The long, Doritos-caked arm of the law—Liverpudlian burglars foiled by American watching store’s internet camera feed. They would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that damned TCP/IP.

Another grateful nod to Paul Hunt (who is Dutch, not Danish, which fact would certainly never be misrepresented and then hastily amended in a prior issue of this publication, because we know the difference) for this contribution.

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Attentive long-time listeners will recognize today’s song—more recent and less attentive listeners will hopefully be pleased by this new-to-you recording.  We’re having an unofficial holiday today, at the office, and so I felt it would be prudent to dust off an oldie rather than leave you wanting for content.

And so, a look back—it is March, and the President of the United States is taking a trip to the subcontinent.  And what were we doing, here at The Aural Times?  We were taking a trip to the dance-pop continent.

Enjoy, and expect a brand new composition on Wednesday.  Happy listenening.

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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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Don’t blame me—NewsBot 3000 dropped the ball on this one. I was looking for a low-cost alternative to flesh-and-blood Interns, and I have to admit the sales folks at LogiSong LLC painted a compelling portrait. No tardiness. No clogged toilets. No incense burners. And the NewsBot 3000 would analyze input text and automatically compose music and lyrics based thereupon!

Heaven. Until I heard the output, anyway: trite lyrics, questionable meter, nearly indecipherable annunciation—and the damned thing couldn’t even come up with a reasonable summary of the current Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah mess.

So while I did not get the same sense of satisfaction from canning the NewsBot as I used to when doing the same to an Intern—computers, after all, do not wince, or cry, or offer money—you may be assured that it is nonetheless extremely fired.

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Diplomacy says un-huh—Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi and President Bush visit Graceland. The world press has reacted with a series of strained, wince-inducing puns.

I met Elvis once—this was years ago, he was neither fat nor dead yet. We shared a bus, he a young, cocksure musician, I a budding journalist with an ear for music. I told him about an idea: a singing newspaper. And, goddam him, he just laughed. Laughed and laughed. We didn’t speak for the rest of the bus ride, and the next time I saw him he was on national television.

But that was a long time gone. And these days, as I sit in the office of the finest musical news outlet in the nation, I reflect on the fact that I am neither fat nor dead. So you can eat your heart out, Presley.

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We’re Number…Out! Ghana beat US 2-1, ejecting US in the first round of the World Cup.

Today’s issue is brought to you by guest correspondent Alex “yes relation” Millard—and his fabulous octet choir. Alex is available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, “or whatever, if the money’s right.”

This may be our last World Cup update—or, as one of the Interns, Berklie, has been insisting I write, “Worldcupdate”—pending any new and truly interesting news beyond small differences between two integers, of course. Should a truck strike someone midgame, you might hear about it.

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Careful, new moons tonight—Pluto’s second and third moons have been named. Nix, goddess of night, and Hydra, a nine-headed snake beast—fitting for a ninth planet, or so the reasoning goes. One wonders if Hydra tucked one of his heads out of view every couple thousand years, the better to taunt Neptune…

Today’s issue is brought to you by what I can only hope will be a short-lived Intern sideproject: three of these over-privledged under-achievers have taken to wearing their hats backwards and writing, mostly, songs about properly cooking a turkey dinner. They’re calling themselves the Baste-y Boys.

That is a sentence I would never have expected to utter.

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Ghana getcha—Ghana’s football team scores 2-0 World Cup victory over Czech Republic.

We’re not very sports-conscious here at The Aural Times. Now and then the Interns will strike up a game of hackysack or frisbee—which I wish they would do outside—but in general they specialize in, if any thing, a sort of competitive sloth. I have seen slouching matches that would make a strong man wince and rub his coccyx, and—oh, stop giggling, Gregor! It means tailbone! It’s a perfectly legitimate—

No, tail and bone aren’t funny either.

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Three days late for the apocalypse—meteorite of suspected record size struck Norway early Friday morning. At press time, no clever jokes were available.

I have a note here from one of the Interns. Petunia, I think—looks like her idiosyncratic (read: childish, untrained) scrawl. It says, simply: “Norway. Built fjord tough.”

…

As I said early, at press time, no clever jokes were available.

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It’s a bad year to be in Jakarta—Mt. Merapi likely to erupt, just weeks after a nearby earthquake killed nearly 6,000 people.

It’s not exactly a good day for spelling and pronunciation in the office, at least for whichever lunatic Intern is responsible for the vocals on today’s song—if I didn’t know better, I’d guess he’s singing “Melapi”. Not that you can make out the words. Damned heavy metal. I’m going to have to put them back on barbershop duty if they keep this up.

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How would we write without it?  The letter W joins the Swedish alphabet, at long last.  At long last, Bert is vindicated.

Do not be alarmed if today’s song sounds different.  No, I did not hire a new and talented Intern—if only it were that easy.  No.  Today’s issue is brought to you by our first field correspondent: Dutch staffer Paul Hunt.

When he’s not performing his duties as our European Correspondent, Paul is making excellent music, which you can listen to (and buy!) at his site, www.wolkenvelden.com.

Happily enough, today is my birthday.  I will be locked in the office with a fine bottle of scotch and some earplugs—anything that doesn’t bear kicking down my door is officially not my problem.

On that note, purchases from the Gift Shop are the gifts that you give yourselves.

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As in America, so in Italy—Silvio Berlusconi refuses to concede the election.  Crucial absentee votes, demands for recounts, questions about discarded ballots: it hits a bit close to home.  But the current results favor challenger Romano Prodi.  If you’ll forgive the allusion, smart money says that the center-right cannot hold.

