Friday 30 January 2009

Chalkboards


The Guardian have launched interactive chalkboards on their football pages. These boards analyse Premiership games from this and past seasons showing you goals, passes, player movements and everything else you might want to know. Go to their Quick Start Guide to find out how to make the best of it.

Thursday 29 January 2009

John Martyn 1948-2009

Singer-songwriter John Martyn has died at the age of 60. Although born in Surrey, Martyn grew up in Glasgow and was widely sited as an inspiration by many and varied popular musicians throughout the years.

Martyn was so much of an influence on Wet Wet Wet they nicked much of his stuff wholesale.

I only saw him perform live once, at Glasgow Green in 1989, where he was one of many support acts for Wet Wet Wet's free concert.

Down below is Martyn performing 'May You Never' on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973. This is an interview with him from November 2007.

It May Be Time

This is a commercial for Career Builder dot com. Watch it cos it's absolutely brilliant.



via.

If you liked that then you'll probably enjoy this 8 minute compilation of 16 of their monkey ads.

Wednesday 28 January 2009

Flight of the Conchords Live

Here is a 50 minute show from Flight of the Conchords when they played at a record shop in April of 2008. It does take them about ten minutes to get started, but it's well worth a watch.

Doug Stanhope - Word of Mouth

You know this ain't safe for work. This is all 84 minutes of Doug Stanhope's 2002 DVD Word of Mouth.

Bill Hicks on Letterman

This Friday evening Late Night with David Letterman will air the infamous never before broadcast 1st October 1993 performance by Bill Hicks. One of the guests on the show that night is his mother, Mary Hicks.

It's a big deal, not only because the editing of his entire performance from the show, caused Hicks much consternation, but because it'll be the first time in a long while that his material will have reached this large an audience. Surprisingly Hicks isn't held in the same esteem in his home country as he is here and the airing of his performance should lead to him being discovered by a lot more people.

Hicks discusses the censorship in one of his last ever recorded interviews down below.

Leary on Leary

This is funny stuff. Denis Leary talks about Denis Leary movies.

On Demolition Man - "Wesley Snipes was insane cos he insisted on doing all of his own action stuff. Then they'd wait until they wrapped him and then they'd have the stunt guy come in and re-do all the action stuff."



Wednesday 21 January 2009

Minutemen Photograph

From Ain't It Cool News comes this 1940 picture of The Minutemen from the forthcoming Watchmen movie.

Tuesday 20 January 2009

Obama's Inagauration

With George W. Bush packing his bags this afternoon and Barack Obama moving his stuff into the White House, here's a look at some of the things that are happening today.

First up a profile of Obama's chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau.

Favreau would be up most nights until 3am, honing the next day's stump speeches in a caffeine haze of espressos and Red Bull energy drinks, taking breaks to play the video game Rock Band. He coined a phrase for this late-night deadline surfing: "crashing".

A BBC report on the security measures in place.

A short video of Bush's belongings being removed from The White House, put in a van and then chucked in the river (hopefully).

Below is a video where Iraqis discuss their thoughts on Obama.



Read all the previous inauguration speeches.

The BBC has unearthed footage of Dr Martin Luther King predicting a "Negro president", although he was out by 20 years.

An article from The Times on the changes that are set to be made to The White House website when Obama's tech-savvy team comes in.

Dave Chappelle on the first black president.



Black comics talk about Obama.



Chris Rock supporting Obama.



From The Richard Pryor Show - The 40th President of the United States



Obama is urged to create a new tartan to celebrate his Scottish roots.



Originally uploaded by Gattoraffa


Flickr have an Inauguration 2009 pool and I'll post a few of those photos throughout the afternoon.

The New York Times have a live blog.

Not Quite Nigella has a recipe for the Barack Obama Inauguration Pizza and some photographs of the quite impressive finished product.


ObamaDrama163
Originally uploaded by SteveThornton



The Huffington Post have their own Obama Inauguration page.

Dick Cheney is at the inauguration in a wheelchair thanks to injuring his back moving boxes into his new house.

Here's a cracking picture of me all done up in Obama's style courtesy of Obamicon.Me.

Get your Obama gear on the streets of Washington here.

The Guardian has a report on Obama's swearing-in.

The FBI is investigating two "streams of intelligence" suggesting the "Somalia-based terrorist organization Al Shabaab" may have been plotting an attack timed to coincide with the event.

CNN has President Obama's just completed speech in full.

USA Today has a set of inauguration photographs on Flickr.

News that both Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Robert Byrd have collapsed at the inuaguration lunch.

The Daily Show has plenty of stuff on the inauguration in their own inimitable style.

Ted Sorensen, speechwriter for JFK when he made his inaugral speech in 1961, gives The Guardian his view on President Obama's speech.

Sunday 18 January 2009

Happy Birthday to Me!

Hello Tom,

So, you've made it another year, huh? Impressive. Well, impressive if you consider your festering stagnant life clicking over another year an accomplishment. I bet you woke up today feeling a little bit excited still, huh? Despite all your misanthropic bullshit, a little part of you - that little part that dime-store psychologists like to refer to as the "inner child" - perked up a bit. "Hey, today is my birthday!" you thought.

