Coldplay’s Twisted Logic Tour with Fiona Apple hit the American Airlines Center in Dallas February 27^th 2006. The tour which kicked off several weeks ago started off like a well oiled machine right at the stroke of eight with Fiona taking the stage to an arena about one third of capacity, although the show itself was sold out.

Fiona’s voice was strong as she played her grand piano in a full length turquoise colored dress. She worked through several of her new tracks from Extraordinary Machine including a song I was looking forward to hearing, “A Better Version of Me”. She didn’t disappoint the masses by bringing back her breakthrough hit, “Criminal” and “Shadow Boxer” from her first album Tidal, as well as a small sampling from When the Pawn Drops….

One of the most difficult parts of the show was simply watching Fiona try to perform when she wasn’t sitting behind the piano. She has very little stage presence, almost going into Morrison’esque shouts during the songs she performs. She would do little more than stomp her foot or wave her hand which wasn’t holding on to the mic stand.

Though the stage presence wasn’t as strong as other performers the crowd which bothered to watch her showered her with applause and random shouts of “Fiona”, which rang through the crowd. She even giggled saying she needed to get back to that angry place so she could perform her songs. After about forty-five minutes she exited the stage to make way for Coldplay…

Their cue to hit the stage was The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the Revolver album, and once they hit the stage the crowd erupted to “Square One” from Coldplay’s latest effort, X&Y. They looked like a band who had been on the road for a while; rough around the edges if you will appearance wise.

Chris Martin did a great job of working the crowd, playing piano, guitar, and leading sing-a-longs. The stage setup was simple, nothing extravagant or anything which blew up during the show. A simple video screen behind the band displayed images, members of the band as they played, and a count-down clock which was synched up with moments in the song “Square One”.

One of the more noteworthy props was the giant glitter filled yellow balloons which were playfully batted around by the audience members until they reached the stage again, or popped. The band covered most of the X&Y album, and received one of their loudest applause when they did their tribute song to Johnny Cash, “Til Kingdom Come”, followed by a cover of “Ring of Fire”.

Chris Martin also made a brief appearance in the back of the arena, where he briefly finished up a song and then sprinted back to the main stage to wrap up the show. Coldplay has that rare combination of rock & and pop to draw in a more diverse crowd. The band has been together performed long enough together to put on an entertaining show which will be enjoyed by event he most casual Coldplay fans.

Coldplay Setlist ~ no particular order

• Square One
• Politik
• Yellow
• What If
• White Shadows
• Fix You
• Talk
• X&Y
• Speed of Sound
• Swallowed in the Sea
• Kingdom Come
• A Message
• Trouble
• Don’t Panic
• Clocks
• The Scientist
• Got Put a Smile on Your Face
• Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash)

So lately, I have seen many references to an anonymous tip abot Sony releasing a new version of the PSP. Apparently, they will be slimming it down, offering several colors, using built-in 4GB NAND memory, a camera, and probably more.

Let me speak directly to Sony for this one. Screw you. That’s right, you’re a bunch of assholes who managed to trick me into getting a PSP that I now regret. If there is any validity to this rumor, I will sell my PSP and any games I have for it. This utterly frustrates me beyond belief. I know the pain and anger of a Dreamcast owner.

Here’s some advice Sony, why don’t you try and worry about games first. The game selection available on the PSP is lackluster at best. Lackluster is actually a very nice way of saying “craptacular.” Sony, you are spending all of this effort to put every possible multimedia function in the PSP and neglect the one thing that most people consider it used for: games! Why the hell would I want a stupid camera?! Why would Sony think it’s a good idea to piss off and annoy the early adopters by doing this.

Go on Sony, release your new PSP handheld. I’m most certain I will buy a DS Lite, which means I may very well sell my PSP. I think I made a royal mistake. The PSP clearly violates the KISS principle.

When I first heard of the sale of six ports to be run by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)I shrugged it off without giving it much thought. Bush vowing to veto anything which may stop the sale of the ports, the first time he would use his veto while in office mind you. Why did he feel so passionate about it? Why did he not feel the need to explain his reasons, and when questioned about the possible security risk it would pose he counters the question with “trust us…”

The same man who said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The same man who almost refuses to recognize that some of the terrorists on the planes on September 11, 2001 were from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Then I heard some crazy stuff about the affiliation he has with a little group called the Carlyle Group, and their ties with UAE.

For lengths sake, here is a link to information on the Carlyle Group (The Guardian)

Lou Dobbs, from CNN, took this matter head on and came up with a terrific piece which aired on February 22, 2006. I am going to paste parts of the transcripts; the link to the full transcript is at the end of this post. I found it amazing, mind boggling, horrifying, and most important informative.

DOBBS: McClellan went on to say that the Committee on Foreign Investments examined 65 deals a year on average, but as we reported here last night, and we would like to remind Mr. McClellan, that the committee has turned down only one deal out of 1,500 deals that it has reviewed.

President Bush has put forth a challenge tonight that I simply can’t ignore. The president yesterday said he wanted those who are critical and questioning of this port deal to “step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company.”

Well, first of all, Mr. President, to equate any country to your principal partner in the coalition ignores that special relationship this country’s enjoyed with the United Kingdom for decades and decades. This also is not just a British company and an Arab company, as I think you well know.

Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation is a British privately owned company. Dubai Ports World is a UAE government controlled and owned company. You see the difference, of course.

And furthermore, the money used to fund the 9/11 attacks, most of it, in fact, was sent to the hijackers through the UAE banking system. In fact, two of the hijackers were originally from the UAE.

The UAE stonewalled U.S. efforts to track al Qaeda bank accounts after 9/11. In addition, the Emirates does not recognize Israel as a sovereign state. And the UAE was a transfer point for shipments of nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

And if those aren’t good enough reasons, I would just suggest I’m at a complete loss to offer what might be considered good reasons.

The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush’s father once served as senior adviser and is a who’s who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Another family connection, the president’s brother, Neil Bush, has reportedly received funding for his educational software company from the UAE investors. A call to his company was not returned.

Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX/. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.

In Connecticut today, Snow told reporters he had no knowledge of that CSX sale. “I learned of this transaction probably the same way members of the Senate did, by reading about it in the newspapers.”

Another administration connection, President Bush chose a Dubai Ports World executive to head the U.S. Maritime Administration. David Sanborn, the former director of Dubai Ports’ European and Latin American operations, he was tapped just last month to lead the agency that oversees U.S. port operations.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs Transcript

So, does this make Bu$h a terrorist?

I’ve been surfing around a few plugins that will hopefully enhance zero-blog. The first one that caught my eye was Rate My Stuff. It provides a quick and easy way to give a graphical rating. It’s actually pretty decent. I had to modify the images to work better with non-white backgrounds (apparently, this has become the in-thing). I changed the empty, half, and solid images to have transparent backgrounds. I also had to add support in the core file for the “Final Verdict” image that I yanked from the example page.

You can check out my Katamari review with the new star rating system.

Slashdot has a story about how Microsoft has come to the realization that perhaps this RSS thing is here to stay. Check the article out here.

Wow, now that is entrepreneurial insight. It only took them damn near 10 years after standardization! This is clearly their attempt at firing back at Yahoo! and Google, since both companies have learned to heavily rely on RSS.

After everyone and his brother has a blog, after the standard has hit its third revision, they finally decide it might be a good idea. Yeah, way to think outside the box on that one, Billy. Let me guess, next you’ll decide that perhaps keyboards are pretty good ideas too.

Thank god I don’t have to put up with that Windows crap at work.

Note: For those of you who cannot remember the Metallica vs. Napster thing, I got the title of this article from the old Camp Chaos movie. It’s safe to say they killed what was left of their career. I mean, did you even listen to that last CD? I’ve heard belches more melodic than that!

Recently, there has been news confirming a sequel to God Of War for the PS2. This is kind of a given due to its popularity and the open ending. This is a really strange announcement for many reasons.

Does this mean that they will continue PS2 development long into the PS3 launch? Almost at the drop of a hat, every generation shift in consoles means immediate death for the previous generation. Why would they target this development for the PS2? It’s not like this is a developer who does not have acess to next-gen hardware, since God Of War is developed by Sony.

This generally raises the question if they are going to keep the PS2 alive and market it as the economy model. This has never really been done before with the exception of the GBA SP, but that doesn’t technically count because the Nintendo DS is not the sucessor to the GBA (or even in the GameBoy product line).

Either way, I don’t care, I just want more original God Of War content.

Update: I spotted this article on Kotaku and it enrages me. Why the hell did they strip the online mode from GT4 and replace it with the crappy Director mode only to release another edition with it. Wankers.

The English language is a complicated pile of junk. Its only consistency is its inconsistency.

There’s 1 word in particular that I hate above all others: of. It’s pronounciation contradicts its spelling. It is pronounced like “uv” but its spelling is similar to “off.” If you add an “f” to the end, it changes, not only the pronounciation but also the meaning. It’s one thing if the spelling differs and is pronounced the same. It’s another thing to add a letter that should not affect the the pronounciation yet does. We should spell it like it sounds.

rainman and I started talking about this during lunch. There are other situations similar to this one and many other questions were raised. For example, if this logic is followed, the word “often” should be pronounced “uvton.” Why are there cases in the English language similar to this that make no sense?

There are other words like this: butt and but, bee and be, in ad inn, to and too.

Then I started wondering where the hell the “v” sound came from. So I started playing around with the letters. I wanted to see if I could find a pattern between the spelling and the pronounciation. Sure enough there is, so let me explain the pattern.

Let C represent all of the possible consanants in the English language, such that:
C = { b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, z }
Let V represent all of the possible vowels in the English language, such that:
V = { a, e, i, o, u, y }

Similar to Rot13, all characters are shifted to the right within their address space by 13 values. This means an “o” shifts 13 vowels and becomes a “u” and a “f” shifts 13 consanants and becomes a “v.”

Shifting is restricted to the address space in which the original letter belongs. For example, the letter “q” belongs to C and can never take a value in V or any other address space other than C.

If there is a collision between the resultant word and another pre-existing word, the process must be repeated until a uniquely sounding word is created.

So I decided to apply this rule to some of the other words. “In” will now be pronounced as “ut,” “to” will be pronounced “lu,” “be” will be pronounced “ri,” and “but” will be pronounced “ryl.”

There you have it, fun with the English language!