Archive for July, 2004

Dude, where’s my blog?

Poor old Yaksox isn’t having much luck with his domain name registration. Spouting is still not working. What a shitter!

Last night I went to see Life is a Miracle. It’s being shown as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. It is a very good film, although I didn’t really feel like reading a movie on a Friday night. It was in Serbian and Bosnian with bits of English and German. I’m not much of a movie reviewer, so all I’ll say is that it gets 4 out of 5 from me. It’s a film that is worth a look (especially for the crazy pets in the main character’s family home).

Some kind of bullshit

On Saturday night I went to the Village Cinemas in Bourke St. and saw Some kind of Monster. Yeah, the Metallica documentary. It’s screening as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival It must be the decade of the doco. It was pretty funny seeing 900 bogans lined up to see a movie (me being one of them…semi-bogan anyway). As far as the movie, well, save yourself the trouble and rent out Spinal Tap. What a load of bullshit it was. It’s also funny seeing Lars Ulrich partly justifying his anti-napster stance. He’s a prize wally if I’ve ever seen one. It’s not funny seeing rich, ageing men using a personal therapist to attempt to take them back to their youth so they can pump out more predictable music. Chung, chung, da da da da da da da da chung chung. Ching. Chung chung da da da da da da chung chung.

I said, ’sure looks like it’s gonna rain?’

YS: Well Le Tour is almost over. For me one of the better things to come out this year were some of the names. I’m not going to spell them right or bother looking them up:-
Foff n’hoff,
Cursypoo - niceypoo,
Vladimir Carpets - from Russia,
the Danish sprinter (sounds like) Pushoff — big teeth, scary lookin’, no doubt of the Viking connection there,
Ekimov - although I’m sure I saw it spelt Eskimov, which is better,
and Levi Liepiemer. For some reason I can’t get that word out of my head, liepiemer, liepiemer, liepiemer. It’s a strange sound. Pie Limer. The next time I have to say or write down my name somewhere and it doesn’t matter I’m going to put Levi Liepiemer.

Feeling overly melancholy lately. I think it’s the SADs kicking in. Reread The Catcher in the Rye and really connected with it. I thought I was over angst. Think I’ve been overdosing on green tea. Woke up last night and felt like some internal organ was about to die. I dreamt my mum was going to leave the family home and join the circus.

ships on fire

YS here again.
The era of clipper ships has pretty much always bored me up until recently. But it’s pretty cool how the local landscape (Geelong and Melbourne) figured into the history of a lot these ships because of the gold rush. The Lightning and the Red Jacket (named after a North American Indian chief) were launched within weeks of each other in 1854 and were rivals for the title of fastest ship on the high seas.
The era of clipper ships is a good starting point, and this page The Red Jacket runs the iceburg gauntlet has some pretty cool stuff about the two ships racing between Liverpool and Melbourne, carrying in immigrants, hauling gold dust and wool back.
“[Captain Forbes of the Lightning] kept his station at the break of the poop waving a pistol in each hand to ward off any of his crew from releasing the royal halyards and hauling down sail.”

The Lightning went up in flames in 1869 while moored to the Yarra street wharf here in Geelong. Apparently it was spontaneous combustion of wool on board. They pushed it away from the wharf so that wouldn’t burn too then fired cannons at it, attempting to scuttle it. They hit it with 50 cannonballs but only managed to get the air circulating through it better.
The really priceless bit is that in 1938, one hundred years of whitey settlement was celebrated and a re-enactment of the incident was performed with another ship, the George Martin (that’s right, Beatles producer guy), — but it got out of hand and *that one* was destroyed too.

snuffleupagus, ratface & whiteworm

Aloha says: yak sox.
I still get peeved at the use of the word font when they mean typeface, but what are ya gonna do? What the font? might come in handy. You upload a sample of a typeface you’ve seen and the website tells you what it thinks it is. Of course it’d help to have a working scanner too.

I’ve been making an effort to say hello to these people I occasionally see in the local area but who I’d normally regard as strangers. Other non-car drivers are often the most familiar. Incidentally, they don’t let people clinically designated ‘fruit loops’ drive cars.
There’s this one nervous little fella. The ex used to say he looked like Niles Crane from Frasier, my assesment was less complimentary. A few months ago I found myself walking about 20 metres behind him along a residential street toward the main drag. I imagined mugging him. I don’t normally think like that but the hunched shoulders, short quick step and continual glancing back to see if I was still there seemed to cry out, “Brane me and take my wallet!”
I saw him in the op-shop today and said g’day. He didn’t say anything. Freak.

bent as a two bob bit

Hey. It’s Tony here. Remember me? I used to post stuff here occasionally. My sincere thanks go to yak sox for spewing forth wisdom a few times over the last week or so. His domain is still having registration difficulties, so he and I may do some tandem blogging for a wee bit.

Thanks to a few schoolkids from New Zealand, students cheating with mobile phones in exams could be a thing of the past. They developed a cheap mobile phone tracker. It detects a phone when it is sending or receiving information. Smartarses.

