Jenjie

Swindon has became the first town in the UK to do away with fixed-point speed cameras. The nine-strong cabinet of the Tory-run council voted unanimously in favour of withdrawing from the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership. The idea of withdrawing was first suggested 12 months ago by Peter Greenhalgh, councillor for highways in Swindon. This came after a change to the way fixed-point cameras were funded. Mr Greenhalgh objected to central Government receiving the cash from fines while Swindon Council had to pay for the upkeep of the cameras. Speaking tonight after the vote, he said: “I understand we are the first council in Britain to get rid of fixed-point speed cameras.” Just because there will be no more fixed-point speed traps in the town does not mean motorists cannot be caught, he said. Police will still be out and about with hand-held speed-measuring devices. Mr Greenhalgh added: “We will be working very closely with our partners, including police in the road safety partnership to deliver a plan that reduced the number of people being killed on the roads in Swindon.” He said that in 2007/08 70 people had been killed on the streets of Swindon and that this was proof that fixed-point speed cameras were not working to curb motorists’ excessive speed. He said that alternative speed-reducing measures were being considered by the Council now, including education and training for motorists and reduced speed limits in problem areas. This news will be celebrated by motorists across the land, chief among them Jeremy Clarkson, presenter of BBC’s Top Gear who has in the past voiced heart-felt support for Mr Greenhalgh on his programme. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article4998031.ece

not at all. the excitment is infectious

I think you're vying with Carlaatje for longest review this tour :D There's a new Wiki page :D http://wiki.coldplaying.com/index.php/22_October_2008:_Yahoo_Show%2C_Secret_Location%2C_USA

as an actor, yes. I didn't like the character, I think mainly because we only ever saw the bad side of him. Seeing the good side, not only makes him more rounded, but alot more likeable.

Neighbours of a family who died when their car burst into a fireball after colliding with a lorry on the M6 paid tribute to "six beautiful people" today. David Statham, 38, his wife Michelle, 33, and their children, Reece, 13, Jay, nine, Nafon, one, and 10-week-old Elouise were thought to have been travelling home to Llandudno, North Wales, after visiting relatives in Birmingham when the accident happened on Monday evening. Mr Statham worked as a chef at St David’s College, a private school at Llandudno. The casualties were so badly burnt, and their vehicle so damaged, that police struggled for much of the day to identify them, and to inform surviving family. For some hours, emergency services had assumed there were only five victims. Police said that the car disappeared beneath a truck after being struck by it, exploding into flames on impact, during a tailback on the motorway in Cheshire. The accident took place between junctions 16 and 17 of the northbound M6. The traffic jam had been caused by an accident about an hour earlier in which David Myers, a former rugby league player for Wigan Warriors and Great Britain, was killed. Lyn Claricas, a 70-year-old shop worker, who lives across the road from the Stathams’ house, in in the centre of Llandudno, north Wales, said: “It made me feel absolutely sick when I heard the news. “They were lovely people, quite quiet, with very well behaved children. They were a very happy family. “The only thing I can be grateful for is that they shouldn’t have suffered a lot because of the way the car was smashed. But that's almost too much to think about.” Vince Collina, 49, another neighbour, said: “They were a wonderful, model family, just six beautiful people. “They had lived here for about four years. I was painting my house when they moved in and Michelle asked if I could paint theirs - so I did.” Mr Collina, a builder who lives doors away from the family, said there was a horrible sense of worry yesterday when he discovered the six dead came from the seaside town. He said: “My heart just sank when I found out and my mouth went dry. Then the confirmation came and it has just knocked us for six. The police called to ask about their car and at first I thought it had just been stolen. We just can’t believe it.” Judith Leslie, the bursar at the private school where Mr Statham worked as a chef, said: “The whole of St David’s community was devastated to hear of the awful tragedy and our thoughts are with David’s family. “David was a well-liked member of staff, always had a friendly smile and would lend a helping hand - nothing was ever too much trouble. “He will be very sadly missed. He made a huge impression because he was so amiable and cheerful. I have just been across to the canteen now and everybody is desperately upset.” The family had been visiting relatives in Birmingham before setting off for home on Monday night. A 46-year-old Portuguese HGV driver, who works for a Spanish haulage firm, was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. Police continued to question him this morning, and must decide whether to charge him by this afternoon. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4991308.ece

Yay for #42. I've added our new roadie to the collection in our roadie thread :D And I very much like this piccie.

Yay for #42. I've added our new roadie to the collection in our roadie thread :D And I very much like this piccie.

