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Screaming Trees’ Gary Lee Conner Calls Mark Lanegan’s Memoir ‘Vicious and Petty’
Mark Lanegan published his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep last month, and to put it bluntly, it’s been pissing people off. Aside from reigniting a 24-year-old feud with Oasis’ Liam Gallagher, the former Screaming Trees frontman also took some swings at his old bandmates. Earlier this week, the band’s guitarist Gary Lee Conner expressed his thoughts about the book in a lengthy Facebook post. After admitting that the band didn’t “get along like friends and sometimes it felt like we were enemies,” Conner couldn’t deny their musical chemistry. “Mark took the songs Van and I wrote and helped elevate them lyrically and vocally to a higher level,” he wrote. However, while he’s able to take the higher road, Conner was disappointed with Lanegan’s recount of his time in Screaming Trees — a...
Life under lockdown
Kia – who prides herself on discipline – examines the effects of coronavirus on her state of mind Yesterday, I promised myself I would close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. The working hours of my week had taken on a strange, flat quality: a shallowness, like kicking my fins and striking sand. I found myself flitting from one task to another, breaking off midway to check the news, check Twitter, check one tracker and then another. In this manner, I found myself passing hours followed by yet more hours, which is why I promised to close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. Four hours later, I was still on my screen, scrolling, clicking, linking, sinking. It’s taken me six days to muster the discipline to write this post. It pains me to say that because I pride myself on discipline; on grit; on le...
How much does it cost to climb the seven summits?
Our resident mountaineer and would-be seven summiteer crunches the numbers on how much it will cost to climb the seven summits How much does it cost to climb the seven summits? About $180,000 USD give or take $10k. Climbers could significantly reduce costs by foregoing luxuries, cutting corners and taking (even more) risks to get that figure below $100,000, but I do not recommend this and certainly won’t be taking such unnecessary risks. I arrived at the above figure by looking at five established international mountain guiding companies based in the USA, UK and New Zealand. I compiled their prices for climbing all the seven summits (using the same routes where possible) and calculated the average: $162,139. There are then the costs of airfares and equipment to factor in. Flights, of cours...
7 ways nature is flourishing under lockdown
The current pandemic has had a devastating effect worldwide but there are some glimmers of light Human impact on wildlife is almost certainly to blame for the spread of Covid-19, say scientists. The virus is thought to have originated in bats with other wild animals such as pangolins also likely playing a role in its transmission to people. Humankind’s relentless incursion into areas of nature that should be off-limits puts the world at an increased risk of new diseases, say scientists from the Royal Society. In a perfect world, wild animals such as bats and pangolins would never come into contact with humans. Due to hunting, trade and habitat loss, however, the natural boundaries between humans and animals have blurred. One positive is that during lockdown, road traffic has decreased, fos...
BMF’s Big Meech Seeks Early Release Due To COVID-19, Southwest T Already Out
Source: John Ricard / Getty The Coronavirus Pandemic has been a boon for people serving jail sentences to seek an early release out of concerns of contracting COVID-19. The latest inmates seeking and gaining release, with dropping dime a la Tekashi 6ix9ine, are infamous Black Mafia Family (BMF) kingpins Terry “Southwest T” Flenory and Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory. According to the Detroit News, Southwest T left custody on Tuesday (May 5) while his brother Big Meech remains incarcerated. But he wants out early due to COVID-19 running rampant through the federal prison system. Southwest T was reportedly in charge of the West Coast operation of the family drug dealing organization that’s said to have brought in at least $270 million. The 50-year-old was due to be released from a Kentucky pri...
Map projections of the world: which one is the best?
We explore the most common map projections of the world, how they work and which one is the best Kia is usually described as the geek in our relationship. She’s the one with a computer science degree, she’s the one with the editor’s eye and she’s the Star Trek fan who describes herself as Seven of Nine… which is cool apparently? A friend of hers recently described her as “the one who puts the apostrophe in rock ‘n’ roll”. That said, I have a few streaks of geek in me too. I’m a bit of a history nerd and can talk at great length about photography lenses and filters. But above all, I love maps. One day, perhaps when we win the lottery and can afford a house with more than one bedroom, I will have a cartography room dedicated to my scores of Ordnance Survey maps, my collection of outdated cla...
Happiest countries in the world 2020
The happiest countries in the world 2020 have been ranked in the latest World Happiness Report. For the third year running, Finland holds on to top spot Happiness is a nebulous thing; hard to grasp and harder to hold onto. Scientists, economists and philosophers have defined it through the ages as a combination of different things, among them health, wealth, companionship and security. Various indices attempt to rank the happiest countries in the world on an annual basis. The World Happiness Report from the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) is particularly interesting as it ranks 153 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. The SDSN employs an international group of economists, neuroscientists and statisticians to survey citizens on their subject...
The travel that changed me: Jini Reddy
From trekking in Nepal to exploring Iran and Pakistan, author Jini Reddy regales us with tales of the travel that changed her If ever there were an international woman of mystery, she’d likely be a lot like Jini Reddy. A British author and journalist, Reddy has lived in London, Montreal, Hong Kong, Provence and Tbilisi. She has travelled to the Kalash Valleys in Pakistan under armed guard, completed the Annapurna Circuit on a whim and bedded down in a men’s hostel in the daunting city of Delhi. As an author, Reddy has won a British Guild of Travel Writers Awards for her debut Wild Times and was recently named one of National Geographic’s Women of Impact. In her new book, Wanderland, Reddy combines nature writing, personal reflection and memoir to chart her search for the magica...
Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder, Dies at 73
Florian Schneider, the co-founder of German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, has died, SPIN has confirmed. He was 73. “Kraftwerk co-founder and electro pioneer Ralf Alf Hütter has sent us the very sad news that his friend and companion over many decades Florian Schneider has passed away from a short cancer disease just a few days after his 73rd birthday,” a band rep said in a statement. In 1970, Schneider formed Kraftwerk with Ralf Hütter after first meeting at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid, then at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf. From then until his 2008 departure, the group was widely praised for their futuristic keyboard-based sound or in their own words, “robot-pop.” Kraftwerk were set to embark on a North American tour this summer to celebrate their 50th anniversa...
