Monthly Archives: September 2007

A Somerset Church has banned the use of their hall for a children’s yoga class because, apparently, children pretending to be animals while nursery rhymes are played is not in keeping with their “Christian Ethos”.

I think it’s both a hilarious and brilliant decision – by having the kids romp around in a church hall they’d only become comfortable with the environment and be more accepting of the brainwashing that goes on in the premises. Hopefully the lady trying to organise the classes can find a more neutral, forward thinking venue – one that’s safer for the mental health of the children.

“A life-sized statue of Wallace and Gromit is to be built in Preston, Lancashire – the home city of their creator Nick Park.”

We go past Preston on our trips to and from Scotland, but we’ve never had a reason to stop there. For me, a Wallace and Gromit statue is a pretty compelling reason to break up that journey. 😀

It turns out I’m not just getting old – according to this Times article, music really is louder these days.

For ages now I’ve been using MP3Gain to normalise my tracks after I rip them onto the computer, just to take the edge off of them. Initially I was surprised at the number of albums that crept up over 100 decibels, when the target level for comfortable listening is closer to 89 decibels, but now I realise it’s fairly common practice.

I even had to drop using the OGG format due to the sound spikes, because I couldn’t normalise them along with my collection of MP3’s. It was easier to re-rip my OGG stuff in MP3 than to suffer the assault I’d get on the ear drums when my music player went from a quiet MP3 to a much louder OGG while I was at the gym.

Thinking back over the last few years of buying albums, they really have been getting flatter & louder – proved by the lack of volume spikes when I rip an old CD as opposed to a modern one. I guess that’s why I thought that first Arctic Monkeys album was a noisy pile of crap that hurt my ears, when the rest of the world seemed to be fawning over them.