For those who miss Pre_Shrunk and their live dance.
1994, some tough competition with Weezer's first album, Supergroove, Live's "Throwing Copper" and Tori Amos' "Under The Pink". I prefer Tori's "Little Earthquakes", I didn't really get into Weezer's album until almost a decade later and really, Supergroove are pretty silly, so it was between Live and Soundgarden. Soundgarden stomped on Live's head.
1995, a competition between Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. Yes, there is Radiohead's "The Bends" and Tea Party's "Edges of Twilight" but no... Why KFAD and not Disco Volante? Because... Disco Volante is hard to listen to right through.
1996, honourable mentions to Tori, Korn, Secret Chiefs 3, Regurgitator, Pantera and Powderfinger, but that Tool album blew my mind. It has weirdly dated, but only because all music since has copied them.
1997, brain melt! Björk's "Homogenic", Radiohead's "OK Computer", Regurgitator's "Unit", Tea Party's "Transmission", Ween's "The Mollusk" and of course Faith No More's "Album Of The Year". Even David Bowie's "Earthling" is great... but The Whitlams crafted an almost perfect album in "Eternal Nightcap".
1998 has me stumped.
If this blog were a normal human child, it would be well into developing a conscience by now.
And...
In contrast to age eight, nine year olds do not show a great interest in God and religion, and many do not want to go to church and Sunday School. They do have a basic ethical feeling and faith, however, and will pray to God when they are in need.
I distinctly remember around that age praying to God asking if my family could win the lottery.
Not "cruise control", which accelerates the car to the set speed and keeps it there, but a maximum setting which would safely reduce acceleration power and possibly apply the brake if the car creeps over the maximum set speed.
The key argument I hear from drivers against strict road-speed enforcement is that "I need to spend all the time watching my speedo instead of the road." A maximum speed setting on a car would go some way to killing that argument.
The setting must be easy to change (buttons on the steering wheel?) so that it's no less difficult and attention grabbing than applying the brake.
Under normal city driving conditions, the setting should almost never kick in or even be noticed. It will just be there to prevent any accidental speed creep. I can't even see it being used constantly, probably mostly for low speed temporary situations like School Zones or road works.
Recently an automatic satellite controlled auto max speed setting has been suggested for speeders, but I'm not suggesting anything like that.
The option would be manual and driver controlled.
Another argument I've heard is that some cars are often difficult to keep at certain speed limits (school-zone 40kph for example) as their gears, engine and foot pedal response are all tuned for running at 60kph or more.
With today's modern computer controlled engines, a setting which instructed the the car of the speed range (0 to max) at which the user wishes to drive would presumably be very useful for adjusting such settings on the fly.
Update: Friend Josh informs me that Volvo apparently have a cruise control system which will keep you at a set speed, including slowing you down. My experience with cruise control is that if you were going down a hill it would not slow you down if you went over the set limit, but I'll need to research some more.
Something like this system would be fine, although I like the idea of keeping full control of the accelerator and brake and the system only kicking in when you get near the limit. Cruise control is great for long distance highway driving but I really don't like the idea of cruise control's automatic acceleration for city driving.
I'd love to see a big array of buttons for the "hard to keep to" speeds like 40 and 50 that I could just push and forget.
Volvo trucks in the US use a similar system for collision prevention, slowing down trucks automatically if they get to close to the vehicle in front. That sounds fab.
The GPS controlled systems which set the limit for you are good, but I would never trust them to be accurate. The manual control of my idea is important.