You know those full body scanners in airports that peek under your clothes? Well they now are in the street too, perving at you and your car/van/truck and indeed passing school bus for those security personnel of a Pedobear persuasion…and the AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van™ (ZBV) are seemingly sold to anyone, not just government, who in the US and foreign government agencies have bought 500 already.

Really next time I go to the airport – and it’s gonna be a big if, or where I choose to fly from, I’m requesting a pat down, and won’t go through one of those machines…and you know Little Brother/TV detector/X-Files style not to trust those big white vans passing by the neighbourhood unmarked with people with laptops at the front…Me paranoid? Well when it comes to any force wanting to see me naked because ‘you iz a terrist’, I get very paranoid. And very worried for the state of the world today…not that I think I will appear in some gay porn full body scan site, no fear of that!

Really although there is a few journeys I want to make that will include flying, over the last year or two I’ve flown far less than I used to (Ethiopia/South Africa in November was the last time, and you can’t get there overland and it takes a month by sea!) this is intentional as every time the security protocols get more and more draconian and puts me off flying entirely. I don’t think I am alone in this – which is strange the airports and carrier companies are putting up with it in this recession. The short hops we and I used to do over to the continent aren’t worth all this hassle and stress. I wish Eurostar wasn’t so hella expensive, otherwise I’d take that route. Far more preferable, although they are starting to go the scanner route too.

Via Jez CMP.

Finally created a downloadable/iPod version* for my Warm Heart of Africa video/remix. Download, enjoy etc.

*it’s .m4v which is basically a .mp4 with Apple’s wanky new suffix added. Dunno why they do this, but if you have probs try renaming it with the .mp4 suffix. A decent player such as VLC should play it, and Quicktime if you must

I love this song (incidentally it features Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend) one of my faves from 2009 but it didn’t have that boom – or any boom at all. None of the mixes had a really deep beat or dance production, so here’s my first ever solo remix as fingertrouble, I took the Theophilus London mix and added some beats and stuff. It’s a hybrid of remix and mash, with some crafty loopage from various parts but the african kwaito-inspired beat and teh boom is mine.

Also the original song doesn’t have an official video, so here’s a video I’ve made and shot in Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa) a few weeks ago. Also includes some video of the bonkers Sir Victor Uwaifo performing Guitar Boy – which where The Very Best got that great guitar sample from!

Hope you like it – it was originally part of the Take Me Back To Africa video podcast but I’ve remixed the video too.

Download it here (320kbs MP3)

EDIT: Finally created a downloadable/iPod version* for my Warm Heart of Africa video/remix. Download, enjoy etc.

Finally have this on MutantPopTV – for the moment because of Vimeo’s current oddness and slowly uploading to other places this is the only place you can see it in full as one file. Crazy but true.

If you encounter jerkiness then it might be best to let it load for a bit and buffer…it’s not a small file and my server’s hamsters sometimes get tired. Also running stuff or downloading in the background can slow down Flash video, as it tends to be more CPU intensive that other sorts of video – there don’t let anyone tell you I’m not informative…

Remember you can share it by the little menu in the corner, but keep a mind for my poor bandwidth will you? I hope to have a full length video on Vimeo or Viddler or something soon, but who knows?

This is the long-delayed video part of RC: 183 – I really really didn’t want to post it as two parts and will post a hopefully higher quality single version as soon as it converts/uploads and Vimeo stops being shit (I may have a long wait).

I could list a long list of how this has been a nightmare,from broken lights and scrambles to get the only worklight in christendom in the fun environs of Leyton, from Adobe Media Encoder taking 7 hours to create an empty file and the scrabble to get anything out Premiere and it’s usual crashes, frequent crashes and comepletely wrong estimated sizes of QuickTime Pro conversions, and now Vimeo is flaking out with it’s conversions stopping at 4% even with a Plus account. I think this’ll be the first and last video podcast, at least til I have money to get new non-shit hardware and software (6 months-1 year+). Sorry but this doesn’t pay costs loads and I haz no money. *shrugs*

Also that means no iPod downloadable version, don’t have the server space without this server falling over, unless someone wants to donate me the money to upgrade libsyn so it can store a 400-500Mb video, it aint gonna happen. And given it’s taken days of QT crashes to get this far I doubt we’d get there anyway.

Anyway I hope you enjoy it, it’s taken FAR too long.

RC 183: Take Me Back To Africa – video podcast Part 1! from Tim Baker on Vimeo.

Part two:

RC 183: Take Me Back to Africa Part 2 from Tim Baker on Vimeo.

Also now over as one file at MutantPopTV: