12February

Time to wheel out the Swingometer for the first time this year, to analyse the changes and transfers between the three leading parties at local council elections.

(More: A worked example and the latest projection - 561 words)

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Psephology

12February

Pleased to see that the BBC homepage passes strict HTML validation. This is good because it's proof that complete compliance and good design aren't mutually exclusive. And it gives the rest of us something to aim at.

(In this one: 645 words of: Proclaimers, children, earth worship, toonies, Downer, Rand, Radio 3, English as a second language, Gillian McKeith, and...)

Newfoundland Power has told a woman not to pin yellow ribbon to its electricity poles. Might cut into a worker's clothing and cause an electric shock, says the utility company. Anita Wheeler, who says she's supporting Canadian troops in Afghanistan, reckons that the very real risk of killing someone is worth the very marginal benefit of sticking up pieces of cloth. Can't she just tie it tightly?

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Miscellany

13February

Ten years ago, pyramid schemes threatened the government of Albania, John Fashanu was being tried in the Grobbelgaate (©WSC 1994) case, the president of Ecuador was deemed incompetent, Lennox Lewis beat Oliver McCall in strange and distressing circumstances, and after being rescued from almost certain death in the Antarctic Ocean when his yacht capsized, Tony Bullimore is dragooned into appearing on the National Lottery draw show with Dale Winton.

(The ten year old chart review - 708 words)

For the chosen track, we go back to position 32, and a pop-disco version of Sometimes when we touch. James Masterton, whose Dotmusic commentary is still to the sales chart as some claim the Week is to British game shows, reckons the Dan Hill original (from 1977, fact fiends) is the best song ever recorded. Here at The Snow in the Summer, we prefer the phrase, one of the best, but that's small beer. The song is infinitely better than the sloppy mush that comes out around this time of year, not least because it's a bit honest.

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Two Songs a Week

13February

The world's largest advertising broker cannot steal content, ruled a Belgian court to-day. G****e, the evil information behemoth, has been found guilty of breaching the copyright of seventeen Belgian newspapers, and has imposed fines of €35 million. Under the ruling, the brokery must remove copyrighted content within 24 hours of being notified by email, or face a fine of €25,000 per article per day.

Copiepresse, the francophone newspaper collective that beat the behemoth, has said that it's happy to negotiate a mutually-agreeable settlement. Never knowing when they're flogging a dead horse, G****e has entered an appeal against to-day's judgement. This decision corresponds to the Napoleonic Code right to own information, and will pertain to ongoing actions in Austria and Italy.

The court found that en reproduisant sur son site G****e News des titres d'articles et de courts extraits d'articles, Google reproduit et communique au public des oeuvres protégées par le droit d'auteur and à tort que Google estime pouvoir se prévaloir de l'accord des éditeurs de site.

The court also criticised G****e's cache of articles; Le Soir pointed out that it stuffs old news behind a paywall, but the articles are available free and for nothing through the pirates. The court ruled, la pratique de Google consistant à enregistrer dans sa mémoire dite cache des oeuvres protégées par les droits d'auteur et à permettre aux internautes d'y accéder au sein-même de la dite-mémoire représente un acte de reproduction et de communication au public".

As ever, the dunderheads on Slashdot were last with the news, fully six hours behind the ruling. In less than half an hour, the thread had been derailed by a contribution from Dave Giggler of Leuven. Incidentally, is it just us, or should the Slashdot logo have a red dot in the top-right quadrant?

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Geekery

14February

Reaction to yesterday's victory over the evil empire has been mixed. In Le Soir's blog du sel, commentator Julien said, Marre marre marre et vive google !. Greg took the opposite opinion, c’est un autre pas en avant dans le respect des droits d’auteurs! Somewhere between the two, but closer to the latter than the former, lies our opinion. But not that of many Sillycon Valley insiders.

(More: Reactions from the blogosphere. 849 words)

It's very hard to predict who will be the major losers from such a stand-off. The Belgian press will lose some web traffic, but I really don't think that this is as much of a loss to them as the Sillycon Valley-heads are making out; newspaper aggregators are still a fairly marginal product, and if someone really wants to know the news from a particular country, the Yankee-centric G****e is probably the worst place to start.

