You can tell I've vowed to give up booze for weight loss purposes can't you ? If you thought bitter and twisted was a beer from Harviestoun (nice pale ale with a good balance of amber and crystal malts with a hefty thwack of ...shut up !! Shut Up!!!) then you've seen nothing yet.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Readworthy article in the Economist about the music business for ET popular music fans. Some of it may sully your plectrum, but there are some very interesting figures in there.

Henry Trick's musical insights are limited to;

What is it about such spontaneous eruptions of mass enjoyment? Perhaps it is the loneliness of the digital age. We mostly  listen to our music through headphones; seldom do we sing along around a piano or record player.

Perhaps it is an act of faith. Few people now sing together in church. Is a rock concert now a chance to have a glorious choir practice, with added guitars?

The doors of perception it is not.

But he's much better on the business - which is 99.99% what popular music is now.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Muscat: Several threads were woven at the 29th GCC Summit but the final stitch was left for the future as the leaders decided to keep the momentum for economic integration in the region going amid global financial meltdown.

At the end of the Summit on Tuesday, the message was clear that despite some reservations and Oman not being part of it, the Common Currency target would remain.

"The monetary union is approved for today ...," Abdul Rahman Al Attiyah, GCC Secretary-General, announced at the end of the Summit.

"I think it is within the time which has been allocated - 2010, unless there are other developments in the mean time," said Al Attiyah

"Let's wait until, Insha Allah, we agree on the location [of the central bank] and the other details," the Secreatry-General said, adding that the decision on the central bank's location would be finalised by mid-2009.

"The location will be discussed between now and the middle of the year to finalise the place of the headquarters of the monetary council, which will lead to the [GCC] central bank."

So the fabric is in place for the single currency's circulation by 2010 but there are a few finer touches.

THE AGE OF MASS INTELLIGENCE | More Intelligent Life

Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season's opening night from the Royal Opera House. "I like hip-hop and opera," he says. "Not a big deal."

That's increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras.

Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain's crack covert-operations regiment--who have to remain anonymous--have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin.

The sharpest of all these cultural contrasts, though, was the one taking place at the Royal Opera House itself the night Russell Southwood was queuing. Every seat had been taken not by the furs-and-cufflinks brigade but by readers of the Sun, a newspaper not noted for its opera coverage. Amid huffing and puffing from connoisseurs, 2,200 readers of Britain's biggest-selling daily, accompanied by a trio of page-three girls (modestly attired), descended on the house of Handel and Callas for Mozart's "Don Giovanni". The paper celebrated with an inch-high headline: "Well Don, my Sun".

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. Isolated examples of this have been seen for a long time. In the 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen, a doyen of avant-garde music, appeared on the cover of the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper". In the 1990s the Three Tenors found a mass audience for Puccini. But what used to be a characteristic of individuals or particular occasions is now becoming the defining feature of the whole culture.

Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want "the buzz you get from working that little bit harder". This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. "When people talk and write about culture," says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show "This American Life", "it's apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There's an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us."

There's a number of holes in the article, but I think there's an interesting core, in that all that educating people we've been doing since WW2, but particularly since the 60s has changed some landscapes.

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

(...)

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.