This podcast is, as you will already know, very, very late.  Personally I blame a combination of the RNLI, gin, and the fact that Mrs. Toad is away all week, which meant that yesterday wasn’t really available for blog things.

It’s also not very new music-orientated either, so hopefully those of you who come here pretty much just for that won’t be too disappointed.

I think what happened was that I got so into a handful of new releases recently that I neglected all the others, so when I came to sit down and write about tunes last week I suddenly realised I had nothing to write about.  For blogging that makes things a little challenging, but from a podcast point of view I am always happy to just fuck it and play some oldies, which is what I’ll do here.

Direct download: Toadcast #172 – The Oldiecast

01. Mad Melvin (00.17)
02. Chumbawamba – Farewell the Crown (01.43)
03. Billy Bragg – Walk Away Renee (07.37)
04. The Left Banke – Walk Away Renee (09.59)
05. Bruce Springsteen – Growin’ Up (17.07)
06. Psychedelic Horseshit – Rat Poison (24.17)
07. The Chesterfields – Ask Johnny Dee (32.21)
08. The Close Lobsters – Just Too Bloody Stupid (35.23)
09. The Delgados – Everything Goes Around the Water (43.45)
10. The Sleepy Jackson – Acid in My Heart (50.19)
11. Calexico – Si Tu Disais (56.17)

Today I am off to Aberdeen to see Meursault play, get cabbaged with Paddy and Andy from Gerry Loves Records, and put up some posters for the Yusuf Azak album launch gig.  We will record this week’s podcast with monumental hangovers, probably in Andy’s Mum’s living room I think.  My ambitions are limited to scoring a coffee and a bacon sandwich, anything other than that will be excessive.

Some interesting news in the world of Rupert Murdoch and his lovely, cuddly NewsRape corporation – the company which brings the world Fox News, a news channel so full of lies that it is actually banned from calling itself a news channel in Europe.

Firstly, apparently the Times lost about four million readers when they put their content behind a paywall, which seems a little careless.  In some ways you have to admire them for their courage, because as long as the world’s two most reliable online news sources, the BBC and the Guardian, remain free then people have access to all the news they want and are likely to just switch, and they are a little out on their own there.  On the other hand, it’s the Times, it’s Murdoch, fuck ‘em, hahahahaha!  Mind you, I doubt this will be something they didn’t plan for, to be fair, as everyone knew it would happen, so I assume there must be a plan.

Secondly, it appears that MySpace has had its knuckles rapped for… well, for being shit, I suppose.  According to the Graun their quarterly operating losses have increased to around $156 million, which also seems a little careless, and has led to some fighting words from Murdoch HQ.  You have to laugh at MySpace though.  They had all the users, they were the dominant force, despite having a woefully slow and ugly site and clunky user experience, and when they got a massive injection of cash, did they streamline, redesign and modernise their site?  Did they fuck.  They tinkered with it a little, but even now it’s still basically just the same old shit it was in 2004.  Not good enough chaps, and now you’re fucked.  That’s what happens.

And finally, we seem to have an awful lot of scientists who read this site, so that picture above is taken from the webshop of XKCD, the best webcomic of them all.  Science: it works, bitches.

So, here we get to the five silly questions and talking pish part of the week.  I ask five silly questions and, in the comments, you answer them as sensibly or trivially as you please.  Then we all talk pish on the internet for the rest of the day.

1. The first of the five songs is Chumbawamba’s genius Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1721.  Have a listen and tell me who else you’d put on that flight.
2. When was the last time you checked your MySpace inbox?
3. When did you sign up to Facebook?
4. When was the last time you paid to view a news article online?
5. Why do so many scientists read Song, by Toad (answers need not be entirely accurate)?

Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1721

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Four randoms from my music library.  I hope Shuffle is kind to me.

King Creosote – Alas, etc.

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The Metasciences – Four Colour Love Story

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Phil & the Osophers – Let Me Light Your Path

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The Libertines – What a Waster

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Phew, seemed to get away with that one.

