS, a rule is a statement about one style aspect of one or more XHTML elements. A style sheet consists of one or more rules that apply to an XHTML document. A CSS rule is made up of a selector and a declaration. Each declaration itself consists of a property and a value.

Selectors are one of the most important aspects of CSS as they are used to “select” elements on an XHTML page so that they can be styled. The declaration tells a browser how to style any element on a document that is selected.


selector {property:value}


The selector is the link between the XHTML document and the style. It specifies which XHTML elements are affected by the declaration. The declaration is that part of the rule that sets forth what the effect will be. You can group selectors together that share a common declaration.

The property is a quality or characteristic of that element that you are choosing to style. CSS2 defines around 120 properties and you can assign values to all of them. The value is a precise specification of the property. You may specify more than one property for one selector.

Punctuation
Each selector in a group must be separated by a comma. A declaration is surrounded by curly braces. Property and value are separated by a colon. If the value is multiple words, put quotes around the value. You must separate multiple properties for one selector with a semicolon. Do not leave spaces between the property value and the units! “margin-left:10 px” (instead of “margin-left:10px”) will work in IE, but not in Firefox or Opera.

To make your CSS code more readable, you can put each property and its value on a line by itself. But this will increase the size of your style sheet.

Example:


p {font-family:Cambria,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;text-align:justify;padding:0 5px;margin:5px 0}
p {
font-family:Cambria,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;
text-align:justify;
padding:0 5px;
margin:5px 0
}
h1,h2,h3 {text-align:center;font-weight:700;font-size:14px;color:#31659c;margin:0 0 5px}
h2 {font-size:13px}
h3 {font-size:12px}


The curly braces and colon make it possible for the browser to distinguish between the selector, property, and value.

Type Selectors
A type selector matches the name of a document language element type. A type selector matches every instance of the element type in the document tree. Any XHTML element type can be used as a type selector. Type selectors are the simplest kind of selectors.

Example:
The following rule matches all h1 elements in the document and sets their font size to 14px:


h1 {font-size:14px}


id and class Selectors
In addition to setting a style for an XHTML element, CSS allows you to specify your own selectors called “id” and “class”.

id Selector
The id selector is used to specify a style for a single, unique element. You can use an id selector name only once in your XHTML document. The id selector uses the id attribute of the HTML element, and is defined with a “#”.

Example:


#wrapper {width:960px;min-height:100%;background-color:#f6f8fa;margin:0 auto}


The wrapper of my website is used only once in a page, so I use id selector for this outermost container.


<div id="wrapper">
... content
</div>


Caution:
Do NOT start an ID name with a number! It will not work in Mozilla/Firefox.

class Selector
The class selector is used to specify a style for a group of elements. Unlike the id selector, the class selector can be used as often as you need within your XHTML document. This allows you to set a particular style for any XHTML element with the same class. The class selector uses the XHTML class attribute, and is defined with a “.”

Example:


h2 {text-align:center;font-weight:bold;font-size:13px;color:brown;background-color:lime;padding:2px 0;margin:5px 0}
p {text-align:justify;padding:0 5px;margin:.5px 0}
.left {text-align:left}


Now, if I want, I may left-align my h2 element with a padding of 5px as follows:


<h2 class="left" style="padding-left:5px;">Designing with CSS - An Introduction</h2>


Similarly, any XHTML element with class name of “left” will be left-aligned.


<p class="left">This para is left-aligned, and not justified as defined in the external style sheet.</p>


Caution:
Do NOT start a class name with a number! This is only supported in Internet Explorer.

This article is not a tutorial, and there are other selectors like:
universal selector, descendant or contextual selectors, child and sibling selectors, attribute selectors, pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes.
I will explain these selectors as and when I use them in these two series.

Another thing that I haven’t discussed here is that you have an option of two different writing styles for your CSS rules: longhand and shorthand. I always prefer shorthand that allows you to condense your rules by assigning multiple properties and values in a single line, and create a smaller file which uploads faster.

CSS Comments
Comments are used to explain your code, and may help you when you edit your code at a later date. Comments are ignored by browsers. Comments may not be nested. CSS comments begin with characters “/*”, and end with characters “*/”.

Example:


/*
Copyright 2009 GoldenTwine Informatics
Style name: gti - main style web 2.0
W3C CSS Validator - Valid CSS!
*/

/* clearfix */
.clearfix:after {content:".";display:block;height:0;clear:both;visibility:hidden}
.clearfix {display:inline-block}
/* Hides from IE-mac \*/
* html .clearfix {height:1%}
.clearfix {display:block}
/* End hide from IE-mac */


With this brief introduction, get ready to share with us tips, tricks, techniques, and snippets which will enable you to design your web document with creative CSS. Your comments, suggestions, and contributions are warmly anticipated!

Small Business Website Design
Get a professionally designed special custom five-page website ideal for small business that need an online presence as well as personal sites or informational sites at an amazing price of only $125.
Visit our website to learn more!

