Ozzy Osbourne apologises for pissing on the Alamo

Perhaps the most creative thing Ozzy has ever done in his career advertising butter substitutes and staggering around a house in perpetual confusion like some sort of highly-drugged performing bear is pissing on the Alamo.

Now, he's said sorry for doing that. Although he's not doing it through contrition, but to help promote a godawful history programme he's doing for The History Channel:

Osbourne told 'The Pulse of Radio' "Anything past World War II, I'm clueless. I'm kind of up on World War II 'cause I was born a couple of years after. So I know quite a lot about World War II and Hitler and the Nazis and all that."

"But anything from before or after I don't know anything about. So we're going to Mount Rushmore, we're going to the abandoned silos where you guys, America used to have their Minutemen missiles and all that. It's quite educational for me, actually."

This is bollocksy stuff - you don't really need to understand the history of a national monument to decide not to piss all over it. Museums and visitor attractions, it's fairly safe to assume, aren't really set up on a dual mission - there's no sign outside Mesa Verde saying "understand the Ancestral Puebloans a little better, or take a dump if you've never heard of them".

More to the point, given how wasted Osbourne was during those years, even if he'd been at an animatronic reconstruction of the Yalta Conference, it's likely he'd still have whizzed all over it, despite remembering when Nazis weren't quite history.

Osbourne has yet to apologise for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.

25 years ago today: Bates on the wall

If yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the fall of The Berline Wall, that makes this morning the 25th anniversary of Simon Bates turning up in the city to do the Golden Hour from the midst of history.

This was most memorable because, arriving too late to get a good spot, Bates explained his position like a person who'd inadvertently booked a fortnight in Boppard rather than Cologne. The people you saw down at the Brandenburg Gate were just the sort of people who want to get on TV, revealed Bates, but here - further down the Wall - was where the real Germans were.

It sounds less and less convincing with each passing year, doesn't it?

Home On The Range: some discouraging words heard

There's a small cabin in Smith County, Kansas. In 1872, Brewster Higley sat in and wrote the song which would become Home On The Range.



That song, in turn, went on to become the state song of Kansas.

And the cabin?

Well, that went on to become a bit of a wreck. There's a campaign being mounted now, though, to save it. Orin Friesen is trying to raise $100,000 to restore the cabin to its original state.

Obviously, it was a little wood shack, so it's a bit ironic that in order to return it to being a cheap, knocked-up wooden building is going to cost thousands and thousands, but that's the price of authenticity.

"It matters that we preserve this cabin," Friesen said. "It needs to be saved for future generations. There are a lot of songs that belong to different states — Texas has a bunch, and Tennessee does too. But none are more famous than our state song. I can't figure out another state song that is so tied to a particular place."

Hmm. The good people of Tennessee might point out gently that Rocky Top is tied to Rocky Top, but you know what he means. Good luck, Mr. Friesen.

Piss on the Alamo, piss off Phil Collins

I have a faint suspicion that the entire Dallas Morning News article about Phil Collins and his love for the Alamo is nothing more than a long, elaborate pisstake:

British singer, songwriter and drummer Phil Collins has won seven Grammy Awards and sold nearly 40 million solo albums in the United States.

But perhaps his biggest passion isn't music, it's the Alamo.

Admittedly, the idea that Collins doesn't love music as much as something else is quite credible - indeed, for much of his later career, it wouldn't be a surprise to discover that he was driven by a passionate hate for music and all connected with it.

But the Alamo?

Decades later, Collins has gathered what has been considered "one of the largest private collections of Alamo memorabilia in the world." He's said he has "hundreds of cannonballs, documents and other artifacts from the Alamo at his home in Switzerland."

God, his postman must love him.

"What have you got in this parcel, Mr. Collins? Cannonballs?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact."

I wish I had an interest and fascination so deep with an event that I dedicated my life to removing as much connected with that event as possible to be hidden away in a private collection in a totally different continent.

But while Collins might be stealing the Texan heritage, he is giving something back to Texas:

Collins will speak about his Alamo fascination at 6:30 p.m. May 10 at the Margaret and Al Hill Lecture Hall in the Hall of State at Fair Park, 3939 Grand Ave., Dallas.

If I were in charge of the Alamo Mission, I'd be making sure the doors were bolted and everything screwed firmly down next week. Just in case.

French three strikes law ruled pre-revolutionary

Ah, here come the tumbrels for the music industry. It turns out that three strikes rule, which the RIAA-IFPI loves so much, had actually been outlawed by the French Revolutionary Government.

Yes, the idea of throwing people off the internet was actually considered to be a bit too much back in 1789, making John Kennedy the Marie Antoinette of our age:

The [French constitutional] Court found several parts of Hadopi unconstitutional, violating the citizen's right to free speech, and the presumption of innocence. The Hadopi authority also failed to possess sufficient legal status to carry out its job, Judges concluded.

"Freedom of expression and communication is all the more valuable that its exercise is a prerequisite for democracy and one of the guarantees of respect for other rights and freedoms and that attacks on the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the aim pursued," they wrote.

That's quite something - I've been banging on for the best part of a decade that the music industry is desperately trying to cling on to the past, but I'd never realised until now quite how far back they're looking.

Tomorrow: "Let's throw sellers of pirate CDs into the Bastille, cries John Kennedy"

Someday, Richard Attenborough will make a movie about Jay-Z

The value of history. How else could we live in a world where Fifty Cent compares Jay-Z to Gandhi:

"Jay-Z is Gandhi... He'll bear the disrespect for what? For working to be in a great position. So for creating the comfort that he desires for his life, he has to bear the disrespect. Because they'd like to be where he is. That's an interesting concept because Jay (would) rather just let 'em go.

"My take on it is, yeah, I'm gonna say something back, and he gonna wish he never said what he said. He gonna wish he never came around here sniffing around me."

Yes, of course. The disrespecting the British Raj used to give Gandhi for creating the comfort he wanted for his life - they would just mock, mock, mock whenever he went out with some new bling or started dating someone fabulous.

So, Jay-Z is Gandhi. What does that, though, make Fiddy's self-confessed uncontrolled, hot back self? I'm somehow picturing him as a kind of Hulk figure. Only with much better jewelery.

Do you suppose Van Zandt knows he's being self-defeating?

Steve Van Zandt is putting together a curriculum for teaching the history of rock and roll in schools, as part of his rock and roll forever foundation.

Apparently, Van Zandt believes that teaching the importance of rock to kids will inspire them, and not turn an already flailing cultural form into something about as exciting as Martello Towers and pre-decimal coinage.

Van Zandt might be having some trouble putting together his course. He's clearly having difficulty putting together a sentence or two about it:

"The history of rock and roll is a history of, certainly, 20th-century America, from there on, anyway. All the cultural impact that it had with civil rights and women's rights and all that other stuff. Well, this is what's going to last. This is what's going to, you know, be here long after we're gone,"

We're reeling slightly from the idea that there might be an essay set on Motley Crue's contribution to the women's movement, but can't wait to find out the role that rock played in "all that other stuff" that defined the last century.