You gotta be f***ing KIDDING me!

I believe this speaks for itself.

Don't say we never give you nuthin'

Not content with finishing off my Eno series with style, verve, moxie, chutzpah and aplomb, I have also taken it upon myself to give you good good people a couple of small christmas gifts. Call it a token of our esteem from us here at the IllCon compound for it is, after all, the season of goodwill and so forth.




















I did sneakily foreshadow this post in my last one, mentioning, as I did,'writing bollocks about massively overlooked bands from New Zealand' and my enthusiasm for the TV cartoon 'Adventure Time WIth Finn & Jake', so that may well give you a clue as to at least some of the content herein.




















So, my first gift here- just a small one really - is an alternate version of the theme tune to 'Adventure Time'. I find the main theme to be the weakest thing about the show - far too indie and twee for my sensitive ears - so coming across this version that borders on Fancy Metal was pretty darned algebraic for me...



Now, I'm sure there'll be the usual naysayers out there slinging the 'H' word around and blah blah blah, but to those people I say 'SHUT THE FUCK UP'. You soulless cunts, you probably don't like the goddamn Muppets either, and I don't fucking trust people who don't like the goddamn Muppets.


















...aaaaaand relax.

My main present is something that I'm pretty damn sure isn't currently to be found anywhere else on t'internet. That's right people, we got us an EXCLUSIVE. First, though, I gotta ask, does the name 'Shihad' mean anything to anyone?




















If your answer is 'yes', then you probably already know just how damn good their first few records were and you may well already have a copy of the recording(s) that I'm about post.
However, if your answer is a no then I think you're in for a treat. Here's a wee taster to whet your whistle...



Pretty damn rockin' huh? Kinda 'Helmet-y' y'think? Hell, have another...



Yup. I dig 'em.

Both tracks come from 'Killjoy', Shihad's second LP, which was released back in 1995 and is one of my all-time favourite records.
Their debut EP 'Devolve' and their first LP, and first international release, 'Churn' (produced by Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman, fact fans!) were pretty decent, but 'Killjoy' is just a BEAST. Blessed with a rhythm section that pumps like the engine on an exceptionally fine ship-of-the-line and some right noisy guitars, 'Killjoy' totally rocks my world. Hell, those guitars that crash back in at 3.24 during 'Bitter' sound less like guitars and more like heavy steel cables lashing against one another. KILLER.

I was lucky enough to see them live on their European tour in support of 'Killjoy'- although not, alas, in their Faith No More support slot - and can wholeheartedly say that they were a fucking fantastic live band too.




















As I said earlier, I haven't been able to find this posted ANYWHERE else on the internet, so consider yourselves very lucky boys and girls. I've even added the two B-sides from the 'You Again' CD Single - one of which is a cover of Bowie's 'Boys Keep Swinging' - AND the two Shihad tracks from their 'Happy Families' Split CD with fellow Kiwi lunatics Head Like A Hole. These are all from my own personal, deeply cherished, CDs so you'd damn well better appreciate 'em!


















Get 'Killjoy' by Shihad Here.



















Now, just before I leave you to slip further into your Turkey/Tofurkey-with-all-the-trimmings induced comas, I'd just like to add that Shihad still exist - their website can be found here - but they have done nothing of worth since their highly divisive 1996 self-titled LP, so if you decide to go digging around online after getting all fired up by 'Killjoy', don't say I didn't warn you.

ENO

...and so it is that we reach the end of this series of Brian Eno posts, culminating with his 1977 album 'Before And After Science'.
It's been an epic trek, mostly uphill, but this is IT. No more. I can move on to writing bollocks about massively overlooked bands from New Zealand and how much I fucking LOVE Adventure Time With Finn And Jake. Or something.

Ironically this record also had as prolonged a gestation period as my posts, as Eno had begun moving into new musical territory after 'Another Green World' and had a great deal of difficulty in assembling the songs that would end up here. 'Before And After Science' would end up being the last overtly song-based record that Eno produced under his own name for quite some time.

1977 was also the year that Eno worked with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, aka Cluster - begatting the superb 'Eno & Cluster' LP - and worked with David Bowie again, on the second album in his 'Berlin trilogy'- 'Heroes' - as well as making repeated overtures to Talking Heads, a band whom he had fallen in love with during their UK tour with The Ramones.