The wild-card, of course, is if the first news aggregator to agree to pay for content finds that this is a beneficial position. On their own, the Belgians won't make that; if other courts across the Napoleonic Code follow the precedent and half of Europe's papers are pulled, that would change matters entirely.

The Belgian press association, Copiepresse, has already started to target Yahoo's copyright-infringing news scraper. G****e's next target is to be more evil than Evil Edna.

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Geekery

15February

If there's one common thread in most of the songs Radio 1 failed to play, at least before the liberalisation of the Beerling and Bannister eras, it was sex. We've already spoken about George Michael, but the heyday of the ban was in the early years of Radio 1. There was a good reason not to play such dreck as Max Romeo's Wet dream and Ivor Biggun's Winker's song (Misprint), the reason being that these records were atrocious musically. But when such arguable classics as the Stones' Let's spend the night together and Donna Summer's Love to love you are completely removed from the playlist, it's clear that the BBC is not basing its judgements entirely on musical merit.

(It gets round to Je t'aime eventually - 556 words)

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Two Songs a Week

16February

(Brig, Anthologie, Tom, Irina, Vorpal, the Beef, c 818 words)

Lucy's 100 Singles from the 90s is a quality project. I'll finish off 33 and a third (the most influential albums of my life so far) and then think about the nineties.

For those who get easily bored during the Zane Lowe show, or can't stand the unfunny comedians of a Saturday night, Audioscrobbler has now put together stations that sound a bit like daytime Radio 1, daytime Radio 2, and 6music. More interestingly, it's also possible to hear the Recommendations stations, the songs that these stations should be playing. It will be interesting to see if this will influence the stations' respective playlist committees over the coming months.

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Miscellany

17February

Iain Dale reports of a plot to oust Patrick Cormack. This would be a bad idea, for Mr. Cormack has been a remarkably good constituency MP. The Snow in the Summer was brought up in the heart of South Staffordshire, and was represented by this gentleman for over a quarter of a century. Whenever we heard him, Mr. Cormack was polite, tolerant of different views, and quietly persuasive. Whenever we wrote to him, we got the impression that he was going to do whatever he could to resolve the matter, or listen to our views. Richard Burden, the current MP for this blog, may be good, but Patrick Cormack is the master at nursing a constituency. Heck, he's been in parliament for so long that the one-nation Conservatism he espouses has been fashionable, unfashionable, and is now undergoing a bit of a resurgence.

Our previous post on the swingometer crossed in the blogosphere with Anthony Wells's take on the situation. He reckons that the Conservatives aren't doing enough in the national opinion polls to win an overall majority next time out; our analysis suggests they might, just, scrape that overall majority. If we were betting people, we would be piling into No Overall Majority for UK-2010, but with a small saver on a small (20 or under) Conservative majority.

(More on how the model works, and musings on how difficult it will be to obtain a hung parliament - 1016 words)

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Psephology

18February

This year's Show That Would Like To Be is going out on E4. Launched with a tremendous hype (albeit one that we managed to completely avoid), Skins (All3Media) is a series of self-contained 45-minute comedy-dramas, centred around an ensemble cast of teens at a sixth-form college.

Make no mistake, the first episode is a perfect example of Vic's Law of Pilots. The episode ends in a textbook example of plot cliché: borrowed car, handbrake, canal. Running through the first few episodes is a particularly strong plot involving Sid (Mike Dempsey), the titular skins, and a dealer with a moustache that's wider than his face.

Skins is never rushed, yet never wastes time with anything that doesn't advance a plot. It could be, but probably isn't the next My So-Called Life; both shows had an ensemble cast, both were able to address social concerns within the confines of a drama, both managed this without forcing characters into unnatural contortions. However, there's no particular reflection of cross-generational plots - indeed, we've seen one, perhaps two, sympathetic characters older than 20. Redemption by the end of the episode is not guaranteed.

(The bottom line: it's worth the watch. - 1066 words)

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Media

18February

Three new entries into the top five in Germany, with Herbert Groenemeyer's Lied 1-stueck von himmel new at the top. DJ Ötzi returns with Ein stern at number 3, and Hoehner debuts at 5 with Wenn nicht jetzt wann dann?, the theme to the recent handball world cup. Actually, why hasn't Ötzi gone in for Eurovision yet? He couldn't do worse than anything else Germany sends... Four of the top seven are German-language hits, and we reckon five of the top 9 are native hitsters. Basshunter's climb continues, moving up to number 12.

A remarkable French chart, with ten of the top 20 holding position, including Fais la poule, which makes The chicken song song like the height of songwriting. Two new entries into the Finnish top 5, from Danny and Magnus Backlund. Anyone would think that records that don't even get into the national Eurovision final wouldn't be hits. Nelly Furtado hits the top in Flanders, and holds the top in Estonia and Latvia, and number 2 in Lithuania. This week's Finnish number one is Summer wine by Ville Valo and Natalia Avelon.

 20 NE Tokio Hotel - Ubers ende die welt
 19 NE Herbert Gronemeyer - Lied 1.
 18 13 U2 - Window in the skies
 17 15 Holly Dolly - Dolly song
 16 19 Fatal Bazooka - Fous ta cagoule
 15 16 Cascada - Truly madly deeply
 14 12 Snow Patrol - Chasing cars
 13 10 Cascada - Everytime we touch
 12 NE Ville Valo and Natalia Avelon - Summer wine
 11  8 Akon - Smack that
 10 11 Red Hot Chili Peppers - Snow
  9  9 Jojo - Too little too late
  8 17 Sunrise Avenue - Fairytale gone bad
  7  6 Clitring Aguilera - Hurt
  6  7 View - Same jeans
  5  5 Just Jack - Stars in their eyes
  4  3 Eric Prydz - Proper education
  3  4 Fray - How to save a life
  2  2 Mika - Grace Kelly
  1  1 Nelly Furtado - All good things

Charts

18February

The annual ROPRA awards bash this week. We have no idea if Jamie Theakston's prediction - Huey Lewis and the News as best band, Cyndi Lauper as best solo artist, and Who Let the Dogs Out as best single - came true, for we really can't be bothered watching, never mind re-capping. Thankfully, No Rock 'n' Roll Fun saved us the bother of doing both, and we thank them for it.

We can report that the paint on our staircase bannister does dry between 8 and 10pm of a Wednesday night.

Five new entries into this week's top 40, though just one record is in its first week on release. It really does feel like the charts have regressed to the 1980s, when new entries in the top 10 were rare.

Mika holds off Boys Aloud for the top spot, with Akron displacing Just Jack form the top three. Beneath that, there's a huge amount of fall-out from Wednesday's ROPRA awards. As we've mentioned, we found something far more interesting to watch, so have had to rely on some second-hand reports. Take That was victorious in the Best Way For The Grate British Public To Annoy Robbie Williams; their old single Patience rebounds to 10, and follow-up Shine continues its climb at 11. Second two-in-a-row of the year so far, Quirks. Snore Patrol won the Most Overplayed Pile Of Soppy Gobshite, and Chasing cars is back up at number 12. Amy Whinehouse, fresh from her victory in the hotly-contested Best British Screwup category, moves back up twenty-seven places to 22.

Gossip's Standing in the way of control moves up 10 places into the top 20, following use in the E4 drama Skins. O'Marion, the Irish member of bore-band B2K, scoots up to 19, even though there's no release date. Snore Patrol are back at 26 with Open your eyes, a new song that tries to be the logical follow-up to Chocolate. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have re-released their one song again, and it's this week's new entry at 27.

Lily Allen was overlooked completely at the ROPRAs, even defeated in the uncompetitive Most Loudmouth Daughter Of A Famous Father by Peaches Geldof. Lily's new song, Alfie, owes more than a passing nod to Puppet on a string. Razorlight also take advantage of the lack of releases to move back into the 40. Feeling have their fourth top 40 hit with Rosé, a soft ballad. The Fratellis might claim a ROPRA effect, apparently they won Best Italian-Sounding Act, but Chelsea dagger has been hovering just outside the top 40 for a couple of weeks. Not sure why.

Beneath the top 40 are misses for Dutch band Chipz (44), best described as the new Steps, and the Towers of London (46). Between them is Simon Webbe, up 25 to 45. +44 are in at 47, Stacey Ferguson at 56. Emma Bunton had a full release of All I need to know, and it only makes number 60 - we think this is the worst solo Spice performance ever. Killers make it in at 62 a week before release, Junior Jack's Stupidisco re-enters at 64. Old songs from the Killers and Boys Aloud re-enter in the bottom two places, and it was very close for them to top and tail the top 75.