Maybe those kids could develop a phone system that actually works for the Australian Taxation Office. I tried to get through to the section that deals with small business taxation enquiries this afternoon. After 3 minutes of choosing options and selecting frigging numbers to get where I wanted, the phone eventually gave me a ring tone and then a recorded message kicked in - “The number you have dialled has been disconnected.” I nearly smashed the handset against the wall.

think of a waterfall

yak sox again.
There was an article on kuro5hin a little while back about peepee-shyness. I could kind of dig it. I assume the position of taking a slash then totally start thinking about something else, forget where I am and minutes have slipped by. It’s the same with descending stairs. I’ve been doing it so long that my head gets bored of it and thinks the body should know the drill by now. It’s just a matter of time before I come a gutsa on a really big flight of stairs.

Anyway - two good links out of that article: International Centre for Bathroom Etiquette, and this story about a guy who gives all involved a really hard time when he’s got to do mandatory job-related drug-tests.

Don’t ask me where Tony is. He said he wouldn’t be posting much this week, so you’re stuck with me dribbling on, so dribble I will .

I just found out I passed me frikkin’ arts degree. Whoopdeedoo. I’m mildly happy I didn’t screw up those last two psychology exams. The long essay I wrote for ‘Personality: the unit’ included the phrase, “…and I bet that most of the people sitting this exam right now…” as part of the argument as to why Freud was still relevant blablabla.
Especially in Geelong, you can just tell that everyone’s thinking about sex all the time.

There’s only one job around here that I want to get - and that’s only because it’s a really nice walk/ride to get there. If they ever gave it to me it would be a pretty good joke because anyone who pays attention to my regular writings knows I’m pretty shithouse at proofreading - quality contol.

I’m actually thinking about going to South Korea and teaching English. But only if they will treat me like a GOD. I think I’d like to specialise in slang. Or I’d horse around and just use my 1978 British airways business traveller’s english->german phrase book; “I should like an english breakfast”, “I should like to eat in my room” and so on and so forth.
I blame my parents for moving me around so much - I’ve picked up this semi-nomadic tendency and 7 years in the geelong area is way too much. Also, I now realise there’s no such thing as a ‘career path’.

dog day night

Good evening, YS on the mic. again.

Ye may well talk me down that this is just another one of those tired, ‘what ___ are you?’ — but this is different because this one looks niftier, is more studied (i.e. there’s more than three possible answers) and it’s trying to sell a something; an English film Gone to the dogs. What kind of dog are you?
Only the most neurotic of people don’t appreciate dogs in some way, and this thing kind of links in with that myth/reality that people look like their dogs. I’m an Afghan hound, funny, I don’t feel like an afghan.

It’s a gradual thing, but advertising is heading this way - interactive, online - like that subservient chicken thing. TV is slowly becoming the kind of party where no one cares what happens to the carpet anymore.
[link via Adland]

tdf

Hello, this is yak sox of the occcasional spouting.net weblog. That thing’s busted right now so Tony’s been kind enough to let me have a go here.

I like this: Jan Ullrich’s tour diary/blog. Although something tells me he’s not lolling around for a couple of hours each night on the carpeted floor of his caravan, idly flipping a foot up behind, an old tangerine clamshell iBook in front of him, catching up on his favourite peeps/reads, IMing Lance in his tent and blogging about how his big toe hurts a bit.
Nah, something tells me the meat of Jan’s blog entry consists of a few key phrases called out each morning by Jan over a cubicle door to some sap working for T-mobile, who pads it out, laces in a few T-mobile product references and hits publish. Yeah, some sap travelling around with the team would do that.
Geez I wish I had that job.

Also, there’s an excellent photo of Robbie McEwan hanging a mono in the Tour de France magazine they keep flogging on the SBS coverage. You can take the boy off the BMX but …

Flipped off

One blog keeper recently had the best day of his life. George W. Bush gave him the finger. I’d be proud to be given the bird by that bastard too.

A few guest appearances will be made this week by Mr. Yaksox, the brain behind Spouting. It’s the greatest blog to come out of Geelong. Unfortunately he’s having domain problems at the moment so he’ll be having a yak here for a few days.

What’s that smell?

There’s nothing better than seeing a tall poppy getting mown down by a well operated whipper-snipper. Eddie McGuire is that tall poppy. All we need now is a whipper-snipper and someone who knows how to use it. McGuire has no problem exposing dirt on any AFL team except, that is, if it involves his beloved Collingwood football club. He shamelessly plugs his team on anything he hosts on television (gameshows, award nights, network specials etc.). Last night on the TV in Melbourne he hopped into St.Kilda and their problems with alleged bad behavior. Only this afternoon do we find out that the slimy piece of crap has been withholding information that involved his team getting pissed and creating havoc at a Sunshine Coast hotel. He now has no credibility. His leadership is much like the style of John Howard, or most other modern leaders for that matter. A “do as I say and not as I do and if you stuff up spin it to your advantage” kind of leadership.

Get your war on - part 37

Make sure you check out the latest Get your war on strip.