Well no one fucking cares. That's why this email is automated. It's completely impersonal just like every other relationship in your terrible, worthless, and now one-more-year past-it's-prime life.

So go ahead, eat your cake, play with your new iPod knockoff, try on your new fucking sweater while you add another notch on the social odometer of age that we use to validate your existence. You gonna go out and drink tonight? Shouldn't you put some of that money in savings? Fuck, you don't have many working years left, pal. The whole "Live Fast, Die Young" mentality doesn't fit into the picture so much anymore when you've got man-tits and you're putting Dr. Scholl's in your Crocs; your time to quit while you were ahead is over.

Anyhow, Happy Birthday.

Love,
Jesus Loves Doug Stanhope

Thursday 15 January 2009

Hudson River Plane Crash


IMG_1201
Originally uploaded by nyctravis
Amazing how quickly folk have their pictures of this accident up on Flickr. There are more photographs, being constantly updated, here. Or have a look at this photo on Twitter taken by a passenger on board the ferry that went over to rescue passengers.

Flickr user eddienyc has a great set of photographs of the rescue. This photograph by grego! is also pretty amazing.

Late night updates:


This is a photograph of Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, III the pilot who steered the plane into the water, ensuring that there was no loss of life. Here is the article on him from Friday morning's Times.

This is The New York Times article on events.


From Flickr user Amazin Jane's photostream.

"Although the US Airways jet crashed into the Hudson River near the west 50's, they towed the airplane south and 'docked' it in near Battery Park and the World Financial Center. This is the wing sticking up over the height of the walkway."
Gothamist have reports, eye witness comments, photographs, videos, maps and everything else you could want on the story.

Here's Eddie Izzard's great bit on 'Bird strike'. And here's the wikipedia entry for it.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Odds and Sods

So far we've spent this year on 'Pish trying to punt our wares to you all. And it ain't stopping yet. While you still have three days left to listen to The Magic Glue, the Glasgow Comedy Festival programme has just been announced. That's right your good muckers Tom and Fraser are in there.

Join us at the Ramshorn Theatre on Tuesday 24th March for Odds and Sods, a rehearsed reading of our new play. It's a mere four quid and should surely be a hoot. More details nearer the time.

Saturday 10 January 2009

Glue on the IPlayer

I'm assuming no more than a few folk stayed up to after midnight to hear our show.

Here's how to listen to it at a more Godly hour.

I'm very pleased with how it sounded and listened to some of the other Zone stuff before hitting the hay and despite blithering a lot of fairly incoherent rubbish about Armando Iannucci at one point, I think we can off no' too bad. Who knew Tom had a posh telephone voice eh? :)

I know Tom said in his earlier post to head along to The Comedy Zone Site to listen to the show, but that seems from my experience to play the whole 330min(!) Zone on a constant loop, so if it's our show you want to hear, I'd recommend using the Iplayer instead.

Friday 9 January 2009

The Magic Glue on the Radio From Tonight

Head along to the Comedy Zone from half midnight tonight until next Friday (16th) night and listen to our sketch show The Magic Glue. You can also hear Fraser and I blethering about Glue and comedy.

Thursday 8 January 2009

And Now, News of the Inevitable Cock-Up...


Hiya. Of course its us, so there's been some last minute Glue shenanigans. Nothing to do with us really but it all still somehow serves to make your tubby muckers Fizzy and T Bone look like right plums.

Our radio pilot "The Magic Glue" has been taken out of it's 11.30 am slot scheduled for Friday 9th January and as far as we're aware its also not going to be on as advertised in the 8.30pm repeat slot on Saturday 10th. No news on why or even if it will be rescheduled as yet.

The show WILL STILL BE ON (we're told...) in the Comedy Zone at half past midnight Friday Night/Saturday Morning and should be available on the BBC IPlayer and its listen again online facility thereafter.

So, it's a big hello to all you truckers out there...

Monday 5 January 2009

Glue on the Radio

The wait is finally at an end. The Magic Glue, our radio pilot, is on Radio Scotland (92.4 - 94.7 FM and 810 MW) this Friday 9th January at 11.30am. Yes, that's right Friday MORNING. I've already had a few folk asking if I meant PM. I don't, I mean 11.30AM.

That is not the only time you can hear the show however. You can also hear it repeated at 8.30pm the following day, Saturday the 10th.

But you don't have to listen to it on the radio. You can also hear it online. It's repeated as part of The Comedy Zone at 00.30am that night. This show is available online for a week afterwards. The Comedy Zone is about five hours long, but The Magic Glue should be right at the start of it. The rest of the shows in the section have been selected based on suggestions by Fraser and I. Plus we'll be presenting it, so even more chances to hear our voices on the radio.

You can listen to the show on digital radio, through freeview on your telly and probably for a week afterwards on the iplayer. The many ways to listen to Radio Scotland can be found at this link.

There's a Facebook event thing that you can add your 'attendance' and comments to if you're on Facebook.

We were delighted with the recording itself and we're pretty happy with the edit of the show. So we'll just sit back and see how it's received or not by the public at large.