Sounds> Guitar Shred Show

If you guys haven't seen Mr. Fastfinger by now, you need to see him now. Prepare to lose at least an hour of your life with this site. Greetings from Tampere, Finland, at 5 am., btw.

Log> Sights> Ilosaari 2006

I've commenced the second module of my two-phase summer vacation. The kick-off was appropriately Ilosaarirock, the friendliest and most enjoyable of summer festivals in Finland in the good company of Juha and Joonas and dozens of other pleasant people. To crown the trip, we actually had a flat to stay in with the option of taking a real shower and sleeping on a mattress instead of just passing out in the grimy tent. I'm totally exhausted and will need to rehydrate for days but I'm all smiles.

I got to tick Saul Williams, Entombed and M.A.Numminen off my list of must-see acts, and was pleasantly surprised by Mokoma, Capleton, Blackalicious and a handful of Finnish reggae artists. How's that for variety? Here's some festival photos for y'all. Muah fire! Burn dem, burn, dem, burn dem.

Log> Richmond Park

Another beautiful day and another run around Richmond Park. This is the jewel of London, a vast open space inhabited by wild deer and picnicing families, only scarred by the white lines in the sky from the planes lingering in Heathrow's holding pattern.

This was my second run around the park, and altogether perhaps the fourth time I've gone running (outside) in the past two years. And my first run in two years was also my first run around the park. This time it took me one and half hours; the first time it was more of an interval training session with very frequent walking pauses. Now it didn't even feel like such a challenge anymore. I mostly follow the Tamsin Trail clockwise but bear left as much as I can while the trail makes frequent short cuts, so I think that makes it a bit longer. I couldn't imagine a better place to run - or a better place in all of London, for the matter. I think I'll move to Richmond.

Stupidity> Mashed songs

Rant: I was at the gym and the TV was again stuck on this music channel, TFM or TMF or what ever the hell its called. Total Fiasco Music. Anyway, they played these... mixes, titled 'mashed up songs' or something like that, and this must be the pinnacle of artistic inaptitude combined with utter lack of taste.

They'd grabbed a rock classic or a newer song with a catchy riff (Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Prodigy's Firestarter, something by The Strokes...) pasted on top the vocal track and maybe a little bass drum from a dance/r'n'b/soul abomination (Christina, Mark David, Blue Cantrell or WTF ever they were...), applied a little automatic timing adjustment - and voila, there's a new track. Worse yet, the music videos were simply a collection of clips in chronological order, telling the exact same story as the original abomination without any applied creativity. Clips of the 'background' were added here and there, sometimes slightly in a different order - but only because the 'mixer' had decided to use only something like 8 bars of the original track.