Archive for the ‘Distractions’ Category

Please, please buy Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name this week.

In case there are people out there who haven’t heard about it, there is a campaign to get RATM’s Killing in the Name as the Christmas number 1 in the UK singles chart in an attempt to beat the X Factor single.

I’m sure many of you are either aware or can figure out the reasons why we would want this to happen. X Factor predictably wins every year off the back of a TV show rather than genuine popularity of the music. This is evident from the fact it’s called the X Factor single rather than actually mentioning the song title or artist.

Not to mention the fact that the campaign for Killing in the Name has also raised £30,000 for charity Shelter.

However given you’re smart enough to know all this, what I really want to talk about is whether you should go out and actually buy the song. Many people will probably be thinking that it won’t make a difference and the X Factor single is obviously going to win so it’s pointless buying it.

But it isn’t.

Here are some stats. The Christmas number one normally sells around 400,000 copies, that is around half the number of people in the Facebook group for the campaign. If everyone in the group bought just one copy it would have twice the sales that the X Factor single would have.

Of course you’re thinking that most of the people in the group won’t buy it and so it won’t get nearly that much sales. I thought the same thing but apparently that simply isn’t the case. As well as the group growing exponentially (it’s gained 50,000 members in the past 24 hours) it is actually outselling X Factor currently according to BBC News.

It has been ahead of X Factor on the Amazon, HMV and Play.com sales charts and this afternoon finally overtook X Factor on the iTunes chart as well. It’s winning.

The reason we aren’t counting our chickens just yet though is because the X Factor single comes out in hard copy tomorrow, which is likely to give it a boost in sales.

However physical sales account for only 10% of singles sales these days and according to the BBC News article Killing in the Name is just over 10% ahead currently. This means that with the boost X Factor will get from physical sales it will amost be a dead heat.

Therefore we can draw two conclusions from this. Firstly is that you actually buying the single will actually make a difference as Killing in the Name can win this thing. Secondly it isn’t too far ahead that it makes it pointless you buying it because it’s obviously going to win. It’s going to be very close to the point where you actually buying the single could not make more of a difference.

So there you have it, buy it, it will make a difference. Also if you aren’t aware, it is only 29p on Amazon! For that kind of cash if you bring me your receipt when I next see you, I will actually refund you the cost of buying a single.

For those of you that really want to get involved, while chart rules prevent you from just buying loads of copies for yourself (although one wonders how they would know, especially if you buy from multiple sellers), you can gift extra purcahses to your friends and family. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group and invite all your friends too.

Oh and one final thought in case everything I have written has yet to sway you – just imagine how much Killing in the Name willing will annoy Daily Mail readers 😀 .

Having won tickets to the rugby league Four Nations final, I headed down on Saturday to watch the game. Luckily England had pulled a surprise victory over New Zealand beforehand so had made it through to face Australia in what would hopefully not be a repeat of their first encounter in the competition.

We started off quite well scoring the first try to take an early league and were only trailing by 4 points at halftime. However shortly after the second half had kicked off Australia realised that rather than trying to break our line, if they just kicked the ball past us and ran after it we wouldn’t really know what to do eventually leading them to win 46-16.

Still, no matter how many times you witness it, it’s still funny to watch someone shout advice about the rules to 26 national-level professional players whose job it is to play the sport and several officials whose job it is to marshall the sport even though they are at the other side of a 40,000 seater stadium.

All in all I have to say I really enjoyed it, I thought I would get bored at some point during the match but I never did. Although I did lose the £1 I had wagered on the match even with Australia having a 12 point handicap. Gutted.

With John having finally got a World of Warcraft group together for Atheist Society, we set out last night on our first exciting adventure as everyone started fresh characters under the banner of our new society guild, the Atheist Alliance.

Not having played for two years I spent Monday patching, or at the start clearing space to patch, as the installer informed me I would need to free up 15GB! However after a long, long period I finally got things finished 14 hours later and was ready to play. In grand news I also found my long lost original character which disappeared some time ago!

So we set out adventuring last night at about 8pm and next thing we knew it was 2am! We did however manage to get to level 10 in that time, which is quite impressive given the amount of time it takes to loot 40 wendigo manes not to mention factoring in the long period of time we spent knocking back beers at The Blue Recluse. We also have a guild tabard which looks very similar to our logo which is awesome.

As I found out while recently clearing out my old bedroom I wrote quite a bit back in the day.

Some of my writings included outlines for loads of different TV shows. What I found interesting though is how many of them have manifested themselves as actual TV shows in the ten years since I wrote them. For example Just One Way was an outline which followed the fast-paced action of one man’s life over a 24 hour period, a plot similar to what we would now recognise as 24.

Other shows included The President’s Office which has striking similarities to The West Wing and 100 Deeds Before I Die which could easily be compared to My Name is Earl.

What this shows us it that the makers of today’s television programs have the same imagination, ideas and thought processes as a child. Where this is a good thing or a bad thing I will leave up to you.

Friday saw A-Soc hit Leeds City Museum to take a look round the exhibit, notably the first edition of Origin of Species. We spent a good hour or two looking round the museum before they kicked us out, which is enough time to get round most of the stuff anyway. Unfortunately we forgot to get a group photo on the steps but there will be plenty of other opportunities no doubt.

Here’s me busting a groove earlier today.

I spent the day on set filming an Atheist Society parody of Utah Saints’ Something Good ’08, a little idea I had had for an intro video for the society this year.

It was actually a really quick shoot – we didn’t kick off until 4pm and we were finished by about 8pm. Of course this is where the real world begins – since getting home I’ve spent nearly three hours doing the pre-editing for the camera I have – we still have all the editing to do on top of that and that is just one of three cameras we were using!

Never the less the film is now in the can so with a little bit of magic editing and after effects we should have something pretty good.

I’ve just watched through Derren Brown’s “how to win the lottery” in which Derren (supposedly) correctly predicted the lottery numbers for last Wednesday’s national lottery draw. Last night he offered to explain how he did it. Of course in reality, he still leaves you wondering.

His explanation was that it used the “wisdom of crowds” which suggests that subconsciously a group of people can make more accurate predictions than one person alone, and in his example he took 24 people, had them study the lottery numbers for the past year and try and work out which ones came next. He then averaged them out and claimed to have successfully predicted the numbers.

That or, as a final end to the show briefly discusses how we could have fixed the lottery to make sure that the right numbers came up. Of course he claimed this theory was both illegal and ridiculous and this is for the most part true – I think we can rule out that Derren and his team actually managed to get through security and fix the draw.

So how did he manage it? Derren begins his show on Friday by listing the three possibilities by which he could have done it. Faked a lottery ticket, genuinely predicted the numbers or fixed the draw.

However this is where it begins to break down. Where have we seen such an example before? The answer of course is “bad, mad or god.” The classic Christian proposition that Jesus was either evil, crazy or he actually was the son of god. Immediately ruling out the idea that he could have been mistaken, never claimed to be god or never existed at all, to name just a few of other possibilites.

Derren begins by ruling out his first suggestion and leaving us with just two possibilities – either he correctly predicted the numbers or he fixed the draw. He then dismisses the second idea and offers us a very dubiously scientific but almost believable senario and invites us to “believe, or not.”

In reality of course, the first lines Derren spoke on the show were the most accurate. “This show uses magic, trickery and misdirection” he proclaims boldly and yet we still do not appreciate on what scale it is – that the entire one hour show is a misdirection leading us down the garden path to draw attention away from the fact that there is was something a little dodgy about the stand the predictions were held on – which couldn’t be revealed in advance for legal reasons.

We rack our brains trying to work out whether his theory of crowds could actually work and so much thought do we put into this that it never occurs to us that the 24 people predicting the numbers are probably in on the trick – or that Derren ignored the numbers they predicted and only “revealed” to them the numbers they had predicted when the lottery draw had been made.

Not that this takes away the magic of it. Derren put on a superb performance and one which I would highly recommend watching. Just remember that you’re still watching a magic show.

Or at least, that is my take on it. You can believe, or not.

We finally made it to the Leeds Museum on Sunday and while we only had an hour or so to get round it, it was quite interesting none the less. It was a little more grand than I had expected with a large arena style room in the centre and plenty of winding staircases with different exhibits on the different floors.

We made it round most of it in the time we were in there but most of it in a rush so we could have easily spent a few more hours in there. All in all, worth a visit though nothing spectacular.

Having secured some time off work I spent last weekend down in Swindon visiting Kieran. While down there we made our way round Stonehenge, Avebury, some kind of castle ruins, a rather enjoyable meal out at the local Italian and a BBQ – as well as plenty of drink and good conversation too. All in all a very enjoyable weekend.

Perhaps I don’t have much room to talk, but you should really proof anything you publish as mistakes such as this don’t exactly do much for your advertisements.