Firstly I have been looking around for a new flat; and the conclusion I have come to is that I can’t afford one at this moment in time. Most one bedroom flats are £400 or more per calendar month, which only leaves me about £170 to pay all the bills, and buy in groceries, which would mean giving up Sky TV; internet connection, and phone line, so I couldn’t even use dial up! Which is something that I don’t want to do; I don’t think I could bear to not have an internet connection as I have been connected continuously via various companies since 1998, I could live without Sky TV, but that I don’t want to give up either, it’s hard to go back once you have gotten used to it. So it looks like I will have to stay here for the foreseeable future unless I magically come into come money or get a better paid job, maybe now would be the time to start buying lottery tickets? But things seem to be back to normal in the house again now, but I do wonder how long it’ll be before the next big blow up? I’ve decided to stay away from JFK’s completely as I was much happier with things before I returned there after being unbanned! Besides if the things that Stephen reckons was said about me behind my back are true, I’d rather not have anything to do with them. At least Stephen said it to my face, which I can respect, even if it did hurt; I shall be going back into my former life, going to live gigs, at least its original music and not the same shit played every week! Tomorrow I will probably go to the (Me)’Tallica’ covers band gig tomorrow which also features two of my favourite local bands, Redemption Unnamed and The Southpaw Jinx; it should be a good night, the only downside is that it costs £6 entry!
I think that I may have judged Zinedine Zidane a little harshly over his headbutt to the chest of Italian defender Marco Materazzi as it looks like Materazzi uttered some racial abuse at the French player because of his Algerian roots, rumoured to have said that Zidane was “the son of a terrorist whore” although Zidane himself never repeated what was said. He just said that Materazzi insulted his mother and sister; I am not excusing what Zidane did, it’s unacceptable at any level of sport, let alone at international level, but you can understand his reaction! FIFA who initially cleared Materazzi have now said that they will investigate Zidane’s claims further, but whether anything will come of it is anyone’s guess, as we all know that FIFA are weak when it comes to dishing out punishment!
Oh look, I have been warned – the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) have warned users of allofmp3.com, e.g. me and lots of other people that they are breaking the law because allofmp3.com isn’t licensed to sell recordings, despite an American court ruling that allofmp3.com was legal, at least it Russia, where the download site is based! The ‘Bastards, Pricks and Idiots’ have vowed to sue allofmp3.com, and get their site taken off the internet, but it’s unlikely to happen, America tried to put pressure on the Russian government to close the site down, but nothing happened except a short period of downtime while they moved servers, probably related to the yanks leaning on the Russians. At the end of the day, it’s cheap, reliable, and you get a choice of what format, and bitrate you download through their revolutionary ‘Online Encoding’ system. So you could download a complete album in WAV format, that’s 1411kbps, which is pure CD quality or download at 128kbps and anywhere in-between. For example, the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album “Stadium Arcadium” can be downloaded at CD Quality for just over £14, where as iTunes will charge you over £22 for a propriatry sound format, laden with loads of apple DRM crap at only 160kbps, now what would you rather use? Let’s face it, the BPI are scared, the world is changing thanks to the internet superhighway, which it cant control and overcharge for CDs which it has been doing for way too long now, come-on; £4 for 3 tracks on a CD Single, and up to £14 for a 12 track album. I have long said that if they dropped the prices of CDs to say £5 – £8 then more people would buy them instead of going through the hassle of downloading through p2p, but do they learn, do they fuck; *bangs head against wall*