Thanks to our very dear #42, we have a new roadie for our collection :D May I introduce Maynard

don't remember seeing that one in the dictionary of proverbs. I did see this one though: More Haste Less Speed :P

Hey there fellow Coldplay fan It’s really sad that in this day and age the best music in the world is relatively underground and the radio stations refuse to play the tracks. Therefore we are bombarded with the annoying overtones of Timberland and The Pussy Cat Dolls everyday when we tune in to the radio, Mtv and other well-known music websites. Grrrr it’s annoying. If I have to listen to another play of that Pink track and her desires to be a Rock star I may break my radio. But I’m broke and a student’s life is tough. Since you like Coldplay and I like Coldplay. I would recommend you to my assignment blog: http://rufreshmeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/cd-review-time.html Be free to criticise and peruse. Keep up the awesome work... Original post can be seen at: http://saulk.co.za/2008/04/29/coldplay-jumps-on-a-bandwagon/ http://rufreshmeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/market-blog-comment.html

Of Coldplay, bagpipes, and obscure shouty music from dismal places Author's note: This article is shortly to appear in the Halloween edition of Turntable and Blue Light. Or maybe it isn’t… I missed the submission deadline, a rewrite was ordered after I voyaged off on some bizarre tangent about Sarah Palin and the blind children who do her make-up… I know, very much not like me. Anyway, as I have been promising to write about Prolapse for quite a while, here’s some words. And yes, Turntable is a fine way to spend an hour or two if you have your reading spectacles handy. *** Turntable and Blue Light’s editorial office. The top two floors of a converted warehouse in the Bowery. It’s chic, it’s drafty, and when I arrive there’s a crowded conference suite; half-dressed midgets performing Bavarian folk songs. I don’t ask. The editor’s inner sanctum – known colloquially as the Den of Pain – contains a desk the size of small Caribbean island. I can just make out the editor herself on a distant shore, up past the paperclips. She’s reciting war poetry of an ancient, undiscovered civilization. Or maybe telling me I have to have 1,500 words ready for the Halloween issue – she’s so far away it could be either. I take the safe option and nod. “And make it spooky” (I think) she yells on my way out. The midgets are still busy singing. I don’t ask. “Make it spooky”. Spooky – I looked it up in this big book that explains what words mean. In reference to horses it defines acting in a nervous or skittish fashion. In any other context, it means eerie, scary. Coldplay, in other words. Or maybe not even Coldplay, more the waves of cultural and critical acclaim that such safe, anodyne, soulless drivel continually generates. Any combination of earnestness, pretentiousness and anaemia is begging for public ridicule (plus any band who name an album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends deserve to spend the afterlife in the company of Billy Corgan) – and yet they shift records in qastonishing amounts. I don’t get it. Why Coldplay? Even the merest glimpse of Chris Martin’s smug face makes me desperate to hide in the refrigerator, and I grow mightily scared when I crawl onto the shelf next to the yoghurt and those pesky elves slam the door shut. The prospect of writing 1,500 words on what Gwyneth Paltrow likes to stuff in her ears leaves me headed directly for that consignment of semi-legal vodka Keith Richards gave me after I’d discovered that he’d had his entire internal organs replaced with those harvested from Cambodian orphans, and I’d promised not to write about it in any of my articles. Several vodkas calm my nerves enough to stagger over to the stereo. A Prolapse album, played at some vulgar volume, that should do the trick. Ah, Prolapse. If Coldplay’s global exposure is in inverse proportion to their inventiveness, Prolapse did it the other way round. Or, as my neighbours probably won’t testify, there’s something rather special about this all-too-quickly-forgotten band from a lost decade and a dreary city in the border country that’s neither North nor South, the UK’s very own Mason/Dixon line. Leicester is a city I know well, an urban persona strafing POST-INDUSTRIAL in large, untidy letters on the walls of concrete underpasses. It’s an aesthetic found – in the 1980’s and 90’s at least - in many similar cities: Sheffield, Düsseldorf, maybe even Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (although I can’t be sure of the latter; the last time I was in the Keystone State a large man with a mean glint in his only eye and a hunting rifle strapped to his torso came up to me in a bar, remarked upon my pink sneekers, then suggested that I should return to Canada with haste, so I never made it that far). Cities struggling with their own idenity possess a distictive sound, and it’s a sound that Prolapse plugged into with brio. It’s also, by the name of Pointless Walks to Dismal Places, the name of their debut album. Beat that, Mr Paltrow. Prolapse sound like Leicester in 1992. Conversely, this is also the sound of flying to Amderstam to start a riot, or the Fall if they’d come from a small village in Switzerland and had been touched inappropriately by Auntie Freda. Prolapse continually executed a fine line in shouty. A quick rummage, in the big book that explains what words mean suggests that the correct noun is shout, or (context-dependant) shouting – which just goes to prove that big books can be as wrong as a