Merry Christmas from CosmoBells!

I'm about to go away for a two week holiday so comments will be switched off until I return.

Thanks to all the CosmoBells faithful supporters and those who have donated

- it has all been hugely appreciated.

To those who appreciate the sentiment:

Merry Christmas and let's hope for a great 2011!

It's COSMOGEDDON...

CosmoBells is finished.

You read that right, folks...

We have received a DMCA complaint for one or more of your blogs. Emails with the details were sent to you and all posts have been reset to "Draft" status (you may find them by selecting "Drafts" on the "Edit posts" page for each of the affected blogs). You may re-publish the posts with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

Here's the email I got and, the funny thing is, check out the weird items that caused the complaint:

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to "draft" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.

A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. For more information on our DMCA policy, including how to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org

. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed. If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Affected URLs:

http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/10/music-while-you-watch.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/09/babylon-zoo-spaceman.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/09/music-from-ceefax.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/08/singalong-with-max-disc-2-you-are-my.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/08/max-bygraves-singalong-with-max-readers.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/08/max-bygraves-viva-congalongamax-vol10.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/08/max-bygraves-discolongamax.html

 So we got a charity album, a decades old cd single, some music "mixtape" ripped from a teletext broadcast compilated by someone else which you could hardly call cd quality, and a bunch of well and truly ancient Max Bygraves vinyl!

 So that's it, it's over now for this blog. I really can't see the point in continuing with CosmoBells anymore. I'm getting hassles left, right and center for the stuff I'm sharing here. Rapidshare no longer give premium points for downloads and Megaupload is worser than Rapidshare. And what with the endless requests for reposts and other stuff, I think the time is well and truly come to call it a day. It's been an interesting few years but, at the end of the day, it had come to a point anyway where I was wondering what the point of carrying on is since I'm not really getting anything out of it except endless hassles and risks.


Now you might think I should just continue and let those in charge take things down if they get complaints but, really, this is the final straw in a whole bag of slowly rotting hay. I hope and trust you enjoyed CosmoBells for it's brief few years of insane and unusual excellence, originality and surrealness. To those who constantly supported CosmoBells and my previous blogs throughout the years, I thank you dearly.

Since it's near Christmas (not that I'm really into it!) and this really is the end of the line, I decided to put up the donations box in the top right corner of the blog for those who would like to give a little something to put a smile back on my face and invest in a few bottles of schnapps!.....

So, on that note, that's it. I'm quitting. I'll leave CosmoBells up for you to enjoy and "take advantage" of what's left of this blog (I'm sure more posts will be taken down in the near future - I reckon this is just the beginning of takedowns - so grab what you can before it disappears!) but there won't be any new posts from me after this.


Cheers and all the best,
X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut.

Update: More of this DMCA takedown shit:

http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/11/top-dog-retrospective-of-classic-tv.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/04/chris-payne-early-english-music-chap.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/04/keith-mansfield-historical-perspective.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/02/paul-piot-dance-and-mood-music-vol4.html
http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/2010/01/raymond-scott-manhattan-research-inc.html

Like I suspected, someone is going through the entire blog reporting this stuff. Weird how only now the "DMCA" are taking notice of the older posts. Even weirder how there are blogs out there which have been sharing full dvds of the latest movies for years without hassle. Obviously someone out there has a personal vendetta with me and CosmoBells.

Apocalypse Mercenaries

Here we have 80s trash war movie Apocalypse Mercenaries aka Mercenari Dell'Apocalisse from Italian director Leandro Lucchetti (aka John Dowson). The badly dubbed actors include Vasilli Karis, Bruno Bilotta (aka Karl Landgren) and Brigitte Christensen. Also starring a lot of poorly edited stock footage. You may have caught the trailer doing the rounds on Youtube and the like (embedded below this post) - so if you enjoyed that then I think you're more than prepared for the actual feature! It's hilariously bad, extremely low budget and charmingly so... Great music too!

The plot: An elite group of five mercenaries, each with highly specialised skills, are hired to take out a German Command Center situated deep within a lime stone cavern system. Along the way to this objective, our intrepid soldiers of fortune also undertake various sub missions including blowing up an arms supply train and a German airfield (presumably said missions included by the filmmakers to pad out proceedings somewhat).

I ripped this from the Inglorious Bastards 2 - Hell's Heroes 4-movie dvd set released by Video Asia. All of the movies on this weird low-budget release were obviously sourced from old VHS tapes and have irremovable Asian subtitles and, yet, the low quality just adds to the fun. And anyway, the set was a snitch at $5 and it seems to be the only place to see these particular films (at least in English) on dvd. Plus the release is region free. Really, there's absolutely nothing to complain about as long as you know what you're getting (someone should tell that to a few 1-star giving Amazon reviewers)...

Apocalypse Mercenaries is old-school 80s mindless action trash video rental fun - the like of which we don't really get anymore. Enjoy with a few pints, snacks and some daft mates.

Apocalypse Mercenaries

1986

Country: Italy

Language: English (with hardcoded Asian subtitles)

XVID

Approx. 88 mins

700 mb

RS / MU

Ripped & encoded by X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut.