February 27th:
Dear all, sorry about the unexpected gap last week (when our computer Dell Boy was at the doctor’s), but the good news is that A) we’re back again this week and raring to go and B) I’ve put the time to good use by completing this year’s April Fool’s Day article ahead of schedule. You should get your entrance tickets in about a month’s time (heh heh heh there’s a cryptic introduction for you...)
While we’ve been away a number of things have happened. On the website front we’ve now rattled past 47,000 where we left you hanging last time and have now passed 50,000. Woo-hooh! We’ve done particularly well in Sweden the last fortnight (near enough 500 hits) which is now 4th in the ‘countries most addicted to AAA music’ list! I’m not sure if it’s a whole lot of you suddenly tuning in at once or one of you reading one heck of a lot of articles but either way, thankyou very much for reading and we’re very pleased to make your acquaintance! That goes for all you old fans too by the way! We also had another record day last Wednesday when 971 people all logged in within 24 hours would you believe (some major official websites with a proper budget and everything don’t get that, so we’re particularly thrilled!) For some reason Wings’ ‘Venus and Mars’ album seems to have really taken off and now sits at top of the ‘most viewed articles’ column – we really can’t anticipate what will be popular in advance (that review’s been sitting on 16 views for some time now and was written over four years ago!!) Hello to all the new viewers we made that day too!
In other news, hurrah to Cait Reilly, the Geology graduate who took the Government to court over their illegal ‘workfare’ scheme and had her claim upheld on appeal! Forget all the negative things the papers have been saying about people not wanting to work – she was already doing her town a great service with her unpaid volunteer work and quite rightly thought being forced to do unpaid work at a shop that could have been employing people and giving them wages at the risk of losing her benefits and any income she needed to live off amounted to slavery. We’ve been saying for sometime now that workfare broke the law as it stood in the UK and indeed breached every European Rights charter you can think of, so its wonderful news that a judge had the guts to stand up to Cameron and his cronies to disagree, whatever our ill-informed papers seemed to think. And yes, it is slavery not laziness: I’m all for work experience when its paid and there’s a possibility of a job at the end of it, but interrupting someone’s career opportunity for a company that never have any intention of hiring you and is trying to make some free money on the side by hiring unpaid staff is ridiculous. The idea of voluntary work is also that it is, well, voluntary – mandatory work experience positions like this one, where you have no choice if you want enough money to live, are so obviously illegal head of welfare Duncan Smiths’ defence shouldn’t have had a chance of standing up the first time this mess made its way to court. Hopefully this Government will lose every welfare battle they fight now, even with Duncan Smith trying to close up the gap in the law as we speak but, heck, that’s still an outright moral victory to us – and any Government that has to change the law when one of its subjects wins a court case against them clearly has something nasty to hide...We repeat, well done Cait Reilly, far from being ‘an example of everything wrong with this generation’ as the Torygraph said the other day (hopefully they’ll be forced to print another huge apology after their big cgaffe on chronic fatigue a month back) she really is our modern-day Rosa Parks, someone who stood up to a big monster and said ‘no!’ Here’s a far more eloquent discussion on the same topic dealing with all of I ‘Dunce’ S’ mis-truths: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/ian-duncan-smith-workfare-propaganda.html. Incidentally, a big boo! To the Poundland shop in London who decided to take down and sell a mural by leading artist Banksy showing a poverty stricken child creating bunting for the Queen’s jubilee weekend, although the adverse publicity they gained as a result is probably making them wish they hadn’t bothered...
As ever, please click on this link for this week’s ‘other’ news stories from lots of AAA bands (well, hopefully, we had a piffling two last week I noticed and one of those wasn’t anything to do with music...)
http://paper.li/f-1347835090
No comments:
Post a Comment