Coldplay-loving populace. Open-larynxed, sophomore angst or politicisation - shouting is an artform that any three year old can manage with aplomb, and certainly isn’t something that graces any canon of popular music. Shouty however – it’s something far more subtle. Often just as loud, but far more inventive, multi-layered and multi-textured. Former Pixie Frank Black has spent his entire career enveloped in shouty. Zack De La Rcoha has spent his entire career shouting. Shouting = Spandex heavy metal, Courtney Love, Courtney Love’s vagina. Shouty = Old Julian Cope records, At The Drive-In, Dear Science - the fantastic new album by TV On The Radio, LCD Soundsystem’s North American Scum. Shouting = Fox News. Shouty = that understated “hello, we are Prolapse”; buzzy, droning, hacking guitars; male / female duel vox underwtitten by a twist of sexual tension and embellished with improvised, non-sensical wordplay. It’s like eavesdropping to a couple arguing in a cupboard whilst feeding each other candy. That they never had a hit single, it’s simply further emphasis that the majority isn’t always in the right.Just ask those who want the hideous piano intro from Clocks played at their next funeral. Shouting is bad, shouty is damn fine thank you, and by half-past whenever, with dawn trying to kick the windows in, I’ve traversed the entire Prolapse back-catalogue. I’ve consumed enough vodka to make me eligible for Russian citizenship. I’ve spectacularly failed to write a single word of the “spooky” article. Only there’s a far more pressing problem. Prolapse are the greatest band in the world, ever, but I haven’t yet played Autobahn by Cha Cha 2000. You know, Kraftwerk’s zen-industrial masterpiece, only covered by the real greatest band in the world, ever. Cha Cha 2000 were the evil spawn of Prolapse, depraved masterminds who knew that the only way to improve upon the original was to coat it with the sound of bagpipes mating. The pained cry a set of bagpipes emits is so soul-destroyingly awful, the only people who should be subjected to them are those who would quite happily be stuck in an cupboard where Paul McCartney’s Mull of Kintyre record is the only choice on the jukebox (I was thinking on nominating Chris Martin for that particular pleasure – but it would only give him ideas). Cha Cha 2000’s true genius was to apply the theory of inverse awfulness and release it as a record. Yes, the only way to attain greater understanding of a seminal record was to re-record it as a discordance befitting two Glaswegians fighting over who has the fewest teeth. There’s nothing else for it; the very future of the planet may as well depend on me listening to this record RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT. I crawl over to where the vinyl lives, next to the box of severed mannequin heads. A preliminary search displays a sharp lack of Autobahn. A more thorough search, one that involves an unnecessary amount of mess and a certain degree of trauma, confirms the worst. I no longer own this record. A precise memory, the exchange of hard cash for 10 (yes – 10!) inches of gramophone record - sullied, invalidated even. There’s something deeply unsettling about a treasured, lost record. If I understood the concept of irony (hey - you attempt consulting a dictionary after this much liquor) I might try a wry smile; whilst failing to mould a spooky article, I end up asking myself: is there anything spookier than the land where lost records go? Where is this place? How do you get there? These many, many records that I’ve owned, that by every sensible law of physics should be standing on some shelf pleading to be played, do they elope together to some stereophonic nirvana? Are they awaiting more responsible owners via a thrift store secret door? Pimping themselves online? Ah – the internet. No-one buys records anymore. What’s the point, when some high-school student has altruistically uploaded a torrent of exactly what you’re after? Except that Autobahn by Cha Cha 2000 doesn’t exist online. Not a single torrent, not one single blog specializing in obscure Leicester-based rockola available to click on and save as. What is the point of being able to download every anthem, ditty and advertising jingle that has ever existed, directly into your cranium, if the one fucking record that the entire planet’s survival depends upon isn’t waving its derriere in the air and screaming “yeah, let’s internet copyright theft, baby”? At 6.03 in the morning, with a deadline for a “make it spooky” article about to be missed, I finally admit defeat. No vodka left. Mannequins lacking torsos, they look sad, resigned. No Autobahn right now for us. The future of a small and insignificant planet is out of my hands. Prolapse split in 2000. Cha Cha 2000 probably didn’t exist in the first place. Before I pass out, I recall a recent visit to a bar in Scotland. A roaring fire, a splendid range of malt whisky, and the gentle sound of bagpipes dripping out of the wall-mounted speakers. It took me a while for the song to register. It was Yellow. Bagpipe Coldplay. As a metaphor for doom it worked far too well. Keith – I need more alcohol. Posted by Misanthropes for Jesus at 17:28 http://misanthropesforjesus.blogspot.com/2008/10/of-coldplay-bagpipes-and-obscure-shouty.html

says you and your treacle? :P :rolleyes:

plus, you wouldn't want everyone to be a decent stalker, or it wouldn't be so special

easiest way is to right click on your photo in facebook. copy the link & then add to the image tags here :)

Ottawa Citizen has posted a gallery http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/galleries/index.html#