Exactly how much he wanted to work with Talking Heads is made quite clear on one album track here, entitled Kings Lead Hat, a fairly bloody obvious anagram of the bands name...



...something that worked out nicely for Eno, as he ended up producing their next three records and making a rather splendid li'l record with Heads mainman David Byrne entitled 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts', all four of which are amongst some of my favourite records of all time ('Fear Of Music' in particular)














The usual array of guests helped Eno to finally realise his vision here, after several false starts - the previously mentioned Roedelius and Moebius, Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith, Can drummer and Krautrock legend Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Bill MacCormick of Matching Mole and his Quiet Sun bandmate Phil Manzanera, the ubiquitous Robert Fripp, Free drummer Andy Fraser, the ever-execrable Phil Collins and Brand X buddy Percy Jones, again, and the disembodied voice of deceased Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (on the track 'Schwitters Rejoinder' natch).



Musically, the album is split between the more upbeat, jagged sounds of the first half and the more intimate, pastoral tones of the latter, yet still manages to remain coherent and, to me, utterly gripping. I also appreciate the inherent Englishness of the line "Ooh what to do, not a sausage to do" in the bouncy 'Backwater'. Yes, we really DO say things like that. Well, I do, anyway.

Now, for MY money, the centrepiece of 'Before And After Science' is the achingly beautiful 'Julie With...', as languid and lunar a song as any you could hope to hear.



...isn't that just gorgeous?

This really is a beautiful album, tonally, and one of my favourite Eno records. I hope those of you who haven't heard it before give it a listen and enjoy it as much as I do. So, get it here and dig in.




















...also, as a special treat because I've kept you waiting for so long, I've put together a package of Eno's non-album tracks - including a couple of singles and a BBC session featuring re-interpretations of tracks from 'Here Come The Warm Jets', an embryonic version of 'I'll Come Running' from 'Another Green World' and a Peggy Lee cover - which you can get here.








I've also decided to throw in a copy of The Winkies self-titled 1975 album in which they re-use the musical backing track to their version of 'The Paw-Paw Negro Blowtorch' and re-title it 'Trust In Dick', with rockin' power-pop results, just....because.
















Shame about the cover though. Mind you, it does give you an idea where they got their name from....

HAIL TO THE KING THAT NEVER WAS!!!

I think Steve Delchin is my new hero.

Eno Meany

Life is full of things that slow you down and generally impede your progress. Mostly people, but also things like 'having a job with slightly awkward hours', 'wanting to make the most of your time with your special lady friend', the nebulous 'other commitments' and 'having a brain that hates and despises you and tries its level best to make things difficult whenever possible'. Ladies and germs, I'll level with you - add to those obstacles a general feeling of bone-tired weariness and a pinch of slack, and you'll have my situation in a nutshell.

I mean, I have been productive, just not as productive as I'd like to be. I've been writing music reviews for the fine folks at The Sleeping Shaman and, more recently, Bearded Magazine and tinkering with some new music equipment I recently acquired, but, well, it's not enough DAMMIT!!

I want more life, fucker.

...and so, without further ado, excuses and shameless self-promotion, we plunge into the plangent, comfortably warm waters of the third of the first four Brian Eno solo 'vocal' albums.














'Another Green World' was released in 1975, one year after the slightly lacklustre (IMHO) 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy', and the same year as his first 'ambient' album, 'Discreet Music', emerged. Tonally and in terms of mood, 'Another Green World' is closer to the latter i.e contemplative and somewhat tranquil. This tonal shift came about in the wake of a traumatic accident wherein Eno received a serious head injury that laid him low for a while.
I'm sure you've heard the tale of how Eno invented ambient music, as we know it, so I won't bore you with it, suffice to say that some of his resulting methodology and approach also rubbed off on 'Another Green World'.



...note the early use of a drum machine, set on 'bossa-nova' there.

On all of the Eno albums featured here, there are a number of other musicians featured, many of whom reocurr over the course of time - most notably Robert Fripp and bassist Paul Rudolph - and 'Another Green World' is no exception to this, boasting the obligatory Fripp, some viola from John Cale (who may well be featured in another of these mult-part posts in future), bass from Winkies man Brian Turrington (of whom, more in the next, final, post), mo' bass from Brand X bassman Percy Jones and drums from his Brand X bandmate.....Phil Collins.

