Une analogie trop loin?

French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, has used the following analogy regarding Britain’s attitude to The EU…

“Imagine Europe is a football club and you join, but once you’re in it you can’t say, ‘Let’s play rugby’.”

Clever, Monsieur Fabius, but here’s a more accurate analogy…

You can’t say, “Hey, let’s play a game of football”, then change the rules over a period of time until it becomes a game of rugby.

Taking the analogy further, you can’t expect us to still be happy when you invite us to a gang bang, get the hump when we don’t join in and say we’d prefer to stay in the kitchen with some of the other ‘less keen’ players – and then it turns out that the gang bang was a bit of a let down after all and you are struggling to keep your partners awake.

Boff!

BAiT Produces Video Demo from a Live Rehearsal

In early December, BAiT decided to embark on a live audio and video recording of a rehearsal. We thought this would serve a couple of purposes. Firstly, it would allow us a relatively quick means to create an honest audio demo of how we sound live. Secondly, it would give us an opportunity to hear and see ourselves properly and identify any areas for improvement.

Our main aim was to create an audio/visual montage of our songs, joining a short snippet from each of the songs together.

We booked a few hours in Hartshill Community Centre, Nuneaton, took along our standard stage equipment, some cameras, and some headphones (for monitoring purposes). Chris brought along his portable recording desk and we set everything up and then ran through the set a couple of times. The first run through gave us a chance to get used to the monitor mix and get into our stride with our singing and playing.

By the second run through we were more relaxed and just enjoyed the performance. We were finished by the mid afternoon, having recorded nine songs.

Over the following days, Chris worked on the audio while I worked on the video side of things. We also met up to discuss the mixes and tweak these as necessary. Once Chris had mixes of all the songs, he sent me the mixes and I did the video syncing. However, over Christmas, Chris invested in some mastering plugins for Cubase (on which we mixed the tracks) and had a play with these. The results were very pleasing and really lifted the sound of the recordings, transforming them and making us far happier about the sound (even if we do still beat ourselves up about the mistakes we hear). By the time we had synced the newly mastered audio tracks to the video and viewed these, we decided to let them stand in their own right as individual tracks, rather than the montage we originally intended.

The videos can be viewed above and also from the Media / Videos page on the BAiT website.

Yes, we could perform better, but we feel the videos give a very fair and accurate representation of how we perform live at the current time. We have already identified areas for improvement and will be working on these in upcoming rehearsals.

Las Malvinas son Falklands

Bloody Argentinian politicians at it again!

Look, Ms Kirchner… The Falklands have never been inhabited by Argentinians and are approximately 300 miles from mainland Argentina (250 miles from Tierra del Fuego, a part of land which isn’t physically joined to Argentina, and therefore, using Kirchner’s logic, should probably belong to Chile). Who discovered the islands may be debatable, but the candidates are Britain, Spain, and Portugal – not Argentina – and the first human settlement was French.

The proximity of a blob of land to another is irrelevant in geopolitical terms, and who owned said blob of land at a specific time in history is largely irrelevant to modern times. I refer the honourable lady to a map. Presumably, you want us to hand Jersey and Guernsey back to the French, right? Or perhaps you fancy having a go at the Middle East too, given that Judaism pre-dates Islam by over two thousand years.

In cases of inhabited territories, self-determination by inhabitants is the only fair way to resolve these disputes. There’s an upcoming Falklands referendum in March, and I think we know how that’s going to go.

Listen to what a Falklands government spokesman said:

“We are not a colony – our relationship with the United Kingdom is by choice… Unlike the government of Argentina, the United Kingdom respects the right of our people to determine our own affairs, a right that is enshrined in the UN Charter and which is ignored by Argentina.”

As he states, the islands are not a colony. Britain has defensive responsibility for the islands, but they are otherwise self-governing, like all the other British Overseas Territories.

What would be sensible would be an agreement based on mutually beneficial exploitation of potential nearby resources, which may be why you’re kicking up this stink again. But this will only come about through dialogue, and is not likely to happen while you indulge in sabre-rattling for domestic populist political purposes.

There is no ill-will towards Argentinian people in Britain itself. I don’t think that there’s any love-lost for Argentinian politicians on the part of the Falkland Islanders though. Either way, you won’t make any friends on the Falklands or in Britain with nonsense assertions of territorial rights over the Falkland Islands.

So in the interests of diplomacy and any chance of future co-operation between all the sides involved in this squabble, please stop it.