Author: Subrato Paul lives in Kolkata, India. He’s the owner of GoldenTwine Informatics, which he founded in 2003. He is a website designer, Internet marketer, and provides social networking and bookmarking services. He writes in his official blog and as a guest writer about internet trends, computer issues, internet marketing, website design and development, and his website…

Social Networking
Join goldenTwine on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Did you like this article?
If you’re new to goldenTwine blog, you may want to
subscribe to our RSS feed | Permanent Link.
Thanks for visiting!

I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the first time last night.

Absolutely incredible. Possibly the best film I have seen in my life. Just wow.

If you haven’t already seen it, I advise you to do so as soon as you can. Seriously.

Rae goes for broke as he presents a raw visual for his raw song Pyrex Vision.  Be warned this is not safe for work.

Female #1: “We were playing Yahtzee.”

Female #2: “How delightful.”

Female #1: “I was on fire with the Yahtzee. Sometimes the dice and I really like each other. Sometimes they….”

Female #2: “Do they speak to you?”

Female #1: “Yes, they speak to me. I love Yahtzee. Anyway, I rolled another Yahtzee and The Hammer shoots me a filthy look and snarls, ‘You and your damn voodoo hands.’ She was taking it all very personally.”

Female #2: (scrunches face in displeasure)

Female #1: “I know. Every time I rolled after that remark she’d hiss and droplets of spittle would land on the table.”

White Lies, Cardiff University’s Great Hall, December 4, 2009…

It would be accurate to say that White Lies have been attracting a fair amount of attention this year. As well as headlining Radio 1’s Big Weekend, supporting Coldplay and Kings of Leon on their US and UK tours, and making up one fourth of the NME/Shockwaves tour alongside Florence And The Machine, Glasvegas and Friendly Fires, the band also became the first British band of 2009 to have a number one album.

The Ealing-based band formed when Charles Cave, Harry McVeigh and Jack Lawrence-Brown were still at school under the original name Fear Of Flying. In 2007, the band decided that they wanted a change of musical direction, and so a new name was created. The newly-named White Lies played their first gig in February 2008, and Zane Lowe named their single Death as his Hottest Record In The World months before it was even released. After much media hype, the band finally released their debut album, To Lose My Life…, in January 2009.

This tour is the band’s second sell-out headlining tour of the UK and Europe. Weeks before the Cardiff show, White Lies had to pull out of most of their European dates due to McVeigh being ill, so it was with great relief that he recovered and was able to play the UK leg of the tour, whilst rescheduling the European dates for early 2010.

I was very excited when the tickets landed on my doormat and announced that the support act would be Asobi Seksu, a New York Dream Pop band with an amazing female vocalist that I had been wanting to see for a while. Originally called Sportfuck, Asobi Seksu is made up of duo James Hanna and the beautiful Yuki Chikudate, as well as occasionally recruiting friends to help out along the way. They took to the stage and played a brilliant support set, complete with screaming vocals and clashing melodies. Yet as the band’s style of soaring female vocals and intense percussion is the complete antithesis to White Lies‘ moody vocals and keyboard-heavy baselines, I wasn’t completely convinced that the audience fully appreciated Asobi Seksu’s musical brilliance. Although at times Chikudate’s soprano vocals reached dizzying heights, and not always in a good way, the band set a high bar for the main act to reach, with songs Thursday, Transparence and Neji & Girly being particularly amazing showcases.

Although White Lies deny any favourable comparisons to Joy Division, Editors and Interpol, McVeigh’s deep voice does has a certain tone that harks back to these bands. Their first song of the night, Farewell To The Fairground, highlights his voice perfectly and was a huge crowd-pleaser. The three-piece took to the stage in their traditional all-black outfits to great applause and were joined onstage by Tommy Bowen who is a permanent fixture as keyboard player for the band during their live shows.

The band seamlessly played through almost the majority of their single debut album, with the title track To Lose My Life and The Price Of Love and Unfinished Business being firm crowd favourites. EST was a standout track for me, as it is one of the songs that I previously tended to skip over in favour of the singles. However, as a live entity it took on a whole new dimension of dynamics with a bridge that had the crowd chanting as one, and since the gig has fast become one of my highlights from the album.

As well as album favourites, White Lies also played the popular B-side Taxidermy and currently unreleased track You Still Love Him, as well as treating the audience to an unexpected cover of Talking Heads‘ 80s hit Heaven. Despite this cover being well received, it was clear that the audience were craving more familiar material for an encore, and waited rather restlessly for the song they knew and loved best.

White Lies‘ first single Death ended what had been an amazing night, simultaneously demonstrating both their timeless sound and the reasons why they have been billed as one of the UK’s best live acts at the moment. With a series of sell-out headline shows, a new album due out next year and their distinctive vocals and unique sound, the band look set to have an even more successful 2010 ahead of them…

Video of White Lies’ ending song Death… Rubbish sound quality as usual, but shows the crowd loving every second…