From The Associated Press
CARACAS, Venezuela (April 8) - D'oh! A Venezuelan TV channel has yanked "The Simpsons" off the air because it may be inappropriate for children. Taking its place: "Baywatch Hawaii."
Televen TV station spokeswoman Elba Guillen said Monday that the decision to hand over the daily 11 a.m. time slot came after the National Telecommunications Commission received complaints from viewers.
"It had to be taken off," Guillen said. "They consider it to be a series that isn't appropriate for that time because it isn't appropriate for children."
The regulatory agency didn't specify which elements of the program were deemed offensive, but said showing the animated cartoon series at that hour could violate national regulations prohibiting "messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents."
Guillen said it is up to Televen's management whether "The Simpsons" may be shown at another time of day.
"Baywatch," which features bikini-clad bombshells and musclebound hunks working as lifeguards on the Hawaiian coast, has been running in the 11 a.m. slot since Friday.
The station has not received any complaints about that show, General Manager German Perez Nahim told the Venezuelan newspaper Ultimas Noticias in its Friday editions. Perez was out of the office Monday and could not be reached for comment.
"We are hoping it will continue to have a good rating, because 'The Simpsons' worked very well - so much so that it had the highest levels of viewership for that morning timetable in the history of the channel," Perez said.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
NEW DARK FUNERAL ON DECK.
Ave everyone!
I guess it's about time to let you guys know what's going on here. Well, we are currently working on material for a new full-length album. We're in the very early stages of the writing process though.
There's still a lot of work before we're ready to hit the studio, but we're on the right course at least!
Plan is, however, to be ready to record a new album sometime during 2008, with a possible early 2009 release (but it all depends on when we're ready to record and so on, of course). We will keep you posted on the writing progress and what kind of time plan we'll put up for the new album.
We have also renewed our contract with Regain Records. So we will be releasing the next album through them too.
In the meantime, and during the wait for our new studio album, I'd suggest that you check out two killer DVDs that we have released, "Attera Orbis Terrarum" parts 1 & 2 (part two will be released on May 22). A trailer for the up-coming DVD will soon be posted on the band..s MySpace website and YouTube channel.
Also, keep your eyes open for the date when we'll launch our webstore "DIABOLISWEAR!"....
/
Lord Ahriman & Dark Funeral
www.darkfuneral.se
www.diaboliswear.com (official webstore - open soon!)
www.myspace.com/darkfuneral
www.youtube.com/darkfuneral
www.reverbnation.com/darkfunera
---SVENSKA---
Dags för lite nyheter. Vi har just påbörjat skrivandet till ett nytt album. Vi är än så länge bara i startgroparna, så just nu är det alldeles för tidigt att ge er mer ingående info än så. Vi har i alla fall ställt in siktet på att spela in ett nytt album under 2008, med en förhoppningsvis tidig 2009 release. Vi kommer att hålla er uppdaterade under tiden vi arbetar på det nya albumet, var och när vi bokar studiotid osv.
Vi har just förnyat vårt kontrakt med Regain Records. Så nästa platta kommer genom dem.
Medan ni väntar på ett nytt album från oss föreslår vi att ni kollar in de 2 dubbel DVD..s vi släppt "Attera Orbis Terrarum" del 1 & 2 (del 2 släpps den 22 Maj). Del 1 innehåller 3 spelningar från vår senaste Europaturne. Del 2 innerhåller material vi spelade in under vår senaste Sydamerika turné så förbered er på en förkrossande grym DVD! Båda DVDérna innehåller även en hel del bonusmaterial i form av amatörklipp inspelade under årens gång.
De går att beställa från tex www.bengans.se, www.discshop.se & www.ginza.se
Vi kommer även inom kort att öppna vår webbutik "DIABOLISWEAR" så håll även utkik efter ett datum för denna stora händelse.
/
Lord Ahriman & Dark Funeral
www.darkfuneral.se
www.diaboliswear.com (official webstore - open soon!)
www.myspace.com/darkfuneral
www.youtube.com/darkfuneral
www.reverbnation.com/darkfunera
NICE, BUT IT'LL COST YA.
From Engadget
Internet connections in the United States lag behind much of the developed world, but it looks like things are finally starting to improve. Comcast is launching DOCSIS 3.0, the next-generation of broadband technology, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
This new modem connection technology promises speeds up to 160 megabytes per second (Mbps) -- 50 times faster than current broadband speeds, which average around megabytes per second. This means you can download a full-length HD film in four minutes. Yes, that's minutes, not hours.
Of course, access to these kinds of speeds doesn't come cheap. Consumers are going to have to shell out around $150 each month for the top-tier access. All Comcast users will see speed upgrades, even if they don't decide to go with the extreme broadband (or "wideband") connection.
