  kee wen and i have our test on the 24th at expo. blah. zero 7 is the perfect fusion of guilty guitar pop, keyboardish acoustic guitars, fuzzy IDM and not entirely clever urlLink lyrics , but there you go. it's even christian pop at intervals. "in the waiting line" could have been an argument for the theists, but it's like sophie barker waking up in red jammies with her hair in all the wrong places and putting on nerdish thick glass and rubbing her eyes delicately and there's an alien on her bed holding her hand and they're singing "do you believe in what you see?
everyone's saying different things to me! " and when the song is done the alien has disappeared and she realises it morphed magically from the emblem on her blanket. maybe a guyferd blanket. if anything, i might be one of those MTV directors one day. but only if it was some intelligent lounge pop and the vocalists were all cute girls with nice voices.
i'd be the alien. and now for something completely different: boring language nonsense. don't read further if you think english is a language meant for idiots, it'll bring you down to its level and defeat you with confusing vocabulary. isn't that formulaic? but fuck, what isn't formulaic? i mean, within the newton-bound confines of earth. oh yah, grammar. lye hwa (we call teachers by surname in school, but in inquisitive blog postings like this one, i hope we can dispense with formality) seemed pretty insistent about groups not being referred to with "are" and "have"; that is, 'the group is' and 'the team is' and 'the Concert Band is'.
but isn't it supposed to be the case? pertinent question. apparently, the bbc do not see it that way, and lye hwa (we refer to teachers by surname in school, which thinks the bbc "is wrong". (the headline of this urlLink article on bbc sport says "man utd rule out investigations", which is telling enough. ) of course, i don't know what the beeb might think about "the bunch of grapes are horny and fruity souls", but i dunno. honest to goodness. the beeb's official stance is that urlLink they are practically complementary if you can change your perspective a bit.
of course, there's also the headline "US lets canada bid for reconstruction work", which not only reeks of fox but also americanism. and for those of you with "drug problems" and intentions to study "material engineering", take note that since narcotics deals with a great variety of drugs and the latter deals with a great variety of materials, the beeb deems it better to refer to them in the plural. "drugs problems", "materials engineering". but you read the "sport pages", and not "sports pages", although you will note that there are no "musics pages", and most people will differentiate aesthetic from the plural by verb versus discipline (noun).
so why am i so militant on trying to find out more precise british english conventions? well, i don't really know. it's one of those mindless teenage passions. (like for linkin park and being on either side of the political camp. ) grammar is really fun.
even the americans with their sulfur (they sniff lots of its gaseous incarnations in los angeles) and their not pronouncing the H in herb (they got it from the english, who got it from the french... and later the english changed the pronunciation and the spelling). 