Yeah. I know. Him.

Now, loathe as I am to attempt a defence of this purveyor of ultimate filth, this was 1975 and Phil was still content to keep his damn mouth shut and just play his drums, which he does with verve, aplomb, moxie and ....uh...possibly chutzpah herein.



'Sky Saw' there, the slightly alarming opening track of the album, contained a backing track that Eno would cannibalise several times througout his career, thus really getting his moneys worth from Phil Collins and, as I mentioned back in the first part of these posts, finding a genuine use for him to boot.

















Now, my personal musical highlight on this album would have to be the track 'St Elmo's Fire', which has fuck-all to do with the movie and everything to do with Robert Fripp's lyrical, liquid guitar solo, improvised on the spot when Eno told him he wanted a solo that sounded and felt like electricity arcing between two points on a generator. I think he nailed it...



...wouldn't you agree?

Ssssssooooooo, yes. There you have it. 'Another Green World'.




















Go get it.


* Nerd Footnote - Issue 23 of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, April 1984, featured a story entitled 'Another Green World', a definite reference to this album, given Mr Moore's musical inclinations and later use of song titles, lyrics and album titles as titles for Swamp Thing stories.

Eno Meany Miney

I'm gonna level with you here. Of the four albums I'll be putting up here for your delectation, 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy' is my personal least favourite, so I'm not gonna say much about it.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad album - far from it - it's just that it doesn't really do as much, musically, for me as the other three.
I guess it's because it's so much more upbeat and melodic than the others that I find it a little dull - which is ironic, as the lyrical content is pretty dark. 'Burning Airlines Give You So Much More' is about an aircrash near Paris in 1974 and 'The Great Pretender' is about an insane machine raping a housewife.

Oh, incidentally, 'Burning Airlines Give You So Much More' is where the ex-Jawbox band, Burning Airlines, that so many people seem to like but I couldn't give a gnats fart about, got their name from. So now you know, unless you already know, in which case, I just reminded you. You're welcome.

Several things of note about the album are that a VERY pre-MTV music video was made for the track 'China, My China'...



...featuring proto-punk icon Judy Nylon of the band Snatch, the lyrics to the track 'The True Wheel' came to Eno in a dream, and inspired the name of the shortlived band he was a member of, along with Phil Manzanera, The 801, who released one so-so live album (although a couple of better quality bootlegs are available), 'The Fat Lady Of Limbourg' allegedly refers to a groupie of voluminous size that Eno bedded on tour, and the entire concept behind the revolutionary/Communist Chinese slant** to the album was said to have been kicked off by Eno chancing upon some postcards featuring images of a revolutionary chinese opera of the same name.




















So, there you have it. Some fascinating facts about 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy'.

Don't let my lack of enthusiasm put you off, by the way, as it only really suffers in comparison to the other three recordings that surround it - by anyone else's standards, it's a fantastic album...only by my own exacting standards is it a bit boring.

*


















*insert 'pink oboe' joke here.

** Also, I just realised that to the uptight, overly PC eye, this could seem like a racial slur. It isn't, obviously, it's just unfortunate wording on my part, but I'm keeping it in anyway, so fuck you.



BTW, if I was a punk, my punk name would be Rachel Intolerance.

ENO MEANY MINEY MO

"Brian Eno? Isn't he that guy who invented 'ambient music'?"
Well....yeah, I guess.

"Isn't he that bald guy who produced U2 and fucking Coldplay?"

Well....yeah, guilty as charged...BUT he also made four outstanding albums of art rock back in the seventies that he, quite frankly, just doesn't get enough love for.

While all the pseuds and hipsters wax poetic about 'Discreet Music' and 'Music For Airports', I'm diggin' his non-ambient work with Robert Fripp, his pre-Talking Heads Talking Heads-isms and his bold attempt to find a genuine use for Phil Collins (which he DOES, with aplomb).

















I mean, I ask you, LOOK at the dude! Does he look like some po-faced chinstroking pseudo-intellectual? in THAT jacket??*

No, when Eno left Roxy Music in 1973, taking all their mojo with him, he did what people didn't really expect him to do, considering he was the 'non-musician' (his words) and resident brain box of the band...he made an absolutely KILLER solo album that, in MY humble opinion, totally outshines anything Roxy Music EVER did.

