Mercury Music awards

I’ve never really paid much attention to the Mercury’s over the years, but I happened to be listening to the live feed from the ceremony last Tuesday, and heard Jools Holland announce the winners…. Antony and the Johnsons… Who?
I must admit it’s a name that I’ve never heard of before, so I made a point of listening to their/his winning album… WOW! He has a voice that flutters between haunting and annoying, but it passed the 2nd listen test with no problem, and I’m now a convert. The two outstanding tracks for me are ‘Hope there’s someone’ and  ‘Fistful of love’, the latter of which has a spoken intro and guitar work by Lou Reed… Hat’s off to the androgynous Antony… He gets my vote too after listening to some of his ‘competition’ the rest seemed so bland by comparison

Brown gets the boot

The director of FEMA has been ‘removed’ back to Washington… Surprising really… you would have thought, when all hell breaks loose… dead bodies floating around the lake that was New Orleans… a shoot to kill policy in force for looters… forcible eviction pending for the remaining living people… you would have thought that the best man for the job would be a lawyer… Damn… now they’ve got a Coast Guard guy in charge… what will he know about protecting the businesses and getting the oil fields back in production?
Good luck to Vice-Admiral Allen on a challenging few weeks / months…