It begins! foogin Hax0r3d .'.

That's right everyone! I may only be on 25 hits a day, but that's apparently popular enough for someone to tamper with the audio section of the page.

My appy-polly-loggies to anyone who attempted to access music since the 23rd of January, 2005.

I will put the music back up really soon, but my priorities are currently:

• work out how this happened
• work out who did it
• work out how to prevent it happening again
• work out how many pieces I'm going to slice the culprit into when I find 'em.

The positive sides: I keep extensive logs, I like puzzles, I was going to change it anyway.

Womble .'.

Underground, overground, wombledon free,
the wombles of Wim-bledon Common are we,
Ma-king good use of the things that we find,
The things that the eeevr'y day folks leave be-hind...

Money hungry artists.. .'.

I've signed up for the Associates program at amazon, which keeps track of any referrals I make to the Sa'iyr.

So if you haven't already, make me a happy monkey, and buy the album

;)


Also, I'm almost finished with the trimmed down version of the site, so hold on to your bootstraps.
note: There may be a lack of interesting things at pentaphobia (moreso) for a few days after the slim page goes up. appy-polly-logies in advance.

"BUT!" I hear you scream,
"Why not make things work properly before you put them up?"
And to that I say: "Because (a)the album comes out soon, and (b)it's more fun this way"

so nyer.

All hail the god(esse)s of snafu! .'.

hehe.. aspect was nice enough to mention that amazon lists the album as "Sa'Iyr: A Tribal Metmorphosis"

any ideas on what the word "Metmorphosis" means? My first guess would be "Changing of the city" :)

Oh - and just so that I don't seem like biased media: A couple of days after my posts about america's contribution, they upped it by a factor of 10 to US$350 million.

good. I was quite happy to hear that.

though, unsurprisingly - the newspapers the next day were then boasting about how good america was, little lists showing america almost at the top (aside from japan). "aren't we a great little country?"

Still - if you continue to look at it per capita, it's only $1.20, which would put them in 5th place according to my data.

fnork.

my sister arrives today. yaaaaaaaaaaahoooo :)

A fresh taste of Codswallop... .'.

It has come to my attention that Sa'Iyr is now available for presale at buy.com.
If this link doesn't work, then a search for "pentaphobe" at the main page should do it.

Guess it's official. Pretty soon I'll be on the pointy end of the critic stitick..
And to critics the world over, I say:

Be gentle, it's my first time.


On a more personal note (a rarity since I realised People were reading this blog.):
My sister arrives in San Francisco in two days. It will be the first time in over four years that I've seen her. Super-super-super excited.
Additionally, Rachel heads off on tour tomorrow, this will be the last time I see her for at least 6 months. Good luck to yeh, m'lady.
.. hope the world treats you well, and vice-versa.

A few days ago, Michelle Campbell of The Indigo and BellyDance SuperStars and many, many others put on a benefit for the victims of the Indian Ocean earthquake and it was a wild success. more on that later...

A little addition from bogusmagus et al.. .'.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek stylings of my previous post, I think (as with most paranoia) that there are elements worth considering.
Bogusmagus posted the following over at The Maybelogic Academy:

A friend just emailed me with:
"I seems to me that each of the last big earthquakes(Turkey, Japan) happened after someone somewhere tested Nuclear Weapons (Russia last week, their biggest program yet) (Pakistan and India before the others) I'm looking for people on line or somewhere who might be tracking this pattern, especially because Russia has said this is the beginning of their biggest program yet, and Bush is proposing to restart Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative again but bigger, when he was in Canada he tried to talk them into joining him, they refused."

My first search took me here http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/testsNquakes.html
which seems frightening enough to mention.

"Killer Quakes and Bomb Tests
In an even more revealing analysis, Whiteford studies so-called "killer earthquakes" in which more than one thousand people have died. He compiled a list of all such quakes since 1953 and matched them with nuclear test schedules. Some test dates were not available, but in those that were, a pattern was evident: 62.5% of the killer earthquakes occurred only a few days after a nuclear test. Many struck only one day after a detonation. More than a million people have now died in earthquakes that seem to be related to nuclear tests. Again, the governments of the nuclear nations claim the results are mere coincidence."

This one is more cautious http://geology.about.com/cs/eq_hazards/a/aa033102a.htm

Another thing worth looking at (plant those tongues!) is, The Story of John Titor, John Titor claimed to be a time traveller from 2038.. Read it with as much scepticism as you wish - I'm not implying that his story is true, but there are useful things to gleam from his writings regardless.

don't think of a purple elephant... .'.

...don't write about tsunami in your blog..

I was talking about the Indian Ocean Quakes and tsunami the other day at work - and in passing said "at least it didn't happen near the USA, or they'd blame it on a 'WMD' and start bombing random third-world countries." (I know, joking about it is bad, and therefore, I'm bad and will go to live with the [insert bastardised old-world deity here]. but I work in a corporate coffee shop, in the US of A, surrounded by people that can afford things like $6 coffees. It's raining at the moment, and people come in complaining about the weather - not just "gosh, it's wet" but launching into rehearsed diatribes about the unfairness, and sheer disastrous quality of the (quite light) rain and cold weather... blank stares a plenty when I respond with "at least there's not a 33ft wave flying down the street at 500miles per hour..")

anyway - the "joke" about WMDs got me wandering into an hypothetical land where the quakes were caused by some kind of weapons testing. (*chortle* aren't I the happy little conspiracy theorist.. *grabs tinfoil*)

for some reason, my (half-arsed) contemplation of this alternate reality reminded me of an article that I was reading on Geopolitics. note: that link isn't the actual article mentioned - and the wikipedia article doesn't full cover the aspect that I originally read about. to put my ramblings in context, let me summarise my understanding of geopolitics as: there are certain "key" strategic points on the earth, if you control these points you have a distinctly unfair advantage in most (or all) military interactions. One of the big key locations is (iirc) somewhere in Afghanistan.

imagine my surprise when I went to revise my memories of the workings of geopolitics and found:

They were added to the other part of the world, renamed the "Periphery", along with Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. Australia and New Zealand were already part of the "new world".

.. innocently peering back at me from the wikipedia page..

curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

and a bit more fun from Daily Kos:

Number of deaths due to four Florida hurricanes in 2004: 117

Number of deaths due to Aceh earthquake and tsunami in 2004: 120,000+

Homeless due to Florida hurricanes: 11,000

Homeless due to Aceh earthquake/tsunami: 5,000,000

US government aid to help Florida hurricane victims: $2.04 billion

US government aid to help Aceh earthquake/tsunami victims: $35 million

Estimated cost of George Bush's upcoming inaguration celebration, not including security costs: $40 million

US government direct cost, per hour, of the US war in Iraq: $9 million



Spain per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $2.30

Norway per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $1.80

Australia per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $1.30

UK per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.48

France per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.50

US per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.12

Jackie Chan's personal contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $200,000

Chan ratio of US government contribution (ratio of per capita US government donations to Jackie Chan's individual donation): 1/1,666,667, or 0.0000006

happy new year.