So, in order to edumacate youse heathen scum, I'll be posting up the first four Eno 'vocal' albums here over the course of the week, possibly followed by a li'l treat in the shape of an 'odds and ends' comp of singles, radio session tracks and whatnot, if you're all good li'l ladies 'n' germs.



















Here Come The Warm Jets was something that I don't think anyone was expecting. Despite Eno's rep as a ladies man and top shagger, he was commonly regarded as an arty oddball who made bleepy-bloopy noises, and so any kind of solo album he made would probably be 'difficult'. '...Jets' totally blows that notion out of the water by being chock-full of arty funk, off-kilter pop-rock and possibly Robert Fripp's finest recorded guitar solo...



'Baby's On Fire' was actually the first thing Eno wrote for this record and the damn thing sounds fresh as a daisy today. Minimal, artful loping groove, odd, camply-arch lyrics and vocal and THAT solo. It's a total WINNER, as is the entire record. A stone-cold classic. Oh, and for lovers of bleepy-bloopy Eno, check out the end of the exceptionally English 'Dead Finks Tell No Tales'. Sounds like a malfunctioning Cylon.


























*actually, he looks totally like Elrond

Trolling Morbid clunge ferrets...

I just can't let it go...

The Legend of Purple Aki

Every place has urban myths and legendary beasts - Scotland has The Loch Ness Monster,

















Virginia has The Mothman














and rumours have abounded for years of the infamous Abominable Snowman, or Yeti of the Himalayas,
















but NONE of these creatures have terrified the local populace so much as the local mythical beast of where I grew up, the all-too-real man-beast known as...
...PURPLE AKI!




















Y'see, back in the days before the internet, it was a lot easier to be mysterious and for unsubstantiated gossip to spread and mutate like wildfire. So it was with the shadowy figure known to us kids as Purple Aki. He was used as a bogeyman figure (yes, BOGEYman, not BOOGIEman like you fucking septic tanks use...seriously, are you THAT ashamed about disco?) by unscrupulous parents in the eighties in order to bend children to their will..."If you don't get to bed/do your homework/eat your greens, Purple Aki will get you!"...and stories were often told about him and encounters other people had with him, mostly bullshit we figured, but scary nonetheless.

As a kid, I heard the name around and learned the following 'facts' about him - that he was a large black man who was from Toxteth in Liverpool (A predominantly poor, black area where I spent half of my life living. It's a ROUGH place and is mostly famous for rioting and heroin) but was often seen around the St Helens area (Near where I actually grew up. It's a pus-filled canker sore on the face of existence and should be bombed into oblivion. It's famous for....umm....glass). That he would follow and accost young boys, especially those who worked out or went to the gym a lot, ask if he could feel their muscles and then offer them the choice of either being raped by him OR to have his initials carved into their buttocks, leading to the alleged bone-chilling question he was said to have asked his victims..."POP OR SLASH?".

At no point did I find out ANYTHING else about him - what he looked like, aside from being huge and black, why he was called 'Purple' Aki, or if he was ACTUALLY real.
To me, he was a spook, an imaginary ghoul, who would appear to friends of friends of friends and ask his question, only for them to run away and escape his rapey clutches. A friend of mine who was a well known bullshit-artist swore blind that Purple Aki had accosted his brother, but, well, I didn't believe him.
To be honest, I was pretty damn sure he didn't exist.

I was WRONG.













The story that I had heard most often in connection to Purple Aki was that he had approached a boy at a train station and so terrified the boy that he ran onto the train tracks and was electrocuted in his mad scramble to escape. Again, it all sounded like some kind of scare story told by parents to stop their children from going out at night alone or something...but in 1995 I moved to a flat in Toxteth and met people who actually KNEW Purple Aki. Then, I read about him in the local newspaper.

The bogeyman was REAL.

His name was Akinwale Arobieke, and he was known as 'Purple' Aki due to the colouration of his skin giving him an almost purple hue. He was six foot five and weighed twenty stone. He'd been charged over the death of the boy who was electrocuted running away from him but had gotten off due to lack of evidence and possible racial discrimination in the trial. This was the only crime he had ever been charged with, as far as I knew.




















