Saturday, October 30, 2004

Cocaine Blunts & Hip Hop Tapes Rare hip hop downloads - catch them while you can. Be sure to check out the links to other music blogs for plenty of other types of music.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Greco-Buddhism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: OK, so I'm placing too much reliance on simply blogging links to wikipedia or wired but this is an interesting article to me. The links between ancient greek philosophy and Buddhism are genuine and represent an alliance of like thought crossing and mingling - "Greco-Buddhism, sometimes spelled Gr�co-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between the culture of Classical Greece and Buddhism, which developed over a period of close to 800 years in Central Asia in the area corresponding to modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE. Greco-Buddhism influenced the artistic (and, possibly, conceptual) development of Buddhism, and in particular Mahayana Buddhism, before it was adopted by Central and Northeastern Asia from the 1st century CE, ultimately spreading to China, Korea and Japan."

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

UK Indymedia - UK Indymedia: "On Thursday morning, US authorities issued a federal order to Rackspace ordering them to hand over Indymedia web servers to the requesting agency. Rackspace, which provides hosting services for more that 20 Indymedia sites at its London facility, complied and turned over the requested servers, effectively removing those sites from the internet.

Since the subpoena was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia, the reasons for this action are still unknown to Indymedia. Talking to Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that 'they cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order.' ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from updating the concerned parties on what is happening.

It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities.

It is ironic that that this happens now, just days before Indymedia is due to participate in the European Forum on Communications Rights being held alongside the European Social Forum and several other days of discussions about electronic civil liberties and community media. For more information on these events see www.efcr2004.net"

Monday, October 11, 2004

Went to Liverpool last Saturday to see Femi Kuti live at the Liverpool Philharmonic. I don't know why music like this is continuously forced into venues that are really inappropriate. Femi's music is to be danced to yet it ends up in a concert hall where everyone is forced to sit down and people who want to dance are told to sit down or herded into corners with bouncers continuously glaring at them. But the concert was really very good with a lot of new songs from his album (released in the UK today) as well as classics like Beng Beng Beng and an encore of his father's Water No Get Enemy. The energy of everyone involved was high and the performance as polished and professional as any. Didn't really like the support act very much as it was earnest but lacked the power and fun of Femi.
I managed to convince Soo to blag me a poster which was free if you bought a CD, which was very nice of her, as we already have the CD that was on sale. Seemed a shame that the new one wasn't available yet.
I forgot to take my camera along so no photos either...

Friday, October 08, 2004