It's great to see faster Internet connections finally coming to the U.S. Comcast is rolling out these high-speed connections to the Twin Cities first, and Engadget reports that much of the rest of the country can expect wideband as early as 2009.
------------------------------------------
American readers, you may not be aware of this, but your Internet is -- to put it lightly -- sub-par. Compared to the rest of the developed world, broadband access in America is not only slow, but also more expensive.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) performed a study of broadband speeds in the United States and other developed countries. Its findings? Turns out America is way behind in the broadband race. The average download and upload speeds in the U.S. are two megabits per second and 371 kilobits per second, respectively. At that speed, a feature length film takes about an hour and a half to download.
Those speeds compare pretty poorly to average downloads of 61 megabits per second in Japan, 45 in South Korea, 18 in Sweden and 17 in France. Even Canada averages seven megabits per second.
Meanwhile, the World Bank released a study that makes these speed numbers even more depressing. Turns out Americans pay more for their lackluster broadband service than other countries. South Korea spends $0.08 per 100 kilobits of bandwidth, and Japan $0.07. The U.S.? A whopping $0.49 per 100 kilobits a second, slightly higher than the per-kilobit price in France.
Well, at least our gas is cheaper.
From www.switched.com
Internet connections in the United States lag behind much of the developed world, but it looks like things are finally starting to improve. Comcast is launching DOCSIS 3.0, the next-generation of broadband technology, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
This new modem connection technology promises speeds up to 160 megabytes per second (Mbps) -- 50 times faster than current broadband speeds, which average around megabytes per second. This means you can download a full-length HD film in four minutes. Yes, that's minutes, not hours.
Of course, access to these kinds of speeds doesn't come cheap. Consumers are going to have to shell out around $150 each month for the top-tier access. All Comcast users will see speed upgrades, even if they don't decide to go with the extreme broadband (or "wideband") connection.
It's great to see faster Internet connections finally coming to the U.S. Comcast is rolling out these high-speed connections to the Twin Cities first, and Engadget reports that much of the rest of the country can expect wideband as early as 2009.
------------------------------------------
American readers, you may not be aware of this, but your Internet is -- to put it lightly -- sub-par. Compared to the rest of the developed world, broadband access in America is not only slow, but also more expensive.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) performed a study of broadband speeds in the United States and other developed countries. Its findings? Turns out America is way behind in the broadband race. The average download and upload speeds in the U.S. are two megabits per second and 371 kilobits per second, respectively. At that speed, a feature length film takes about an hour and a half to download.
Those speeds compare pretty poorly to average downloads of 61 megabits per second in Japan, 45 in South Korea, 18 in Sweden and 17 in France. Even Canada averages seven megabits per second.
Meanwhile, the World Bank released a study that makes these speed numbers even more depressing. Turns out Americans pay more for their lackluster broadband service than other countries. South Korea spends $0.08 per 100 kilobits of bandwidth, and Japan $0.07. The U.S.? A whopping $0.49 per 100 kilobits a second, slightly higher than the per-kilobit price in France.
Well, at least our gas is cheaper.
From www.switched.com
Friday, April 4, 2008
ONLY 81 PERCENT? THAT'S ALMOST TOO GENEROUS!
From The Associated Press
NEW YORK (April 4) - More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.
The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.
The survey comes as housing turmoil has rocked Wall Street amid an economic downturn. The economy has surpassed the war in Iraq as the dominating issue of the U.S. presidential race, and there is now nearly a national consensus that the United States faces significant problems, the poll found.
A majority of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school say the United States is headed in the wrong direction, according to the survey, which was published on The New York Times' Web site.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was doing better.
The newspaper said Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the poll's inception in the early 1990s. Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992. Two in three people said they believed the economy was already in recession.
Still, the approval rating of President George W. Bush did not change since last summer, with 28 percent of respondents saying they approved of the job he was doing.
The poll also found that Americans blame government officials for the housing crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
Americans favored help for people but not for financial institutions in assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
NEW YORK (April 4) - More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.
The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.
The survey comes as housing turmoil has rocked Wall Street amid an economic downturn. The economy has surpassed the war in Iraq as the dominating issue of the U.S. presidential race, and there is now nearly a national consensus that the United States faces significant problems, the poll found.
A majority of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school say the United States is headed in the wrong direction, according to the survey, which was published on The New York Times' Web site.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was doing better.
The newspaper said Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the poll's inception in the early 1990s. Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992. Two in three people said they believed the economy was already in recession.
Still, the approval rating of President George W. Bush did not change since last summer, with 28 percent of respondents saying they approved of the job he was doing.
The poll also found that Americans blame government officials for the housing crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
Americans favored help for people but not for financial institutions in assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
OH I'M SURE SOME PEOPLE WILL BE TREMBLING WITH FEAR...
From The Associated Press
VATICAN CITY - Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.
-----------------
And so what? I can't sympathize with any of them. The more followers any of them have, the more they want to assert themselves on the world stage. It's totally irrelevant that Western media says Islam is bad and Islamic media says Judeo-Christianity is bad. Submission to any collections of fairy tales is bad, who cares what you call it or what your superiors say about the classic "us is good, not us is bad!" argument that every society teaches its rabble!
VATICAN CITY - Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.
"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook.
He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population — a stable percentage — while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.
"It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer," the monsignor said.Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.
When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.
Spokesmen for the Vatican and the United Nations did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Sunday.-----------------
And so what? I can't sympathize with any of them. The more followers any of them have, the more they want to assert themselves on the world stage. It's totally irrelevant that Western media says Islam is bad and Islamic media says Judeo-Christianity is bad. Submission to any collections of fairy tales is bad, who cares what you call it or what your superiors say about the classic "us is good, not us is bad!" argument that every society teaches its rabble!
FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ARCKANUM – FRAN MARDER, KOSTOGHER, AND KAMPEN
They’re out again, they’re out again! Oh man, this is a great moment in history indeed! See, long ago, before the landslide of mediocre black metal that never quite stopped rolling downhill took charge, there was a one-man project called Arckanum shrouded in mystery and full of references to things we couldn’t quite make out. Who was he? What was he? Are those illegible song titles on the back of the CDs pagan or Tolkien-ish or what? At that time you couldn’t put a disc into a computer and be almost guaranteed the song titles would appear on whatever media player you were using, so you just listened and like what you heard and were clueless, but it was fine. It was fun. It was so long ago, I’d love to go back to the era and just stay there! The labels were much fewer and the music was so difficult to come by that you had to order almost everything from a specialty mail order distro, very few of which had even the crudest of websites! I’ve always wondered if these three albums were supposed to be a trilogy and I still can’t get a straight answer anywhere, but to tell you the truth, that’s perfectly fine. Even more mystique added to these groundbreaking releases, why complain? The many guest appearances on the first album, the intentional low-fi recording of the second, and the long insanity of the third make this “trilogy” etched into memory forever! Turns out Shamaatae is a believer is Chaos-Gnosticism, a very fascinating field to study, indeed. It’s too damn bad original label Necropolis Records bit off more than they could chew and went under so ungracefully while leaving a bad reputation behind (their website is now completely toast and no longer says “WE SHALL RETURN!” or whatever the hell it said for years). Here’s hoping that many more of their catalog releases find good homes on Full Moon or any other caring, responsible labels for the world to enjoy. Some of them are such gems that words alone cannot describe their worth. And the Arckanum CDs are at the top of that list. Watch for their new album on Debemur Morti (website info in Animus Mortis review below) previewed by a 7” EP featuring one new track and one Holy Moses cover. Seriously, a Holy Moses cover? Too cool! (FA)
FULL MOON PRODUCTIONS
www.fmp666.com, general@fmp666.com, www.arckanum.se, info@arckanum.se, www.mypsace.com/officalarckanummyspace
WEIVER SITROM SUNMINA
ANIMUS MORTIS – ATRABILIS (RESIDUES FROM VERB AND FLESH)
Some labels release too much, too often. Why is this any sort of issue, you ask? Well why is it a benefit, I ask? You can blindly release crap just for the sake of releasing crap with no motivation other than to amass releases all you want, but there’s no way I can help but find it disreputable and downright trying. Labels of this nature won’t be named, but they’re out there, and they know who they are. Heck, I’d swear some of them aren’t even shy about it! Luckily Debemur Morti seems to really have their act together and thus have a knack for only releasing more obscure bands and very few at that, all the while making sure that their material is exceptional. It’s quite a cesspool out there in black metal land these days for a number of reasons, and if they need to be explained, then you just must not be paying attention. Enter Animus Mortis from Chile, a nation while not as well known as other for its black metal “scene” (ugh, that word!) has definitely produced killer acts over the years. Moody, dark, and fine tuned with stellar production and a mix of speeds (leaning mostly toward mid-paced), Animus Mortis have what it takes to make skins crawl and stomachs churn. Any fanciness must have never even been a consideration. Just look at that simple yet wicked album cover. Eight tracks, none over five minutes, and all as addictive as that choking game that strikes fear into the heart of parents. Hey kids, wanna really rebel against society and get into black metal? Play the choking game and listen to this. That’ll teach everybody to not pay enough attention to you! (FA)
DEBEMUR MORTI PRODUCTIONS
www.debemur-mortil.com, void@debemur-morti.com, www.myspace.com/animusmortis
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