It turned out that the whole 'pop or slash' rape thing wasn't true, and his ACTUAL perversion was FAR stranger than that. He hung out around gyms and suchlike and would ask people about their muscles and general fitness in the guise of being a fellow enthusiast, offering advice and so on, until he would whip out a tape measure and ask if he could touch and measure the hapless victims muscles. If you were particularly unlucky he would either ask you to do push-ups whilst he lay atop you - in the guise of 'providing extra weight to make it harder' - or, his signature move, "inverted piggybacks" – where the victim would squat so he could lean over their backs with his face by their buttocks and his junk on their necks, while squeezing their quad muscles.

Yeah. Now, you're probably wondering exactly HOW he managed to get such rough 'n' tough big-ass guys to DO this kind of shit? Well, it was a combination of his own intimidating stature, knowing that men are way less likely to talk about this kind of thing to the police, and the personal information he had in his 'Stalkers book'.

His WHAT?!?

Well, when he was most recently arrested in 2008 - after already having gone to jail in 2001, then again, almost as soon as he got out, in 2003, until 2006, when he was released on licence and had the following piece of legislation levelled against him, he was "...banned from touching, feeling or measuring muscles, asking people to do squat exercises in public, entering the towns of St Helens, Warrington or Widnes without police permission and loitering near schools, gyms or sports clubs" - one piece of evidence brought up against him was a book containing "...details about victims' body measurements, contact numbers and families." It was alleged that Arobieke would "do research into his victim, confronting them with such details as their father's car registration number or sibling's place of education.".
Yep, he may be a sexually perverse weirdo, but he does his homework.

Now, these brushes with prison and the 'muscle-touching ban' only seemed to serve as encouragement to him as almost as soon as he was released from prison following his 2008 sentencing, he was jailed for another two and a half years for defying the 'muscle-touching ban' in North Wales. So, his notoriety had spread across the whole of the North-West of England and into Wales. He was now internationally infamous, in a small way.




















With him safely ensconced behind bars for a while, weightlifters and fitness enthusiasts need not fear dropping the soap in the showers, and entire rugby teams will go unmolested - yep, I shit you not, he actually stalked an entire rugby team. you may be unsurprised to know that while he ws inside, even the prison hardmen were terrified of Aki. Of course wild stories still circulated - such as the one about him being the inspiration for Clive Barker's 'Candyman' character, but mostly he has just faded into the local culture as a figure part bogeyman, part figure of fun...
















This banner was seen as the Glastonbury festival back in 2008 - it's phrased in the Liverpool, or 'scouse', vernacular, with 'Arrr mate!' meaning 'What-ho fellow', 'gripped' meaning 'accosted' and 'portaloo' meaning 'portable john' - and can even be found on MySpace, Twitter, and in multiple places on Facebook. There is a Purple Aki website, is STILL widely discussed on bodybuilding sites, sites about urbanlegends and local weirdoes, hell, he's even on wikipedia!!

There have been a few songs written about him by local bands, and he gave his name to this wonderfully twisted composition by my good friends, and fellow infamous local weirdoes, a.P.A.t.T....



...and there are a number of 'tributes' to him to be found on YouTube, of which these two are prime examples - not only of what a well-known twisted weirdo he is, but also of exactly how fucked-up the local humour is where I grew up...




...oh, by the way, the opening of those cartoons is a reference to classic british 1970's kids TV show 'Bod', for all you septic tanks scratching your heads in confusion...



It's funny how an infamous sexual predator can become a cultural icon isn't it? The only other one I can think of is Freddy Krueger, except the child molestation thing was conveniently swept under the carpet after the first film, wasn't it?

Mind you, we do have a history in the UK of embracing well-known criminals and lunatics to our cultural bosom - train robber Ronnie Biggs ended up making a record with The Sex Pistols, and a frankly FANSTASTIC movie was made about notorious prison-addict Charlie Bronson.

So there you have it, yet more evidence that us limeys are a bunch of fuckin' weirdoes.

Now, I couldn't think of anything decent that was appropriate to give you as a download, so here is 'Dropped', the second album by Mindfunk - a criminally underrated record made by a mostly reviled band who saddled themselves with a shitty name - for no other reason than that I like it.




















