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Sunday 12 October 2014

Beach Boys.

A heads up for those of you who like this sort of thing before I start on the main topic, but Q magazine has an 8 page interview with Aphex Twin. Its rather nice and covers an awful lot of ground, it also counters out the fact that the rest of the magazine is utter shite.

Beach Boys for BBC.

Something horrible appeared in the week on BBC and its not Linda's rape to the cat and budgie theme on Eastenders, (Listen here and then listen in the background as Deano comes out of the door its faint but its there) but the horror of a big budget BBC trailer for an old Beach Boys song.

I don't know if you've seen it live on the BBC or just the viral video on Youtube and other places but really is staggeringly awful.  Its a cover of the old Beach Boys song God Only Knows, by a shed load of artists including Pharrell Get Lucky Williams, Lorde as Sephiroth and Brian Wilson himself being menaced by a tiger whilst playing the piano, and One Direction, One Fucking Direction.

For me the pivotal moment, where it all turned to shit came when Emeli Sande started singing, that's when I really decided that this could fuck right off, and it duly increased when Gilles Peterson started to DJ with gold discs (should have got the Scratch Perverts in) and there is Paloma Faith and her leftish mug floating about in a hot air balloon.  And because its the BBC there is no end in sight from this being used in every ad break either in its entirety or in truncated forms, such as Florence from Florence and the Machine poncing about the undergrowth or Sam Sparro singing wistfully in a bedsit.

After all that you'll need something to take the edge off of the whole thing and I suggest you either catch up on IPlayer (or more likely torrent the whole episodes) of the Horizon cat watch 2014 special, a 3 part look at cat behaviour with Liz Bonin.  No really, even though the net is awash with cat clips, this is a full on scientific look complete with moggy cam and a breath taking X ray sequence in which you can see just how agile a cat is when landing on its feet.

Set in Brighton and at a farm location it is a collaboration of 100 cats and their owners detailing their lives and covers, communication, territorial disputes and how behaviours are taught from parent to kitten.  Its a good watch especially if you are a massive cat fan like me.

Another thing that isn't really appreciated here and I've always maintained it, is that certain behaviours scale up, so things that your humble domestic tibbet on your lap does to the massive tiger or lion out on the plains and forests is totally the same. Also it gives me the chance to show odd hunting behaviour like in this clip of Saphie taking on a toy rat, from episode 2, which is the nearest thing to a full on headrush a cat can get.

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