The World Stupidity Awards. I like the idea. The prime candidates as far as I’m concerned are the umpires in tonight’s Brisbane vs Richmond game. Yeah, so I’m a sore loser. The world’s stupidest game award goes to Australian Rules Football for raising my blood pressure and making me shout at a television.
Anyhow, 2 nights ago I went to see The Go-Betweens. I can’t say I’ve been a huge fan. During their heyday (by that I mean when they first had a fair bit of airplay on commercial radio) in 1988-89 I was too busy doing what teenage boys do best, fishing, catching mud crabs in swamps north of Brisbane, going to pubs and clubs and trying not to look too hungover to my parents. I don’t regret doing any of those things but do regret living in Brisbane and not going to see this band playing local gigs in their earlier years. That was then and this is now and the show as a whole wasn’t very exciting. I’m used to seeing bands going nuts, smashing things, jumping into the audience and swilling jugs of beer while on stage. As Robert Forster said during the gig, “…you’re out there drinking beer and here we are drinking herbal tea.” For what the show lacked in excitement (by my obviously high standards) it gave back in the quality of the music. For example, my favourite song of the night was Old Mexico off the latest album Bright Yellow Bright Orange. I’ve had the song in my head for the last 48 hours and can’t shake it. Stop it! Someone please stop it! The funny thing is that until tonight I didn’t know it was off their new album. I assumed it was a golden oldie until told otherwise earlier tonight. For a band to knock out new music that is in keeping with their traditional sound is rare. What’s better is that in keeping their traditional sound they haven’t become stale, predictable, boring and outdated.
The show lasted a good 90 minutes, enough for most of the crowd but not for the most devoted. They played the most recognisable tunes like Streets of Your Town, Cattle and Cane, Bye Bye Pride and Head Full of Steam. The only bad thing about the gig was the Corner Hotel’s stop-start air-conditioning. When that’s your only complaint about a night out you know you’ve seen a good band.
It’s early in the AM this cold Friday and I’ve just returned from a great gig. The Go-Betweens played at the Corner Hotel in Richmond this evening and did a mighty fine job. It’s the first time I’ve seen them and they were very tight (I am assured by my wife that they always have been). The crowd was very subdued and so was Robert Forster. Not that that took anything away from the music – it was fantastic. If you want a good review of the show you’ll have to visit this almighty blog again tomorrow night as I cannot see the keyboard through tiredness and a few VB’s. Hasta luego!
I’m really starting to wonder if I should kill this friggin blog off. I started it as a way to teach myself how HTML/CSS/PERL/CGI/PHP etc. works. Now I’ve figured half those things out but feel as though, no, I KNOW I don’t have anything interesting to post online (unless you find my daily dribblings interesting). This post will be yet another piece of detritus for the googlebots to parse. Argh!
Maybe a photoblog might be OK. I dunno. Someone suggested to me today to post an essay on the ‘significance of woollen leg warmers in nineteen-eighties Holland.’ That’d be better than half the shite written on here.
Graham for VM doesn’t make me feel any better about it all by discovering (with this tool) that the advertising best suited to this blog would be for “Faux Fur Coats.” Brilliant, just fucking brilliant.
Thank god I’ve got cable TV. Instead of the news I can sit back and watch Get Smart and The Addams Family when I get home from work. Those two shows are probably more informative than most news/current affairs broadcasts lately anyway.
Saturday night saw me attend my first ever Rugby Union international. Courtesy of a very generous friend, Bea and I managed to get a couple of complimentary tickets to an $825 per head pre-match dinner/post-match booze fest. Guest speakers were Rod McCall (never heard of him) and Steve Moneghetti. The MC was Craig Willis. He’s the man who does all the courtside interviews at the Aussie Open tennis and all the presentations at AFL Grand Finals. He’s a pretty good MC except for all his old fashioned jokes (you know the ones, the silly wife jokes/blonde jokes/dick jokes etc.)
As for the game, I know why I follow AFL now. As much as I like watching Rugby on television, at the game it is far too slow. It stops and starts all the time and I suppose the fact that I’m not familiar with the rules made it a little more harder for me to watch. I don’t think I’d fork out $70 for a World Cup ticket after that game though. It just ain’t my cup of tea.
Someone in the graphics department of TVNZ will be probably be getting a little pink slip in their pay packet this week.
Went to The Argo this evening for a get together of sorts. Yeah, South Yarra. My big mistake was not wearing my feather boa and mink coat to the pub. I hate not fitting in.
