Radio station leaves broadcasting business

TWO HOURS AGO, I found out that I’ve become ‘one-radio-station-less’ because a favourite European radio station of mine has left the radio broadcasting scene.

iBreaks Radio <www.ibreaks.co.uk> broadcast its last show on 13th August from its London base. As of today, the website is still accessible and registered users still able to download the latest podcasts from the last seven days or so.

DJ Brendan “Bruno” Clay, who hosts the radio station’s regular The M Shift show from Sydney, posted a communique on the inthemix website that iBreaks “will no longer be pursuing the radio aspect of the business.” The communique said iBreaks instead will be concentrating on its record label business, which “is quite clearly the money spinner of the company”. (link)

I’ve been listening to iBreaks Radio regularly almost from the day it started 3½ years ago. Its main window is on breakbeats and techno-type music. It broadcasts shows as live streams over the Internet as well as freely downloadable podcasts. Its regular DJs are from right across the whole of Europe and North America, and also from Japan and Australia.

I really liked this radio station. My favourite DJs have been DJ Kultur from Malaga in the south of Spain and JMekka, also from Spain. Another favourite is Slick Willy Dee, a Brighton-based DJ with a on-air reputation of using foul words and slightly clipsy guests.

So long, iBreaks, it’s been nice knowing you.

Rash judgments

Does this remind you of anything in your own life?

(via email, 05 April 2010)

Where it comes from

We have a great need for certainty, only surpassed by our need to win no matter what. So we end up doing the no-matter-what by picking our own sword and shield:

“Frankly, I don’t know where all this comes from. If I say, schools in the South don’t do as well as those in the North, which is true. But if I say, schools in the South do less well than those in the North because schools in the South are less unionized than in the North, I don’t think that’s going to fly at all at the university.

“Look, there is a research literature. People pick whatever they want or need to support their position. The research literature is big [...] but the literature in this area is mixed. But in the two world top-level journals, [the result is] negative.”

(Debate about teacher unionisation in schools, 27 March 2010)

The remaking of Hong Kong

“It is the intangibles, almost invisible to non-Chinese residents and to visitors, that are making a new Hong Kong. It is a more docile, less assertive city. The innate sense of superiority over any and every Chinese mainlander has almost completely evaporated; Ah Chaan, the name of a country bumpkin created by television to represent the average mainlander has been scrubbed from everyday language, if not from memory.”

(via Augustine Tan, 29 May 2009)

Fashionably expensive