And so, an Italian song for an Italian story.  Or at least, an Italian-y song.  The Interns made various hand-waving arguments for the authenticity of the composition, mentioning (more times than one ought to) the notion of gondolas and lasagna.  I suspect their credentials on the subject are largely restricted to interactions with a certain ubiquitous Italian plumber, but, well, what does one do?

Often, one drinks.

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Sometimes things end well. Jill Carroll has been released by her captors after 82 days spent as a hostage.

The good folks over at The Christian Science monitor—for whom Carroll was reporting when she was abducted—can tell the story better than I, so I’ll defer to them, and leave it at that; I think our song today captures the sentiment at The Aural Times as good as anything will.

In other news, it has been another exciting week in the office. While our Technical Director has not exactly been a beacon of calmness, she has not threatened either to faint (which she has asked me not to mention, and has further asked me to mention that it happens only infrequently should I decline to respect that first request), nor to strangle someone (though I had the names of a couple likely Interns in mind, just in case). In other words, smooth sailing here at the Times.

And our Marketing Director has assured me that there is something exciting happening on the merchandising front. I look forward to an unveiling of sorts on Monday—stay tuned.

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Bow your head and pray for the tobacco lobbyists:  Cigarette eyed in deadly cruise ship fire.  Richard Liffidge, a 75-year-old passenger of The Star Princess, expired during the maritime blaze—and while the doctors are saying cardiac arrest, I think we know the real culprit.

Flavor country.

As for the song we’ve got for you this March friday—I should warn you that the Interns responsible, though they have dreadlocks and khaki duds all, are not remotely Jamaican.  And judging by how they smell, I’d venture that they’ve never been in a bath, let alone the waters of the Caribbean.

And now one of them is giggling and singing “rub-a-dub Dub” over and over again.  These kids are incomprehensible.

NEWSFLASH:

I’ve been informed by a visibly shaken Technical Advisor that something she calls “our registrar” is suffering what she calls “a Distributed Denial of Service” attack against what calls “their freakin’ nameservers”.  See above comment about incomprehensibility, but I’ve asked her to explain, and from what I understand, she means this:

Some uncivil jerks have been hammering on our service provider and consequently preventing you, our readers, from visiting this site.  If you are seeing this, then the problem may have passed.  Understand that as I write this, we at The Times cannot view our own site.

I loathe mornings.  Someone is getting FIRED.

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No more dawdling!  So said US Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, on Tuesday, to Iraqi politicians:  Senators push Iraq to form government.  Apparently, Iraqi leaders have been fighting the good infight since the formation of a permanent parliment in December of 2005, and the Senators—Levin, Warner, and four others—want to see something get done.

I am, frankly, confused:  are we not trying to help Iraq create a free democratic society in the very mold of the American vision?  And yet we want their politicians, of all people, to be efficient?

A wire has been crossed, somewhere.

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The news: cyclone batters Australian coast.

We had a “Cyclone Larry” back when I was just a boy.  Larry Jenkewski.  We’d feed him candy bars and sweets and anything else we could find that had a high sugar-to-mass ratio, and after a while he’d just start spinning and spinning and, well, up until that point it was all damned good fun and so the next bit was generally glossed over.  And then we’d chip in to pay to have his shirt washed so that Mrs. Jenkewski wouldn’t freak out.

Ah, youth.

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It’s worth saying—the problem is H5N1, not the bloody cats.  I’m not a “cat person”, myself, mind you; if I wanted to clean up the droppings of a prissy, self-absorbed grimalkin, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced.  But—I was going somewhere with this, I think—don’t panic.  Keep an eye on your cats.

The interns—I’m not sure where they learned their ethics; they may not be throwing cats out the windows of The Aural Times‘s offices, but they are stealing beats, viz:

Sheep Beats, a sickeningly cute trio of ovis aeries laying out compelling (if not entirely well-tempoed) sequenced music.

Also—RSS feed.  I don’t know what it is, but our Technical Advisor assures me that it will improve site readership and is well worth the overtime pay I am required by state law to pay her.  There’s a link on the sidebar; click on it, if you dare.

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Diplomacy is a tricky thing, a statement that remains true whether one means the current Russo-Iranian nuke discussion or the classic Avalon Hill board game.  Flaring tempers, miscommunications, promises broken: it’s a mess.

And running The Aural Times isn’t any easier.  Sure, we don’t have to worry about nuclear proliferation per se, but there are times when I regret not pursuing a career in military journalism in order to avoid so much fighting.

Apropos of which, the Times‘s editorial staff has found a compromise on an issue of considerable contention in our offices—the issue of muddy, ambient vocals.  For, while it is ever my goal as Editor of this publication to assure that my musical staff have the freedom to express themselves unfettered by any prejudicial bias, it is also the goal of The Aural Times to provide not just sounds but news.

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Call it a tale of two Olgas: Reports on the current Pyleva scandal have been, if not invariably, at least frequently referencing the Russian doping scandal of the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. At that time, Russian skier Olga Danilova ran into similar troubles (as did a few other athletes, Russian and otherwise).

Speaking of 2002: following from the figure-skating controversy at the 2002 Games there came an opinion piece from Steve Wilstein bearing the headline, “If figure skating isn’t fair, get rid of it.”

On behalf of the whole of the staff of The Aural Times, I would like to take this opportunity to assert that figure skating is not fair. Now will someone please take Mr. Wilstein up on that? Because we would, frankly, prefer to watch the Curling qualifiers than to ever have to hear Scott Hamilton fawn over another triple lutz.

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