By the way, that was an attempt at sarcasm. But why should I be worried about using sarcasm as a tool to say how much I hate the “South Yarra” way of doing things? Why not wear a fake fur coat to a pub? Christ, I don’t see that sort of thing up my way (Collingwood, Clifton Hill, Richmond – where I usually go out). When I think about it, I spent the entireity of my twenties trying to be different, just like those fur coat wearing twats. I tried to weird people out, tried to impress the god of alternativity that I must’ve thought was looking down upon me thinking, “You’ve done well Tony, now you must drink 5 more Black Russians and make your way home as if you are a paraplegic learning to walk for the second time”. Tonight I found myself drinking and chattering with a totallly different sort of folk from that of which I am used to. Suits. They were a nice bunch of blokes and blokettes too. They were well spoken (until they got into a shout with me), and had quite liberal views of world events as well (I always sneak politics into a casual conversation). That’s when everything went fuzzy. Not me! I was under the illusion that I’d reached the next plateau of adult maturity, thinking that I had painted a roadmap to peace between blue and white collar workers. I then realised that I had not been drinking enough…
Grown men started doing the NUTBUSH!
Get me outta here.
I’ve finished my exams and essays for the semester…thank Cliff for that (Cliff being a replacement for God…if you’ve watched The Young Ones you’ll know what I’m jibbering on about).
Anyhow, this evening was the first time the good lady and I have left the house to socialise with other humans for 2 months! Went and had something to eat on Brunswick St. before heading to the Old Bar around the corner. There many a pint was knocked down next to a log fire while listening to a blues band. Nice. Just what I needed on a rainy, cold night after finishing doing essays in a language other than English. Stress! At least I know I’m not alone with uni work.
LOST. One passenger jet. 30 000 000 miles on the clock. 3 engines. 5 owners. 30 metres long. 24 metres wide. Last seen in Angola. How the fuck do you steal a passenger jet and get away with it? Methinks it may turn up one day when we least expect it. Yikes!
Rural towns around the world have been in decline for decades as people flock to cities for better opportunities. To defeat this, a small village in Spain has been placing advertisments in foreign newspapers to attract immigrants. I wonder if any Aussie towns might think of trying this.
I recently looked at the website of my old employer, the Queensland Government, who I left in early 1996. With a quick glance at their site artwork I noticed that I, ME, MYSELF am still a part of their public face. Click here and see my ALTERED image (I am the one to the right of the lady with a telephone headset on). As I just mentioned, my image has been altered. During my employment at that godforsaken department I had long hair, long at the front and back. In the photo they’ve given me a receding hairline! Bastards. I wonder if I could claim some payment for continuing to be the public face of my old employer?
Hmmph!
Via acb comes this pretty cool project. “Flash” crowds are being organised around Manhattan. These ‘inexplicable’ mobs gather in pre-determined places and freak people out with their fleeting visit. Here’s some photos of a mob crowding around a $10000 rug at Macy’s department store in New York City. Huh!
7 points! Shit!
Someone tried to burn down Canberra’s Aboriginal tent embassy. That’s not very nice. Also not very nice is Wilson Tuckey’s opinion of the incident – “it is a sign of growing community anger about the embassy.” What a tool. I’m angry about John Friggin’ Howard but I can’t go and burn his house down can I. Honestly, putting Tuckey in charge of a subject like this is like putting me in charge of Carlton and United Breweries – destructive.
Wow. I might try this. If you want to shoplift, this seems like a surefire way to not get caught. Brilliant!
If there’s one thing that pissez me orf more than anything else in this world it’s the Friday Five. I suppose you could call it blogging’s easy reply to the end of week brainfart. When you’ve got nothing to say on a blog probably the best thing to do is just shut the hell up. If you read my blog often you’ll probably agree that I need to shut the hell up more often (I do however have the strange feeling that in the early days of this blog I might just have done one…).
The next major war for the Yanks looks like being “The War on Spam.” “…the top consumer watchdog agency is asking Congress for expanded power to pursue foreign spammers…” Maybe Congress should start with the dickwads who keep trying to sell my wife and I Viagra/slimming pills/penis enlargment lotion/university degrees. This series of emails are not foreign to the US either. It’s a US 1-800 number. The same number for each offer.
Mailwasher does all my work for me. I preview spam just to laugh and wonder how anyone could get sucked into these stupid scams…then either delete it or bounce it back at the sender. By the way, Mailwasher seems to have been sold off.
It’s an historic day today. My father learnt how to send his first email. It was very strange, it was WRITTEN IN CAPS…and he sent it to the wrong person using my mother’s email account. Good one Pa!
What the hell’s happened to spouting? Below is what it looked like this afternoon. Geelong’s first blogger gone?