DO NOT WORRY!  This is not a podcast stuffed full of tedious moralising and empty pontificating and generally depressing garbage about a subject far too weighty and philosophical for this sort of half-arsed internet enterprise.  In fact, towards the end it really gets quite chipper.

Basically, there are so many extraordinarily good murder ballads that that particular aspect could so easily have entirely overtaken a podcast ostensibly about prison, crime and criminal justice.

This week, however, I have still managed to marginalise the role of the murder ballad, because the concept of death incorporates so many disparate emotions and aspects that simply doing a whole podcast about murderous folk tales and their musical counterparts seemed unnecessarily narrow.  So you get this.  Which starts out a little heavy but becomes positively gleeful by the end, I promise you.

Toadcast #86 – The Deathcast

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01. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Painter Blue (03.01)
02. Samamidon – O Death (12.33)
03. Eels – Going to Your Funeral (22.31)
04. Melanie Rivaud & Strange Weather – The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits Cover) (25.05)
05. Bob Frank & John Murry – Jesse Washington 1916 (31.53)
06. Bruce Springsteen – Dead Man Walking (37.02)
07. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Up Jumped the Devil (41.15)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (48.26)
09. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Tramp the Dirt Down (57.02)
10. Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471 (66.35)

I am not much of one for activism, but if ever there was a petition that demands your attention then it is this one: Jail Paris Hilton.

After repeatedly violating the terms of her probation for a DUI conviction she has been sentenced to an extremely lenient 45 days in jail, of which she’ll probably serve twenty, if that. She has raised a petition on her website for “all fans and supporters and all that are outraged by injustice”. Well that includes me. How did the slack-fannied whore get away with so lenient a sentence for what amounts to putting ordinary citizens in danger of their lives?

But no, apparently that’s not what she meant:

“Paris Whitney Hilton is an American celebrity and socialite. She is an heiress to a share of the Hilton Hotel fortune, as well as to the real estate fortune of her father Richard Hilton. She provides hope for young people all over the U.S. and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives. “

So yes, she will inherit her father’s money, which is one unarguable demonstration that imprisoning her for breaking the law is a travesty of justice. And she brings hope to young people all over the US and the world. Right, well if by hope you mean syphillis, then yes, I can see that this too means she should be immune to the law.

The worst thing about Paris Hilton is that there is no way you could express your utter contempt for her in any way that her awful vanity wouldn’t distort into a compliment inside her empty skull. Perhaps publicly executing her would be all we need to do to appease Al Qaeda, because it is very difficult to dispute the ‘Western Culture is Depraved’ charge they so enjoy when that utterly vacant shell of a human being is tottering drunkenly about the place like a paedophile on a school outing. Its almost as if God made a human body, but somehow neglected to put a human being inside it, resulting in this awful echo-chamber of human vanity and craven self-obssession.

Her mere existence makes my skin fucking crawl. You really get the impression that you could hang her upside down in the middle of the Sahara Desert for a fortnight and the hateful little bitch’s fanny still wouldn’t have dried out by the end of it. She’s a disease-ridden, parasitic, tainted, talentless whore, and the sooner she goes to prison and some tattooed old boiler called Edna makes the emaciated little tart her bitch for a couple of weeks, the better. Better still if she forces her to share her needles. So vote, people, your country needs you.

Now, to expunge the rather violated feeling just mentioning that rancid old cadaver gives me, I am going to have to do extremely well in the musical department, just to bring the net value of this post back up to zero. Well what this reminds me of more than anything is the superlative b-side by Chumbawamba – yes, Chumbawamba – called Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471. The title is pretty self-explanatory, and if Paris Hilton belongs anywhere it is on the Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471. It’s the cheery little bye-byes that do it for me.

Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1721

The only real way to get revenge on Paris Hilton, for what her and her noxious ilk have done to our society, will be to sit back and enjoy the unavoidable wrath of Father Time. Watch will glee as she gets older, wrinklier, ever more hysterically desperate and finally dies in a pool comprised of a mixture of her own vomit and the pus seeping from her syphilitic sores, a half-empty bottle of supermarket vodka clutched in her bony fingers and the man batter of some fat old supermarket security guard matting her hair.

[Update: FFS, can't we just burn the bitch?]