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If you’ve ever spent any time on OilDrum finding out the lastest dire predictions on Peak Oil, you’ll know how quickly any lingering hopes for a bright and secure future can wither and die.

Whilst I can well accept the severity of the problems now facing athe globalized, consumer driven society, I wonder if our collective guilt over years of living selfishly hasn’t made us embrace a vision of a post-Oil apocalypse a little too readily.

Obviously things have to change dramatically-and probably that’s where most of the hope evaporates, but every so often something comes along to challenge my overbearing cynicism and allow a brief and fragile hope for redemption.

BlackLight Power is one such thing. The company claims to have created a technology which generates electricity from water at almost no cost.

Too good to be true ? Probably

You can read all about it here, and make sure you trawl through the comments at the bottom where couple of people seemingly close to the project weigh-in. It’s almost enough to make you believe that maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Almost.

Sometimes (most of the time) I find Monbiot just a little a little bit too harsh but true.

But this sounds like something that could work.

We loved the old format (thank you futurosity) but as beautiful as it was it had started getting in the way. So we decided to take it back to something more basic and better suited to our (new) needs.

Sorry it took so long to find a way back.

If HL is about anything, it’s about trying to do things for the right reasons.

Hope you like the new (old) thing-we gonna try and get back in the habit.

Speak again soon.

Sorry for the general lull round these parts in recent days/weeks, it’s partly the real world dominating our tender thought processes and a general, seasonal, sense of need to change and move on.

As easy as it is when there is a natural urgency and tempo to posting, sometimes you become more and more aware of a need to reassess and look to change things round fundamentally. It’s something that we are in the process of testing out and trying to manage. We will be something slightly different quite soon now.

(hopefully)

Aphex Twin-Ageispolis

Time for the second kelly brother stag in a six months this time the action takes us to Brussels for a weekend of fine dining, quality ales and some ritual humiliation.

Could go either way to be honest, but is almost certain to involve a few too many 8% beverages and some moules et frites.

Not sure I know much about Belgian music etc, apart from the work of one Marc Moulin, which by some strange twist of fate is both reassuringly heavy and well within the genre know round these parts as Third Floor and most definitely Classic.

Better the duval you know.

Placebo-Balek

This picture make me want to cry.

Last night, and the few weeks leading up to it, seem to encapsulate all that’s good in supporting a football club.  The desperate lows of eduardo’s injury and seeing the team falter and struggle against resolute but inferior teams, followed by the mighty highs of a dream-like victory against AC Milan.

It really doesn’t get much better than this.

So this is why things have been a little quiet on ‘the lats’ in recent weeks.

Seems change is becoming something of a permanent condition for us (and will continue to be for a while)

Not sure if I have anything to write that would add a great deal.

(except, that definitely looks like a smile to me)

Here is a track that is halfway joyous enough to be appropriate, it’s recently been edited (quite amazingly) by recloose under his chow daddy moniker.

Seek it out and in the meantime, nothing says ‘wow I’m having a baby’ quite like early 80’s jazz funk.

Ronnie Laws-Good Feelings

its been a while, and though it was tempting to herald my return with a cover of one of my old posts, but that would have been superlame so i’m only going half way and i’m re-upping something i’d posted before (but which languishes on a far away server now) for this valentine’s thursday.

a tribute to a tribute if you will.

i had this track on over the weekend while i did the domestic thing - preparing for sunday roast with the folks and my heart damn near melted into the gravy.

tender, yearning, soulful and really quite soppy. take it, prince.

prince - a case of you (joni mitchell cover)

I’m kinda old school Obama. I remember being really impressed by a speech he gave on the importance of the church/state divide-fascinating I know, but in these scary times it was incredibly reassuring to hear someone so intelligent and articulate. It was almost like he was from another era entirely, capable somehow of invoking the memory of the great american political orators who were once so universally admired.

It’s a dangerous thing that kind of charisma, it can seduce and blind you to all kinds of darker political failings. Not that I necessarily think that of Barack-he seems like a sincere and good intentioned man. My worry is that when you raise a people’s expectation of change too high, in failing to deliver you risk damaging the belief that change is possible at all.

If the wire has taught us anything it’s that the fate of individuals who challenge the system to end up bathed in glory far less often than we (or they) would hope.

To quote David Simon;

“In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.”

Which is of course another reason to love the wire and to admire the battles of those with the audacity to hope.

Little Dragon-Twice

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Seems like we lost the habit somewhere between marriage prep and a festive period that came round way too fast. That blog/life balance baby, it’s a mother.

But it’s not like we’re doing this out of duty, only for love.

(and our love has had other priorities in recent weeks)

But it’s a new year now and with a good six weeks of new musical discoveries (and general life experience) it feels like a-good-a-time-as-any to get back to where we were.

There are some fairly major changes on the way (aren’t there always) cause we get bored easily, but for the next month or so we will try to be a bit more regular on the post front.

Thanks to the words of encouragement from those of you we saw over Christmas.

Here’s to an amazing ‘08.

The Impressions-Fool For You