Big Tobacco vs. Big Animation—Turner to edit Tom&Jerry archives to remove smoking. After that, they’ll no doubt proceed to deal with all the gratuitous violence.

Today’s contribution is the second we’ve run from a fine Dutch correspondent, Paul Hunt—who stages his mad schemes over at Wolkenvelden. You may remember his previous composition, a touching consideration of the letter W and its recent formal adoption by the Swedes.

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From the trenches of the culture war—China bans foreign animated programming from prime time in a bid to foster the domestic animation studio system.

In utterly unrelated news:

It is our six month anniversary! O delight! O joy! O bitter, clawing perseverance! Though blue sky and through turbulence we have flown this last semiannum, your humble pilot and his varied, inconstant crew—and I look forward to the next six months, and whatever changes and surprises may be in store for both the world of news and the world of The Aural Times.

To celebrate this milestone, I have (at considerable, not to say disconcerting, cost) commissioned a redesign of both the public face and internal architecture of the site. There are more details to be had on the Site News page, but the gist of it is this: it is a brand new day, here at the Times, and the office has that new-car smell.

Should you find anything odd or missing or broken or simply delightful about the news site, don’t hesitate to let us know. And thanks for listening.

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What can I say? It has been a busy, busy time for us—for me—in relation to things wholly incidental to The Aural Times. I—we—have been distracted, and publishing deadlines have been missed. In the words of that great communicator, that most Ronald of Reagans: mistakes were made.

Apologies.

The reality is that The Times may revert to a less frequent (but, compared with the last two weeks, more steady) publishing schedule in the near future—perhaps once a week, at least for a while—so that we may better attend to unrelated matters while still providing a dependable dose of musical news. I will most certainly keep you, dear reader, posted.

In the mean time, good news: work has begun toward the end of compiling our published work so far in a musical album: a compendium of Aural Times tunes in compact disc format, for your off-line musical enjoyment. On this, too, we will keep you posted.

Thank you for your understanding and your patronage.

As for the Interns…well. I have let the current crop go—I do not believe they ever recovered completely from the disappearance of Dalton during our Montana sojourn—and I am currently looking for a new group. It being summer, I may be able to find a more-or-less able group of PSU students with nothing better to do than work feebly for OSPIRG or Taco Bell. I shall see; I shall see.

Happy listening.

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Shine off, you crazy diamond—Pink Floyd founder and acid casualty Syd Barrett has died of diabetes-related complications. He was 60.

The narrow parabola that was Barrett’s functional career—bursting onto the Brit psychedelic scene in 1965 and being more or less ejected from the band three years later after unravelling—is a sort of model, an inspiration, to many of The Interns, who find the idea of taking tremendous amounts of drugs and retiring after three years attractive. Today’s song features seven or eight of them having some sort of sonic argument with guitars.

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They’re rocked out—Pacific Northwest rock trio Sleater-Kinney is breaking up after eleven years together. The official line is “indefinite hiatus”, which is, you have to admit, a very polite thing to say.

We here at The Times are big fans of the band—their brand of high-energy rock has always done well to inspire at least some movement in even the most slothlike of Interns—but eleven years is a big stretch. They’ve made some good albums, and they deserve to go out on their own terms.

Whereas, on the other hand, the Interns have made no albums and can only be taken out on leashes. Corin Tucker, how I envy thee.

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Tenure, schmenure—Dan Rather will leave CBS News later this year. One imagines an uptick in playtime for a certain REM single over the next few months.

Mr. Rather, I’d trade you for any three Interns in a heartbeat.

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When Jeff Goldblum isn’t available, you talk to Mick Jagger. And, at press time, Jagger has shot his scenes. This is real, people.

Continuing a trend begun last Wednesday, today’s song is brought to you again by a Field Correspondent: David Miller, our Entertainment department. David Miller—as his memoirs state—was born naked and screaming and has remained as such well into adulthood. He has already made fast friends with our token nudist Intern, Dalton.

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Video game enthusiasts are stunned—Nintendo unveils the name of their upcoming game console: ‘Wii’.

Reactions among North American bloggers has been mixed, with commentary tending toward a sophomoric fixation on the similarity to “wee”—with the implication that a buying public might be somewhat dissuaded from purchasing the system for fear that it will contain urine.

Reactions in the office have been altogether more positive.  The Interns spend enough time playing their damnable video games that I’m inclined to consider them an expert panel, of sorts, and today’s song is testimony to their opinion:  not “wee” but “whee!”.

Give me Spacewar on a PDP-1 any day, I say.  Perhaps I am showing my age.

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This is what it has come to—Tom Cruise has to clarify that he doesn’t intend to eat his daughter’s placenta.  Needless to say, Sir Alec Guinness rarely had such image problems.

It has been a long week, and it is only Tuesday evening as we here at The Aural Times struggle to meet our press deadline.  You will excuse me, therefore, if I am less loquacious than normal; I’d prefer to simply yell at some Interns, threaten to fire someone, and call it a night.

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Let’s get one thing straight: when Pamela Anderson talks, the world listens.

It is no surprise, then, that when Pamela Anderson calls for an end to seal hunting, the world perks up and says, “oh my god, do you remember that time when we were watching Baywatch and Brian called you on your cell and he was soooooo drunk, and you were all like, whatever, and he was all like, I luuuuuv you, and you were all like, click! omigod that was so killer.”

And that is, frankly, enough about Pamela Anderson.  Let’s talk about something more exciting.  Let’s talk about…

Merchandise!  Merch!  Swag!  Duds and trickets!

Simply put, I insist you go and spend some money at the brand new Aural Times Gift Shop.  We’ve got shirts.  Mugs.  Stickers.  Additional shirts.

And this is just the start—is there something you’d like that isn’t there?  Do you have a suggestion about the store?  Complaints, brainstorms, proposals?  Let us know, and we’ll be happy to accommodate you.  Fire an email at our Marketing Director:

merch @ auraltimes . com

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Stanislaw Lem is dead.  He was 84, and he was magnificent.

It’s not easy being Editor-in-chief, you know.  It’s hard to run a business, and it’s hard to keep everything in place.  I do my best, but sometimes I get caught so utterly off-guard that things slip away from me—and before I know it, the Interns are running around playing grabass and there’s a fire in the staff washroom’s toilet and I don’t even feel like yelling at them.

Such is the power of losing a hero.  I sit here, listening to the bluesy obit number we’ve put together for this issue, and I thumb through a well-worn copy of The Cyberiad which was my father’s before he gave it to me.

If you have not read any of Stanislaw Lem’s works, do so.  The Cybriad is wonderful, The Star Diaries likewise; really, all of his work is excellent, though in some cases (for example, the twice-filmed Solaris), the English translation—Lem wrote in Polish—is less-than-stellar.  Ask your local independent bookseller; they will almost certainly have a suggestion.

Funny how just talking about something can make you feel better.  In fact, I think I am quite ready to yell at some Interns now.

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Religion isn’t what it used to be.  I can’t fault L. Ron Hubbard for dabbling in the Religious Startup business—it’s certainly a stronger business model than, say, a singing website—but his acolytes seem to made of less stern stuff; in fact, they seem to be a bunch of whiners.  Hence:  Scientologist Hayes leaves South Park, citing religious intolerance.

In his defense, however, Hayes has not, reportedly, burnt down any churches lately, as a joke or otherwise.  So the Scientologists are doing a bit better than college kids from Alabama.  Bold praise, I know.

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