Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Sonseed: I'm calling it as kinda true

OK, now that the annoyed Sonseed fan's SQL injection script damage has been repaired (except the bit that would allow me to use a proper editor and insert linefeeds XD), I'll post in a bit more length later, but it turns out that the Sonseed video was probably real. That said, Doug admits that the bits that rang the alarm bells (the graphics, the poster for the show etc) were indeed faked. The paradox is that if he'd just let it speak for itself, and not dressed it up, it would have seemed more real!

A Long-Forgotten Times Appearance

Here is something I forgot about.

I was looking through my page referals today: the log of who has come to my site and how they did so.  It makes interesting reading for a narcissist: some because of amusing search phrases; some because they betray just who the individuals are, by what they call me or what they know.  Anyway, I copied one search and found a reference to myself I had never spotted before, and which must be very old.  The page was from the Times, and was contained in an alphabetical list of questions put to the Modern Manners correspondent, John Morgan.

Two things stand out for me about this particular recovered memory.  One was that, although it appeared under my email adress (yes I have had the same address for a lot longer than a decade) it was actually a joint effort by a friend and I, and written with the sole intent of getting into the weekly column.  Emily did the tricky bit, and came up with the idea for the subject, while I wrote the letter itself in so close a copy of Morgan's style that it verged on pastiche.  The idea behind that was to appeal to Morgan's role as lazy-journalist-with-a-deadling : the letter would need no editing or revision, but could simply be slotted in to make up the space.  The incident referre to was, of course, entirely fictional.

The other striking fact is that within a day or so of selecting this letter, John Morgan very sadly died, apparently having thrown himself out of the window of his apartment.  I resist all those who claim that he, like Simeon the Righteous, had seen the future and was at last satisfied.

Anyway here are the question and answer:

Q: I recently dined with friends in a restaurant. The service was prompt and friendly so we were all disposed to tip generously and a figure was reached by mutual agreement. One member of our party, above and beyond his share of the bill, produced a small stack of coppers, which he proceeded to toss in. I felt this suggested that we considered the tip as an opportunity to empty our pockets of inconvenient and weighty small change, as well as being condescending towards competent and capable serving staff? Does "every penny count", or should we have rounded it up to convenient denominations? - endie@softhome.net

A: Heaps of copper might be legal tender but they are not good manners. Few people are so poor that a couple of pennies make such a difference to their purses, and nobody likes heaving around large amounts of change. Instead, your friend might like to follow the example of one good woman I know, who saves all her coppers and puts the proceeds to a deserving cause every Christmas.

Sonseed: I'm calling it as fake

Someone was posting on F13.net about the hoho-so-funny Christian ska band Sonseed supposedly rediscovered by Dougsploitation.

I was suspicious.  For one thing, they were surprisingly modern and astonishingly fresh for an early-eighties ska band wearing waistcoats and awful hair, especially in the nicely understated guitar solo.  For another, there were a couple of cliched lines where the audience was supposed to laugh at the naive Christians: "Jesus touched me deep down inside".  And anyone who, like me, has 25-year-old VHS tapes of music videos will look at the video quality after the first few seconds and want to know what climate-controlled vault that master-copy was stored in.

Other things.  Look at the logo for Sonseed that he links to on the dougsploitation site, and which was supposedly the one that they were putting on t-shirts between the late 70s and 1983, when they supposedly broke up.  Despite the fact that this would undoubtedly have had to be scanned, zooming in gives some obvious compression artifacts, and absolutely perfect white away from the lettering.

The supposed poster for the show struck me as a bit suspicious, too, after looking at the detailing around the top and bottom of the lettering compared to the rest of the poster, which had obvious off-vertical artifacts on it. The lettering, however, had absolutely [i]perfect[/i] horizontal lines, top and bottom.  As in, every single pixel was perfect on the horizontal plane of the log, top and bottom.  No other image [i]with[/i] the lettering existed outside of the dougsploitation site.  Looking around, I found the picture which the wording had been added to.  The white lettering against a white background also looked like nothing a professional designer would do, while the style was about seven or eight years out.  Um, so he dug up the real name of a late eighties religious affairs program where the host is already dead.  The host is seen, but muted while the sound begins immediately after he supposedly introduces the band.

The program was a serious magazine discussion of religious affairs, which in the last year that Sonseed supposedly existed (1983) booked "Mother Teresa, Bishop Tutu and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama".  The idea that they were, on that day, running music (try and find any other references to them doing that) and booking a puppet-show called "Punch and Judaism" doesn't hang together.

The only reference to Sonseed that I can find outside of the dougsploitation site and references to it and the youtube posting is their album for sale at a vinyl site.  When I found this, I was kinda surprised.  It looked genuine.  But the last updated date on that page was, suspiciously, within a day of its discovery by none other than... the dougsploitation site: http://dougsploitation.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-about-sonseed.html  Depending on server timestamps it may even be the same day.

And so on.  The lead singer, Sal Polichetti, appears right now linked with sonseed in one link on the web, the dougsploitsation site (this will change as google updates links to it).  Not unbelievable for someone in a televised, widely-touring band with an album release, but not hugely likely either (I'll spare you the detailed explanation, but I can tell you that even obscure UK Christian pop acts of the late 1960s get a few mentions, especially if they had albums, which are quite collectable in some cases).

I believe the stuff about "Sal Polichetti" being an actor.  I suspect that sticking all that stuff in the interview (none of which relates to "Sonseed", including any references to him on the web) was our Doug being a bit pre-emptive.

I could go on and on, but I'll spare you.  And it's Sunday evening.  The keyboards player in that video isn't even pretending to mime, let alone actually playing.  She is actually playing a completely different chord sequence in the reverse of the direction she would actually play it.  While she may have been intended to be miming, it would be unusual for an actual keyboards player to play a falling chord sequence when miming to a song she normally plays with a rising (I-IV-V) one.  The notes are wrong, sure, but the basic shape is wrong. too.

That said, it's nice work.  The instruments are good (I'm not so sure about the drumkit, to be honest), the clothes pretty believable as long as you have the idea that these guys would have chosen to play ska but not to borrow anything of the stylings of the scene.

So I'm pretty convinced that it's dougsploitation getting traffic through self-referential links.  And it's working, too.  With the internet, peoples' critical faculties are dulled, especially when they really want to believe.

If you're interested, here is a real ska song from that year.  Pretty awesome it is, too.