I love nothing better than live music, I have my fair share of great, and I mean simply awesome, live tracks as mp3’s… But I especially love improvised live music…

Case in point being Ben Folds “Rock This Bitch” off his “Ben Folds Live” cd, a fun little ditty brought on by some guy yelling, well, “rock this bitch!” over and over. Anyways, I’m sure he gets requests for it all the damn time now, which takes away from the whole improvisation of the original piece, so when I got a copy of the new cd “Songs For Silverman” from a most unlikely source, it came with “Songs For Goldfish” which contains a few live songs and other assorted stuff, and imagine my delight when the “Rock This Bitch” story continues on in “Weather Channel Music” when he proclaims he’s not going to rock this bitch afterall…

Time to rock out with your cock out… Enjoy both.

Phil, Barry and I went to see the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie at the local cinema tonight, and, despite a few reservations beforehand, it rocks… No it rules! It rules like Genghis Khan!

It’s the story of Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), a fairly typical Englishman who wakes up to find his house is due for demolition, but his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) has much, much bigger news… The Earth is due for demolition not long after Arthur’s house.

Now, I’m a huge fan of the Hitchhikers Guide books, radio shows and the 1981 BBC tv series, and as I said when Douglas Adams died, “The entire 5 part trilogy basically skewered every cliché of sci-fi pulp known to man and is one of the funniest things ever written.”

Anyways, I had a few reservations about this movie adaptation… The biggest one was Mos Def as Ford Prefect, now if you asked me who I’d have play Ford in the movie, I could have went down to the local Office Depot and written on every sheet of paper in there and still not reached Mos Def, but he plays the role very well. Another reservation was the position (or lack thereof) of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head, the teaser trailer didn’t show much, but it was very different, and also slightly annoying, but at least it wasn’t around for long.

Overall, it was a great adaptation of a very bizarre body of work and I think hardcore fans will love it, even though there are slight changes it’s not like the entire Hitchhikers universe has a solid base as each adaptation was different in someway. Everyone else will find it a surreal movie with great laughs, but they’ll miss out on all the in jokes, like the music at the start and a certain robot waiting in line on Vogosphere… But it’s all good.

In a landmark case a 23-year-old woman has been convicted by a Norwegian court for the rape of a 31-year-old man. If I woke up and some chick was going down on me, screaming rape would be the last thing on my mind… But as most know, trying to rape a man is like stuffing marshmallows into a parking meter…

The trailer for the upcoming Firefly movie, Serenity. “This could get pretty interesting. Define ‘interesting’. Oh God, oh God, we’re all gonna die!” Now if only it could get back on TV…

Not only does Rosie O’Donnell blog, but she’s on Flickr too! And she’s a moblogging maniac by the looks of it… I wonder what other famous faces use Flickr…

Kevin Smith now blogs on a pretty much daily basis. News Askew has taken Kevin’s posts from their forum and put them into a blog format. [via]

American teenager Michelle Wie could become the first woman to play in The Open at St Andrews later this year. All she has to do is win July’s John Deere Classic, which gives an Open place to the leading player who hasn’t already qualified.

Since my brother is visiting this weekend, we thought it would be a good idea to take in a game at Turner Field. For once I didn’t go through the whole rigmarole of buying tickets in advance as we elected to just go to the ballpark and buy tickets on the day, and it would be luck of the draw where we sat… So we (My brother, me and Barry) got there about an hour or so before opening pitch and managed to score seats behind home plate, seats that were permanantly in the shade as they were also directly under the press box, which meant they were also pretty cold at times as the wind whipped round the seating bowl.

Anyways, in a very non descript game (apart from Phillies manager getting ejected for arguing with an umpire) Atlanta beat the Philadelphia Phillies 4-0 with all the runs coming in the first 3 innings and Braves pitcher John Thompson pretty much controlled the plate during his 7 innings with 8 strikeouts.

This was also our first chance to see that new fangled Center Field screen, and wow! It’s a monsterous thing, we were sitting approx 600 yards away from it and it dominated everything around it… Though in my opinion it kinda distracts from the game on the field, Turner Field has always had fun things to do and see when the game hits a lull, but now there is just so much eye candy available (especially if you add in the new LED facia between the upper level and the Lexus level which you can see in the new banner up top) that you spend half your time not even watching the game.

And now for the obligatories… Firstly from our seats before the game, then from the Coca-Cola Sky Field and lastly from the Chop House in with the infamous Brew Crew.

Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland. I knew the Icelandic people were mad…

The “long lost” original version of “Oops! I Did It Again” by Louis Armstrong. OK, not quite, but never let facts get in the way of good comedy…

Chelsea and Republic of Ireland winger Damien Duff has been taught how to “dive” correctly by a Judo master. But only to prevent another shoulder injury… So they say.

Monday Night Football, ABC’s flagship NFL programme, will be moving to ESPN at the start of the 2006 season. Moving MNF from network TV to basic cable could be risky one…

Flickr thinks I rock…

Hi FLC!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Feb 19, 2007.

2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies

So let the scramble for those 2 free pro accounts begin… Though, you better do something nice to impress me…

EA Sports are to unveil the next generation of their highly successful Madden NFL series during the first hour of the NFL Draft on Saturday. No doubt it’ll be full of ultra realistic graphics and huge mentions that genre killing “exclusive license,” I’ll stick with ESPN NFL 2K5 thank you very much…

I dunno what’s up… The last few weeks has been crazy hectic, and since they’ve been so busy I’ve had nothing “interesting” to blog about, and by the time I find out about cool stuff to blog I’m completely day late/dollar short, and so on…

I’m not going to close this down… But I draw the line at blogging about the most exciting part of the weekend was being pee’d on by Sally when we tried to put a collar on him, yep, a legfull of cat urine will cure what ails you. Though we did decide to plunge in the icy (or so it felt) depths of Lake Lanier, which was pretty excting at the time, but I digress… There is only so many stories and pictures relating to cats a guy can do before it becomes a cliche, and March’s gallery told more than a 10 part BBC2 documentary series could…

Hoefully things will pick up over this weekend and my brother is breezing into town, I’m sure interesting stuff will happen as the Smith boys take on the ATL head-on, so anyone within, say, 50 miles of the Perimeter, best stay indoors for your own sake.