Mika holds on at the top of the album chart, but ROPRA winners Amy Windbag, Snore Patrol, and That Take climb back into the top 5. Phil Collins has a collection of love songs in at 7, Van Morrison a collection of soundtrack songs at 17. There are the usual climbs for ROPRA winners - the Killers won Most Religiously Obsessives (30-13), Oasis the Just Split Up Already Award (29-20), and the Peppers won the coveted Spinning Out One Rather Poor Song To A Whole Double Album (60-33). The only new entry lower down comes from Jessica Simpsering at 65.

 1  1 Mika - Grace Kelly
 4  3 Just Jack - Stars in their eyes
 7  6 Fray - How to save a life (12MAR)
 9  7 Jojo - Too little too late
13  8 View - Same jeans
15 13 Kelis - Little star
17 27 Gossip - Standing in the way of control
21 11 Bloc Party - The prayer
26 56 Snore Patrol - Open your eyes
29 44 Lily Allen - Alfie
34 41 Razorlight - America
38 73 Feeling - Rosé
39 47 Fratellis - Chelsea dagger
41 43 Fratellis - Whistle for the choir
47 NE +44 - When your heart stops beating
48 30 My Chemical Romance - Famous last words
50 38 Nelly Furtado - All good things
62 NE Killers - Read my mind
64 re Junior Jack - Stupidisco
74 re Killers - When you were young
75 re Boys Aloud - I predict a riot

Charts

18February

This week, we've been watching...

* MI-High (CBBC) No animals were harmed etc etc.
* Blue Peter (BBC1), where the new competition is to design a new Bash Street Kid. Er, no.
* Never Mind the Full Stops (BBC4) Less dull than the ROPRA awards. Slightly.
* Supermarket Sweep (ITV) Less dull than Full Stops.
* Marcus Buerkmann's Trophy People (BBC4) Making the Scrabble championships interesting, without using the night on the tiles pun.

... and listening to...

* Flying feathers, a CBC mini-documentary telling the story of the official pillow-fighting league. (Podcast link, 7MB, expires 20 Feb.)
* Classic Scottish Albums (R Scotland) Aztec Camera and the Blue Nile; latter episode via Listen Again until 21 Feb.
* Ed Doolan Talks With Nicholas Parsons (BBC7) more entertaining than illuminating; via Listen Again until 18 Feb.
* When You're Feeling Like Expressing Your Affection (Radio 3) a setting of Auden's poems and music. An hour was too much. LA until 25 Feb.

Perfect Strangers gets the Week's review this week, but has to defer lead position to the Junior Mastermind final.

Media

18February

A referendum in Portugal on abortion has ended with a non-binding majority. Only 40% of voters cast a ballot; of these, 59% said, yes, they would allow termination in the first ten weeks of pregnancy. The nation's prime minister, Jose Socrates, said that he would introduce a bill to this effect in the nation's parliament.

North Korea has agreed to take steps towards nuclear disarmament, following six-party talks in Peking. The socialist state will close its Yongbyon reactor within 60 days, in exchange for 50,000 tonnes of fuel aid, the first payment in a million-tonne ransom.

The Canadian parliament has set binding rules to meet its Kyoto targets. It's a defeat for the Conservative government, which sees carbon dioxide reduction as a fool's errand.

Moral panic of the week centred around a spate of shootings in south London, apparently related to a turf war by drugs gangs. No-one has picked up on the truism that if one makes the posession of guns a criminal offence, then only criminals will have guns. Or that the drugs barons only operate because of society's prohibitions against some drugs.

Obituary: Mike Oborski, former mayor of Kidderminster and leading member of the Liberal Party.

News

18February

A typical week, perhaps less showery activity than we had expected, and one particularly cold night. The dominant feature was a growing area of high pressure over Scandinavia, pushing such Atlantic storms as there were to the south.

12 Mo showers, sun late  6/ 8, 4.5
13 Tu cloud, rain pm     5/ 7, 1.0
14 We sun                6/ 9, 1.5
15 Th sunny spells       0/11
16 Fr rain               6/ 7, 6.0
17 Sa sun                4/ 8
18 Su sun                3/ 9

Rainfall in February: 45mm; Monthly average: 54mm.
Degree heating days: 381½
2005-6: 547½/808
2004-5: 443½/677½.

Weather