Bon appetit!

I must atone...

I feel pretty bad about subjecting you all to one of my many guilty pleasures in my last post, and seeing as how I'll be away from internet-land for a couple of weeks, I didn't want to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, so I figured I'd hip you good people to a band I just recently heard of, courtesy of the very awesome Hammer Smashed Sound.

Brooklyn-based skronky Death-Metallers Pyrrhon. I figured these guys would fit right in over here, being as they are some kind of Gorguts, Ulcerate, Human Remains and Deathspell Omega-like smorgasbord of tricksy riffage, atonal skronk and balls-out brutality. Here, check 'em out for yourselves...



Pretty darned tasty, right?

These guys strike me as being right up Cobras alley, so here's hoping they catch on around here. The track above is from their new album 'An Excellent Servant But a Terrible Master',which is available at their Bandcamp page as a 'name your own price' download. I URGE you to get over there and purchase it for however much you can afford. It really is a great album.





















Now, this being the twenty-first century - for most of us, anyway - you can tell the guys in Pyrrhon how much you love 'em via either the old-school way, if you still use MySpace, or, for those down wit' the kids aight, over at Facebook. The choice, as ever, is YOURS.

As I said earlier, I'll be mostly off-line for a few weeks now, but i didn't want to leave you empty-handed, so here is a track from Pyrrhon's debut EP 'Fever Kingdoms'...



...and HERE is a link to that EP for you to download, which I totally stole from Death Metal Invasion.




















Now g'wan, SCRAM you kids, before I get all verklemmt....

GUILTY PLEASURES WEEK - The Thing That Should Not Be

Damn you Cobras. I'll make you sorry you started this.

Okay. So. My musical guilty pleasure is an artist that many of you may well be unfamiliar with, as I'm not entirely sure if she's made much, if ANY, impact on your side of the pond.

I'm talking about *deep breath* Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
















Anyone know who she is? Raise your hands if you do, and for an extra ten points, can you tell me who her mother is and what SHE was famous for? Anyone?













Janet Ellis. Bingo. Co-presenter of terminally middle-class british children's TV show 'Blue Peter' during the eighties. Here she is with fellow presenters Simon Groom, Goldie the dog, whatever the FUCK the Blue Peter cat was called and Peter Duncan, on the right there.

You may recognise Peter Duncan from the AMAZING 'Flash Gordon' movie, ALSO made in the eighties. He's the guy that sticks his hand in the treestump, gets bitten by the thing that lives in it, and begs Timothy Dalton to "Spare me the madness!" by stabbing him to death with his sword.




YEEEEEAH, THAT GUY!





Anyway, I'm just padding this, to try and cushion the blow.

Speaking of which, what do you think has happened here?



















I have my suspicions, but, HELL, this is a family blog.

Movin' right along, Sophie is what they call a 'pop' star over here. She makes 'pop' music with a slight twist - it doesn't appear to be aimed at tweens, homosexual men or menopausal women, which for THIS country is a reeeeeeal fuckin' novelty. I guess you could say it's pop music for GROWN-UPS.

Yeah, yeah, I knoooooow, I'm makin' excuses...but the truth is, her songs are really damn catchy.


Sophie Ellis Bextor - Catch You by bigproblem11

Hell, I can't listen to fuckin'.....ABSU or ANOMALOUS all fuckin' day. I need a little variety.

Also, I don't know if you noticed, but she's also kinda easy on the eye...









































































...she's famous for her long legs, which frankly makes it likely that any potential suitor of MY height would need a fuckin' step-ladder.







































Now, SOME people, CRUEL people, have likened her face to, well, a variety of objects, all of which are wide, flat and white...
















































...but I think they're just jealous of her widescreen beauty. Embittered, twisted people the Brits can be.

Okay, okay, I've padded this out enough. Siiiiiiigh. I'm NOT gonna upload her latest album because...Uhhh...I don't think it's been released yet and we don't want the DMCA all over our asses, right?



















So, instead, here is the third of her four albums for you to enjoy instead.


Okay kids, top THAT 'guilty' pleasure...if you can.


*Oh, and also, if anyone can spot and name the constellation hidden in this post, they'll win an honest-to-goodness PRIZE!!