Concert Review: Coldplay Disappoints, Duffy Exhilarates Coldplay, who many rock critics have tabbed as the next U2, headlined the the Quicken Loans Arena tonight and drew a crowd that I would estimate at about 17,000. The band that hails from Britain failed to answer the lingering questions that I had about about the band. Chris Martin and company were wise enough to bring along the next rising star in the music industry as Duffy thrilled as the opening act. The problem that I see in Coldplay is too much show and not enough actual talent to back up their big act.. The band has some songs to thrill a crowd but aren't quite at the level that they seem to think they are at. Between the set of the excellent opening act Duffy was simply eyebrows raising. Coldplay seems to accept the fact that they don't know who they are despite being rock veterans. Playing songs ranging from rap to classical music before they took the stage made you wonder what to expect and, not surprisingly to me, failed to deliver on the supposed grandiose entrance. While Mr Paltrow possesses good songwriting skills at times it didn't fulfill a full set that could entertain for an entire evening. The selection of songs tried mask the weak vocals by Martin by utilizing a wide assortment of t lighting effects which seemed to enthrall parts of the crowd but veterans of rock shows in attendance knew that there was something lacking in terms of quality in the bands performance. The band does not inspire passion from the crowd and simply seems to be a passing fad that will fade as soon as the music industry moves onto the next "in" thing. While I can dismiss their live show, Coldplay is not afraid to employ a solid opening act. On their last tour, the band had one of the most underrated singer-songwriters in the last decade opening for them in Richard Ashcroft who shot to fame in the mid-90's with his band The Verve. This time around, the band is touring with neo-soul singer Duffy who truly lived up to hype that has surrounded her from her home of Wales. While her live sound has not been fine tuned to an Arena setting, Duffy truly has the making of an extraordinary live act. Her meek voice which introduced her songs was an amazing contrast to her strong vocals which wowed the crowd and probably made them wonder why she was supporting a band instead of headlining a show herself. Duffy has the makings of a superstar if she can handle the fame that surrounds it. http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7392

thanks guys. I was still snoring when you posted those :p

coooooooooooooooooooooooool :D have a fab time

you going to the show?

no, coz she doesn't do news, that's anchorman's job :D

no Spurs hatred here. just general dislike of southern football teams :p

I thought of something earlier, and thought I'd research travel times. I was curious as to how long it takes to get between venues in the US. The times are from google maps, and are just average, but that some pretty serious driving. 21-Oct-2008 cleveland, ohio to east rutherford (7h 30 mins) 27-OCt-2008 East Rutherford to Boston (3h 56mins) 29-oct-2008 Boston to Washington (7h 45 mins) 31-oct-2008 washington to philadelphia (2h 39mins) 1-nov-2008 philadelphia to detroit (9h 38 mins) 3-nov-2008 detroit to atlanta (11h 17 mins) 5-nov-2008 atlanta to orlando (6h 46mins) 7-nov-2008 orlando to ft lauderdale (3h 23 mins) 9-nov-2008 ft lauderdale to atlanta (9h 45mins) 11-nov-2008 atlanta to kansas, mo (12h 18mins) 13-nov-2008 Kansas to st paul (6h 30 mins) 14-nov-2008 st paul to oklahoma city (11h 35mins) 16-nov-2008 oklahoma city to houston (6h 54 mins) 18-nov-2008 houston to dallas (3h 40mins) 19-nov-2008 dallas to denver (13h 0mins) :shocked2: 21-nov-2008 denver to salt lake city (7h 27mins) 22-nov-2008 salt lake city to anaheim (10h 0mins) 26-nov-2008 anaheim to phoenix (5h 14mins)

:lol:

http://nonamedufus.blogspot.com/2008/10/last-night-maryse-and-i-took-our-semi.html Last night Maryse and I took our semi-regular "let's relive our youth" trek to the Scotiabank Place and took in a Coldplay concert. They were excellent! Preceeded by a forgettable opening act (Stars, who Wikipedia refers to as "a Juno Award nominated Canadian indie pop band") Coldplay squeezed all their hits and some new stuff into about an hour and-a-half. We had fairly good seats, three rows up in the 200 level to the side of the stage. Not near enough for close-ups but I got some decent pics from my point and shoot camera. The band began at centre stage, used the aprons at either side of the stage throughout the concert, did a short acoustic set below us on the stage-left apron and -get this - ran to the far end of the arena where they performed two acoustic numbers in front of a level 100 box! All in all, a highly entertaining evening from Chris Martin and his band mates. [more pics & some vids at the blog]

Newsreel: Another UK support announcement October 21, 2008 3:39 pm Jon Hopkins to support on all shows Good afternoon. Further to yesterday's announcement of the opening acts for the upcoming UK/Irish dates, we're pleased to reveal that the main support for the tour will be Jon Hopkins (one of the principal collaborators on the Viva La Vida album). Jon will be playing at all the shows, from 29th November to 23rd December. Click here to check out his MySpace. Anchorman